Little Fish
Every year, attending film festivals in Chicago, Texas, Colorado and elsewhere, there is a pattern that emerges for that year’s films. Sometimes, it’s a similarity of titles. Sometimes, it’s a similarity of theme.
In 1984 there was “The River” and “Places in the Heart,” two movies about families losing the family farm. One starred Sissy Spacek and the other featured Sally Field, with America’s farm crisis taking center stage.
More recently, in 2018, at the Chicago Film Festival, the big theme was drug addiction, with “Beautiful Boy” (Timothy Chalamet) and “Diane”(MaryKay Place)dealing with the opioid crisis in the U.S.
In 2019, the theme that more than one film covered was Death Row. We had Alfre Woodard’s “Clemency,” with Alfre as a prison warden tasked with carrying out the execution of a Death Row inmate, and “Just Mercy,” with Jamie Foxx as a convicted prisoner on Death Row and Michael B. Jordan working to free this innocent man.
那么，2020年的话题是什么？
Perhaps not surprisingly, the topic is epidemics that come out of nowhere and strike without warning.But what the epidemics cause is different from real-life horror stories like Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion.”
This year, the pandemic that is sweeping the multiplex, afflicting people at random is amnesia.In both “Apples,” a Greek film, and “Little Fish,” we have people who are losing their memories and their minds. I didn’t like “Apples,” the film that showed at both the 56thChicago International Film Festival and the 43rdDenver Film Festival, because it tried to play the theme as humorous, when losing our knowledge of who we are is anything but humorous. Still, in Chicago “Apples won the Silver Hugo for Best Screenplay.
乍得·哈蒂根（Chad Hartigan）执导的“小鱼”，基于阿贾·加贝尔（Aja Gabel）的短篇小说，加贝尔（Aja Gabel）和马特森·汤姆林（Mattson Tomlin）制作了剧本，是艾玛（EmmaDying Girl”) and Jack O’Connell (2014’s “Unbroken” and “Seberg”).
Called NIA, Neural Information Affliction, at first people simply forgot to stop running a marathon or abandoned the bus they were driving in the middle of the street. Over time, more and more people began to forget their loved ones and pilots forgot how to fly and crashed.
The plot focuses on the romance between Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell)and their friendship with another couple, Ben (RaulCastillo)萨曼莎(Soko). As Ben, a musician, is losing his memories, he strikes out and becomes violent, ultimately destroying his relationship with Samantha.
艾玛（Emma）和裘德（Jude）决心不让他的记忆力损失破坏他们的关系。裘德甚至有资格参加试验计划，该计划将尝试一种称为的实验方法口腔颅穿刺, where a hole is surgically drilled in the top of one’s mouth into the brain cavity. When Ben is turned down for the experimental treatment because he tests positive for cocaine, he talks Emma, a veterinarian, into trying the method on him herself. That adds drama and intensity to the simple retelling of people losing their minds, but, ultimately, neither film could figure out how to come to a satisfactory “ending.”
The cinematography by Sean McElwee(some nice aerial shots and great scenery) is good, the acting is more than good, and Josh Crockett has done a fine job editing the film, but, ultimately, the failure to stick the landing hurt both “Apples” and “Little Fish.”
