Tribeca Film Festival 2021- “Ascension” (Wendy Moscow)

A Chinese worker checks a head that will be put on a sex doll in “Ascension.”

June 22, 2021.  “Wealth only goes to whoever deserves it,” says a Chinese business leader in a pep-talk at a company dinner in the disturbing and visually compelling film “Ascension,” directed by Jessica Kingdon. An observational documentary, “Ascension” surrounds the viewer with the sights and sounds of an industrial and entrepreneurial revolution happening in China, driven by a crackpot Social Darwinism that assures budding social media influencers and corporation strivers that if they just work hard enough they will become tremendously rich. At that same company dinner, images flash on the screen behind the speaker of soldiers goose-stepping in a military parade, conflating cosmetics sales with a frightening hyper-nationalism. This is a film about class and gender, money and power, national pride vs. a seemingly perennial inferiority complex (at least in modern times) vis á vis the West. But Kingdon primarily asks: What are the values being instilled in the contemporary Chinese worker and what has been lost, both culturally and spiritually?

Tribeca Film Festival 2021 – “New York, New York 2021” Short Films Collection (Seth Shire)

Meliki Hurd and Tatum Marilyn Hall play teenagers with secrets in “Cracked.”

June 19, 2021.  The short film collection “New York, New York 2021” is a compelling and varied collection of five short films connected by the theme of secrecy. Each film has a character, or characters, who have something about their lives that they need to confront while keeping them hidden. The films include one comedy, “Liza Anonymous.” There are also four dramas that are introspective and which use their characters’ conflicts to speak to larger societal issues. I will give away as little as possible, plot-wise, about each of the five shorts while attempting to convey their essences.

Tribeca Film Festival 2021 – Animated Shorts Curated by Whoopi Goldberg (Wendy Moscow)

“Navozande, the Musician,” one of the animated films curated by Whoopi Goldberg.

June 18, 2021.  I’m a big fan of intelligent, non-conventional and international animation, so I always eagerly look forward to the shorts program curated by Whoopi Goldberg at the Tribeca Film Festival every year. This year’s program has the viewer experiencing a wide-ranging cascade of emotions, from sadness, anxiety and regret to joy, anticipation and surprise. There is tragedy and comedy – sometimes in the same film. These shorts also feature a wide variety of techniques, such as stop-motion, photogramic, paper cut-outs, and pastel drawing. As an artist, I crave animation styles that reflect approaches closer to those one might see in artworks created in a variety of media – typical of the drawings, paintings and collages on a gallery wall or museum. There’s much more to animation than the ubiquitous Disney/Pixar 3D computer style that defines the form for most people, and this collection celebrates that.

Tribeca Film Festival 2021 – “Kubrick on Kubrick” (Seth Shire)

Director Stanley Kubrick

June 15, 2021.  Director Gregory Munro’s documentary “Kubrick on Kubrick” is a rich, priceless treasure trove of interviews given by director Stanley Kubrick, who died on March 7, 1999 at age 70, to French film critic Michael Ciment over a period of 10 years. While it may not seem particularly unusual for a famous movie director to have given interviews, in Kubrick’s case it was. He was notoriously private and never participated in publicity for his films. Why Ciment? In an archival television interview Ciment explains, “He tolerated or temporarily accepted me just for an interview,” adding “One cannot become Kubrick’s intimate friend.” Ciment elaborates that he wrote an article in 1968 that was the first major study of Kubrick’s work in France. “When A Clockwork Orange came out he granted me an interview for Express magazine.”

In one interview Kubrick explains to Ciment his reluctance to give interviews stating that, “One always feels under the obligation to say some witty, brilliant summary of the intentions of the film.”

An unidentified television commentator says, “Stanley Kubrick has been called the Howard Hughes of cinema because he was such a recluse. I prefer to think of him as the Frank Sinatra of cinema because he always did it his way.”

Tribeca Film Festival 2021 “No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics” (Wendy Moscow)

Cartoonist Alison Bechdel

June 13, 2021. Watching the terrific new film “No Straight Lines: The Rise of Queer Comics” sparked a personal memory of a warm, breezy night in the summer of 1985. Women were straggling back to their tents after the mainstage concert at the New England Women’s Music Festival had ended. Although the sounds of gentle female laughter and important political analysis beckoned me to engage with the world beyond my tent, I was already nestled in my sleeping bag, my camping lantern casting a pool of inadequate light, turning the pages of the latest issue of WomaNews in search of “Dykes to Watch Out For.” Created by Alison Bechdel, “Dykes to Watch Out For” was a smart, funny comic strip in which I saw my (then) New York City lesbian life reflected. Her characters were immersed in a multi-ethnic lesbian-feminist universe, full of the complexities, the constantly renegotiated politics, and (sometimes) euphoria of blazing new paths and changing societal paradigms.

Bechdel is one of five comic book artists who are featured in this essential-viewing documentary, directed by Vivian Kleiman, that traces the evolution of queer representation in comic strips, comic books and graphic novels. We also hear from Rupert Kinnard (whose Brown Bomber was the first serialized Black queer comic), Mary Wings (who created “Come Out Comix” in 1973, the first comic book by an out lesbian), Jennifer Camper (of “Rude Girls” fame) and Howard Cruse (creator of “Wendel” and the brilliant graphic novel “Stuck Rubber Baby”) in interviews recorded before his death in 2019. The next generation has their say, as well, and we find out how they built upon the innovations of the original queer comics pioneers.