No Magic Kingdom in sight

The Florida Project finds America’s underclass in a bleached-out Orlando

Starring Willem Dafoe. Rated 14A

In the mid-1960s, as the Vietnam 2 War was heating up and prosperity boomed for white folks at home, “the Florida Project” is what Walt Disney and his Disneyland “imagineers” called their secret Orlando outpost. After Disney died, the team came up with “Disney World”, which managed to sound both mundane and imperial at the same time.

Fifty years later, central Florida— and by extension the US of A—is not exactly the Happiest Place on Earth. The black-and-white iconography of Mickey Mouse still stands beside red-white-and-blue flags on stripmall highways, but everything looks bleached and hollow in the Orlando sun. Everything, that is, except the Magic Castle, a fourth-rate motel painted such a garish purple, only the most desperate people can tolerate staying there.

On the ground floor is single mom Halley (Bria Vinaite), whose tats are bigger than small daughter Moonee (Brooklynn Prince). It’s July 4th weekend, and Moonee spends her free-range days with other kindergarten-aged kids, including Scooty (Christopher Rivera), who lives upstairs with his single mom. (Can someone really be named Mela Murder?) The latter hangs out with Halley and cadges free food for everybody at the waffle house where she works.

Halley has a bad attitude instead of a job or a personality, but she’s hardly more grown-up than those kids. And her profanity-laden rants mask sadness that must come from lifelong abuse. When not smoking and watching trash TV, she’s doing shady stuff to make ends meet. Fortunately for her, the motel, and the movie, there is an Uncle Walt on the scene: an impossibly patient manager called Bobby, played by Willem Dafoe, in his most kindhearted role. Bobby himself has likely fallen out of the middle-class Magic Kingdom, judging from the inexplicably quick visits by his resentful grown son (Get Out’s Caleb Landry Jones).

Dafoe and Jones are virtually the only professional actors in a truly magnificent effort from director Sean Baker and cowriter Chris Bergoch. Their last was the rightly lauded Tangerine, shot entirely on iphones. The focus here is still on marginalized people, but Baker and Bergoch have graduated to 35mm film, which perfectly suits the empty-candy-wrapper aesthetics of the place, and also recalls the dreamlike weirdness of Beasts of the Southern Wild—minus soundtrack music, except for one of the most riveting finishes you’ll encounter this or any other year.

The movie’s end, like its start, focus- es on its little Prince, and she’s a real find. It’s impossible to know how much of this girl’s ecstatic performance was directed and how much she invented on the spot. Kingdoms come and go, but sometimes you can tell from a child’s face that she’ll wind up a kind of princess, whatever else happens.

> KEN EISNER

Many of those largely plot-free minutes are spent observing, à la Paris, Texas, this bowlegged, 90-something relic simply walking through the desert. There are other callbacks: muttered “bullshits” flown in from Repo Man; Stanton and his Nostromo captain, Tom Skerritt, trading Second World War stories. Here and elsewhere, the allusions point to the impending death of a very old man, which Lucky reckons with in any number of sometimes bullish, sometimes achingly vulnerable ways.

His doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) crankily admits that the three-packs-a-day Lucky is better off smoking than not, before delivering the kind of speech about mortality you don’t tend to hear in movies these days, if you ever did. And so death hangs over this thing like one of the threadbare awnings you might find in Lucky’s dry gulch of a town, as it did in the Twin Peaks reboot that similarly employed Stanton’s sheer embodiment of human life pacing through its final days with a kind of unshrinking, if fragile, grace.

Speaking of: David Lynch shows up as Lucky’s best friend Howard, mourning the loss of his pet tortoise, President Roosevelt. It’s one of the film’s heavy (and funnier) contrivances that works partly because we’re willing it to, and partly because director John Carroll Lynch (no slouch as a character actor himself in films like Fargo and Zodiac) is careful not to intrude.

Among a supporting cast committed to giving Stanton/lucky a gallery of warily affectionate foils, Beth Grant steals a few of her own scenes as the local bar owner. Less showily, Bertila Damas is a storekeeper who invites the old coot to a Mexican birthday party, where Stanton—having earlier denounced the very idea of a “soul”— breaks into an indescribably moving version of “Volver Volver”. We should consider ourselves Lucky too.

> ADRIAN MACK

with himself, it seems, and with a few close friends. Even these squarejawed guys, captured on camera, don’t attest to a deep knowledge of Hamilton outside of his talent. But what if there isn’t more to him than his preternatural aquatic skills?

Certainly, filmmaker Rory Kennedy—the last child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, and better known for political docs, like The Last Days in Vietnam—can be accused of mild hagiography here. But there’s a sense that no amount of probing would have revealed more about a man who dropped out of school early and never developed any interests apart from surfing. In fact, his refusal to follow through on any other kind of success, include early stabs at acting and modelling—for Bruce Weber, no less—constitutes a kind of integrity.

Now 53, the perennially blond man-child has a battered body and a young family (he’s now with former pro volleyballer Gabrielle Reece, but an earlier marriage isn’t mentioned), and has turned increasingly to new technology, including a hydrofoil design that finds him floating above 80-footers that shouldn’t really tolerate interaction with bipeds. The music-laden photography here is phenomenal, especially in a drone-footage finish so spectacular no one even tries to narrate, let alone explain it.

> KEN EISNER

The Florida Project.

Starring Domhnall Gleeson. Rated PG

Goodbye Christopher Robin seems to be at odds with itself. On one hand, it’s just as Masterpiece Theatre twee as you’d expect from a British-made period piece about famous people. On the other, it has a darkly subversive streak regarding unpleasant human behaviours—the kind that haven’t exactly disappeared over the last hundred years.

The story, if not the movie structure itself, begins that long ago, with the twentysomething A.A. Milne (played superbly throughout by Domhnall Gleeson) caught in the terrifying trench combat of what was then called the War to End All Wars. Good branding; horrible lie. He returns to upper-crust London life, in which Ptsd–suffering veterans can just about allow themselves quick nods to that “bad show” in the blood-soaked fields of France. Milne was already an established writer of

2light plays and Punch magazine satire. Postwar life didn’t call for such frivolity, but you can imagine how eager English publishers were to spend money on angry tracts about arms merchants and corrupt aristocrats.

Keeping the coffers full was very important to his fashion-plate wife, Daphne. (She actually looked more like Flora Robson than Margot Robbie, but only the latter was available.) So Milne, nicknamed Blue, attempted to rediscover his writing voice by moving out to the quiet countryside of East Sussex, from where Daphne frequently decamped back to the flapper-mad capital, leaving small son Christopher Robin (mostly played by engaging eight-year-old Will Tilston) with a caring nanny (Kelly Macdonald) and an initially indifferent dad.

Of course, ol’ Blue eventually became entranced by the fantasy world created by the boy, called Billy at home, based on stuffed animals his mother brought him from town. These included, oh, let’s see: a tiger, a piglet, a donkey, and a brown bear named after a regal creature sent to the London Zoo from Winnipeg.

Directed by Simon Curtis, responsible for such middlebrow, reality-based affairs as The Woman in Gold and My Summer With Marilyn, the new movie compresses years of Winnie-the-pooh bestsellers into a kind of golden summer of father-son rapprochement. Christopher Milne’s memoirs suggest that the upper lips stayed pretty stiff for the rest of their lives. Certainly, there’s some perfectly horrid parenting on display here from the beginning. The first hour is filmed with light so honeyed (or hunnyed, for Pooh fans) and enough Disney-esque effects that it comes as quite a gut punch when Winnie’s worldwide success plunges the boy with the Buster Brown bowl cut into a more or less permanent nightmare. Family fare it ain’t, but if you’re open to its mood swings, this Goodbye has something complicated to say to the hurt children we used to be.

from the Guardian and Spin to Consequence of Sound. On many days, Tegan found herself wondering what she was doing talking about pop music when the world seemed headed to hell in a flaming handcart.

“Look, it’s terrible times that feels like the end of times,” the fantastically quotable singer says between sips of coffee from a sunny L.A. “I feel like, at this point in humanity, we deserve an asteroid—we’ve literally used up all of our lives. It’s been a really tough record cycle for us because it’s hard to self-promote when all I’ve wanted to do is talk about what the fuck is going on in the world.”

But there has been an upside, in that when things get really ugly, good people realize they need to stand up and step forward. Count the Quinns among them. At the age of 37 the proudly gay siblings are now established music veterans. Over the course of nearly a quartercentury together on-stage they’ve gone from a quirky Calgary-spawned indie-folk duo to legitimate pop stars, graduating from intimate club shows to soft-seaters and arenas. There have been gold records, radio hits, and a 2015 Oscar nomination for “Everything Is Awesome”.

Now that they’re swimming in the mainstream, Tegan and Sara Quinn have plenty to lose by letting a hopelessly divided world know which side they’re on. That’s not stopping them for a second, their activism including the Tegan and Sara Foundation, which couldn’t be more timely, considering the way President Donald Trump and his supporters have been openly hostile to America’s LGBTQ community.

“Not to make it all about us, but I feel gross self-promoting at this point, although I have to,” Tegan says. “But it’s also been great in that we’ve launched our foundation, so there’s a way for us to tie in something good even in the midst of so much that’s bad.”

For The Con X—proceeds from which will benefit the foundation—that meant approaching artists to reinterpret songs on The Con in whatever fashion they pleased. As a result, we get everything from a golden-era-of-lounge reading of “I Was Married” from Ruth B to a buzz-saw strafing of “Back in Your Head”, courtesy of former alt-country bad boy Ryan Adams. City and Colour’s Dallas Green turns “Hop a Plane” into a plaintive rainy-day ballad, while golden-throated wunderkind Shamir gives “Like O, Like H” an experimental alt-pop makeover that would wow the Flaming Lips.

When Tegan and Sara began thinking about who they wanted to contribute to The Con X, they went to those they admired not just for their work.

“We tapped 17 artists, and we went out of our way to approach artists who are very dark and sad themselves,” Tegan says with a laugh. “All of them had to be open LGBTQ allies, or LGBTQ themselves. All the proceeds go to our foundation, and a dollar from every ticket sold goes to the foundation. The foundation is going to redistribute that money to organizations that centre on women and girls, specifically trans women and women of colour in the LGBTQ community. It feels like we’ve covered all the bases so that we can go out on tour and feel really good.”

If Tegan and Sara are extra stoked, it’s partly because the tour transcends the music.

“It won’t just be ‘Look at us,’” Tegan says. “It will also be ‘Look at our community, look at these stories, look at these universal themes. And look at us all coming together and, I hope, feeling good about coming out and supporting each other.’”

The Con,

The Con remains extra special to them, and not just because it was where they finally entrenched themselves in the mainstream. When the record was released, the siblings found themselves on Warner Bros. after the indie label they’d been signed to, Sanctuary, got into financial trouble. Initial reviews were sporadic and, Tegan says, peppered with statements such as “I guess they can play their instruments”—snipes, she notes, that were sexist and sometimes even homophobic.

“We’ve talked a lot about how Pitchfork and Alternative Press and NME were complimenting us, but how the language was coded in a way that felt really reductive,” she says. “But then something happened, and there was this groundswell. All of a sudden we started selling a lot of records, and thousands of people were showing up every night to see us play. It was a very strange twist in the plot. The language changed. All of a sudden we were ‘a beloved indie-rock

band, a critically acclaimed indie-rock duo’. In a twoyear period, we were suddenly loved.”

What Tegan and Sara took away from The Con— which followed 2004’s well-received So Jealous—was that anything was doable. That speaks volumes today about how they are determined to make a difference at a time when, increasingly, the battle seems like a futile one.

“We sold hundreds of thousands of copies of So Jealous

and established ourselves on radio and then we made an antiestablishment record,” Tegan remembers. “We didn’t make a commercial record—we did the opposite. We rejected the traditional studio route—we went in and recorded ourselves first, and then went in and added drums and bass. We made it dense and at times unlistenable. We disregarded all conventional routes. And we couldn’t have picked a better time to go out and do that again.”