Aurora’s Sunrise: Bearing Witness to the Armenian Genocide

Imagine if all prints of Hotel Rwanda or Schindler’s List disappeared a few years after they premiered. That is basically what happened to Auction of Souls, a widely seen 1919 silent film about the Armenian Genocide, starring Aurora Mardiganian, a genocide survivor, portraying herself. Sadly, Auction of Souls is still considered a “lost film,” but some rediscovered fragments have been incorporated into Inna Sahakyan’s animated “documentary,” Aurora’s Sunrise, which opens today in New York.

A friendly Kurdish shepherd warned Mardiganian’s father the Ottoman regime was rounding-up ethnic Armenians, but he simply could not envision the horrors that were coming. Some of the men were drafted into military service, but the rest of the Armenian enclaves were forcibly expelled in brutal death marches. After witnessing the deaths of her mother and sisters, Mardiganian was several times sold into sexual slavery (sometimes referred to with inappropriate romanticism as harems). Yet, she kept escaping, hoping to reunite with her surviving family.

Eventually, an uncle with the Armenian resistance arranged Mardiganian’s passage to America. Despite her youth, she became a spokesperson for the Armenian cause, even reliving the horrors she endured in Auction of Souls, the movie adaptation of her serialized biography.

It is important to remember Mardiganian and the roadshow screenings of Auction of Souls raised over $116 million dollars for Armenian orphan relief, which when accounting for inflation amounts to over $1.7 billion in current dollars. There was widespread outrage across America regarding the Armenian genocide, which is why the Roosevelt administration’s stony silence on the Holocaust is so hard to accept.

Regardless, Aurora’s Sunrise bills itself as documentary, but the story unfolds like a narrative film. From time to time, Sahakyan includes archival interview footage with the late Mardiganian, but the film plays out like an epic historical. Mardiganian’s many escapes might even have a “Perils of Pauline” vibe were it not for the dire circumstances and tragic context in which they take place.

Toast of Tinseltown, on Roku

Anyone who thinks British actors are classy hasn’t met Steven Toast yet. When you do meet him, you can’t umeet him. However, the abrasive blowhard has such a knack for bringing out the worst in people, it weirdly almost makes him sympathetic by comparison. After annoying his British colleagues during a few seasons of Toast of London, he takes a shot at Hollywood in creators Arthur Mathews & Matt Berry’s six-episode sequel series Toast of Tinseltown, which premieres today on the Roku Channel.

Toast comes to Hollywood with the delusional understanding he will co-star in the next Star Wars film. Of course, his long-suffering agent is happy to have a break from him, referring him to her Hollywood colleague, Brooke Hooberman, who specializes in Brits. She also works out of her car, sort of like the Lincoln Lawyer, but in a way that inspires less confidence.

At first, Toast assumes he is lucky to meet Russ Nightlife on the flight from London, because the stranger offers to put Toast up in his Hollywood Hills home. Then the actor discovers his host is ragingly neurotic and deeply anti-social. On the plus side, Nightlife’s housekeeper-caretaker Billy Tarzana is quite charming. She pretends to only speak Spanish around Nightlife, but she is happy to relax and converse in English around Toast.

The first episode is basically an extension of Toast of London, in which Toast’s agent sends him off to an anger management workshop, which seems to be suspiciously successful. “LA Story” introduces Toast to Hollywood, exaggerating its eccentricities in ways that hit somewhat more than they miss. As he acclimates to Hollywood, he thinks he has a torrid affair with a dominatrix and lands a role on cheesy medical drama. There is a weird, feverish Manson-family-influenced Western-style detour, before the series culminates by revealing the truth about Russ Nightlife.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter: from the Captain’s Log

People forget Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, probably because most film versions cannot replicate its use of letters and journals to tell its classic tale. One of the scariest sections of the book was the “Captain’s Log” of the Demeter, the ship contracted to transport Dracula’s coffins to London. Focusing on those often glossed-over passages is good idea for a fresh take on the legendary vampire, but the results are somewhat mixed in Andre Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which opens nationwide tomorrow.

Obviously, this voyage will end badly, especially for Captain Elliot. It is too bad, since he just announced his retirement. Their journey starts promisingly, except for the local Bulgarian seamen, who freaks out at the sight of their Dragon-stenciled cargo. He will be replaced by Clemens, a trained doctor eager to return home after knocking around the Balkans.

Clemens gets on famously with the Captain’s grandson Toby (whose life he saved) and mostly passably with the rest of the crew. However, tensions start to rise when their livestock is mysteriously slaughtered. Clemens comes into more direct conflict with cruder, more superstitious crew members, when he insists on nursing an emaciated stowaway back to health, after they discover her buried half-dead in their strange dirt-filled crates. Obviously, she was supposed to be food for the vampire now hunting the Demeter crew.

The Dracula of Øvredal’s Demeter deliberately resembles Max Schreck in Murnau’s Nosferatu, which is a shrewd aesthetic choice for a film partially conceived as Alien on a 19^th Century sailing ship. The vampire makeup applied to Javier Botet is appropriately monstrous and creepy. A distinguished looking gent in a cape just wouldn’t work in this context.

Frankly, the best part of Demeter is the gothic look of its period production. The design team (including production designer Edward Thomas and art director Marc Bitz) create a richly detailed shipboard environment, showing us all the narrow passageways and rat-infested chambers of the Demeter. The ship is cool, in a dank, uninviting kind of way.

Unfortunately, screenwriters Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewitz depart from established lore in distractingly annoying ways. No longer does the sight of the cross hold any power over Dracula. This does indeed seem to reflect an ugly anti-Christian bias, considering Joseph the abrasively Catholic Filipino cook, is the first rat to abandon the ship—and the audience is not expected to feel sympathy for him, when he gets his gory comeuppance.

Aporia: Time Travel at its Grungiest and Most Heartfelt

Respect physicists. They can kill with equations. You just don’t see it happening, because of the “observer effect” (you’re not one of the observers). In this case, a gently mad scientist friend of Sophie Rice’s late husband created an uninspiring looking contraption that can put a nasty “equation” in someone’s head, back five years or so in the past, thereby killing them. Of course, she wants to use it to save her husband, but the ripple effects will be surprising in Jared Moshe’s Aporia, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Things have been bad for Rice since a drunk driver mowed down her husband Malcolm. Money has been tight, their daughter Riley has grown distant and lost ambition, while the wheels of justice have been insultingly slow to punish the loutish Darby Brinkley. Then Mal’s old physics buddy Jabir Karim drops his bombshell. The machine he soldered together with Malcolm can take out Darby before the accident happens. At first Rice doubts him. Then she presses the button.

Suddenly, Malcolm is back and Riley has returned to her high academic achieving form. Only Rice and Karim have miserable memories of the last few months, because of the observer effect. Of course, Rice should quite while she is ahead, but she also remembers seeing Darby’s estranged wife Kara looking distressed by his drunken behavior. When she tries to check on her, she finds the woman and her daughter Aggie have been evicted and face ruinous medical bills. At first, she enlists Jabir and her now in-the-know husband to help them conventionally, but Jabir is itching to apply his machine to the problem.

Aporia is the best kind of science fiction—the kind that does not depend on special effects, because it is driven by ideas and characters. Frankly, the story of Aporia would not look right in 3D IMAX. It is a grungy tale of grief and desperation that could be happening in your neighbor’s garage.

It is shame that all the proper critics and guilds ignore low budget sf (and barely pay attention when it comes from the likes of Nolan and Cameron), because Greer gives an awards-worthy performance as Rice. She is not playing a time traveler. She becomes a woman grieving her husband, as viewers can acutely feel throughout the first act. She also has solid chemistry with Edi Gathegi’s Malcolm Rice, which justifies all that anguish.

Operation Napoleon

It sounds like it was based on a Robert Ludlum novel, but it is really adapted from a book by Icelandic writer Arnaldur Indridason. That title certainly has a Ludlumesque ring to it and it also happens to be a Nazi thriller, but they aren’t the bad guys. Instead, it is the CIA who are the villains in Oscar Thor Axelsson’s Operation Napoleon, which releases tomorrow in theaters and on-demand.

Right before Hitler’s suicide, a mysterious flight left Berlin disappearing into legend and conspiracy theories. Shadowy CIA bigwig William Carr (played by Scottish actor Iain Glen) and his late father have been looking for it ever since. Kristin’s outdoorsy brother Elias and his mates have the bad luck of stumbling across the wreckage of the fabled plane while exploring one of Iceland’s melting glaciers. Soon, Carr’s trusted enforcer Julie Ratoff (played by British thesp Adesuwa Oni) is stabbing them to death with a pencil.

Elias manages to escape Ratoff on the ice, so Carr dispatches his assassin Simon (played by German actor Wotan Wilke Mohring) to eliminate Kristin, since she saw her brother’s posts. However, being a sharky corporate loan officer, Kristin easily eludes Simon, with the help of her ghosted boyfriend, Steve Rush, a British professor, who specializes in American military history.

Finland just joined Iceland in NATO and their fellow Scandinavian nation Sweden is well on its way as well, but apparently Axelsson and Indridason consider their Ally, the United States, to be their greatest national threat. Russia and China surely appreciate the propaganda assist. Does Mark Cuban also see the world that way? That is a question to ask yourself next time he endorses a candidate, since he owns the American distributor of Operation Napoleon.

So basically, the CIA shoots the stuffing out Iceland trying capture Kristin and Rush. However, it is important to keep in mind they get help from Einar, a schlubby soccer fan who lives alone on the glacier. Granted, it all looks slickly professional, but the anti-American plot and uninspired action sequences are mediocre at best.

Sophie Bartes’ The Pod Generation

Don't call them test tube babies. They come from pods, at least they do if their parents have sufficient resources for stress-free pregnancies. There are still people who prefer to do things the old-fashioned way, but Rachel Novy does not think she is one of them. Yet, her pod-pregnancy starts to change her perspective in screenwriter-director Sophie Bartes’ The Pod Generation, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Rachel Novy is an online marketing consultant, while her husband Alvy is a botanist. That definitely means she is the one who makes all their money. Seriously, in this near-ish future, botany is almost a lost science, since most plants are synthetic or computer generated. As you might suspect, he is also the one who is skeptical of the pod process, but she signs up anyway.

At first, he is a bit out of sorts she made this decision without him, but he accepts and steadily warms to the idea. In fact, he is the one who bonds with the incubation pod they carry home. Ironically, she starts experiencing the sort of fevered dreams associated with traditional pregnancy. Much to her surprise, she also develops a new-found appreciation for the genuine and the natural.

Talky films can interesting. Fortunately, Pod Generation is one of them. Admittedly, the arc of Barthes’ narrative is a bit flat, but she raises some heavy issues regarding science, nature, and authenticity. Her ostensive subject is motherhood, which is a big theme in itself, but a lot of the points the film raises could apply to topics.

It is also worth noting getting the right look for Pod Generation was almost as important to its success as it was for the Barbie movie, but it had a tiny fraction of that monstrosity’s budget. Production designer Clement Price-Thomas and art director Stephan Rubens convincingly create an ambiguously near-future world that feels slick and affluent, but also somewhat cold and impersonal.

Moving, on Hulu

Stan Lee always cautioned his superheroes: “with great power comes great responsibilities.” That is especially true for super-heroic parents. They are desperate to keep their powers and those of their offspring hidden from their old deep-state bosses in South Korea’s NIS. However, a superhuman assassin is hunting them all in the new Korean series, Moving, which premieres today on Hulu.

Lee Mi-hyeon has the super-heightened senses that every bratty child fears their parents must have. She is indeed one protective mother, but she has her reasons, as viewers will learn. To start with, her son Kim Bong-seok is unable to control his mysterious floating ability. Technically, they can sort of manage it with weights, but when unencumbered, he starts to rise, especially when his emotions are stimulated. That will make a relationship with Jang Hee-soo, the new senior transfer, tricky to pursue. Fortunately, she is surprisingly understanding. It turns out she has Wolverine-like powers to immediately heal, just like her father, Joo-won.

Some of the mysterious teachers at their high school seem to have an inkling about Kim and Jang’s powers, but they try not to let on. Instead, they have super-powered class president Lee Kang-hoon keep an eye on them. The two almost girlfriend and boyfriend are largely unaware of their interest. They also do not realize Lee Mi-hyeon and Jang Joo-won share some dramatic history, along with Kim’s father, Kim Do-shik.

After seven episodes mostly focusing on the super high schoolers and Frank, the Korean-American supervillain working his way through a super-powered hit-list, Moving takes an extended, Dark Shadows-worthy detour into the past, explaining how Kim’s parents met, as super-human black ops agents for the NIS precursor agency, before the democratic transition.

This flashback is so extensive, it feels like an entirely different series. Jang Joo-won’s origin story takes so long, devoting an entire episode to his early days as a gangster, the producers of the Fast & Furious and Mission Impossible franchises probably would have split it into two movies. In fact, the thirteen episodes provided for review do not even manage to return the series to the present time yet.

Arguably, the flashback episodes might be better than the high school-focused timeline, but they are definitely darker. Some viewers might be annoyed that Frank’s bosses are stereotypical CIA villains, but it obviously does not bother Disney (Hulu’s owners), since the CIA also worked with the bad guys in their recent Indiana Jones movie. At least a North Korean supernatural appears to be positioned the climactic villain.

Regardless, Han Hyo-joo is terrific playing Lee Mi-hyeon. Having a teenage son does not appear to have aged her a day, but she is a supernatural, so okay. Ryu Seong-ryong (who has notably played both good guys and bad guys in films like Extreme Job, The Target, and War of the Arrows) is perfect as the invulnerable on the outside, brooding on the inside Jang Joo-won. Lee Jeong-ha is mostly likably nebbish as Kim Bong-seok, but his character’s awkwardness can be trying. However, Ko Yoon-jung is quite charismatic as Jang Hee-soo. Plus, Moon Sung-geun is spectacularly scummy as the dirtbag deputy intelligence agency director.

This Stolen Country of Mine, in The Epoch Times

THIS STOLEN COUNTRY OF MINE is a timely and damning indictment of China's systematic imperialist plunder of Ecuador and the Chavist regime that abetted them. Review up here.

King on Screen, the Documentary

Zane Grey and Simenon saw more of their books adapted for film and television, but Stephen King is still way up there. He might even have more if you include the “dollar babies,” short film adaptations of his short stories, whose dramatic rights King automatically grants to accredited film students for a mere buck. None of the dollar babies are covered in this documentary, but maybe they should have. Of course, there are no shortage of big commercial releases to discuss in Daphne Baiwir’s King on Screen, which releases Friday in theaters.

It is a little awkward discussing Stephen King movies, since the author so notoriously hates Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, which remains the Citizen Kane of King films. However, Baiwir’s talking heads do a nice job addressing the Kubrick film, the subsequent mini-series remake, and the 2019 sequel. According to the director, Mike Flanagan, he did his best to “Parent Trap” the look of the Kubrick film with the plot and tone of King’s novels.

The other titan of King cinema would be Brian de Palma’s Carrie, but the director’s absence is unfortunate. Unlike other movie docs like Sharksploitation, King on Screen has no time for the usual suspects of on-camera commentating critics, which is probably just as well. However, the participating voices are almost only directors. Horror fans are always happy to hear from Mick Garris, Tom Holland, Tom McLouglin, and Creepshow series showrunner (and frequent director) Greg Nicotero, but an appearance by Kathy Bates (obviously the star of Misery, as well as Dolores Claiborne and the original The Stand) or Matt Frewer, who holds the record with five King appearances, might have added an interesting perspective.

Strange Planet, on Apple TV+

Science fiction is supposed to take us to strange places. Star Trek literally promised that at the start of each episode. However, the whole point of this animated series is the familiarity of its alien behavior. Creators Dan Harmon and Nathan Pyle adapted Pyle’s children’s-books-for-adults as Strange Planet (not to be confused with Strange World or Forbidden Planet), which premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+.

The humor of Strange Planet is very much in the tradition of anthropologist Horace Mitchell Miner’s often-reprinted spoof-essay “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which presented 20^th grooming and medical techniques as if they were the customs of a primitive indigenous tribe. The general purpose was to make us question how much of what we assume is modern and advanced really makes logical sense or are we mostly observing social mores. Fair enough, but you should probably continue brushing your teeth.

In the case of Strange Planet, the bulbous headed aliens are just like us, except they are extremely literally in everything they do. That is where the humor is supposed to come in. For instance, in the first episode, “The Flying Machine,” we hear all about “comfort supervisors” who distribute “jitter liquid” and “mild poison” on “flying machines.” Of course, we are meant to recognize them as flight attendants serving coffee and booze.

Japan Cuts ’23: The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn

Death never comes for a holiday at Tenmasou Inn, but she brings plenty of guests. She has a relationship with the two Tenma Sisters and their mother to host spirits in limbo, as they decide whether to keep living or to proceed unto death. The latest guest she escorts will be quite a surprise: a half-sister the Tenma siblings never knew they had. Its is also news to the traumatized Tamae Ogawa, who will have a lot to process in Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Three Sisters of Tenmasou Inn, which screens today as part of this year’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

Nozomi, Kanae, and their irascible mother Keiko Tenma are dead, but Ogawa is not, at least not yet. Her young life has been hard, because her father abandoned her at a young age, just as he did with Nozomi and Kanae. They still had Keiko, but Ogawa’s mother tragically died during her infancy. Despite her unfortunate current circumstances, Ogawa is delighted to meet new family, as are her half-sisters. However, the boozy Keiko is less than welcoming.

Considering herself part of the family, Ogawa insists on working at the inn. Since most of the day-to-day responsibilities fall on the older, more professional Nozomi, she appreciates Ogawa’s help. She is especially grateful when her half-dead half-sister takes the hospitality lead with two difficult guests. One is an old lady who takes pleasure in nitpicking. The other is Yuna Ashizawa, a privileged influencer, who attempted suicide. Both are somewhat disarmed by Ogawa’s honesty and lack of guile. Nevertheless, Ashizawa cannot control her disruptive behavior. Apparently, even in near-death, some Millennials remain obnoxious and entitled.

Tenmasouu Inn is a lovely looking film that seems worlds removed from Kitamura’s recent horror and action movies, such as Downrange and The Doorman. However, he previously helmed a much darker thriller set within the “Sky High” manga universe that Tenmasou Inn is also adapted from.

It turns out he can jerk tears with the best of them. Thematically, Tenmasou Inn is a lot like Kore-eda’s classic After Life and Edson Oda’s Nine Days, but it is more sentimental, yet also sometimes more surprising. It is all achingly sentimental, but its Japanese-ness makes it really appealing, sort of in the tradition of Departures.

Japan Cuts ’23: Mondays

If you were stuck in a time loop while at work, but you never noticed, your job probably kind of sucks. That is pretty much where Shukai Yoshikawa and her office mates are. To break the loop, they will have to work together, but that is always harder than it sounds in office-place comedies, very definitely including Ryo Takebayashi’s Mondays [See You ‘This’ Week], which screens tomorrow as part of this year’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

Yoshikawa was hoping to jump ship to the bigger, more prestigious advertising company that often subcontracts Nagashige’s rag-tag firm, but that will never happen while she is stuck in a loop. Two of her junior coordinators managed to awaken her consciousness to the time loop and they have developed some theories as to what their next course of action should be—because they have had time think on the problem and watch a few movies.

They need her to awaken her direct superior, so he can awaken his, and so on, working their way up to Nagashige. If they go straight to the boss, he will not take them seriously. This might be an outlandish situation, but this chain-of-command mentality definitely strikes a chord, doesn’t it? They also have a theory as to how the manga-loving Nagashige can break the curse that has befallen all of them, but he will take some serious convincing.

Apparently, the Japan film industry has a massive competitive advantage when it comes to producing original time loop movies. Just like Junta Yamaguchi’s The Infinite Two Minutes, Mondays takes a somewhat familiar premise and turns it inside out. In this case, Takebayashi and co-screenwriter Saeri Natsuo also add sly workplace humor just as funny or funnier than any episode of The Office (either of them).

Japan Cuts ’23: From the End of the World

Freud would be pretty impressed by Hana Shimon. The interpretation of her dreams could save the world from apocalyptic destruction. Of course, she is not really dreaming. She is traveling into the “Sea of Sentiment,” a realm that is as real as our own—and what happens there directly impacts our own world. It is not looking good for us. There are only two weeks until Armageddon, unless Shimon can save us, assuming we even deserve it in Kazuaki Kiriya’s From the End of the World, which screens tomorrow as part of this year’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

We need Shimon to save us, but she has it hard. Her parents died when she was seven and the grandmother who served as her guardian recently passed. She waits tables for money to live on. When she makes it to school, she is relentlessly bullied by the worst mean girl. Then Shogo Ezaki and Reiko Saiki show up from the National Police asking if she dreams much. She certainly will that night.

Suddenly, she finds herself transported to a black-and-white universe very much like feudal Japan, where she befriends Yuki, a soon-to-be orphan, thanks to the marauding ronin. When she tells Ezaki and Saiki about it, they immediately launch a pre-set contingency plan, which spares Japan great damage from a surprise earthquake.

It turns out there is a Millennium-like group in the National Police that understands how that dream world affects our universe and they have persuaded the Prime Minister to act on their warnings. Unfortunately, there is an ominous dream-walker sort of figure who can operate in both worlds—and he knows about Shimon. However, the greater danger to her might be greater from those who want to topple the current government, by exposing the PM’s dependence on a “fortune teller.”

End of the World is definitely a return to big idea, big spectacle genre films for Kiriya, after the English language production Last Knights, which was a lot of fun, but was not nearly as ambitious or significant. In contrast, this is a distinctly original conception of the end times. It incorporates some really crazy extremes that are too complex and too spoilery to get into here. It is safe to say this is a big film that is sure to inspire a lot of analysis over time.

Japan Cuts ’23: Under the Turquoise Sky

During WWII, Japan’s invasion of Mongolia did not go very well for them. That is why they agreed to a neutrality treaty with Stalin. Yet, after the fall of Communism, the two nations forged strong diplomatic ties. That is a lot of history. The history is particularly complicated for Saburo, an aging industrialist, who served in Mongolia during the War. He has a daughter somewhere on the steppe, whom he hopes his wastrel grandson can find before he dies in Kentaro’s Under the Turquoise Sky, which screens as the centerpiece selection of the 2023 Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

Saburo is dying, but he knows the hard-partying Takeshi is not sufficiently responsible to succeed him yet. He hopes his mission to Mongolia might season him a little. Of course, he cannot send him alone. His unlikely companion will be Amaraa, a Mongolian national who was arrested for stealing one of Saburo’s horses (and giving the cops an extremely cinematic chase on horseback). Fortunately, the old man is a good judge of character, so he hopes the horse thief can help the clueless Takeshi find the woman known as “Japanese Tsermaa.”

In terms of storyline, Turquoise Sky is not excessively complicated. It really is your basic road narrative with lessons to be learned by a young man—when he least expects them, of course, but the sweeping Mongolian scenery is an amazing visual (they do not even make to the massive Genghis Khan Statue Complex). Kentaro (an actor turned director, probably best known for roles in Rush Hour 3 and Kiss of the Dragon) also achieves a potently wistful vibe. Arguably, there is strength in the simplicity of his approach.

Amarsaikhan Baljinnyam (who also co-wrote the screenplay) is also quite remarkable as the taciturn but strangely charismatic Amaraa. His relationship with Takeshi is smartly written and subtly played. They do eventually reach friendly terms, but there is never any blubbering bro-mance. They just start to accept each other.

The Highest of Stakes

Richard Heart (real-name Richard J. Schueler) is either a financial prophet, if you ask his allegedly cult-like investors, or a fraudster, if you ask the SEC, who filed suit against Heart four days ago for defrauding investors with unregistered securities. That development is far too recent to appear in this documentary. It is certainly a dramatic coda, but it probably did not surprise his detractors or his loyalists. You would not expect to find much middle ground when it comes to appraising Heart/Schueler, but directors Patrick Moreau and Grant Peelle manage to find it in The Highest of Stakes, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Heart is a flashy guy character who parlayed his success predicting crypto booms and busts into the launch of his Hex Token. Unlike other tokens, Hex also acted as a sort of savings certificate, allowing investors to “lock in” their tokens for a pre-set period, for a varying rate of return. However, like pyramid schemes, earlier investors earn a greater return than newer arrivals, which Heart transparently admits. However, the constitution of the so-called “Origin Account,” which takes the lion’s share of fees and penalties, remains a little murky.

The thing is Hex performed really well, at least until Mikey, the film’s representative retail investor, jumped in with both feet. Then it starts to tumble, giving Mikey’s wife Ramey ample opportunity to say “I told you so.”

Frankly, the first forty-five minutes or so play like a Hex infomercial. However, Moreau & Peele enlist two academics, Kelly Richmond Pope the forensic accountant and Lamont Black the currency futurist, start pulling at the threads of the Hex story. Black turns out to be more skeptical than Black, which makes them sort of a good cop-bad cop tandem.

Lola: The Future Front

They are partially inspired by the Mitford Sisters (especially Diana, the one who married Oswald Mosley), but initially their ideologies are not so extreme—just their personalities. When Thomasina Hanbury invents a device to view the future in 1941, the sisters duly try to use it to serve the British war effort. Unfortunately, hubris brings the downfall of the arrogant, even when they can see the future in Andrew Legge’s Lola, which releases in theaters and on VOD this Friday.

“Thom” is the socially awkward genius, who invented the “Lola” device. Martha is her hard-partying sister, who becomes a fan of Dylan, Bowie, and the 1960’s counter-culture through the Lola. She is not a scientist, but she does the leg work for their “Angel of Portobello” radio broadcasts, giving advance warning of the next day’s air raids. Martha also “handles” Lt. Sebastian, the ambitious intelligence officer, who traces their signal. Unfortunately, Thom starts to resent both Sebastian’s unwelcome oversight and her sister’s romantic interest in him.

Lola is not exactly a time-travel film, but it is a very clever, low-fi sf film that twists the time continuum into knots. It is also one of the more inventive “found footage” movies in years. Initially, found footage seems like a strange choice to tell the tale, but it makes sense at the end.

Legge incorporates archival newsreel footage for a Zelig-like effect, but that is really the least of it. The most intriguing aspects of the screenplay, co-written by Legge and Angeli Macfarlane, are the ways in which the Hanbury Sisters use their device to re-shape the war. At first, they very successfully mitigate the impact of the London Blitz. However, as they get more ambitious, they start causing unintended consequences.

Japan Cuts ’23: Convenience Story

Convenience stores (konbini) are important in Japan. They are places to buy cup-noodles and iced coffee in a can (so good). Kato is about to walk into one that might look modest, but it is actually quite mysterious. The cooler door ushers him through to a Lynchian world in Satoshi Miki’s Convenience Story, which screens tomorrow as part of this year’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

Kato’s screenwriting career is on the skids, because his bro comedies are out of step with woke producers. Ironically, his resentful live-in girlfriend Zigzag’s career might be on the verge of taking off, while he falters. After ill-advisedly blowing off steam (by abandoning her dog in the middle of nowhere), Kato finds himself broken-down outside an empty konbini. Frankly, he doesn’t even realize it when he gets pulled through the cooler door-portal, but he certainly notices Keiko on the other side.

In this world, she manages the convenience store with her schlubby husband Nagumo. Since he is stranded, they hospitably offer to put him up. They are almost suspiciously welcoming. However, a David Lynch-worthy Postman Always Rings Twice-esque melodrama develops, when Nagumo leaves Kato and Keiko alone for hours, while he practices his air-conducting in the forest.

Convenience Story is not entirely successful, but it is more watchable than overly self-serious Lynchian secret world movies like Silent River or Chariot, because Miki maintains a brisker tempo. Viewers never share the feeling they are also stuck in an isolated konbini. Miki’s adaptation of the novella written by Japan Times film critic Mark Schilling also retains an ironic sense of humor.

Reveille

They were not exactly great hosts, but Germany and Italy better adhered to the Geneva Convention than their fellow Japanese Axis. Perhaps reciprocity was a reason—the fear that mistreatment of Allied POW’s would lead to mistreatment of their own. Such reciprocity will be a very real concern for one German patrol in director-screenwriter Michael Akkerman’s Reveille, which releases this Friday on-demand.

In the first act, Sgt. Jens Artur’s platoon capture a rag-tag group of American GI’s. Their treatment of the new POW’s is somewhat questionable, but probably not worth our outrage. Soon thereafter, Staff Sgt. Walter Brander, a WWI veteran called back into service, takes a small group out for some recon. This time, the Yanks have the drop on them.

Brander wanted to find the Americans and that is exactly what happens. It is a one-sided battle, with only Artur, Brander, and new rookie (who is as green as Kermit) are gravely wounded, but the rest are KIA. As he should according to the military code of conduct, “Sarge” prevents his redneck private from finishing them off. Instead, they take them prisoner. He duly sends for medics, but because they are pinned down by Germany artillery, the men instead must watch their German POWs slowly and painfully expire.

The inherent irony of the German POWs’ situation is ripe for drama. Unfortunately, Akkerman’s verbose screenplay literally talks around it. A talky film can be engrossing, sort of in the Playhouse 90 kind of tradition, but the dialogue in Reveille often feels tangential and unfocused.

Fantasia ’23: Mother Land

Life was always hard in Siberian. That is why the Soviets exiled dissidents there. However, the nomadic Yates people are used to it. In fact, there is beauty in the way they live in balance with nature. Lt. Vladimir intends to disrupt that balance, for the sake of his socialist ideology. A young girl in search of a mystical animal could be collateral damage in Park Jae-beom’s stop-motion animated feature, Mother Land, which had its North American premiere at the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival.

The Yates survive on the meat and blood of reindeer, but they also have great affection for the animal, some of which they keep as pets. It is a hard life, but their family ties are strong, so when Krisha’s mother falls ill, she will do anything to save her. The Shaman’s treatment is ineffective, but she advises Krisha to seek out Red Bear, the great guardian of the forest, who is reputed toi have healing powers—should he chose to use them.

Krisha sets off on her own, but her bratty brother stows-away on her reindeer sled. They are not alone. Lt. Vladimir has recruited Bazak, a disillusioned Yates hunter, to track and kill the legendary Red Bear, thereby providing secular socialism’s superiority over superstition and nature.

Reportedly, Mother Land is the first Korean stop-motion feature since the late 1970s, which is somewhat surprising, given the international success of Korean animators employing different techniques. Regardless, Park’s film is a wonderfully rich world, realized with keen sensitivity. It definitely captures a culture facing existential challenges, mostly from the “modern” Soviet world (the ironic title is a sly play on the Soviet “Motherland” and the ailing land of Krisha’s ailing mother).

Japan Cuts ’23: Winny

Winny was sort of like a Japanese Napster, but it was originally envisioned for more Wikileaks-style purposes. At least that was the defense offered by the creator’s lawyers when he was put on trial for facilitating copyright infringement. Technically, Isamu Kaneko is on-trial, but so is his creation in Yusaku Matsumoto’s Winny, which screens as part of this year’s Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

Kaneko fits every programmer stereotype, making him a difficult defendant for the old school judges to relate to, or understand. Fortunately, Toshimitsu Dan gets him enough to formulate his defense, while also communicating persuasively. Dan also has the benefit of Akita Masashi, his firm’s crafty senior partner, who is serving as co-counsel.

Of course, the naïve Kaneko makes things much more difficult for them, by signing pre-written statements the Kyoto police assure him they he can change later. The case is strange in many ways, since it focuses on Kaneko instead of those who actually pirated copyrighted works. However, it is not lost on anyone that the same police precinct is concurrently denying corruption charges prompted by financial records distributed anonymously via Winny.

During the trial, the word “proliferate” takes on great significance. In fact, these court room scenes and all the trial prep are really crisply executed. Unfortunately, Matsumoto and co-screenwriter Kentro Kishi never fully integrates the police slush fund subplot with the rest of the film. It is a shame, because Yoshioka Hidetaka is excellent portraying Senba, the police whistleblower.