Category: Film

What a trip.

I liked this documentary film. Maybe not loved, but definitely liked. Mostly, I thought it looked pretty stunning. Shot after shot of colorful, dewey, exotic mushrooms made me feel like I was rolling around on forest floor. But that was really only the first half.

That part taught me a lot about how important fungi are for ecosystems. Smooth music and misty slo-mo was essential. I was lulled into understanding that fungi are the only decomposers that can break down the cellulose in plant cell walls, which I think is actually pretty incredible. My favorite part was when they described how fungi actually help plants communicate to each other: if there’s some kind of threat, like a disease, the fungi can alert the roots of a plant to grow in a direction away from the threat. And look how coolly they animated it!

Ok, onto the part I didn’t think was as successful: the second half of the movie was about fungus having helpful qualities as a drug. My problem isn’t with the idea; it’s with how imbalanced the exploration was into the medical benefits of it. The movie felt a little preachy about how promising that field was. Too heavy-handed. I kept waiting fort the producers to present a more cautious attitude toward using it for relief: there was none. Just, “here are a couple experimental studies of people taking a dose and describing how it helped with depression.” Not enough to convince me of a lot.

On top of that, the movie mostly followed (in the noneducational part) one man’s experience with fungi. But, the movie wasn’t a documentary just about this man; the movie’s called Fantastic Fungi. So this guy’s enchantment with fungi just doesn’t quite seem well-vetted enough to convince me of much more than his enthusiasm for it. Didn’t teach me much about fungi generally.

I’d say, watch this movie if you’re curious about fungi and don’t know much about it yet. Don’t expect to uproot your life and start a mushroom-growing business because of it.

Michigan Theater is still showing “Fantastic Fungi,” one more showing! Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 15 at 9:55 pm. They have been showing it since before winter break, and I think I understand that people liked it so much that Michigan Theater brought it back to run a little longer than expected! It’s a documentary film about fungi, their roles on forest floors and potential to heal people. Check it out.

If you are fan of the famous film director Makoto Shinkai and his much beloved and critically acclaimed anime film, Your Name, I”m sure you’ve already heard of his new project, Weathering With You.

Weathering With You focuses on two young individuals: Hodaka, a boy who has run away to Tokyo to start a new life, and Hina, a mysterious, magical girl who is able to control the weather. Hodaka’s life quickly becomes bright and full of wonder due to Hina and her ability to chase away the rain and the two quickly fall in love. However, they must fight to stay together.

Michigan Theater is providing a fan preview screening of the film this Thursday, January 16th, at 8pm.

If you do not yet have tickets, now’s your chance!

There will even be an exclusive interview with the Makoto Shinkai along with the film.

I am very excited to experience Weathering With You. Makoto  Shinkai has such a unique imagination and an impressive ability to merge the mundane day to day of human life with magic in such a way that you could almost believe the events actually happened.

The beginning of marriages tends to be well documented. Professions of ever-lasting love on Facebook. Engagement photos on Instagram. Videographers and photographers at the meticulously planned wedding. No detail is too small to be forgotten. Everything must be remembered. The end of marriage, on the other hand, is swept carefully away, only referred to in a past tense long after it has occurred. No one live tweets their divorce. In many ways, then, divorce becomes more personal and less public than even marriage. An intensely shared experience between two people alone. Yet, Marriage Story brings this private process to the big screen without sacrificing any of the awkward, all-too touching intimacy.

When you marry someone, you know more than enough to love them. When you divorce someone, you know just enough to hurt them. Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) and Charlie (Adam Driver) obviously know a lot about each other. Years of accumulated knowledge spill out over the opening few minutes as each describes the other, noting many of the little quirks and characteristics that make up their partner. Each detail is the result of loving and being loved. Yet, all this knowledge is not enough to stay in love. For all of the things that Charlie and Nicole do notice about each other, there are other characteristics that they failed to acknowledge. Oversight breeds resentment and grievances overwhelm. Gradually, affection is paired with an equal amount of bitterness. What director Noah Baumbach does so well is portray both the lingering tenderness as well as the animosity. By avoiding depicting a truly hateful divorce, he achieves sympathy for both Nicole and Charlie. Neither want to hurt each other. Yet, the process of separation makes hurt inevitable. For, divorce means an entire disentangling of lives. It means taking separating all the things you once shared together. It means becoming selfish and a little bit petty despite your best intentions. Marriage Story doesn’t avoid depicting the inevitable clumsiness of the process, often in ways that aren’t typically acknowledged by separation stories. A particularly funny and insightful scene, for example, involves Nicole informing her mother and her sister that they can no longer be Charlie’s friends during the divorce. Even families must be disentangled. The process of divorce becomes imagining separate lives when you once could only see them together.

To their credit, it is even more impossible to imagine the film without the collective brilliance of Johansson and Driver. Each, when given the moment to shine, take the light and reflect it a hundredfold. Johansson is particularly good at modulating her voice, going from a place of resignation and softness to fierce independence. Her face, too, expresses a thousand different feelings in the span of a monologue. It is a revelation after seeing Johansson stiffly emoting in so many Marvel movies. Driver, on the other hand, is most effective with his body. He uses every inch of his tall frame, his physicality always more humorous because of how large he is. Somehow, he depicts Charlie’s lack of self-awareness through slouches and hand gestures alone. The characters are brought to life both by these extraordinary performances and the thoughtful attentions of Baumbach, who wrote the screenplay as well. It is almost uncanny how natural the dialogue is, as if all were improvised or stolen directly from real life. Johansson and Driver deliver his words without a hint of performance, transforming memorized lines into something more honest. Thus, when Charlie and Nicole speak, we pay attention, unable to tear our eyes or ears away from the screen.

Marriage Story is all the moments that you typically cannot glimpse. It is about the messy moments that you don’t show others, for fear of exposing too much. But it is also about how those moments are ultimately necessary. There can be no omelet without first breaking a couple of eggs.