Jan. 20, 2017 "Split's got a big personality": Today I found this movie review by Chris Knight in the Edmonton Journal:
Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan likes to take a simple idea and run with it.
Like: What if the protagonist of a story was dead the whole time?
Or: What if aliens who were allergic to water invaded a planet that was covered in the stuff?
And what if Mel Gibson was the only man standing in their way?
Shyamalan’s newest, Split, stars James McAvoy as a man with dissociative identity disorder — what old folks call multiple personalities. His character has 23 identities, although we only meet about eight of them in the film. The first, Dennis, kidnaps three teenage girls in the opening scene, locking them away in an underground bunker.
The teens are Marcia (Jessica Sula), Claire (Haley Lu Richardson), and Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy). Casey is far and away the most interesting, given that she gets an extended backstory, played out in flashback — something about being taught to handle a rifle as a five-year-old by her father and uncle. I was surprised how little these scenes connected with the rest of the movie.
Taylor-Joy is, however, worth watching for her own sake. Maybe it’s those wide-set eyes; she seems to see more than anyone else in her movies, and in this one she’s the first of the captives to get a handle on what makes Dennis tick.
For those without preternatural vision, Shyamalan helpfully front-loads Split with several overly long scenes of expository psychobabble.
They are delivered sincerely if awkwardly by actress Betty Buckley, although one senses the voice of the director, and it might have been easier if he’d just come out and delivered a prologue like Rod Serling in the Twilight Zone.
He does have a bizarre, unnecessary cameo.
Buckley’s character, Dr. Karen Fletcher, seems a little too pleased with the upsides of the multiple-personalitied.
“They are what they believe they are,” she gushes.
And: “Is this where our sense of the supernatural comes from?”
Never mind reverse psychology; hers is the 23-speed variety.
But the bulk of the film, and the most fun to be found in it, deals with Dennis’s alter egos.
McAvoy performs as a giggly nine-year old with a crush on Casey; a fashion designer; evil Mrs. Doubtfire; the most boring history professor ever; and a few more besides.
It’s a shame the Scottish actor didn’t also give us a mad Glaswegian, or maybe a Sean Connery impersonator.
There are moments of fear and loathing in the story, but at just under two hours the whole production overstays its welcome, and isn’t really as clever as the director would have us believe.
Nov. 15, 2021 My opinion: I saw the trailer, and it doesn't really interest me.
Apr. 27, 2017 "On stranger tides": Today I found this article by Simon Houpt in the Globe and Mail:
If George Plimpton and Hunter S. Thompson had a love child, it might have been a young Canadian fellow by the name of Jay Bahadur.
Back in the sixties, you may recall, Plimpton was a famed practitioner of something known as participatory journalism, wherein he would throw himself into vocations as varied as NFL quarterback, symphonic percussionist and stand-up comedian in order to write knowingly about the experience.
Bahadur went for a meta twist: His chosen vocation was journalism itself. Despite having no background in the field whatsoever – his professional interviewing experience evidently limited, in his job as an entry-level market researcher for a paper-products company, to querying store managers on their shelf-stocking practices – Bahadur travelled to Somalia in 2009 as pirates were seizing ships in the Gulf of Aden, and simply proceeded to cover the unfolding crisis.
(Oh, and Dr. Thompson’s gonzo DNA? Bahadur regularly found himself chewing khat with the pirates, the leafy green addictive narcotic they insisted he bring to their sit-downs as the price of entry.)
Bahadur’s fake-it-till-you-make it approach yielded The Pirates of Somalia: Inside Their Hidden World, an acclaimed 2011 bestseller that a Globe and Mail reviewer praised for its “grasp of the minutiae of how local clans interact, and his ability to explain this seminal aspect of Somali culture to us.”
And on Thursday night, an indie film adaptation of the book, titled Dabka (translated from Somali as “into the fire”) and starring Al Pacino, Melanie Griffith, Barkhad Abdi and Evan Peters, the latter as the callow Bahadur, will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
If what Bahadur did was bonkers, he aspired to convey a rare level of nuance and understanding about Somalia. The film, too, resists Hollywood-style cheap thrills. (Pirates! Shipboard shoot’em-ups! Gold-toothed bandits!)
But if its approach is more morally forthright than what normally makes its way to screens, it made the film a lot harder to sell.
“I think the idea of a guy who’s going in really over his head, kinda clueless, not knowing what he’s getting himself into – the spirit of that was conveyed [in the film] pretty dead on,” says Bahadur, 33, chuckling over the phone earlier this week from Nairobi, where he is currently doing investigative work for an international agency.
In the film, the fictional Bahadur, wearing a Toronto Blue Jays jersey and fussing with a tape recorder that keeps acting up, bluffs his way through interviews with dignitaries and pirates alike.
Director Bryan Buckley, whose only other feature is the impressively acidic 2015 Sundance hit The Bronze, may seem an unusual candidate to make a drama set in a war-torn African nation. Dubbed “the 30-second auteur” by The New York Times, he has more than 40 Super Bowl spots on his CV, including ads for Bud Light, FedEx and E-Trade. (Perhaps you remember his work with the chimpanzees.)
“There’s always going to be that commercial-director stigma,” Buckley acknowledges, patched in to the call this week with Bahadur. “Although, look, if you end up doing the right thing on a commercial, obviously it can be powerful and entertaining and honest.”
In fact, it was a commercial, of sorts, which brought him into Bahadur’s sphere.
In 2010, Buckley made No Autographs, a nine-minute documentary for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees which followed the Sudanese-born NBA All-Star Luol Deng on a trip to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. “Both Somalia and the plight of the refugee became very clear to me, firsthand,” he recalls.
Inspired by that experience, Buckley wrote and directed Asad, an 18-minute fictional drama about a Somali boy trying to resist a life of piracy, which nabbed an Oscar nomination for best live-action short film.
“Jay’s book was what we used for research to make that film. Literally, he had the only material that was available,” Buckley notes. That film, which starred two Somali boys who had never acted until Buckley began training them, served as something of a template for Dabka.
(The end credits for both films note all of the Somali refugees who contributed to the productions.)
With Asad helping to prove his bona fides, Buckley’s production team, including the Canadian born producer Mino Jarjoura, secured the rights to Bahadur’s book after some back-and-forth with the author.
“When Bryan was sort of selling me on the project early, he said, ‘I don’t want this to be Black Hawk Down,’ ” Bahadur recalls. “That stuck in my head, because that film looked like they had cast Nigerians as Somalis speaking a Bantu language, not speaking Somali. Granted, those nuances would be lost on a lot of the audience. But to Somalis, that’s sort of an extremely insulting portrayal.”
That’s not the only way in which Buckley’s film differs from Black Hawk Down, which came under fire for a range of inaccuracies. For, while the possibility of danger is always lurking in Dabka – Westerners were, after all, being kidnapped, ransomed and killed in 2009 – Buckley tries to focus on the locals as much as the white man at the centre of the story.
He also saw the film as a call to action. Still, it is not overly earnest.
“If you preach too heavily, I think you have a hard time having people listen,” he says.
While the film is consistently engaging, it refuses to pander to the assumptions of a Western audience. “When you make a movie that takes somebody into Somalia, the expectations are preset – and this is based on both the media and Hollywood – of what’s going to happen. And a certain degree of reality, for sure,” Buckley says. “Part of what the film tries to do is let the mind [imagine what could happen].”
In the film, Bahadur’s security handlers warn him against opening the steel shutters on his window; later, as he pursues a friendship with a wife of a powerful pirate, viewers may brace for the Hollywood-inevitable reprisal.
But since – spoiler alert – nothing too bad ended up happening to Bahadur during his three months in the country, Buckley faced a challenge: “This is why this is an independent feature, because, if you go into a studio, they’re going to go, ‘C’mon, man, somebody’s gotta get shot here! He’s gotta get on the [pirate] ship! Fist fight! Something?!’ ”
Over the phone, he and Bahadur share a laugh.
“But we had to stay true, and just play with the mind, and build the drama around that.”
Nov. 15, 2021 My opinion: This looks like a serious drama, so I'm not going to watch it.
I do like "participatory journalism." I try new things and experience things and write about it.
It's like going to a restaurant and trying the food, and writing a review of it.
