The music short “Chappell Roan – ‘Casual’” happens to be a story-based music video. Director Hadley Hillel sets the short tale in a small seaside town whose beach is terrorized by attacks from a siren (MIka Lesha). Roan (playing herself) accidentally encounters this sea creature and finds a mutual physical attraction. Will what follows be a lesbian version of “The Shape Of Water?”
The song’s role in the music video is to articulate Roan’s feelings while the video’s visuals translates those feelings into, for example, a fantasized underwater dance and a room decorated to look like an underwater cave. But Roan’s uncertain whether the sea creature’s committed to a relationship with her. On one hand, the siren doesn’t treat Roan like a walking snack, but it’s not clear she’s shaken off the whole “luring unwary men to their doom” shtick.
“Casual” may not be an anthemic banger in the mode of such Roan hits as “Pink Pony Club” or “Hot To Go.” However, there’s still something to be said for the singer’s trying out more than one mode of songcraft.
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Chris Reading’s “Time Travel Is Dangerous” works best when the viewer considers it a character comedy employing science fictional trappings. The moment a viewer insists on taking the film’s science fiction elements semi-seriously, then awkward logistical questions get raised which are likely to cause a viewer’s suspension of belief to come crashing down. For example, it’s not clear how the lead characters can travel to the past without accidentally unleashing germs to which people of earlier times may not possess immunity. So let Reading’s film be dubbed science fantasy (the same category applied to “Doctor Who,” so no insult here), and let us move on to the film itself.
Middle-aged friends Ruth and Megan run a vintage shop called Cha Cha Cha in a mews in the North London suburb of Muswell Hill. When the duo accidentally discover a working time machine left out in the trash, they decide to spice up their store’s stock by regularly going back in time and finding one-of-a-kind objects to be sold in the present. Ruth & Megan’s trips come to the attention of local inventors’ organization TESTIS, which forbids the duo from further using the time machine. However, the two women are eventually forced to make more trips to the past lest their greedhead landlord Rich Dickinson have an excuse to tear down Cha Cha Cha. Disaster soon strikes when the universe’s balance is thrown off by Ruth and Megan’s jaunts…resulting in Megan being lost inside a cosmic sinkhole known as The Unreason. Now Ruth must travel to The Unreason herself to find and save her friend.
The Cha Cha Cha owners aren’t malicious despoilers of past times. They’re more akin to human magpies seeking rare things that they think they can sell. However, seeing the duo try to take a carved wooden spoon from a tribesman who possesses very few material goods or learning where they got the ten gallon hat they brought back from the Wild West puts their acquisition efforts in morally dubious territory.
There’s a nice garage hobbyist feel to the inventions created by TESTIS’ members. Either they look put together out of bits and bobs (e.g. a robot dentist) or still look likely to kill its user (e.g. the rocket boot which self-launches). The time machine itself would not impress Doctor Who. The device falls into the bits and bobs category as it resembles a repurposed carnival bumper car fitted out with instrument banks mounted on its lip.
True to its name, TESTIS turns out to be a mostly male playground for vanity and power-grabbing. Valerie, the sole female member until Ruth and Megan come along, barely tolerates the petty power-grabbing engaged in by organization head Martin Onions. TESTIS, incidentally, is not the only pointed pun used in the film. Sharp-eyed readers will understand the odious character of Ruth and Megan’s landlord after noticing the first syllables of his first and last name.
Reading’s film offers viewers much more than an inspired pun or two. Fans nostalgic for 1960s and 1970s era “Doctor Who” will appreciate the film’s alchemy of turning ordinary objects into something extraordinary. There is a reason why famed “Doctor Who” monsters The Daleks are sometimes referred to as the pepperpots. More importantly, the film’s general air of whimsicality and quiet drollery (some of it supplied by Stephen Fry’s narration, which isn’t heard often enough for this viewer) leads to some great moments large and small. Of course the inventor of the time machine thought he was honoring his promise to dispose of his working invention by leaving it in Ruth and Megan’s trash area. Ruth’s accidental transformation into her teenage self causes this responsible and methodical woman to embrace her second chance to live irresponsibiy even when the party’s long over. As a great side moment, continual contact with the teenage Ruth visibly seems to add years to Megan’s face.
The film’s shifts in tone from mockumentary form to “Bill & Ted”-like time travel adventure to something else entirely feels less like parts contributing to a greater whole than random fictional pieces welded together a la the game that plays a critical role during Ruth’s rescue effort. Said game can best be described as making Calvinball look like a game of checkers.
“Time Travel Is Dangerous” will not be a go-to for science fiction based comedy as “Star Trek: Lower Decks” can be. But even this flawed tale delivers moments of reasonable amusement.
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Has first-time director Kenji Yamamoto ever heard “A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes” from the Disney animated film “Cinderella?” It feels like an appropriate comment on the theme of his semi-personal documentary debut “The Dreamers And I.” The film might be called an optimistic look at what Silicon Valley represents once you look past the loud-mouthed tech greedheads who dominate the news.
Yamamoto himself worked in the tech industry long enough to have witnessed Steve Jobs’ first public unveiling of the iPhone. But he’s also a veteran film editor who worked on indie films. His decision to take a shot at first-time film direction leads him to the hacker house known as Startup Embassy.
Carlos de la Lama-Noriega, founder of Startup Embassy, wanted to create a space where would-be engineering entrepreneurs from around the world could live together to inspire and help each other to turn their ideas into the basis for a startup business. Lama-Noriega’s efforts have made Startup Embassy one of the nation’s Top 10 hacker houses. HIs house guests’ dreams, though, clash with the reality that only 0.1% of startups ever become successful.
Besides Lama-Noriega, two other film subjects are would-be entrepreneurs. Lucas Gonzalvez is a Spanish college graduate who’s gone all in on trying to start his own business. Turfan Habibe is a Turkish materials scientist trying to turn her useful ideas into the basis of a business.
The film’s last subject is the director himself. He’s uncertain whether his filming at Startup Embassy will create enough footage for a feature film. Despite having an initial grant, Yamamoto’s filming process will take several years and involve shooting footage in Spain and Turkey.
Yamamoto definitely captures moments showing the human side of gambling on making real an intriguing idea. Lama-Noriega stumbled into running Startup Embassy thanks to his own failed startup and a year-long lease that still had some months left on it. Gonzalvez’ experiences demonstrate the type of resilience needed to be an entrepreneur. This includes making important calls at 4 AM, working with big-talking flakes who don’t deliver promised services, and enduring the continual tension of not knowing whether a potential buyer’s interest in his startup will translate into an actual purchase. Habibe’s creative enough to resurrect a smartphone displaying the blue screen of death by baking it in the Startup Embassy communal oven. But can she translate her interest in nanotechnology into a commercially salable product?
The director himself faces his own personal crises. How can he keep filming away after his grant money runs out? What happens when the emotional toll of trying to make a first film leads to health problems?
Of “The Dreamers And I”’s subjects, Habibe’s backstory turns out to be the most intriguing. She’s a 1st generation Uyghur raised by her single mother Gulbahar. The older woman unquestioningly supports her daughter even as the younger woman engages in such non-traditional behavior as not wearing a hijab in public.
Yet Yamamoto’s on-and-off filming over several years hasn’t resulted in a film which goes much beyond answering the obvious question of which film subject will succeed by the end. Clearly, the director was hoping to have Gonzalvez be the film’s success story. It’s not that much of a spoiler to say that doesn’t happen, as the odds were against him and the film’s other subjects. But even if age, family obligations, or a prototype failure occur more often than life-changing success, Yamamoto finds something to admire in the willingness of these subjects to trade the sure comforts of the pipe dream for the consequences (both good and bad) of leaping into the unknown and seeing what happens.
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For a far darker take on the brave new world of Bitcoin sales and not quite ready for prime time technology, one must turn to Will Crouse’s short drama “The Coder.” Its titular protagonist must navigate this treacherous world while under both physical and emotional attack.
Mary lives in constant pain thanks to an MS-like disease which has left her displaying such symptoms as optic neuritis and spinal inflammation. Her doctors have failed to identify the disease that’s making her life miserable. But that’s not the only source of pain in the coder’s life. She constantly hears a very vocal inner critic which sounds like her hypercritical mother. Thad, Mary’s employer at Crypto Comunicon, hogties her healthcare to the coder’s success in making sure the checks Thad frequently writes with his mouth can be more or less cashed.
A crisis arises when Thad orders the deployment of a new program for processing Bitcoin stop-loss sales and purchases so visiting higher-ups can be impressed. However, the program itself is still buggy, with worker processes going down with such frequency that literally thousands of customers complain about being shorted on their sales. The pressure’s on Mary to fix the program’s problems, but it’s not clear what will collapse first: the defective exchange program or her sanity.
The protagonist is clearly conscientious about her work, if for no other reason than to stop her internal critic from having a new reason to verbally trash her. Yet that dedication comes at a price. Abbey Toot, who plays Mary, has a face which frequently displays either a deer in the headlights look or the hollowed eye sockets of someone who’s continually haunted. The casual sexism of the tech world (e.g. a strip club visit is treated as communal workforce entertainment even when it wouldn’t be such for someone like Mary) also serves to emotionally bottle Mary up. She can’t vent her feelings lest her peers perceive her rightly or wrongly as unable to handle the pressures of work.
Thad is clearly a boss willing to manipulate Mary to get what he wants while rationalizing his actions as somehow pushing her to do her best. A nightmare sequence shows Thad using Mary’s desperation for access to better medicines for her treatment as his medium for controlling her. Though Crouse doesn’t show the moment where Mary supposedly says the sales program can go live, it’s highly likely Thad hectored her into agreeing with him.
Is the protagonist’s solution to her dilemma the right one? Let’s just say “not rocking the boat” and “going along to get along” no longer work as viable options for Mary. While Crouse doesn’t make clear what the future will bring his protagonist, he does show the burdens she carries just got a little lighter.
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Legendary organizer Fred Ross Senior faced such daunting challenges in his lifetime as building political power among Los Angeles’ Mexican community and helping the victims of Japanese-American internment reintegrate into American society. But as Raymond Telles’ inspiring documentary “American Agitators” shows, Ross Senior’s challenges and the problems facing those activists who have followed in his footsteps over the decades are neither insurmountable nor intimidating enough to justify being supine in the face of capitalist greed.
Ross Senior may have been a son of San Francisco, as he was born here. But Telles’ film shows Ross Senior’s political awareness and activism was very much a work in progress. College friend Eugene Wolman’s influence helped provide a focus to Ross Senior’s politics. Wolman’s death while fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War may have spurred the future organizer to do more in life than mouth the right opinions. But it was the experiences of working at Arvin Camp (a California Farm Labor Camp for Dust Bowl refugees) and the administering of the Minidoka Relocation Camp (an Idaho World War 2-era high-security prison for dissident Japanese-Americans) that would push Ross Senior from centrist liberalism (aka an “FDR can do no wrong” attitude) into the community activism that would mark his place in history.
Ross Senior’s activism sprung out of the belief that a community organizer had to be a combination of missionary, educator, and agitator. His ability to truly listen to people and understand their concerns made him the best kind of small-d democrat. Doing one-to-one conversations and building trust may seem slow and inefficient, but the deeper political bond that was created would be stronger than one built on public demagoguery. Film narrator Luis Valdez refers to Ross Senior as “the beautiful American,” and it’s hard to argue with that assessment.
Part of Ross Senior’s beauty came from his not exploiting the sociopolitical advantages that came with being a tall white male in mid-20th century America. He wasn’t interested in building political power for himself as much as teaching others how to be free. Ross Senior, at the request of Cesar Chavez, trained the organizers of what would become the United Farm Workers Union.
Those who think the focus in the last third of the film on organizers who’ve followed in Ross Senior’s footsteps seems superfluous wind up ignoring an important point about community organizers. To Ross Senior, a good community organizer is a “social arsonist,” aka someone skillful enough to light in the hearts of ordinary people the sense that when they show up for a political fight their presence makes a difference. Whether the cause is the Fight For 15 or the defense of Las Vegas casino workers, the spirit of Ross Senior lives on in this new generation of organizers.
As this film shows, Ross Senior is a living example of the idea that it is possible to fight and force the corrupt controlling power to implement some degree of accountability. The cops who perpetrated the Bloody Christmas beatings may have thought they were untouchable. But the multi-racial coalition that arose in the wake of that notorious incident succeeded in forcing the Los Angeles District Attorney to prosecute the dozens of cops involved in the crime.
(Note: Beyond Chron editor Randy Shaw was among the donors for making this film)
(“American Agitators” won the Cinequest Jury’s Best Documentary Award.)
