'Hate Rising' Film Review

Journalist Jorge Ramos investigates the growing pervasiveness of hateful rhetoric and violence in America.

The Southern Poverty Law Center dubs the rising tide of hateful rhetoric crimes and violent incidents motivated by bigotry the "Trump Effect." It would have made a far more appropriate title for Hate Rising, Catherine Tambini's disturbing investigative documentary spearheaded by journalist Jorge Ramos.

The Mexican-born Ramos has had personal experience with the matter, having been forcibly ejected from a 2015 Donald Trump press conference after daring to ask the candidate a question about his immigration policy. In the clip of the incident shown in the film, Trump sneers, "Go back to Univision."   

For this documentary, the intrepid journalist throws himself on the front lines. It includes a late-night interview with the Imperial Wizard of a Texas branch of the Ku Klux Klan, held in a remote wooded area. Suffice it to say that this is not exactly a meeting of the minds. Ramos also attends a meeting of the National Socialist Party, where he looks utterly dejected while listening to the racist speeches.

Ramos interviews various other figures of the so-called Alt-Right movement, including the articulate but loathsome Jared Taylor, head of the white supremacist group American Renaissance. Taylor, who speaks approvingly of Trump's positions in the conversation, boils down the immigration issue to his simply not wanting to live near people raising noisy chickens in their backyard.

"I think we'll be judged on how we reacted to Donald Trump," says Ramos, who also speaks with the relatives of victims of the Orlando, Fla., nightmare massacre; a director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors internet hate sites; and, most movingly, a group of Hispanic elementary schoolchildren who tearfully describe their fear of seeing their parents deported.

This timely film makes for highly compelling viewing and demands to be seen. Fortunately, besides its limited theatrical release, it will be simultaneously broadcast on Fusion and Univision on Sunday.

Production company: Univision Storyhouse
Director: Catherine Tambini
Producers: Veronica Bautista, Jorge Ramos, Catherine Tambini, Dax Tejera
Executive producers: Isaac Lee, Juan Rendon
Director of photography: Matt Porwell
Editor: David Dawkins
Composer: Gary Lionelli

‘The Chosen’ Film Review

Antonio Chavarrias’ most ambitious film to date is an English-language take on the assassination of Trotsky.

In August 1940 in Mexico, Stalin’s old rival Leon Trotsky was killed in his office on Stalin’s orders with a pickaxe to the head by a man who the victim thought was called "Frank Jacson," a suspiciously misspelled surname which at the time raised no suspicions. But the killer’s name was not in fact Jacson. Jacson was a Spanish communist, Ramon Mercader, and The Chosen, Antonio Chavarrias’ most ambitious film to date following several well-received small-scale psychological social crit dramas, does a solid job of eking out the suspense and intrigue that this summary implies.

We first meet Mercader (Mexican actor Alfonso Herrera, with just the right generic good looks to play a chameleon), a priest-hating, system-breaking Communist in awe of his mother Caridad (Elvira Minguez), fighting in the trenches during the Spanish Civil War. In this as in other big scenes, the film does well to conceal its relatively limited budget, but when it comes, the dramatic payoff on this big opener is slight and unconvincing.

Four years later, Mercader is in Paris and is being assigned a new identity as 'Jacques Monnard' by a Russian secret police official, Kotov (Julian Sands); in time-honored Soviet fashion, Kotov obliges Mercader to shoot his dog to show his faithfulness to the Stalinist cause. Mercader also befriends, and becomes the lover, of Sylvia (Hannah Murray), Trotsky’s ardent, innocent secretary.

There is a lot of information to get into place for viewers unfamiliar with the story. Chavarrias’ script does so clearly and simply, and without over-falsifying the historical events — though if it’s the historical events you want, then look no further than Jose Luis Lopez-Linares and Javier Rioyos definitive documentary, Storm the Skies.

The Chosen moves efficiently from country to country and from scenario to scenario, though without ever quite earning the epithet "sweeping"; its tight focus on the characters’ intimate relationships rather than on the wider political context — along with the tight budget — see to that. The period detail is convincing and effective throughout.

Behind it all stands the formidable figure of Caridad, a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist who seems to have imbued her son, in the true spirit of Uncle Joe, with the notion that political goals are more important than human lives. She’s fascinating (and convincingly portrayed by Minguez, an actress underused by Spanish filmmakers), and she deserves her own movie. Equally interesting in their own way are the ailing Trotsky, persuasively rendered by Henry Goodman, and Sylvia, with Murray giving perhaps the film’s best performance as the wide-eyed, romance-seeking ingenue who will see her faith in both love and politics cruelly shattered (the scene in which this happens is the film’s most emotionally wrenching).

But as the heart of the pic, Mercader himself is less interesting and a far cry from Alain Delon’s chilling depiction in Joseph Losey’s flawed The Assassination of Trotsky. Following the shooting of the dog, the viewer waits in vain for Mercader to express even the slightest self-doubt, which might have made him more than a political puppet (an admittedly suave and elegant one), but it never happens. At one point, Trotsky observes that Mercader is a little too perfect, and the viewer has to agree.

The demands of the script mean that Herrera is obliged to play a character playing Mercader, with the end result that although we learn a lot about the elaborate, sometimes mind-dizzying tricks which Mercader had to employ to get into Trotsky’s office, we learn very little about The Chosen One himself. This leaves a big emotional hole right at the heart of this intriguing film — a hole which only a heavy falsification of the historical events could have filled.

Production companies: Oberon Cinematografica, Alebrije Cine y Video
Cast: Alfonso Herrera, Hannah Murray, Henry Goodman, Julian Sands, Elvira Minguez, Emilio Echevarria, Javier Godino
Director-screenwriter: Antonio Chavarrias
Producers: Edmon Roch, Antonio Chavarrias
Executive producer: Monica Lozano
Director of photography: Guillermo Granillo
Production designer: Antonio Munohierro
Costume designer: Merce Paloma
Editor: Ernest Blasi
Composer: Arnau Bataller
Casting directors: Heidi Levitt, Natalia Beristain, Cristina Campos
Sales: Oberon Cinematografica

'Brice 3' Film Review

Jean Dujardin returns as the dumb-as-rocks French surfer who worships 'Point Break' in this sequel (and not threequel!) to the 2005 hit film 'Brice de Nice.'

Just six years before The Artist made Jean Dujardin an unexpected Oscar winner, the actor was known mainly for his short-format work on French TV. That changed in 2005, when he starred in the batty French surfer comedy Brice de Nice, which went on to become the biggest local hit of the year. The big joke of Brice de Nice— i.e. a guy called Brice from the city of Nice, on the French Riviera — is that the dim wannabe surfer with the stringy, peroxide-blond hair lived on the Mediterranean, where there are no real waves. A superfan of Patrick Swayze’s character in Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break, Brice is something of a walking paradox as he’s both as dumb as a rock and simultaneously specialized in clever and mean put-downs (he would slay the reading challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race). More than 4 million Frenchies went to see the film in cinemas, and this is how a bottle-blond surfer gave birth to Dujardin the movie star.

Fast-forward to the present, when the oddball character finally makes a comeback in Brice 3, a numerically challenged sequel that was again directed by James Huth. (The not-very-funny joke here seems to be that Brice “killed” Brice 2 with one of his mean put-downs.) French audiences will be curious to see this release, though it's unlikely to match the first film's numbers. International fans of the “French Sean Connery” who are not familiar with his pre-The Artistoeuvre, however, will likely be baffled by this sequel in which Brice, now 44, still acts like a bratty and self-entitled baby who’s in love with everything yellow. 

The narrative is framed by scenes of a very wrinkly Brice (played by Dujardin under lots of old-age makeup) telling the story of his “greatest adventure” to a bunch of cute — and occasionally streetwise — preteen kids. It’s never quite clear why they are holed up in a wooden chalet in the depth of winter with an erstwhile surfer-dude fabulist who is probably in his nineties. But logic has never been a strong suit of the Briciverse, and the one thing these scenes have going for them is that the children occasionally call Brice out on his exaggerations or clear fabrications, such as when he recounts how he lowered an airplane window so he could crawl out and walk onto the plane’s wing and use it as a surfboard through the clouds (SFX are impressive in this sequence).

The story proper involves the fortysomething Brice responding to a message-in-a-bottle from his friend from part one, Marius (Clovis Cornillac, encoring). After his highly illegal surfer shack is bulldozed by the City of Nice, the protagonist doesn’t really have anywhere to go, so he decides to find Marius and offer him the help he’s asked for. Without a precise idea of where Marius is, Brice simply follows the instructions on his pal’s message to “take the first plane,” which happens to take him to Bordeaux, on the Atlantic (where surfing is possible). He tells a cab driver at the airport he’s come to be “with Marius” so he’s dropped off at a bar called “Chez Marius” (the take-the-French-language-literally jokes wear thin quickly).

the level of humor on display here is extremely juvenile, there are some chuckles to be had as Dujardin, like in The Artist, again excels at wordless and/or physical comedy. A perfect example is a slapstick-inspired scene in which Brice tries to get out of the taxi through the window because he can’t get his surfboard through the door. 

The film’s final destination is Hawaii (filmed in Thailand), where, unbeknownst to Brice, a Brice de Nice-inspired, all-yellow resort has popped up and where Marius has become friendly with a native tribe. Audiences will likely have no problem accepting the resort, where contests for the best put-downs are held on gigantic tiki poles equipped with moveable surfboards. The place was clearly designed to confront Brice with his own weaknesses and obsessions and as such, it feels a little elaborate and out there but nothing that a wacky comedy such as this can’t accommodate.

More troubling is the depiction of Hawaii’s native population, which feels so retrograde that one half-expects a scene in which half-naked locals will cook the visiting white folk in gigantic cauldrons. This kind of caricatured depiction hasn’t been seen in North American films for decades, though for some reason, this is not only still acceptable in French comedies but actually de rigueur. This year’s biggest local comedy to date, Les Tuche 2, which also is set in the present, featured a Native American tribe who looked like a collection of warbonnet-wearing members of The Village People. It's not a good look. 

As in the original film, the sketch/standup origins of the character (and its associated limitations) are frequently visible. Some scenes work well individually and some ideas are cute or entertaining — such as a surrogate son in the form of a goldfish, complete with the lead's blond hair, whom Brice refers to as “Fish,” a pun on the French word “fils,” or son — but the overall structure is full of unnecessary subplots, rambling, semi-amusing asides and unexpected interludes that vary wildly in tone (at one point, Brice turns into a musical on a fishing boat with the fish all singing along). And what little psychology there is, is handled in a way that’s overly predictable, right down to the film’s last zinger. However, Dujardin, who developed the character himself years ago, is clearly in his element and his jocular brio will likely keep at least local audiences hooked. 

Brice 3 looks much more expensive than its title character, with plentiful special effects, on-location filming, a sequence in manga-like animation and expert use of famous classical pieces, such as Grieg’s Peer Gynt and the "Lacrimosa" from Mozart’s Requiem, as unexpected counterpoints or to cleverly exaggerate what is happening onscreen. Product placement is ubiquitous and very aggressive. 

Production companies: Mandarin Production, JD Prod, Gaumont, M6 Films, Spartacus
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Clovis Cornillac, Bruno Salomone, Alban Lenoir, Noelle Perna, Jean-Michel Lahmi, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing
Director: James Huth
Screenwriters: James Huth, Jean Dujardin, Christophe Duthuron
Producers: Eric Altmayer, Nicolas Altmayer, Marc Dujardin
Director of photography: Stephane Le Parc
Production designers: Pierre Queffelean, Emmanuelle Pucci
Costume designer: Charlotte David
Editor: Antoine Vareille
Music: Bruno Coulais
Casting: Anne Barbier
Sales: Gaumont