Trumbo (2015)

Director: Jay Roach*

Cast: Bryan Cranston, Diane Lane, Helen Mirren, Louis C.K.

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, never. You’d think it would be right up my alley, but I just missed it. I’d say the way I eventually saw it was an odd way to finally take it in, as the climax of the Santa Fe International Film Festival nine years after the film was released. Bryan Cranston himself seemed to be a little confused by the choice, and he was there receiving a lifetime achievement award. I mean, sure Cranston’s connections to New Mexico are unassailable, and Roach hails from the Land of Enchantment, but can a pointedly political film from shortly after the golden escalator mean much in the here and now?

Did I Like It: There’s plenty in the film that is catering directly to me. Hollywood lore. Typewriter porn. Political contrariness. Cranston swinging for the fences without an ounce of ego in tow. These are the kind of things I like to see in movies.

Glossy and inherently abbreviated in the fine tradition of award-hunting biopics, I’d actually venture to say that as the film played at the Lensic concert hall**, the film means more to 2024 than it probably did to 2015. In 2015, we had what we thought was unrelenting political polarization, but we didn’t know how good we had it. One can’t help but watch Trumbo now and dwell on the possible sacrifices we may just have to make in the years to come.

*Remember when that guy had a whole career of doing whatever Mike Myers told him to? Kids, ask your parents.

**A concert hall is always, always a weird venue in which to see a film. Although, I think most large scale venues should probably be re-committed to movie screenings. Who really wants to see live music? Not I.

The Day After Trinity (1981)

Director: Jon H. Else

Cast: Hanse Bethe, Robert Serber, Robert Wilson, Frank Oppenheimer

Have I Seen it Before: Never. On that note, one more anecdote from film festival land: The film runs, and one guy gets up to leave for a moment. One of the volunteers for the festival—who wasn’t there for the intro to the film—asks where the guy is going (which is kind of a weird flex, I’ll admit) and the guy replies, “I’ve seen it before.” That guy was the director of the film.

Did I Like It: Why bring up such a story? Well, it’s not even my story. Lora was closer to the incident, and I didn’t hear it at all, as I was too engrossed with the film as it was playing out.  The Manhattan Project can sometimes be overblown to the point where each element is inflated to the explosive level of the participants’ eventual successful work. This was true even before Christopher Nolan made the entire affair pure explosive Oscar bait in Oppenheimer (2023).

But here, the people—J. Robert Oppenheimer being the notable exception, as he was notablly dead before the cameras started rolling—who built the bombs that hung over the second half of the twentieth century are real people. They have plenty of insights into their work, the events of their lives, and the people who influenced both, but they are also allowed to be slightly banal, even boring figures. That might sound like faintly damning the film, but the more regular these people are depicted, the more fascinating they become.

One might remark that the film ages a little roughly around the edges, viewing the creation of the bomb through the lens of the disarmament-focused 80s, but zeroing in in the back half of the film not just on the tragedy not of Oppenheimer’s eventual political exile, but also on the uncontrollable nature of what they wrought has more potency for the current political age than one might have thought.

Superboys of Malegaon (2024)

Director: Reema Kagti

Cast: Adarsh Gourav, Vineet Kumar Singh, Shashank Akora, Riddhi Kumar

Have I Seen It Before: Nope! Neither have you, probably.

Did I Like It: On first view, I probably have nothing in common with the characters—pulled from real life and based on the documentary Supermen of Maleagon (2008)—in the film. They live in a mostly rural, conservative (likely too conservative) area. They dream of making movies. Through a series of misadventures and increasingly desperate turns of fate, they resolve to make a cheap, amusing pastiche that owes more to Superman: The Movie (1978) than anything else.

Ahem.

That’s the easy, obvious charm of the movie. These men may come from a place that is unrecognizable to my own experience, but I see myself in them. Roger Ebert once called the movies an empathy machine, and the birth of the Malegaon movie industry feels largely like experience I’ve had in Oklahoma. Twain may have called travel fatal to prejudice, but movies from another place are almost as good. I don’t think I would have had the same close connection to the people of Malegaon by visiting there than I would immersing myself in their story.

That feeling of identification isn’t the only thing the movie has to offer. The performances are good, and their interactions are often quite amusing. It’s a good time at the movies. The movie is not without its flaws, though. It runs a bit too long. One gets the sense that the film is a just on the wrong side of too attached to its documentary source material. Elements of their relationships with one another are introduced—seemingly in the service of authentically depicting their subjects—but never quite connect or properly pay off with the narrative constructed here. It’s early goings, though. By the time you might see the film, it might be a little more pared down and committed to its underlying story.

The Strike (2024)

Director: Lukas Guilkey, JoeBill Muñoz

Cast: Jack Morris, Dolores Morris, Ernesto Lira, Paul Redd

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, yes. I’m not sure how much I’m supposed to talk about that, now that I think about it. It is also the first and only time I am likely to see a film for the first time while exercising around the house, and seeing it the second time with director sitting right behind me.

Did I Like It: It will be very difficult to not be somehow both cynical and naively hopeful throughout this review, but I will try.

The Strike is easily my favorite documentary of the year. Offering macro analysis and first-hand testimonials in perfectly calibrated balance, we hear the stories of inmates in the Security Housing Unit or SHU of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. I imagine it is impossible for anyone who hasn’t been in that kind of a situation to imagine what it must be like. While the film does depict that hell with all of the tools at its disposal, cinema may just be unequal to the task.

The film isn’t focused on that bleak, impenetrable reality, though. Depicting the events leading up to and ensuing from the 2013 prisoner hunger strike, we see these incarcerated people take their lives into their own hands in the only way they possibly could. You will march through the film increasingly confident that positive social change is just out of reach in our current age, but both you and I were wrong. There is still a long way to go in the cause against mass incarceration and the overuse of solitary confinement, but by the end of the film real progress is made.

Then again, the last real progress on the issue happened in 2015. Maybe our current era is still just out of reach.

Turns out I didn’t try all that hard to avoid being cynical and hopeful in the same instant.

The Piano Lesson (2024)

Director: Malcolm Washington

Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher, Danielle Deadwyler

Have I Seen It Before: No. This was the first film I saw for the Santa Fe International Film Festival this year. A full-week pass to a film festival is a strange thing. You look at a list, see a quick description of a film (or a series of films, if it’s an exhibition of short subjects), see if tickets are still available (they often aren’t, I missed a few things over the week to this struggle), see if it conflicts with anything else that you’re wanting to see or support, and then see if you’re interested in the film.

Did I Like It: A stage play adapted to film is always a tricky thing. Something like Dracula (1931)--which has far more to do with the play by Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston than it did Stoker’s novel—came so early in the era of the talking picture that the camera just sort of sits there while the play is performed in front of it. The big musicals of the turn of the centuries knew they had to embrace the trappings of the big screen and delivered their spectacle. I can’t help but watch this film and feel as if the act of adaptation was not fully fulfilled. Pointedly cinematic scenes are added that I can’t imagine existed in the original August Wilson play—mainly depicting the creation and heist of the titular piano—but these feel somewhat tacked on.

The cast is terrific, but the majority of them are transplants from a recent Broadway revival of the play.

The themes are well constructed, and I’ve been thinking about them for most of the week since screening it. Are the ghosts real, or is the metaphor of being haunted by your past more potent? The film manages to not conclusively answer the question, while at the same time not feeling as if the story is cheating in the ambiguity.

And yet, would I have been better off watching a staging of the play? I wonder.