Okay, I guess it's only three. Still, that's a lot.
The latest came Thursday night, and it's the poster you're seeing here.
I had every reason to assume Riders of Justice was in English. Mads Mikkelsen probably does more English language roles than Danish roles these days, and besides, Jason Bateman can't speak Danish, can he?
Jason Bateman? Where did I get that?
Well, look at this poster and judge for yourself:
If that's not Jason Bateman riding shotgun, I don't know who it is.
Okay, I do know who because I have IMDB. It's Nikolaj Lie Kaas, and he's really good in the movie. But he's Jason Bateman if I've ever seen Jason Bateman.
Of course, if this poster were what I'd seen, I would have known this were not the kooky ensemble revenge comedy I thought it was. (It's sort of that, but it's a kooky Danish ensemble revenge comedy.) That title -- Retfargegheandends (pause for breath) Rytereareyrre -- kind of gives it away. But it was seeing Kaas' picture in the MIFF materials that led me to my incorrect assumption.
Bateman or no, the movie was good. I don't think it totally sticks the landing, but before that, it's another masterful mixture of tones from a Danish director. That's something director Thomas Vinterberg already does well, and as it turns out, so can Anders Thomas Jensen. I could give you some further information about the film here, or I could point you to my review. The latter's easier so I'll just do that.
I had intended to review the movie I watched Wednesday night, Night of the Kings from the Ivory Coast, to lend more diversity to the slate of international films I watched at MIFF this year. In fact, I'm not sure if I've ever watched a film shot on the African continent at MIFF, and Night of the Kings gave me a good opportunity to rectify that. (I mean, I still watched it, even though I didn't review it. That begs the age-old question: "If you watch a movie but don't review it, does it make a sound?")
Alas, I had a rarity for me when it came to writing that review: writer's block. If I'd really sat down and set my mind to it, I'm sure I would have come up with something -- I always do. But I got caught up in the workday on Thursday (despite having technical problems that were making productivity almost impossible), and the two sentences I'd written never turned into anything more. By the time I missed posting it on Thursday, I allowed Riders of Justice to become a candidate for my last MIFF review of 2021, and as it turns out, I found it easier to churn out something passable about that film last night before I went to bed.
Part of the issue was that I resisted Night of the Kings a bit. It had a pretty intriguing setup, as the film is set in a notorious Ivory Coast prison where the inmates run the place. A new inmate arrives and per tradition, he is named storyteller, meaning he has to tell the inmates a story. The quiet part that doesn't get said out loud is that after he finishes this story, he's to be executed. Another prisoner (played by Denis Levant!) lets the cat out of the bag, so our storyteller keeps talking all night -- I guess if he survives the night, like Scheherazade before him, he will escape his fate.
There's some good gritty realism here, but also some parts that I just didn't really believe, like the fact that 60 prisoners would hang on this man's every word for a whole night. The story he's telling is in way too broad strokes to go on for 12 hours, or however long -- in order to tell a story like that, he'd need to recite the characters' most mundane dialogue, which would test everyone's patience long before then. We also don't learn much about any of the characters, and I didn't find the story he was telling very compelling either.
Just as well I didn't review it. To not love my first MIFF film set in Africa kind of undid the benefit of watching it in the first place. It's probably a good thing that my attempt at virtue signalling backfired, because that shouldn't be something we critics have to do ... though to suggest we might be exempt from it is pretty naive as well.
Okay, just two more MIFF movies for 2021. I'll either single them each out in their own post or combine them into one. I'm sure the suspense is killing you.
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