The menu is short this week. I couldn't review several films mostly because of scheduling issues by the distributors. They include Beau is Afraid, three hours of weirdness, Evil Dead Rise, horror moves from a cabin to a Los Angeles apartment building, The Covenant, Guy Ritchie's new one and Judy Blume Forever, a bio before next week's film of her best-known novel.
I did get to see these. Note the high ratings.
Satan Wants You (from Hot Docs): 4 ½ stars
Chevalier: 3 ½
Little Richard I Am Everything: 4
To Catch a Killer: 3
HOT DOCS: Canada's premier festival of documentaries is about to start. The opening is Thursday but it's not too early to check out what films you might be interested in. And how they'll be available. They're screening in theaters in Toronto and some are streaming anywhere in Canada. Google Hot Docs 2023 to find out more or try this: https://hotdocs.ca/whats-on/hot-docs-festival.
I review one film below and saw several others on the list that I'm very interested to see. A documentary about Michel J. Fox, for instance. One about the 2011 hockey riot in Vancouver. A profile of Supreme Court member Rosalie Abella, Others about Joan Baez, disco queen Donna Summer and NBA star Stephen Curry. How about a pioneering black fashion model or a black Barbie Doll? The future of food production, forests, Hong Kong freedom or Putin's Wagner mercenaries. I'm intrigued by one filmmaker's attempt to revisit embarassing incidents from her school years and this from the opening film about Greenland: a “quest to bring her two colonizers, Canada and Denmark, to justice.” Huh? Hot Docs runs April 27 to May 7.
SATAN WANTS YOU: Here's a film you must see. It's both a fascinating history lesson and a cautionary warning for today. Pizzagate, QAnon, stolen election. How can so many people believe? This old story may illuminate some of that. It tells of a Satanic Panic that spread across North American back in the 1980s, was covered by all the talks shows including Sally, Oprah and, yes, Geraldo in the US and even Jack Webster and Barbara Frum here in Canada. There are clips. They heard about a cabal of satanists abducting children, torturing babies, performing rituals. And it started in Victoria, B.C. where a psychiatrist wrote a book called Michelle Remembers detailing a patient's memories of being given to a satanic cult when she was a child and joining orgies and sacrifices.
The alleged acts were horrific; the book was a sensation and other victims elsewhere came forward with their own memories. A special FBI unit was formed and police were trained. People went to jail. Terrifying. Except none of it was true. People thought it was true because the media talked about it. The film exposes it all. The psychiatrist's methods were suspect (he's gone), Michelle's motivations were suspect (she declined to participate with the film), her sister and best friend, the doctor's ex-wife and a psychologist tell what really happened. Why didn't the media have doubts back then? The film shows how easily people can be made to believe “what they want to believe” and, though it doesn't intend this, how you can get them to believe. (At Hot Docs on opening day and May 5 and also at DOXA, Vancouver's documentary festival, May 6 and 12) 4 ½ out of 5
CHEVALIER: I always enjoy it when a movie tells me a true story I had never heard of before. Here I learn about Joseph Bologne a composer and violinist around the time of the French Revolution, who so charmed Marie Antoinette that she dubbed him a chevalier, a knight. What's remarkable is that he was an outsider, the son of a French plantation owner in the Caribbean and a woman slave. His father told him to always be the best and that goal enabled him to overcome racist taunts when he was sent to school in France. And after. Or did he? Maybe he deluded himself.
Kelvin Harrison does a remarkable job of bringing out the doubts he may have felt alongside the perseverence he showed. He dared to compete for a top job, director of the Paris Opera. That turned a few noses, including a marquis (Marton Csokas) whose wife (Samara Weaving) he wanted to star in an opera he composed. He also slept with her. So, he's not faultless though much of the film shows him as a good man beset by racism. It's hard to know how much of that is true because so little is known about him. But with a modern world view the probabilities are brought out. He briefly finds the real him away from genteel society by playing a drum in a street celebration. He lost the support of Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) when he associated with revolutionaries. There's a dramatic end, terrific costume and set design, strong acting, and efficient directing by Canadian-born now L.A.-resident Stephen Williams. (In theaters) 3 ½ out of 5
LITTLE RICHARD: I AM EVERYTHING: He was one of the originators of rock and roll (the originator he would insist) and we get plenty of evidence here. His wild stage manner, his pounding piano playing and his flashy costumes are all here, plus more. His gay personna is more on display than I've seen before. Billy Porter said he inspired him to be open about his own queerness. Richard is seen talking about being gay in an early TV interview and the film explains the backstory. His father rejected him when he was still a teenager. He learned from two gay musicians and early in his career performed in drag.
But when the hits started coming, Tutti Frutti, Good Golly Miss Molly and so on he went big. Sort of. Mainstream audiences got those same songs from white singers like Elvis Presley and Pat Boone. The real guy was too wild. And he had a messy life. We hear of the woman who rejected his marriage proposal and the other one who did marry him. We hear of the night he saw what may have been the Sputnik satellite, thought it was a message from God and gave up rock and roll and joined the church. He was back and forth on that a couple of times. Director Lisa Cortes stays on track though, giving us the facts of his career and with comments from people like Tom Jones, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger, his influence on music. “His DNA is everywhere,” somebody says. His documentary is adoring. (In theaters) 4 out of 5
TO CATCH A KILLER: Here's a small crime thriller that's nifty in how it plays out but has a few story problems. The bad guy's motivation, for instance, is murky. It needs to be much more sharply eteched to justify the eerie and deranged tone of the resolution. Also, the beginning of his crime spree is so sudden that it feels unrealistic. Other than that, this is a sprightly and plausible police procedural, smoothly directed (in Montreal) by Damián Szifron (from Argentina) and starring Shailene Woodley and Ben Mendelsohn.
She's a young cop in Baltimore, stalled from promotions by an ill-defined personal history. He's an FBI special agent who takes charge of an investigation into a killer. The guy shot up a New Year's Eve crowd from high up a condo building. The police have suspects but Ben is sure their thinking is far too conventional. He brings along Shailene as a fresh mind and she delivers. She reasons the shooter is a loner, not the NRA-member the police have in mind. She googles “Psychological pathologies that limit inhibition” and gets a better idea. Yeah it's daft but you're drawn in to the investigation and it keeps your attention. And it does lead to a guy who seems to have a grudge against society in the US. That's also not well-explained. Despite the flaws, though, this is a decent crime movie. (In 20 theaters across Canada, from Halifax to Victoria) 3 out of 5
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