Sundance ’21: Amy Tan—Unintended Memoir

Amy Tan is a literary bestseller on the magnitude of the late, great Tom Wolfe. She has only published six novels and two full-length nonfiction books since 1989, but each one has been an event. Her debut novel, The Joy Luck Club became a sensation and so did Wayne Wang’s film adaptation. She is a totally appropriate choice for the American Masters treatment and director James Redford obviously had the connections to get Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir into this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered yesterday.

Tan’s early novels incorporated considerable autobiographical elements, but they were still fiction. The “Joy Luck Club” was indeed based on a real-life investment and social cooperative formed by her parents and their friends (it seems like there are a lot of lessons to draw from that alone). Unfortunately, her early teen years were marred by the tragic deaths of her beloved father and older brother, as well as the erratic behavior of her unstable mother.

Redford does a nice job tracing how her real-life family history is reflected in her work. Clearly, Tan is reserved by nature, but he gets her to open up on several occasions. Viewers will find a good deal of emotional resolution or payoff in the film, but Tan would surely chafe at the triteness of calling it a “recovery” story.

Indeed, Tan is refreshingly candid. When asked about the criticism of supposed Asian stereotypes in her work, she cuts to the heart of the matter, explaining the outrage-chorus will never be satisfied with anything that isn’t outright propaganda. Exactly so.

Sundance ’21: Prisoners of the Ghostland

Westerns have been taking inspiration from Samurai films—and vice versa—for years, so why not put them together? And who better to do it than a master of chaos like Sion Sono, in his first English language production? In terms of cinematic firsts, Sono in English is up there with “Garbo Talks” for fans of hyper-kinetic genre films. An anti-hero known only as “Hero” is in for a wild ride in Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland, which premiered as part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Hero is an outlaw, but he is not evil. Unfortunately, he was teamed-up with the aptly named “Psycho,” who suddenly started blowing away customers in the bank they try to rob in the prologue. Eventually, the law caught up with him, but the sinister “Governor” of a weirdly undefined Wild West Japanese town offers him a deal he has to accept. Hero must “rescue” the Governor’s adopted granddaughter, Bernice, who ran off into the dreaded “Ghostland.” It is sort of a radioactive wasteland, in the Mad Max tradition, but with more radiation and more ghosts.

There will be a few complicating factors for Hero, like the booby-trapped leather jumpsuit the Governor straps him into. The whole thing will self-destruct if he is not back with Bernice in five days. There also happen to be strategically located explosives to regulate his behavior—very strategically, if you follow. He will need her voice to forestall an explosion, but she has been struck dumb by the supernatural power of the Ghostland.

If you know the recent work of Sono and Nic Cage than no review will dissuade you from watching Ghostland. Happily, their first collaboration lives up to its billing. Honestly, Cage gets his most mime-able rant perhaps ever, which he totally knocks out of the park. Oh, you will know it when you hear it.

Sundance ’21: Marvelous and the Black Hole

Magic isn’t just for casino acts and annoying Harry Potter movies anymore. It might just help sad and angry Sammy Ko get through her super-awkward teen years. She still grieves her mother and has no use for a prospective step-mother, but her unexpected mentor Margot the magician might just have some construct life lessons for her, beyond mere sleight of hand, in Kate Tsang’s Marvelous and the Black Hole, which premiered as part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Life is difficult for Ko, both at school and at home. She dearly misses her late mother and it upsets her that her father and older sister have already gotten over it. Of course, they haven’t really. They just don’t show it as much, but Ko can’t see that yet. After nearly getting expelled, her father delivers an ultimatum. Enroll in summer community college classes or get shipped off to a tough love boot camp. Ko reluctantly opts for a business class.

It is there that Ko meets Margot, on her way to a gig at the campus daycare center. Margot has a special affinity for children. It turns out she also has a knack for reaching troubled thirteen-year-olds as well. Initially, Ko thinks she is too cool for kiddie magic, but she needs to shadow a small business-owner for her project, so it becomes Margot by default. Yet, Margot’s tart attitude and skillful illusions start to impress the confused kid (her rabbit Sebastian also helps). Unfortunately, news of her father’s engagement to Marianne Revell (who makes the classic mistake of trying too hard) renews all her angsty resentment.

Admittedly, Tsang’s narrative is about as predictable as the New York Jets losing another game.  However, Tsang’s visual sensibility makes it all feel fresh again. She incorporates brief spot animation and flights of magical fantasy that add a lot of razzle dazzle. Stylistically, it comes from a similar place as This Beautiful Fantastic, but with more emphasis on the fantastical. It moments of beauty are also more beautiful, especially Tsang’s striking representation of the Chinese fable of the Empress and the Moon Rabbit.

The people in Marvelous are pretty good too. Rhea Perlman has worked steadily since Cheers, but Margot is a perfect showcase for her endearingly sarcastic talents. Margot also eventually turns out to be a more interesting character than we expect, who has tragic roots in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Sundance ’21: Knocking

In horror movies and psychological thrillers, shrinks are always discharging their institutionalized patients a little too soon. Will poor Molly be another? She suffered a nervous breakdown after a vaguely implied personal tragedy, but now her doctor thinks she is ready to rejoin the outside world. As luck would have it, they secured a flat for her in the Gaslight Arms. However, the persistent rapping noise she hears in her new apartment might just drive her mad (for good) in Frida Kemff’s Knocking, which premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Molly had her apprehensions, but she was still mostly happy to get away from the dreary institution. Unfortunately, she has no support network of family of friends waiting for her. Molly is basically alone in her apartment, with nobody to confirm the strange knocking noises she starts to hear. Her neighbors are all suspicious-acting characters, who claim they can’t hear any such noises and don’t want to be bothered in any event.

As they persist, Molly latches onto the notion they could be a call for help in Morse Code, from a captive being held somewhere in the building. Of course, when she reaches out to the cops, it goes rather badly. It gets even worse during her subsequent attempts. Everyone thinks she is just crazy, including maybe even us, the viewers.

Cecilia Milocco really is terrific as Molly. This is a harrowing portrayal of a vulnerable woman wrestling with guilt, isolation, paranoia, and fear. There is no one she can trust in this film, not even herself. Milocco and Kemff vividly convey a sense of her extreme alienation, in every sense.

Sundance ’21: Censor

The truth is film censors make totally logical horror movie characters, because they obviously love to cut. Some enterprising shlock-meister ought to turn that play on words into a full-on slasher movie. Writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond goes in the opposite direction, suggesting there really is something dangerous about the images her protagonist seeks to suppress. However, she has to watch the gore before demanding cuts, which forces her to see some pretty disturbing scenes that maybe not so coincidentally hit uncomfortably close to home in Bailey-Bond’s Censor, which screens again today as part of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Enid Baines really believes in her job as a British film censor. In the mid-1980’s, her work largely involves trimming the notorious “video nasties.” These were low-budget VHS releases that were vilified and even prosecuted for excessive violence. It is worth noting Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead and several Fulci films were on the nasty list, so clearly one man’s nastiness is another man’s art, but we digress.

Baines considers them all nasty, but she tries to be reasonable in the cuts she demands. She thought she was fairly well desensitized to on-screen violence, but she is thrown for a loop when a new nasty appears to re-enact the childhood disappearance of her long-lost sister. The leering producer, Doug Smart, also seemed to know it would strike a chord with her. Her review screening launches her down a rabbit hole, where nasty fiction and grim reality blend together.

The basic Macguffin of Censor has a lot of potential, but Bailey-Bond does not fully exploit the creepy meta-ness of nasty “art” imitating real life and the inevitable inverse, whereby real life killings are possibly committed to create on-screen murders. This is a little counter-intuitive to say, but Bailey-Bond might be a little too concerned with Baines’ inner angsts and traumas, concentrating too much on her head-space, at the expense head-tripping game-playing.

The truth is the boundary between lurid horror-movies-within-horror-movies and their revolted viewers was much more compellingly violated in Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio. Astron-6’s The Editor also addresses these themes in a more entertaining way. In contrast, Bailey-Bond and co-screenwriter Anthony Fletcher never fully assemble a hall of mirrors for the viewer to get lost in, so we are always pretty sure where we are, even if Baines isn’t.

Sundance ’21: In the Same Breath

Censorship kills—and not just those in the censored country. If you ever doubted it, Xi and the CCP have proved it for over a year. Intrepid documentarian Nanfu Wang exposes how early reports of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan were covered-up, as well as the Communist Party’s propaganda spin efforts once the pandemic became too large to conceal in In the Same Breath. Her timely documentary premiered last night during the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, which was forced to pivot to online this year precisely because of the events and decisions she documents.

When Wang visited China in early January, 2020, she did not think very much at the time about cursory state media reports claiming eight doctors who were arrested in Wuhan for spreading false rumors of a SARS-like virus, but she returns to that moment over and over in Breath. However, when she started seeing an alarming volume of social media reports of a highly contagious and debilitating flu, she realized there was more to the story than the government was letting on.

Wang’s team archived as much of the social media posts as they could before the government deleted them and reached out to the posters. Eventually, she hired a local crew in Wuhan to record conditions in the hospitals and help her conduct remote interviews. She draws out grieving family members and shines a light on the harassment of whistleblowers, like journalist-lawyer Chen Qiushi, who has been conveniently missing since early February 2020.

What emerges is a far more complete and disturbing picture than what viewers saw in Hao Wu’s 76 Days. We have respect for his past work, but Wu’s film rather awkwardly shares a lot of similarities with the characteristics of the state media’s heroic Covid first-responders TV documentaries, as described by Wang.

The way Breath explains the relationship between censorship and propaganda is especially valuable. Merely suppressing embarrassing information is not enough for a regime like the CCP. They also need to create a favorable alternate narrative. In memorably telling sequences, Wang and co-editor Michael Shade shows dozens of Mainland “news” broadcasts repeating the same script, word-for-word verbatim. The effect is both absurd and chilling.