Tag: p

Place of Bones

  By

★★★½
“Grave encounters.”

I’ve followed director Cummings since we screened her debut feature Berkshire County, at our film festival. Here, we reviewed the impressive She Never Died in 2019. Both films were distinctly horror-tinged, so it was a bit of a surprise to see her attached to what seemed a Western period piece. Having watched it… let’s just say, things make more sense now. For right at the very end, the film takes an abrupt turn into darkness, that may remind the viewer of Bone Tomahawk – albeit nowhere near as graphic. I’ll say no more than that, except: well played. Things unfold in a remote part of the West, where Pandora (Graham) is bringing up her daughter Hester (Robillard) after the death of her husband. 

Their isolated life is disrupted when Hester finds a badly injured man near the cabin. This is Calhoun (Nemec), who also has two saddle-bags of money, the proceeds of a bank robbery. Calhoun subsequently had a violent falling-out with his accomplices. However, Bear John (Hopper), the brother of one of the deceased criminals, is growing concerned about his sibling’s disappearance, and is closing in on Pandora’s cabin. It’s going to be up to her, a crippled robber and a teenage girl to withstand an inevitable assault from career criminals, with limited resources in the way of arms and ammunition. On the positive side, it’s clear from the way Pandora deals with Calhoun, that she is not somebody who should be taken lightly or underestimated. 

This is definitely a slow burn. The first hour is more concerned with depicting the life of Pandora and Hester, along with how Calhoun’s arrival changes things. Though I have to say, after how the film shifts at the end, you’ll find yourself viewing these early interactions in a very different light. Bear John doesn’t even arrive on screen until well into the movie, in a well-handled scene which does a good job of depicting his gang and their relationships. Thereafter, there’s a looming sense of threat, with a ticking clock of escalating tension as the cabin’s inhabitants try to get ready for the violence to come. Again, without revealing too much, mother and daughter may be more ready for this than they seem.

I do admire movies where you reach the end and are forced to reassess everything that has gone before. Even the title takes on a different meaning by the time the end credits roll. This certainly helps a film which, otherwise, would be a fairly generic Western siege pic. Graham has always tended to be under-rated, and it’s nice to see her get a chance to exercise her acting talent. Nemec is a good foil, and their interplay helped guide my interest through a fairly languid first two-thirds. Once things kick off, the pace ups considerably and by the end there’s little doubt it deserves inclusion here. It may still be a little too horrific for Western fans, and too Western for horror fans. Yet if you like both, this is an interesting combination. 

Dir: Audrey Cummings
Star: Heather Graham, Corin Nemec, Brielle Robillard, Tom Hopper

Peggy

  By

★½
“Amateur hour and ten minutes.”

An early contender for widest gap between synopsis and reality in 2024. On the one hand, we have “After years of torment, Peggy finally gets revenge on all those who wronged her in the past.” On the other? A dumb, microbudget not-a-horror, not anything really. It’s probably most notable for the unexpected appearance of Tom Lehrer on the soundtrack. I guess the basic concept is there. Peggy (Van Dorn) is almost thirty, but still lives at home with her doting dad (Williams). Her main hobby is abducting and torturing those who “wronged her” – though quite what they did to deserve such punishment is never made clear, which makes it kinda hard to feel empathy for her.

Possibly even more irritating are… well, everyone else, to be honest, but I suspect the local cops are top of the list. Even when Peggy carries out a mass poisoning at the bar where she works, when a customer makes an off-colour remark (have the makers ever been in a bar?), they do basically nothing. Mind you, Dustin (Guiles) is picking up evidence at a murder scene with his bare hands, so there’s that. The victims, including former high school Queen Bee Rachel (Osoki), are slightly noxious. But again: nothing to merit death, unless you consider dropping the C-bomb a capital crime, as Rachel does on a couple of occasions. [If so, I’m in trouble: being Scottish, it’s locked in to my sweary vocabulary].

There’s no particular sense of escalation, development or anything much. Spoiler, I guess, but it ends with Peggy simply announcing she has decided to go on a road-trip. The end. Well, if you discount ten minutes of the world’s slowest end-credits, which live up to the term “title crawl”, despite including an alternate ending that adds nothing of note or interest to proceedings. Including this, it still barely reaches an hour and ten. But, you know what? I’m not even mad about it. Indeed, half a star is probably for the film appreciating the line from Hamlet: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Though given the lack of wit here, the saying needs to be reworked as, brevity is the soul of brevity. 

Performances range from the acceptable (Van Dorn) to the “actor no-showed, but there’s a homeless guy hanging around outside the 7-11” level. There aren’t even any decent exploitation elements which might have provoked some interest, with no nudity and gore limited to the occasional squirt of red-tinged corn syrup. To be fair, I get that making movies is hard. Making good ones is more difficult still. Yet when I sacrifice part of my hard-earned day off to this low-grade nonsense, I feel I have earned the right to be moderately aggrieved by the waste of my time. I never did figure out about the “years of torment” allegedly suffered by Peggy. I sincerely doubt it was significantly worse than the hour of torment this inflicted on me.

Dir: Brandon Guiles
Star: Tiffani Van Dorn, Brandon Guiles, Brian Williams, Katie Ososki

Phoenix

  By

★½
“Tubi or not Tubi? NOT Tubi…”

Much though I love the streaming service, even I have to admit that “Tubi Originals” are a bit of a mixed bag, to put it mildly. For every Mercy Falls, an entertaining enough B-movie that punches above its weight, there is also… Well, things like this, which is filled wall-to-wall with non-actors trying to act, among a plethora of other, poor choices. Both heroine and villain are former WWE employees, being known there respectively at Eva Marie and Vladimir Kozlov. The latter comes off better, largely because he doesn’t have to do much more than be a menacing thug in his role as Maxim Vasiliiv, head of a Russian crime syndicate in Miami.

He’s involved in the death of Everett Grant (Couture), which is a bad move, since the corpse’s daughter, Fiona “Phoenix” Grant (Marie), is a combat trainer in the US Army, and does not believe her father killed himself. You can probably figure out the rest of the story without me needing to explain it. To be honest, my notes on the topic would not trouble a cigarette paper, such is the shallowness of the plot. The acting is no great shakes either. A lot of the supporting cast is filled out by people who are clearly more familiar with the inside of a gym, rather than the Actor’s Studio. Consequently, they look the part (even if it’s “Menacing Thug #4”), only for the illusion to be shattered when they deliver lines.

There are a couple of minor exceptions, though the real actors only show up the deficiencies elsewhere. Neal McDonough plays Fiona’s commanding officer, and the always welcome Bai Ling appears as a rather weird role, missing from her IMDb entry, most notable for lipstick and make-up which leaves her looking as if she came right from a booking as a kid’s party clown. All of which would be acceptable, if the film delivered copious amounts of over-the-top mayhem – as you’d expect given the two leads’ histories. The reality is, it’s almost forty minutes before you get Phoenix doing anything of significance. We do first get a shopping montage with her Aunt Grace (Camacho – a former cop who appeared on Survivor, apparently). So there’s that.

Things perk up somewhat thereafter, at least when those involved are kicking and punching each others. These sequences may not make a lot of – read, any – sense, yet they’re preferable to the makers’ feeble efforts in other departments. The scene where Fiona and Maxim have dinner and trade lscklustre barbs, may be the low-water point in this department, though any flashback involving Everett (“It’s Christmas Eve and Dad still hasn’t shown up – or called!”) is probably going to be ranked. When I saw the trailer for this, I was surprised by how little action it seemed to have. Turns out, the answer is definitely “not enough,” and the final ten minutes are not enough to rescue the situation.

Dir: Daniel Zirilli
Star: Natalie Eva Marie, Oleg Prudius, Jessie Camacho, Randy Couture

Panther of the Border

  By

★½
“A load of panths.”

There are times when I can look at a failure of a movie, and kinda see how the various elements could have been arranged to better effect. That’s the case here, where a poverty-row, Spanish-language (but made in Texas) production about rape, revenge and narcos, could potentially have worked. Except, it absolutely doesn’t. It’s the story of Carla Mendoza (Verastegui), who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, working for her boss, Pedro Camargo (Palomo), blissfully unaware he is a cartel leader. As a result, she’s arrested, and ends up spending seven years in prison, while daughter Nina is taken care by her grandmother.

On getting out, Carla vows to take revenge on everyone she considers responsible, which is not a short list. Beyond Camargo, who tried to have her put away for life, it also includes her previous boss (Soberón), who raped and then fired her; Camargo’s rival, La Cobra (played, according to the IMDb, by “La Cobra de Tamaulipas”, though my Internet sleuthing suggests she’s actually called Caty Gutiérrez); Camargo’s wife, who dissed Carla just before the arrest; and, quite probably, the doctor who doesn’t quite exhibit a top-tier beside manner, after Nina is shot when Camargo tries to take Carla out. Our heroine holds grudges like an elephant with a Rolodex (Kids! Ask your parents!), and has taken lessons in the necessary skills to exact payback from those on her list.

Unfortunately, the execution is terrible. The script is a complete mess, at one point repeating the entire sequence of events leading up to Carla’s arrest, which simply confused the hell out of me. Motivations for most characters are unclear, with things happening for no reason, out of thin air, or not at all, being simply described to us. For instance, Nina mounts an assault on La Cobra’s men, which we only hear about third-hand, through a report given to Camargo. This isn’t surprising, since the production values are woeful, with the “police station” and “hospital” battling it out, for the title of Least Convincing Facility. They’re still not as bad as Carla’s combat skills: my grandmother could do better, and she’s been dead for 40 years.

It feels as if the makers ran out of money or script pages, the film ending with Nina miraculously going from coma to 100% well again, followed by Verastegui giving a rousing karaoke rendition of the film’s theme song in a nightclub, before a crowd charitably numbering in double-digits. Even by the low standards of the Mexploitation films we’ve seen previously, this is bad. Yet as mentioned, arranged differently… I actually liked La Cobra, who genuinely acts like I feel a cartel leader would. If the whole film had been her against Carla, for some reason, it would have been on considerably stronger ground. Indeed, the performances in general are okay: most would not feel out of place in my narconovelas. Every other element though, ranges from poor to flat-out terrible.

Dir: Martin Palomo, Luis Antonio Rodriguez
Star: Carla Verastegui, Martin Palomo, La Cobra de Tamaulipas, Héctor Soberón
a.k.a. La Pantera de la Frontera

Pride & Prejudice & Airships, by Caylen McQueen

  By

Literary rating: ★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆½

As the title suggests, this is one of those literary mash-ups, similar to Pride & Prejudice & Zombies. However, beyond the steampunk influence apparent from the title, this adds another major twist, with the universe here being a gender-swapped one. For in this world, women run everything, with men being largely reduced to waiting for the opposite sex to woo them. Specifically to the novel, meet the Bennet family, who have five sons, whom their parents are increasingly keen to see married off. However, that’s going to be easier said than done in some cases. Elisander, for example, has some newfangled notions about the place of men in contemporary society: that they should be allowed to pilot airships, for one. Another brother is gay, a needless conceit which feels shoehorned into proceedings, in a particularly clunky fashion. 

While Elisander represents the main protagonist of the book, it’s the unusual setting which qualifies it for inclusion on this site. Of particular interest is Darcy Fitzwilliam, a female military captain who initially enters the plot as the best friend of a landowner to whom the Bennett parents are keen to wed a son. More or less any son. She takes an instant dislike to the family in general, and Elisander in particular – the antipathy is largely mutual. But you likely won’t be surprised to hear, that over the course of the book, the relationship between the two thaws out.

Also of interest is Darcy’s foster sister, Georgette Wickham, a pirate in the high skies. She owns an airship, which Georgette and her female crew use to carry out robberies. The Bennet family are one such victim, though Georgette turns out to be a bit more complex than she initially appears, particularly in her relationship with Darcy, and her half-cyborg sister. I’d like to have read more about them, and indeed the gynocentric society as a whole. I have… questions. How did it become this way? How does the issue of having and rearing children get handled? Despite an enticing cover, the book is annoyingly uninterested in things outside the Bennett clan and their marriage plans. The tech is also vague, being whatever is needed for the plot. For instance, there’s a throwaway reference to a “chip”. But just the one.

I will confess to not having read Jane Austen’s 1813 original, so that aspect of this mash-up is completely lost on me. As a steampunk story on its own terms, this is okay, though I’d liked to have seen more action from the women. In particular, it feels like it’s setting up a confrontation between Darcy and Georgette. While this does eventually take place, it’s over, almost before it has started. Perhaps there is more of note in the follow-up volume, Pride & Prejudice & Pirates? But there’s not enough here to make me more than marginally interested in finding out whether or not that is the case.

Author: Caylen McQueen
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book.
Book 1 of 2 in the Steampunk Pride & Prejudice series.

Polite Society

  By

★★★½
“Almost everything, everywhere…”

Sitting somewhere between Everything Everywhere All at Once  and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, you will find this British comedy. It shares the same immigrant culture clash origin of the former, and the teenage angst of the latter – though, fortunately, without Pilgrim‘s smug self-awareness. It’s the story of Ria Khan (Kansara), a teenage daughter in an Pakistani family in Britain who wants nothing to do with her family’s expectations, and instead, dreams of becoming a stuntwoman. Her older sister, Lena (Arya), recently dropped out of art school and, to Ria’s horror, is now heading towards marriage to hunky scientist Salim (Khanna). He basically represents everything about traditional culture Ria detests.

She decides her sister must be saved from this fate, with the help of her plucky school-chums, and in increasing defiance, both of her family and the evidence that Salim is a nice guy, who genuinely loves Lena. That is, until Ria stumbles across the secret laboratory under his house, and it turns out she might have been right all along. Except, it might be his mother, Raheela (Bucha), who is the evil mastermind, with a plan to… No, I can’t say. Not so much for reasons of spoilerness, more because it’s such a dumb idea for a villainous plot, James Bond wouldn’t give it house-room. Even in the Roger Moore era. Regardless, Ria’s only hope is now to kidnap her own sister from her own wedding, under the nose of both Rahella and the bride’s parents.

This manages to tread the fine line between self-awareness and blatantly being “meta”. Ria is excellent, delivering fiercely as the committed teenager, who is 125% sure she is utterly correct, regardless of what any so-called “facts” might indicate. However, the real star is likely Khanna, who in just a few scenes manages to steal the entire movie, as the epitome of an evil overlord. I did sense some of the cultural beats might be lost on those outside Indian society. Most of the time, there’s enough context you can work out the details (and it was refreshing that the script avoided the obvious “arranged marriage” trope). But what is an “Eid” and why would you have an “Eid soiree“?

The action is surprisingly robust, setting up each fight with an introductory title. It generally delivers with emphatic oomph that provoked comment from me more than once: the fight between the two sisters was particularly savage. It was also appreciated that Ria’s idol is Eunice Huthart, who genuinely is one of the top British stuntwomen, having doubled for Angelina Jolie in Salt. I would have welcomed a bit more action, especially towards the end. It seems to be setting up a big fight between Ria and Raheela: this doesn’t arrive, instead being simply Ria landing the signature move she has been failing to complete all movie. But as an entertaining mix of dry British humour and flying fantasy, this works better than I expected.

Dir: Nida Manzoor
Star: Priya Kansara, Ritu Arya, Nimra Bucha, Akshay Khanna

Paradise Highway

  By

★★½
“Mother trucker.”

I spent much of the first thirty minutes here going “That can’t be Juliette Binoche.” Yet, it is, the French actress looking thoroughly unglamorous and very convincing in her portrayal of white trash trucker Sally. Her brother Dennis (Frank Grillo, whose role isn’t as big as the poster would have you believe) is in prison, and under pressure from even sketchier parties, so Sally has been delivering packages for said parties as she criss-crosses the country. He’s about to get out, so this will be her last run. She’s still shocked to discover the item in this case is a very young girl, Leila (Finley), though she has no alternative but to comply. Except, the hand-off goes violently wrong, the intended recipient ending up dead in the dirt. Sally flees with Leila in tow, and tries to figure out what to do. In pursuit are both the girl’s “owners”, and the authorities, led by federal agent Sterling (Monaghan) and ex-agent Gerick (Freeman), who is now an FBI consultant.

If you’re think this seems like a cross between the various versions of Gloria and The Transporter, you would be about right. Things unfold almost entirely as you’d expect, with the relationship between Sally and Leila going from suspicion and mistrust to affection. Nor will you be surprised to discover that Sally has a background of abuse herself, giving her a particular reason to want to protect the child from the thoroughly unpleasant fate for which she was slated [The film never details it, but a scene where Sterling and Gerick find the traffickers’ den gives you enough of an idea] The problem is we don’t need this justification: wanting to protect a child should be the natural response of any right-minded individual. As a result, this set-up is largely a waste of time, and in a film which runs an overlong 115 minutes, is certainly unnecessary.

Much the same goes for the way the film splits its focus between the two pairs: Sally and Leila, or Sterling and Gerick. I couldn’t help feeling they should have stuck to one or the other, instead of what feels almost like an even split, leaving both somewhat under-served. The agents don’t seem to have a particular purpose, except perhaps to indicate that not all agents of the system are bad – despite the way it has clearly and monumentally failed Leila. It’s always a pleasure to watch Freeman act, and that remains the case here. Indeed, the goes for Binoche: all the performances are good enough for their roles, and make the relationships the best thing about this. They just seem to exist in a vacuum, servicing a plot that doesn’t manage much more than a shadowy antagonist until the very end. There are too many under-developed elements, such as the posse of other women truckers, who exist purely to come to Sally’s aid, as and when necessary. This big-rig looks imposing, yet is running empty in terms of any emotional payload.

Dir: Anna Gutto
Star: Juliette Binoche, Hala Finley, Morgan Freeman, Cameron Monaghan

Tracie Tanner Thrillers, Vol 1-3 by Allan Leverone

  By

Parallax View
Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½

This largely unfolds over the period of about a week in May-June 1987. History buffs will recall that being the time when the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart, and it’s that which provides the background to the novel. President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to shepherd his country into a more open era, but is facing strong opposition from some elements within the government. He writes a letter to his American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, whose contents are potentially explosive, and which the anti-Gorbachev faction in the Kremlin will do anything to stop. They fail to stop the communication being handed to American courier and CIA agent Tracie Tanner in East Berlin, but that’s only the start of their efforts to prevent Tracie completing her mission.

This is the kind of book I liked despite its flaws – and there are quite a few of those. The plot really wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny: it’s the old “She can’t trust anyone” trope, and it’d take about five minutes of thought by a trained intelligence operative to figure out how she could bypass that. Meanwhile, Tracie has no qualms putting her complete faith in the male lead, hunky (but thoroughly doomed – he just found out he has an inoperable brain tumour) air-traffic controller Shane Rowley. No surprises for guessing where those two end up. Despite the period setting, there’s not much sense of that very specific era, and Leverone does spend too much time diverting into background information on characters who, in truth, are not more than fringe players. Finally, while it’s clear who the “bad guys” are, it might have helped if there had been a particular antagonist, rather than a series of relatively faceless Russian agents and American traitors.

However, you shouldn’t necessarily let any of the above dissuade you, since they are largely the kind of criticisms I only realized after I’d finished the book, and was contemplating this review. The author does a fine job of managing the pace, keeping things moving at a fast and furious rate. There’s one hurdle after another for Tracie and Shane to overcome, as they hurtle towards the final confrontation, atop a building in Washington. There are even occasional moments where I was genuinely impressed by Tracie’s smarts, such as her taking two motel rooms on opposite sides. Leverone has a very good eye for action, and some of the set pieces are positively cinematic, such as the fight on board a B-52, and its subsequent marginally controlled descent. Could quibble about the way Tracie needs “rescued” at the end, except it’s foreshadowed well enough to make sense.

All Enemies
Literary rating: ★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

After finishing Volume 1, I was pleased to discover I’d been smart enough to pick up Volumes 1-3 as a freebie (you can also get the first seven books for ten bucks). Having been solidly entertained by the first book, I headed more or less straight in to the next two, figuring that it would be a good candidate for our first ever featured book review. I wasn’t disappointed. This is another slick page-turner, albeit one with some of the same issues as its predecessor.

It begins only a couple of days after the events which ended the first volume. Traci is already back out in the field, even though she is still healing – both physically and mentally – from the damage she suffered while completing her mission.Only the personal intervention of President Reagan saved her from being drummed out of the CIA by Director Aaron Stallings, but it’s clear she is not exactly his flavour of the month.

A couple of months later, in September 1987, things kick off properly with the abduction of US Secretary of State J. Robert Humphries from his home in Georgetown. He’s a close personal friend of the President, who orders Stallings carry out an off-the-books operation, using a lone operative, to find out what happened and who’s responsible. No prizes for guessing to whom the director gives this fraught mission The initial evidence all seems to point to it being a Russian plot, this being the peak of the Cold War, but the more Tracie looks into the matter, the more it seems the Russians are being set up to take the fall, and the real culprits are elsewhere. Trying to tell Stallings this only gets her fired from the CIA; naturally, this is barely an inconvenience for the heroine.

As in the first book, the circumstances do throw Tracie back onto relying almost exclusively on her own talents. While she does get some help from CIA Analyst Marshall Fulton, it’s mostly information, which helps her put the pieces together. He’s a desk jockey, and although brave enough, ends up literally dropped off by the side of the road, as Tracie speeds off on her rescue mission. There is a slight sense of romantic tension between them; it doesn’t amount to much, yet still feels a bit awkward, considering how close we are to the personal tragedy Tracie endured in book #1. Her stoic refusal to call for back-up also felt a little strained. I get she no longer had official standing, yet there’s a point where this seemed a tad contrived.

It is a bit more of a stealth mission, which is what leads to the slightly lower kick-butt quotient for this: there’s more creeping around, trying not to be detected, in place of plane crashes, gun battles and chases. However, it feels more coherent and has a better ring of plausibility to it. Each piece of the story connects well to the next, and does a good job of drawing the reader along, towards the eventual climax on an small island off the East coast. My reading is usually split, with one book on my phone and a different one on the tablet. So it likely says something that, as soon as I finished this, I loaded up volume three on both my devices, the better to get into it.

The Omega Connection
Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

Again, there’s no much of a pause between the end of one story and the beginning of the next. No matter how much Tracie may have been taxed by her exploits, she’s thrown back out there by boss Stallings, on another hazardous mission. I do wonder about her motivation, since she’s now entirely off-books, no longer even being a CIA employee: why love your country so much, and be prepared to put your life on the line for it, when its agencies treat you in such a disrespectful manner? I’d be high-tailing it towards the private security sector after all she’s gone through. That might just be me though.

This begins with an electronics company being decimated by a bomb attack, with its CEO also murdered in his hotel room. Threatening letters had been received, blaming the corporation for its role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco over a quarter of a century previously, an abortive invasion attempt against Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which cost the lives of many Cuban expats. Now, it appears, someone is out for payback. Tracey is assigned, first to bring in the only surviving member of the board, its R&D genius, Edison Kiley, then find out the person or persons responsible and make them stop. The task will take her into the darker corners of the expat community in Miami, over into Cuba itself, before she has to go deep into the almost unexplored territory of the Florida Everglades.

There is a certain sense of deja vu, in that as in All Enemies, the culprit for whom Tracie is seeking, is not who it initially appears. Neither book makes much effort to hide this fact: they’re not really whodunnits. However, it is a little too familiar for my tastes, and she also accepts what she is told regarding this by a certain party as the truth. While she is limited in what she can do, due to her unofficial status, I’d still expect her to be a little more “Trust, but verify…”

The best thing here is likely the main antagonist. They spend most of the film in the background, with Tracie dealing mostly with the results of their action. However, the eventual face-off is worth the wait, a downright brutal and savage brawl in the depths of the Florida swamps. It’s good enough to make me wish they’d met up earlier in the story, and had more than one such encounter. By the end, I’d be hard-pushed to say Tracie had shown much character development. She’s more or less in the same place she was at the start of volume 3 – just with a bullet wound in her leg, and a nasty concussion. However, the whole trilogy proved to be more than an adequately fun read, and I would not bet against further volumes showing up here, down the road.

Author: Allan Leverone
Publisher: Rock Bottom Books, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 9 in the Tracie Tanner Thrillers series.

Perfect

  By

★★★½
“All in, all out!”

When I reviewed Russian fencing film On the Edge, I said, “I just need to find a synchronized swimming movie.” While this is a documentary, with all the positives and negatives of that genre, this fits the bill until Hollywood produces something more narrative. It follows the efforts of the Canadian team to get into the 2016 Rio Olympics. While normally, they’d be in as Pan-American champions, hosts Brazil got the spot reserved for the Americas. This forces Canada to go through the qualification tournament, battling their nemeses, Spain and Italy. The doc covers the arrival of new Chinese coach Meng Chen, efforts to get the most from her swimmers, and when this initially falls short, a radical re-invention of the team’s routine. 

You may be wondering what one of the most mocked Olympic sports is doing on the site. But beneath the fixed grins, penguin walks and stripper make-up, lies one of the most intense, demanding and gruelling sports, for men or women. To quote one team member, it’s like “running an Olympic-level 400-metre sprint while holding your breath”. She’s not wrong. The most memorable sequence here is when a series of team members list the injuries suffered for their sport. Broken bones. Torn muscles. And concussions. So many concussions, an inevitable result of rapidly-moving limbs in close proximity to skulls. I wrote elsewhere about the sport, now called “artistic swimming”; read that if you want the full case for why it belongs here.

Alternatively, just watch the film, because you’ll likely leave giving the athletes the respect they deserve. It’s the result of throwaway lines like one saying she spends 7-12 hours a day in the pool. Or the relentless pressure of Chen, pushing to unlock their potential. Or team captain Morin succumbing to an eating disorder, this sport being as much about how you look as how you perform. However, I’d have liked to have seen more technical background, rather than another scene of Chen yelling at the team. Even simple things, like explaining they aren’t allowed to touch the bottom of the pool, would have enhanced the footage of them throwing team-mates into the air. Though there are still some staggeringly beautiful shots, using reflections, tilted cameras, etc. it is a shame they couldn’t use the performance music – presumably for rights reasons. 

Interestingly, and perhaps pointedly, the team realizes its greatest results, after Chen adopts a more collaborative approach with them, and brings in external help. They even get an acting coach, to help improve their ability to convey emotions through movement. It’s nice too, to get a bit of insight into the aspiring Olympians, such as Holzner, for whom this has been an ambition since she was eight. We see the scrapbook she made when she was young (to help cope with a concussion!), and it helps foster an understanding of why people are willing to put themselves through this kind of ordeal. It all ends a bit messily: we don’t even see their final routine. But the journey is the thing here, not the destination, and you should be left with a new appreciation for the sport and its participants. 

Dir: Jérémie Battaglia
Star: Claudia Holzner, Marie-Lou Morin, Meng Chen, Karine Thomas

President and Kung-Fu Girl

  By

★★½
“Lifestyles of the Rich and Communist.”

On a trip to Thailand, businessman’s daughter Wen Wan manages to cause trouble with some rather unpleasant people, causing her father, Wen Ruhu to fear a revenge attack. He hires security consultant Liang Shan to protect Wan, but his business partner Li Kaishi, also sends his daughter, Xin You, as another bodyguard. Shan and You initially see each other as rivals, but as they get to know each other (and stop me if you’ve perhaps heard this before), eventually realize that they both want the same thing, to protect Wan. The sparks become more of the romantic kind, although it turns out that the situation in which they are involved is not as advertised, with envious eyes being cast at Liang’s company and its assets.

Firstly, I apologize for the lack of information on the participants. While in both Chinese and English, the opening credits list only the crew, not the cast, and the end credits (presumably listing the players) are only in Chinese. I found the names of two actors online, but absolutely no info about the characters they played. Nor is there an IMDb page for the movie: I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese films lately, and that often seems to be the case, especially with straight-to-streaming entries like this. Even the images I found for it, such as the one above, manage to mis-spell the movie’s own title. I get they really don’t care much about finding a Western audience, so I am just grateful the print has subtitles.

This begins brightly enough, though after the opening scene, I was a bit confused as to why Wan needs a bodyguard, since she seems quite capable of taking care of herself. [I must also say, for a supposedly Communist country, the luxurious lifestyle she enjoys looks much more like an episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous!] However, it’s clear that You is no slouch in the martial-arts department, though the editing here seems more intended to conceal than show off her physical abilities. Still, she looks the part and it seemed to have potential, with her and her male colleague fending off wave after wave of attempts at revenge.

Except it doesn’t happen. The film grinds to an abrupt halt in the middle, heading firmly for something closer to relationship driven soap-opera, complete with a soppy soundtrack. This sucks all life and promise out of the film, even if the two characters are rather more engaging than the whiny Wan. They’re trying, bless their hearts, it’s just not the kind of scenes I wanted to see: I generally prefer my kung-fu uncluttered with romantic tension (except for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, of course). There’s a brief burst of energy at the end, when all is revealed.  and did regain my interest, though even here You takes a bit of a back seat. It’s very much harmless fluff – I suspect it is the Chinese equivalent of a Netflix Original.

Dir: Feng Zhe
Star: Zhang Yigui, Xie Mingyu.