Monos

Monos is a modern twist on the Lord of the Flies story, while also recalling the surreal jungle insanity of Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972).

Set in an unknown Latin American jungle, a group of teenage guerrillas are training for a war that seems to be happening somewhere beyond the Andean mountain camp where they are based above the clouds while waiting for orders.

It’s a classic tale of how children from different social backgrounds, unsupervised and isolated from civilization left to their own devices armed with deadly weapons, will bring out their most violent instincts.

Playing soldier, the young commandos, addressed by their war names like Rambo, Lobo, Smurf, Dog and Bigfoot, are tasked with holding an American female doctor hostage (Julianne Nicholson). As rivalries grow, and opinions differ, shifting alliances form into separate camps that eventually threaten to tear apart the fragile order of the wild cult of kids with deadly results.

What makes Monos so intriguing and powerful is its unflinching and unnerving look at how a cadre of child soldiers, wielding automatic weapons, steadily degenerate from free spirited self-discovery, to baser warlike instincts and survival in the lower depths of the jungle.

The original music, a mix of drums, whistles and synthesizers, by Mica Levi contributes to the dark dense eerie atmosphere and feeling of primeval beauty and terrifying horror. With echoes of the hellish tribal chaos of Apocalypse Now (1979), Monos is a bold unpredictable film with an impressive ensemble cast of young unknown actors.

They are referred to as Monos, meaning monkeys, which is exactly what they appear to be devolving into as they savagely lose their innocence, regressing to a state of anarchy and eventually forced to individually fall away from the group to find their own way out of the jungle.

As the film builds to a gripping climax, we are left with the wild forces of nature consuming any sense of humanity. The visuals become darker, hallucinogenic and confused. A small breakaway group of aggressive fanatical “monos” enter into another world, another reality, absorbed by the heart of darkness.

Visually stunning, Monos was beautifully filmed by cinematographer Jasper Wolf on remote locations in Colombia’s Andean mountains and dense jungle rivers that were mostly untouched by humans.

Director Alejandro Landes in only his second fiction feature, brings us a mesmerizing nightmarish vision; an unforgettable experience with fully realized characters, and makes it relevant for our modern times with all its metaphorical elements in tack. He is an important new voice in Colombian cinema.

An International co-production between eight countries, Monos has won multiple international awards including the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury prize at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and was selected as Colombia’s official Oscar submission for the Best International Feature Film.

JP

Jojo Rabbit

A child’s eye view of war in Nazi Germany and the propaganda machine that vilified Jews, Jojo Rabbit starts as a hilarious farcical romp that mocks Nazis and their Hitler youth indoctrination program, and becomes a surprisingly poignant and touching comment on hate and the toxic effect of lies.

Written and directed by New Zealand wunderkind actor, producer, director and comedian Taika Waititi who previously directed Thor: Ragnarok (2017) and Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), from a novel by New Zealand-Belgium author Christine Leunens’ Caging Skies, Jojo Rabbit is very much a reflection of Waititi’s own wacky irreverent Kiwi humor.

A mixture of zany comedy and uplifting drama that makes no bones about portraying the Führer as a childish buffoon as played by Waititi himself. This Hitler is the imaginary companion of ten-year-old ardent Nazi follower Johannes (Jojo) Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis).

To help the audience understand the extent of Hitler’s popularity in Germany, there is a brilliant musical sequence early on that shows images of adoring crowds screaming and reaching for Hitler put to I Want to Hold Your Hand by The Beatles. If you didn’t know who these people were, you’d think they were crazy Beatles fans.

Jojo, egged on by his imagined Hitler, thinks war is fun and exciting, so when he must prove his courage at the Hitler youth camp by killing a rabbit with his bare hands and fails miserably, he’s teased by the other kids who call him a scared rabbit.

After being injured in an accident during war games while trying to prove he can be as fearless as the other kids, he starts questioning the blind fanaticism of the country. It’s not until he discovers a Jewish girl Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) secretly living in his house, a “monster” hidden in the attic by his mother (Scarlett Johansson), that he starts to question his own loyalty and humanity.

Part of Jojo Rabbit’s huge appeal is Waititi’s hilarious performance as Hitler and how it contrasts dramatically with the innocent naive sweetness of Johannes who tries to be the perfect Nazi killer but just can’t seem to live up to the morally corrupt expectations of his Nazi superiors.

Sam Rockwell who won the best supporting actor Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), brilliantly portrays a hysterical disillusioned Nazi training officer who clearly struggles with the Nazi ideology.

Jojo Rabbit is a fun and moving satire that exposes the absurdity of war and the harmful consequences of blind faith in propaganda. In this there are a few similarities with the Roberto Benigni film Life is Beautiful (1997). Both are coming-of-age stories that have at their heart a young boy who is protected from the horrors of war by an adult who plays into the illusion of war as an exciting game.

Jojo Rabbit has just won the coveted People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival 2019, and it’s a good bet to do well at the Oscars. You won’t find a more crowd-pleasing and audacious film than this one.

JP

Honeyland

Amid the ruins of a remote, long abandoned stone hamlet somewhere in the Balkan Mountains of North Macedonia, lives one of the last remaining European women to practice an ancient tradition of beekeeping.

This visually stunning documentary and winner of multiple Sundance Awards, follows Hatidze Muratova as she goes about her daily routine taking care of her ailing mother in a small stone hut as she moves about the barren valley landscape tending to her beehives and collecting honey according to ancient traditions.

Without electricity, phones or transportation, her dedication and love of the wild bees is apparent as she respectfully safeguards her beehives, ensuring their sustainability by only taking from the bees what she needs, leaving enough honeycombs for the bees to continue their production.

It’s a quiet solitary existence but Hatidze seems content to live this simple way of life harvesting and selling her pure honey to the marketplace in the capital city of Skopje, some 12 miles away by foot.

Set in a world seldom seen in film, the breathtaking visuals are realized with starkly beautiful vistas showing a way of life now gone or quickly disappearing. It harkens back to a time when people worked the land in harsh conditions always conscious of the delicate balance of nature.

When a family of Turkish gypsies arrive with their herd of cattle, Hatidze is glad for the human company, especially the children that she befriends and teaches about the ways of beekeeping. But her trusting and generous nature is betrayed and her livelihood threatened when their father Hussein is forced to supplement his income to support his growing family by starting his own beehive business with disastrous results.

The naturally unfolding drama is a microcosm of today’s problems in society as a whole and environmental allegory. Being a docudrama, filmed by Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov over the course of three years, the experience of Hatidze’s hard life, which plays like a neorealist parable, is as real and heartfelt as it gets.

Honeyland recalls the early films of the acclaimed Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami – Close-Up (1990), and Jafar Panahi – Taxi Tehran (2015), 3 Faces (2018) in style and setting; about people living on the fringes of society in extremely poor and desperate circumstances.

For those who are looking for an eye-opening experience and learning about how some people are living in isolated regions of the world, this is a must-see. But this film is more than that eventually revealing an important cautionary tale about our consumerist greed.

JP

The Cinema of Astronauts in Jeopardy

On the 50^th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, I have compiled a list of films that have attempted to capture both the adventurous wonder and the dangerous horrors of space travel.

As we learn more about vast new expanses of our universe with unmanned space probes, space travel becomes a more tangible prospect within our grasp. These films have captured our imagination and whetted our appetite for the challenges of exploring the universe beyond our own planet.

In recent years we have seen a slew of big budget films exploring the technology and spirit (or folly) necessary for traveling through space and reaching unknown destinations. The infinity of space is both intriguing and terrifying. Even more so today since advancements in science and technology have shown that we are very likely not alone in the universe. 

Our imaginations run wild as we contemplate the unknown with possibilities both positive and negative. But as humans have taken their first steps into space we have discovered that the study of science and physics are critical to the understanding of the cosmos and how to survive in it.

Whether you are fascinated by the prospect of space exploration, discovering unknown regions of our universe, the challenges of living in isolation from the rest of humanity while floating in a self-contained bubble orbiting the earth, or stranded on an uninhabited planet, scientific reality-based astronaut films that attempt to portray realistic adventures in space while keeping the fantasy elements to a minimum are becoming a genre on it's own. 

We have come a long way toward making those ambitious dreams of life in space a reality and recent films and documentaries have made the prospect seem a little more exciting if scary. IMAX space documentaries such as Blue Planet (1990), Cosmic Voyage (1996), Space Station (2002), Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon (2005) and Hubble (2010) have ignited the imaginations of many filmmakers, making the idea of living and traveling in space tangibly real.  

The latest in a new sub-genre of Sci-fi space films have created a whole new visual vocabulary for realistic interstellar space travel. Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995) set a new standard for astronaut films, Alfonso Cuarón’s award winning film Gravity (2013), Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015) each taking the perennial Homeric hero’s journey to a whole new metaphysical level with both intellectual and emotionally satisfying results.

Below is a list of 26 films that represent the evolution of the astronauts-in-jeopardy adventure cinema since 1950. You are now go-for-launch. T minus 3, 2, 1, liftoff…

Ad Astra (2019)

First Man (2018)

Alien: Covenant (2017)

Passengers (2016)

The Martian (2015)

Interstellar (2014)

Gravity (2013)

Stranded (2013)

Europa Report (2013)

Prometheus (2012)

Moon (2009)

Sunshine (2007)

Solaris (2002)

Red Planet (2000)

Space Cowboys (2000)

Mission to Mars (2000)

Armageddon (1998)

Lost in Space (1998)

Event Horizon (1997)

Apollo 13 (1995)

The Right Stuff (1983)

Alien (1979)

Marooned (1979)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Rocketship X-M (1950)

JP

Bohemian Rhapsody

I grew up with Queen’s music while going to school and loved their dramatic, lyrical, diverse sounds, but I knew very little about the band itself during that time.

Whatever you might think of the rock band Queen, or director Bryan Singer, or whether this musical tribute to the band is accurately portrayed, it matters little as there is no denying the sheer emotional power of this rapturous film that tells the story of one of the legendary performers of our time.

Bohemian Rhapsody follows frontman Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) as he gains fame and battles with his identity as a bisexual of immigrant parents, and his relationship with fans and the other band members.

The music of Queen is so brilliantly used here to connect the turbulent story of lead singer Freddie Mercury and his rise to fame; a performer who believed so strongly in himself and his ability to capture an audience with his amazing vocal range that his bursting onstage energy could barely be contained.

The historic epic performance of the band’s Live Aid appearance that bookends the film is one of the most euphoric and powerful cinematic experiences of any film I’ve seen.

We meet Freddie at the beginning of the film working as a baggage handler at an airport in England and scribbling poetry and lyrics in his spare time. When he goes out at night to see a small band play at a nightclub gig, he approaches the band members after the show to offer his admiration and boast of his own musical talent. This is the early group of musicians who would eventually become the musical phenomenon of the 70s known as Queen.

Bohemian Rhapsody shows us the creative process of a disparate group of misfits with an unwavering belief and acceptance of each other while working as a family unit. And the power of Queen’s music comes from Freddie’s ability to use his incredible vocals in a way that spoke to those who are outsiders and feel unwanted or unloved.

A special mention is due to the incredible performance by Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury who fully deserves the accolades and awards he has been receiving which include the Best Actor at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. He embodies the spirit of Mercury’s larger than life persona both onstage and off.

Like Queen’s music, the critics were not always kind to the film, slamming it for its inaccuracies, but for many fans that are not familiar with the band’s private or public history, Bohemian Rhapsody absolutely works as an emotionally satisfying film with so many iconic songs that it easily warrants multiple viewing. Most filmgoers have come away from the experience with elation.

Bohemian Rhapsody was nominated for 5 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rami Malek who has already won the Golden Globe and the SAG Awards, making him the front runner to win the Oscar. The film also won the Golden Globe for Best Picture – Drama.

JP