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Self-Build and Custom House Building Register
The Council is obliged to keep a self-build and custom house building register covering the land within the District outside of the New Forest National Park. The Register will provide valuable information on demand for such house building in the area and will form a key element of the housing demand evidence base that will inform the Local Plan making process.
The Register
The Register contains details of individuals and association who have expressed an interest in inclusion. It has to include contact details, the number of serviced plots sought, the date the entry was included and the date of any subsequent amendments. Additional information can be required so as to support a greater understanding of the nature of demand but the failure to supply this information does not debar entry on the Register.
In order to allow for a greater understanding of demand in the planning area it covers New Forest District Council is asking in what area(s) people would like a plot, what size of plot in square metres is required, whether the applicant intends to do most of the building themselves, whether they would consider a plot on a large commercial housing development, whether they could only proceed if land is made available at a discount and whether they have any local connection to the area.
All information is held in confidence and at regular intervals those on it will be asked whether they wish their entry to be amended or maintained.
You can apply to join the Register here
Further Government guidance is available here
The relevant legislation is available here
The Planning Services Privacy Notice can be read here.
New Forest District Council Privacy Notice can be read here.


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A2 (420 x 594 mm) digital inkjet printout on photo paper. Doesn't fade, decent stuff. I will sign it unless you tell me not to. Other sizes available too, let me know if you want something else, up to 1000 x 1414 mm is possible, in case you're crazy like that. I'll need to check out the prices for printing and shipping then.
This is part of my Buffalo Bill Gates project. Which apparently is what I was put on earth to make. Mashups of celebrity names and faces, which make your synapses vomit.

subset: commoncrawl


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In response to a recent letter to the editor, I now give my perspective. Let�s get the facts straight and stop drinking the Kool-Aid regarding Mandela.
Mandela was not a great man. Yes he survived 27 years in prison but that doesn't make him great. It makes him patient. Mandela achieved next to nothing in his relatively short political career which saw South Africa
rapidly decline to the status of the world's most violent and crime-ridden country.
His greatest friends were communists and Muslim dictators like Fidel Castro, Qaddafi, Arafat and Saddam Hussein. Mandela was always critical of the democratic countries of the west, but had nothing but praise for the remaining communist and Muslim dictatorships of the world. He was a pure communist. He was supposedly a �hero of oppressed people everywhere� but considered dictatorships like Cuba and Libya as shining beacons of freedom and justice.
Now regarding guns on recreational facilities. It's always amazing to me that some "supposedly" bright people really think that outlawing guns anywhere will actually keep the bad guys from going there with guns. Actually that is an invitation for them to go there because law abiding citizens will actually follow the law.
Why do you suppose they like to shoot things up at schools? Maybe because they know there are no guns there? When a bad guy shows up with a gun everyone hopes a good guy shows up with a gun immediately. If a law abiding citizen goes through training and a complete background check I would want them to be at the recreational facility to possibly protect those children.
And regarding unemployment payments, just exactly how long should that go on? 99 weeks? Why not 10 years? I see "help wanted" signs all over this town and many other towns I travel to. Yes maybe not the best job in the world but it is a job. Too many people are too lazy to actually work these days. They think they are entitled to everything. Funny how a little hunger can maybe actually get some people off their backsides and do a little work.
I went to school while delivering newspapers, dug graves and flipped hamburgers. You do what you have to do. It's called "responsibility."
Now let�s talk education. Please see the chart below regarding education. Easy data to get online.
Spend per child Literacy Rate Math (600 Max) Science (600 max)
Simple facts seem to indicate we are spending plenty on our children. Most importantly, many other countries spend less but get better results. This is not about more pay for the teachers. It is really about transferring money from the insane education overhead and red tape. Give that money to the teachers. It's not about more money; it's about spending it properly. And why are you afraid of vouchers? Scared there may be a better idea?
As to unions, yes there was a time when they were badly needed but today they have grown into simple corruption. They are all about money. They (and obviously you) also think the minimum wage should go up. All that will do is put more people out of work. I guess you think that money grows on trees. If you were really serious you should make the minimum wage $100 an hour. Where's your heart? Hypocrite.
Christ asked us to give and take care of those in need. He asked us to do that voluntarily. He didn't say the government should steal it from one person and give that to whomever they choose to.
If you agree with that then that simply makes you a thief and certainly not "Christ like." If you want the teachers to make more money and still keep the ridiculous red tape then you should simply pay more on your tax bill, I can assure the government will gladly accept your gift. Put your money where your mouth is.
Spend your money and stop trying to spend mine.
Lancaster is a resident of Gaston County


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Abt Card
The clean, contemporary shape of Glacier complements any kitchen design. Impressive LED lighting and superior smoke and odor removal are a mere introduction to everything this hood has to offer.
Approximate Dimensions:
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Fill out the form below to request Better Price for this product.
Enter your zip code for a more accurate delivery estimate.


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Mad Science of ________ is a franchise of The Mad Science Group. Our programs are created by a team of professional scientists and teachers at our head office, in Montreal, QC. Millions of children in over 160 locations, in 22 countries have enjoyed our programs. Mad Science of _______ has been running camps in this area for ____ years.
The child to instructor ratio varies depending on enrollment. We always have at least one counselor for every 13 students.
Most of our camps are designed for rising first graders to sixth graders. Our "Red Hot Robots" camp and "3, 2, 1 Blast-Off!" camp are targeted to rising second graders to sixth graders. If you have a 5-year old child who is entering kindergarten, some of our camps may be appropriate. Please call us for recommendations.
Yes and no. A few of our camps are divided by age, but, for the most part, they are not; we use a buddy system where, if required, the older children help the younger ones. Also, our low child to instructor ratio ensures that there is always plenty of help. Please see the online registration form or call us to see which camps are divided by age.
Mad Science instructors tend to be college students pursuing an education or science degree, former/retired teachers, or teachers on summer break. Most of our instructors have worked for us in our after-school programs. All of our instructors have experience working with large groups of elementary-aged children and have undergone an extensive background check. They also receive summer-camp specific training. The main characteristic of our instructors is that they all share a love of working with children and the desire to spark and nurture their campers' imaginations!
Yes, at most of our camps. Please check with us for more information. Morning extended care hours are from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. at a cost of $10/day; afternoon hours are from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. at a cost of $15/day. If you choose the morning and afternoon extended care, the cost is $20/day. If your child is attending a partner-hosted camp, please contact them directly to secure arrangements with them.
Depending on the location of the camp, there may be many ways to register: mail, over the phone, in person, or online. The easiest way is through our online registration system. It takes about 5 minutes and accepts Visa, MasterCard, and checks. All of our Mad Science hosted camps will be made available through our online registration system. Our partners' camp registrations are handled directly through our partners (such as the school districts, parks & rec., etc.). On occasion, we provide registration assistance to a partner-hosted camp. Note: Registration requirements, start dates, end dates, and minimum camp size may vary by location. Due to limited spaces in each camp, we cannot reserve a space for your child until we receive your payment. If you are paying by check, we do not reserve your space until we receive the check.
Some camps and dates fill very quickly, while some may have spaces available up to the start date. We recommend that you register as soon as possible, because space availability depends on how quickly everyone else signs up!
For all camp registrations (i.e. our online registration system, phone-in, paper), cancellations that are communicated more than 30 days prior to the start of the camp are subject to a refund, less a $25 service charge. Cancellations that are communicated between 8 and 30 days prior to the start of the camp will be given a refund, less a $50 service charge.
No refunds will be given for cancellations inside of 8 days prior to the start of the camp - we often are under obligation to pay the camp-facility a facility-fee at that point in time. At any time prior to the start of a camp, you may transfer your registration to another child with no service charge.
If we do not get sufficient enrollment to hold the camp, Mad Science will make every effort to provide alternative camp locations, or you will be offered the option of a full refund. Refunds that do not involve referral-rebates, multi-camp/child discounts will be processed in 3-6 weeks from the scheduled camp-date. Those involving rebates and discounts can take longer to process.
If your child decides he or she doesn't want to continue after the first day of camp, you may withdraw and receive a full refund, less a $50 cancellation fee. However, you must call Mad Science at (XXX) XXX-XXXX prior to the start of the second day of camp to obtain a refund. After that, no refunds will be given.
Yes, in fact, we encourage it. Each camp is completely different so your child can enjoy them all without repeating activities. Last year, many children initially registered for only one camp. After they discovered how much they enjoyed our activities, they attempted to register for additional camps. Due to the popularity of many of our themes and weeks, several children were disappointed when the additional camps were already sold out.
We offer discounts for additional enrollments, and for siblings. These can add up to as much as $20 in savings (max.) for each Camper!
The camps are the same as the ones that we have used last summer. We have had a lot of children take a particular camp again and still enjoy it the second time.
Call us and we will be happy to look it up for you.
The minimum number of campers necessary to hold a camp is 12. Mad Science tries to inform parents as soon as possible should it appear that a camp will not reach its minimum enrollment. On these occasions, we will offer priority enrollment in other camps. Contact us for additional information on camp cancellations.
Mad Science provides all the equipment and materials for both the in-class activities and the take home projects. All you need to provide is a child who is ready to have fun! Children should dress comfortably for that day's weather. We ask that children not wear open toed shoes to a Mad Science camp, specifically no flip-flops. Also, as we will be outside on a number of occasions, please do not dress your child in any clothes that you do not want to get dirty. You may wish to apply sunscreen or insect repellent, or send these items with your child. A hat and/or sunglasses may also be useful.
The snacks that are part of each camp day are not a significant amount of food. If your child would benefit from some additional calories during the day, please pack additional snack items. We cannot guarantee that coolers or refrigeration will be accessible at our camp-sites.
For full-day camps, we require parents to send a lunch and snacks. PLEASE AVOID PEANUT BASED FOODS. Please clearly mark your child's name on all items he/she brings to the camp.
Prior to actual attendance at a Mad Science full-day summer camp, we require certain medical information from you regarding your camper. This is to assist the camp instructor with knowledge of specific considerations for your camper.
You must be aware that all summer-camp activities involve some risk, and, by registering for a camp, there is an assumption of risk made by the participant. Mad Science is dedicated to securing safe facilities for our camps and using personnel and equipment that is designed to be safe. However, Mad Science instructors are NOT trained in provision of medical services of any kind.
By enrolling your child in a Mad Science camp, you do agree to not hold Mad Science Group, its Franchisees, Agents, Representatives, Facilities, Employees, Managers, Contractors and Instructors liable for any medical emergencies or conditions your child may experience, related directly or indirectly to a camp.
Mad Science may offer custom designed T-shirts or Hydration stations for our campers depending on availability. After all, your Mad Science experience is not complete without a wardrobe or branded gizmo! These are FREE of cost to you and are not included in camp-fees.
Maybe not. We are in discussion with many locations to provide our Mad Science camps. Please look at our website on a regular basis as we will be updating our schedule as soon as additional locations are added. Also, if you have a particular location in mind, please bring it to our attention.
If our schedule does not work with YOUR schedule then bring Mad Science to you! All you need is 12 children and a safe place to hold the camp!
We may even be able to adjust the start time, length of the day, number of days, or customize our programming to exactly match your needs.Location needs for a Mad Science camp are:
Mad Science provides everything else! Please contact us for more details.


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The mechanics of the U.S. health care system – and how it can best work to help patients – has intrigued Dr. Thomas J. Foels since he became a pediatrician in the mid-1980s.
Foels, 57, a North Tonawanda native, has a master's degree in medical management from Tulane University as well as his medical degree from the University of Rochester. He started working part time at Independent Health in 1994 and has worked full time for the insurer since 1997, the last four as chief medical officer. In that role, he has helped Independent Health continue to improve a team-oriented approach to regional health care.
He has been among the key players in an Independent Health initiative launched last summer called the Primary Connection, which combines computer data, greater medical collaboration and a willingness to share best practices among more than 20 doctor groups, including internal medicine, family practice and pediatric physicians.
Q. What do you feel is the condition of the U.S. health care system now?
We have to think about a different path, and that's where I think communities are going to come into play, because I really don't think there's going to be some grand edict out of Washington that's going to solve all of these issues.
Q. Can you describe the Primary Connection in terms of what it does for the system and how it's going to help patients?
What it represents is 200 primary care physicians and their staffs that have built off the trust and relationship they've had with the health plan for many decades to really assume a role as lead architect for a new system of care. We call the ultimate goal the triple aim. Three things. You've gotta hit 'em all:
• Improved affordability. Lower the cost. We understand there's a lot of waste and redundancy and non-value-added investment.
• Improved quality. We're good, but we're not as good as we could be, we should be.
• Service excellence or service attributes: Access, communication, empathy. Those are measurable, too.
Affordability is certainly measurable. Quality is now measurable.
We call that the triple aim because three out of three, you score. Two out of three? Try again.
Q. How does the effort work?
Primary care physicians often do their work kind of siloed. The average Medicare patient has seven doctors. They usually have five specialists and two primaries in the same group. My dad has five doctors … but the five never talk to one another. They don't communicate well, and they're not incentivized in any way to work together. They're all busy, and the patient doesn't have anyone to help navigate them. And the primary care physicians generally make referrals based on who they know, who they trained with, who they've used in the past. Now, since this collaborative formed, they say, 'You know, we can probably start making decisions on who we refer to based on whether they're aligned with the same principles were trying to follow. Who's got the better quality outcomes? Who's got the better service attributes? Who's going to work and collaborate with us, so when you have a diabetic patient seen by a cardiologist, where diabetes is a big contributor to their cardiac disease, are we both looking out for the diabetes of the patient or is the cardiologist turning a blind eye to that?'
So the primary care doctor can say when it comes to choosing specialists, 'I'm going to make very informed decisions. It's going to be data driven, I'm going to hold the specialist to new expectations for service and communication, and I'm going to start referring my patients to those people who are going to collaborate with me.' To the credit of the speciality community, they are also very interested in saying, 'Got it.'
Q. Are insurers in the region collaborating a little bit more? Are you competing?
Probably neither. The health plans have taken various runs at this. … We at Independent Health have been working in this space for a very long time and have an evolving vision on where the community could be taken. We're all in on this. Now, when an office begins to transform how it practices, it doesn't do it just for its Independent Health patients. It does it across everybody – it's Health Now (BlueCross BlueShield of WNY), it's Univera, it's Medicare, it's Medicaid – which is absolutely fine with us. Do unique benefits come to Independent Health patients? Absolutely. We have unique data on those patients … (but) we're trying to raise the bar in the community.


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For Sale: One - Used - Dynrad Aluminum Ingot Preheater for sale DCM 1657
Status: Sold
We offer for sale, subject to prior sale and the terms listed below:
For Sale: One - Used - Dynrad Aluminum Ingot Preheater for sale DCM 1657. Inventory item: DCM-1657.
Manufacturer: Dynarad
Features & Accessories:
Item Specifications for DCM-1657
Shipping Terms: Ex-works
One used (second hand) Dynarad, Model: RL-24, 36 KW Carousel Ingot Preheater & Loader, Serial Number: 308, New in: 1995, Cell Number: 7, DCM Inventory Number: 1657 This item is part of the Lunt Manufacturing Company liquidation. It may be viewed at the Lunt, Hampshire facility located at 200 Brandt Drive, Hampshire, IL 60140. To view all of the available items at Lunt Manufacturing, please click on View Machinery and then click on Lunt Manufacturing. To schedule an appointment to inspect this machine or other items at Lunt, please call our office at 847-360-9170.
The following technical terms are to assist you with searches:
See jumbo large photos of this 36 KW ingot preheater
PURCHASER'S (Buyer's) RESPONSIBILITY AND INDEMNITY: Used machines, equipment or any part thereof, may not incorporate approved activating mechanisms, operator safety devices or safety guards as required by OSHA or otherwise. It shall be a Purchaser's (Buyer's) responsibility to ensure that any and all merchandise or equipment purchased from Die Cast Machinery, LLC or its affiliates is installed and operated in a proper and safe manner. Purchaser (Buyer) also acknowledges that it may have to install or change guards, safeties, warnings or other components to ensure that the merchandise or machines purchased will conform to all laws, codes, regulations, ordinances, statutes, insurance requirements and industry standards. Purchaser agrees to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Die Cast Machinery, LLC from and against all suits, claims, costs, damages and expenses, including, but not limited to, reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of, or in connection with, the transportation, purchase, ownership, or use of the merchandise or equipment sold hereunder. Information has been obtained from sources deemed reliable, buyers should avail themselves of the opportunity to inspect the items before purchase.


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Canadian juniors beat Slovakia after early wake-up call
Fell behind by two goals twice before powering back
Canada's punishing brand of hockey is unloved by European teams and gets them into trouble with the authorities at the world junior championship.
It's also a style that produced an important second win of the tournament for Canada on Friday, even though there may be a price to pay for that victory.
A 6-3 comeback win over Slovakia hinged not only on Anthony Camara's crushing check on a Slovak player in the second period, but the Canadians rallying around what they perceived as the injustice of his ejection.
Canada was down three forwards early in the second period because both Camara and JC Lipon had been ejected from the game by then, and Boone Jenner was serving the second of a three-game suspension assessed prior to the tournament.
Derek Roy tweet
"Congrats again to WJC team Canada on beating Slovakia today. Keep working together as a team! #goforgold #noregrets"
Trailing 3-1 midway through the second, Canada rattled off five unanswered goals to win and sit atop Pool B at 2-0.
Ryan Strome led with a pair of goals, while defenceman Morgan Rielly contributed a goal and an assist. Mark Scheifele scored the go-ahead goal with less than a minute to go in the second period. Canada also got goals from Ty Rattie and captain Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
Goaltender Malcolm Subban made 25 saves on 28 shots for his second win of the tournament. Defenceman Xavier Ouellet had two assists, including one on Scheifele's goal.
The International Ice Hockey Federation choosing not to further discipline Camara, whose check on Patrik Luza sent the Slovak defenceman off the ice on a stretcher, indicates the hit was legal. Replays show Luza had his head down when the Barrie Colt levelled him along the boards.
Canada didn't escape the long arm of the IIHF's law, however. Lipon will have a hearing on Saturday morning for his hit on Tomas Mikus behind Slovakia's net in the first period.
If the Kamloops Blazer is suspended, Canada will be minus both him and Jenner for Sunday's game against the United States.
But Friday's game turned on the reaction by both countries by the Camara check.
While Canada was galvanized after losing a second forward in the game, Slovakia's emotions over watching their teammate leave the ice on a stretcher got the better of them. Rielly and Rattie scored power-play goals to tie the game.
"Once that hit took place and Anthony came to the bench and we realized it was a clean hit and there'd be no call and then there was a call, I think our players rallied around that and I think as coaches we use that as a rallying point," Spott said.
"Dirty" has been applied to the Canadian team, most recently by Mikus who used the term to describe both the hit on him and Luza.
"In my eyes, the two hits were dirty," Mikus said. "I didn't see the second one, so I can't comment on it, but there was ... blood in the face so not clean."
In an English translation of a story published on the eve of the tournament, Russian forward Nail Yakupov is quoted as using "dirty" to describe the Canadian team. Since Yakupov has not yet spoken to media so far at this tournament, it's difficult to know whether that is what he meant.
Nevertheless, the Canadians are seen as a team that tries to win by intimidation.
"Canada are aware when they play more physical, the European teams basically don't really handle it well," Slovakia's coach Ernest Bokros said.
Lipon's hearing will be Canada's second for this tournament. Jenner's suspension came down Dec. 25 for his check on Swedish defenceman Jesper Pettersson in pre-tournament game. Jenner's hit was late and Pettersson suffered a broken wrist and dislocated shoulder.
Strome made no apologies for Canada's hard-hitting ways.
"We play the game hard," the Niagara IceDogs forward said. "That's what we've always done."
One of the game goals Spott sets for his players is limiting minor penalties to four or less.
He conceded that Lipon's stick was high on Mikus, but pointed out that Mikus laid face down on the ice while Lipon was turfed.
Mikus was back on the ice for his next shift, however, and scored a power-play goal to make it 2-0 for his country after the first period.
"The question we have as a staff is 'if you embellish, does that assist [the severity of the penalty]?"' Spott asked. "Our boys don't lie down. Canadian guys don't lie down. They'll drag themselves off the ice before they lie down."
Gamesmanship aside, Canada passed their first real test of the tournament.
Slovakia had taken Russia to overtime in their tournament opener before falling 3-2. Against Canada, they were the faster, smarter and harder-working team in the opening period.
Marko Dano scored twice in the game and Adam Nagy made 24 saves in Slovakia's net.
"In an event like this, you've got to find different ways to win and tonight was about dealing with adversity early and staying true to our tasks," Spott said.
"I give our kids a lot of credit. They had to be resilient and ultimately find a way to win and they were able to do that."
Russia edged the Americans 2-1 in the other Pool B game Friday. With five points, the hosts sat second behind Canada with six.
The Czech Republic downed Finland 3-1 and Sweden edged Switzerland 3-2 in a shootout in Pool A games.


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This is the work of several hours of typing. An hour here, an hour there, adding to a cumulative of about 10 hours over the past year. I am happy to report, I have finally completed this task.
I never knew my Grandmother kept a journal until my Sister mentioned it to me in 2003. I was finally able to snag it from my Aunt Jackie on the promise I would return it. To uphold that promise and to ensure it is not lost with it going back into her hands (you would have to know the situation to understand) I have typed the entire thing up. The same like I did with my Great Grandmother's (Lillian Coley Jonas 1898-1987) journals.
To preserve these journals for posterity, I will place them all up here (Lillians' will be up shortly).
This journal starts in mid 1944 and ends fall 1946. It is her high school years and covers several noteworthy dates. She records V-E and V-J day. She comments about the passing and birthday of siblings. While her entries are typically short, they do flesh out years I knew nothing of previously. There are many sites mentioned which do not appear to be still present and even in asking older people, they do not know them either. White City is the main location nobody seems to remember. I assume the saw mill is the Temple Saw Mill site up Logan Canyon. Logana was a swimming hole in Logan. Another issue is that many people are mentioned by their first name only, and even then many by nickname. I do not assume Dutch, Chick, and other names are actual names. Hence my difficulty. I fear only those closest to the situation would know who these people really where, and most of those closest don't remember or are no longer available for asking.
There are also cultural things which have changed. Going to a movie or swimming on Sunday is now taboo in LDS culture where they were much more common place then. The separated meeting schedule is apparent with Sunday School and night church (Sacrament) being defined as separate meetings. Most of us would not even make mention to the fact that we listened to the radio where it was made special mention of in this journal. The putting up of the hair is another phrase which is not heard anymore. Other phrases in the journal have a completely different connotation in today's world and hopefully they will not be understood in that light.
Colleen Mary Andra was born 27 May 1928 in Preston, Franklin, Idaho. As the journal shows, the main location of most events is Preston, Idaho. She married Wilburn Norwood Jonas 27 Sep 1946 in Elko, Elko, Nevada as is obvious in the journal. I have written more about them at this link: Jonas-Andra Wedding.
There are interesting things to note of the Jonas family as well. The marriage of Evan and Lona, the death of Irwin Jonas, and more are to be found. The journal definitely focuses on the Andra side in its short entries. Norwood would die tragically in 1975. Colleen would remarry twice more before she would pass away suddenly in 1999 from an operation.
I hope for those who read this and can add anything more, I would appreciate hearing from you. Defining more of these people and places involved would be great help and very appreciated. Please feel free to download a copy (by clicking on the link below) for your reading pleasure. I beg of you for your input and recollections!


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Mixing it up at Skyline Rotorua MTB Gravity Park
Skyline Rotorua Mountain Bike Gravity Park is the world's first year-round, all-terrain gondola accessed mountain bike park.
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Loading your mountain bike into a gondola cabin can be an art rearing the bike and manoeuvring it onto one of the 11 (out of 33) refurbished gondolas but by the second run at Skyline Rotorua Mountain Bike Gravity Park you'll have it nailed and there is enough space to fit four bikes to a cabin.
Once you're at the top, you'll have multiple trails to choose from ranging from Grades 2 to Grades 5 with six full-time patrollers all of which are trained to pre-hospital fist aid levels, making the Gravity Park the Southern Hemisphere's only full-time patrolled mountain bike park.
The park's longest trail Simple Jack a Grade 2 status covers 2.3km and traverses across Mt Ngongotaha, crossing the hillside three times under the Gondola and Chairlift lines taking in exceptional views over the city and Lake Rotorua. The trail eventually leads the rider round a mega-berm and into the Redwood forest where corners start tightening up and superb berms practically turn into wall rides if you hit them hot enough eventually spitting you out of the bush at the trail end, leaving you wanting more.
Mix it up on another run by take the fork in the Redwoods to hit the Daywalker trail Grade 3 in status which steps up to a more intermediate ride as the trail narrows and steepens, making for an awesome option to have more fun with. The next trail to tackle is Hipster where a section of three decent-sized hip jumps about half way down the track can be found. The trails are built so the jumps are all roll-able, but plenty of air is on offer for the more skilled rider. Everything links together well on Hipster. These are definitely the type of trails that you want to ride over and over again.
For the more seasoned rider a lush blend of digger built and hand built trails, providing a welcome diversity and the established Redwood forest provides the perfect canopy to house the bottom half of the trails where the bottom section of Moss Piglet is a sight to behold.
This section of trail, accessed from Sprint Warrior, takes you over two big tables before dropping into a gnarly, off-camber, raked-in line through the forest. This line finishes with a 300m jumps track and features for riders to really challenge themselves. The section starts off with a 'must jump' step down, laden with boulders in the gut of it, which leads into the Empire of Dirt trail building team's pièce de résistance – the surgeon's table, a feature that resembles something out of an international slope-style course.
Multi Day Adventures own and operate a Mountain Bike Rotorua hire base at the bottom Skyline terminal, providing bike hire, repair and servicing, as well as guided tours of the trails.
- The stage one trail terrain covers 8.5km and includes 30% easy trails, 40% intermediate and 30% advanced. The trails are: Grade 2 - Simple Jack; Grade 3 – Daywalker; Grade 4 – Sprint Warrior (part 1) and Hipster; Grade 5 – Sprint Warrior (part 2), Moss Piglet and Ten Fifty One.
- The Gravity Park opens from 9am. A morning pass is from 9am to 1pm and an afternoon pass is from 1pm to 5pm. Closing times may be extended as light allows in summer months.
- The Gravity Park is not recommended for first-time cyclists. All riders aged 12 and under should have the consent of a parent, guardian or caregiver to ride. For safety reasons access is not allowed for children under 5 years, pregnant women or tandem riders (including infant bike seats/carry packs
- Skyline Mountain Bike Gravity Park is the second mountain biking venture for Skyline Enterprises, with the Queenstown operation offering riders access to trails from September to May.


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Todd Phillips's Joker, Starring Joaquin Phoenix as the Iconic Villain, Gets Teaser
There's a little Charlie Chaplin in the Joker's steps early on, before madness grips him in ways that would probably make Pennywise shudder.
Before today, a psychological thriller about the Joker directed by the man responsible for The Hangover series wasn't exactly on our list of priorities. After all, we've been burnt way too many times by the Marvel and DC universes to summon much excitement even for a more character-driven, less action-packed affair fiercely devoted to charting the mental anguish of one of the comic book canon's most iconic villains.
But our affection for Joaquin Phoenix, perhaps the greatest actor of his generation, knows no bounds. And based on the two and a half minutes we've just seen of Todd Phillip's Joker from its first teaser, the film looks like it may be closer in spirit to Taxi Driver than to Zack Snyder's smugly self-serious contributions to the superhero industrial complex.
At the very least, it looks to be a fine showcase for Phoenix's blend of sadness, grace, fury, and, above all, precision. There's a little Charlie Chaplin in the Joker's step early on, before madness grips him in ways that would probably make Pennywise shudder.
Joker, the first film in a series of DC-based films separate from the DC Extended Universe, also stars Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Brian Tyree Henry, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais, and Shea Whigham.
See the first teaser trailer for Joker below:
Warner Bros. will release Joker on October 4.
Review: Angel Has Fallen Paints an Incoherent Picture of an Action Hero
The film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.1.5
Ric Roman Waugh's Angel Has Fallen sees U.S. Secret Service agent Mike Banning (Gerard Butler)—having returned to his home turf after a trip across the pond—contending with more threats to international security. Mercifully jettisoning the Islamophobia of Babak Najafi's London Has Fallen, the film finds Mike framed for an assassination attempt on President Allan Trumbull (Morgan Freeman). And clearing his name appears to hinge, at least at first, on whether or not he learns to grapple with the physical and psychological toll of his previous exploits, as multiple concussions and spinal injuries have saddled him with insomnia and an addiction to painkillers.
As a fleet of miniature drones slaughters Trumbull's security detail, it's impossible not to think of Mike's early interactions with his old Army Ranger buddy, Wade Jennings (Danny Huston), the head of a private military contractor. Angel Has Fallen introduces Wade openly lamenting that Trumbull's efforts to stop war profiteering have hurt his business. It's almost to the film's credit that Jennings's guilt is never in doubt, meaning that Mike's subsequent escape from custody and quest to clear his name are rooted solely in his having to contend with his traitorous friend's private army, and not some dull mystery centered around who set him up.
Still, the film's framing of Mike as the most wanted man in America is clumsily executed. Given that his face is plastered on screens all over the country, you'd think that the man would be trying to avoid public exposure at all times. In practice, though, Mike is almost always in plain sight, never making any attempt to disguise himself, almost as if he's aware that no one ever seems to recognize him. The only exception to this rule is when he's held up by two armed, backwoods militiamen in Angel Has Fallen's most baffling scene; after all, when one imagines the sort of people who might be driven to an outraged citizen's arrest over an attack on a liberal, black president, one doesn't immediately think of white nationalists.
Given the lack of significant impediment to Mike's movements, the film allows plenty of space for action thrills, but Waugh seems to have cobbled his set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection. And because of so much coherence-defying shot continuity, it's impossible to tell what's happening during any given skirmish. Even the nonviolent scenes are jittery and aggressive; a close-up at one point tracks a character picking up a phone with a whip pan so fast that the shot slips out of focus. Worst of all, though, are the special effects that mark the more grandiose set pieces, with smoke from massive explosions hanging statically in the air as a giant, solid mass and, in the film's rooftop climax, the obvious use of green screen revealing image artifacts around the actors' faces.
It doesn't help that, three films into the Fallen series, Mike has almost paradoxically lost some of his dimensionality as a character. In an age of impossibly conditioned physiques, Butler's everyman image is a welcome throwback to the action stars of yore. But he doesn't radiate much wit and personality, delivering Mike's punchlines with the same leaden severity that he does the film's exposition. Butler portrays Mike's dire health condition with nothing more than the occasional flutter of his eyelids and a momentary stumble, and what could have given Mike's quest to clear his name added urgency is swiftly abandoned as soon he goes on the run, evincing as he does no visible signs of suffering from any malady or trauma.
The only time that Angel Has Fallen exhibits any spark of inspiration is when Mike hides out with his estranged, traumatized veteran father, Clay (Nick Nolte), who's secluded himself in a cabin in the deep woods of West Virginia. When Jennings inevitably finds his prey there, Mike's efforts to take charge are overridden by Clay tripping a number of booby traps, setting off so many explosives that the sequence, for the way its initial tediousness blooms into improbable hilarity as each successive explosion dispatches one of Jennings's men, comes to suggest a brutal iteration of the famous rake gag from The Simpsons. Nolte, with his gravelly voice, bent frame, and matted briar patch of hair, communicates in a few scenes all of the pathos of weariness and trauma that Butler fails to invest in Mike, providing Angel Has Fallen with its only sources of comedy and emotional resonance.
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morgan Freeman, Danny Huston, Michael Landes, Tim Blake Nelson, Nick Nolte, Piper Perabo, Jada Pinkett Smith, Lance Reddick Director: Ric Roman Waugh Screenwriter: Robert Mark Kamen, Matt Cook, Ric Roman Waugh Distributor: Summit Entertainment Running Time: 121 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Locarno Film Festival 2019: Technoboss, Echo, & A Voluntary Year
A striking number of the titles that appeared in the festival's competition slate this year operate in a playful, breezy register.
Locarno often leans into its reputation as Europe's most unapologetically highbrow summer festival, but a striking number of the titles that appeared in the festival's competition slate this year operate in a playful, breezy register. Such as João Nicolau's Technoboss, an unwaveringly deadpan musical comedy about an aging divorcé, Luís (Miguel Lobo Antunes), nearing the end of what seems to have been a tedious career selling and maintaining integrated security systems. His existence is far from enviable, as he's past his prime as a salesman and baffled by modern technology, while his primary companion is his cat. To compound the overriding sense of ennui, Nicolau presents a decidedly drab vision of Portugal, all cramped offices, cluttered shop floors, and soulless hotels.
Luís, though, remains optimistic, as evinced by his tendency to burst into song as he drives between assignments, and by the quietly determined way in which he attempts to regain the affection of an old flame, Lucinda (Luisa Cruz), despite her apparent disdain for him. Antunes, in his first professional acting role, is compelling, with a perpetual twinkle in his eye that hints at a rich inner life. And while his vocal range is limited, to say the least, he brings an earnestness to the musical numbers that elevates them above mere quirky window dressing.
Ultimately, the film is too narratively slight and tonally monotonous to justify its two-hour running time. One running joke in particular, involving a smarmy executive who's frequently heard off screen but never seen, runs out of steam in the final act. And yet, when viewed in close proximity to the likes of Park Jung-bum's dreary crime drama Height of the Wave, which bafflingly won this year's special jury prize, Technoboss is a breath of fresh air.
Runar Runarsson's Echo isn't exactly a laugh a minute: An early scene depicts the preparation for a child's funeral, while subsequent sequences revolve around police brutality, domestic violence, and the lasting impact of childhood bullying. But it's delightful to behold Runarsson's sly execution of a formally bold premise. Clocking in at 79 minutes, the film is composed of 56 standalone vignettes connected by a Christmas setting. The constant narrative shifts are initially jarring, but recurring themes begin to emerge: rising social inequality in the aftermath of the financial crisis; the impact of modern technology on traditional ways of life; the drabness of winter and its impact on the country's collective mental health.
Yet while the film's underlying tone is melancholic, there are frequent bursts of pure comedy, from the absurd spectacle of abattoir workers bopping along to a jaunty rendition of "Jingle Bells" amid animal carcasses, to a farmer and her partner earnestly squabbling about the state of their relationship as they document the mating habits of their goats. Humor also arises through the juxtaposition of scenes. The haunting image of a boy in a coffin is followed by a clinical shot of a similarly motionless adult body, and it takes a moment to register that we're looking at not another corpse, but rather a man lying under a tanning lamp. Later, a heartwarming kids' nativity scene cuts abruptly to a shot of bikini-clad bodybuilders performing in a harshly lit, half-empty auditorium.
However, it's Echo's sincerity that really impresses. One sequence, in which an emergency services operator calmly reassures a child reporting a violent altercation between his parents, is remarkable in the way it hooks the viewer emotionally in mere seconds. The film ultimately coheres into a vivid portrait of contemporary Iceland that's equal parts bleak and beguiling.
A Voluntary Year, co-directed by Berlin School alumni Ulrich Köhler and Henner Winckler, is a similarly bittersweet affair, walking a fine line between raw domestic drama and precision-engineered comedy of errors. Sebastian Rudolph stars as Urs, an off-puttingly pushy small-town doctor intent on packing his teenage daughter Jette (Maj-Britt Klenke) off to Costa Rica to volunteer in a hospital. Jette, though, would rather spend her gap year at home with her boyfriend, Mario (Thomas Schubert), who seems harmless enough but has been written off as a poisonous influence by Urs. A sequence of mishaps in the thrillingly unpredictable opening act gives the young couple a brief chance to take charge of their own futures, but the decision Jette hastily makes pushes her strained relationship with her father towards breaking point.
Köhler and Winckler do a fine job of eliciting sympathy for their deeply flawed characters. Jette is maddeningly indecisive and prone to overly dramatic outbursts, but her brash exterior masks deep-seated vulnerability. Meanwhile, it's easy to share Urs's disbelief that Jette should be even remotely infatuated with the woefully uncharismatic Mario, but the boy's earnestness ultimately proves strangely endearing. Urs is much harder to warm to, as he's the quintessential big fish in a small pond, clearly used to throwing his weight around and getting his own way. To add insult to injury, his handling of sensitive situations is often jaw-droppingly misjudged. And yet, the viewer is given a strong enough sense of his good intentions to at least partially root for him as he attempts to patch things up with Jette.
While it may not do this modest film any favors to make the comparison, there are shades of Maren Ade's masterly Toni Erdmann in The Voluntary Year's nuanced depiction of a fraught father-daughter relationship, and also in the way the filmmakers play the long game when it comes to delivering comic payoffs. An enigmatic narrative thread involving a migrant boy has a laugh-out-loud resolution that also neatly paves the way for a moving final scene.
The Locarno Film Festival ran from August 7—17.
Interview: J. Hoberman Talks Make My Day, Ronald Reagan, and '80s Movie Culture
Hoberman discusses how the art of filmmaking, and the business of moviegoing, influenced, mirrored, and altered Reagan's presidency.
The poster boy of American conservatism, the bar to which all Republicans would unashamedly evaluate future candidates, and yet now seemingly lower on a weekly basis, Ronald Reagan was an ideal movie star with an idealized view of the past. His perfect America would be equivalent to the opening shots of red roses, green lawns, and white picket fences that kick off Blue Velvet, while America's reality would be what transpires once Bobby Vinton's song concludes and the swarming ants are revealed beneath the surface.
A time of Hollywood blockbusters and silver screen patriots, macho men and teens headed back to the future, the 1980s, while not considered a golden movie age, saw a symbiotic relationship between American film and the nation's chosen leader. How else to account for Reagan proposing his "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative in March of 1983, a mere two months before the release of the year's top grossing film, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi?
With his methodically researched new book, Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, former Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman takes a sociological approach to discovering how the art of filmmaking, and the business of moviegoing, influenced, mirrored, and altered the goings-on of our 40th president's administration. And on the occasion of the book's release and accompanying Film at Lincoln Center series, which samples feature films from the '80s, I spoke with Hoberman about the first Reagan screen performance he ever saw, being a working film critic during the "Age of Reagan," and the unexpected rise of real estate mogul and Celebrity Apprentice host Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.
One of your most revered books is Vulgar Modernism, a collection of reviews and essays written during the '80s without the benefit, or trappings, of historical hindsight. Now 30-some-odd years later, you've taken a step back to take a look at the bigger picture of the decade. What was that experience like?
I should say that this book was the culmination of two earlier books, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties and An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War. Make My Day is the end of a trilogy. When I began writing the trilogy, I didn't realize how central Reagan would be to it, but by the time I started Make My Day, he had become, in effect, the protagonist of the entire trilogy. Make My Day was different from the other two books. It's not just that I lived through this period, but that I was then a working critic. How was I going to deal with that? In the earlier books, I went out of my way to quote critics and others who wrote about movies because I was very interested in how these films were initially received. In the case of Make My Day, however, it seemed absurd to quote other critics when I was there myself. It took me a while to come to that conclusion because my impulse wasn't to put myself in the book and yet I realized that I would ultimately have to.
I found that my opinion of the various movies discussed hadn't changed all that much. My opinion of Reagan was modified somewhat, in that I saw him as a more complicated figure than I did during the 1980s, but I also believe my response to him in the '80s was true to the moment. That's why I included a number of longer pieces in the book, while also annotating them, so that one could see that I wasn't just reusing the material without thinking about it.
You note that each volume can be read in chronological order, the order in which they were published, or as standalone installments. I took it up after finishing your and Jonathan Rosenbaum's Midnight Movies, and it felt like I was emerging from the pre-'80s underground to a Reaganized American society that had become depressingly anything but countercultural. What was it like being on the underground and Hollywood beat as a critic throughout those years?
I didn't really start reviewing the blockbuster films until around 1984. I was the Village Voice's second-string critic when Andrew Sarris, the first-string critic, fell ill, and I took his spot for a while. As a result, I was reviewing movies that I might otherwise not have. To make things interesting for myself, I began reviewing these movies from a political and ideological perspective. Even when Andy came back, that stayed with me. So, for example, there were a lot of action films during that period that Andy was very glad not to review, like Top Gun, but I did those while also reviewing foreign films, avant-garde films, documentaries, and so on. I always said that I could never be a first-string critic for a newspaper. I would have lost my mind having a steady diet of big Hollywood movies! I would have had to mix things up.
While midnight movies aren't the primary focus of Make My Day, the underground did find a way into your reviews of '80s blockbusters. I recall a review in the Voice titled "White Boys: Lucas, Spielberg, and the Temple of Dumb" in which you tear down the nostalgic Indiana Jones prequel while praising Jack Smith's nostalgic Normal Love. Was it maddening for you to review the latest Spielberg while underground artists concurrently made the same points to much smaller audiences?
That was really something that came from the heart. I was outraged by Temple of Doom, by its attitude, and I was really sick of these guys, Spielberg and Lucas. I wanted to bring out that there were other forms of filmmaking and other ways of dealing with this material. I was making a point, yes, but it was something that was fueled by emotion rather than reason.
Were there any Spielberg films, or Spielberg-adjacent films like Gremlins or Poltergeist, that you found less than risible throughout the Reagan years?
There were some that I preferred. I liked Gremlins quite a bit, and I enjoyed Back to the Future, which is Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. At the time, I didn't much care for Poltergeist, but when I looked at it again for the book, I thought it was interesting in terms of its pathology. I should also say that I liked Jaws and E.T., to a degree, although it was no Blade Runner.
Though primarily concerned with Regan's political reign, you also dig deep into his filmography, noting how his sole villainous role, in The Killers, has always prompted a vocal reaction from every audience you've watched it with. Why do you think that is?
Well, I'm not sure that's still true. A friend recently saw The Killers at Film Forum and told me he was sort of shocked that people didn't respond to the scene where Reagan slaps Angie Dickinson. The first time I saw The Killers, which was, I think, in June of 1969, I didn't expect to see Reagan in it. I don't think I had seen him in a movie before. I was well aware of who he was, of course, and I hated him because I had been at Berkeley the previous summer, when students were public enemy number one and there were disturbances every night—the whole thing was extremely compelling for me as a 19-year-old. The point I wanted to make was that my whole view of Reagan was predicated on The Killers. To me, he seemed to be playing himself. I had a very naïve response. I couldn't understand why he would do the role. I mean, what crazy hubris prompted him to show what he dreamed of becoming on screen? I recognize my response as primitive, but it also demonstrates the power of movie images. I didn't see him as acting, even though he clearly is. I saw it as him projecting his evil, bastardly essence.
Speaking of essence, it's odd re-watching Donald Trump's numerous cameos in American film and television. Unlike Reagan's silver-screen presence, Trump literally always played himself: an obscenely rich braggadocio. Whereas Reagan's "lovable" persona no doubt helped his later career in politics, Trump's media appearances helped to fortify his reputation as an arrogant huckster.
This is the point I tried to make at the end of the book. I was surely thinking about Trump a lot while writing the book, but he only became president when I was close to finishing it. Trump may have a star on Hollywood Boulevard, but it doesn't come as a result of the movies. He's a celebrity and a celebrity is someone who's able to project a cartoon version of themselves, or a larger-than-life version of themselves, into the media world: TV, the tabloid press, and so on. Trump is being true to this persona. I didn't really see Trump's presidency coming. For me, he was a New York City character, a local celebrity who was regularly exposed in the Village Voice's narrative of New York City corruption. I had no sense of how he existed to the rest of America, in Celebrity Apprentice. Clearly that's what put him over, or at least helped to put him over. That and his appearances on Fox News as a kind of pundit and even his involvement with professional wrestling.
As you mention in your book, the uncomfortably awkward 1979 CBS Ted Kennedy sit-down interview with Roger Mudd ultimately derailed Kennedy's attempt at a presidential run. It's hard to imagine, given the feckless attempts by our current political leaders to appear like an everyman, that current presidential candidates' chances could be derailed by the televised struggle to answer a basic question. If anything, we might view the guffaw as endearing and humanizing. Trump says dumb stuff on a daily basis, and we all just accept it. Have we become desensitized to politicians being put on the spot and not being able to come up with succinct answers?
I think it's different for different candidates. Being the younger brother of J.F.K., who was the first real political star, created a lot of expectations. People credit Kennedy's success in the 1960 election with his appearance in the first debate, for looking so much better than Nixon. That may be simplistic, but it's not simplistic for people to think that TV had something to do with Kennedy becoming president. I think this is a case of "live by the sword, die by the sword," that his brother just stumbled so badly in that interview, in what was essentially his television debut. He did go on all the way to the 1980 Democratic National Convention, but the myth of the Kennedy charm and invincibility was destroyed by that interview.
Looking at subsequent presidents, Reagan certainly had an elastic sense of reality. But in his distortions and lies and misstatements, he was by and large upbeat and, when he wasn't, he was at least coherent. Trump lies so continuously that you feel that that must be part of his appeal for his base, that he's just going to make this stuff up. They think it's funny or entertaining or maybe that it represents a "greater degree of authenticity."
There had been a very interesting point made by Theodor W. Adorno about Hitler's appeal. I'm not saying that Trump is Hitler, but he's a demagogue and Hitler was too. Adorno, who lived through Hitler's lies, made the point that intellectuals and serious people didn't get Hitler's appeal. Before he came to power, he just seemed like a clown. There was something ridiculous about Hitler's assertions and his tantrums. What they didn't realize was that's precisely what his fans liked about him. I think that's also the case with Trump and his supporters.
If Nashville, as you point out in the book, foresaw the real-life presidential assassination attempts that were soon to come, could you see the same cinematic influences happening today? Are there films today that you think are foreshadowing things that could come into fruition within our own political future?
Nashville was a movie made at a time when movies were much more central to American culture than they are now. It was made by a filmmaker, Robert Altman, who was directly addressing, as an artist, what was going on. I bracketed Nashville with Jaws because in some respects, Jaws is a similar movie, although I'm not sure if Spielberg was consciously making an allegory. Some things in the film are political, for example the behavior of the Mayor of Amity, but beyond that the movie itself was utterly central to American culture. There was nothing more important during the summer of 1975 than Jaws. There's no movie that has that kind of centrality anymore, nor do movies as a whole.
A number of television shows seemed to be predicting Hillary Clinton before the 2016 election. There were shows like Madam Secretary and Veep and Homeland, strong, female, political heroes, or, in the case of Veep, comic. But what were they compared to Celebrity Apprentice? Those aforementioned shows were very feeble in terms of reaching an audience and I think it was more a projection of the people who made it. When I look at movies now, and I have to say that I don't see as many movies as I used to, I see some that seem to manifest things that are in the air. Jordan Peele's Get Out would be the best example of this. That movie was made and conceived while Obama was president, but it certainly projected the post-Trump mood. Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is interesting because, on the one hand, it's a movie about 1969, and yet it's also a movie about 2019. It can't help but manifest some of our current fantasies and tensions. But even if it had a bigger audience than Nashville, people just aren't taking it the same way.
And Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood presents a cinematic take that has a romanticized, almost fetishistic view of a 1969 that never truly existed, at least not the way Tarantino wishes it did…
Well, that's certainly one way to look at it. I would put it somewhat differently, but we can let people discover for themselves if they haven't seen it!
The book also talks a great deal about the revisionism and idealization of specific time periods that were said to represent wholesome Americana. The '50s is a big one, but as you point out, the movies' view of the '50s were drastically different from the one the world actually experienced. I remember growing up in the '90s convinced Happy Days was a TV show not just about the '50s, but from the '50s itself.
That makes perfect sense, and I think other people share that same experience. The genius of that show is that it portrayed the '50s "as it should have been." Jean Baudrillard has a memorable description of walking in to see Peter Bogdanovich's 1971 black-and-white film The Last Picture Show and, for a moment, thinking it was actually a movie from the period it depicted: the early '50s. It was a hyper-real version of it. That's what Happy Days was. I think Reagan's genius was to be able to do that on a larger scale, to conjure up an idealized '60s almost out of whole cloth, vague memories, old television, and old movies in his own conviction, even if that was ultimately a fantasy. It was an idealization of the period.
On the occasion of your book's release, you've programmed a selection of double features for an upcoming series at Film at Lincoln Center. Outside of a closeness in release dates, like The Last Temptation of Christ and They Live, what went into the pairing up of certain titles?
I appreciate that question. I really love the concept of double bills. Whenever it's possible, I like to teach using double bills, because then the movies can talk to each other—and I don't have to talk as much. Ideally the movies should comment on each other. The reason for including The Last Temptation of Christ was a bit tricky. I thought that the response that it got certainly looked forward to the culture wars of the '90s. There was such hostility directed toward that movie and, by extension, the movie industry as a whole. As Trump would say, it was as "an enemy of the people." And to me, They Live seems to be the bluntest, most direct critique of Reaganism ever delivered, and it was delivered at the very, very end of his presidency. In a sense, it was already over, as the film came out just before the 1988 presidential election. I see both They Live and The Last Temptation as political movies, one overtly political and one that was taken in a political manner.
Review: Vita & Virginia Leaves the Nuances of a Love Affair to the Imagination
The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces.2
When capricious socialite and writer Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) first glimpses Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki) at a bohemian party in Chanya Button's Vita & Virginia, the latter is the midst of a dance, her head leaning back and arms freely swaying in the air. It's an uncharacteristic moment of outgoingness for the author, who by this time in the early 1920s has had only modest success, and the throbbing ambient techno music that underscores the scene lends her and Vita's desires a strange and striking modernity. But the film doesn't fully commit to such anachronistic flourishes in its portrait of the two women's tumultuous love affair, instead frequently falling back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces.
Vita's deviousness and unpredictability does, for a time, make for some compelling proto-feminist drama, thanks in large part to Arterton's bold performance. Vita is amusingly blasé in the face of both her heiress mother, Lady Sackville (Isabella Rossellini), who protests to her dressing as a man and openly having affairs with women, and her diplomat husband, Harold (Rupert Penry-Jones), completely dismissing his concerns about maintaining their marriage of convenience. Elsewhere, Debicki is left with the difficult task of dramatizing Virginia's escalating strife, and with little help from a script that basically skirts over the serious mental health issues that plagued Woolf throughout her life. In fact, Virginia's joys and struggles as they arise from Vita's hot-and-cold treatment of her are rarely given any concrete form aside from the occasional ham-fisted touch of CGI-enhanced magical realism, as when vines grow out of the woodwork when Virginia returns home after first sleeping with Vita.
Outside of these moments, Virginia's interiority is given similarly blunt expression through her relationships with her passive yet understanding husband, Leonard (Peter Ferdinando), her lively artist sister, Vanessa (Emerald Fennell), and Vanessa's roommate, the flamboyant painter Duncan Grant (Adam Gillen). Each of these archetypes always seems to be conveniently on hand to explicitly outline the details of Virginia's emotional state. The only time her thoughts and emotions, as well as Vita's, are articulated with any nuance is through a series of epistolary interludes that see Arterton and Debicki reading the love letters that Sackville-West and Woolf wrote to one another. And yet, these moments are so awkwardly and unimaginatively incorporated into the film, with the actresses speaking their words directly into the camera, that the letters' flowery language is effectively drained of its poeticism.
Vita & Virginia eventually lands on Woolf writing her breakthrough novel, Orlando, which was inspired by her relationship with Sackville-West. But as Button gives us only a vague sense of what drew these two vastly different women together, she leaves to the imagination how Sackville-West had such a lasting and profound effect on one of the great authors of the 20th century. In Orlando, Woolf writes, "Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth." There's more ambiguity, complexity, or passion in that one line regarding the elusive and illusory qualities of Vita's love for Virginia than there is in all of Button's film.
Cast: Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debicki, Isabella Rossellini, Rupert Penry-Jones, Peter Ferdinando, Emerald Fennell, Gethin Anthony, Rory Fleck Byrne, Karla Crome Director: Chanya Button Screenwriter: Chanya Button Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 110 min Rating: NR Year: 2018
Review: Ready or Not Ribs the One Percent with More Laughs than Horror
Only in its giddily gory finale does the outrageousness of the film's violence come close to matching that of its plot.2.5
Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's horror film Ready or Not is centered around a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek, and if that sounds unconscionably silly, at least the filmmakers are aware of that. Guy Busick and Ryan Murphy's screenplay embraces the inherent absurdity of this premise, concocting an elaborate narrative justification as to why a bunch of grown-ups would be engaged in a murderous version of the classic kids' game. It all boils down to a family ritual: Anyone marrying into the obscenely wealthy Le Domas clan must play a game at midnight on their wedding night, and this game, which is selected at random by a puzzle box, could be anything from old maid to checkers.
Bright-eyed good girl Grace (Samara Weaving), who's just wedded the family's favorite son, Alex (Mark O'Brien), gets picked to play hide-and-seek, and that's where the trouble begins. Because while the other games proceed in perfectly ordinary fashion, the Le Domases have made a violent mythology surrounding this one game: The family must capture its newest member and slaughter them in a ritual sacrifice before sunrise, or else each family member will be cursed to die. And so, the Le Domases give Grace time to hide anywhere she likes in their sprawling country manor before they set out with rifles and crossbows to find her.
Gradually, the convoluted family mythology comes to overtake the goofy simplicity of the film's premise, and to the point that one is apt to forget that a game of hide-and-seek is even going on. But Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett keep things lively with a lavish visual style that nods toward Kubrick's The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut, and even Barry Lyndon, while still maintaining an identity of its own. Lit mostly with candles, the sprawling villa in which the film mostly takes place assumes a creepy aura reminiscent of the opulently spooky house in Robert Wise's The Haunting. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett's mildly showy use of long takes and lithe camera movements exhibit an ironic grandiosity that suits the film's light-hearted sadism.
Funny but not quite a comedy, Ready or Not, to its credit, leans in to the arbitrariness of its own myths and rules. Some of the members of the Le Domas clan aren't even sure they believe in their family curse, and they bicker over whether they should be allowed to utilize modern technology, such as their mansion's security cameras, to track Grace down. But the film's constant reiteration and reevaluation of the Le Domases' goofy traditions can sometimes make things feel repetitive and slightly exhausting, impressions which are enhanced by the lackadaisical handling of the film's kills. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett primarily employ violence for laughs, but they frequently flub the punchline with a confusingly quick edit or an awkwardly shaky handheld shot. Only in its giddily gory finale does the outrageousness of the film's violence come close to matching that of its plot. But this gonzo capper has the effect of retroactively diminishing the tame, uninventive bloodshed that preceded it.
Cast: Samara Weaving, Adam Brody, Mark O'Brien, Henry Czerny, Andie MacDowell, Melanie Scrofano, Kristian Bruun, Nicky Guadagni, Elyse Levesque, John Ralston Director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett Screenwriter: Guy Busick, Ryan Murphy Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures Running Time: 95 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Jawline Takes a Measured Look at Social Media Stardom
The film is refreshing for its lack of pearl-clutching, its ambivalence in assessing what it's like to be a commodity with a nervous system.3
The perma-glossy avatar of our profit-minded social media era is the cheery influencer, that species of professional bon vivant who seems perpetually more put together than anyone could be. Liza Mandelup's debut documentary feature, Jawline, traces the dynamics that drive such influencers, their intensely adoring fans, and the malicious managers who try to turn a profit on them, and it's refreshing for its lack of pearl-clutching, its ambivalence in assessing what it's like to be a commodity with a nervous system.
The film begins on Austyn Tester, a sweet, poor Tennessee teen with a few thousand followers across Instagram, Twitter, Musical.ly, and YouNow who's itching to escape his hometown and become an online celebrity. Mandelup mostly focuses on his daily efforts toward achieving that fame, including his semi-disciplined uploading regimen and the many retakes required to snag the perfect post. He spends much of his times posting, singing, and assuaging his young fans' personal frustration on live chat. Only a slight variant on his actual personality, Austyn's online brand, a "follow your dreams, no matter what" sort of positivity, would be unremarkable if it weren't for its apparent impact on his teen girl fans.
Several of these fans are interviewed throughout the film. Each one is grappling with unique problems, from abusive families to bullying, though all of them justify their interest in Austyn and his peers for their willingness to listen, emphasizing the therapeutic effect of his livestreams. Jawline displays a certain evenhandedness here. The girls' intense reliance on a stranger for comfort is uncomfortable to watch, but the film doesn't trivialize this dependence. In an act of fan service, Austyn meets with a small group of girls at a local mall where their intense affections make themselves plain. Mandelup records them pushing an uncomfortable Austyn to ride around motorized stuffed animals so they can post it on Instagram, all the while demanding affirmations from him. Later, one girl forces him to share his phone number with her. Here, Jawline suggests a limit to his affection for them, if it ever existed, as well as the emotionally transactional nature of the relationship between fan and influencer.
The libidinal peak of this surreal relationship, though, occurs when Austyn and other influencers go on tour, performing shows for adoring fans with the hopes of upping their follower count in the process. On stage, the teens pose with fans, sing, and dance, all without any clear knack for it, in what amount to in-person livestreams. In this moment, there isn't much that can be said about these largely cookie-cutter performers except that they're toned, twinky, and peppy, and their fans love them for it. Mandelup's footage of their displays is transfixing, not because the performances are spectacular—the shows are expensive to attend but often happen in dingy unadorned venues—but because the nearly contentless shows are only about the fans' adulation. From an outsiders' perspective, there's a dizzying mismatch between the palpable intensity of their fervor and what they're actually responding to.
How to relate to teen girls, how to monetize what's relatable, and how to make the content more relatable and more profitable? These are the sorts of questions pondered by social media talent manager Michael Weist. He's great to watch in the way reality TV villains are, as his success is propelled by a well-known combo of business sense, greed, and probable chicanery (appropriately, he finds himself in legal trouble by the film's end). Around 21 years old, Weist has somehow marketed himself into a role as an authority figure on social media stardom, roping in young wannabe celebs and growing their followings. He's turned a house in L.A. into a content factory, living there with his clients while haranguing them into posting, recording, and being on call 24/7 for their needs. Ever-candid, Weist reveals his long game at one point without being prompted: to run influencers through the content mill before they're old enough to drink, at which point he can move on to the next hot prospect seeking fame.
At the heart of Weist's efforts is the exploitation of Austyn's more successful colleagues to commodify young girls' emotions. Jawline is most fascinating when it tracks this process in action. Mandelup doesn't draw as much attention to it as she could, meandering through IRL details that don't quite elucidate or explain as much as they pretend to and don't measure up to the retina-display realities of virtual stardom. A similar problem shows up in the documentary's way of depicting tween girls. One notable scene involves slow-motion portraits of the fans accompanied by their disembodied voiceovers explaining why they spend so much time online. The scene is conceived in the spirit of chromatic maximalism, with the girls brightly lit against floral-print and pastel backgrounds, in a manner that humanizes their experience but flattens their differences, as if one were the precondition of the other. The style presents their range of justifications for standom as more or less equivalent to each other, reducing these girls to the same faceless morass of drives that Weist cashes in on.
More importantly, while Jawline's depictions of predatory managers, overblown hopes, and obsessive followers spell out reasons to be despondent about the way this economy works, the film doesn't look past its narrow horizon. There's little indication of how this phenomenon is so profitable or how wide reaching this it is. Instead, Jawline offers a deflationary, measured suggestion that the current crop of influencers differs only in quantity from celebrity cults in Hollywood or the music industry. The latest iteration of celebrity is just monetizing a new type of media. All that's really changed is that the stars burn dimmer and fade younger.
Director: Liza Mandelup Distributor: Hulu Running Time: 99 min Rating: NR Year: 2019
Review: Brittany Runs a Marathon Is a Moralizing Buzzkill of a Comedy
The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.1.5
Watching writer-director Paul Downs Colaizzo's Brittany Runs a Marathon is a bit like listening to a runner describe a motivational poster—the type with a single-word slogan below a stock photograph—that inspired them to persevere as they trained themselves to be a serious runner. Sensing that such overt preachiness would be irksome, the film cloaks its proselytizing in self-aware jokes about how much more pleasurable sitting around is than running and a token acknowledgment that there's nothing wrong with being out of shape. But the screenplay's cute, if somewhat insipid, humor doesn't prevent the film from feeling self-righteous. Indeed, for a comedy about a woman who makes a personal decision to get in shape, Brittany Runs a Marathon sure engages in a lot of moralizing.
At the start of the film, twentysomething Brittany (Jillian Bell) is overweight and working part time as an usher for a small off-Broadway theater, which somehow provides enough income for her to regularly drink champagne at high-end clubs with her roommate, Gretchen (Alice Lee). Walking back to their Queens apartment after nights of hard drinking and eating greasy food, they often catch their uptight, bougie neighbor, Catherine (Erica Hernandez), going out for an early morning run, seemingly judging them for their indulgence. It's only a matter of time, then, before Brittany is informed by a Yelp-recommended doctor (Patch Darragh) that her lifestyle has led to elevated blood pressure and an unhealthy body mass index—and an ominous close-up on the doctor's chart shows us that she's crossed over into obese terrain.
And so Brittany begins running, ill-advisedly, in her beat-up Chuck Taylors, which she soon upgrades to spotless, turquoise New Balances. Catherine, for some reason forgiving of Brittany's persistent churlishness, introduces the young woman to a local running club. What follows is surely intended to inspire laughs of recognition in audience members who picked up running in adulthood, as the neophyte Brittany hangs out at the back of the group with a fellow reformed slacker, Seth (Micah Stock). The new trio sets themselves an ambitious goal: to complete the New York Marathon the following November.
The film makes jokes about how hard running can be, but there's an earnestness behind such humor that leaves certain sacred cows untouched. Most of these have to do with the self—namely, self-discipline, self-love, and self-actualization. As the film sees it, all those things can be realized through running. Seth may joke about how ready he is to stop, or how much he'd rather be doing something else, but he keeps going, and if Brittany cheats on her diet and eats some cheese fries, it's portrayed as a dramatic, shameful misstep. We're told over and over that Brittany is valued by her friends, old and new, because she's funny, but we see scant evidence of this, particularly as her devotion to running takes on a quite pious dimension.
Arriving for comic relief and romantic interest is Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar), who works the night shifts at the same house-sitting service where Brittany has begun picking up hours during the day to fund her marathon training. Casually trashing the house they're meant to be looking after, Jern supplies Brittany Runs a Marathon with the levity that began to evaporate from the film as soon as Brittany started exercising. But as her flirtatiously contentious relationship with Jern deepens, the other parts of her life become a plodding series of confrontations. Her improving self-image emboldens Brittany to kick Gretchen to the curb, accusing her friend of having always viewed her as a "fat sidekick."
It's a fair enough grievance for the character to have, but at a certain point in Brittany's active defense of herself, the film takes on a self-righteous tone, associating its protagonist's newfound healthy living with virtuousness and seeing Gretchen as despicable for her profligate lifestyle. Brittany Runs a Marathon's positioning of exercise as a moral triumph is nothing more than a marketing technique, as Colaizzo's film is "inspirational" only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.
Cast: Jillian Bell, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Michaela Watkins, Lil Rel Howrey, Micah Stock, Mikey Day, Alice Lee, Dan Bittner, Peter Vack, Patch Darragh Director: Paul Downs Colaizzo Screenwriter: Paul Downs Colaizzo Distributor: Amazon Studios Running Time: 103 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Official Secrets Is an Ambitious Muckraking Thriller Prone to Melodrama
Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.2.5
Gavin Hood's Official Secrets is a muckraking thriller that revels in wonderfully lived-in details as well as generic biopic platitudes. The film tells a story that might have caused a sensation in Britain and the U.S. had it not been drowned out by those nations' war machines. In 2003, Katherine Gun, a British translator for an intelligence agency, leaked an email in which the American National Security Agency urged for surveillance of pivotal members of the U.N. Security Council. This operation was for the purpose of blackmailing the U.N. into voting for the American invasion of Iraq (which President George W. Bush authorized later that year anyway, without the U.N.'s approval). Katherine leaked this email, and faced prosecution from her government under the Official Secrets Act of 1989.
In the film's first half, the filmmakers offer a fastidious glimpse at how the press responds to Katherine's (Kiera Knightley) whistleblowing. Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode), Martin Bright (Matt Smith), and Ed Vulliamy (Rhys Ifans) are anti-war reporters for The Observer, which is in favor of the war and eager to maintain its relationship with Tony Blair's government. Hood wrings suspense, and docudramatic fascination, out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts. Various jargon in the N.S.A. email is decoded, as insiders weigh its legitimacy. An intensification of surveillance is referred to as a "surge effort," intelligence sources are "product lines," and so forth.
This sort of commitment to texture is reminiscent of the novels of John Le Carré, as are the juicy scenes in which Beaumont and Bright reach out to people in the MI6 and the British government. Though Hood isn't a moody stylist in the key of, say, Alan J. Pakula, his handling of the film's actors is sharp, as their crisp and musical cadences allow the audience to understand that every spoken word matters, and that, if the reporters misstep at any time, they could potentially lose more than their contacts.
Katherine is eventually defended by an attorney, Ben Emmerson (Ralph Fiennes), who has vast experience with human rights cases and with working within the labyrinthine British government. Fiennes's probing, tormented, erudite charisma is always pleasurable, but this section of Official Secrets, meant to provide the legal counterpoint to the journalism thread, is shortchanged, as Hood starts to juggle too many balls at once. Interspersed with Emmerson's adventurous interpretation of the Official Secrets Act are moments in which Katherine must rush to prevent her Turkish-Kurdish husband, Yasar (Adam Bakri), from being deported out of an obvious retaliation against Katherine. These scenes are unimaginatively staged and unmoving—a sop to melodrama that temporarily halts the film's procedural momentum.
It's strange that the domestic dimension of the protagonist's life should feel like clutter, which underscores a larger issue with Official Secrets: Katherine herself isn't especially compelling as rendered here, as she almost entirely operates in the formula mode of aggrieved, persecuted, self-righteous avenger. A major ellipsis in the narrative is telling, as the British government forces Katherine to wait almost a year in limbo before deciding whether or not to persecute her, which Hood skips to keep the story moving. The emotional toil of such a year could've provided a personal counterpoint to the film's political gamesmanship. As it is, the filmmaker reduces Katherine to a supporting character in her own story.
Cast: Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Ralph Fiennes, Matt Smith, Indira Varma, MyAnna Buring, Rhys Ifans, Tamsin Greig, Jack Farthing, Hattie Morahan, Conleth Hill, Katherine Kelly, Kenneth Cranham, Hanako Footman, Adam Bakri Director: Gavin Hood Screenwriter: Gregory Bernstein, Sara Bernstein, Gavin Hood Distributor: IFC Films Running Time: 112 min Rating: R Year: 2019
Review: Tigers Are Not Afraid Wrings Preciousness from a Drug War's Carnage
It never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly compelling argument about the legacy of trauma.2
Writer-director Issa López's Tigers Are Not Afraid is a tapestry of flourishes. All are inseparable from Mexico's gangland carnage, but its most memorable one is also rooted in magical-realist tradition, namely 100 Years of Solitude. The novel tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, and in one particularly exacting and vivid passage, master fabulist Gabriel García Márquez details how the seemingly eternal Ursula Iguarán learns of her son José Arcadio's death after a trickle of blood from his body winds its way through war-torn Macondo, around corners, across terraces, down steps, and over curbs, before finally arriving at his mother's doorstep. "Holy mother of God," she says.
Ursula comprehends the truth of that thread of blood even before it leads her back to her son's body. By contrast, the protagonist of Tigers Are Not Afraid, Estrella (Paola Lara), prevaricates so as to put distance between herself and the horrors around her. "We forget who we are, when the things from outside come to get us," she says in voiceover at the start of the film. She doesn't see the line of blood that runs from a dead man's head and follows her all the way home until it's already tracing a path across her living room floor and up a wall, finally creating the shape of an insect on a dress that hangs from the ceiling. Estrella's mother is missing, and in this moment, the girl seems to know that she's being sent a message, which she won't learn to decipher until she becomes more fluent in the language of fairy tales.
At its most assured, Tigers Are Not Afraid strikingly literalizes the idea of the ties that bind, suggesting how the living and the dead walk hand in hand, almost as a matter of course, in a modern-day Mexico where 160,000 have been killed and 53,000 have disappeared since the beginning of the drug war in 2006. Before Estrella stumbles upon the aforementioned dead man's body, you get the sense that today isn't the first time she's seen boys use police tape as limbo sticks, or dragged her fingers across walls riddled with bullet holes. Which isn't to say that the girl is desensitized to this violence. She seems to almost exist at a remove from it, and López sensitively syncs the swaying of her camera to the girl's visible numbness.
That sensitivity, however, proves to be a kind of redundancy. Throughout Tigers Are Not Afraid, López effectively conjures an aura of ordinariness, but she never resolves her commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly compelling argument about the legacy of trauma. The film concerns Estrella and a group of orphaned boys going head to head with a cartel after young El Shine (Juan Ramón López) swipes a gun and phone from the treacherous El Chino (Tenoch Huerta), and when that narrative isn't picking up signals from the supernatural realm, you sense its allegiance to so many films indebted to the neorealist tradition, from Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados to Héctor Babenco's Pixote. Tigers Are Not Afraid is alive to the harsh reality of its main characters' lives, though at times it feels as if López's only means of accessing that truth is by conspicuously shaking her camera.
As for the film's supernatural flourishes, none are as inspired as that thread of blood that trails Estrella at various points. Little flying creatures suggest visitors from Guillermo del Toro's cabinet of curiosities, while a gathering of ghosts inside an expansive, derelict building brings to mind a Silent Hill freak-out. And in the case of the tiger graffiti on a wall that comes to life at one point, there isn't even the sense that we're watching the dead's handiwork. After a while, death's intrusions come to feel more cosmetic than substantial.
Early in the film, López fascinatingly suggests that Estrella's perception of the world, after a teacher grants her three wishes, is both shield and sword. But after the girl uses one of those wishes to commit an act of brutality, the film's fairy-tale conceit reveals itself as an engine for easy absolution. By the time the girl arrives at an understanding of her world that isn't too far removed from the logic of her opening voiceover, Tigers Are Not Afraid has so given itself over to feeling the innocence of cocooning that it only effectively haunts us with its preciousness.
Cast: Paola Lara, Juan Ramón López, Hanssel Casillas, Tenoch Huerta, Nery Arredondo, Rodrigo Cortes, Ianis Guerrero Director: Issa López Screenwriter: Issa López Distributor: Shudder Running Time: 83 min Rating: NR Year: 2017
Review: Where'd You Go, Bernadette Serves Up Lifetime-Grade Chestnuts of Wisdom
The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.1.5
The opening passages of Where'd You Go, Bernadette include a handful of scenes in which an agoraphobic architect and mother, Bernadette Fox (Cate Blanchett), restlessly expresses her internal thoughts inside the empty rooms of her Seattle mansion. Observed in flowing Steadicam shots, these soliloquies—recorded and translated to text by Manjula, the digital assistant on Bernadette's smartphone—give space to reflect on how the woman's eclectic furnishings grow out of her racing mental landscape. And in performing them, Blanchett offers the rare cinematic spectacle of a mother in her alone time, compelled to let her imagination and anxieties loose outside the pressures of maternal duty. In these moments, the film, an unapologetically straightforward adaptation of Maria Semple's best-selling novel, briefly takes on the tone of something candidly personal.
It's a shame, then, that Where'd You Go, Bernadette is cloyingly beholden to the demands of its crowd-pleasing narrative arc—that of a creative woman driven to ennui by motherhood and middle age yet rescued from the brink by an inspiring vacation and the love of her family. It's nice, reassuring stuff, not false by any standard, but told with such didacticism and cuteness that one can't help but be bewildered by the fact that the film was co-written and directed by Richard Linklater. Where the Texas auteur's leisurely paced Boyhood and Everybody Wants Some!! excel in their attention to the nuanced spectacle of characters changing over time, Where'd You Go, Bernadette plays like all of its air has been sucked out in the interest of plot progression, which it conducts with the workshopped efficiency of a television movie mindful of commercial breaks. In fact, with its coverage-dependent mise-en-scène, off-the-rack musical score, and tacked-on bookending voiceovers, Linklater's latest feels strangely close to something Lifetime might have churned out in the early aughts.
The film establishes its narrative conflicts quickly and bluntly, often through dialogue, simple juxtaposition, and, in one particularly dull case, a YouTube mini-documentary about Bernadette that plays in full in order to clarify her backstory. A brilliant and influential architect in the midst of a long hiatus after a demoralizing relocation and a series of miscarriages, she displaces her creative frustration on her city and its inhabitants, including her prosperous, TED Talks-giving husband, Elgie (Billy Crudup); stuffy neighbor, Audrey (Kristen Wiig); and Soo-Lin (Zoe Chao), a gossipy associate of Elgie and friend of Audrey. Her only routine source of joy is her wise-beyond-her-years daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson), who loves her unconditionally and whom she treats perhaps a bit too much like a peer.
Symptomatic of Linklater's always-generous worldview, the film sees Bernadette's quirks not as deficiencies, but as inevitable side effects of life's persistent curveballs. When the character refers to herself as a "creative problem solver with good taste and a soft spot for logistical nightmares," it's clear that the filmmaker endorses that assessment, and perhaps even recognizes it as a description of his own artistic career. For all their suspicion toward Bernadette, Elgie and Audrey aren't characterized entirely negatively either, for each is given a path to redemption, and Wiig's portrayal of her character's transition from belligerence to empathy in particular is one of the highpoints of Where'd You Go, Bernadette.
Rather, in true boomer fashion, Linklater reserves his cynicism for technology, kickstarting the film's third act with the contrived revelation that Manjula is actually a Russian-operated phishing scheme seeking to steal Bernadette's identity. This development briefly gets a Department of Homeland Security agent, Marcus Strang (James Urbaniak), and a therapist, Dr. Kurtz (Judy Greer), caught up in the narrative, but it's all really just a busy preamble to the Antarctica family vacation that's hinted at from the very first scene. Bernadette has her reservations about the trip, Bee thinks it will be cathartic for the family, Elgie is too preoccupied with his career to concern himself with the logistics, and the shadowy forces behind Manjula are poised to swoop in and cause chaos during the scheduled dates.
What ends up happening is neither the transporting escape Bee wants nor the complete disaster Manjula intends to enact, but something messily in between that triggers a coordinated stream of life lessons—and a few uninspired drone shots of icebergs. Indeed, in its eagerness to diagnose Bernadette's existential impasse, the film lays on thick the kind of back-patting chestnuts of wisdom that have become increasingly common in Linklater's recent films, groaners like "Popularity is overrated" and "You don't have to do anything you don't wanna do." Such sentiments have always been window dressing in Linklater's nonchalantly libertarian body of work, but if in many cases his films have tacitly acknowledged the limits of language to articulate life's mysteries, here there's very little sense of a frontier to be explored. If Bernadette is Linklater and Blanchett's collaborative expression of the right balance between parenting and artistry, it's a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening—and privileged—idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.
Cast: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Kristen Wiig, Emma Nelson, Zoe Chao, James Urbaniak, Judy Greer Director: Richard Linklater Screenwriter: Richard Linklater, Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr. Distributor: Annapurna Pictures Running Time: 130 min Rating: PG-13 Year: 2019
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Map & Parking
Kiddie Park is located near the corner of Broadway and East Mulberry Avenue.
The park is between Avenue B and Broadway.
Parking is available along both Avenue B and in the empty lot on the corner.
Once you get close to the park, look for the signs that say Kiddie Park parking.
As a courtesy to our neighbors, please DO NOT park in the WD Deli & Half Price Books parking lots. These lots are not available for Kiddie Park parking, and those who park here and walk to Kiddie Park will have their cars towed.
Parking Map
Kiddie Park parking is available in any of the above lots.