The debut feature of Spanish filmmaker Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren is an evocative immersion in a place, avocations of that place, in family and trying to figure out how one fits in all that.
“20,000 Species of Bees” grabs you on several levels, starting with the arresting Basque Country locations. We pick up the rituals of beekeepers, but also explore how one of the fruits of the hive — beeswax — is vital in casting bronze sculptures.
It’s a traditional world, with a very Catholic martiarch, widow of a locally famous sculptor, and the return of her daughter with her three kids. Ave and her brood show up on the eve of St. John the Baptist’s Day, celebrated with a festival and bonfire, allowing them to take a vacation from a struggling marriage and lifestyle just across the border in France.
Whatever else is going on in their lives — husband Gorka is skipping this visit — it is their youngest, Aitor, who seems clingiest and neediest. Aitor prefers to be called “Coco.” Aitor likes having his nails painted, playing dressup and waring his hair long.
Aitor acts-out and is indulged, frets and is comforted, and asks questions — of his slightly older brother Eneko, sister Nerea, and when he’s with them, older family members. And for Aitor, or Coco, answers are always forthcoming.
“Will I be like Dad when I grow up?” (in Spanish with English subtitles). “What’s faith?” “Did you always know you were a boy?”
Aitor is eight years old.
Let’s steer clear of the label “coming of age story” for this sympathetic drama about adults bending over backwards to accomodate what we tend to label what children go through at that age — “phases.”
“He’s eight,” more than one adult shrugs.
Even in this corner of Basque country, there’s tolerance — with limits.
“20,000 Species of Bees” is about a family forcing itself to listen to a kid and a child struggling to find the words and blundering about in confusion and the schisms this causes within the family.
Mother Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) isn’t hearing the relatives gripe about what’s OK “back home” in France. As supportive as she is, she is distracted, with three kids, an absent husband, a possible teaching job in Bayonne. She relishes the chance to dive into her late father’s workshop to see if she still has the skills and the talent to land that job.
And then what?
“Are you separated,” her mother (Ane Gabarain) wants to know?
Grandmother Lourdes sees the kid’s “girlish” hair and affectations and ponders ways to get Catholicism involved. But Aunt Lita (Itziar Lazkano), granny’s sister, is more worried that Coco’s parents haven’t taken the time to “see” the kid and hear the child out. If Aitor/Coco is asking questions of siblings, insisting on using the women’s toilet and dressing room at the pool with Mom and other little girls, Ane needs to shed some distractions.
Bits of the beekeeper’s work, rituals and traditions meet sculpture casting basics in this sublime drama. But “20,000 Species of Bees” lives on its performancs, and the open-faced/open-hearted turn by little Sofia Otero closes the sale.
It’s a childish, unaffected portrait of impulse, shame and anger. A child gets labeled, and wants to correct that label. But to what? At eight, who would know?
Aitor’s reluctant to wholly embrace the gender-neutral name Coco, with his parents shrugging off every bit of acting-out, accepting their indulgence as a way of getting everyone to school/the train/etc. on time.
That’s how lip service is paid to the push-back in a lot of cultures about the seeming explosion in trans identifying children. But “20,000 Species” has somebody from many points of view for the viewer to identify with.
There is no “media” or pop culture “pressure” behind Aitor’s confusion. Aitor takes it on “faith,” in his heart, that something’s not connecting him to the sex he was born with.
Arnaiz stands out as the mother, and there’s great contrast between grandma and great aunt — one obsessed with finding a stolen statue of St. John, a prank that precedes their festival some years, and baptisms, the other hearing the kid and seeing the seeing Coco and wondering how blunt she has to be with Ane to get her to do the same.
Even on the remote edge of the Pyrnees, what much of the world recognizes as “gender fluidity” on a sexuality spectrum, their people grew up as knowing that there’s more than one species of bee.
Rating: unrated, adult themes
Cast: Sofía Otero, Patricia López Arnaiz, Ane Gabarain, Itziar Lazkano, Unax Hayden and Andere Garabieta
Credits: Scripted and directed by Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren. A Film Movement release.
There’s something very attractive about this idea that we go “when it’s your time to go,” and that maybe the hereafter is a bureaucracy we can litigate our way into more time on Earth through.
As fodder for fantasy, that “Heaven Can Wait” plot point was most popular during World War II, when death visited many a family and cinematic comfort food for the grieving and those who know someone who’s grieving resonated with audiences near and far.
It began with playwright and screenwriter Harry Segall’s idea for 1941’s “Here Comes Mr. Jordan,” remade with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as “Heaven Can Wait” in the ’70s and remade again as a Chris Rock star vehicle, “Down to Earth,” in the early 2000s. There was also “A Guy Named Joe” (remade by Spielberg as “Always”), and of course, that holiday hereafter staple “It’s a Wonderful Life” broadly fits in this same conversation.
But the best version of this “taking heaven to court because it’s ‘not my time'” is British, an aching wartime/casualty-of-war romance starring David Niven, Kim Hunter and Roger Livesey, and written and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger — “A Matter fo Life and Death.”
This 1946 film blends the tragic with the screwball, with daft banter and goofy, ever-so-British stereotypes of Brits, the French and Yanks to boot. It is dazzling in realization, a stunning Technicolor production that made the afterlife and pale imitation of life on Earth — the ultimate “British” bureacracy, finger-pointing within it, and a world that’s monochromatic to boot.
It leaps to a start with an opening scene of a Lancaster bomber pilot (Niven), on flames and “going down” in the fog, his only lifeline a compassionate American Women’s Army Corp (WAC) radio operator (Hunter).
The Brit is antic, almost flippant about death — “Don’t be upset about the parachute, I’ll have my wings soon anyway, big white ones. I hope it hasn’t gone all modern, I’d hate to have a prop instead of wings!”
“June” can’t help but fall in love with such bravado, and Peter the pilot is smitten by her voice. And her reassurances.
“June, are you pretty?” “Not bad.”
Peter wakes up in his flight suit in the surf on the beach near the base where June works. They stumble into each other, instantly recognize their soul mate, and kiss.
During “the war,” they didn’t mess around.
But that romance has a catch. Up in heaven, Conductor 71 (Marius Goring) has noticed paperwork issues. One soul is missing. Tracking it down becomes his mission. “Reasoning” with Peter is his strategy, one arrived at by consulting a dead member of Peter’s crew.
Goring, who’d turn up in Powell & Pressburger’s “The Red Shoes,” plays this “Conductor” as a pre-revolutionary French fop of the first order, not so much a buck passer as a chap who relishes the chance to make his case “down there” for why Peter should come quietly and accept his fate.
“One ees STARVED for Technicolor, up there,” he swans as he swoons over flowers, perhaps the best one-liner in any Pressburger script.
Peter’s in love, and he’s not going quietly. June figures Peter’s communication with this Frenchman is a hallucination, and enlists her pal, Dr. Reeves (Powell & Pressburger mainstay Roger Livesey) to treat him. Dr. Reeves kind of believes the guy, which worries him.
“A weak mind isn’t strong enough to hurt itself. Stupidity has saved many a man from going mad.”
Heaven’s bureaucracy will not be denied, but Peter’s insistence wins him the reprieve of a court hearing in the afterlife. The film’s third act is a somewhat drawn-out “Defending Your Life” court case, another film that draws its inspiration from the idea that heaven is a place where you can take the powers that be to court.
There aren’t many actors who could give Cary Grant a run for his banter like Niven, and Pressburger’s script is decorated with ways for him to show it off — reciting a poem, for instance.
“Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, My staff of faith to walk upon, My scrip of joy, immortal diet, My bottle of salvation, My gown of glory, hope’s true gage; And thus I’ll take my pilgrimage.” Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that. I’d rather have written that than flown through Hitler’s legs!”
Hunter, years before her “Streetcar Named Desire” immortality, is all compassion and emotion as June, buying into Peter’s hallucination, but still hoping Dr. Reeves can “cure” it.
The third act court case is taken over by heavenly protocols, and two powerful performances — Raymond Massey, of Powell & Pressburger’s “The 49th Parallel,” plays an embittered casualty of the American Revolution prosecuting this smarmy Brit, facing off against the man whom Peter gets to defend him. We wonder if Peter has a chance.
“Your smile is not unattractive, sir. Did you use it to enamor this young American lady?”
Alfred Junge’s production design is most impressive in the hereafter, with a giant, Busby Berkley-inspired staircase taking our characters on their long walk “up” to eternity. A diverse sea of faces attends the trial — Indians, South Africans, African Americans and Chinese — reminding us it wasn’t just white guys fighting against fascism.
The overlong trial kind of stops the movie in its tracks, but the speechifying fireworks as Massey and his foe make their cases for “The Law” and “Love” in front of judges, bureaucrats and interested (dead) parties, including Puritans, carry it.
The screenplay makes its “love story” sale right in that first scene, just Niven in a mock-up of a burning plane and Hunter trying to keep it together with only the voice of a doomed man to reassure her that it’s going to be all right.
“A Matter of Life and Death” is one of the most timeless classics of its era, a bucket list film for any true film fanatic.
And if you haven’t seen this lovely, funny and moving film, why not let Martin Scorsese make the case for it? He does that, and more, in the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” reminding us that much of what was great about the cinema of the ’40s came from the writer/director/producers who called themselves “The Archers” and who rarely missed their target.
Rating: TV-PG, combat deaths, discussion of suicide
Cast: David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey, Marius Goring, Joan Maude, Robert Coote and Raymond Massey.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. A Rank Org/Archers release on Tubi,etc.
Running time: 1:41
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Leaning into the logic that “parents are still taking the tykes to “Garfield” at the cinema — at least until “Inside/Out 2” opens — let’s see what this latest iteration of “The Garfield Movie” is all about.
Years of TV shows and other movies about the fat-and-proud-of-it lasagna-addict tabby meant that they’d ave to do something new, something more than just another “Garfield” in his element tale, much more than another “origin story” about how he wound up with put-upon nebbishy “owner” Jon.
So they went for a caper comedy, having Garfield and friends — and relatives — try to hijack a milk tanker from big, impersonal Lactose Farms. It’s a slapstick heist that isn’t a shadow of what Aardman animation did with “Chicken Run” or “Sean the Sheep.” But if you’re going to “borrow” plot points, borrow from the best.
Two members of the cast of “Ted Lasso” turn up. Hannah Waddingham sings, as does Chris Pratt in the title role, an actor who has been in demand in animation ever since “The Lego Movie.” Not that he ever adds anything to these roles.
Samuel L. Jackson voices Garfield’s long lost alley cat dad, Ving Rhames is a bull wanting some satisfaction from that diabolical dairy, and Snoop Dogg and Bowen Yang pitch in, with Nicholas Hoult as Jon and “Lasso” grump Brett Goldstein as a sharpei enforcer for cat diva villain Jinx (Waddingham).
The action is slapstick heavy, aimed at little kids who maybe grew up deprived of the physics-bending violence of “Looney Tunes.”
But this script — three writers, not a one-liner that works — barely a line that inspires so much as a smirk.
“Can I just say, you will NOT be disappointed” the cat narrates in the opening scene. Cats are such liars.
“Have you ever jumped a train?” papa Vic wants to know of his portly progeny.
“I’ve never JUMPED.” “Cheese is my love language.”
At least Jinx, sipping her “Meow-mosas,” watching “Catflix” (Netflix with cat videos) and plotting her revenge on an America that robbed her of the chance to be “America’s Top Feline,” registers.
Garfield still loves his lasagna, still underestimates Odie the dog and grumbles about “Mondays.” But slapstick and decent CGI animation aside, and even grading on that “aimed at very young children” curve, this “Garfield Movie” is slim pickings.
Did they save anything for the sequel?
Rating: PG, slapstick
Cast: The voices of Chris Pratt, Samuel L. Jackson, Ving Rhames, Bowen Yang, Snoop Dogg, Brett Goldstein, Nicholas Hoult and Hannah Waddington.
Credits: Directed by Mark Dindal, scripted by Paul A. Kaplan, Mark Torgrove and David Reynolds, based on the comic strip by Jim Davis. A Sony/Columbia release.
It isn’t scary, with even the best-engineered “gotchas” landing flat.Kind of a big deal when you’re making a horror film.
It’s joyless and humorless to boot, with slick production design that imagines a creature-inhabited “forest” on an island generally forest-free (but not around Wicklow) — Ireland.
“The Watchers,” adapted from a novel by Irish writer A.M. Shine, stumbles onto the screen under a “nepo baby” cloud, with miss-or-hit horror impressario M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Ishana Shyamalan as writer-director. The best one can say for her hand here is that she’s competent and utterly uninspired.
M. Night, long one of our more delightfully egomaniacal cinematic self-promoters, must have figured that he could turn his “brand” into a filmmaking dynasty.
Nope.
But at least that spares poor Dakota Fanning much of the beating this derivative drivel richly deserves. One of the least expressive actresses of her generation, she plays an American pet shop clerk ordered to deliver a talking yellow parrot (Perhaps a Golden Conure?) from Galway to Belfast, only to break down in a vast forest from which “there is no escape.”
Our clerk, Mina, stumbles into this sage older woman, Madeleine (Olwen Fouéré) who lets her into “The Coop,” a bunker-like structure where Madeleine, Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and young Daniel of (Oliver Finnegan) are holed up.
They have been here for varying lengths of time. Those who tried to escape were never heard from again. So they have to trap and kill their own food, they tell her — ravens or crows, mostly. They cannot be out after sunset. They must “never” look into the burrows that honeycomb the forest. And despite a lot of “Point of No Return” signs that ostensibly could guide someone out, they can’t make it all the way out before darkness comes.
Thus the trap. And every night, “The Watchers” insist they stand up in front of the mirror facing a window and be displayed to their captors.
“It is not wise to keep them waiting.”
The dialogue is a collection of mytho-poetic rubbish of the “It is said that they once walked among us” explanations. The set decorations include an ancient CRT TV and DVD player and an even more ancient Victrola.
We and Mina hear the rules. We and Mina see flashes of children — hallucinations — in the forest. We pick up on Mina’s past, why she’s exiled herself to Ireland.
And not a word of it, not a single fact forced-in, not an attempted “escape” or breach of “The Rules” can do a damned thing to interrupt the tedium.
Bringing in John Lynch for further third act explanations has a “too little, too late” and “Too much” explaining about it.
I’m inclined to think the clumsy and cumbersome material itself, being M. Night “adjacent” in themes and set-up (“Knock at the Cabin”), is just not worth the trouble of adapting.
But Ms. Shyamalan and Ms. Fanning seal its fate, each in her own way — one for having no “gift” or flair for directing, and for casting Fanning and the other for not knowing better — at 30 — than to accept a part that required more of her than she’s got in her repertoire.
Rating: PG-13, some nudity, bloody violence, profanity
Cast: Dakota Fanning, Georgina Campbell, Olwen Fouéré, Oliver Finnegan and John Lynch.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ishana Shyamalan, based on the novel by A.M. Shine. A New Line release.
I didn’t really warm up to “Hit Man,” a glib comedy about a freelance police surveillance technician pressed into service as a fake murderer-for-hire to entrap people conspiring to have someone killed.
Its efforts to find “cute” and “charming” in a romance between this fake killer and a woman who wanted to hire him fall flat. The many disguises and guises trotted out by star and co-writer Glen Powell as a New Orleans assassin didn’t play as funny, even if the “acting” and predicaments his real-life character talked his way out of are amusing.
There’s lots of cloying voice-over narration giving away the interior life of a seriously boring guy, a thoughtful college philosphy professor who treats his moonlighting gig as “field research.” Gary is a philospher, student of human behavior, cat lover and bird feeder. He’s the sort of guy who says, in voice-over, that “hit men don’t exist” in real life.
Outside of the movies. Lots and lots and lots of movies. And, well, outside of the mob.
In better movies than this, and better performances, we “see” this in the character and situations. We don’t have to be “told that” Gary Johnson sees one alter ego, cool and “professional” Ron as “not a thinker. He was a doer.”
The leads — Adria Arjona plays a miserable but beautiful wife who tries to hire her way out of a bad marriage, and “falls” for “Ron” — are merely adequate, and the supporting cast mostly sketched-in, depicted in light but not terribly funny strokes, save for the odd cartoonish New Orleans local yokel.
The “sexy” bits here can’t hold a candle to the steamed heat of such similar films as say, Clooney and J. Lo’s “Out of Sight.”
But this is Powell’s breakout year, starting with “Anyone But You” and that first “New Brad Pitt” headline. And he shows us a little star quality — not a lot, just a little.
Director and co-writer Richard Linklater has done at least one better “true crime” comedy than this — “Bernie.” The director of “Boyhood” almost always gets criticism’s benefit of the doubt, but this is, frankly, a bit of a slog.
Watchable? Sure. Well, close enough. But maybe dial down the “next Brad Pitt” thing.
Credits: Directed by Richard Linklater, scripted by Richard Linklater, and Glen Powell, based on a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:55
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It’s usually only alluded to in TV news coverage of why China is so interested in “developing” Africa with roads and infrastructure and buying up swaths of America or Australia, what Saudi Arabia is up to purchasing land abroad or why Russia “really” covets Ukraine.
But every now and then a fictional feature film comes right out and says what governments won’t, and what journalists are often too timid or under-funded to get at.
If James Bond knows nefarious multinational actors are after arable land and water (“Quantum of Solace”), why isn’t anybody else talking about it?
For “The Grab,” filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite (“Blackfish”) checks in with reporter Nate Halverson and his team at the Center for Investigative Reporting, people who are following tips, digging through data dumps of leaked emails from notorious, shadowy figures, visiting Africa and China and connecting the dots about the great conflict of the “future” that is already joined today.
The world is just now getting past the malevolent oligarchy that was OPEC. Journalist Halverson says we’d better prepare outselves for “FARMPEC.”
“The Grab” is a dogged doc about a complex yet kind of plain-sight-simple subject. When Chinese interests buy much of La Paz County in Arizona, it’s not mere land speculation. They’re pumping water, raising crops on desert land, drying out locals’ wells and shipping their hay and whatever back to China.
When Russia is online recruiting genuine American cowboys to come to a climate-changing Siberia, it’s because Putin thinks they can be the meat provider to the world as the planet warms. When Ukraine responded to the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea by closing off river water to the canal that supplied the peninsula, the ruinous expense of his aggression pushed Putin to try and invade the rest of the country.
When Saudi Arabia and other rich oil states in the Middle East buy land in Africa and America, they’re using their climate-changing profits to insulate them from the next “wars over resources.”
“Whoever needs water and has guns is going to go get it,” a CIA analyst tells us.
Cowperthwaite’s film follows years of this team’s work, the ultimate “follow the money” project that chases down China’s motives for buying Smithfield (pork) Foods, taking ownership of “one in four pigs” in North America.
China loves pork, and the leaders there remember The Great Famine. And unlike American TV news talkers, Chinese communist leadership knows what “inspired” “The Arab Spring” — food shortages and inflation, hungry young people with “nothing to lose” taking to the streets and toppling regimes.
“The Grab” shows us Chinese, Russian, United Arab Emirates and American villains in this shadow war over “food security.” Nabbing mercenary mogul Erik Prince’s emails gives away the game that high profile right wing actors aren’t acting out of nationalist pride. They’re trans-state opportunists properly painted in Bond villain colors. Prince moved beyond his scandal-plagued Blackwater mercenary “contractor” company to run a Frontier Services Group, a Chinese-owned company setting up land acquisition and “security” for oligarchs, far and wide.
Halverson ties this vast rich state vs. poor country conspiracy up and guides Cowperthaite toward CIA, Army, Navy and State Dept. veterans, non-government organization experts, reporters working with him and Holly Irwin, a dismayed county supervisor in La Paz County, Arizona, where decades of “anti regulation” voting by the conservative locals have allowed the Chinese to come in and take all their water from them.
And we meet Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema of Zambia, home to the most coveted land and water in Africa. He’s a Georgetown-educated lawyer who returned to his homeland after graduation to help locals “fight back” against the corrupt officials that sell the land that they own and depend on, but whose ancient legal “deed” standing provides multi-nationals with the opening to vast transfers of land.
“The Grab” is more informative than polemical, and plays as a dry — sometimes suspenseful, often fact-packed — treatment of the subject.
But it isn’t just cautionary, it’s sounding the alarm. It’s not predicting the future, it’s reporting on the present.
And if you aren’t shocked at a turn of events where it has become obvious that “governments are working for corporations” that acquire “food and water security,” well you must know your Bond villains by heart.
Rating: unrated, scenes of street violence, profanity
Cast: Nate Halverson, Holly Irwin, Molly Jahn, Anuradha Mittal, Robert Mitchell, Robert Schoonover, Mara Hvistendahl and Brigadier “Brig” Siachitema.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite. A Magnolia release.
There are many good excuses for a film buff to not “get around to” the Powell & Pressburger production, “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.”
It’s almost three hours long, is famous for its sentimentality and cinematic patience in getting round to those sentiments.
But the new David Hinton documentary “Made in England,” basically a filmed Martin Scorsese Master Class on why the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger stood out in their day and still matter now, talked me into at long last getting around to the one WWII Powell and Pressburger film I’d missed, all of them made as the war was raging.
“Blimp” is a mostly soundstage-bound Technicolor spectacle, offering Britons a few hours of escape just after The Blitz, just as the war in Europe was turning into an Allied offensive that would eventually crush if not exterminate fascism.
Inspired by a satiric newspaper comic strip character, a walrus-mustached old fart whose reactionary politics and out of date military acumen were the subject of fun, “Blimp” was a movie Powell and Pressburger made over the objections of much of official Britain at the time, especially Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
The debates between “Colonel Blimp” and his pre-war friend, dueling foe and German officer Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff are about the dangers of militarism tied to political fanaticism — cult leader politicians goading the public with race-baiting nationalism, the masses rationalizing “any (murderous) means necessary” to achieve their efforts to dominate and rule. So yes, this 80+ year old saga has something to say to modern audiences.
The story, which has little to do with the comic, is framed in an embarrassing Colonel Blimp debacle.
An eager beaver Army officer (James McKechnie) uses his romantic connection to a female Army driver (Deborah Kerr) to start a war games assault on London six hours early.
It’s to be an Army attack with the WWII “home army,” recruited and armed militiamen — many of them older veterans — relied upon as a last line of defense in the event of an invasion. The war games are intended to simulate “the real thing,” but have a set start time.
“The war starts at midnight!”
Violating that rule allows this officer to storm into a London Turkish baths and seize the elderly officers in charge of the Home Guard, including “Blimp” plump Brigadier Clive “Sugar” Wynne-Candy.
A naked “Blimp” (Roger Livesey) bellows through his mustache at the “impudent” junior officer and drags him into the bathwater for a senior citizen thrashing.
“D’ye KNOW how many WARS I’ve been in?”
That sets up the flashback where we meet the young “Sugar” or “Suggie” Candy, a junior officer fresh out of South Africa’s Boer Wars, 40 years earlier. He’s won the Victoria’s Cross. And acting on his own newspaper-interview notoriety and a friend’s tip from a letter “niece’s governess’s sister,” a governess in Germany, he sets off for a place where “they HATE us” thanks to anti-British German propaganda ginned up by a spy who worked both-sides of that colonial conflict.
One in the Kaiser’s Germany, Candy meets the governess (Kerr, again), and sets out to trip up and taunt Kaunitz the spy (David Ward) in a very public restaurant. And the next thing he and the VERY disapproving local embassy know, he’s been challenged to a duel. He insulted the entire German Army, and German officers of “honor” won’t stand for it. They wear their sabre-cut dueling scars with pride in their increasingly militaristic imperial state.
A draw of lots pits Candy vs. Teutonic Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook) through an elaborately explained, protocol-governed duel by “the rules.” And as the two convalesce from their wounds, they become lifelong friends.
That friendship is tested by World War I, and Kretschmar-Schuldorff’s blind patriotism, even in defeat, and by the coming of World War II, by which time one old man has become wise to the threats of military dictatorships even if another still regards war as something of a sport, where “right makes might” when the other side is constantly cheating, killing civilians, introducing poisonous gas and sinking unarmed merchant ships.
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