My Worst Nightmare is a slight and more entertaining than not romantic comedy directed by Anne Fontaine. Isabelle Huppert plays Agathe, an uptight proprietor of an art foundation who crosses path with the crass father, Patrick (Benoît Poelvoorde), of one of her son’s friends. Agathe’s older boyfriend (André Dussollier) hires Patrick to perform some repair work on their apartment and the down on his luck handyman lingers in their home longer than Agathe can tolerate. Over the course of the film, Agathe loosens up thanks to the shenanegans of her unwelcome guest. Theoretically, hilarity ensues, but My Worst Nightmare is never quiet as funny as the filmmakers seem to think.
Fonatine uses the low brow Patrick to take some easy pot shots at the art establishment. This tension builds up to a final visual joke that is meant to shock but will probably illicit nothing more than a shrug from most viewers.
The plot of My Worst Nightmare grows increasingly complicated as Agathe’s boyfriend takes up with Patrick’s case worker and the custody of Patrick’s son vacillates between Agathe and Patrick leading to their unlikely matrimony.
My Worst Nightmare entertains mainly because Huppert is convincing as both the uptight Agathe of the opening and the more adventurous Agathe of the second half. Much of the humor is obvious and worth nothing more than a chuckle but occasionally the script provides some clever insights.
Using the festival’s scoring system, I rank My Worst Nightmare as Good or 3 out of a possible 5.
Call Me Kuchu, directed by Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall, is a fascinating and heart-breaking documentary focusing on the first opening gay rights activist in Uganda, David Kato. The government of Uganda proposed a hateful anti-homosexuality bill that could mean death for any known homosexuals and imprisonment for anyone who fails to report known homosexuals. The outspoken Kato puts himself at risk as he pursues legal action in an attempt to protect human rights.
The film seems to climax when Kato and his allies stop a local newspaper from exposing presumed homosexuals only to take a dark turn that exposes the level of hate people are capable of. A finale featuring various nations condemning the actions of Uganda provides a somewhat upbeat ending for an emotionally exhausting viewing experience.
Although Kato is front and center for most of the film, other activists are provided screen time to share their stories, including a survivor of “curative rape” and a social work who hides her orientation from her bigoted supervisor while trying to convince him that homosexuals deserve equal treatment. The supervisor’s conviction that homosexuality is evil is disheartening as is his desire to change the behavior of those who he believes have chosen their orientation.
Call Me Kuchu serves as an indictment of organized religion, in whose name this hatred is fomented. One of the principal players offers the insight that the British had colonized the area and introduced Christianity. Although the British have since taken a more liberal stance on homosexuality, the conservative religion they left behind bolsters a political system that sees homosexuality as such an evil as to justify genocide. Interviews with some of those justifying violence will certainly anger most people and the appearance of preachers from the U.S. who desire to claim Uganda as ground zero in the battle against homosexual resonates with the rhetoric of the religious right making this a timely documentary more locally.
Although difficult to watch, Call Me Kuchu is an important film that exposes how religion can be used as rationalization for a whole spectrum of hateful acts.
Using the festival’s scoring system, I rank Call Me Kuchu as Very Good or 4 out of a possible 5.
Watching the documentary, Room 237, followed by its subject, The Shining, was a brilliant experience. I had seen The Shining before, probably when it first came out on VHS. Even though I am a fan of many of Stanley Kubrick’s films and I recall liking The Shining, I never found myself wanting to revisit it. But when the opportunity to see it on the big screen came along, I figured this was the time to see it again, and I am very glad I did.
Room 237, directed by Rodney Ascher, is an excellent documentary not only about The Shining but also about how we watch movies and glean meaning from visual information. The film interlaces nine various interpretations of The Shining, ranging from how it’s Kubrick’s admission that he helped stage the moon landing to it being a cathartic means of coming to terms with the Native American genocide. At first blush, some of these readings seem a little wacky but the evidence presented gets one thinking even if the explanations aren’t entirely convincing. Given Kubrick’s notoriously meticulous nature and the inherent artificiality of set designs and costumes, the appearance of anything on screen cannot be arbitrary. The appearance of a particular picture on a wall or the use of a unique piece of clothing are chosen for a reason, perhaps not the reasons explored in Room 237, but given the enigmatic nature of The Shining, it’s not unreasonable to start asking questions. Some of the film’s oddities (e.g. a chair that seems to disappear from one shot to the next) could be written off as continuity errors; however, Kubrick’s perfectionism makes this explanation unlikely.
One of the more compelling discussions involves allusions to Native American symbols and iconography. An early discussion about how the appearance of a Calumet baking powder can, decorated with an Indian Head, references the United States’ treatment of Native Americans seems like a stretch at first, but additional exploration begins to give this idea credibility. Early in The Shining, someone explains how the Overlook Hotel was built on a Native American burial ground. Unlike Poltergeist a couple of years later which uses a similar conceit in a very broad and obvious way, this concept is never mentioned again. It’s the gun which appears in act one that never goes off in act three, unless you take into account that there’s something more subtle taking shape during the course of The Shining.
Room 237 provides numerous clips from The Shining to help clarify the points being made. It playfully uses scenes from Kubrick’s body of films and other films in general to comment on these diverse observations. This technique gives life to what could have been a rather dry documentary in other hands.
It was fascinating to then watch The Shining with all of this buzzing in my head. I had had a discussion earlier in the day wondering if it would be better to watch the documentary before or after the film itself. After the experience, I can confirm that watching Room 237 first is the way to go.
I won’t say much about The Shining since it’s a decades old famous film, but one thing that struck me was how enigmatic it really is. Because Kubrick uses many tropes of horror films, it’s easy to see it as not much more than a film, with some supernatural undercurrents, about how a man goes stir crazy and tries to kill his wife and son, but the film raises so many unanswered questions that it’s not surprising that people go digging for deeper explanations. Even though I was not totally convinced by all of the theories presented in Room 237, it did get me to realize what a mysterious and slippery film The Shining is.
Using the festival’s scoring system, I rank both Room 237 and The Shining as Very Good or 4 out of a possible 5.
