Your Name Engraved Herein (2020)

If you've seen one gay film you've seen them all... sort of. Your Name Engraved Herein does follow the typical formula for the prototypical gay romance. Young lovers in a repressed world meet, find joy together, face the backlash of their homophobic environment, resist their love (usually one more than the other) before each realizing they can't be whole without each other, yet often still ending in a tragic separation. It's played out a hundred times in gay movies in every culture and in 2020 Taiwan had a huge hit with this take on the same old story. Queer people can attest to the need to see narratives like this affirming their emotions on screen. But perhaps it does get tired after some time, and the desire to see queer stories which are as varied as heterosexual ones  becomes stronger. still, when a beautiful film like this comes along, you go with it, even if you know where it's taking you.

Your Name Engraved Herein is beautifully shot and performed. It is filmed with a lovely golden hue to most scenes that give it a sense of warmth, especially when its leads are together. The story is paced well, engaging us with the subjects arcs and delivering on the needed emotional pay off at the end. There is a sweetness to the love scenes that is powerful, evoking the kind of passion which helps express the passion between the characters, making its rather recycled story line feel honest and beautiful.

There is also the historical context that is specifically Taiwanese, and the film very effectively tells the history that this romance is set in. It handles the specifically Taiwanese queer context that helps it stand out from other films with this story. There is a reference to long time LGBTQ activist Chi Chia-wei in the film, paying homage to one of the real people who've done the work which allows a film like this to not only be made but become as popular as it was.

So in the end Your Name Engraved Herein is a lovely little film, if a bit predictable, that fits into a certain moment in queer cinematic history, and tells a beautiful love story.

Your Name Engraved Herein

Starring: Edward Chen, Tseng Jing-Hua, Fabio Grangeon, Leon Dai, Jason Wang, Mimi Shao

Director: Patrick Kuang-Hui Liu

Writers:  Yu-Ning Chu, Jie Zhan, Alcatel Wu

 

Nomadland (2020)

Everything about Zhao's film Nomanland is beautiful. It is a visually stunning piece with McDormand's singular performance at its centre and its narrative is a hauntingly lovely little story about people who have chosen to live differently. Zhao has sprinkled the music of Ludovico Einaudi throughout highlighting the melancholy glory of such a tale. All of it is truly gorgeous. 

Zhao films her story with a lyrical style, keeping her camera moving slowly throughout so there is always a sense of movement. She eschews too many scenes of conflict, focusing more on her individual subjects and their passion for their lives, especially McDormand who always is able to fill a screen with her incredible face that gives us so much to watch. Nomadland is like that, so much to watch as we just look at it as rarely is much happening.

There isn't much plot per se to Nomadland. Much of the film is situational. We're just seeing what happens, and not so much a strung together series of events. Instead the story here comes through moments, not played out for dramatic effect, but just laid before the audience for us to experience.

And as it comes to and end you'll just want to sit there with what you've seen and let it wash over you. Perhaps it won't all mean much at first but it will certainly stick with you.

Nomandland

Starring: Francis McDormand, David Strathairn, Peter Spears

Writer/Director: Chloe Zhao

 

Unpregnant (2020)

Unpregnant has it's heart in the right place but never quite finds a good groove. It starts out right from the gate as a series of cliches. Popular girl has an unwanted pregnancy. Her so called "friends" are no help and neither is her clueless boyfriend with whom she has absolutely zero chemistry so you can understand exactly why they are together. She can't tell her parents and the only place she can get an abortion without their consent is 3 states away. So she turns to her childhood best friend, from whom she is now estranged, and who has become a nerdy outsider, for a road trip to get to the clinic to do what she needs to do.

Framed as a comedy, Unpregnant looks for laughs, often to the point of forcing them. It takes some absurd turns along the way as it explores the rather predictable narrative of the friends reconnecting over this untenable situation. It manages to be entertaining enough and its two leads are both charismatic making it more watchable than it should be. Despite making the obvious choice at every turn the film still makes you smile occasionally. But only occasionally. More often than not it feels like it's going through the motions.

Unpregnant never finds honest kernels of truth. Every emotional moment seems trite. It really felt like they were trying, and I wanted to buy into these young women's stories, but the film kept making them 2-dimensional the whole way. So by the end, the film feels like it's telling us instead of showing us.

Unpregnant

Starring: Haley Lu Richardson, Barbie Ferreira, Alex MacNicoll, Breckin Meyer, Giancarlo Esposito, Mary McCormack, Denny Love

Director: Rachel Lee Goldenberg

Writers: Jenni Hendricks, Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, William Parker, Ted Caplin, Rachel Lee Goldenberg

 

Promising Young Woman (2020)

Carey Mulligan has been one of the most incredible actors on screen since her debut in An Education. Her turn in Shame is one of the best performances I have ever seen. She has found what could be a career topping role with Promising Young Woman, but that being said with this actor, she'll likely top it again in a few more films. But regardless her Cassie is going to be memorable.

Writer/director Fennell has crafted an intricate, clever subversion of every film dating trope, clearly exposing the violence in the ways our culture has set up courting rituals, making the totality of our cultural violence against women explicitly clear, in a way that is clearly unnerving and awakening. Part of its brilliance is how it does this by making it entertaining, almost seductive itself, only to pull the rug out from under us again making the point even more real. Fennell's story is brilliantly laid out, working on so many levels, and just when you think you have it figured out, she ups it one more time. Watch the way she plays us, gives us many opportunities to think things are okay, or that our whole way of understanding romance isn't messed up, and then reveals to us a difficult and uncomfortable truth.

Promising Young Woman is shocking, because of just how much it makes clear what is right before our eyes, and how much of that we are willfully blind to. Our complicity is on display and she's made it all delicious in a way so that we can't look anywhere but at ourselves to blame. 

Promising Young Woman shows us just how great the toll of violence against women is, how pervasive, how much its ripples permeate all aspects of our culture. It never blinks in limiting things to "good" or "bad" people, never falling in to gender binary traps, it even begins a racial analysis related to these issues, although it really could have done more on that front. But it is fearless in its take, a slap in our faces and the promise that maybe we'll wake up.

Promising Young Woman

Staring: Carey Mulligan, Laverne Cox, Bo Burnham, Alison Brie, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Connie Britton, Adam Brody, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Sam Richardson, Alfred Molina, Molly Shannon, Chris Lowell, Max Greenfield

Writer/Director: Emerald Fennell

 

Funny Boy (2020)

Mehta's adaptation of Selvadurai's novel is beautiful and lush and heartbreaking. The story of Arjie, a young Tamil homosexual man is both classic in its narrative of queer people finding their peace in a world that won't accept them, and uniquely Sri Lankan, in its attention to detail of the specific culture of this man. 

I understand the film makers had trouble telling a gay Tamil story both in terms of where they could physically film the movie and in finding a Tamil cast. The topic remains so taboo, even a Canadian film maker cannot find a cast willing to tell it. It is that queer by definition and that dangerous.

But with Mehta's experienced and gentle hand, Funny Boy becomes a beautiful story. I can be a bit jaded towards coming out stories like this as it feels like a narrative that has played out time and again, and we've had to suffer through it time and again. But in some ways that's the beauty and importance of these stories, and the universality of them. Still, there is much for western audiences to learn about the specific nature of this Tamil story which adds more colour to the queer rainbow of narratives.

Funny Boy

Starring: Arush Nand, Brandon Ingram, Agam Darshi, Ruvin De Silva, Nimmi Harasgamma, Rehan Mudannayake

Director: Deepa Mehta

Writers: Shyam Selvadurai, Deepa Mehta

 

Soul (2020)

Soul is peak Pixar, the kind of film only they make. It's like Inside Out or Wall-E, the sort of story that could only properly be told through animation. Soul reaches into emotional spaces that the average film (not just animated) never even attempt. It explores the sort of existential questions that mainstream movies rarely successfully tackle. And while Soul is doing that it tells a captivating story that is both hilarious, thrilling, and packs an emotional punch that will bring you to tears. Pixar is heading back into a bit of a renaissance with this and Onward after some weak years and Soul is a triumphant return to form.

Pixar has often been able to achieve the holy grail of film making, telling a truly original story that isn't just a retelling of some familiar narrative we've all seen a hundred times before. Soul is another example of this, perhaps one of their better ones. Even if you've seen the trailer you won't know what to expect. And once the story gets going, it will take you places you do not see coming. But once it all plays out it all feels so honest and real that it will just overwhelm you. Writer/director Doctor, who is responsible for the amazingly original Monsters Inc. ups his game even more with this original story.

And then there is the music. Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor provide a score that isn't like anything they've done before. They might not be the choice you be thinking of for a film like this but they have done some amazing work here. But the heart of it is Jon Batiste's exquisite jazz, which even in a year of great jazz scores (The Photograph, Ma Bailey's Black Bottom), Soul hits the right groove. The film works as a jazz song, allowing the rhythm and notes that may start out familiar to riff on unexpected themes and take us in deliciously random journeys which end up being well worth the ride. Just like Baptiste's music.

Soul may be the most adult film Pixar has produced. Many of their films work on duel levels, appealing to both children and adults in differing, and sometimes similar, ways. Soul though takes a new approach by focusing almost entirely on adult themes. I wonder if it will speak to children much at all. The story here is very much a mature story that doesn't spend time introducing the sorts of hooks, characters, and story beats that appeal to younger folks. Soul may be the first adults only Disney/Pixar film.

Visually the film is dreamy, hitting both the perfect note for this story and living up to a studio which has upped the animation game again and again. I fell in love with this animation studio years ago and lately I've felt a little cold to its product. Soul is reminding me what made me love Pixar in the first place, one of the most original animations studios perhaps rivaled only by Ghibli. It is the sort of cinematic experience that transports me, heart and, yes, soul.

Soul

Starring: Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Questlove, Phylicia Richad, Daveed Diggs, Angela Bassett, Graham Norton, Rachel House, Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, Donnell Rawlings, Wes Studi, June Squib, John Ratzenberger

Director: Pete Doctor

Writers: Mike Jones,  Kemp Power, Pete Doctor

 

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

In one of the most influential comics I read as a teen, just as I was starting to look for more meaning in my media and comics, Wonder Woman saved the world from the evil villain, not by defeating him in battle but by showing him truth. It was rather revelatory for me at the time. Superhero stories were always about overpowering the "bad" guy. The hero won through a contest of strength. Here was something different, something new to inspire me and my young idealistic world view. This story was a big part of why this hero specifically went on to be meaningful for me. As Wonder Woman 1984 played out I realized I was experiencing that again and it not only brought me back to a rush of emotions of my younger self, but also renewed much of those feelings for me. 

 

Wonder Woman 1984 starts out showing us some typical superhero movie tropes, but through the course of the film it transforms that, subverts that, showing us something different. Jenkins takes the "superhero" movie and shows us that heroism often doesn't look like saving people from crime but from bringing people to truth, transforming how we live our live our lives, and bringing us into a new world. The film starts out with a cool traditional "superhero" style scene, played by leaning quite hard into its cliches, only for the film to eventually subvert these ideas into examining what heroism might truly need to be beyond stopping criminals. That's the kind of superhero movie maybe we need right now, but it is often not what we are expecting and often it's not what we want.

Sequels often give us more of the same. What was refreshing right off the bat with 84 is that it is completely new movie. While it is connected in many ways to the first Jenkins Wonder Woman film it is clearly not trying to make lightning strike twice in the same spot. It is saying it will give us something new. Are we ready for it or do we want the more traditional, beat-em-up action movie that we're used to seeing? Jenkins starts us there, in familiar superhero territory, but takes us on a very different journey. So many superhero sequels just reproduce what happened in the previous films, but with a new villain. This one avoids that entirely. 

Jenkins wastes no time. We get thrown into the story. Diana has lived into a new era, more than 60 years after the events of the first film. But she hasn't moved on. She is alone. She has lost most of the passion and spark which motivated her in the first part of the century. All of this is established efficiently and effectively right away allowing this story to begin. We are in the 80s, an era that encapsulates the themes of this tale so well, the greed, the selfishness, the precipice of self destruction the world rested on. And the film is shot with 80s stylings, making it feel like a film of the era. We're all there in a moment and the story is set in motion quickly.

 

And this manages to be both action film and character study. The nature of this story is one of self examination as much as it is of set pieces. Jenkins uses this story to build a narrative of personal accounting. Wonder Woman is needing to decide who she is going to be, and who she really is. And I was taken right back to that comic of my childhood, coming to a new understanding of what heroism means, what doing what is right means. Seeing it play out again on the big screen was a moment of affirmation for me. 

Technically this is a great film. Zimmer's score is fantastic. The visuals are impeccable. The film mimics 80s action movie film style, evoking the era classically, not only visually but in the way its story plays out as well. Catch little easter eggs like a photo of Diana and Etta Candy (as an old woman) showing they remained friends well into the latter's late life. Catch no-so-little easter eggs like the film finding a way to introduce the invisible jet. The cast each do great work but for me the standout was Pascal, walking a delicate tightrope of over the top 80s villain and the melodrama needed to sell this story. that just clicked for me in all the right ways. It just came together like a lovely treat. My only wish was more Cheetah. Wiig was fantastic in all that she did, and her character, like Diana's spent more time wrestling with her sense of self than fighting in spectacular set pieces. But her design was amazing and a part of me wanted to see her kick more butt. But then I was reminded that 84 isn't trying to be that film and it has different plans for this character. What we do get is worth it, as is the whole ride.

There are some parts where the film stumbles. There is a problematic plot device involving Steve Trevor's return in the body of an unsuspecting man which never feels like it's resolved well. I have to sort of head cannon it to be that Steve swaps places and the other man isn't there until he returns to make it okay. There is an action sequence set in the Middle East which is visually spectacular but has some issues with it. So the film never quite reaches the greatness of the film it follows but still manages to overcome these to be quite rewatchable. 

And long time fans need to stick around for a worthwhile post-credit scene, a scene that simply needs no explanation.

 

Wonder Woman 1984

Starring: Gal Gadot, Kristen Wiig, Chris Pine, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright, Connie Neilson, Lilly Aspell

Director: Patty Jenkins

Writers: Geoff Johns, David Callaham, Patty Jenkins