Indie Focus: A lost voice returns with āThe Half of Itā
Hello! Iām Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.
Only good movies
Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
Instead of a typical summer movie preview, this week we took a look at how Hollywood is responding to this strange lost time with theaters closed and production on hold.
Jen Yamato and I reached out to directors, producers, actors and below-the-line craftspeople to get their thoughts and feelings on what it will take to get working again and audiences back into theaters and what post-pandemic working conditions might look like.
āWeāre going to have to adapt. Iām fundamentally an optimist, but these are challenging times and they challenge anyoneās optimism,ā Kenneth Branagh said. āI do think that a desire for the communal experience is who we are, and I hope that we have the privilege of being able to return to it sometime soon.ā
Ryan Faughnder wrote about what movie theaters are doing to make audiences feel safe to return. He and Anousha Sakoui also looked at how productions are preparing to resume, and Amy Kaufman wrote about how the production shutdown is affecting the world of documentaries.
Josh Rottenberg wrote about some of the movies that have shifted to VOD from planned theatrical releases, including Branaghās āArtemis Fowl.ā And Glenn Whipp surveyed the upcoming Oscar season and how the trickle-down impact of the pause on studio releases will impact the schedule later in the year.
He and Justin Chang dove into the history of summer movies ā and Justin invented something of a play-along game for the summer movie season that wasnāt, inviting readers to vote on their favorites released each week over the years.
If you are reading this newsletter on Friday, you could be in for a real treat. The streaming service Mubi, along with distributor Music Box Films, is making āEma,ā the latest film from Chilean filmmaker Pablo LarraĆn, available free for one day only. Starring Gael GarcĆa Bernal and Mariana di Girolamo, the film is a dazzling exploration of regret, told in an expressive, kinetic style, and features astonishing dance sequences.
In more regrettable news, the Indian actor Irrfan Khan died this week from cancer at age 53. A superstar in his home country, he was known to American audiences for his appearances in films such as āThe Namesakeā and āThe Lunchboxā as well as āLife of Pi,ā āSlumdog Millionaireā and āThe Darjeeling Limited.ā He contained all the magnetic charisma of a true star but was also capable of the deep emotions of a real actor.
Lorraine Ali wrote an appreciation of Kahn. āThe cinema is where we often go to see our best and worst selves, and to gain access to buried parts of our lives that are too painful to touch outside the safety of a theater or film. Khan was a conduit to that pain and love, that loss and redemption; a master in the art of emotive silence, as [Kal] Penn pointed out, he performed that special trick of only the most luminous stars: To impart grace in the least graceful of places.ā
Enjoying this newsletter? Consider subscribing to the Los Angeles Times
Your support helps us deliver the news that matters most. Become a subscriber.
āThe Half of Itā
The first film from writer-director Alice Wu since her debut āSaving Faceā in 2005, āThe Half of Itā is a young adult rom-com set in a small town in Washington state. Borrowing from āCyrano de Bergerac,ā the film follows a young woman named Ellie Chu (Leah Lewis) as she ghostwrites love notes from a football player (Daniel Diemer) to the girl (Alexxis Lemire) on whom she has a crush. āThe Half of Itā was set to premiere as part of the canceled Tribeca Film Festival, where it nevertheless won the top prize in the festivalās U.S. narrative feature competition. The movie is available now on Netflix.
Reviewing for The Times, Kevin Crust wrote, āUltimately, āThe Half of Itā and its multilayered title are about the expansiveness of love, with the romantic kind being just one among equals. Itās about friendship and family, the acceptance of self and others, and the freedom to be who you are and screw up royally along the way. ā¦ Wu is confident enough to make the bold strokes her characters speak of and craft a movie thatās comfortably different. Almost 16 years after āSaving Faceā made her a voice to reckon with, Wu is back and weāre happy to have her.ā
At Vulture, Bilge Ebiri called the movie āso tenderhearted and transporting, its characters so likable, that you canāt help but want to give the movie and everyone in it a big hug.ā Also for Vulture, Alison Willmore profiled Wu, who said of leaving and coming back to filmmaking, āIām like a weird forest animal thatās in some part of the forest that no one ever goes to. ā¦ Literally, someone was like, āYou know, what we need is an Asian lesbian. Thereās one!āā
For Time, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, āWhatās wonderful about āThe Half of Itā is the way it respects everyoneās insecurities, without letting its characters get away with their biases. Ellie feels like an outsider, perhaps not so much because sheās a person of color in a mostly white town but because sheās so much smarter than everyone else ā and also happens to be gay. ā¦ When youāre young and you long to be in love, friendship somehow seems like less, even when it may be more. Yet thereās no denying that love triangles hurt like hell. Why do you think their points are shaped like arrows?ā
For Vox, Emily VanDerWerff wrote that in the movieās third act, āeverything falls apart in incredibly disappointing fashion. The many storylines Wu was juggling with only a few bobbles to that point start to collide into each other, and she drops more than a few. The missed landing is the difference between this being the next āTo All the Boys Iāve Loved Beforeā-size hit for Netflix and it being just another Netflix movie that sinks without much of a cultural ripple.ā
For the New York Times, Kyle Turner wrote, āThe husky-voiced Lewis embodies, with palpable anguish, the stinging contradictions of emotional freedom and romantic fraudulence that abound when writing these notes. In letters (or over text), you can be anybody and yourself at once, and Wu suffuses the film with a painfully mature understanding of the ache of longing for the impossible. With tenderness, humor and beauty, āThe Half of Itā comprehends the chasm between wanting and being.ā
āDeerskinā
From French filmmaker and musician Quentin Dupieux, best known for his oddball movie āRubberā about a tire that gains sentience, comes āDeerskin.ā The film follows a man (āThe Artistā star Jean Dujardin) who responds to his midlife crisis by buying an absurd suede jacket. As he becomes involved with a local bartender (āPortrait of a Lady on Fireā star AdĆØle Haenel) by trying to convince her he is a filmmaker, things get increasingly complicated, psychotic and bloody.
For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, āThis desire to rid the world of any and all jackets is Georgesā central fixation, and itās one of the movieās many indications that he isnāt just your garden-variety narcissist. ā¦ Itās his honest belief that no one else should be allowed to wear a coat of any kind. The marvel of Dujardinās performance is that he embodies this conviction as if it were the most natural, intuitive thing in the world. He shows us a man slipping almost imperceptibly from one level of derangement to the next.ā
For the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis wrote, āLike āRubber,ā Dupieuxās 2011 tale of a homicidal tire, āDeerskinā is slight and forcefully eccentric. As with Georgesās personality, audiences will be split: The movieās dive into one lonely manās lunacy isnāt entirely successful. Yet Dujardinās commitment to his batty character is unflinching. Gazing admiringly at his outfit in the mirror, Georges canāt get over his ākiller styleā ā a self-compliment he will, perhaps unknowingly, soon be taking all too literally.ā
For Rolling Stone, David Fear wrote that āthis isnāt just a movie about unstable, unmoored men trying to get their mojo back ā itās also about a horror film about moviemaking. ā¦ And when Georgesā scenes start to include stalking and the aggressive use of sharp objects, [Denise] finds herself taking a more active role in literally and figuratively calling the shots. Like the blind Mrs. Stephens says in āPeeping Tomā: All this filming isnāt healthy.ā
āThe Infiltratorsā
Directed by Alex Rivera ad Cristina Ibarra, āThe Infiltratorsā is a hybrid of documentary and fiction filmmaking that tells the story of a group of young undocumented immigration activists who decide to get sent to a Florida detention center on purpose, in order to work to free other detainees from the inside.
I reviewed the film for The Times, writing, āWith its inside-out prison break story, āThe Infiltratorsā has the energy of a crime thriller crossed with the urgency of a social issue documentary. The bulk of the events in the film are from 2012, and when the story leaps ahead to 2016 with the election of the current administration, things take an ominous turn. Watching the movie now in our current moment, āThe Infiltratorsā shows people making the best of a bad situation and finding ways to move forward both as individuals and toward greater common goals.ā
For the New York Times, Teo Bugbee wrote, āJumping between wildly dissimilar styles makes for an occasionally jarring film. Yet despite this awkwardness, the movie works. The narrative approach represents a risk taken by the filmmakers, and their daring suits the story they are trying to tell. For a group of activists who took chances with their own legal status, only a comparably experimental cinematic style could do their efforts justice.ā
For The Wrap, Carlos Aguilar reviewed the movie when it premiered last year at Sundance, where it won two prizes. āBringing down the wall from within is the heroic campaign that NIYA [National Immigrant Youth Alliance], and countless others organizations like United We Dream, are pursuing, not to antagonize but as an act of self-defense. To that end, āThe Infiltratorsā is eye-opening on both sides: It delivers an encouraging example of the power of a united people, and it opens a window into the abuses and inhumane separations that are carried out under the guise of protecting the nation.ā
Only good movies
Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.