A happy International Women’s Day to all!
If you’re looking to celebrate today (or Women’s History Month, for that matter) cinematically, Kino Marquee has just the thing for you: a free rental of Lois Weber’s Hypocrites. If you don’t know the name, she was an early pioneer in the director’s chair and one of the first great filmmakers of the medium.
Worth a read today: for TIME, Judy Berman writes “From Britney to Buffy, We're Suddenly Rethinking Postfeminist Pop Culture—and Nothing Could Be Healthier.”
Finally, ending on a high note (though we should caveat that U.S. coronavirus cases are almost certainly undercounted):
Now, what you came for…
DAY 361: Los Reyes (available to rent on iTunes)
Sorry to start this recommendation on such a down note, but it’s unavoidably weighing over how I write tonight: my family bid farewell to our beloved miniature schnauzer Annie today. We knew it was coming, which didn’t make it all that much easier — though I’m certainly grateful I knew to savor every day of the last month or so, never missing a chance to tell her how much I loved her.
We (or at least, I) spend so much time talking to — or at — dogs. We take love and affection from them. But how often do we really stop and listen to them? To treat empathy like a two-way street, giving to them what they extend so freely and lovingly to us humans? For this in cinematic form, I truly cannot recommend enough the documentary Los Reyes, the boldest attempt I’ve ever seen at capturing the canine consciousness.
Here’s my ode to the film from my top 10 list in 2019:
Who said experimental films have to be boring exercises in thought? In Los Reyes, Osnovikoff and Perut set out to find the language of narrative and aesthetics to tell the story of two park-dwelling dogs in Santiago, Chile. There’s no language, no talking heads, no anthropomorphization. Just the daily rhythms of Football and Chola as they amble through life. For 71 minutes, it feels like we are truly inside the minds of two dogs, living life and experiencing the world around us as canines. This documentary’s achievement is remarkable yet humbly presented. It’s easy to miss just how radical the stylistic choices of Osnovikoff and Perut are because we’re also falling head over heels for the two precious pooches at the film’s center.
And here’s some of what I had to say about it for Crooked Marquee at years’ end as well:
The year had no shortage of talking animal movies — and might have even hit a nadir with the atrocious Lion King remake where Disney asked us to believe photorealistic African animals moved their mouths to form words like humans. There’s no forced dialogue or anthropomorphizing in Iván Osnovikoff and Bettina Perut’s documentary Los Reyes, which follows the exploits of two street dogs in a Chilean street park. And yet, Chola and Football are more alive than any two animals that have graced the screen in years. Osnovikoff and Perut’s observant camera captures their relationship and routine without personification or explanation. (And unlike Chola and Football, the filmmakers are quite aware of what the trash left in the park and the cranes surrounding the open air say about the city of Santiago that surrounds them.) If ever anyone could capture what it is like to go through life as a dog, this would be it. Los Reyes makes for the boldest reinvention of cinematic grammar this year but never feels like an academic exercise because the lovable pooches win us over time and again. 14/10, best boys.
If you’re lucky enough to have a four-legged friend with you, take your eyes off the screen for a second and go give them a big hug and kiss for me, please. Movies are a machine generating empathy, as Roger Ebert said, but let’s not forget that oftentimes the best sources of that very sensation are staring us right in the face from the other side of the screen.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall