InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 16

FILM REVIEWS
depression as an investigative superpower, but by crossreferencing
bank records… ya know, boring old police work.
Ostensibly a dry procedural, the manhunt for a suspect
converges with a lament for the state of American culture. The
investigation reveals the way military-grade weapons meant for
decommissioning trickle down to specialty gun dealerships, and
the killings themselves only further open up existing fissures
along racial and political lines; the film goes off on a tangent that
concludes with a violent shootout in a pharmacy with white
nationalists that, while thrilling in the moment, is a narrative
dead-end. Szifron, an Argentine director (whose previous film,
2014’s Wild Tales, also opened with a shocking act of mass
violence, although it was played for black comedy there),
attempts to bring an outsider’s perspective to the material, and
clearly has more on his mind than just cheap thrills. You can feel
the film fumbling around for some sort of an explanation for this
decidedly American phenomenon, but it loses its nerve
somewhere along the way, abandoning any kind of stinging
indictment for a wan variation on “hurt people hurt people.” For
all of its superficial nods to racial profiling and conservative
news personalities riling up their viewership, the film ultimately
comes down to a showdown at a farmhouse between the good
guys and a chatty, only-in-the-movies criminal mastermind who’s
at all times several steps ahead of his pursuers. No one expects
a film like this to solve a problem as insidious and culturally
ingrained as gun violence, but it's still an especially abrupt and
disappointing reversion to the same old bullshit. It’s all as generic
as its title implies. — ANDREW DIGNAN
DIRECTOR: Damián David Szifron; CAST: Shailene Woodley, Ben
Mendelsohn, Jovan Adepo; DISTRIBUTOR: Vertical; IN
THEATERS: April 21; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
JUDY BLUME FOREVER
Davina Pardo & Leah Wolchok
Since the late 1960s, readers of a certain age have been
discovering and devouring Judy Blume’s books. Are You There
God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume’s breakout middle-grade novel, has
taken up regular space on library and bookstore shelves since its
release. That book, and many of the author’s others, has
operated as the introduction to taboo topics for many young
women (and men, if they’re being honest) — masturbation and
sex, religion, divorce, and death, to name a few. This reviewer
had a particular fondness for Starring Sally J. Freedman as
Herself, a book in which Sally, a precocious 10-year-old Jewish
girl, believes Adolf Hitler has moved into a neighboring Miami
Beach apartment. And I wasn’t alone; as many celebrities,
writers, and friends of Blume detail in Leach Wolchok and Davina
Pardo’s new documentary Judy Blume Forever, her impact on the
lives of children and adults over the last 50-plus years is almost
unparalleled in the literary world.
Like Blume’s books, which packed these heavy topics into
bite-sized, digestible pieces for young adults and children,
Wolchok and Pardo’s film boasts a child-like quality. Throughout
Judy Blume Forever, scenes of Blume reading selections of her
writing are juxtaposed with talking heads from celebrities and
fans, as well as Blume’s recounting of the real-life experiences
that influenced much of her work. She reads about Sally J.
Freedman fearing for her father’s death while describing her own
father passing away when she was still young; her adult novel
Wifey, about a woman in an unhappy marriage, was released just
as Blume was divorcing her first husband.
Unlike the titular author’s books, however, Judy Blume Forever
feels overly saccharine and artificial. Sure, her work has had a
massive impact on these people’s lives, but the unending praise
begins to tiptoe into sanctification and feels almost scripted by
the end. The filmmakers also dedicate a large portion of Judy
Blume Forever to the author reading correspondence from her
readers, all of which she has kept throughout her career. This
section proves to be the film’s most affecting thread, but it
likewise can’t escape the sentimental shadow cast across the
entire project. The only real conflict in the film comes when
Blume discusses book banning, and the challenges she faced
during the years of Reagan and the Moral Majority. The end of the
film briefly juxtaposes that censorship to today’s political
climate, but it ultimately foregoes depth and shies away from
actually confronting or addressing the insidious motivations
behind the attempted restrictions.
Blume is such an aggressively endearing presence that it makes
the work of critiquing the film, which is so deeply rooted in her
experience and personality, an unenviable task. There’s just
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