HedgehoginPS

In light of later events, like the dog-walking woman and the Black birder on 25 May 2020, this is an important for documenting the character and intelligence of Christian Cooper, the Black birder. It's also one of the most sympathetic portrayals of the joys and value of watching birds that I have ever seen. The video recordings of individual species of birds going about their lives is very good. Photo and sound editing are top-notch. My one salient criticism of the film is that the different species should be more consistently identified. It was a pleasant way to spend an hour of pandemic isolation.

The Thin Yellow Line just played the Palm Springs International FilmFest. Having lived and worked in Mexico many years ago, I was immediately struck by its ring of authenticity. Everything about it reflects workaday life in "blue collar" Mexico. The story centers around a down-on-his-luck working stiff, Toño (Damian Alcaraz), encountering an old acquaintance who hires him to ramrod a crew of misfits (four guys who might have been picked up at some Home Depot parking lot) to paint a centerline on a back-country road in northern Mexico--210 km. in 15 days. The five of them, a beater pickup, an antiquated walk-behind spray painter, a wheelbarrow, and a dog undertake their own little odyssey. The task is simple; new challenges appear daily. Over a couple of weeks, what starts as a band of bothers becomes, slightly twisted, a band of brothers. The language, the horse play, the problems they encounter and their solutions to them are totally, characteristically, the Mexico I once knew. Because work pivots the plot, Thin Yellow Line exalts the working man in a way that few films of this genre do. Billed as a comedy (and occasionally quite funny), it's a minor-key Homeric, authentic slice of life in working class Mexico. An enjoyable film to watch, its awards are well deserved.

If Ingmar Bergman had directed the Monty Python crew through a script by August Strindberg and story boards by Edvard Munch, this is the film that might have resulted. Billed as a comedy, it produces the occasional chuckle, but humorous it isn't. A surreal Nordic allegory, as suggested by other reviewers, it might possibly be, but one would have to sit through it several times to extract that degree of narrative intent. I think I wouldn't have the patience. One can imagine that Swedes would find it much more meaningful, and funnier, than Americans for possessing the cultural context upon which the film clearly depends. There are a lot of subtleties of history, social mores, and such that get lost in translation.

One has to hope that the eponymous pigeon's existence is less dreary than the lives of the film's characters, or the writer's vision of the world. The DP and Art Director seem to have been a gleefully willing accomplices in the whole thing, however. The staging and photography are at times positively brilliant.