Two Minor Entries (Patreon)

Causeway (Lily Neugebauer, 2022)

Considering the backlog of viewing I have at this point, there's really no excuse for having watched this. But as Jen correctly pointed out, "it's Paperboi!" As it happens, I am glad to have watched the exceedingly mediocre Causeway because Brian Tyree Henry's performance, while not enough to carry the picture, is certainly strong enough to earn some year-end poll points. His James Aucoin is a big-hearted depressive, someone whose basic decency continually peeks out from behind a wall of unspeakable pain. His unexpected friendship with Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) always feels genuine, particularly the way he causally tamps down his simmering romantic interest in her out of a gentlemanly desire not to offend or intimidate. Lawrence, as an injured Afghanistan vet struggling with a brain injury, isn't really suited to the task of the role, and Neugebauer's clumsy direction does her no favors. This is Sundance / Tribeca material, with a handful of affecting moments.

100 Ways to Cross the Border (Amber Bemak, 2022)

The new team running the Houston Cinema Arts Festival selected this film, an unconventional documentary about the legendary Mexican-American performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Although I've been aware of his work since the 80s, I'd never really considered it in depth, and this documentary by Bemak does give a fairly coherent account of his current theory / practice of "queering the border" through body-based art actions. Having said that, the focus on GGP's La Pocha Nostra performance workshop becomes a bit tedious, mostly because of the relative sameness of the pieces emerging from the collective.

It's admirable that an artist of GGP's stature wants to recede into a collaborator / pedagogical mode. But the film's evidence suggests that the workshop is producing lots of less accomplished versions of himself. And the focus on contemporary work, while admirable, means that GGP's former partner Coco Fusco is never so much as mentioned, a substantial elision. Bemak, who has previously collaborated with Angelo Madsen Minax, is a welcome onscreen presence, working to address and complicate the friction of being a white American woman profiling a Mexican Latinx artist. Worthwhile, but could have offered more.