At one point at the beginning of Frederick Wiseman’s monumental documentary about the New York Public Library, someone basically calls it a holy place for secular people. That’s a fair description of any library, but New York’s is special in that it not only provides the largest research resource collection of almost any institution in the world, it actively involves its users in the life of the city’s vast culture. Entering the huge, beautiful main branch at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, with its famous marble lions and elegant wood paneling, is like entering the city’s soul—the good ecumenical soul that should be at the heart of every great city’s endeavor.
But Wiseman does something more. He reveals the institution to be not only a holding center for information, but a social space that brings people together for the common task of self-enrichment. He’s careful to point out how vital the various smaller neighborhood branches are to the lives of local residents, for whom very few things are free the way the library is. On a larger scale he shows free public interviews with such cultural stars as Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, and Ta-Nahesi Coates. He also presents fairly long lectures on things like the Marxist view of real estate and the role of slavery in Western Civilization. He shows people doing research into cancer diagnoses and the provenance of the Border Patrol. Andy Warhol, it’s revealed, got a lot of his ideas from the NYPL. It’s tempting to wonder what Wiseman, in fact, left out, because he’s famous, especially in his longer, later works, for giving more than ample time to certain anecdotes and discussions that he appreciates simply because he likes them. And the fact is, his taste is impeccable.
He also delves into the library’s funding and politics, and the viewer, of course, wants it all to be approved. There’s one uncomfortable scene of a fund-raiser for the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture where we realize that most of the money is coming from rich white folks. Perhaps that can’t be helped, but Wiseman’s good sense compels us to understand that the library is seen by both sides of the political divide as worthy of support and attention. If you’ve ever lived in New York and left it, Ex Libris will crystallize exactly what you miss most about the city. It’s a unique and wonderful thing, and Wiseman’s film a fine testament to it.
Now playing in Tokyo at Iwanami Hall (03-3262-5252)
Ex Libris home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2017 Ex Libris Films LLC
Though it doesn’t really amount to much in the end, director Bart Layton’s decision to claim up front that his heist movie is a bona fide “true story”—as opposed to a movie “inspired” by one—is a fairly bold step, and compels him to add inserts wherein the actual people involved in the caper provide details, albeit from inside prison, thus letting us know rather soon how the heist turns out. It’s not really much of a spoiler, because despite unerring confidence in their criminal skills, the two masterminds behind the robbery, art student Spencer (Barry Keoghan) and his less savvy pal Warren (Evan Peters), who’s the beneficiary of a sports scholarship, don’t really give the impression that they know what they’re really getting into.
Rebellious teens come in all shapes, sizes, and modes of seriousness, and thus are reliably timeless as cinematic characters. The hook for this debut feature by Crystal Moselle is that it’s based on a popular Instagram account and uses the subjects of that account as actors mostly playing themselves, though the plot is contrived and even a bit elaborate. The world depicted is that of female skateboarders in Manhattan, most of whom enjoy very little in the way of family life or educational opportunities. Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), a dedicated skater living out on Long Island, falls into this milieu after injuring herself while skating and receiving a command from her worried Spanish-speaking mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez) that she can no longer partake of the pastime, so in order to avoid her mother’s gaze she takes the train into the city to do her thing.
Having seen Mimi Leder’s On the Basis of Sex, I approached this documentary about the life of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg equipped with a certain store of images and facts that I assumed would aid me in understanding the iconic legal hero, and was somewhat taken aback when I left with more questions than when I went in. It’s not often that a dramatic narrative feature tells you more about a subject than a documentary, and the only answer I can come up with is that the filmmakers of RBG, Julie Cohen and Betsy West, are so enamored of their subject they assumed that devotional regard would satisfy anyone who viewed it, including the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who nominated it for an Oscar.
Gus Van Sant manages to recover from recent poor choices (Sea of Trees, Promised Land) with the help of Joaquin Phoenix and an inspired cast of A-listers in supporting roles. The vehicle is perhaps less impressive than any of its component parts, but the somewhat tired theme of personal redemption is at least given a new lease on life with a totally bonkers take on addiction porn. Basically a biopic of the parapalegic cartoonist John Callahan (Phoenix), who died in 2010 at the age of 59, Don’t Worry trades mainly in black comedy undercut by some rather nasty truths about human nature. Set in the 1970s and 80s, the script moves liberally back-and-forth in time with little regard for narrative coherence, which actually saves the film from having to justify Callahan’s actions or even make sense of them.
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When Rikiya Imaizumi’s latest movie premiered last year at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the official English title, Just Only Love, sounded a bit like nails on a chalkboard. The IMDb lists the movie’s English title as What Is Love?, which is a direct translation of the Japanese title, Ai ga Nan da. Some months later, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that the TIFF-designated title more accurately reflects the movie—not so much its story or theme, but rather its somewhat incoherent take on infatuation.
Boosted as a welcome light touch for the DC Comics movie universe, this rambunctious, somewhat unfocused comedy doesn’t really pass muster as a proper superhero feature, and it’s difficult to tell whether that’s the point. If you broke it down as you would a normal story you’d find two trains of thought: a touching tale of a foster child finding a family that’s more supportive of his needs than he could ever expect, and a hackneyed fairy tale about the same boy being gifted with super powers he has a hard time dealing with. As far as the latter thread goes, the recent Into the Spider-verse already nailed that particular theme, and the former thread is never really given a chance to make its case since it’s always being interrupted by the superhero stuff. What’s left is mostly confusion, though quite entertaining as such.
Jon S. Baird’s loving tribute to the legacy of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy falls into a trap common to biopics of performers. The film focuses on an episode in the comedians’ career that occurred late in life, thus allowing the filmmakers simultaneously to provide an overview of that career and a comment on how it turned out. It’s the early 1950s, and Laurel and Hardy are obviously past their prime. They are touring music hall theaters throughout England, staging famous slapstick bits from their movies. Their fans are their age or older. Younger people, who don’t have widespread access to TV yet, barely know them and so aren’t interested in the show, which means the performances are lightly attended except in the larger cities. This background provides the narrative with its requisite bittersweet tone, and while Baird doesn’t force the point, he doesn’t seem to feel obliged to make any other case for their situation at the moment, which is made even more melancholy by the fact that the purpose of the tour is to drum up industry interest in a new movie, which Stan (Steve Coogan) is constantly working on by pitching new sketch proposals to his partner (John C. Reilly), who doesn’t seem particularly interested. Due to health problems and his relatively new wife (third? fourth?), Ollie has already assumed the attitude of a retired man.
In the press synopsis for his documentary, American director Miki Dezaki calls the comfort women issue “perhaps Japan’s most contentious present-day diplomatic quandary,” which is true to an extent but misleading in terms of scale. The issue of the comfort women, the euphemism used by the Japanese military to describe women who sexually serviced soldiers at officially sanctioned brothels during World War II, needs to be approached from the standpoint of overall responsibility for the Pacific War, which remains to this day unsettled in Japan while it has been mostly decided elsewhere. Though Japan was not alone in committing atrocities against civilian populations during that conflict, its acknowledgement of Japan’s primary role in instigating the war for purposes of territorial expansion has shifted over the years. The comfort women issue is simply one part of this problem.
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