The Last First: Winter K2, in The Epoch Times

THE LAST FIRST: WINTER K2 captures the majesty and deadliness of the Himalayan peak, while addressing issues of accountability. Armchaiir mountaineers should watch it instead of ill-advisedly trying to summit K2 for themselves. EPOCH TIMES review up here.

April X: Original Cyberpunk SF

First, April had a troublemaking twin brother. Then she had several zonked-out, unstable clones. She didn’t ask for any of them. Unfortunately, her brother Baxter failed her, but maybe he can save her best clone in Michel K. Parandi’s April X, which opens today in theaters.

Baxter and his hackery pal Ronny did some business with Klein the gangster, but it turned out badly for them. (It turned out even more poorly for the patient that bought their defective synthetic heart.) That put Baxter in Klein’s debt. April hoped to do a deal with the shadowy Tetris, to help buy his way out, but instead, she disappears.

Years pass, as Baxter drinks and sub-optimally works as a driver for Klein. Then he sees April. Initially, he is angry, assuming she abandoned him, but then he realizes it isn’t her, at least not entirely.

April was an ideal candidate for cloning, because she had the unique ability to record her dreams with crystal clarity. Those dreams constitute massive downloads of data that made April who she was. Unfortunately, the more Tetris downloads, the more unpredictable his April clones get. Consequently, he keeps their memories light, so they compliantly serve in his “clubs.” However, April X was already exhibiting unstable and rebellious behavior, even before she meets Baxter.

April X works surprisingly well as an original cyberpunk concept. Parandi and screenwriter Jack Coulton do some nice world-building using Post-Soviet Romania (where production took place) and Russia as a starting point. Yet, in one scene, the AI-looking cityscape appears to incorporate an architectural behemoth inspired by the empty hulking Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea.

Regardless, there are indeed a lot of cool speculative elements, but the gangster business is rather standard issue. Still, Baxter’s relationship with Klein is a bit more complicated and nuanced than viewers might expect.

Infirmary, on Shudder

In the horror genre, ever since Poe published “The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether,” just about every shrink working in an asylum loses their minds, like it is a predictable occupational hazard. Apparently, something like that happened at Wilshire Infirmary. It has been closed for years, but it still employees a skeleton staff, primarily consisting of security guards—or at least it did, until the events of this film. Luckless Edward Yoon’s first night will be a rough one in Nicholas Pineda’s found footage horror film, Infirmary, which premieres today on Shudder.

Ms. Ambrosia Downey hired Yoon believing he was a veteran, but his reluctance to fill out her VA paperwork immediately causes viewers to suspect a case of stolen valor. If so, better Yoon work in Wilshire, rather than a real hero. For one thing, his supervisor will be Lester Wooley, a bitter ex-cop, who has some rather mean-spirited hazing up his sleeve. There will also be junkie intruders hoping to find drugs, or possibly something more sinister.

True to found footage conventions, viewers entirely watch the drama unfold either through the extensive security cameras or the security guards’ bodycams. For a long-abandoned institution, their surveillance gear is first-rate. Of course, that is super-helpful for cobbling together a found footage movie.

Frustratingly, the full first half of the movie moves along slow as molasses, because it is dominated by Wooley blowhard bullying, with only the occasional hint of something more evil afoot. Yet, when Pineda starts teasing the Wilshire’s sinister backstory, the film starts to intrigue. Frankly, even though Infirmary clocks in just shy of 90 minutes, it feels like the opening episode of a much bigger story.

One Day in People’s Poland, on OVID.tv

September 27, 1962 was a day like any other in Communist Poland. It was typically oppressive and typically well documented. Listening to excerpts of secret police reports selected by Polish documentarian Maciej Drygas might make viewers wonder if everyone in Poland was under constant surveillance during the Communist era. For all practical purposes, everyone had to assume they were. While it does not seem like a hugely significant day from our historical vantage point, it was pretty awful for many average Polish citizens, as primary sources attest in Drygas’s short documentary, One Day in People’s Poland, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

Every word in this film was in some way recorded in 1962. It starts with an early morning police report regarding anti-Communist graffiti defacing the wall of the Chinese embassy. It was a rather punky but amusing act of defiance. The mystery offenders also did a thorough job of it, because the authorities literally had to chisel sections out of the stone wall.

More ominously, there are multiple reports from the Security Service, regarding their surveillance targets. One poor woman went to three different stores in hopes of finding salt for sale. She never got her salt before the Party arrested her.

Considering this day was chosen for its averageness, Drygas’s film should dispel several misconceptions. First, it demonstrates widespread discontent with Communism, well before the Solidarity movement rose to prominence. There are several cases of anti-Communist graffiti, also including a few choice words left on the wall of a train station bathroom.

It also proves just how desperately poor the country was under Marxist economics. The lack of basic necessities was even a national security concern for one military inspector, who reported “25% of soldiers have no shoes whatsoever.” We can only imagine what happened to a truth-teller like him.

Violated Letters, on OVID.tv

Handwritten letters still feel like a much more personal statement than e-mails or texts. Therefore, the interception and censorship of a private letter feels like a much more personal intrusion than snooping on e-mails. The Polish Communist regime did so, by the tens of millions. In fact, internal Communist Party reports boasted of the volume of their internal surveillance and argued for increasingly draconian punitive applications. Viewers can hear (and read subtitles of) those reports along with dramatic examples of the censored correspondence in Marciej Drygas’s short-ish documentary, Violated Letters, which premieres today on OVID.tv.

Every word in Violated Letters could be considered a historical document. Essentially, it shares stylistic and compositional similarities with Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam, The Ordinary Thing, and other previous documentaries, in which off-screen voices read letters accompanied by archival video from the period under consideration. There is not a strict narrative as such, but the selected texts illustrate the sweep of Twentieth Century Polish history.

Drygas starts with poor Polish peasants complaining about the brutality of the occupying Soviet Red Army, and ends with the censorship office’s 1989 instructions regarding how to hide or dispose of evidence of their crimes. Sometimes, Drygas incorporates eye-witness accounts of traumatic historical events, like a Polish soldier mobilized for the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet, there are small-scale disasters, like the woman unable to obtain a passport to visit her sick mother abroad, who asks a friend to send her a bereavement notice as a ruse.

By far, the most heartbreaking correspondence must be the letter sent by a young boy to the figurehead president, begging for clemency for his father, Karol Chmielowski, who had been sentenced to death. More than any other letter, young Chmilowski’s illuminates the regime’s petty cruelty.