Movie Nation

With other films coming out in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, the trait that makes Dawn Porter’s “Rise Again: Tulsa and the Red Summer” stand out is the context, and the drama of “proof.”

Her National Geographic crew was filming the day the mass grave that removed any doubt that this tragedy was as awful in scale as claimed. And in 88 brisk minutes (PBS had a doc mini-series about Tulsa in 2019) we learn of most of the events that led up to that last “Red Summer” of several that followed the end of World War I.

With Washington Post reporter and Oklahoma native DeNeen Brown (below) as journalist and anchor interview, this film visits archives, interviews survivors and a white eyewitness and retrieves interviews with survivors no longer living and audio of historical figures speaking on the state of race in America in the early years of the 20th century.

President William Howard Taft delivers remarks on the pace of progress in African American social and business affairs in the years after slavery. But a few years later, after the first “Red Summer,” largely a reaction to the threat that “progress” represented to white America, poet Claude McKay wrote his “If We Must Die,” and we hear him recite it.

“Rise Again” deftly traces the string of white mob massacres that raced across the country in 1919, 1920 and that climaxed in Tulsa just after Memorial Day in 1921. And it takes us into the lesser-known preamble, an armed assault on Black farmers in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919.

As Brown notes, in cities from Chicago to Knoxville, Atlanta to Elaine, “all it took was a rumor” of an alleged assault or affront, or in Elaine’s case, the threat of Black farmers organizing to get better prices for their labor, for lynch mobs to form.

Brown meets an archivist who shows us the then-governor’s scrapbook revealing how Charles Brough dashed to the scene of the Elaine unrest, participated in it, then promised “hangings” for those Black victims charged with inciting or carrying out the violence, when their real crime was defending themselves and surviving.

Airplanes circled over Tulsa and are widely believed to have bombed the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood and business district, 35 blocks of the city destroyed in days of racist rage in 1921. Hundreds died, most of the scores and scores of businesses never came back to life.

Brown notes her own newspaper’s ugly part in the summers of unrest, blasting headlines calling for reprisals and violence in Washington, D.C. in that first Red Summer. And we see Tulsa’s laudable commitment to unearth this past when efforts to investigate it more thoroughly were thwarted in the late 1990s.

At a time when America is wrestling anew with what the country “means” and stands for, when “Jim Crow” is again in the headlines thanks to voter suppression efforts in Republican-controlled legislatures across the land, and when grappling with the long history of racial animus that is a stain we never seem to want to acknowledge, “Rise Again” is a sober reminder of the history many want to erase, all but ensuring it’ll repeat itself for the next hundred years as well.

MPA Rating: unrated, archival photos and descriptions of violence

Cast: DeNeen Brown, Oklahoma State Representative Regina Goodwin, Cameron McWhirter, Rev. Dr. Robert Turner and Mayor G.T. Bynum.

Credits: Directed by Dawn Porter. A National Geographic/Hulu release premiering June 18 and 19.

Running time: 1:28

“Skater Girl” is a pleasant “feel good” Indian drama played in a minor key.

It’s sort of a Westernized look at income disparity, lingering “caste” culture and sexism, as it tells the story of an Indian woman raised in London who comes to see the problems of the tiny village of her family’s past as solvable by teaching the kids to skateboard. We see the impact even this tiny bit of joy and “freedom” has there through the eyes of a poor teenage girl who finds herself and her ambition on a board.

Newcomer Rachel Saanchita Gupta is Prerna, a gawky teen who has outgrown her school uniform, but that’s just as well because her family keeps her out of school, making her sell peanuts in the nearby market town, cooking and keeping the house. School is now where she drops little brother Ankush (Shafin Patel) in the morning.

Prerna can’t win for losing. She’s kept out of school, but her stubborn brick-maker dad criticizes her inability to sell peanuts, and lashes out in misguided macho pride whenever her mother suggests other jobs she could do to help support the family. Prerna shows up at school after a teacher berates her for skipping. Too poor to have a textbook? He then humiliates her in front of the class and it’s back to skipping school.

As is the way of such films, a visitor from the Progressive West then shows up and changes her life. Jessica (Amrit “Amy” Maghera of TV’s “Hollyoaks) rolls into the village on a bus, checks in at the modest internet-advertised hotel and wanders the place, looking for vestigial connections. She is struck by the memory of how “one small step” changed her and her family’s fate.

Seeing the “bearing car” Prerna fashioned for her little brother gets her attention. It’s essentially a homemade skateboard. The abrupt arrival of a convenient American-who-knows Jessica, Erick (Jonathan Readwin) allows her to make the connection. He brings his skateboard, shows the kids a little, and next thing you know, Jessica has equipped all the kids, in all castes, with skateboards.

But that won’t change Prerna’s predestined life of grinding poverty and menial labor, or her fate to be married off too-young before she can do anything to improve herself. For that, they’ll need to think bigger.

The amusing things in “Skater Girl” are the way the Westerner accidentally imports anarchy the moment she introduces the children of Khempur, Rajasthan to skateboards. She’s not just “disrupting” these kids’ life paths, she’s upending businesses, dinging the public peace and giving the kids something they’d rather do than attend school.

She’s remaking this town in the West’s image, and the locals are soon in a tizzy over that, as you might expect.

“Doesn’t matter where you go in the world,” Erick cracks, “everybody hates skateboards.”

The blowback is both predictable and still disheartening in an amusing way. But if the kids go back to school they can learn how to impose change the way the father of their country did. WWGD? What would Gandhi do?

There are plenty of cute bits in director and co-writer Manjari Makijany’s film. The skating might be remedial, strictly low-speed, low-skill set shredding.

But that’s the point. Introduce it, get the kids hooked and they’ll never be content to scrub floors or tend fields again. It’s a “small thing” but it could change this village and the kids in it in ways far beyond the inevitable scars from their many inevitable falls.

MPA Rating: PG, corporal punishment, mild profanity

Cast: Rachel Saanchita Gupta, Amy Maghera, Shafin Patel, Jonathan Readwin

Credits: Directed by Manjari Makijany, script by Manjari Makijany, Vinati Makijany. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

July 16, humans are back in season. For the apex predators called Great White sharks.

The effects are impressive and the over-dubbing is good enough that most characters you’d swear were speaking their native English on Shudder’s Russian release, “The Superdeep (Kolskaya sverhglubokay).”

But you don’t even need to take the (super shallow) cheap shot that any horror film titled “Superdeep” serves up to pick apart this slow-walked bore. It’s acted, filmed and shot in ways that spoil its limited dramatic/suspense/fright possibilities, a classic 85 minute movie wrapped in a 103 minute package.

It’s the sort of movie where there isn’t much point noting the supporting cast, because you just know this officer, that junior officer, this scientist and that lab tech aren’t going to be around for long. Picked off, like Poe or Agatha Christie characters, one by one.

Anya (Milena Radulovic) is an epidemiologist with empathy issues in the last Gorbachev years of the Soviet empire. She has little problem “following orders” when things go lethally wrong with a vaccine she and colleagues are hastily testing in the opening scene.

Will that come in handy when she’s called in for an emergency at a super secret “deepest bore hole in the world” outside of snowy Murmansk? Something’s gone terribly wrong in a lab and research station buried some 12,000 meters down. She is to “collect samples” from bodies and “leave any rescue mission to the World Health Organization.”

As the WHO doesn’t even know about the lab or what it’s up to, well, just do your duty, comrade.

But one stunned survivor of the accident staggers up to her and lectures her, without knowing her name, credentials or orders.

“There’s nothing worse than betraying our principles!” Although she assures him “I took the Hippocratic Oath,” he, she and we assume it’s the Russian version. First, do what the State says, not “first, do no harm.”

As Anya, an epidemiologist sans facemask (Russian shortcuts) makes a rapid (unpressurized) descent into the Superdeep, she sees “Demons live here” graffiti and hears “It’s hell down there, Hell!” from others. “Superdeep” goes wrong, step by slowly-taken step.

There’s a catalog of camera angles and edits that help most horror films create empathy for characters, build suspense and even reach for pathos when the worst happens. Writer-director Arseny Syuhin either never watched John Carpenter’s “The Thing” or even Jon Amiel’s “The Core,” or simply didn’t feel the need for this strategy as he wasn’t worried about those built-in problems for any “creature feature.”

There’s a lot more to making an effective thriller that sending a pretty scientist to be tested, physically, morally and ethically in an alien environment than “The Superdeep” that he made. The film lacks urgency, stakes, deaths that matter, the works.

But again, the hurtling elevator (up, and down) effects and over-familiar human bodies taken over by something viral and inhuman effects are top tier.

And kudos for Samuel Stewart Hunter for getting the Russian speakers’ words in English (he adapted the dubbed dialogue) to come close to matching the movements of their lips.

Aside from this, “The Superdeep” is a super bust.

MPA Rating: unrated, bloody violence

Cast: Milena Radulovic, Sergey Ivanyuk, Nikolay Kovbas 

Credits: Scripted and directed by Arseny Syuhin, English adaptation scripted by Samuel Stewart Hunter. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:53

I’ve been arguing with people online all week about building up box office expectations for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first big musical, “In the Heights.”

It’s also showing on HBO Max, and TV is a good place for it.

It’s a watchable film lacking stars, breakout tunes, lump on the throat moments, real drama or much that would bolster its appeal. Inclusive, a cute moment or two and great dancing can’t overcome those missing selling points. And selling the Dickens out of it can’t overcome that lack of pop and pizazz.

It always looked like “Rent” and that’s how it opened $11.4 million. Jon Chu’s directed an underwhelming movie that this time, audiences ignored.

I just caught “Peter Rabbit 2” and while Sony can be pitied for not getting it out on Easter, last year and this year, judging from the joyless Sequel they should be happy with $10.4 million.

New openings let down aside, it’s
not like “A Quiet Place 2” ran away with the weekend. $11.65 million.

https://www.boxofficepro.com/weekend-box-office-in-the-heights-peter-rabbit-2-a-quiet-place-part-ii/

It rallies for an almost-boffo finale, with James Bond movie rescues and a James Bond Astin Martin — if spies ever drove convertibles.

But “Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway,” is a curiously perfunctory affair, a laughless comedy based on the Beatrix Potter animal darlings of scores of dainty little books created when the world was less cynical, in which the new “Bea” (Rose Byrne) wrestles with selling out to Big Business.

So in a meta sense, it’s a kids’ movie about the cynicism and salesmanship that goes into producing “children’s content.” Hilarious, and ever-so kid-friendly? Not bloody likely.

Bea and rabbit-leery, screams-like-a-teen-girl Thomas (Domhnall Gleeson) marry in the opening scene, in which Peter (voiced by James Corden) fantasizes about lashing out at his former tormenter Thomas at the merest hint of being “triggered.”

As a new publisher (David Oyelowo) woos the newlyweds with promises of riches, and the input of “marketing types” on Bea’s second book, Peter decides to follow his impulse — as usual — and run off to the city.

That’s how he falls in with some artful animal dodgers and their own rabbit Fagin, voiced by “Walking Dead” regular Lennie James. Peter wants to prove he’s not a “goody goody,” that he’s a “baddy baddy.” So naturally he enlists his old farm friends to help with The Big Farmer’s Market Heist.

The slapstick has one moment that made me chuckle, a clever Gleeson-and-stuntman stunt that involves chasing the family Land Rover down a hill. “Screaming like a teenage girl?” That’s a given.

Other laughs are very hard to come by, with the story turning dark as Peter and pals are nabbed to be sold as pets, and we look out from inside the cage as they do, at the horrors of clumsy or ill-intentioned human “owners” who have their lives in their hands.

“THIS is what it’s like to be a pet?”

Little kids will appreciate the drink-seltzer-and-belch gag. Adults will get a chuckle out of a Sony production taking an amusing cheap shot at Disney. Other than that…

COVID-delayed or not, this production has a half-hearted/half-arsed feel, something Corden’s Peter all but admits in the curtain call. Why reward them for that?

MPA Rating: PG for some rude humor and action

Cast: The voices of James Corden, Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki, Lennie James, with Domhnall Gleeson, Rose Byrne and David Oyelowo.

Credits: Directed by Will Gluck, script by Patrick Burleigh and Will Gluck, based on the books of Beatrix Potter. A Sony Columbia release.

Running time: 1:33

People asking me “Any movies you’re looking forward to this summer?” can stop asking.

My friends know when I’m Being sarcastic.

Not Disney. Not Pixar. 20th Century Studios releases this defective robot pal comedy this fall.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that the curious, expressive and exceptionally smart husky may be the dog who truly “gets” us, and will most likely be the first canine to carry on a conversation with her or his human companion.

One is reminded of this eventuality in the new film “Siberia,” when our soul-and-psyche searching hero Willem Dafoe beds his team down for the night in a cave, where figures from his past and his nightmares visit him by firelight.

As the naked dwarf woman labors into the light in her wheelchair and utters “I just wanted to save the best. I just wanted to save the best,” we cut to the pack, staring at her and Dafoe in a quizzical way any critic or film fan will recognize. Their expression says the same thing I’ve heard shouted in cinemas or film festivals, and not always shouted by me.

“WTF Abel Ferrara?” they unmistakably wonder. “W? T? F?”

Dafoe has become the muse for the “Bad Lieutenant/King of New York” director and once-and-always bad-boy of American indie cinema, Ferrara. We’re allowed to read “director’s alter ego” into Dafoe’s performances here and in “Tommaso,” and “4:44 Last Day On Earth,” and maybe in “Go Go Tales,” if not in “Passolini.” The fact that Dafoe’s character, Clint, literally faces off with his own alter ego, and the ghost of his surgeon father (also Dafoe) in this film tends to underline that viewers’ “permission” to leap to conclusions.

So what is Ferrara putting on the screen that he might be better off telling to his psychotherapist this time?

Dafoe’s Clint is in a sort of mental Siberia, a loner running a bar “in the far north,” Canada we’re told (it’s an Italian co-production, so no, the Alps). He serves Eskimos who tell him their drink order and we assume how their day went and what not in untranslated Inuit dialects.

A Russian grandmother babbles in untranslated Russian before showing off her granddaughter’s nude, pregnant torso, which Clint reacts to in ways that suggest this is his doing.

An ex-wife vision here, a grizzly attack nightmare there, Clint has issues that go beyond knocking back shots with his customers.

Ferrara’s Clint gives an ex-wife and a child the same trite rationalization that thousands of marriage counselors have rolled their eyes at and 400 middling playwrights and screenwriters have recycled before him.

“The only thing I’m guilty of is loving you too much.”

He’s come to this remote place to get away from civilization, although this could be all in his mind. When he hitches his team of huskies up for a run through the snow, past some sort of home invasion/mass execution, into that cave and eventually to an oasis in a north African desert, that “in his head” notion seems on surer ground.

I’ve found Ferrara’s cryptic, navel-gazing bent of late both tedious and yet fascinating in what he’s trying to get across about where his head’s at when he makes this or that self-reflective film.

“Siberia” is gorgeous to look at, taking in bits of Inuit culture and id/ego psychobabble and the forlorn romance of “escaping” civilization, running a bar in the middle of nowhere.

Clint arguing with himself over “You don’t live in the world” seems to be the point, assuming that we’re meant to find one. There’s a whole “search” for “the black arts” bit (Simon McBurney plays an alleged magician) that feels like a tangent a filmmaker who never met a tangent he didn’t pursue might have avoided.

Still, even though I didn’t much care for the movie, and took up the huskies’ question for them more than once — “W.T.F. Ferrera?” — I can say I didn’t mind the “escape” of it all. We can leave the “solutions” to this existential crisis on film to the shrinks, if indeed this ballsy, indulgent head-case of a filmmaker ever bothers to see one.

MPA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity/graphic nudity, some disturbing violence, and bloody images 

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Dounia Sichov, Fabio Pagano, Valentina Rozumenko and Simon McBurney

Credits: Directed by Abel Ferrera, script by Abel Ferrara and Christ Zois, A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:31

Former photojournalist and cinematographer Liam Le Guillou brings a lot of Werner Herzog drama and breathless, narrated suspense to his feature documentary debut, “An Unknown Compelling Force.”

“Nature calls the shots out here,” he emphasizes, speaking of the snowy Ural mountains above the Siberian Arctic Circle. He went there to solve a mystery he stumbled across on Google, and he isn’t shy about striking just the right Herzogian Heroic pose and tone as he does it.

“I don’t like ‘We don’t know’ as an answer!”

What got his attention was a sort of Soviet era “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” only not fiction. A group of mostly-student hikers, members of a university “explorer’s club,” died near a peak known as “The Dead Mountain” in 1959. The deaths, investigated at the time, were “mysterious,” no matter what the Soviet authorities said.

The hikers were ill-clothed and a great distance from their tent, in sub-zero temperatures. The tent was sliced up, and the victims had various evident and even bizarre injuries. There was evidence of radioactivity on some of their clothes. They’d been taking photos on this trip, one was of a fuzzy image of a two-legged figure in the distance, and in a “Grizzly Man” touch, the last shot was a blur of bright lights, seemingly in the night sky.

This is the famous Dyatlov Pass Incident, with a piece of little-visited geography named for the leader of their expedition, one of the victims — Igor Dyatlov. It’s been the subject of many a Russian “Unsolved Mystery/In Search Of…” program, and even a mini-series.

As Le Guillou asks around, various Russian authorities on the incident suggest he come see for himself and take an outsider’s look at this mystery. So he does.

Was it an avalanche, mass hysteria, an animal attack or an assault by a “Soviet Yeti” (abominable snowman)? Was it aliens, or a military cover-up of something the “tourists” saw? Did the hikers turn on each other? Might the indigenous tribespeople living in this remote part of the world have had a hand in what happened?

Every scenario, Le Guillou finds, has its backers, even the wackier ones. As he and a camera operator make their own trek — as part of a team — to the still-unpopulated area where this occurred, he and we get a feeling for how hostile and unforgiving that environment remains, and how difficult it will be to find answers to a 60 year-old mystery.

Interviewing Russian authors, “Dyatlov Society” fanatics and a criminologist, and an American coroner and a retired FBI agent, Le Guillou revisits the case, looking at files released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, hunting for inconsistencies, hints of a cover-up directed from higher up, sealing up blind alleys as he seeks new interpretations of the facts-as-we-know-them.

Using extensive still photos, both from the hikers and the later “official” search and discovery of their bodies, readings from the autopsy, investigation and even from the hiker’s field diaries, the film personalizes the young victims, shares (censored) post-mortem photos, hears from people in the original search party and scholars studying those indigenous people as Le Guillou tries to shoot down hypotheses, one by one.

The filmmaker/narrator maintains our interest in this admittedly fascinating forensic documentary with stretches of breathless narration, underscored with dramatic music. Le Guillou’s odd Anglo-European (he’s British) accent is rendered more Werner Herzog-like with his cadences, his earnest way of leaning in to emphasize danger from the elements or…finding the REAL truth.

Reading the Wikipedia summary of the latest turns and findings on the case — which has been reopened and closed and reopened again — you can see that although our filmmaker is sure he’s got the answer, others are still seeing evidence pointing in other directions.

“An Unknown Compelling Force,” which takes its title from the original case’s noncommittal conclusion, makes a case for “case closed,” backed up by experts and the filmmaker’s entertaining sense of dramatic hype. Has he solved it? Watch it and see.

MPA Rating: unrated, graphic scene photos

Cast: Liam Le Guillou, Svetlana Oss, Ken Holmes, Mick Fennerty, Natalia Sakharova, Yuri Kuntsevich, others

Credits: Directed, written and narrated by Liam Le Guillou. A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:47