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Movie Review: SING SING

“RTA (Rehabilitation Through the Arts) helps prisoners develop critical life skills through the arts, modeling an approach to the justice system based on human dignity rather than punishment.” So says their website, https://rta-arts.org/ After being approached multiple times by other production companies offering to take their program to the big screen, A24’s reputation for taking on the complicated scripts got them the gig.

SING SING offers few surprises, but it is not a cliché or tropey prison movie that confines itself within the stone walls of the genre. The story arcs are comfortable, with organic acting by people who were convicts. Scenes are allowed to play out with actors revealing the pieces of themselves that moved them through the program and back into the world.

Paul Raci (Sound of Metal) portrays the director and writer from the outside world who holds the group together and brings the member's ideas to the stage. Raci has a two-pack-a-day face, framed by a hairstyle that proves he don’t care how they do it in the big city. He has kindness and strength, and whiteness that contrasts with most of the cast members. Perhaps another actor in this role would oversell a racial power dynamic that would pile a distracting issue on SING SING. But Raci’s character uses his powers to guide the cast, not control, but is not afraid to face anger that threatens to derail the process. A beautifully nuanced and subtle performance worthy of the big screen over a glass one.

Even more impressive than Raci are the actors playing themselves as they were back in the day. Colman Domingo, himself not a convict, is an award-winning actor who plays Devine G, the de facto leader of the convict actors. Domingo sometimes overpowers the non-professional actors but doesn’t overpower the film.

Clarence 'Divine Eye' Maclin, playing himself, has authenticity so solid he dominates any scene where he is on screen. The evolution of his performance of a Hamlet soliloquy parallels the cast's transformation. His final rendering of Shakespeare’s words is no less spellbinding than Olivier’s. Divine Eye’s presence never relents and never disappoints.

Sean 'Dino' Johnson is a man who lets his anger go before it consumes and corrupts his soul, which brings a calming influence on an incendiary cast.

The rest of the cast is no less remarkable; each deserving a paragraph of praise.

When the end credits roll, you will notice many instances of an actor “playing himself.” Maybe this speaks to the success of the RTA program, and this can be a surprise. How can these people not be professional actors? The program made them actors, professional or not.

SING SING plucks many of the emotional strings one expects from a success story ripe with devastating failures along the way. It’s forgivable, given that SING SING is crafted so well. The audience's visceral reaction is audible and reminds the viewer they are watching a movie in the real world. This movie should be seen with other people who will likely need a tissue, too.

A movie about the transformative nature of art has to have a little plasticity to keep out of the ruts of all the movies about the transformative nature of art that have come before. SING SING shows the viewer the process from the gritty beginnings to the still gritty but ongoing progress in the right direction. These men do not transform into angelically palatable versions of the men they were. They still have to live in a world of prison and, upon release, be convicts in a world outside the prison. The real world, a place as horrifying to them as confinement is to most viewers. But the movie spends more time out of the ruts than in them due to the story being told by the convicts in their own voices. Voices that have not been tamed by the director Greg Kwedar (Transpecos) or bleached into something pliable for the majority demographic. SING SING is not preachy. It walks the walk. The RTA curates respect between the prisoners with learning skills to channel rage through art rather than their fists. We see this in real-time with real words from real convicts. It’s not us-and-them, and this invites everyone to see the movie and its magic.

SING SING was shot on 16mm film, which is not the easiest way to make a movie. Real movie film, especially a smaller format than the standard 35mm cinema stock, renders the graininess that sets the tone of a prison but gives the warm tones AI has yet to recreate digitally—the warm tones that art brings to the coldest of existence.

 

Movie Review: EVIL DOES NOT EXSIST

Immediately after World War II, drastic agricultural land reform was implemented in Japan. Today, descendants of the original farmers now live on that very land. Enter the carpet baggers offering the “simple” villagers a better life in exchange for a shittier one. “A little pollution won’t hurt anyone.” Takumi is the village jack-of-all-trades. He lives in a simple cabin with his eight-year-old daughter, Hana, a child as adorable as she is rambunctious. His day is simple, and his work is essential, like bringing spring water to the unadon lady or cutting wood. And he ain't buying it.

This is Ryusuke Hamaguchi's follow-up to his Academy Award-winning DRIVE MY CAR. He is not a man inclined to tell a story hastily. He knows the magic happens when the viewer is a voyeur, watching the story unfold in real-time rather than torpedoed in so quickly; it’s easy to think movies should be one explosion after another. EVIL DOES NOT EXIST eschews cinematic shorthand that collapses the timeline to get to the next scene. Hamaguchi takes the first 30 minutes of the movie to immerse us in the relationship with nature that defines the villagers’ lives. We are invited to experience these people's sincerity and appreciation for their existence. This is not a point that should be made in a hurry.

It is this appreciation that goes with the viewer into the village hall for a presentation by the developers to build a “glamping” site with a casino. The young, pretty city people sit before the audience. Takahashi is arrogant, wearing a bright orange puffy coat that contrasts magnificently with the audience, driving home his inability to read the room. Mayuzumi carries a softer sell with her softer voice and features. Together, they inelegantly dodge and weave through the villagers’ questions and comments. Their persuasion proves inadequate. Upon their return to the big city, they are re-dispatched to the wilderness to try again because this damn thing needs to happen before the covid subsidies they used for the plan expire.

The developers’ agents want to recruit Takumi as the caretaker of the new development. Transparent, yes. Takumi plays along, even letting Takahashi wield an axe, teaching him ways of wood chopping. This is where Hamaguchi’s direction shines. The characters are complicated yet understandable. The civility with which the villagers treat the city folk is not forced. It is just the way they are. But the obsequiousness of the developers’ subordinates lands poorly. Their ignorance of anything without a Wi-Fi connection makes the woods a scary place. Mayuzumi asks Takumi if deer will attack people. “Only a wounded deer, or the parent of that deer sometimes will attack humans - they don't have the power to escape so they might fight. But it's highly unlikely." True of both deer and the villagers.

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST is mastery of subtlety. We hear gunshots as we learn about the deer trail the planners want to steamroll. When Hana fails to return home after school, the town turns out to search the woods. Even one of the urbanites pitches in. It is here where the movie takes a turn that will keep audiences talking after the credits. We have been given all the pieces to understand how the story ends. It might take a few days for them to drop into place.

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST explores the relationship between prey and predator without injecting the idea of good and evil, whether speaking of the hunting and killing of deer or the hunting and killing of an ecosystem. The movie gives us the time to inhabit a world under the threat of change. We sit in the backseat of a story patiently told so beautifully; expectations are surrendered to the skill of Ryusuke Hamaguchi vision.

Movie Review: WE GROWN NOW

It has been said that you will not know when it is the last time you play with your childhood friends. Suddenly, forts and mud puddles are “stupid,” and we're all about impressing each other and letting hormones have their way with us. WE GROWN NOW is about that grace period before the world explodes with rage and love in minds too young to know it will all work out. 

Erik and Milik have been neighbors in the Chicago projects since birth. Now, as they are getting ready to leave elementary school behind, an act of violence racks the 1992 Chicago low-income housing community. A boy is dead. A kid both Erik and Milik knew, who was their age. Racism and economic stratification move from a background roar to the foreground when white police officers enforce Mayor Daley’s mandate, breaking down the door at 2:00 am without a warrant to look for drugs, ransacking the apartment, and shoving people around. 

WE GROWN NOW is not an issue movie that unpacks centuries of systemic racism. It's a movie about two boys with loving families and friends. The circumstances are urban life in the projects in the early '90s. 

The boys like to jump. They drag mattresses from anywhere and pile them in the courtyard. After running at full speed, the kids leap into the air and descend safely on the soft stack. Who can jump the highest? The farthest? It could be kids anywhere at any time, finding entertainment where imagination meets movement. 

WE GROWN NOW is a delicate movie set in indelicate times. The boys move through their world on the breezy ripples of the curtains their mom made or watching the cracks in the ceiling until they reveal the stars of the universe. Meals are ripe with conversation, though it might be the same meal they've had four days in a row. Grandma (S. Epatha Merkerson. You’ll know her when you see her.) contextualizes the love that followed them from the south to the city with stories that manifest in the minds of the boys as sounds in the projects and images snatched while playing hooky at the Art Institute.

WE GROWN NOW will not drag the good people of our hamlet kicking and screaming into a world so unlike our own that even an organic kale smoothie won't soothe our privileged feathers. Instead, we are invited to see through the eyes of who we all were before the proper way to load the dishwasher became the hill to die on. Milik sees the snow that falls as a gift of winter that blankets the noise and motion. Erik has been steeped in the church's traditions, but even as just a kid, he starts to feel around the edges of his beliefs. 

There is no preaching or call to action. WE GROWN NOW is beauty deciphered by sharing the vision of the children most of us once were. It is not a perfect movie. The empathetic cinematography and pinpoint direction of a miraculous cast smooth out the forced precociousness and strained Rockwellian homelife. Every character, young or old, lifts this movie above most of anything else you'll see this year. Blake Cameron James is a bright light of talent as Milik. Erik, a sensitive boy of fine features and a gentle manner, is brilliantly rendered by Gian Knight Ramirez. Together, they celebrate childhood with gripping relatability on the screen. Jurnee Smollett embodies motherhood in the ‘hood with all the tension and worries a black woman of 1992 with a son and daughters is forced to endure. Watch these actors. They will be seen again.

An hour and a half spent with WE GROWN NOW might find you building a fort in the backyard with pallets and hoisting a pirate flag on a broomstick. In a time of world turmoil, it helps to remember how we all once, regardless of gender or situation, stood on the exciting springboard to adulthood.