FILM REVIEW: THE DREAMS OF JINSHA

A scene from The Dreams of Jinsha.

Colored children

By John Esther

The Dreams of Jinsha illustrates the rather childish tale of a young boy named Xiao Long (voice by Xu Gang) who travels back in time 3000 years to a mystical China filled with domesticated beasts, talking animals, ethereal spirits and a beautiful princess whose father's kingdom is threatened by an outside force and it will be up to the young, traveling boy from the future to save the day.

The most expensive animated film ever produced in China, the hand-drawn fantasy film has its moments of animated inspiration, but the story is an all-too similar one unlikely to bring any English-speaking children in America who will not appreciate the fine craftwork so much as be annoyed by having to read the English subtitles underneath. As far as adults go, animators may find it interesting for a technical/cultural comparison -- although it pales in comparison in many areas to domestic, Euro and Nippon animation -- but there is not much else here to summon most adults into theater seats.

In fact there are plenty of lulls in the story where the The Dreams of Jinsha runs scenes which do nothing to propel the story anywhere. Perhaps the animators felt a scene was just too expensive to produce to have it discarded to the edit room floor.

There is also a reactionary subtext throughout the film implying that once you learn a little history you will respect your elders. Whether that is a valid point elsewhere may be debatable -- there certainly is no real history here. But what do you expect from a country whose film industry requires approval from a gerontocracy?

Released this Friday in a futile attempt to garner Oscar recognition, The Dreams of Jinsha should soon be history here as well.

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FILM REVIEW: WAITING FOR SUPERMAN

Working class hero: Geoffrey Canada in Waiting for Superman.

Ed-You-ca(n’)t/e-a-nation

By John Esther
 
Focusing on five endearing underprivileged children -- Anthony, Bianca, Daisy and Francisco -- plus teachers, dedicated educators like Geoffrey Canada, administrators, teacher unions, parents and a plethora of mixed meritorious experts analyzing the dismal conditions of a public educational system, the Oscar-winning documentarian of An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim, takes a look at how the United States of America fails to educate a lot of its children.
 
Applying a somewhat rather simplistic narrative based on a lot of empirical evidence, some startling documentation, and the questionable attributes of teacher unions, co-writer and director Guggenheim (It Might Get Loud) and others not only can cite what is wrong with the U.S. educational system, but also offer possible methods to make it better. And it does not require a superman, just the social and political will.

It is a lot to take in and it is a lot to get mad about. There are people, including precious schoolchildren, who truly want kids to receive a great education but, due to a barrage of circumstances, they will never get it. For starters, kids have problems at home, schools are overcrowded, children lack respect for legitimate forms of authority, kids are passed on in the name of government funding, too many teachers are undeservedly tenured and resources are not properly allocated to education.

It is also heartbreaking to the point that you could, or wish you could, attain that teaching degree, get to that needy school and show the other teachers how it is done.

Sure to be a darling in politically conservative circles, Waiting for Superman certainly works on an emotional one and often an intellectual one as well. However, Waiting for Superman is not without its shortcomings.

The documentary creates a brief historical narrative on the role of education in 20th century America, talking about how superior it was until the 1970s when it started to deteriorate. What happened in the 1970s is not discussed. California’s Proposition 13 (1978) may be a good start.

(Guggenheim’s father, Charles, the most honored documentarian in AMPAS history, directed the 1983 Oscar-nominated documentary, High Schools, which looked at the public educational system in the 1980s.)

Another problem is the documentary’s failure to address a country with a notorious history and au courant dose of anti-intellectualism. In an era where an Ivy League education is often viewed as a flaw in character (and I do not mean in the Gore Vidal sense where an Ivy League education is still an under-education or a mis-education or a miso-education), superstitions supercede science, real intelligence is met with suspicion, and a fool (or propagandist) is allotted the same amount of space in the media to spew out nonsense on a matter as an expert on the same subject has made making a responsible case (i.e. climate change; healthcare reform; capital punishment), the public education system can only do so much.

Then there is the issue of influence in politics. Waiting for Superman takes its time tackling the American Federation of Teachers for its considerable influence in politics, and not without undue course, either. But what it fails to account for is those other special groups whose monetary interests depend on the continuation of an undereducated working class. These special interests lobby hard in state and national capitals for such policies as lowering those taxes funding public education, preventing the school year from expanding, Wall Street bailouts, handing over public programs to the private sector and maintaining the prison-industrial complex -- which goes hand in pocket with low education standards. (As of 2007, the very blue states of Vermont, Michigan, Oregon, Connecticut and Delaware, respectively, have the dubious distinction of spending more money on prisons than state colleges.)

To be sure, although Waiting for Superman is far from addressing it, the educational system of America and everything else weak about our nation will never significantly improve without drastic campaign finance reform.

Waiting for Superman also takes a rather kindhearted, if not whitewashed, viewpoint of charter schools. The documentary glosses over the poor achievement of most charter schools despite ample research illustrating that most charter schools perform lower or just as comparable as general public schools. It would also be interesting to know how non-union charter schools fare against public schools (and union pay) over time. Do they work better in the long run or not? I would imagine the latter. At any rate, Waiting for Superman, like many parents and students who have little or no options, considers non-union charter schools to be the answer. This is good publicity for some highly respectable educators at charter schools, but it may just be wishful thinking for the parents whose children will wind up just as intellectually impoverished as their parents whether the kid’s name is drawn in a charter school lottery or not. (As the director readily admits in Waiting for Superman, his wealth permits choice.)

A documentary sure to stir up some heated debates, especially amongst those with more disposable income than others, Waiting for Superman is an important yet definitely flawed discourse on the current courses America’s public educational system is taking, making, faking and breaking.

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FILM REVIEW: NEVER LET ME GO

Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Ruth (Keira Knightley) and Tommy (Andrew Garfield) know their destiny in Never Let Me Go.

Can Need Been Goes

By John Esther

“All moanday, tearsday, wailsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday till the fear of the Law” – James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

Woefully, erroneously set in England during the years 1967-1994, director Mark Romanek’s and writer Alex Garland’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go explores universal themes and notions of creation, duplication, destiny and purpose in ways reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s brilliant novel, Blade Runner, by way of a storyline resembling Michael Bay’s maniacal blockbuster, The Island, where clones are created in order to supply vital body parts for their wealthy "original" patrons.

Secluded in a boarding school called Hailsham (located in East Sussex) cloned children live and die with one purpose: to supply their organs for strangers. The word “children” rings hollow, as the organ-grinding, mass-produced majority of them will not see beyond the age of 40 yet their series of subsequent seclusions – from birth to death -- stunts rather than accelerates their growth. Before they go under on the table multiple times – the third time is usually “ the completion” charm – they will remain behind the times and socially underdeveloped. This is not a cushy government job.

It is 1967, and far from the Summer of Love, as the world splinters from its modernist to postmodernist era/error, Young Kathy (Izzy Meikle-Small), Young Ruth (Ella Purnell) and Young Tommy (Charlie Rowe) live under the school’s headmistress, Miss Emily (Charlotte Rampling at her best). They have no idea what is in store-age for them until Miss Lucy (Sally Hawkins) lays down the law of the land in no uncertain terms. Before the kids can love the teacher who cared and dared to defy the disciplinarian -- a la Madchen in Uniform (recently released on Home Digital for the first time) -- the agitator is given the axe. It will be the first of many times, the kids are stunned again and again before they become remains of the days in the futures of others.

Jump to 1985, in the heart-less-for-the-poor center of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s dismal England, the kids have learned to accept their fate. For the first time outside of Hailsham, Kathy (Carey Mulligan), Tommy (an impressive Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley giving the best performance of her career) learn to adapt to such simple tasks as laughing at moronic television, ordering breakfast at a restaurant and sex. (I suppose they are medically prevented from reproducing, but what about STDs?)

As their lives are arranged there is little for them to do, but bide their limited time. Ruth and Tommy start a romance while Kathy, who is narrating the film, looks and listens on in confusion. Each un-ideal copy seeks her or his “original,” but none are to be found for these characters “copied from trash,” as Ruth puts it. A bittersweet time that was probably never in their control, once they part, the three will rarely ever be together again.

In a medical-scape scarier and drearier than ever (did the overcast ever go away during the movie?), 1994 sees Kathy as a caregiver while Ruth and Tommy have already undergone two completions. Ruth’s dying wish is Tommy and Kathy get a reprieve by convincing others they are in love. But society and fate never spares the dead men and women walking and talking for the sake of love. When the times come, the doctors who have taken their Hippocra(i)tic-al Oath have their ‘fresh name donor game fair meat all the same’ to remove.

To live and lose rather than to never have lived at all, Never Let Me Go is dead set against cloning humans for the purpose of harvesting the organs of individuals whose destinies are too tangible, to stark for any other place in society. If the cloned possess the qualities of human beings, then how can we allow them to be body fodder for the origin-al of species?

Of course, there are parables here with regard to much larger political issues (war, GLBT rights, medical ethics) that Never Let Me Go eschews for emotional impact. And that is something of a shame.

Even worse than this, the film’s unfortunate use of music or lack thereof some apropos tunes, and the nonsensical art gallery for soul’s sake issue, the film’s primary problem is setting up the film in the past. There was no such “national donor program” during the 20th Century. People could not be cloned in 1952 and in 1967 most people did not live 100 years. Historical dystopian narratives rarely work to great affect -- such as in Dick’s The Man in the High Castle or Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. More commonly, however, is that rather than create a haunting nightmarish history from which we may be unable to awake from today, the use of this anachronistic trope in Never Let Me Go only de-empathizes the audience from the film’s bigger and brighter ideas.  

Superior to The Island, on the upside of this depressing film with tears aplenty, the aforementioned acting is admirable, director of photographer Adam Kimmel (Capote) artistically captures the film’s mood without breaking for relief and Never Let Me Go does have a few ethical topics to discuss over a few drinks with your fellow humans.

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FILM REVIEW: KISSES

Kylie (Kelly O'Neill) and Dylan (Shane Curry) surviving a night of Kisses.

Kisses of youth

By John Esther

After two years on the film festival circuit, where it picked up a few nominations and awards along the way, writer-director Lance Daly’s Kisses touches the silver screen in select cities across the country.

Set around and in Dublin, Ireland, Dylan (Shane Curry) is an obnoxious 11-year-old child living with an obnoxious father (Paul Roe) in an obnoxious neighborhood filled with obnoxious people of all ages. Gossip, taunting, yelling and hitting are the rules of the day.

It is a daunting existence, but like a flower set amongst the weeds, the only thing growing well for Dylan is Kylie (Kelly O’Neill), the abused next door girl who fancies one day marrying Dylan if he promises to get her out of town.

After a series of escalating antagonisms between father and son, Dylan and Kylie flee to center city where they roll through the rugged rues on their flashing shoes, seeking Dylan’s older runaway brother while trying to find food and safety from the city’s more sinister elements. Temporarily the pre-teens find solace and comfort from strangers such as Down Under Dylan (Steve Rea), a kind Australian man who does tributes to American singer Bob Dylan, but a big city is rarely kind to runaway kids.

Marked by strong performances from Curry, O’Neill and their older peers, the 75-minute Kisses captures the precariousness of kids who are trying to break free of their sad surroundings while holding onto the solidarity of childhood friendship. Unfortunately, one gets the feeling these kids will eventually miss the opportunity and lose the will to leave while encountering the likelihood of losing touch with each other by the time they are through their teens -- despite the seemingly tacked-on trite ending.

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LA FILM FESTIVAL 2010: CANE TOADS IN 3D

The cane toad: Australia's imported terrorist.

Toad the line

By John Esther

A follow up to his 1988 documentary, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, filmmaker Mark Lewis returns with the toad-and-cheeky documentary Cane Toads: The Conquest.

Presented in illustrious 3-D – although the film works in 2-D as well – this ribbiting tale reintroduces us to the titular character in all its menacing glory.

Indigenous to Central and South America for millions of years, more than a hundred cane toads were imported by Australia in August 1935 to eat the greyback cane beetle, a sugarcane pest, at the Mulgrave River near Gordonvale, Queensland, which is located in the northeast part of Australia.

Rather than lick out the vermin, the cute cane toads multiplied by the thousands and started to go west across the continent, creating a toad jam along the way.

Leap years later, the approximately 1.5 billion cane toads have taken on mythological proportions as pet and pest. While some keep them as companions, others have lost their pets when their dogs, cats, snakes, etc., ate one of the poisonous creatures.

The fear and misunderstanding of the toad, which is hardly a threat to human beings (for now, they are highly active evolutionary creatures), has brought on hysterical reactions from everyone from the local yokel to parliament and beyond.

“Toads are enemy No. 1,” says Dr. Chris Burns, Northern Territory health minister, in one of the calmer responses to the manmade problem.

To stop the toad tide, some deliberately drive over the accreting amphibians on asphalt, buy ineffective traps or worse. One unlucky hick electrocuted himself to death while spearing toads. (Frogs have also been mistakenly killed.)

While more joyless Australians may not appreciate the highly unflattering portrayal of their country and this particular ecological blunder, Cane Toads: The Conquest is a lot of fun to watch. Similar to, but a little scarier than The March of Penguins, it will likely provide children and adults a three-dimensional blast watching this “toadally” wonderful Summer Showcase entry while learning a valuable lesson about messing with an ecosystem.

Recommended.

(Cane Toads: The Conquest screens June 18, 10:30 p.m., Regal Cinemas)

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