Reviews
Tribeca '08: Rednexploitation! "Tennessee," "From Within," "The Wild Man of Natividad."
Friday, May 2, 2008 | 12:18 PM
After a few rounds on the festival circuit, you start to wonder if the road to indie inauthenticity is paved with Southern accents. "Tennessee" is a banner example of the type of film that aims for grit and heartstrings by way of regional blue-collar misery and ends up seeming as genuine as a McDonald's sweet tea. The second film from Aaron Woodley, who's actually Canadian — so Canadian he's David Cronenberg's nephew — is indeed about Tennessee, along with New Mexico, and the states through which you'd have to drive in order to get from the latter to the former. In "Tennessee," all marriages are abusive, everyone drinks their liquor straight and someone can be treated for leukemia without losing a hair on his pretty head. The film's about two brothers who set off on a road trip to Knoxville to find their estranged father, from whom they fled years ago when he started getting rough with their mother. But you don't watch the film for them. You watch it, with glee in your heart, for Mariah Carey, who plays Krystal, the singin', cryin' Texan waitress who's on the run from her overbearing State Trooper husband, and whose flirtatious mothering of the siblings makes you wonder if the film is going to head into "Y "Tu Mamá También" realms. (It doesn't.)
Tribeca '08: "Let the Right One In."
Wednesday, April 30, 2008 | 12:11 PM
Red on white on white, Tomas Alfredson's "Let the Right One In" is a moody, surprising Nordic pre-teen love story about a bullied boy, Oskar, and the girl who moves in next door, Eli — a vampire. And it's not the perky goth fable it sounds like it could be — Oskar's a monochromatic, friendless lad who plays with a knife and dreams of killing everyone who's tormented him, while Eli's eating habits leave her and the surrounding walls smeared with gobs of blood. Set in an ice-encrusted Swedish backwater, the film is centered in the apartment building in which the two children live, a thin-walled structure where everyone dwells claustrophobically close to one another in the midst of swaths of empty land. Eli and Oskar prefer to be alone, which is why they meet — both go out at night to the courtyard for solitude, though Eli's always underdressed and in bare feet. She reflects that she's forgotten how to feel cold.
"Let the Right One In" isn't told entirely from Oskar's point of view, but it does have the elliptical quality of the internal life of an only half-emergent adolescent — incidents swarm into sharp focus like unconnected memories. It's a coming-of-age story, but only for Oskar — Eli, played by the remarkable Lina Leandersson, with enormous eyes and a dour face, has the air of an old woman in a juvenile body, but is really just an eternal girl, frozen at 12. For Oskar, who likes stories of death and visiting his father in the country, and otherwise lives in metropolitan isolation, Eli arrives as a form of very dark salvation, and the formation and arc of their relationship is a knife-edge balanced mixture of the gentle and the disturbing, right through the film's splendidly bittersweet ending.
Elegantly lensed to capture both the poetically bleak, birch tree snow globe exteriors and shabbier interiors of the town, "Let the Right One In" is the kind of film you like better a few days after first seeing it. Or at least I did — by the very nature of its central connection, the film's at an emotional remove, and it took some time mulling it over to really appreciate the inherent and uncompromising cruelty in its version of the world. That the film may include the gruesome ending of a previous iteration of the relationship Eli and Oskar strike up is the most unsettling fact of all — after all, she's never going to grow up.
"Let the Right One In" has been acquired by Magnet Releasing, though no theatrical dates have been announced yet.
[Photo: "Let the Right One In," Magnet Releasing, 2008]
+ "Let the Right One In" (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
Tribeca '08: "Somers Town."
Monday, April 28, 2008 | 1:15 PM
35-year-old director Shane Meadows seems unruffled by the burdens of being the current great hope of British cinema. "Somers Town," his sixth film and best yet, is all the finer for its modesty — shot in black and white and coming in at a neat 75 minutes, the tale of the friendship between two teens in the North London neighborhood of the title reaches for nothing beyond its grasp and is, because of it, just about perfect.
Meadows reunites with Thomas Turgoose, the fierce little thirteen-year-old he made the star of "This is England" after the kid demanded for five pounds in exchange for his audition. Two years older, a bit longer and leaner and at an awkward halfway point in adolescence, Turgoose is still an amazing find, brash and fearless and possessed of an expressive baby face and a irresistible laugh. He plays Tomo, a runaway from Nottingham who arrives in London with nothing more than a bag that's quickly stolen, and who takes up with Marek (Piotr Jagiello), a quiet Polish boy living with his father. Tomo's great talent is an untrammeled ability to impose on others, which he uses to cadge himself a place to stay with Marek, who anyway doesn't put up much of a fight. Marek likes the company, even if he has to hide Tomo from his father, who works all day and spends his nights drinking with other local Poles. The boys spend their days doing odd jobs for a local, semi-shady businessman, stealing Tomo a comically inappropriate outfit from the laundromat, and wooing the older, amused French waitress at a local diner with rides on a found wheelchair.
"Somers Town" was funded by Eurostar — the train service to Paris figures in at the end of the film. It's an odd fact that, taken with the short run-time, would seem to make "Somers Town" a difficult film to place in theaters, which is regrettable. "Somers Town" doesn't feel remotely like an ad; it feels, in fact, freer of burdens than any film I've seen recently, a scruffy and stupendously warm story of life in an unpretty part of the city with no lessons to teach or morals to impart.
"Somers Town" currently has no U.S. distribution.
[Photo: "Somers Town," Works International, 2008]
+ "Somers Town" (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
Tribeca '08: "Playing."
Friday, April 25, 2008 | 12:36 PM
For his tenth feature, "Jogo de Cena" (Playing), documentarian Eduardo Coutinho placed an ad in the paper calling for Rio de Janeiro women over the age of 18 with stories to tell to come to an audition. Naturally, everyone has a some kind of story to tell, but the subjects he selected were all particularly driven to perform, either because of a burning need to recount something that happened to them in the past or because they harbor aspirations toward acting. "Playing" is composed entirely of interviews conducted on a bare stage, monologues of women's stories in tall type, of heartbreak, of faith, of children lost or estranged, of departed lovers, of missed parents and their stand-ins. Coutinho's twist is that half of the women we see aren't the owners of the stories they tell. They're actresses interpreting the accounts, some of whom, like "Central Station"'s Marília Pêra, might be recognizable to audiences here.
Coutinho isn't the first, or the second, or the hundredth director to poke his finger through the gauzy fabric that separates fiction filmmaking from fact and wiggle it around. But "Playing"'s seemingly simple premise makes for an intriguingly layered and sometime plainly fascinating film in which your assumptions about whoever's on screen are constantly being undercut. Some stories the film revisits, revealing that their first telling was a dramatization, while others toggle between the teller and the reteller. My favorite tale was delivered by a woman with seeming absolute conviction who, at the end, turns to the camera and adds a "she said" that's almost an affront. We're never shown the original source.
It's the act of performance that most attracts Coutinho — how do you play a real and ordinary person? Do you imitate her, interpret her, add to the material she's given you? The actresses often tear up where the subjects won't, something they're forced to defend afterward — Coutinho dissects their choices with them, wanting to know why, for instance, one of them cries when describing the death of her son when the child's own mother didn't do so in the original interview. These talks yield a discussion of crying on camera that may sum up the film as a whole — tears are seen as an undeniably authentic display of emotion, one actress points out, which is why so many players on television and film like to show them off. But that's not true to how people actually cry — real tears, she explains, you blink back and try to hide.
"Playing" currently has no U.S. distribution.
[Photo: "Playing," VideoFilmes, 2007]
+ "Playing" (TribecaFilmFestival.org)
SXSW 2008: "Stop-Loss."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 | 6:00 PM
"Stop-Loss," Kimberly Peirce's first film since 1999's "Boys Don't Cry," tears itself into tortured pieces trying to be an impossible combination of things — an Iraq War film for the MTV crowd; Serious Cinema that's also a goggle-eyed aesthetic appreciation of Channing Tatum's hot bod, Ryan Phillippe's pretty face and Joseph Gordon-Levitt's expert broodiness; a celebration of the troops' badassery that doesn't condone their actions against collateral citizens; an issue flick that nevertheless sometimes earnestly recalls "Top Gun." Peirce's younger brother enlisted and went to Iraq, and she's reverent of the choice, which puts her in a bind — "Stop-Loss," unable to take a stance against the war its characters have signed up to fight, settles for being against its titular policy, which allows for enlisted soldiers to have their contracts extended without their consent by order of the President. In other words, the film's main beef isn't having to fight or get maimed or possibly die, it's having to do more than your fair share of it.
SXSW 2008: "Nights and Weekends."
Monday, March 17, 2008 | 9:10 AM
There's a meta-mumblecore movie just begging to be made that's set amidst the group of people who've been making mumblecore movies, and it would start off at the tense premiere screening of "Nights and Weekends." Co-directors, writers and stars Greta Gerwig and Joe Swanberg presented their third feature together to (and later took part in a candid Q&A in front of) a crowd half made up of friends and acquaintances uncomfortably aware that things had gotten ugly during the making of the film. In a mini-movement that's eluded agreed-upon definitions beyond the fact that its films are the collaborative creations of collections of friends, it was both stinging and poignant to see a film about a break-up that coincides with the break-up of a creative partnership. And "Nights and Weekends" is good, the best thing that Swanberg — who's on his fourth film in four years, and the first in which he's shared a co-director credit — has produced in his young career, maybe because his influence is balanced out by Gerwig's, and maybe because this is the first in which the shadow of adult life encroaches on the post-college bubble that's been both the playground and bane of his work.
SXSW 2008: "Medicine for Melancholy."
Thursday, March 13, 2008 | 9:10 AM
The details of Barry Jenkins' righteous "Medicine for Melancholy" — fixed-gear bikes and messenger bags, bottled iced tea and late night tacos, Rainbow Grocery and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, old Victorians and housing rights discussions — evoke a life I once lead so strongly that watching the film sent me into sense memory flashbacks. A bittersweet paean to San Francisco and its indie scene, "Medicine for Melancholy" is also a vivid semi-love story and a contemplation of race and gentrification in the city — and to answer the question that was posed to producer Justin Barber at the Q&A after a screening and turned by him to the crowd, no, it's not a mumblecore movie, for all that it's about a pair of twentysomethings spending the day talking. It doesn't look like one, and it has too much solidity and forthrightness; the characters actually confront their own emotions and each other, they have social and political concerns, they fight.
(When this subject was raised, the audience was vehement about not applying that label to this film — at 2008 SXSW, the bloom is off the mumblecore rose.)
They — 'Jo (Tracey Heggins) and Micah (Wyatt Cenac), along with director/writer Jenkins — are also black, something unseen in the kingdom of mumblecore and not exactly common in the larger world of indie culture of which it's a part. As Micah puts it, of the seven percent of San Francisco that's black, maybe one or two percent are part of their scene: "You ever realize just how few of us there really are?" It's that awareness that drives him to track her down after a one-night stand and to win her over into spending a meandering Sunday riding to the Museum of the African Diaspora (the one part of the film that leans a little heavily on its themes), cooking dinner, giggling about Rick James over a joint and going out dancing. He's charming, but has a chip on his shoulder, and she's not really sure what she's doing — her boyfriend, white, is away in London. The film is desaturated to the point that the only colors that come through, mostly reds, are muted, giving it a pensive feel, but also standing as a visual reminder of Micah's sense of isolation. "Medicine for Melancholy" is something like a movie mixtape, with a soundtrack from smallish bands rising up to carry us from scene to often ecstatic scene — it was shot in HD, but doesn't look it — to an end that's, fittingly, melancholy. It's an assured and impressive debut from Barry Jenkins, and one of the great finds of the festival.
[Photo: "Medicine for Melancholy," Strike Anywhere, 2008]
+ "Medicine for Melancholy" (SXSW)
+ "Medicine for Melancholy" (Official site)
SXSW 2008: "Wild Blue Yonder"
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 | 9:37 PM
Cinéma-vérité and the first-person documentary go to war in "Wild Blue Yonder," and vérité wins — this engrossing car wreck is an unintentional argument as to how difficult it is to successfully include yourself in your own nonfiction film. "Wild Blue Yonder" is about "a daughter's search for her father," as the filmmaker, Celia Maysles, puts it — that father is David Maysles, who with his brother Albert made seminal docs like "Grey Gardens" and "Gimme Shelter," and who passed away in 1987, when Celia was 7. Judith Maysles, Celia's mother and David's widow, fought it out with Albert over the rights to the Maysles brothers' films in an ugly court battle that ended in a settlement and the rights of all of the films, including "Blue Yonder," the film David was working on at the time of his death, becoming solely Albert's. The lawsuit pretty much ended communication between Maysles Films and Celia and Judith, until Celia decided to bridge the gap in the making of this, her own debut film.
SXSW 2008: "The Order of Myths."
Sunday, March 9, 2008 | 2:52 PM
Tradition is rooted in history, and history is littered with things we'd rather forget. Mobile, Alabama's Mardi Gras celebration is the oldest in the U.S., and some aspects of it, like a customary float depicting Folly chasing Death around a broken column, can't fully be explained even by those who grew up there. Others, like the fact that the celebration, the pride of the city and the generator of $227 million of income a year, is blatantly and surreally segregated into separate parades and pairings of Mardi Gras kings and queens for the black and white populations, can be broken down without much effort. But most of the people interviewed in Margaret Brown's superb documentary "The Order of Myths" instead perform an exquisite verbal dance around the issue, citing tradition, roots, history and the debatable fact that everyone prefers it this way. "The Order of Myths" is a tender, unsparing portrait of Mobile's Mardi Gras, but it's also a tremendously rich examination of how people carry on from day to day while negotiating the minefields of the past.
Helen Meagher, a coltish blond with a sweet-natured smile, is designated queen of Mardi Gras by the MCA &151; the Mobile Carnival Association, an all-white, old school Alabama organization. Stefanie Lucas, a glowingly round-faced elementary school teacher, is proclaimed queen by the all-black, slightly newer but just as entrenched MAMGA — the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association, once the Colored Carnival Association. As the film follows the queens and their accompanying kings through the fittings, coronations, lunches and balls leading up to the parades, it dips into the past, recent and further back. Helen comes from a long line of property owners and, once, slaveholders, one of whom commissioned the last slave ship to come from Africa over 50 years after the slave trade has been outlawed. Stefanie's ancestors arrived on that ship. Elsewhere, the costumes of some of the secret "mystic" societies who make up the parades recall, without question, those of the KKK; an outspoken debutante discusses her own liberal nature and free spirit while gradually being seduced by all of the pageantry; a few paeans are composed to moon pies; and the MAMGA king and queen pay an unprecedented visit to the MCA coronation.
It's heady material, but Brown doesn't let it bear the entire burden of the film. "The Order of Myths" is beautifully composed and shot, and, even better, delicately edited — while none of the subjects are let off easy, none are given unfair treatment. Parallels that could have been hammered in are allowed to breathe — someone discusses the city's love of the old oak trees that line the streets and makes a note of how they represent, literally, the area's roots; later, we see an image of a 19-year-old man who was found hanging from one of those trees in 1981, one of the country's last reported lynchings. A reveal, late in the film, of the filmmaker's own connections to Mobile and the carnival draws the film's fond and rueful tone together. Only someone who came from this world would have this kind of knowledge and access, and only someone with a bit of remove would be able to present it in such sharp detail.
[Photo: "The Order of Myths," Margaret Brown, 2008]
+ "The Order of Myths" (SXSW)
SXSW 2008: "Bi The Way."
Sunday, March 9, 2008 | 2:02 AM
There's an interesting doc to be found somewhere in the recent surge in the cachet of showing an openness to sometimes bat for the home team, or at least make out with the shortstop on a friend's couch after a few beers. "Bi The Way" is not it. The first film from Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, "Bi The Way" would like to be an exploration of our nation's shifting sexual mores, but it's so unfocused that it never really manages to argue its thesis, one that some of its own interviewees are hesitant to endorse. Is bisexuality actually on the rise? A slo-mo replay of the Britney-Madonna VMA kiss does not an argument make. Closer looks at a few subjects — an 11-year-old from an unconventional family, a male dancer getting into his first relationship with another man, a theater type with mother issues, a teenager girl, a couple exploring bringing in a third — are surrounded by interviews with academic and journalistic talking heads, and by footage of the filmmakers on a road trip, talking to people across the country about bisexuality. It's a very literal approach to capturing the cultural zeitgeist, I suppose, but stooping to footage of how your scouting process involves asking a Utah fast food drive-through attendant where one would find a bisexual Mormon doesn't come across as a cute joke, it comes across as an insulting flaunting of lazy filmmaking.
But the film does contain one fascinating figure — Josh, a kid on the cusp of puberty who's the son of "Tarnation" director Jonathan Caouette from an early fling with a female friend. Raised by his mother, but in touch and on good terms with his father and his father's boyfriend, Joshua can seem disturbingly grown up and over-informed, but also extraordinarily free, a child sprung from an experimental petri dish of openness and supportiveness in which his determining of his own sexuality is as close as it can come to being no big deal.
[Photo: "Bi The Way," Brittany Blockman and Josephine Decker, 2008]
+ "Bi The Way (SXSW)
+ "Bi The Way" (Official site)
SXSW 2008: "Humboldt County."
Saturday, March 8, 2008 | 1:27 PM
Term I wish someone cleverer than me would coin: one to describe that kind of movie in which a free-spirited (and ever so lightly damaged, like a can of discounted tomatoes) girl latches on to a glum male protagonist and hauls him off to introduce him to joy and laughter — see "Garden State," see "Elizabethtown," see everything in between. "Humboldt County," the feature debut of Danny Jacobs and Darren Grodsky, starts off looking like yet another entry in this genre, with Fairuza Balk playing Bogart, an actress/singer who swoops into L.A. to offer the promise of salvation to depressed med student Peter (Jeremy Strong), whose strict professor father (Peter Bogdanovich) has just failed him in his final class. But after taking Peter home to Humboldt with her after a one night stand, Bogart fades out of the film, which turns instead into a love story between Peter and a way of life — a ramshackle, dilated-pupils day-to-day funded by the illicit farming of marijuana. Brad Dourif, always a loopy pleasure, is a curmudgeonly physics prof who fled academia for a life in the woods with his spacey wife (Frances Conroy), his stepson Max (Chris Messina) and Max's sprite of a daughter (Madison Davenport).
"Humboldt County" involves a whole bunch of gawkish gazing at a rose-colored representation of the neo-hippie Humboldt lifestyle — constant weed consumption, a local school funded by a community pool of pot plants, an outhouse, gas lamps and plenty of wide-lensed shots of the eye-poppingly gorgeous landscape on this sparsely settled stretch of northern California coast. But despite all the "Look how kooky!," the film's genial and pleasant, and the expected transformation of the exaggeratedly buttoned-up Peter into a flannel-wearing expert on DIY irrigation systems is balanced by the less conventional way the film's main relationship becomes the friendship between him and the prickly Max, who's smart enough to see that the life his family is living is both an escape and a trap, and who's gambling on an oversized crop to lift him out of the cycle. Yes, you can stay too long at the party, and eventually the hubristic Max gets his comeuppance, driving Conroy and Dourif into unwieldy monologues and mild overacting — unable to recommend either the outlaw-farmer thing or the rejoin-the-system one, "Humboldt County" settles instead for making the case, vaguely, for doing something in between. Or at least taking a summer off to get really high and look at the ocean, which sounds none too shabby to me.
[Photo: Jeremy Strong in "Humboldt Country," Embark Productions, 2008]
+ "Humboldt County" (SXSW)
+ "Humboldt County" (Official site)
That tricky directorial debut.
Thursday, February 14, 2008 | 6:44 PM
There are two conflicting critical impulses one has to fight off before ever seeing (and presumably honestly reviewing) a film like Madonna's directorial debut "Filth and Wisdom," whose Berlin Film
Festival premiere yesterday was described by many as the hottest ticket
in town, even if that warmth was generated by a desire
to see La Madge commit acts of cinematic hubris. On one side is the urge to wield the long knife one's probably been sharpening since the film's presence at the festival was announced, and on the other is, perhaps, that wild contrarian compulsion to hold up the sure-to-be-maligned film as a misunderstood masterpiece. Unfortunately, no writer's been willing to go as far as the latter in the reviews of the film so far, but there has been a lot of "Hey, it's not actually awful!" A sampling of the range, from wretched to "huh":
Peter Bradshaw, Guardian: "Well, it had to happen. Madonna has been a terrible actor in many, many films and now - fiercely aspirational as ever - she has graduated to being a terrible director."
Leslie Felperin, Variety: "Having contributed to arguably the worst films of some other big-name helmers (i.e. Warren Beatty's 'Dick Tracy,' John Schlesinger's 'The Next Best Thing' and Abel Ferrara's 'Dangerous Game'), Madonna seems to have learned little about directing from her experiences in filmmaking. Her stylistic approach seems most akin to that of late-'80s/early-'90s pop videos, wherein story is often revealed without dialogue in music-backed montages, the likes of which abound here. It's as if she's taken her video for 'Papa Don't Preach' as her main dramaturgical template."
Jonathan Romney, Screen Daily: "While Filth And Wisdom may not quite inhabit the same Hall of Shame as Shanghai Surprise, Body of Evidence and (God save us) Swept Away, it's likely to be forgotten as quickly as most of them. The big surprise is that she's chosen to make her directing debut with a cheap and cheerful London ensemble comedy that's no better or worse than the average creaky low-budget Britflick."
Sheila Johnston, Telegraph: "The movie is - disappointingly, perhaps - not an outright embarrassment; there are even a couple of intentional laughs in it. It's not an entirely unpromising first effort. But the director would do well to hang on to her day job."
Ray Bennett, Hollywood Reporter: "'Filth and Wisdom' is unexpectedly sentimental, too, but the three leads are sufficiently engaging that while chaotic and more than a bit silly, the film in the end conjures up a surprising amount of goodwill."
James Christopher, London Times: "Despite its many shortcomings and an ending so mushy and neat it would embarrass Richard Curtis, Madonna has done herself proud. Her film has an artistic ambition that has simply bypassed her husband, the film director Guy Ritchie. She captures that wonderfully accidental nature of luck when people's lives intersect for a whole swathe of unlikely but cherishable reasons. Altmanesque would be stretching the compliment too far, but 'Filth and Wisdom' shows Madonna has real potential as a film director."
Daily Motion has a clip from the film here.
+ Filth and Wisdom (Guardian)
+ Filth and Wisdom (Variety)
+ Filth and Wisdom (Screen Daily)
+ Filth and Wisdom: Don't give up the day job, Madonna (Telegraph)
+ Filth and Wisdom (Hollywood Reporter)
+ Review: Madonna's Filth and Wisdom (London Times)
+ indieWIRE: Madonna's "Filth and Wisdom" (Daily Motion)
"Diary of the Dead."
Thursday, February 14, 2008 | 4:38 PM
With "Diary of the Dead," George A. Romero has retconned his zombie apocalypse series back to its beginnings, before the burdens of upping the scale in each installment backed things into tough-to-swallow scenarios like "Land of the Dead"'s fortress for the wealthy. In "Diary," it's present day, the dead have just commenced with the rising and the munching and everyone else is willfully resistant to accept how bad things are becoming. There's a guy, a girl, a few of their more edible friends and the end of the world -- and, oh yes, a camera with which to record it all. The unpolished filmmaking techniques that gave 1968's "Night of the Living Dead" the disconcerting air of a documentary have been traded in for new ones that explicitly signify the same -- shaky camerawork, uncertain lighting and actors repeatedly shrieking at an unseen shooter to just put the damn camera down already. Like "Cloverfield" and chunks of "Redacted," "Diary of the Dead" channels its story through the lens of one of its characters, the mostly unseen Jason Creed (Joshua Close), a Pittsburg film student who's directing a mummy movie out in the woods when everything goes to hell and, on the upside, provides him with some more compelling subject matter. Creed, a handful of fellow students and their hard-drinking British professor head out to find their families in the RV they were using for the production. We probably needn't tell you the trip doesn't go well.
Aside from the richly difficult-to-pin-down parallels of his first film, Romero's rarely shown what could be called a light touch with satire or subtext. "Diary" takes on its chosen target of truth and power in media by having its characters talk, sometimes endlessly and at the cost of scares and interest, about truth and power in media. The living are often more dangerous to each other than the sluggish dead in these films, but "Diary"'s characters have such a tendency toward taking ethical stands or speechifying during impractical moments that you start to feel like they deserve their inevitable chomping. The issue of how anyone could keep filming through the devouring of his friends by animated corpses is explained away as an obsession/coping mechanism for Jason, but no excuse is offered for how his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) can keep railing on the fact -- "If it didn't happen on camera, it didn't happen," she snips at him. We know Debra's due for a change of heart, because she also somberly narrates the film, presenting it as something edited together from Jason's footage with music for effect, because, as she says, "I am hoping to scare you, so that maybe you'll wake up."
Even with its serious ham-handedness, "Diary" has resonance: Jason posts what he's shot on the web, where it's a magnet for those wanting to get to the truth through the noise of misinformation from official sources, something that unmistakably recalls amateur coverage of Iraq, and what Brian De Palma did even less elegantly in "Redacted." There's both a virtue and a cost to this documentation, a cause to which Jason, it's not so much a spoiler to write, martyrs himself. "Diary" also martyrs itself to making its point -- as a horror film it has some scares, but also an overabundance of didacticism and listless downtime. The rare and ridiculous moments of humor -- a "don't mess with Texas" bit, a meta-rebuke of the recent rapid-undead trend and a mute Amish farmer -- are more than a relief. They're a gesture to the fact that "Diary" is, after all, a zombie movie, and that the audience is owed a little fun.
+ "Diary of the Dead" (Myspace)
NYAFF 2007: "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A."
Wednesday, June 20, 2007 | 3:41 PM
You hear "Takashi Miike made a gay prison love story" and you think... well, we're not sure what you think, but we imagine it's probably blood splattered, sexually incomprehensible, and includes someone cackling maniacally in the background. Of course, the only thing you can really generalize about Miike's films is that he sure makes a lot of them; "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (more literally translated as "4.6 Billion Years of Love") comes on the tail of "violence across the ages" epic "Izo," an episode of "Ultraman Max" and fabulous, traumatic children's film "The Great Yokai War," which screened at last year's NYAFF. "Big Bang Love" is, unlikely enough, a pensive, symbolism-laden art film that regards its delinquent protagonist pair with rueful tenderness and bemused sorrow.
Shiro (Masanobu Ando) is, at the film's outset, dead -- strangled -- and Jun (Ryuhei Matsuda), who was found with him, immediately confesses to the crime. From there the film stutters back to when the two arrived at the prison, blood-splattered from the respective murders they've each committed and eyeing each other as they're stripped and processed. Shiro is all rage and violence, while Jun is remote and affectless, and Shiro falls into protecting Jun from the other inmates. It's no "Oz"-style relationship, though, and it's not, despite the heated pans down Shiro's tattooed form, physical; the two have an immediate and unspoken understanding of each other expressed through the sweetly vulnerable conversations they have in their few moments alone. The world of "Big Bang Love" is otherwise cold and methodical, from the sparse, abstract sets that recall Lars von Trier to the circling investigation into Shiro's death that shapes the film.
Looming outside the prison are a rocket ship and an ancient pyramid. One is a way to space and the other supposedly leads to heaven, we're told -- they're the most overt instances of the film's reoccuring application of astral imagery to emotion. It's as if in "Big Bang Love"'s desolate setting science is the inadequate sole language available to describe human connection, and the damaged young men experiencing such things are as foreign and incomprehensible as alien beings.
"Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" will screen at the IFC Center June 28 at 7:00pm and July 5 at 6:45pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "Big Bang Love: Juvenile A" (IMDb)
NYAFF 2007: "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay."
Monday, June 18, 2007 | 12:50 PM
Park Chan-wook (mostly) trades in the vengeance for offbeat romance in "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK," a love story set in the most adorable mental institution in all of Korea. Lim Su-jeong plays Young-goon, who's committed following a possible suicide attempt after she's convinced herself that she's actually a cyborg and therefore do not need to eat. Pop star Rain is Il-sun, who suffers from the delusion that he's
disappearing and that he also has the ability to steal aspects of people's personalities. It's meant to be fanciful, but Park both engages the fact that little sympathy or understanding is given to those suffering from mental illness in many parts of Asia -- Young-goon's mother doesn't understand why her daughter can't just act normal enough to not disturb the customers at their family-owned restaurant -- while displaying no particular understanding of mental illness himself. The craziness of everyone in the asylum has a direct cause, whether it be parental abandonment, societal pressure or just a particularly traumatic event (however you choose to define that -- in one case, it's failing an audition for the Edelweiss Boys and Girls Choir, which would be a dire blow to us as well).
Park is a prodigious pop filmmaker, and while "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK" doesn't zip along like his earlier work, it offers a snappy, sun-soaked view of the shelter from a unkind world that group delusions have provided the institution's residents. The film would be slight even without the failings mentioned above, but Lim, wafer thin and capable of producing some decidedly uncutesy rictus expressions, does manage to find flashes of genuine sadness in her character's suffering. Park, meanwhile, having gotten his chirpy jollies out, will next move on to vampire movie "Evil Live."
"I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay" will screen at the IFC Center June 24 at 6:20pm and June 30 at 8:15pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "I'm a Cyborg, But That's Okay" (IMDb)
NYAFF 2007: "The Banquet."
Monday, June 18, 2007 | 10:58 AM
Somehow, the historical martial arts epic has become the Chinese answer to the Merchant Ivory film, steeped in prestige, crafted for international consumption, and skipping over complicated contemporary issues to revel in an earlier time period when people wore prettier, more complicated clothing. "The Banquet," directed by Feng Xiaogang, is a Gertrude-centric "Hamlet" transposed to tumultuous 10th century China and cut through with generous dollops of balletic, wired-assisted fight scenes. It's a categorically sumptuous film -- from cavernous palace halls to the elegant unfurling of blood in forest stream, there's no chance at visual extravagance passed up. It's not enough to make up for the film's almost complete lack of vitality, but it sure is nice to look at.
"The Banquet" has more than a little in common with Zhang Yimou's "Curse of the Golden Flower" -- both are focused on women furiously manuevering for their own survival in the viperous, gilded courts of ancient China, and both were supposed to star Gong Li, who passed on "The Banquet" due to scheduling conflicts. In her place is Zhang Ziyi, who's seems more like a kitten playing at being a big cat as Empress Wan, once a court maiden in love with Prince Wu Luan (Daniel Wu), but chosen as a bride to the emperor instead, causing the unhappy Wu Luan to leave the court to immerse himself in theater and music. At the film's open, the former emperor has been murdered with the "Hamlet" poison of choice (ear!), and Wan has taken up with his murderer, the new emperor (Ge You), in order to protect herself and Wu Luan. Various machinations and assassination attempts follow as the prince arrives at court, culminating in a midnight banquet at which everyone's agendas are bloodily revealed.
The famous choreographer Yuen Woo-ping (the man behind "The Matrix" films as well as "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and dozens of others) put together the action sequences, which director Feng shoots in slow motion so luxuriant it's hard not to giggle. Poetic? Sure. Silly? Totally. When a genre is shoulder to shoulder with self-parody, it might be time to give it a rest. Nevertheless, Zhang and Wu have excellent thwarted chemistry, even expressed via a loving swordfight. Zhou Xun (of "Suzhou River") gets the best (if also, in retrospect, most foolish) death scene in a film heavy with them as the Ophelia character.
"The Banquet" will screen at the IFC Center June 22 at 8:15pm and June 27 at 8:45pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "The Banquet" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "The Banquet" (IMDb)
NYAFF 2007: "Memories of Matsuko."
Thursday, June 14, 2007 | 10:31 PM
A middle-aged woman is murdered by the river. There's no one to mourn her -- she lived alone in squalor, barely removed from homelessness. Her neighbors knew only that she smelled bad and sometimes screamed to herself at night. Her 20-year-old nephew Sho (Eita), who had no idea she even existed, is enlisted by his father to clear out her apartment, where, sorting through the remnants of her life, he learns that the woman, Matsuko (Miki Nakatani), bounced from terrible relationship to terrible relationship, was disowned by their family, worked as a prostitute and served time for murder. All in all a pretty wretched life, but what makes the self-proclaimed "fairy tale tragedy" "Memories of Matsuko" so good, even a little great, is that Matsuko refused to accept so, and accordingly, the film is both a musical and a brilliant whirl of stylized, candy-colored visuals, "The Life of Oharu" by way of a neon "Amelie."
Like Mizoguchi's miserable heroine, Matsuko was once ensconced in a respectable life. In flashbacks, we see her first in her early twenties, working as a middle-school teacher and being wooed by a handsome coworker. She's thrilled by the promise of romance, but the love she really yearns for is paternal -- her solemn father has always favored her sweet, invalid sister and scarcely given Matsuko any attention. When she's forced to quit her job after a misunderstanding when one of her students steals some money on a field trip, her troubles at home come to a head, and in shame and rage she leaves, forever, as it turns out.
From there, she falls into a relationship with an abusive, alcoholic writer, and then on to one with his married rival, whose attacks turn out to be emotional. Then on to a soapland, and, more degradingly, out of the soapland, no longer in fashion and unwanted, and into the arms of a pimp, and onwards toward an ending we already know. This is, under its giddy appearance, unrelentingly grim melodrama -- every fresh start arrives hand in hand with dread at what will come next. Matsuko's no martyr; she has no sense of self-worth, she makes awful decisions, is more than a bit pathetic, and embraces her role as a human punching bag, but she maintains an unwavering faith in the belief that happiness can and must lie only in other people, and when each tragedy has her declaring her life is surely at an end, each new man has her singing again. She's is a holy fool -- she can't not love completely and selflessly without judgment or discrimination. Her devotion is so total that it's frightening, even ultimately repellent to the men she's involved with, and it leads her to believe that no one will ever love her back, because no one is willing to love with her reckless total commitment.
Director Tetsuya Nakashima last chronicled suburban subculture malaise in the enjoyable trifle "Kamikaze Girls," and here that fanciful visual style kaleidoscopes out to encompass an entire world of magic in the mundane and the woeful. The film's most indelible image is one of an amusement park on the roof of a city department store, a setting of impossible wonder when first glimpsed in a childhood memory, and later the more prosaic, bittersweet backdrop to a grown-up confrontation framed by a Greek chorus of stage performers. Almost as memorable is the dreamlike, starlit grassy field in which Matsuko meets her end, and in which the film finds in its foreordained tragedy an unexpected and well-earned moment of grace.
"Memories of Matsuko" will play at the Japan Society July 7 at 8:45pm and July 8 at 1:00pm. It has no US distribution.
+ "Memories of Matsuko" (SubwayCinema.com)
+ "Memories of Matsuko" (IMDb)
NYAFF 2007: "Exte."
Thursday, June 14, 2007 | 5:28 PM
The New York Asian Film Festival starts June 22 -- leading up to the festival, we'll be publishing reviews here on the blog and eventually gathering them over at IFC News.
So, Sion Sono's "Exte" is a film about haunted hair extensions, but it isn't a parody of the declining J-horror trend and its nonstop parade of droopy-locked ghost girls. With its hirsute spectral source taking a back seat to a vampishly cruel older sister and a goofy hair fetishist, it's not exactly a serious endeavor either. Like Takashi Miike's less successful supernatural cell phone horror pastiche "One Missed Call," "Exte" keeps a straight face through a wacky set-up, and comes up with, if not quite scares, at least imaginative and impressive death-by-tress sequences, including one in which a victim gets up close and literal with the expression "being given the hairy eyeball."
Sono made a name for himself among the fanboys both here and in Japan with 2002's "Suicide Circle" (semi-sequel "Noriko's Dinner Table" is currently playing at the Pioneer Theater in New York), a film that used horror conventions to explore the country's high suicide rate. "Exte" doesn't have such social satire in mind -- central character Yuko (played by Chiaki Kuriyama, best known as Gogo Yubari) is an apprentice at a salon and approaches her chosen career with all of the ganbatte spirit a plucky drama heroine can be expected to muster. The town's police force have discovered a dead girl secreted in a shipping crate filled with hair extensions. They speculate that she was killed so that her organs could be sold on the black market, but before they can investigate further, her corpse is stolen by a morgue worker who's enchanted by the way her hair continues growing even in death. He pawns her postmortem locks off on Yuko's salon, and customers start finding out the hard way that they're infused with the dead girl's vengeful spirit.
The ghost may do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to killings, but its Yuko's slatternly bully of a sister Kiyomi (Tsugumi) who's the more frightening figure. Striding into Yuko's nascent independent life unannounced to paw through her things and drop off her unfortunate, abused daughter for a few days while she goes out to party, she carries with her an implicit history of Yuko's dismal family life. Kiyomi's power to harm may not be otherworldly, but it's considerable -- Yuko scrambles in her wake while her salon coworkers look on, unsympathetic.
"Exte" will play at the Japan Society July 5 at 8:30pm and July 7 at 3:30pm. It has no US distribution.
Cannes remnant: "My Blueberry Nights."
Wednesday, June 6, 2007 | 1:51 PM
One last one.
Nah, we didn't like it much either. Looking back at "My Blueberry Nights" with some remove, though, the film doesn't seem such a crushing disappointment as much as just Wong Kar Wai on an off day. He was certainly due. The run of "Happy Together," "In the Mood for Love," "2046" and his "Eros" segment "The Hand" makes it easy to forget that there have been other times his signature fixations, his heady visual style and his narrative aimlessness haven't congealed into a great film. That it should happen with his highest profile film to date is a shame, but "My Blueberry Nights" isn't a complete write-off -- it's just not, with the exception of one silent, quivery kiss, shot through with that particular cinematic felicity that suffuses his successes.
Part of that's the setting: Wong's America turns out to be a diffuse and figurative creation, sketched out in half-filtered details: New York is empty streets and elevated subway trains, Memphis is trolley cars and "Try A Little Tenderness" on the jukebox. It's all as lusciously photographed as you'd expect, but also feels stretched thin, like he took the hyperdense Hong Kong of "Chungking Express" and spread it out across an entire continent. The best parts of the film take place in New York, where a winsome heartbroken girl played by Norah Jones starts frequenting a cafe and chatting with the scruffily charming owner (Jude Law) in the aftermath of a bad breakup. You really couldn't do much better by way of director for your debut than did Jones, who, done up as a dusky 50s ingenue, looks fantastic in her first on-screen role. She not a strong actress, but that only grates in the beginning -- as the film goes on, she's more an unobtrusive observer, taking in the lessons imparted to her by those she meets on the road once she takes off, not yet ready for what's blossomed into a tentative pre-courtship.
Those middle segments, in Memphis and Nevada, are clunkier, in part because those aforementioned lessons are delivered with such discordant directness (Wong co-wrote the script by mystery writer Lawrence Block), and in part because of the context-free casting. The buttoned-down David Strathairn plays a lovelorn drunk; the aristocratic Rachel Weisz a trashy Tennessee bombshell. Natalie Portman, in bleached curls and a thigh-skimming dress, is supposed to be a strutting, seen-it-all poker player, and it's the toughest act to buy.
It's Chan Marshall, the singer also known as Cat Power and whose "The Greatest" serves as the warmly weary theme of the film's first segment, who makes the biggest impression in the least amount of screen time. In what's again inexplicable casting, she plays, honeyed twang and all, one of the character's Russian ex-girlfriend. Turning up at the edge of a night, she sweetly embodies the universe the rest of the film aspires to encompass, one of unguarded moments in emptying bars and swept-up restaurants.
"My Blueberry Nights" will be released in the US by the Weinstein Company.
+ "My Blueberry Nights" (Festival-Cannes.fr)
+ "My Blueberry Nights" (IMDb)
Cannes remnant: "Flight of the Red Balloon."
Friday, June 1, 2007 | 6:40 PM
Hou Hsiao Hsien's "Flight of the Red Balloon" was commissioned by the Musee d'Orsay, and the film finds it way there at its close, as children peer at Vallotton's "The Balloon" and are coaxed through a discussion of whether the painting is a happy one, or a sad one. It's as close as one comes to feeling any sense of narrative pressure from the film, which combines Hou's typically exquisite naturalism with melancholy Parisian imagery inspired by a film doubtless thrust upon many an unwilling child by loftily intentioned parents, Albert Lamorisse's 1956 "The Red Balloon." Simon, the child in Hou's film, sometimes has his own balloon bobbing alongside him, and drifts in the half-emergent awareness of childhood. The adults in his life, as one points out, are a bit more complicated. Foremost is his mother, played by Juliette Binoche in a valiantly unflattering though not unsympathetic role as a blowsy single parent devoted to her theatrical puppet troupe and struggling to rid her house of the freeloading friends of her lover, who has taken off for Montreal to write a novel and seems to have no intention of coming back. Binoche is fantastic as one of those warm, ramshackle human beings whose emotions seem to always be slipping the reins of their control; though sometimes shrill, her Juliette is always genial and all but invites others to prop her up. In the beginning of the film the one she's found to do this is Song (Song Fang), a sometimes amusingly even-keeled (her sentences are always punctuated with "d'accord" -- "all right") Chinese film student to serve as Simon's nanny. Song is also using Simon in her student film, itself an update of Lamorisse's, and in one of the most charming scenes we see Simon trotting down the street being followed by a balloon being carried by a man in full green screen costume.
We loved this film, but while watching it couldn't help but think that there's a reason Hou's work rarely make much headway in the US. His muted narratives aren't difficult to follow as much as unfriendly to the even slightly impatient. Lacking the visual voluptuousness of his last, "Three Times," the slender slices of Parisian life depicted in "Flight of the Red Balloon" require a predisposed viewer to capture interest, which, we suppose, is exactly what the film will attract when it reaches theaters here this year. The dramas it delineates are slight but momentous, not at all like those in your average movie, but a lot like those in everyday life.
"Flight of the Red Balloon" will be released in the US by IFC First Take.
+ "Flight of the Red Balloon" (Festival-Cannes.fr)
+ "Flight of the Red Balloon" (IMDb)
Cannes remnant: "Terror's Advocate."
Thursday, May 31, 2007 | 3:55 PM
We swore we get these last few up this week or not at all, by gum.
Jacques Vergès, a famous, infamous French lawyer, is the focus of Barbet Schroeder's dense documentary "Terror's Advocate." If it didn't summon lingering memories of Al Pacino bellowing that God is a tight-ass and a sadist, "The Devil's Advocate" would really be a better English title. Vergès has made his name defending the seemingly indefensible, among them Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, terrorist Carlos the Jackal, and, he's claimed, Slobodan Milošević. Schroeder seems to harbor an unflattering opinion of Vergès, though the film is no an easy hatchet job. Schroeder once let Idi Amin damn himself by "directing" his own documentary self-portrait. Here, Vergès, dapper and cigar-smoking, is also a cheery and willing participant, but while Schroeder traces his life through warrens of high-profile courtroom trials, international terrorist incidences and moral relativism, Vergès remains an elusive and unplumbable figure.
Vergès went from being an anticolonialist student activist to being the young lawyer sent to defend Djamila Bouhired, a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front. Using what would become his signature "rupture defense," in which he attacks the very social structures supporting the trial, together with an international media campaign, he freed her and later married her and, still later, left her to vanish off the grid from 1970-78. His whereabouts during the time are still unknown, though the most popular theory is that he was advising Pol Pot in Cambodia. He's twinkly-eyed and dissembling about it all, even as he goes on to described wooing later client Magdalena Kopp, the wife of terrorist Carlos the Jackal, by smuggling Armagnac into prison to pour on her holiday treat, ice cream.
Vergès is almost a fantastical figure, a besuited legal representative who seems to have stepped out of the chaotic multinational ether on behalf of terrorists and ousted dictators the world over. At times he seems to be motivated by righteous belief in the cause he represents, other times by the attention or the sheer challenge. His slightly demonic cast is abetted by the fact that he's been connected to so many major figures in the last four decades of international unrest that "Terror's Advocate" actually dissolves under its own weight. To give context to Vergès' life to date, the film races through reams of background delivered by a variety of talking heads. At almost 2 1/2 hours, it's at once not nearly enough and far too much -- an avalanche of ill-shaped information that obliterates Schroeder's end goals. If this is a portrait of Vergès, it's an interesting, muddied, unsatisfying one. If it's a Cliffs Notes of contemporary terrorism, its attempting the impossible for a feature film.
Magnolia Pictures will release "Terror's Advocate" in the US.
+ "Terror's Advocate" (Official site)
+ "Terror's Advocate" (Festival-cannes.fr)
Cannes: "Boarding Gate."
Wednesday, May 23, 2007 | 12:42 PM
Cannes seems to have a strong idea as to what a midnight movie is, and it appears to be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the designation as we know it. The sole midnight screening we caught was of Olivier Assayas' "Boarding Gate," which is technically a genre film, an elliptical, shellshocked thriller starring Asia Argento. "Boarding Gate" lives in the same opaque world as the needle-sharp "demonlover," an awfully unfriendly one in which globalization seems to have leached all humanity and softness from its characters, each of whom nurses a bundle of not always explicated agendas and is involved in some sort of mundane but dangerous multinational racket.
Argento's character Sandra spends half the film in Paris verbally and then physically sparring with her former lover, a fading businessman played by Michael Madsen. She spends the second half on the lam in Hong Kong, having fled to join her new love (Carl Ng), only to be apparently betrayed and abandoned. Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth has a slightly stiff role as a Cantonese-speaking expat heavy, while Hong Kong starlet Kelly Lin plays a steely, smiling businesswoman. The film is a whirlwind of dislocation, particularly in Asia, where Assayas takes winding us through exploring karaoke clubs and shady businesses tucked floors up in downtown skyscrapers, or dark back corridors that suddenly empty into crowded noodle shops. The machinations fueling the plot remain only half-graspable by the film's end.
We're still unsold on the distinctive charms of Ms. Argento, who looks fierce stalking around in black lingerie, spike heels and a gun, but who's a strange and slurry presence on film. She's a little too unhinged to play femme fatale, or maybe she's just bent on reinventing the term -- roles like this and past ones in Abel Ferrara's "New Rose Hotel" and Michael Radford's "B. Monkey" cast her as the precarious, nationless screen siren of the future circa 1998. She is, like "Boarding Gate," both compelling and off-putting.
"Boarding Gate" currently has no US distributor.
+ "Boarding Gate" (Festival-Cannes.fr)
+ "Boarding Gate" (IMDb)
Cannes: "No Country For Old Men."
Sunday, May 20, 2007 | 5:13 PM
"No Country For Old Men" is the best thing the Coens have ever done. We would never have guessed that Cormac McCarthy's laconic fatalism would combine so well with the brothers detached genre sensibilities, but here it is -- a dark thriller laced with darker humor that unravels to reveal something greater, wiser and regretful.
Josh Brolin (Josh Brolin!) is Llewellyn Moss, who stumbles on the wreckage of a drug deal gone wrong while hunting out on the plains of West Texas (as more than one later visitor to the site observes, as if to underline the carnage, they even shot the dog). Amongst the bodies he finds a load of Mexican heroin and $2 million in bundles of $100s in a leather briefcase.
Moss is careful -- the outstanding first sequence outlines his methodical competence, from his retrieval of his own shotgun shells to his patience in approaching a man who may or may not be dead. Still, in taking the money he acquires an enemy even more efficiently badass: Anton Chigurh, played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem in the kind of role that has "Best Supporting Actor" written all over it, is a terrifyingly flat hired killer with a Prince Valiant-in-hell haircut, an unnaturally deep voice and a cattle gun. In his strangeness, he verges on being an element of the supernatural -- one character even calls him "a ghost." Moss and Chigurh engage in an epic duel of sorts span