GFF Reviews

Author: gffreviews

  • The Dissident

    The Dissident tells the story of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. It is gripping, enlightening, and moving.

    This film was quite an eye-opener for me, going into a wealth of context I did not know. I followed the story in the news at the time, but my reaction was “Brutal regime murders journalist. No mystery there then.” I didn’t feel the need to dive much deeper into the details because it was so obvious that no explanation seemed needed.

    But there is a huge amount of pertinent context to Jamal’s killing. Firstly, the idea of Saudi Arabia as a place that always has been and always will be as oppressive as it is now, is a reductive over-simplification. Reporting usually has slightly racist connotations of the ancient (and backward), brutal rulers of the ruthless and opulent East, this image of sultans chopping off hands, in an unchanging and unvarying stereotype from a timeless age. This obscures the truth of what is actually happening in the 21st century in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And it makes it harder to tackle the reality of government oppression, and denies and erases the reality of activists and citizens who resist on a daily basis.

    In Saudi Arabia, 8 out of every 10 citizens is on Twitter. There has been for generations a suppression of free speech there, but the boom in social media has overturned that in an extremely short time frame. With IRL speech dangerous, online is the only place to have open discussions about the state of the country. It reminds me of a joke in the movie Rosewater, another movie about a journalist being targeted by the state, where his interrogator accuses the protagonist of disseminating anti-government propaganda through newspapers, and the journalist replies that there would be no point doing that, it’s a dead medium.

    The Saudi Arabian government has reacted quicker than most to the digital revolution, and has strategies to neutralise online dissent. They have a building with 1000 government staff all with multiple dummy accounts who flood Twitter with pro-government propaganda, to drown out the noise of any differing opinions. Like Russia and China, it has top-level hackers.

    At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s government is changing. While yes, it is a monarchy, not a democracy, the king used to have a wide range of other royals as government appointees. To our ears this sounds worse, because then you’ve just stacked ever more of the same powerful family into positions of power, but it had the converse effect of dispersing power among a range of powerful individuals. Yes, not great, but what is happening now is worse. Because Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) is wildly ambitious, and has been strategically removing from office other royals, and concentrating power solely on him. And up until Jamal’s murder, he was doing so with excellent spin. He was seen as a reformer and moderniser, purging corruption from within the royal ranks. He pushed through many popular policies, such as allowing women to drive, and allowing cinemas and concerts.

    So where does Jamal fit in this story? Despite how he is seen now, as a martyr for free speech, Jamal spent most of his life in government reporting institutions, he was part of the establishment. He was a supporter of MBS, seeing his values and goals for the country as aligned with MBS’s espoused vision. He considered himself a patriot, and was not particularly bothered by the Saudi style of reporting, which he saw as basically telling the truth while not being disrespectful to the honoured institutions of the royal family. While he met with reprimand on some stories over the course of his life, he was considered a loyal servant of the state.

    So how did he get from there to here? Step-by-step, and very much against his will. While speech was always limited in Saudi Arabia, MBS’s rise to power saw a crackdown. And several journalists, colleagues of Jamal, were arrested. Jamal, as someone considered friendly to MBS was let off with a warning, but even the intimidation he faced was enough to make him flee the country. Even then, he believed he would return, that things would calm down, that he would watch for the release of his colleagues. But things got worse, and he was now seen as a defector. His wife had to divorce him to protect her and their kids. He was fired from all his Saudi Arabian outlets, and he became targeted by trolls on Twitter. It was MBS’s overreaction that drove Jamal from someone content to see the country change little by little to someone who became an activist against increasing government tyranny.

    And that was why Jamal was considered so much more dangerous. Because he had spent his entire career on the inside of the establishment, he knew how they worked, he had powerful connections, he knew MBS, and he had a large following because he had mainstream exposure. And now he was going rogue, using his platform and knowledge to speak about against MBS, and hiding behind the shield of American residency and employment at the Washington Post.

    He was not just any journalist. And he was considered far worse than any protestor who was on the outside of things. MBS took Jamal’s defection and criticism as a personal betrayal.

    And worse, when Jamal started to meet up with other dissidents like Omar Abdulaziz, he became a mentor to the younger generation of activists, and they in turn radicalised him and educated him on how new technology was being utilised for surveillance and oppression. He learned of the government tactics on social media, the new frontier of propaganda, and started to organise an online resistance. And for the Saudi government, if you are trying to counter their cyber attacks, that means you are engaging in war against the state.

    That is the big picture part of the story, but this film also has the very human part of this story. Jamal was a man, who at the age of 60, had the life he had built for himself taken away. And while he had his integrity, he facing a lonely life in a strange land. And then he met Hatice Cengiz, and fell in love. And they planned to marry and start a new life together. And while he had taken every precaution to stay clear of his government’s reach, if they were to wed, he had to get a marriage document from the Saudi embassy. So he and the woman he loved turned up in the bright sunshine of the afternoon, and he told her to wait for him outside while he stepped inside and got it. And she stood. And she stood. And she stood. And hours passed, and she began to worry, and she called the police, she called journalists, she called Jamal’s friends with political clout. And she stood there until 1 in the morning. And he did not come out. And that’s because she had stood outside on the street while he was being murdered in that building. It is a nightmare we cannot even imagine.

    And now this is the future she has, trying to hold to account her fiancé’s murderer. It is not what she wanted, but it is what has come to pass.

    It is a deeply moving story, showing the best in people, who act with love and integrity, and the worst in people, who act with cruelly and callousness.

  • Dreams on Fire

    Dreams on Fire follows a young girl as she leaves her strict and sheltered home in the countryside to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer in the big city. Her journey takes her through the various dance subcultures of Tokyo, from contemporary and tap, to headbanging to heavy metal, to R&B and urban freestyle, to voguing, drag and ballroom, to go-go dancing in a S&M club. It is so interesting, and just a whistle-stop tour through the kaleidoscopic Tokyo nightlife.

    The main character goes from a very naïve young girl, to a practiced, versatile dancer influenced by this eclectic mix of styles. She finds out that she needs more the just talent to make it, she needs savvy, she needs to build her brand, and know how to sell herself on social media and in person. She needs to learn how to take rejection after rejection, and preserve. Making it as a dancer is a marathon, not a sprint.

    She makes lots of friends who help her on her way, but you really do feel for her, because she has such ambition and nothing comes easily to her. You watch her struggle and pray she doesn’t lose hope.

    Really a beautiful film whose cinematography really captures the wonder with which its main character sees the city, and showcases the creativity of its people, and variety of its culture. Just gorgeous.

  • Tina

    Absolutely fantastic! What an inspiring, interesting, in-depth documentary.

    Tina traces the life of Tina Turner, world renowned superstar. This is definitely one of the better music biopics I’ve seen, really doing a marvellous job of pulling together a wealth of sources to tell the story of an extraordinary woman’s life.

    I knew Tina from her hits in the 80s and 90s, and I knew that was kinda the second chapter in her career, but it was weird for me to see her singing way back in the 50s. That seems almost too remote a time. Like, Tina Turner is basically as old as rock and roll. And she was in music from the age of 17 until she retired at the age of 70. I mean, that’s just incredible.

    Also, she had so much tragedy that befell her early on. Firstly, she really came from nothing. Her family were dirt poor, picking cotton in the South. Her father was abusive and her mother fled the family without warning to escape him. She never really had a bond with her mother and that relationship remained strained their entire life. Her father also abandoned the family not long after, and she had to be put into the care of relatives.

    Then at 17 she fell into the hands of Ike Turner. And you could see what a hold he had on her from the beginning. He was older than her at 25, he was her favourite musician, and he mentored her, giving her her first break in singing. He was like an older brother to her, which then morphed into having a sexual element, and eventually marriage. He worked her day and night in the studio and on tour. She was almost never out of his sight, and he controlled everything about their music. And for her, he was the only family she had in the world, the only person who wanted her, and had sworn never to abandon her, and who was desperate that she stayed with him. She was central to his life, so much that his personal and professional lives both revolved around her, surely that was love.

    But that continual monitoring and control, disguised as attentiveness, love and loyalty, soon descended into abuse. It was physical, sexual, mental and emotional. And it last for over a decade. So to the world, they were the adorable couple singing love songs together on the tv or wireless. And that image was his shield.

    She was approaching 40 when she finally got the courage to leave him. It’s hard to imagine, being a big music star, having sold millions of records, and she left in the night with the clothes she was standing up in, running across a motorway in the dark, dodging trucks and cars to make it to safety. In the divorce, he got everything. She literally got one thing, the trademark to her name. And in middle age, with 4 kids, and no money, she had to start all over again.

    And it’s from here you really see was an incredible woman she is, because with nothing but hard work, and iron-strong belief in herself, she fights every uphill battle to, not just reclaim the ground she has lost, but to propel herself further, into a level of superstardom she had only previously dreamt of. Given her talent, to me as a kid in the 80s it was unremarkable and self-evident that Tina Turner was a star, but now I look at it years on, you see what she was facing. That a 40-year-old woman was able to launch a solo music career, with herself as a sex icon frontwoman, is just unheard of.

    She did it, and she did it on her own terms. And it’s an enduring legacy. Her work is still being discovered by younger generations of audiences through the Tina! musical. She became an icon for music fans, an inspiration for women, and a beacon of hope for survivors. She was handed trauma and poverty, and what she gave the world was song and strength.

    Just a great film.

  • A Brixton Tale

    A guy gets a white girlfriend and everything turns to shit. A Brixton Tale is about Leah and Benji, teenagers from opposite sides of the city, who meet and begin a relationship. But the pressures of racism and class are present from the very beginning and threaten doom.

    I spent the whole of this film waiting for disaster, from the very first shots you see exactly where this is going. Several of the other characters do to, and try to warn Benji, but all to no avail. It’s like slowly falling down a spiral staircase, and hitting the occasional landing hoping you’ve passed the worst, only to keep on reeling downwards.

    Leah from the first is shown to have an objectifying gaze and be motivated by her own self-interest. She’s a white, middle-class lassie who wants to be a filmmaker, and she decides to film a ‘gritty’ subject by slumming it in Brixton. There she meets Benji, who she is drawn to both as a subject and a lover. Benji is genuinely smitten with her, but to be honest, Leah doesn’t even see him really. She sees the racist stereotype in her head that she can exploit for her film.

    She films Benji smoking a spliff, snorting cocaine, getting into a fight, getting nicked by the police, and getting the crap kicked out of him in a rival neighbourhood. What she fails to show in the film is she gave him the spliff, she gave him the cocaine, Benji was only defending her in a fight between her and her ex, and she’s the one who talked shit to the police, getting them nicked, then dropped off in a rival scheme, primed for a kicking. She is moulding Benji into the racist stereotype she wants, both for her film and for her rebellion statement lover.

    The worst thing about this is, Benji wants to be that for her too. He becomes ashamed of being a nice boy who plays video games in his room with his mate and goes fishing, steers clear of trouble, and really isn’t that tough. He wants to be this hypermasculinised idea she has of him. It’s fucking awful to watch.

    And you don’t need me to tell you where this is heading. She exhibits her work, to rounds of applause from the wealthy, white, middle-class, art intelligentsia, for its unflinching look at the reality of urban youth, a reality they crave and have created for a narrative too narrow to encompass the full humanity of others. The whole thing is a circlejerk of patronising paternalistic self-congratulation on exposing themselves to the exotic and other, disguised as awareness-raising. Boke.

    Meanwhile Benji is devastated. Horrified at seeing himself through her eyes. He’s ashamed for his mum to see it. It depicts him as just a string of criminal behaviours, with no thought to consequence of making something like that public with an uncensored identity. The whole thing is a shitshow.

    And this was the first landing upon which I fell, bruised and hoping I’d come to the end of my descent. But no, this is about the halfway point of the film, and things just get worse from there.

    This film is very much a rebuttal to delusions of a post-race world, or a new Britain, or the classless society. It kinda reminds me a bit of Blood Brothers, because everything Leah and Benji do, they do together, but the repercussions are very, very different.

    It’s always a question for me to what extent Leah knows what she’s doing to Benji’s life, and if she sincerely cares for him at all. I think it’s kinda worse if she does, because then she is literally just a cat with a can tied to her tail, barrelling into Benji’s life with no idea of the carnage she’s dragging with her. If she is consciously manipulating him, it takes away from the inevitability of this demise.

    In their own way, both characters are hopelessly naïve, and blind to the powder keg they’re dancing on. There is a mutual mirror there of their own hopefulness about the connection that is stripped from them as things play out. And where they end up seems like where they were always going to end up.

  • Run Hide Fight

    That was fucking great! Run Hide Fight is Die Hard for high school shootings. On the purely fun level, this movie is gripping, with twists and turns, cat and mouse, rising tensions, just excellently put together.

    There’s a little note of caution when you see a hero vs school shooters film because you don’t want folk to emulate it in real life, which is an unfair standard, coz no one thinks Die Hard might promote unwise behaviour in real life terrorist hostage situations. But there is a sensitivity around school shooting movies that isn’t there with other mass carnage event action films. And perhaps rightly so. It’s a good thing to expect a degree of responsibility in storytelling.

    Yet, I feel you have to go back to the quote about fairytales – they aren’t important because they tell us monsters exist, they’re important because they tell us they can be beaten. We all want a hero like Zoe, we all want a happy ending, and we all want justice, in this aspect of life as in every other. And there is a glorious wish fulfilment to Run Hide Fight that is so satisfying, and leaves you cheering, “Fuck yeah!”

    Also, I think this film does strike a good balance between the action film it is and a degree of responsibility. I would say it does not aggrandize the villains, or show them as sympathetic losers, but as ego-driven self-entitled narcissists. While they espouse a lot of the excuses you’ve come to associate with these type of killers, with Zoe as their mirror, it’s kinda shown as all just bullshit to cover doing what you want because you think you have a right to. The only difference between the rest of us who have our own shit to deal with, and these killers, is they think they have the right to make their point on the broken and bloody bodies of other people. They’re bastards, plain and simple.

    And because it is an action film, when it rounds the corners of sensitive topics, like why this is so easy to do in America but not anywhere else in the world, it has to walk a fine line of being honest about its subject while not puncturing that fun, fictional world of the film. For example, at one point someone asks the ringleader of the shooters how he put all this together, which is a fair question, narratively speaking, because this is an elaborate plan, with various steps, co-ordinated among a team, in which they seem to be 2 steps ahead of the police at every turn. He replies quite frankly, that the live shooter lockdown procedure is public knowledge, as any changes and amendments have to go before school board hearings, which are open community meetings. Which is insane. I watched that and was like, “Is that for real?” and yup, a Google search later and you can find live shooter policies online. Which blows my mind, it means you can literally plan your attack with foreknowledge of how it will be responded to, and any weaknesses exploited. What the fuck America?!

    So yeah, it’s a difficult balance, but Run Hide Fight pulls it off, and you never feel like you are being talked at. The performances are great, especially from the lead Isabel May. The whole thing hits its mark and just builds in momentum to the final showdown. Thumbs up!

  • Special Delivery

    Frightfest short about a Deliveroo driver instructed not to open the box they’re transporting. It’s basically the opening scene from Gremlins played for comedy. Cute and funny.

  • City Hall

    Four and a half fucking hours that took! Fucking hell. I don’t know why you would insist on that being a movie rather than a miniseries. I mean, it’s the filmmaker’s perspective, but I dunno. Maybe he thought the minutiae of municipal governance wasn’t something that would get people tuning back in, and he needed to trap people in a cinema in a oner to get them to watch it, preferably under a big net.

    He needn’t have worried though. This is an interesting documentary. I would tune in again, and maybe with a bit more merriment that after being killed by a marathon run time. City Hall is a close-up look at how democracy actually works. Not elections, not campaigns. What happens on a day-to-day level to keep a city running, and ensure what it’s doing is representative of the will of the people.

    It’s basically a year in the life of Boston, and covers a huge variety of topics. It feels like the director shot nearly every municipal meeting. There’s something quite exhausting about the scale of it. They say if you wanna get away with something evil, hide it in something boring. That also works for good too. City Hall tries to unearth from interminable meetings and concept-level discussions a city-wide movement towards redressing economic, racial and gender disparity. In the dull and mundane maintenance of school buildings, business building permit community consultations, and fact-finding enquiries, lies the hidden successes of the lowest unemployment rate in the city’s history, the increase in Latina women business leaders, and a far larger engagement in furthering civil rights than has been seen in half a century. People are getting off drugs and being supported in addiction recovery. Improvements are being made in providing services to homeless queer youth. Discussions about mental health and trauma are being foregrounded in every aspect of community work.

    Quietly interesting is how I would describe this film. There are no car chases or explosions. There are no cast of characters where you can boo the baddies and cheer for the goodies. But if you slow down, and accept the pace of intent listening, you will find the stories of a whole city’s worth of people. There is a gallery of individual experiences being interwoven to give a portrait of how a city hangs together.

    It’s also about how democracy functions. Because at first I was like, “Ahghugh!” and nearly had my head roll of my shoulders in protest at having to listen to a council meeting. And that’s kinda the issue. We don’t want to do good, we want good done for us. Democracy is so important, but please, don’t make me hear about it. So how do you ensure people’s will at the ballot box perpetuates itself for the next 5 years? And not through media reports of scandal when it goes wrong, but all those boring days it goes right. That’s what City Hall looks at, and comes up with a lot of answers and also no answer. Is it people’s dedication? Political will? Good habits and routines set by policy and culture? Community relations? An engaged population whose sustained attention will hold you to account? All? Something else?

    It’s a good one for thinking about. And a good one for slowing down and listening to. Take it more like a podcast than a movie. But worth your attention, definitely.

  • Audience Award winner announced!

    The winner of this year’s Audience Award was Sweetheart! Yeay! Nice to see queer female filmmakers and stories getting recognition.

  • The Masque of the Red Death Q&A now available free to the public

    https://www.facebook.com/glasgowfilmfestival/videos/256170672655750

  • Vicious Fun

    Super fun neo-80s meta horror comedy.

    Joel is a smug obnoxious horror movie fanboy with more than a small dose of male entitlement and skeevy ego. His Nice Guy TM obsession with his flatmate leads him to tailing the latest guy she’s dating to a bar, in a jank boundary-crossing move. There he proceeds to drown his sorrows at not being appreciated for the romantic devotee and cinephile genius that he is. Passing out in a closet, he awakes after the bar is closed to find a backroom private meeting of a serial killer support group. Having to use all his wits and understanding of horror genre tropes to survive, Joel goes on a bloody nightlong fight for survival.

    You’d think starting in such a low and unlikable place with the main character might alienate the audience, but his hapless incompetence and dawning self-awareness makes the movie an upbeat experience. It helps that he’s played by Evan Marsh in a way that rounds the edges off the worst of his character and gives him a plucky appeal.

    In fact, the whole cast is awesome. Ari Millen plays the American Psycho archetype Bob, a charming psychopath who leads the murderous troupe. I loved Ari in Orphan Black where he played the Castor clones, so it was great to see him in this, pure revelling in how bombastic and playful he could get with it. Julian Richings is also in it, playing a Gacy-inspired killer clown. You may not recognise the name, but you’d know the face, he’s been in, like, nearly every horror movie made since the 90s. You’ve got comic actor David Koechner as a crazed mercenary with a love for wholesale slaughter. The whole thing’s bananas.

    While the self-aware horror movie jokes sometimes stray into being a little self-indulgent, it’s only pleasantly so. Vicious Fun is stylish, funny, with interesting deaths and a killer score, celebrating as it skewers horror movie tropes.