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Reviews
Alyssa Limperis: No Bad Days (2022)
Traumedy = Tragedy/Comedy & Trauma/Remedy
Great comedy, a mature emotional processing of tragedy in a constructive way, using heartwarmingly human humor. I very much enjoyed Limperis' survivor-spirit stage presence as she took us along her journey of emotional processing.
It has been said: Comedy = Tragedy + Time
And I suppose the less Time that has passed, the edgier the Traumedy.
Traumedy = Tragedy/Comedy & Trauma/Remedy
I wish I could say I was surprised at some of the whining prudes who have chimed in against these more sophisticated uses of humor-as-medicine/humor-as-healing, but alas... Simply put, it is a person with low emotional intelligence who judges Limperis' open grief process as invalid. Such a person labors under the delusion there is such a thing as an "off limits" topic for humor---one for which humor cannot morally be used for openly processing negative emotions, exploring both pain as well as joy, in the context of one's wider community of peers and fellow citizens.
In truth, there is no such thing as an "off limits" topic for harrowing humor or Divine Comedy, to help us and each other deal with the vicissitudes of life; nor for cynical sarcasm, judgmental jocularity or social satire, in order to draw attention to topics of social and political importance to us all.
***** We laugh at these things, not because they are funny but because, in laughing at them, we take away their power over us. ***** The Ancient Greeks called it exorcizing the demons of fear and shame. And perhaps you've heard the old saying, tried and true: Laughter is the best medicine.
Indeed, psychological and medical experts echo these sentiments in their analyses of the prevailing objective clinical data. And neurophysiologists tell us that laughter has a well-established causative link to a cascade of positive hormonal, musculoskeletal, nervous and neurochemical responses, such as the relaxation response and the release of dopamine, serotonin and endorphins, which act to stabilize mood, improve state of mind and restore emotional equilibrium. (Google is your friend, children. Use it.)
It is an emotionally immature prude who complains of the supposed "inappropriateness" of humor in all but a narrow set of circumstances. Humor is NEVER inappropriate in the setting in which Limperis openly shared her constellation of human experiences---experiences which clearly so many in her audience resonated strongly and positively with. As long as prudes in the room are willing to check their assumptions and their insistence upon "reading between the lines" at the door, and instead pull their heads out of their bums and take things said WITHIN CONTEXT -- you know, like adults -- then it's all good.
Pro-Tip:
Take everything a comedian says, and every review you read, with a grain of salt.
The Taking (2013)
The Mechanics and Metaphysics of the Soul...
While wrong-turn backwoods horrors are a-dime-a-dozen, this film explores something more than mere murder and mayhem. The creepy grand matriarch of a motley band of misfits has some metaphysical mojo and a yin for your yang, making a powerplay for your very soul. You float in a wooded bardo, the naked expanse between an unrelenting sun shining into every hidden corner of your psyche with incisive intensity and a dark moon which threatens to swallow you whole. In three days, you are to be sacrificed, but first your very being will be pared down using the sharp edge of your own fears and desires, layer by layer, to your innermost core. Gooooood times.
The film uses a slow, smoldering burn to build the existential horror of the protagonists' predicament, with flurried sights and booming, dissonant sounds a la Lars von Trier's "Antichrist." While certainly not as masterful as von Trier, the film is an encouraging and refreshing feature debut. Given the use of the anglicized version of Carl Jung as the name of a main character, the film is also reminiscent of Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton's "Yellowbrickroad," for its depiction of a spooky forest pulling double duty as a vast Jungian jungle of the collective unconscious in which the mythic archetypes of our collective psyche must be fought or fled from.
This is an intelligent person's horror film, rather than the tired, skull-effingly boring formulism that typifies the vast majority of today's additions to the genre. My only critiques are (1) that the old woman's dialogue, which I'm fairly certain the audience is meant to be able to understand, is often post-processed to the point of inaudible oblivion, and (2) some of the dialogue's verbiage from other characters sounds a little pedestrian and lacking in polish, incongruent with the contextual gravity of the scenes in which it is spoken. That said, originality and departure from formulism go a helluva long way with me, as does the film's ability to provoke deep thought about dense existential subject matter. So I give it 6.5 stars out of 10.
As is so often the case when a thinking person's film gets bad reviews and bad ratings, it is for no other reason than so very many people will just not get it---or rather will not expend any more thought trying to "get it" than is necessary to process the short-attention-span, re-hashed dross that relentlessly churns out of the Hollywood conveyor. (Speaking of short attention spans, those giving just 1 star in their reviews all admit they were too impatient to get beyond around the 15-minute mark.) YES, it did have a plot and well-defined, if cryptic, narrative, and YES the film had a point, a compelling one at that. So when can bad reviews on art-house films safely be ignored? When they are suspiciously rock-bottom 1-star reviews that go beyond simply, "This film wasn't my cup of tea," to the spitting of angry venom, yet with a complete lack of any specific citations of supposed failure---a petty tirade which is nothing more than a thinly disguised declaration that, "This film made me feel stupid, so I hated it." All art-house films are plagued by these. Ignore them.
So, if you want gratuitous gore or torture porn with no dramatic underpinning and no existential substance, and if you want a director that will spoonfeed you neatly appointed plot points and resounding narrative resolutions, then look elsewhere, as this piece surely leaves the drooling masses wanting and wailing. If, however, you like a directorial and writing style that doesn't capitulate to formulaic demands for right-angled scene construction and all literary exposition through spoken dialogue, but instead tasks the viewer with finding meaning from the cinematic language and the consideration of mythic archetypes, then look no further.
Whoops! Sorry, I've got to dumb that down for the drooling masses, don't I? Fear what you don't understand? Movie bad. Want refreshingly original filmmaking that tries something new? Movie good. Want big-budget blood, boobs, and booms? Movie bad. Want cinematic subtlety singing a sinister serenade? Pass the popcorn.
Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)
Terrible. Just...terrible...
Terrible writing. Terrible dialogue. Terrible acting from the two principal characters. Not only was the script fatally flawed in that it was internally inconsistent, but it fails in key, fundamental ways to jibe with what had already been well established in the first film. In addition, the narrative is uneven, incongruent, and choppy. The storytelling was so utterly formulaic as to be skull-%&@*ingly boring---a litany of missed opportunities and pure laziness on the part of Writer/Director Michael J. Bassett, who has forever ruined the franchise. Could someone have done any worse of a job blowing a budget of millions of dollars and producing a big steaming pile of crap if they'd actually tried to screw it up? That's a tough one... I had been so looking forward to this sequel. I am disappointed beyond the telling of it.
They Come to America (2012)
Another propagandistic political puff piece
Full of factual inaccuracies, non sequiturs, conservative buzzwords, and scare-mongering, this so-called "documentary" film is nothing more than the parroting of tired right-wing bigotry masquerading as "fair and balanced" (and no more convincingly than Fox News manages to pull off "fair and balanced"). The filmmaker, Dennis M. Lynch, makes much of his attempts to appear to be giving equal time to "both sides"; however, the sides are completely misrepresented in the first place. Am I being fair and balanced by giving equal time to "yes" and equal time to "no" in my film in which I ask my neighbor the yes/no question, "Have you stopped beating your dog yet?"? In reality, my neighbor has never beaten his dog, but then that wasn't one of the sides I portrayed in my film, is it? Lynch similarly frames the issue of immigration in a false dichotomy and then proceeds to carefully cultivate the appearance of fairness and balance for those uninformed, trusting, or simple enough to be fooled by it. As such, his credibility as an objective documentarian goes right out the window.
The actual pro-immigration stance is woefully absent in Lynch's film, no doubt because accurately representing it would sound the death knell for his carefully crafted narrative. Lynch works hard to cast himself as a victim in the film, as a lone seeker of truth being abused by some of those he interviews, being kicked out of political rallies, and knocking on the massive closed doors of a conspiracy hellbent on keeping a terrible secret. In reality, however, he aggressively asks leading questions and is wantonly disruptive of those not likely to agree with him. It is not that those who support immigration refused to be represented in his film, but that they were not willing to be a part of an obvious attempt to misrepresent them.
In lieu of an expansive soundtrack, Lynch opts instead to underscore his film with the constant drumbeat of an endless string of white people all too eager to scapegoat immigrants for everything wrong in their own lives. An overt, over-the-top racist predictably appears at opportune moments in the narrative to act as apologetic counterpoint in order to lend the appearance of legitimacy to the undercurrent of "softer" bigoted attitudes given voice throughout the film. Lynch casts himself as a softy that feels for the undocumented immigrants, and suggests at one point that perhaps America is not the best place for immigrants because it would be a shame for them to become the victims of rising racial tensions. There's nothing revelatory here, just an incendiary laundry list of long ago refuted straw-man arguments dramatically staged to look as if they are alive and well and candidly documented on the gritty front lines of public opinion.
What does it say about the strength of the anti-immigration political position when it must be bolstered by such underhanded tactics?---that proponents of this position are on shaky ground. What does it say about these proponents that these tactics are so transparent and unconvincing?---that they're scraping the bottom of the barrel. The debate is over, they have lost, and the only alternative to having the integrity to concede the point is to attempt revision of the debate itself and its historical timeline. Still, they refuse to read the writing on the wall and accept that they could ever have possibly been wrong. In this reviewer's opinion, all of the ills Lynch outlines in the film can be cured when conservatives cease running interference that prevents immigration law reform from ever coming about.
It is an insult to the venerable art of documentary filmmaking to call this piece of propagandistic political puff a serious addition to the genre. Whatever your views on immigration, this film can safely be ignored as it seeks only to muddy the waters.