Quick takes on Green Border and other films

Will Ferrell and Andrew Steele have been friends for nearly 30 years, since a young Will and Andrew both started at SNL at the same time, Will an actor and Andrew a writer (who wrote many of the iconic sketches that featured Will). They became good buddies and continued to hang out after each left the show. Then in 2021 during COVID, Andrew sent an email to Will that he, now she, was transitioning to be a woman. To Will, this came out of left field, and the former Andrew, now Harper, obviously worried how one of his best friends was going to take the news, and if they would even still be friends. Will responded that they should do something together, sort of to get it all out in the open, and thus was born the idea of Will & Harper. As Andrew, Harper loved driving cross country and visiting small towns, stopping in roadside bars to meet people and share stories, but she’s never done it as a woman. Will and Harper set out from New York to drive to California, a leisurely 17 day trip with many stops along the way. Will ostensibly is there to provide emotional support in situations where Harper may feel uncomfortable, but along the way, viewers are treated to the duo’s conversations about that sense of wanting to be who you were born to be, of decades of trying to hide who you are from everyone around you, and the friendships that are stronger than you could have hoped for. It’s not all smooth sailing, as there are plenty of places in this country that will not support Harper, but the film is at times funny and poignant, full of emotion and support. Afterwards, I appreciated the loving human being that Will Ferrell is, but more so Harper, for being so vulnerable as to share a lot of private thoughts and hard moments in her life. ★★★★★

Limbo is a cool film out of Australia, starring an unrecognizable Simon Baker (in his buzz cut and a few days’ growth of unkept beard, gone is the suave look he rocked for nearly a decade on The Mentalist). He plays Travis, a detective who has been sent to examine an old murder cold case in the tiny town (or, really, too-small to even be a town) of Limbo, located way out in the outback. Travis, addicted to heroine after doing drugs undercover years ago, doesn’t seem to care much if he finds anything or not, as he’s just doing what he was sent to do, but as he digs into the evidence, he uncovers lots of the buried (and not-so-buried) racial divide that still exists between the white residents and the aboriginal Australians. Charlotte was killed 20 years ago, and rumors at the time pointed to a white man named Leon, who liked to invite black girls to parties to watch them dance. Leon seems to have recently died, but his brother Joseph is still around, and he’s not talking. Neither is Charlotte’s surviving brother Charlie, nor, at first, is Charlie’s younger sister Emma. But Travis’s resilience finally pulls some information out of them, but maybe not enough to get the powers-at-be to reopen the case, if they were ever really interested in doing so. It’s a slow burn and any answers at all are frustratingly slow in coming, but the film oozes atmosphere and modern noir, and Baker’s performance is worth the price of admission. ★★★½

Some films are made just to elicit a reaction, and Green Border is there to make you angry. With the world up in arms about what to do about refugees pouring across borders, it examines the ugliness of one border in particular, that of Poland and Belarus. In 2021, a family from Syria are fleeing ISIS, trying to get to a family member in Sweden. They’ve been promised safe passage from Belarus, so they fly there and are able to make it across the border to Poland. Now in the EU, they think they are safe, but their nightmare is just beginning. Turns out, the dictator ruler of Belarus has been promising safe passage to all immigrants who will listen, and weaponizing them against Poland by swarming the border. Poland doesn’t want to deal with them, so they’ve tasked their border patrol with rounding them up and throwing them (sometimes literally, as they do with a pregnant woman) back across the barbed wire separating the countries. The family gets tossed from one side to the other several times in the first third of the film, and when we catch up with them near the end of the movie, they are looking rough from weeks of living outside, still without a resolution. We also get a viewpoint from one of the border guards, a young man with a pregnant wife of his own. The man doesn’t seem like a bad guy, but as is so often the problem, he’s “just doing his job.” Those he works with, however, do seem pretty terrible. Another section of the film follows the activists, people trying to help the immigrants, but with no real power and severe laws restricting what they can and can’t do, all they can really do is patch up the immigrants when they find them (putting salve on their trench feet from walking the swampy area) and send them on their way. And if you made it through all the atrocities shown throughout the film, you might get sick with the epilogue; in 2023 when Ukraine refugees are looking for a place to flee, Poland welcomes them with open arms. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that these white-skinned safety-seekers look a lot more like their neighbors. A tremendous film, but its depressing message is one you might not stomach to watch twice. ★★★★★

Crossing another Hamaguchi film off the list, this time with 2021’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (released, in fact, the same year as his breakout Drive My Car). This is an anthology film in 3 parts. The first, Magic (or Something Less Assuring) starts with two good friends, Meiko and Tsugumi, driving home after a model shoot. Tsugumi is relating an amazing first date she recently had, but something she says about the guy, the way he talked to her, startles Meiko, and she gets quiet especially when Tsugumi says the guy is still getting over an ex-girlfriend. When Tsugumi gets out of the taxi, Meiko goes straight to the guy, because in a twist of fate, she’s the ex-girlfriend. Meiko needs to decide between hers or her best friend’s happiness. The second part, “Door Wide Open,” is my favorite, about a male student’s vindictive scheme against a professor for flunking him in his class (a grade the student very much deserved). The teacher has recently written a well-received novel with some racy sex scenes, so the student sends his older girlfriend in to try to seduce the teacher and get it on tape, to release to the public and ruin the teacher’s life. Things do not as planned. In fact the ending is nothing like what you’d expect, and is fantastic. The final part, “Once Again,” was the weakest for my tastes. Two women spot each other and think they know each other. One, Natsuko, recognizes a girl from high school with whom she had a romantic relationship, but neither could commit to a lesbian relationship at the time. The other woman, unfortunately for Natsuko, is not the same woman, just a look-alike, but she, Aya, thinks Natsuko also looks familiar, like someone she once admired for her subtle bravery against bullying in school. Overall, a nice film, especially the first two parts. ★★★½

Here definitely lives in the moment, but because of this, there’s really no narrative structure that I could find. It follows a construction worker in Brussels named Stefan who is on the cusp of a 4 week vacation, but unlike most people going on vacation, he doesn’t seem very excited about it. In fact, he doesn’t seem very excited about anything, coming off as depressed, or maybe resigned is a better word. No real energy in life. His car is currently in the shop and he wants to pick it up on Monday to drive to visit his mother, and while walking around town over the weekend, he meets Shuxiu, a Chinese grad student working at her parents’ Chinese food restaurant while studying plants for school. Finally interested in something, maybe for the first time in awhile, Stefan puts off picking up his car to spend time looking through microscopes with Shuxiu. That’s it, that’s the movie in a nutshell. Even beautiful cinematography can’t save this one. It is dull and as lifeless as its characters. The plants and trees flowing in the wind have more life than the characters. ★½

• TV series recently watched: House of the Dragon (season 2), Battlestar Galactica (season 4)
• Book currently reading: The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan