IN THE DARK REVIEWS

My first Port Townsend Film Festival was in 2016, and my first marathon review of the film festival for the newspaper was in 2017.

This event has evolved yearly, but this year has brought welcome changes.

The festival now allows attendees to make digital reservations for their chosen shows and the festival's handouts include guides to all the places to buy snacks and drinks between screenings.

My goal was to watch as many as a dozen films in four days.

Sept. 21: Day 1

"Red, White & Brass" (2023) preceded by "Joyful" (2021)

In eight wordless minutes, "Joyful" director Simantini Chakraborty takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of multiple countries and continents, contrasting the hectic pace of modern society and the ways in which we're spoiling our planet and ourselves, with uplifting moments of grace, as she exhorts us to cherish life.

"Red, White & Brass" director Damon Fepulea'i sustains this spirit with his underdog comedy on the 2011 Rugby World Cup's Tonga versus France game in Wellington, New Zealand. It inspired a local Tongan church group to start a brass band so they could get tickets to the game for free by performing at the match.

From "The Bad News Bears" in 1976 to "Brassed Off" in 1996, watching unskilled misfits overcome the odds to develop their talents and unite as a team possesses its own appeal. What makes "Red, White & Brass" stand out is the authenticity of its amusing and endearing insights into New Zealand's Tongan culture.

It's hilarious to see self-styled "gangsters" cowed into sheepishness by the admonishments of an elderly Tongan mom (my Filipino friends might recognize shades of their own families), while another young Tongan man copes with being treated as "too white" by his peers for not being as familiar with the heritage they share.

I doubt I'm spoiling the conclusion by revealing this initially discordant crew achieves a rousing rhythm in time for their big show.

Sept. 22: Day 2

"Before I Change My Mind" (2022)

Director Trevor Anderson presents a tonally tumultuous profile of a genderqueer adolescent, Robin, who moves to Alberta, Canada, from my childhood hometown of Spokane in 1987.

You don't need to be LGBTQ to relate to Robin's hardships, but it helps if you can remember how it felt to tense up before you got punched in the face by your fellow kids.

Robin falls under the spell of the school bully, who deals with his own repressed feelings for other boys by preying upon them, which leads a benign Robin to make the petty moral compromises that the victimized too often go along with to fit in.

Not that Robin has many positive role models.

His single dad is as gifted at fixing computers as Robin is at creating art, but both are socially awkward within their age groups.

We catch glimpses of Robin's mom in fragmentary flashbacks, but enough to guess why his dad moved to Canada without her.

Even Robin's outwardly "good girl" acquaintance, Izzy, gradually reveals a casual thoughtlessness.

"Before I Change My Mind" is as authentic as, but more harrowing than, Bo Burnham's "Eighth Grade" in 2018, and in both cases, I'm glad I saw those films, but I never need to see them again.

Anderson leaves his conclusion messy after his characters stage a hilariously misfiring, but all-too-era-appropriate, subversion of "Jesus Christ Superstar."

"Patrol" (2023), preceded by "The Forest Beyond" (2023)

In 16 minutes, "The Forest Beyond" directors Jeremy Seifert and Fred Bahnson find a moment of optimism within a downbeat environmental trend. A young woman from the Shipibo people of the Amazon River in Peru travels to see virgin forestlands for the first time on the outskirts of her ancestral lands.

"Patrol" directors Brad Allgood and Camilo De Castro paint an even bleaker picture of how the protectors of the Nicaraguan rainforest struggle to repel illegal cattle ranching interests that are tacitly supported by President Daniel Ortega's government.

With terrain that's passible only by foot or over water, these patrols are always a step behind the impoverished ranchers whom the cattle companies rely on to convert nature reserves into commercial properties.

An especially bitter blow is dealt these defenders of Earth onscreen as a hurricane forces them to seek shelter in tarps and thatched huts, while winds blow metal roofs off industrial buildings, leaving our patrol shivering in their wet T-shirts and jeans before one of them surveys the storm's damage to the ecosystem.

Even as he dispassionately concludes that the hurricane was likely a symptom of human-made climate change, the camera lingers on his face as it crumples into silent tears, long enough to make me uncomfortable with its invasiveness.

"Year of the Fox" (2022)

Ivy, a contemplative teen adopted by a privileged and dysfunctional couple, splits her final stretch of high school between her mom in Seattle and her dad in Aspen after they divorce. Her already complicated relationship with her mercurial father is affected by the secrets being kept by the elites in their famous Colorado resort town.

Ivy's greatest strength is her earnestness, which becomes her most vulnerable weakness when she hobnobs over cocktails with her fashionably fast friends and with her parents' on-the-make acquaintances.

Jake Weber has long proven his range, but he's so perfect at reverting to type by playing Ivy's narcissistic adoptive dad, who wields his worldliness like a cudgel. He's like Hart Bocher as Harry Ellis in 1988's "Die Hard," with more polish and a higher IQ, while Jane Adams yet again conveys the simmering meekness as Ivy's adoptive mom.

On the pulp melodrama spectrum, the plot tropes are barely a few steps shy of V.C. Andrews paperbacks, but they're acted out so well and executed so deftly, that I had to know what would happen next.

Like Robin in "Before I Change My Mind," Ivy is still figuring herself out in "Year of the Fox," mostly because she doesn't understand the folks who raised her – not counting her caring live-in maid in Aspen.

Ultimately, Ivy is a good soul to root for.

"The Grab" (2022)

At first, it might sound like a national security scenario too absurd or dull for a Tom Clancy novel, except it's happening and it is existentially terrifying.

In 2014, China bought Smithfield Foods, the United States' largest pork-producing company, which made reporter Nathan Halverson curious about whether other foreign interests had made significant purchases of U.S. agricultural resources.

"The Grab" director Gabriela Cowperthwaite followed Halverson and the Center for Investigative Journalism for the next nine years as they connected the dots between China, Saudi Arabia and Russia's acquisitions of crops, livestock and aquifers on U.S. and African soil.

These findings lead to the forecast that it's food and water, rather than oil or other fuels, whose increasing scarcity will spark global wars in years to come.

Indeed, "The Grab" contends that the Arab Spring of 2010, and Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea and its ongoing attempts to annex Ukraine, all stem from scrambles to secure such resources.

Halverson and his colleagues have uncovered so many covert takeovers of resources that they can recall discovering their names on literal hit-lists, and nearly becoming "disappeared" people while in Zambian government custody.

It's fascinating to hear how casually Halverson assumes that all his wireless devices have been hacked, which is why the Center for Investigative Journalism's "treasure trove" of intel is so aggressively air-gapped, on a computer without Wi-Fi capacity, and whose USB ports have been superglued shut.

Sept. 23: Day 3

"Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project" (2022)

I attended this screening with my mom, a retired English teacher who was in college when Nikki Giovanni hit the scene in a big way as a poet.

Mom loved how "Going to Mars" captured so much of Giovanni's inspiring language, which can be challenging for a medium as visual as film, while I was impressed by the visual flourishes directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson employed to sell Giovanni's writing, which was read aloud by a combination of modern-day Giovanni, Giovanni as a younger woman in archival footage and the actress Taraji P. Henson.

Giovanni's works celebrate her Black-American culture, and my mom was moved by how Giovanni seemed to speak to her own experiences as a white woman.

"Going to Mars" conveys how unapologetic and genuine Giovanni has always been about her identity, which was evident in her moxie when she promoted her early poetry by renting a New York jazz club when it was closed on Sunday.

Giovanni has lived through

civil-rights history, but a stroke has robbed her of many of those memories, so while she still knows those events, she regards it as a blessing that she can't recall how traumatized she was by crimes such as the lynching of Emmett Till.

Per the film's title, I was fascinated by how Giovanni shared jazz musician Sun Ra's Afrofuturist view of outer space exploration as a metaphor for Black transcendence.

"Scrap" (2022)

Director Vivian Kerr's family dramedy benefits from casting herself and veteran straight man Anthony Rapp as adult siblings Beth and Ben, whose strained relationship is tested further when Beth is reduced to living out of her car after she's laid off. She refuses to tell Ben, even though he and his wife are looking after Beth's daughter in the meantime.

Speaking as someone who's observed the dynamic of older brothers acting as surrogate fathers to younger sisters in my own family, Rapp and Kerr have a lived-in brother-sister vibe, as it's established that Ben essentially raised Beth after their parents died in an accident.

Kerr's portrayal of Beth as having trapped herself in a loop of false promises and overcompensating aspirations to compensate for her past failures, feels real enough to induce a full-body cringe, whether you've tried to rescue someone from themselves or whether you've been that person yourself.

In a twist on the cinematic cliche of a writer who wishes he could branch out into fantasy storytelling, what's hilarious is that Ben has actually built up a profitable following as a sort of next-generation George R.R. Martin, but his heart isn't in it because what he yearns to publish is his completed biography of jazz singer Billie Holiday.

Lana Parrilla deserves credit for making Ben's wife nuanced and sympathetic as she realizes her conflicted emotions over her and Ben's plans for their own family.

Sept. 24: Day 4

This morning, self-testing revealed I had COVID, so my movie marathon came to a premature close.

I was 41 years old when I first attended the Port Townsend Film Festival and I'm 48 now.

I will always participate in the film festival when I can, but I'm too old to maintain the pace of my younger years, when I watched as many as 15 films in a single film fest.

My thanks to the fine folks at the festival for providing an excellent experience.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]