The Embrace of the Serpent (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets  by Ian Brockway

The Embrace of the Serpent

Ciro Guerra's Oscar-nominated film "The Embrace of the Serpent" is a hypnotic and gripping analysis of two European explorers and their exchanges with indigenous people. It is as rich and satisfying as any novel by Joseph Conrad or Patrick White.

In the Amazonian jungle, Theo (Jan Bijvoet) a German botanist who has become sickened by a mysterious ailment, seeks treatment. The Amazonians are suspicious of the white man, naturally thinking that he is to blame for eradicating tribes.  Theo manages to convince a shaman, Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) that he is without malice or desire for conquest and only wants to search for the sacred plant that might cure him. Karamakate takes the weak scientist on a series of misadventures, one involving an mad priest who flogs children with a whip. During each episode, Theo grows more and more mystified, while his guide grows more passive and opaque. Karamakate blows some powder into Theo's nostrils but there is no guarantee of health or well-being.

In a parallel story, Evan (Brionne Davis) an American botanist, strives to retrace Theo's path and find the yakruna plant that has hallucinogenic and divine  properties. Evan also meets the now older Karamakate (Antonio Bolivar) and tries to persuade him that he is not a conquerer. Needless to say, history repeats itself. Evan tries to ingratiate himself but this has little success; Karamakate merely tolerates the Westerner. The two happen upon the same missionary school  depicted in the first segment, but the school has now grown severe, with a raving self-proclaimed Jesus figure and some quasi-voodoo rituals. Evan is increasingly left by himself, mute and silent with questions for company.

Gradually one realizes that Theo and Evan are very much the same person.

The cinematography by David Gallego is extraordinary, showing the carnal beauty of the jungle in a black and gray exoticism. This, combined with the enigmatic and often unsettling story, gives the film a one two punch. The hallucinatory montage alone is as startling as it is surprising leaping off the screen with a burst equal in power to the first revelation of color shown in "The Wizard of Oz."

But above all "The Embrace of the Serpent" meticulously illuminates a clash of cultures with care and feeling, while also depicting a wilderness with the strange magic of a far away and distant planet.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Week of March 18 - 25 (Rhoades)

Tropic Overview

Eight Films Vie for Screen Time at Tropic

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Film Critic, Key West Citizen

This may be a record for Tropic Cinema, eight -- count ‘em, eight -- movies showing on its four screens. While this very likely amounts to a scheduling nightmare for Tropic programmers and projectionists, it offers great variety for Key West moviegoers. 

This year’s Best Picture Oscar-winner “Spotlight” continues to tell its true-story about a team of Boston Globe reporters who uncover abuse within the Catholic Church. The ensemble cast includes Mark Ruffalo, Michael Keaton, and Rachel McAdams. Graffiti With Punctuation calls it “an advertorial for journalistic objectivity and integrity in the face of abject perversion.” And Excelsior notes, “The effort and teamwork highlighted in this film is absorbing, intelligent and … its cinematic importance is undeniable.”

Another Oscar winner is Leonardo DiCaprio for his role in “The Revenant,” the revenge Western famous for its gruesome grizzly bear scene. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu won a golden statuette too. Konexion observes, “DiCaprio offers what is probably the most physically demanding role of his career, almost completely lacking in dialog – although no less powerful for that.” And Todays Zaman calls it “a powerhouse of a film, with an admirable cinematic brilliance achieved by creating an enthralling universe of harsh men and harsh wildlife.”

Nominated for Best Foreign Language, “Embrace of the Serpent” is a lyrical examination of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. The storyline follows two scientific expeditions led by the same shaman, although they take place some 30 years apart. Chicago Reader tells us, “This stunning historical drama, shot mainly in black and white across the Amazon region of Colombia, focuses on a shaman who’s approached at different points by white men seeking medicinal substances.” And Washington Post says, “Like Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (and the movie it inspired, ‘Apocalypse Now’), the drama examines the idea of progress and what it means to be civilized.”

A more urban setting is found in “The Lady in the Van,” with Maggie Smith portraying a wacko old woman who parks her van in a writer’s driveway … for 15 years. Mountain Xpress calls it “A charming, touching, absolutely delightful comedy-drama with a terrific Maggie Smith performance.” And The Young Folk explains, “What essentially fuels this film is an intelligent script, one that reminds us of the depressing inevitability of old age while still bolstering a genuinely comedic tone throughout its run-time.”

Another interesting lady is profiled in “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict,” a documentary about the famous art patron. Yes, that famous New York museum is named after her family. Newcity sees it as “a brisk, neatly constructed look behind the life of the late heiress who became one of the twentieth century’s most proficient wheelers and dealers at the top end of the art market, collecting art, but also artists along the way.” And Globe and Mail naughtily adds, “By her own legendary admission, Guggenheim had thousands of lovers and pursued art and sex in equal measure.” 

A heroic Coast Guard rescue is recounted in “The Finest Hours.” This so-called suicide mission was led by Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernie Webber, played by Chris Pine. The Film Stage finds it to be “a lush disaster film that assumes audiences will undoubtedly root for love at all costs.” And Daily Express says it “packs an emotional punch.”

“Eddie the Eagle” is another true story, the inspiring tale of British skier Michael “Eddie” Edwards. Taron Egerton takes the title role, backed up by Hugh Jackman and Christopher Walken. SSG Syndicate calls it “an uplifting, feel-good film that soars with sentiment” and NowToronto says, “Eddie looks like a cockeyed genius who just had to believe in himself. By the end of the movie, everyone else believes in him, too.” 

Just want to sit back and laugh? Then you’ll enjoy “How to be Single,” an instructive rom-com starring Dakota Johnson. Think of it as “Sex and the City” Lite. El Nuevo Dia summarizes it as “the ups in downs of being single from the female perspective presented in a very funny way.” And 3AW adds, “Hey, here’s an original idea for a comedy: single girls in New York trying to land men.”

Whew! Eight films, a marathon for cinephiles.

srhoades@aol.com

The Finest Hours (Rhoades)

Front Row at the Movies

“The Finest Hours” Is Sea Story About Doing Right Thing

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Think of this as “The Perfect Storm” meets “The Poseidon Adventure.” Two ships break up during a storm and a dauntless Coast Guard team sets out on a rescue mission. Or as one of the Coastie’s girlfriends calls it, “A suicide mission.”

The film is titled “The Finest Hours” and that pretty well sums up this act of heroism. It’s currently playing at Tropic Cinema.

This Disney movie is based on a same-named book about a real-life situation off Cape Cod back in 1952. No spoiler alert, this being about a historic event. It’s the edge-of-the-seat telling that will enthrall you, not plot turns.

During a severe nor’easter two T2 oil tankers (SS Fort Mercer and SS Pendleton) broke in half. The Fort Mercer got off a call for help, but the Pendleton couldn’t. The second distressed ship was accidentally discovered by shore radar being used by the Chatham, Massachusetts, Lifeboat Station in its search for the Fort Mercer.

Boatswain’s Mate First Class Bernard C. Webber volunteered to take his 36-foot motor lifeboat CG-36500 on this nigh-impossible rescue mission. He and his three-man crew fought the heavy seas with 60-foot waves and hurricane-force winds, managed to pull up under the Pendleton’s broken-off stern and offloaded 33 stranded seamen.

Coast Guard vessels and aircraft rescued another 29 from the sinking Fort Mercer. Only five lives were lost among the tankers’ crews.

Webber and his men were awarded the Gold Lifesaving Medal for their heroism.

Chris Pine (you remember him from the new “Star Trek” blockbusters) takes on the role of Webber. Casey Affleck (Ben’s brother), Ben Foster, and Eric Bana are other recognizable faces. Holliday Grainger plays the concerned girlfriend.

Bernie Webber passed away in 2009, so Chris Pine didn’t get to meet the man he portrays. But he listened to several recorded interviews. “For him, this was his job,” Pine says. “This was what he was supposed to do and just like anyone clocking in for a job, his task was going out and saving people, and a real sense that there was no glory in it for him or any need for self-aggrandizement. It was just very simple.”

Pine adds, “This is almost like a studio film from the ‘50s, you know? There’s no cursing and people are good and right and love conquers all, it’s really very sweet. There’s a sweet earnestness to this film that people will either engage with or the cynicism of the world will win out.”

Let’s root for sweet earnestness. And doing the right thing.

srhoades@aol.com

Embrace of the Serpent (Rhoades)

Front Row at the Movies

“

Embrace of the Serpent” Observes Culture Clash

Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Long before Amazon connoted an online book service, it was the name of the world’s largest rainforest. The Amazon jungle covers 2,100,000 square miles in South America, about 40% of the entire continent.

The Amazon River slithers through the jungle like a serpent, some 4,345 miles in length. There are about 100 uncontacted tribes living in the Amazon. They are dwindling.

In 1909 a German scientist named Theodor Koch-Grünberg visited the Amazon in search of a sacred healing plant. There he met a young shaman known as Karamakate. He recorded this in his travel journal.

Three decades later an American biologist named Richard Evans Schultes penetrated the rainforest looking for this yakruna plant. He too recorded his meeting with Karamakate.

Columbian filmmaker Che Guerra’s “Embrace of the Serpent” tells these parallel stories. Together they reveal the decimation of indigenous cultures by rubber barons and outside marauders. Shot mostly in black-and-white, the film is lyrical in a hallucinatory way, as if Guerra has slipped a little yakruna into the audience’s sodas.

“Embrace of the Serpent” -- currently playing at Tropic Cinema -- was one of this year’s nominees as Best Foreign Language Film. English subtitles supplement the Spanish intermixed with a number of Amazonian tribal languages.

This retelling is loosely based on the diaries.

In the first journey Theo (Jan Bijvoet) travels up the river by canoe, accompanied by a younger Karamakate (Nilbio Torres) and an interpreter (Yauenkü Miguee). Karamakate is hesitant to help Theo find the cure-all plant, but agrees on the condition that Theo help him locate any surviving members of his tribe, the Cohiuanos.

In the second expedition, an enfeebled Karamakate (Antonio Bolívar Salvador) leads Evan (Brionne Davis) into the jungle in search of the yakruna. By now, the shaman is aware he is the last of his tribe. Angry and full of grief, he has lost his ability to commune with rocks and trees.

While new agers may applaud Karamakate’s admonition that possession are “just things” (he advises the explorers to throw their luggage overboard), and appreciate his disdain for money, that’s not the true message of “Embrace of the Serpent.” The film’s anger is focused on the white intruders who are destroying the tribal cultures and the indigenous people themselves.

In 2011, Columbia signed legal decree #4633, guaranteeing uncontacted peoples the rights to their voluntary isolation, and reparations for any violence against them by outsiders. Peru has five reserves meant to protect the lands and rights of isolated peoples. Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) seeks to protect the territory of uncontacted people by posting notices warning invaders away.

But rainforest is still being cleared for cattle ranches and oil drilling and lumbering operations, forcing tribes to relocate. And in 2013 more than 20 uncontacted Taromenane Indians were killed by contacted/settled Indians. Also it’s not unusual for half of a tribe’s population to be wiped out by measles, influenza, and the common cold within a year of first contact.

Thus “Embrace of the Serpent” is not so much about the quest for a magical hallucinogenic plant, or about a shaman’s simple-life wisdom, as it is about the inevitable clash of cultures, with one slowly but surely eradicating the other.

srhoades@aol.com

The Finest Hours (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

The Finest Hours

In the tradition of "The Perfect Storm" and "Titanic", Craig Gillespie's "The Finest Hours" depicts the most famous Coast Guard boat rescue in history. In 1952, oil tanker The SS Pendleton is caught in a severe winter storm.

Actor Chris Pine is crewman Bernie Webber dispatched to the tempest in the hopes of finding any sign of the Pendleton. Webber is not a born hero; he simply attempts what is right. Holliday Grainger plays Miriam, Bernie's idealistic fiancee and she is very fetching, making a kind of Lois Lane to Chris Pine's work-a-day Superman role.

Casey Affleck appears as Captain Sybert, head of the unlucky Pendleton. He is a quiet and reserved man but he knows his stuff. The film has echoes of "It's A Wonderful Life" in its idyllic depiction of a small Massachusetts town but most closely resembles James Cameron's "Titanic" with its plucky and adventurous romance pitted against a rabid and almost supernatural danger. The storm is an animalistic vortex in which a congenial shore community is almost swallowed whole. Bernie and Miriam are a Cape Cod version of Jack and Rose who try to love against the ravages of an impartial Nature.

Although the film is pure Hollywood in the tone of Spielberg, it is perfect in its creation of a time, when cars were considered boats and boats were cars, when America seemed, at least on the surface, romantic and right.

The film makes an engaging pop art fever dream of danger and euphoria, portraying a world where the act of doing good doesn't come from outside forces, but it is a systemic pulse within every being. Bernie and Meriam exist on a telepathic romantic plane; he on a boat and she in a Packard galleon, both are united in trying to aid others.

While some of the dialogue is macho and conventional along with a heap of melodrama, the allure of Meriam and Bernie pulls one into a whirl of hopeful positivity as predictable as it is. Chris Pine is perfect as a kind of nautical Captain Kirk, the underdog with charisma and screen presence. The 3D effects too are colorful and wellplaced, offering surprise without any overdone or distracting frills.

For those that like films of the underdog or Saturday Matinee category with a comforting nostalgia, "The Finest Hours" will undoubtably satisfy with tissues for emotional ballast.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Son of Saul (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Son of Saul

This year's Academy Award winner in the foriegn category "Son of Saul" by  László Nemes is a flawless and riveting story of the horror of The Holocaust. It is punchy, dynamic, sickening in detail and does not hold back.

A concentration camp worker in charge of body disposal, Saul Auslander (Géza Röhrig) sees his son survive the gassing, only to be put to death by a Nazi doctor. Needless to say he is numb. He persuades the doctor to delay the autopsy. Saul is determined to find a rabbi to say the Kaddish, giving his boy the proper burial.

First and foremost is the stunning cinematography by Mátyás Erdély which delivers the concept of Saul as a man on the border of life, quickly darting around corners of darkness without a chance to breathe and taking nothing for granted. Saul is a full man but he is treated less so, little more than a fly. The wild, jittery and furtive camera bears this out and becomes a character in the film.

Action in the foreground is in sharp detail while a mere foot in the background, all is blurry and indistinct. The events before us are too horrible to envision beyond visceral jolts, and this makes the episodes all the more shocking.

Here and there, Saul is hassled at the most inopportune times. A few moments of satisfaction which at first seem achievable are often snatched away under a burdensome haze of dead flesh. Often he is misunderstood or ignored entirely. Seen in this way, the film has an unmistakable resemblance to the stories of Kafka. Saul is promised a future outcome when in actuality, he only travels further and further into darkness to witness a carnival of abhorrent misery.

The immaculate and shining officers are nonchalant crass and mad, fattened and stuffed by belittling and demeaning humor.

This is a minimal and uncomprising creation, completely without the stylistic overtures of the classic and potent   "Schindler's List."  It is far the most visceral and direct film of the period that I have seen. Though not for every visual palate, "Son of Saul" stands alone with an unflinching honesty, where others have pulled away into convention.

 Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com

Mustang (Brockway)

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

Mustang

The Oscar nominated foreign film "Mustang" by Deniz Gamse Ergüven is a haunting spellbinder with push and pull. The story begins softly with all the warmth of a family tale but gradually shifts into a story of apprehension and mania, worthy of any crime thriller.

Five Turkish orphan girls are living with a family. It is the end of school. On a whim they decide to enjoy the afternoon by taking a respite on the beach and the five meet a group of boys. On hearsay from an old lady, the girls are beaten, one by one, by their grandmother for innapropriate conduct.  Bars are installed.  Our sense of shock increases as we realize that these young people are essentially in a prison, kept from social events and school.

Lale (Gunes Sensoy) is the most adventurous of the youngsters and yearns to escape to attend a soccer match. The girls flag a ride from a passing stranger Osman (Erol Afsin) . They manage for a brief idyll but the eyes of their uncle are always above them.

The tension of this film is first rate as is the cinematography by David Chizallat and Ersin Gok, portraying each of the girls either popping to and fro like balls in a roiling pinball machine, devoted to soccer's  bacchanalia, or marooned on a cement island right out of "Papillion."

In watching "Mustang" your senses will be tricked. The close family appearances subtly give way to the realization of servitude and forced marriages. Not since "Phoenix" has a film so gradually ensnared  us with humanity, a bit of black humor and absolute horror.

Write Ian at ianfree1@yahoo.com