Reviews

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)

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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.

Hot Docs Review – Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street (Marilyn Agrelo, 2021)

Posted on by Ricky in Hot Docs | Leave a comment

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Sesame Street is one of those institutions that we take for granted. It is on every day, it has a stable of characters most of us grew up with and it’s a great way to grab a child’s attention during the day.

But how did Sesame Street become an institution? And more importantly, how did it actually change television? These are some questions that Marilyn Agrelo answers with her heartwarming documentary Street Gang: How We Got To Sesame Street.

Make no mistake, this film is exactly what you think it is – a well produced documentary featuring all things good (and some bad – it is a documentary after all) behind the tale of Sesame Street. Featuring amazing archival footage and access to all the key individuals, this film perfectly encapsulates Sesame Street and celebrates how it came to be – and boy, what a story it is.

I, like most viewers, know Sesame Street for its lovable characters and quirky educational methods, but I was completely caught by surprise in discovering all the subtle agendas that the Sesame Street team (including writers and educators) had with this program. As the film reveals, the team behind the show wanted to not only educate in the academic sense but also wanted to address race, class, diversity and other difficult issues for children. In the world of documentary, you often see corporations painted in a negative light, but this film takes the opposite approach. Maybe that was deliberate on HBO’s behalf, but the child in me wants to believe that there are good people in the world, and this film really does do that.

In 2021, you can call that a relative triumph.

Hot Docs Review: Bangla Surf Girls (Elizabeth D. Costa, 2021)

Posted on by Gary in Hot Docs | Leave a comment

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I suppose professional sports is as bizarre and opaque a concept to me as professional science is to 99% of the population. Regardless of novelty, though, if an activity is the only way out the drudgery of a Bangladeshi slum, even for just a few hours a day, it naturally becomes the center of one’s world.

Cox Bazar is a coastal resort of sorts in Bangladesh’s eastern corner on the border with Myanmar. Its beaches are rife with the contrast between haves and have-nots on a daily basis. Most children have little chance of upward social mobility; girls, especially, have few choices between menial labor, tourists trades, or being exchanged as brides. Requiring no more than a piece of foam, some sticky bumps, and the bracing ocean, it isn’t surprising that professional surfing can be a salvation.

Bangla Surf Girls follows 3 girls who not only found but excel at surfing, enough to join a club and compete nationally and internationally. With training from Bangladeshi expat Rashed and some graft, these girls learn to navigate their family/community expectations with literal abandon. While their prize money and recognition can mean subsistence, the club also serves as point for food handouts – a Salvation Army on surfboards, if you will.

Editing of such documentaries is secondary to the experiences they portray – but Bangla Surf Girls is an accomplished and well-produced film in both regards. A part of enjoying these intimate portraits requires us to not just sympathize with circumstances, but suspend the norms of western liberal democracies that seem to us universally optimal. Social dynamics are simply an informally agreed set of values, and not inherently backward or progressive as judged by GDP. For example, an individual father whose sole concern is prestige might not deserve the “unenlightened” label when we realize that losing-face will pragmatically reduce his prospects among peers and community, in lack of trade and access to land/help, etc. Why should he adopt our particular moral compass in a masochistic way, to face daily hardship, just to win an occasional remote approval? We often recite that most societies “become like us” as they “modernize”, like some underlying refrain that must occur in every pop song ever written. But the saying “All roads lead to Rome” has been proven quite wrong over the past two millennia, and in all honesty, I doubt the recent partisanship is the pie-in-the-sky that attracts any developing country.

Sitting out in the sea for 3 hours to avoid a suffocating future is the polar opposite of my memories of the same in San Diego. I have to confess that I will probably never be as good as any of these girls at surfing; maybe that lack of commitment was precisely why. Besides sealions and sharks, I never knew what I was avoiding while bobbing out at Black’s.