Volume 107 - No Bears / 1946 / Don't Look At The Demon
THE VOICE OF ENERGY VOL. 107
Hello, friends. After a lengthy hiatus, this newsletter has returned. And as I mentioned at the end of last month, the focus of each edition is going to shift. With writing about music and musicians consuming much of my time, I'm switching tracks to concentrate on reviews of new / newly released films. I truly love writing about cinema and don't get it to do it nearly enough. Rather than bug the publications of the world for low paying work writing reviews, I'll do it on my own. I hope that you get something out of it each week.
My intention is to follow the lead of newsletters like The Reveal and balance out reviews with longer pieces, including a continuation of Deeper Into Movies, my occasional series of essays on musical artists who have made films. Previous installments have looked at the work of Madonna, Anthony Newley, and Frank Sinatra. Tip of the iceberg, really.
Some housekeeping: if you have a paid subscription to the newsletter, please put a stop to it. I've halted that completely as I don't have the energy to offer up exclusive content for those willing to spend their hard-earned money on this silly endeavor. If you still want to support me, I can help you do that in some other fashion. I'll have some other bits and bobs at the end, so read on.
No Bears (2022, dir. Jafar Panahi)
No Bears, the latest film from Jafar Panahi, is an indictment, and not merely another symbolic charge against the repressive Iranian leadership that is currently facing the biggest threat to its power in decades. For as often as the 62-year-old has put himself in front of the camera, playing out a version of his circumstances as an artist barred from making movies or leaving his home country, he’s never before been as self-critical as he is here. The weight of his circumstances continue to bear down on his shoulders but Panahi is coming to a deeper understanding of how those same conditions can unintentionally crush those around him.
The film takes place, primarily, in a small Iranian village near the border of Turkey. Panahi has decamped there to remotely oversee the production of a new movie, which he attempts to do in spite of an often wonky Internet connection. The residents are honored to have the filmmaker around but wary of the attention it may be bringing them. When a member of the production team sneaks over for a surprise visit that includes a drive to the border, Panahi’s landlord Ghanbar (Vahid Mobaseri), insists that he clean the dust from the nearby desert off his car lest someone notice.
Panahi complicates his situation even more after village authorities are at his door, insisting he turn over photo evidence he might have of an illicit tryst involving a young woman whose hand has been promised to another man. The director never seems to take the situation seriously even when he is asked to visit a “swear room” to defend himself before the village elders. Running parallel to this is the story within the film Panahi is making, which concerns an Iranian couple living in exile in Turkey and attempting to flee to Paris. Much as his own art imitates his life, the situation being played out before the cameras turns out to be very real, which only makes its inevitable trajectory that much more agonizing to watch.
What No Bears calls to mind is the stunning final moments of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1979 film Camera Buff. In it, a man has the path of his previously quiet life diverted when he begins filming events in and around his factory on a super 8 camera which slowly reveals to him the sociopolitical implications of art. In the closing scene, he decides to turn the camera on himself, shuddering like he’s taken a punch when he sets the film rolling. Panahi feels a similar impact in No Bears, but here it plays like a slow motion capture of a bullet being shot through an inanimate object and no one near him is protected from the shrapnel. (No Bears opens today in Los Angeles)
1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted A Culture (2022, dir. Sharon Roggio)
In 1946, a group of scholars and theologians set about producing a new translation of the Bible, a text that would be forever known as the Revised Standard Version. As part of their work, they combined a pair of Greek words in certain passages, converting their meaning to what they deemed was a simple portmanteau: homosexual.
The decision has had far-reaching consequences on generations of Christians using the new text of 1 Corinthians 6:9 to preach against the LGBTQIA+ community and engage in horrific practices like conversion therapy.
Documentarian Sharon Roggio knows firsthand how devastating that translation was. After coming out to her parents, she left home, and her relationship with her father, a pastor who founded a church in New Jersey, remains fractured due to his rigid belief that she’s leading a sinful life.
Roggio threads that tenuous yet loving bond throughout her new film 1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted A Culture. Her father Sal appears on camera somewhat reluctantly for interviews and even more reluctantly to join his daughter at a conference in Seattle about encouraging churches to accept more LGBTQIA+ members. He’s a fairly doting parent but behind their every interaction is a tension and disappointment over Sharon’s sexuality. That they can still be in the same room together is nothing short of miraculous.
That personal connection to the larger story of 1946 gives the film its weight, even as it veers off to include Kathy Baldock and Ed Oxford, two researchers who have been studying and giving lectures about the mistranslation. Oxford is an especially damning case as his fundamentalist upbringing cost him a lot of relationships when he revealed his homosexuality to friends and loved ones. He perseveres in his faith in spite of the pain it has wrought, which makes his efforts to change the hearts and minds of those who might otherwise persecute him feel all the more important.
As a film 1946 doesn’t find the perfect balance between the delivery of the facts regarding this important mistranslation and putting on camera the faces of the folks who have suffered as a result of its publication. This is especially true of some slightly awkward attempts to tie-in the stories of teens who, due to teasing and abuse from their peers and families, have taken their own lives. Her intentions with those moments, though, are absolutely laudable. If there’s a chance that someone will hear those names and see those young people and feel a shift in their hearts over the long history of oppression of LBGTQIA+ people by the church, then even those rockier moments in 1946 will have been worth it. (1946: The Mistranslation That Shifted A Culture screens this weekend at the Palm Springs International Film Festival)
Don't Look at the Demon (2022, dir. Brando Lee)
Perhaps more than in any other genre, horror filmmakers have a difficult time not wearing their influences around their necks like pieces of gaudy jewelry. So it goes with Don’t Look At The Demon, the new film from young director Brando Lee. The story of a potentially haunted house being investigated by the makers of a paranormal TV series called Skeleton Crew is dotted throughout with signifiers both large and small of the movies that came before it.
The good news is that those nods to forebears like Poltergeist and The Exorcist don’t detract much from the core tale. Nor do they make those moments of demonic possession, furniture whirling around the room, and various body horrors any less scary. And thanks to the committed performances by everyone involved, it’s easy to empathize with the young expat couple (Malin Crépin and William Miller) living in Malaysia who are hoping that Jules, the star of Skeleton Crew played by Fiona Dourif, will rid their spooky manse of a ghostly presence that has been haunting their dreams and moving their bodies around the house as they slumber. Dourif, especially, puts her whole self into her performance. Jules’s unsteady mental health and personal vices pop out through every vibration in Dourif’s skinny frame and expressive eyes. The backstory about the death of Jules’s sister when she was young and trying to comprehend her abilities to commune with the afterlife adds some strain to it all, but at least invests the character with some welcome emotional investment.
The effort that Dourif and her co-stars give to this film goes a long way toward papering over the less-than-assured hand that Lee has behind the camera. Don’t Look is overstuffed with plot wrinkles and useless backstory as well as a good amount of mystical woo-woo concerning the work of Malay monks. And he has yet to truly develop a distinctive directorial voice, opting to once again borrow details from the works of others. It feels like Lee hasn’t put enough faith in his audience to be able to hang with an otherwise creepy tale without giving them familiar beats and pieces to latch onto. (Don’t Look At The Demon is available for rent / purchase on DVD and VOD services)
Thanks for reading all the way to the end. Feel free to hit me back with comments or questions.
If you'd like, come see me play records on Twitch. I do at least three shows each week on Mondays from 10 - midnight, and Thursdays and Fridays from noon - 2 pm. (All times Pacific.) If you want to buy records from me, visit my tables at Crossroads Music or Memory Den in Portland. Just look for the code RHA.
Back next week with reviews of some other new films and maybe a little more.
This newsletter was written on the unceded land where once stood the traditional village sites of the Multnomah, Wasco, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin, Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River creating communities and summer encampments to harvest and use the plentiful natural resources of the area.