CS Film Club II

Last round:

The Hunt (2012)
For the longest time I held off on watching the films of Thomas Vinterberg, thinking he might make a good subject for one of my “crash course” marathons at some point, and didn’t end up watching his recent success The Hunt because of this. However I needed to see his film Another Round before the 2020 Oscars and also found myself watching his breakout film The Celebration after that, so clearly the time was right to just watch this thing instead of procrastinating some more. The film stars Mads Mikkelsen as a kindergarten teacher in a small town who finds himself falsely accused of child molestation and the effect that this has on his life as the town believes the false accusation and makes him a pariah. The falsity of this accusation is unambiguous in the film, which is important, but it also wisely doesn’t make this some sort of malicious act on the part of the accuser or those who believe them. In fact the film presents a plausible and in that sense kind of chilling scenario of how such a misunderstanding could happen and one of the more unnerving aspects of the movie is that it isn’t exactly clear what anyone did wrong to lead to this situation and all the pain associated with it. Then there’s the part of the film in which the town foments a sort of witch hunt (hence the title) against him and other supposed victims emerge appear to be inspired by the case in the documentary Capturing the Friedmans, although that wasn’t a movie about people who were entirely innocent and this offers at least a little more chance of redemption for all involved by the end. In a lot of ways this is a typically dark and biting Danish drama, albeit one that is a bit less steeped in dark comedy than what you sometimes get from Vinterberg and other from that clique and which is more formally conventional visually. Strong work.
**** out of Five

This round:

Elf (2003)
This is a movie I’d successfully avoided for the longest time for most of the same reasons I tend to avoid Christmas movies and also the same reason I avoid something like 75% of Will Ferrell movies. I’m going to be completely honest and say that I mostly intended to watch this to hate on it but, I don’t know, I’m certainly not going to say it “won me over” or anything but it ended up being more of a “meh” experience than something to be truly hated. The film is essentially an exploration of how not to do a transracial adoption: Santa adopts a human into his elf community without giving him any education about his native culture and then when he tries to reconnect with his roots he’s completely incapable of relating to any of his own people. This leads to a lot of fairly amusing fish-out-of-water scenarios early in the film but it starts running out of steam eventually and his continued failures to fit in start to feel like a lack of effort on his part more than anything. I also think there’s kind of an illogical paradox at the center of all this: in the world of this film Santa is canonically real and has in fact been delivering presents all these years and yet the world still seems to think he doesn’t exist and acts with disbelief to the antics of “Buddy the Elf.” That… doesn’t really make sense. Where do they think these presents that haven’t been purchased by parents have been appearing from? It’s dumb. Okay, I realize I’m probably reaching a bit here for complaints. My real reason for not caring for it are a lot more boring: it’s a comedy and I didn’t find it particularly funny. I’m not oblivious to why it’s been popular though. I may not be the best Christmas movie by it might be the most Christmas ever as it invokes pretty much every single tradition and symbol of the season and uses just about every Christmas song of the last fifty years. The movie also has a fairly impressive cast including late career performances by James Caan and Ed Asner and I was also definitely amused by Bob Newhart being there as a deadpan elder elf. Still, plainly not a movie for me, I probably would have been happy to have left this one for the zoomers.
**1/2 out of Five

You Hurt My Feelings