The latest movie releases include Piece by Piece, The Apprentice, We Live in Time, and The Last of the Sea Women. Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and The Los Angeles Times, and Monica Castillo, freelance film critic and senior film programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center.
Piece by Piece
Directed by Morgan Neville, this biopic focuses on musician Pharrell Williams, animated with Lego bricks.
Walsh: “It's a cute documentary. I enjoyed it. Listen, it's Legos. It's not asking any tough questions. There's a lot of stuff that goes un-interrogated. It's a little bit of a celebrity puff piece, but it's a lot of fun. The music's great. I think it actually does fit with Pharrell as a subject”
Castillo: “It was also a great reminder of how rich and deep, and how many hits Pharrell had his hand on. I also really appreciated that they did creatively use the Legos. Some of it is a bit cliched. Other times, they really think outside the box. … How do you visualize synesthesia, which is when you see music as color, which is something that Pharrell has. … They visualize that with very bright, beautiful colors and waves coming out of the stereo, to give you a sense of what he experiences. Or even his creative process, where he'll put different Legos together, and then they light up in different colors and shapes. … It has fun with his story.”
The Apprentice
Named after the hit NBC reality TV show that Donald Trump hosted, this film is set in the late 1970s-80s and depicts the relationship between Donald Trump and his early mentor, the notorious attorney and fixer Roy Cohn.
Castillo: “I think the two actors are doing a pretty good job of … bringing these larger-than-life figures to life. I'm not particularly sold on The Apprentice as just a film. Is anyone really interested in the evil origins of Donald Trump? I think we've maybe heard of it over the last few years [and] have seen the ramifications of that since then, so I wasn't enamored with the story. It kind of flattens, I think, the complexity of what that relationship might have been.”
Walsh: “Sebastian Stan is unbelievable. He is giving such an incredible performance as Trump because it starts in the early ‘70s, and so you see him evolve. It starts off with just a small flavoring of the Trumpism that we know, and you see him evolve, especially influenced by both his father, Fred, and by Roy Cohn. He's picking up their accents. He's picking up their cadences until he becomes the guy that we know now.
…[Director] Ali Abbasi shoots all the ‘70s stuff on Super 16, and then it evolves in the ‘80s into [a] more camcorder VHS format. It evolves with the media era of the time. … It's a Frankenstein story. It's Roy Cohn taking this young man and turning him into a monster. I also think the psychopathy is there. You can't create that, but there's some real horrifying stuff in seeing how he takes his teachings and becomes even more monstrous than his mentor.”
We Live in Time
This drama follows a couple, played by Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, from the beginning of their relationship to childbirth and a serious unplanned illness.
Walsh: “A woman bravely facing cancer — it's not for me. I did not like this movie at all. Actually, it made me very mad. But I can't quite get into why it makes me so mad without spoiling the movie. Listen, I really like Andrew Garfield, and Florence Pugh can do anything. They have great chemistry together. They're very fun to watch on screen. … The film is constantly jumping around to different parts of their life and relationships. … It will go from a very joyous moment to a very tragic moment in seconds. And I don't really know why the film had to be told like this. It doesn't really make the case for why it should be told in a nonlinear fashion, except that it's like a gimmick. But … just the story itself, I didn't buy these characters’ choices, and I didn't like what it ended up doing with the Florence Pugh character.”
Castillo: “I think the leads are very charming. … I actually really enjoyed the non-linear story structure because it made me pay attention and reassess certain things that I saw earlier on, and just kept me thinking throughout. … There were some moments where I second-guessed myself, where I rethought about other things because new information comes to light. So yeah, I was pretty charmed with this one.”
The Last of the Sea Women
Produced by Malala Yousafzai, this documentary is about older women in South Korea who free dive for seafood.
Castillo: “They explain the history of the haenyeo, how it used to be men's work, but over time, it became women's work, and over the centuries, it became codified as this is something that women do, and they've become a sisterhood. They meet up, they go out to fish, they come back. And they regularly do this for years and years and years. However, now, because as they've aged, new haenyeo are not joining the ranks because it is really hard work and very strenuous.
And as the documentary starts to unravel, you hear more about how climate change is affecting their work, whether or not there will be enough to fish from the sea or they have to go further out, which means they can no longer free dive the way they have. And they may have to resort to scuba gear and things like that. And then, of course, there's the threat of pollution from neighboring countries. And then, the whole bigger conversation of: How do we protect cultural legacies, especially ones that we really want to hold on to? And how do we invest in both those who can teach that cultural legacy as well as the up-and-coming generations that are curious about it, but maybe don't see a pathway in?
So I love that this is such a beautiful, loving tribute from [director] Sue Kim. She made the documentary, and it becomes a launch pad for all these different conversations. And it's really gorgeous cinematography. I fell in love with almost everybody that we meet along the way, in the different interviews. They're all such great personalities, and they're really honest and candid to the camera. So of all the movies that I saw this week, this was by far my favorite. I learned something. I felt better for having watched it, and I also feel motivated to learn more.”
Walsh: “There actually is a scene where one of the divers goes to testify at the U.N. in terms of the release of Fukushima-contaminated water into the ocean. So that's the arc that we're building with — is their environmental activism coming together. … I loved this movie so much, loved learning about this culture, being inspired by these older women, women who are in their 70s, in their 90s, going out free diving, and just the beauty of this culture. One thing that really struck me is that they are very against using oxygen tanks, because then you can over-harvest. So there is a real balance to the work that they do in terms of their relationship with the environment. They can only harvest as much as they can gather, with one breath. So I really, really recommend it.”