76 DAYS
PG, 93 minutes, opens on Saturday
Rating: 5
Here, finally, is the missing piece of the pandemic media coverage: plain evidence of the horrors wrought by the disease.
It is one thing to read about how patients die alone, begging to see loved ones. It is another to see it happen. Written reports about overwhelmed hospitals pale in impact next to a clip of a knot of panicked citizens on the verge of a riot, pounding on a medical centre's locked doors, demanding to be let in for testing and treatment.
The directing team of Wu Hao, a New York-based Chinese citizen and two others based in Wuhan (Chen Weixi and another who has asked to stay nameless) have, in journalistic terms, landed one of the biggest scoops imaginable. They have captured the events of Ground Zero as it was happening, before the disaster that struck Hubei province reverberated around the world.
Given free rein in four Wuhan hospitals - most times, it is unclear which hospital is being filmed - the camera crew silently capture vignettes with an emphasis on emotion rather than information. Much of the human behaviour on show is uniquely Chinese, yet universally relatable.
A doctor scolds a patient, telling her to trust his diagnosis instead of consulting Weibo, China's version of Twitter. An asymptomatic patient, fed up with being cooped up, throws a tantrum. His relatives, having had their fill of his antics, snap him out of his mood by reminding him that true members of the Communist Party never sulk.
Gradually, random segments coalesce into the stories of a handful of main characters, each one editorially balanced in the quantum of tears and smiles they elicit. Save for title cards that mention the date (from Jan 23 to April 8, 2020, the 76 days of the first citywide lockdown that gives the film its title), there are no sit-down interviews or voice-over narration that in lesser documentaries substitute for visual evidence.
Glimpsed at the edges are the orderly food distribution stations and desolate streets that defined the first Wuhan lockdown.
At the time, the quarantining of a city of 11 million was historically unprecedented and viewed by Amnesty International and Western outlets such as The Washington Post as an example of Orwellian overreach. One year later, comparing death tolls in China with the West, those remarks feel tragically removed from reality.
The camera crew's degree of access is jaw-droppingly deep. If this were shot in Singapore or in the West - assuming a film with this degree of access could even be made at all - there would be so many pixelated clouds floating over faces and name tags, only the bottom third of the screen would be visible.
The film-makers have risked official censure, not to mention infection, to capture what it feels to be on the medical front lines of a besieged city. This is a war diary.
As a record of our times, it is hard to imagine anything more complete, or profoundly moving.
LOCKED DOWN
M18, 113 minutes, available on HBO Go
Rating: 2
What better time to make a single-room movie than now? That is the gimmick behind this enterprise, shot in London last year during the lockdown and featuring as plot drivers some of its most identifiable traits, such as cabin fever, Zoom conferences, the banging of pots to thank the National Health Service, empty streets and social distancing measures that place infection control above security.
Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Linda (Anne Hathaway) are a couple on the verge of separation but because of pandemic measures, are now stuck with each other in a London home. In the midst of working out their complicated feelings for each other, they discover a way to carry out a perfect crime.
A tightly plotted heist movie this is not. Director Doug Liman and screenwriter Steven Knight have on purpose delivered a product that looks much like one of those feel-good Valentine's Day or Christmas movie that contrives to have as many star walk-ons as possible, so a good two-thirds of this work is meandering talky stuff that crams in big-name Zoom cameos (Ben Kingsley, Ben Stiller, Mindy Kaling, Danish actor Claes Bang). Whether the viewer buys into the variety-show tone depends on the quality of walk-ons and the writing. Some of it is fair to good, but much is middling to bad.
As a writer, Knight (the terrible fantasy-tinged drama Serenity, 2019) needs his tendency to sprawl reined in. Liman, one of the best action directors today (science-fiction thriller Edge Of Tomorrow, 2014), is not the person to do it.
The result is one of those films in which everyone in it feels like they are having a jolly time, the way the stars who took part in last year's Gal Gadot pandemic singalong video did.
The video featured stars crooning about sharing and equality from gated mansions. Instead of feeling inspired, many who viewed it wished the singers thought a bit harder before they took on the project. The same wish applies here.
AN AMERICAN PICKLE
PG13, 84 minutes, available on HBO and HBO Go
Rating: 2
This gentle underachiever of a movie is in many ways much like the characters its star, Seth Rogen, tends to play. It ambles when it should be running, it is dumb when it should be smarter, and it tries to talk about grown-up topics using the vocabulary of a 12-year-old.
Adapted from Sell Out, a 2013 New Yorker magazine story series by Simon Rich, this story begins in Brooklyn, with Eastern European Jewish immigrant Herschel Greenbaum (Rogen, bearded and wearing wool) falling into a vat of pickling brine. When the vat is re-opened a century later, Herschel is alive and has to be re-introduced into modern society.
He is united with his only living relative, great-grandson Ben (Rogen, beardless and clad in denim), a programmer whose American dream is to make the next killer app.
As in the source material, the movie takes satirical pokes at modern foibles, with the reanimated Herschel delivering pithy observations about food, computers, sexual orientation, masculinity and, most importantly, the meaning of family and the Jewish faith.
The theme of being grounded in one's culture takes the story into mawkish territory, a tone that fails to sit well with the jokes about rock stars who dress like women and how these days, milk comes from nuts, not cows.
A Greenbaum versus Greenbaum conflict erupts midway, a patience-testing contrivance meant to illustrate the superiority of the old ways, but only serves to highlight the sloppy screenwriting.
THE CON-HEARTIST
PG 13, 129 minutes, opens today, not reviewed
This Thai romantic comedy has Ina (Pimchanok Luevisadpaibul), a woman whose heart has been broken, turning the tables on conman Tower (Nadech Kugimiya) and using his skills to take revenge on her ex-boyfriend Petch (Thiti Mahayotaruk).
