Movies

SXSW Film Review: Wild Life [Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, 2023]

Posted on by Gary in Movies, South By Southwest | Leave a comment

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Doug Tompkins, his wife Kris, and their close circles of nature-loving extreme athletes (climbers, surfers, skiers, kayakers… you name it, they’ve got it) rode the wave of entrepreneurship and popularized their ’70s free-spirit lifestyle into products that are still going strong today. This exulted C-level cast may bring people to this documentary to romanticize about dinner-con-night-walk along the Seine and all the other million things that seemed so easy to go right when the stakes are low. Yet, in reality, were the stakes all that low?

From Doug and Kris Tompkins’ point of view, they certainly were not. An extractive philosophy from both industry and governments held captive many other, more harmonious ways to give value to natural resource wealth. In developing and developed countries alike, the adjectives merely distinguished whether resources have been sufficiently depleted. Our society was happily re-opening the industrial wounds on the natural world, which had never fully healed since the 18th century. While the Tompkins cannot hope to sway the forces that be in the United States, they may yet do so for less entrenched nations and save them from dire straits.

Their plan was to simply buy land, to preserve and conserve through direct ownership. Unfortunately, their push for land acquisition in Chile and Argentina ran into bad timing of a significant proportion. Barely two decades after the tumult of the Pinochet dictatorship and that of the military junta, respectively, suspicions abound as to the true intent of these foreigners. After long hardships, Chileans and Argentines also had few reasons to give up their immediate prosperity for long-term ecosystem stability.

And so, as the stage opened and home videos of Doug Tompkin’s funeral rolled, this seemed destined to remain just another impossible American Dream. Instead of being just a touching memorial, however, the main thrust of Wild Life is to document the journey of Kris Tompkins as she completes the dream for her late husband. She would consolidate their land into practices and policies, and eventually establish functioning national parks there. Being mostly a documentary about nature conservancy, there are obligatory wide and stunning landscapes from both the ’90s and more recent times. It is also filled with interviews from the Tompkins’ close friends and allies in both government and civilian roles, but obviously only the positive influences. On the other hand, to fulfill the vicarious thirst to see people push themselves in needlessly harsh circumstances, it is also stuffed with tales enshrining how “hardcore” these early pioneers were.

A cynical take on the motivation here could be that of a brand-building exercise for North Face and Patagonia et al. But I’d like to think that is far from the truth. I believe the film was more about legacy building – by way of introducing one such, albeit giant, legacy, send a call-to-arms for all of us to build the same, multi-millionaires or not. Logical long-term thinking from any number of angles will inevitably favor “not destroying ourselves for the sake of some arbitrary definition of progress” as the all-time best practice. Sadly, while one can convince people to mime their love for nature via puffy jackets and carabiners, it is not easy to entice the uninitiated to live that nature-loving lifestyle. Yes, even with lots of money.

SXSW Film Review: 299 Queen Street West (Sean Menard, 2023)

Posted on by Ricky in Movies, South By Southwest | Leave a comment

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If you were to ask me for the perfect documentary that captures what it was like to listen to music while growing up in Canada, 299 Queen Street West would be it. I’m very happy that this film exists because I can now watch it every five or ten years and remember what it was like when I was young.

For the uninitiated, 299 Queen Street West chronicles the story of MuchMusic, a DIY startup 24 hour music channel that was an extremely large part of the lives of everyone who grew up in Canada in the ’80s and ’90s. If you are not Canadian, however, this documentary is still for you as the film also chronicles the changing landscape of music on several fronts, from the medium through which it was delivered (music videos to streaming) to the genres that took turns dominating the landscape over the course of 30 years.

The story is told purely through archival clips, featuring the voices of many of the players that defined the MuchMusic era including Erica Ehm, Steve Anthony, Master T, Rick the Temp, and Strombo among others. I really appreciated this approach (vs visual talking head) as it really let the film focus in on clips of the past. I was not in Canada when MuchMusic first started, but it was interesting to see how the channel grew from its initial conception to it taking over the building at 299 Queen Street west. For me, the nostalgia kicked in with clips from Electric Circus, The Wedge, Intimate and Interactive and footage of all the VJ’s.

At almost two hours the film provides just the right amount of time to relive all those memories and as the film draws to a conclusion, we start to see the demise of MuchMusic and it’s eventual transformation into what it is today, which is garbage. Still, the story of MuchMusic as captured in this film will bring up a lot of fond memories and joy for those who lived through it while also capturing a very important moment in time for the world of music as a whole.

I believe this film will be streaming on Crave at some point, which is quite ironic in itself.

SXSW Film Review: 32 SOUNDS (Sam Green, 2022)

Posted on by guestwriter in Movies, South By Southwest | Leave a comment

32 SOUNDS is seemingly custom-designed to be one of those tiles that lives forever in the scroll of your local library’s free online streaming service: An intriguing, brain-teasing but ultimately meagre documentary built to bestow a greater appreciation for the world around you, but may just end up being better suited to helping you fall asleep on the couch on a lazy spring afternoon. Award-winning documentarian Sam Green invites the viewer (or, more earnestly, the listener) on a journey through 32 individual sounds. You may wonder why that particular number. Do they correlate to octaves or other fundamental laws of sound? Are we cataloguing important moments in the history of sound innovation? Or, perhaps, is this a personal journey through 32 important moments from the filmmakers’ own life? Unfortunately for the audience, the answer is all those things and seemingly not enough of any one of them, either.

There is no grand thesis to 32 SOUNDS beyond tickling the viewer’s auditory ossicle and the film, for however genuinely noble its intentions, buckles under that assiduous weight. We’re treated to sounds from the womb, detours through the avant-garde scene of the 60s and 70s as seen through the eyes of pioneering sound artists like Annea Lockwood, peeks behind the curtain of Hollywood sound foley production and extended looks at Green’s own life and personal recordings with subjects of past documentary efforts. Any number of these angles would make for a solid focus to build a clean 90 minutes around, but Green opts for a poetic collage of all these ideas in addition to applying some aural glue to hold the vignettes together, like trees solemnly falling or church bells chiming in the distance.

What is meant to come across as an awakening experience to the beauty of nature and the miracle of hearing frequently comes across likely a shapeless This American Life episode, with Green whispering platitudes like, “Listening to a mixtape is like travelling through space and time,” or, “[We were] making films, which kind of means ‘marvelling at people and the world’,” at the audience. Such banal insights could be gateways in deeper discussions about our relationship to sound, but 32 SOUNDS frequently opts to skim from one surface to the next, barely clearing a bar for brain-tingling sensation set by any given Bose in-store demo room one could wander into at a mid-tier mall in the 2000s.

There are fleeting moments of inspired filmmaking that make 32 SOUNDS work better as an actual movie rather than a Calm meditation podcast, particularly in cuts that make the distant past feel much closer than it really is. For example, when we suddenly jump from watching Lockwood demonstrating one of her art installations in the 60s to witnessing her looking at footage of that event on an iPhone in the present day, 32 SOUNDS compellingly bridges an enormous gap of nearly 60 years in the blink of an eye. Elsewhere, however, 32 SOUNDS frequently declines to the offer to be a movie, even inviting the viewer to close their eyes and ignore what’s on-screen no less than five separate times.

While not unexpected given the subject matter, this approach puts cracks in the foundation that 32 SOUNDS never reconciles, often inhibiting its ability to take full advantage of film as an art form. In the homestretch, Green even admits to the viewer that he was having trouble understanding how to wrap all of these ideas up into a resounding cinematic ending, remarking, “No, I don’t really know where this is heading,” to the viewer. He eventually lands on making the film temporarily about himself, which is an approach that honestly would have been welcome as a throughline throughout the whole experience. Sarah Polley’s STORIES WE TELL is no less effective for exploring the impact of memory and identity through images and film taken from her own life, but Green often shies away from making his story the spine here even if when that vulnerability naturally invites itself as the most organic approach to take to get the audience genuinely invested in what’s happening.

32 SOUNDS amounts to a novel experiment that doesn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts. The approach is even treated flippantly on occasion, with title cards announcing what number we’re at, appearing unceremoniously at random (to paraphrase one moment: “We’re at sound #8, but who’s counting, really?” Green remarks ever so uncannily). 32 SOUNDS wants to be simultaneously carefree and profound, deeply reverent yet also playful. One moment stuck out to me that exemplifies these tones rubbing up against each other unsuccessfully, where Green presents an early-20th century film reel about the structure of the human ear. While the old-timey black and white footage plays, he dismisses their approach as clearly corny and outdated compared to what his film can teach us about the human ear. All I could think about at that moment was how 32 SOUNDS might be received over 75 years from now: would documentary filmmakers of the 22nd century be similarly dismissive of Green’s labouriously abstract, incohesive approach? There are a lot of carefully considered details to be seen and heard in 32 SOUNDS, but false notes such as these rang the loudest in my ears by the time the credits rolled.

Joe Hackett

Film Review: Artificial Gamer (Chad Herschberger, 2021)

Posted on by guestwriter in Movies | Leave a comment

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by Nash Bussieres

In Artificial Gamer, Dota is described as Basketball meets Chess – and there’s merit in that. But it’s more like if in your basketball/chess game, you and everyone on the court also got a gun. Dota is a mechanically intensive, heavily strategic team game of mutually assured destruction. Every character in play has abilities and powers that can have devastating consequences and completely shift the tide of battle if used perfectly. So the question posed by Artificial Gamer is an inevitable one: would a computer be able to play Dota more perfectly than a human?

The answer – if you were to ask your average Dota player – would be “obviously no.” Dota is a 5-on-5 team game where players take turns drafting characters, all with unique abilities and attributes, to form a cohesive squad. Your goal is to take down your enemy’s base called “the ancient” (Dota stands for Defense of the Ancients) by coordinating attacks on your opponents’ team and marching forward. You collect gold for killing your opponents and small computer-controlled swarms of enemies that are spawned in waves. Gold allows you to power up your character through buying items with the goal of becoming so powerful that your opponent can’t defend any longer as you waltz into their base and claim victory. It’s very much a war of attrition – even the fastest games can take over 20 minutes to complete.

So that’s the real rub here, a game this complex with this many variables in a real-time setting doesn’t immediately seem like it’s ripe for the taking from our eventual robot overlords. In fact, AI that plays Dota has existed since its inception as an in-game tutorial. And the AI teams, called “bots”, are incredibly bad; even on the hardest setting new players can easily overcome computer controlled opponents.

This concept of not only competent AI, but powerful AI in Dota being a laughable idea in the eyes of the wider community serves as the main narrative of Artificial Gamer. It follows the journey of OpenAI, a company who sets out to make a bot strong enough to beat any Dota team – even the world champs. We first see it take on Dendi – the best player in the world at the time – one-on-one and demolish him. But one-on-one Dota isn’t really the draw; it’s a team game and the complex decisions, coordination and human intuition needed to perform at a top level is completely incongruent with what is needed in a single player game. So can OpenAI do it?

The majority of the film focuses on the trials and tribulations of OpenAI as they try to get their bot ready to fight in time for The International 2018: the Dota world championships. There they will play exhibitions versus real human teams and attempt to prove that their bot can hang with the best. It’s a visually engaging story with lots of fascinating illustrations and fun graphics and is edited in a way that (mostly) nails really difficult segues and topic shifts without feeling too jarring or compartmentalized. The lack of a main narrator and an occasional inability to truly describe the concepts being talked about in laymen’s terms can make it a bit dry if you don’t already have at least a casual understanding of Dota, machine learning or both. The film is built up to The International as if it were to be the climax of the story, but this grand battle happens an hour in and turns out to only be a stepping stone in a much longer journey, which in turn hurts the pacing of the last third of the film.

Compelling and endearing interviews from the team at OpenAI do a lot to emphasize how much the current field of artificial intelligence and machine learning is a wild west; no one knows if anything is actually going to work or how it will work or when it will work. Spending this amount of time and energy on a project that has an unknown chance of success is unforgiving work and you can easily see the toll it takes on the team despite their determination.

Ultimately, Artificial Gamer is a deeply human story about a team of passionate and desperate pioneers trying to accomplish something they’ve been told is impossible. If you’re a fan of Dota or of machine learning in general you’ll get a lot out of it, but your eyes might glaze over a bit from time to time if you’re completely uninitiated.