Nomadland (4/5 Stars)

 

Nomadland, a feature by relatively new writer/director Chloe Zhao, seems to be part fictional narrative and part documentary. It has the thinnest of plots, Fern (played by Frances McDormand), lived her life in a one-factory town in Nevada. Her husband died and then the factory died, so she packed up her life in a van and has been living out of it ever since. There are many people out there like her in the sparsely populated areas of the American West, and I as far as I can tell, the real people show up in this movie and talk about themselves while Frances McDormand sits there and listens. A woman in an Amazon fulfillment center lunchroom talks about her tattoos. A man gives an impromptu educational lecture on the practical dos and don’t for a life on the road to a crowd of passerbys. An elderly woman sells the little that she has and embarks on one last road trip to Alaska.

Most movies have conflict or plot. Nomadland is adamant about having neither. Banking on the fact that you are likely not familiar with the subject matter, it believes your natural curiously can hold your interest with just showing you a novel way of life with its capable inhabitants acting as tour guides. It is right. Nomadland is lovely little movie filled with the beauty of the open West and the good nature of the nomads that make it their home.

The negatives of this type of life are generally overlooked, lest it spoil the mood and cast shade on the very real people here. One I can think of would be a lack of security either from nature or other people or both. How do you guard your stuff from random people in the middle of nowhere? This is not explained. Fern experiences trouble with her van’s engine. She conveniently has a sister she can call and ask for a loan. We believe Fern when she is good for the money, but that is besides the point. The point is that she has someone to call. I am reminded of Kelly Reichardt’s movie Wendy and Lucy starring Michelle Williams. When Wendy has car trouble, she calls family but they have no interest in helping. Unlike Fern, she ends up selling her car for parts.

The difference between Fern and Wendy is that Fern still has some support. Not only from her sister, but also from the federal government. She looks to be old enough to be receiving social security and be covered by Medicare. She works part of the year in a federal park, which incidentally provides services to nomads like her. The life is not so bad a life and plenty good the movie wants to show. Fern has little wants, makes what she needs to provide them, and has access to community and infrastructure, albeit loose, to support her. The best line is when Fern is asked by a teenage girl if she is ‘homeless’. Fern replies that she is ‘houseless’ and that there is a difference. Fern is not poor, she is simply living on the cheap. There are nomads out there that are truly poor, but we don’t know enough about the people we meet here to know which of them are in that number.

Movies about truly poor people are kind of rare. This is not helped by the fact that writers’ need their characters to have some sort of money in order to be able to make choices and do things. Movies are generally about people who have the opportunity to do make choices and do things. I can think of two good modern examples of people being poor, not just living on the cheap like Fern, but poor like do not “have a sister who could loan money if in a tight spot” poor. Wendy and Lucy by Kelly Reichardt is one. The other would be the TV-series Atlanta. The character Earn (played by Donald Glover) is poor, like truly poor. I have never been truly poor, but I’ve lived on the cheap for a few years and certain scenes in that show really made me uncomfortable. There is one episode where Earn takes his girlfriend out to a place that he believes has a cheap burger special and a happy hour that goes until midnight but upon arrival finds out that management has turned the place into a seafood restaurant that specializes in tiki drinks. That, as they say, was real. Nomadland instead is a bit like its last piece of sage wisdom. “One of things I like most about this life is that there is no final goodbye. I’ve met hundreds of people out here and I’ll don’t ever say a final goodbye. You just say, I’ll see you down the road. And I do, I see them again. And I can be certain in my heart. That I’ll see you again.” Well that’s pretty, but not, as they say, real.

Minari (4/5 Stars)

It is a good business idea. Tens of thousands of Koreans immigrate to America every year. Would they not miss Korean food? Korea is too far away to ship vegetables that would be fresh on arrival. Why not grow the Korean vegetables here and sell same at Korean markets? It is this shrewd entrepreneurialism that brings a Korean family to 1980s rural Arkansas to start a farm. Their efforts and travails form the basis for writer/director Lee Isaac Chung’s movie Minari, the name being a native Korean plant that, it turns out, grows well in the heartland of America.

The visionary in this business quest is Jacob, played by Steven Yuen of Walking Dead fame. The antagonist to his vision is Monica, his wife (played by Yeri Han). You would think that Monica would be a little more supportive given that their previous situation in California involved working in a dead end job sexing chickens for an agricultural corporation. For those unfamiliar, sexing chickens means looking at the hindquarters of chicks to determine whether it is male or female and sorting them likewise. The female chicks grow into hens that produce eggs. The male chicks, the movie infers, are killed immediately. Jacob and Monica do this a thousand times a day everyday. I think, compared to that, living in a prefabricated house in flyover country would be preferable if it meant you had your own property and business. Jacob argues about this with Monica all the time.

I am being a little unfair to Monica. Their son, Paul, has a heart condition and Monica is convinced that if they are not near a hospital in case of an emergency then they are being unforgivably reckless with his health. Understandable, but those of us familiar with the childhood of Theodore Roosevelt are optimistic about the kids chances if he grows up in rural area and engages in farm work.

The fighting amongst the parents comes to a head when the lights go out during a storm and they mistakenly believe they might be hit during a tornado (not a Korean thing I hear). The short term solution is to import Monica’s mother to live with the family (played by Yuh-jung Youn). This movie takes place in the 1980s so that would mean this woman would have lived through World War II and the Korean War and be a tough old lady. She does not disappoint. She likes to watch professional wrestling and curses while playing cards with the kids. Paul points out that she is not a real grandma because she doesn’t bake cookies. She is a good sport about it. A very good grandma, exactly the kind Paul with his condition needs.

There is something that feels very American about this film. It’s actually not to different in tone than those many movies where some city slicker ventures out West to do something different with his life, is awed by the natural wilderness, and interacts with the otherworldly natives. Except, here, instead of a white guy being introduced to Native Americans, it is a Korean family being introduced to evangelical Christians. The most otherworldly, played by Will Patton, seems to have his own church of one. Like all good immigrants, the Koreans politely keep their opinions to themselves and shrug off the natural misunderstandings that would occur between otherwise good people of different cultures. At one point, Jacob takes his family to church, not because he is any sort of convert, but because he wants his family to make friends in the local community. That is a great reason to go to church. Several minor things occur that certain people today might categorize as 'microaggressions' but what the makers of this movie seem to instead be offering up as "jokes", as if the people involved don't have to be natural enemies. I don’t know anything about Lee Isaac Chung and had not seen any of his other movies before watching this one. I'm not surprised to learn that his parents were immigrants who moved to Arkansas while he was a child to start a farm. This movie has a very personal feel to it. 

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar (3/5 Stars)

 

I guess I should be happy that this movie exists at all. In 2011, the creative team of Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo made their spectacular debut with Bridesmaids. That movie was written by both Wiig and Mumolo, though only Wiig had a major acting role (Mumolo has a cameo on a plane). One would think that the critical and financial success of Bridesmaids would have resulted in a second movie in less than a decade’s time. It did not for reasons unknown to me, hopefully having to do with the team following different ambitions. They seem to have been plenty busy with other projects.

But here finally is Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, which really wants you to have a good old-fashioned time. It stars two cheery best friends as main characters that take a vacation to the bright sunny and colorful paradise which is Vista Del Mar, Florida. The main conflict in the story is provided by an albino super villain named Sharon Gordon Fisherman who stalks a secret lair and has plans to murder the entire town at the local Seafood Jam festival.

There are plenty of good-natured jokes here and several up-tempo musical numbers, but something is lacking that ought to give the movie much needed weight. For instance, I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be a satire, and if so, of what. First, are Barb and Star supposed to be a caricature of a recognizable type of person. I mean, they are supposedly middle-aged woman from middle America, but do people there actually have the broad characteristics of these stereotypes. Because it kind of just feels like Wiig and Mumolo enjoy speaking in their funny voices. The jokes don’t seem to be really connected with the characters. Unless middle aged woman from Nebraska really do love cullotes and Tommy Bahama to an absurd degree. But do they?

Also Vista Del Mar? That’s a real place right? I looked it up, but it does not appear to be anything like the fancy hotel and resort paradise that is in this movie. So is this Vista Del Mar a satirized version of some other place like in Miami or Mexico. Or is it just a funny sounding name that rhymes with Barb and Star?

Then there is the supervillain plot. What this seems to resemble is a Dr. Evil from Austin Powers sort of situation which itself was a satire of 1960s James Bond movies. But Barb and Star aren’t spies with secret missions and the supervillain does not have any geopolitical aspirations. Barb and Star are just screwball middle-aged woman who are on vacation and the supervillain just wants to kill everyone. Really, if there was one thing I would change about the plot is that I would make the supervillain plot less extremely serious and fatal. I think it would have been better as something serious but less fatal, like a oil spill on the beach, or something just ridiculous, like letting loose a skunk spray on the crowd in the Seafood Jam. Ruining the party would have had the same dramatic weight as the murdering everyone plan in this scenario.

There is certain level of absurdity that the audience can take before things get a little too absurd and then the movie starts losing its sense of reality. That level is achieved within the first scene of Barb and Star when a seemingly innocuous and overweight Asian child with an affinity for 80s pop songs turns out to be an evil henchman named Yoyo to the above-mentioned nefarious plot. The scene is funny but it would have been funnier if it made any or would make any logical sense.

The pleasures of Barb & Star are shallow and do not last, but that is not to say that the pleasures do not exist. After all, it is pleasurable to be in the company of two cheery comedians with funny voices in a bright vibrant place. Children under five may love this movie for its overall feel. Wiig and Mumolo are also correct in their suspicion that it would be pleasurable, on the surface at least, to have a handsome man, Jamie Dornan here from 50 Shades of Grey fame, demean himself by singing musical numbers while half-naked and prancing in the sand. It reminded me of the same type of performance that Chris Hemsworth gave in the Ghostbusters reboot a few years back. I suspect women and gay men would get a bigger kick out of that than I do. I only wish the movies could make hot women do that in mainstream movies. They used to.

Finally, there is Darlie Bunkle, a man who repeatedly attempts to get the attention of Jamie Dornan. There is a repeated joke that he is trying to be surreptitious but keeps giving away his name, general identity, and place of residence, though I could never figure out what organization he was supposed to be representing or what he wanted to accomplish. Anyway, I mention him because so many variations of a theme are made on his joke that it becomes blaringly obvious the joke that is left on the fence untold. They missed the joke where Darlie Bunkle is trying to blend into the crowd but can’t because he’s the only black person on the beach/in the hotel/in the town/in the movie. Am I wrong?