Whether I'm keeping up with new movies in theaters, catching up on films I haven't seen, or rewatching favorites, I don't have the time or inclination for viewing movies that are supposedly so bad that they become good. I chose to make an exception for THE ROOM.
I was unaware of this cult film until reading A.V. Club writer Scott Tobias' New Cult Canon entry on it. (An Entertainment Weekly article about the film and the phenomenon is also essential reading.) THE ROOM sounded intriguingly awful, but I couldn't locate it on Netflix and just assumed it wasn't available on DVD. When I found out about Columbus Alive's private screening of it tonight, I knew I needed to go if possible. Thanks to Alive's Melissa Starker for getting me on the list to attend.
Although it plays as comedy, THE ROOM is a drama about sensitive banker Johnny (Tommy Wiseau) and his cheating, scheming fiancée Lisa (Juliette Danielle). (I'm not buying after the fact claims that THE ROOM is supposed to be as hilarious as it is.) Lisa seduces Johnny's best friend Mark (Greg Sestero), who is conflicted about the affair because he is Johnny's best friend and Lisa knows that he is Johnny's best friend.
THE ROOM is so incompetently made that the terrible acting and writing take a back seat to the comic artlessness. Viewing this on projected video made it hard to notice the camera's infamous focus problems, yet it isn't hyperbole to say that THE ROOM is shot and assembled as though writer, director, and star Wiseau doesn't know the first thing about film grammar.
Characters come and go without explanation. Plot developments are introduced and discarded, sometimes within the same scene. THE ROOM is essentially a long string of non sequiturs that binds the character's (and Wiseau's) heartbreak. Well, that and three--or was it four?--ridiculously long and determinedly unerotic sex scenes in the first thirty or so minutes.
It's remarkably difficult to make a movie this bad on purpose. Only something made out of tremendously misguided passion and arrogance could achieve the magical crapitude of THE ROOM. Wiseau seems deadly serious about his jaundiced take on women and relationships. Laughable as the movie is, his anguish pours out from this personal cinematic statement. Of course, it's such earnestness in incompetency that makes THE ROOM consistently funny.
That sincerity may also be why, for all of its technical and artistic shortcomings, THE ROOM is compulsively watchable. I couldn't wait to see what utter nonsense would come next. Most bad films are routinely bad; THE ROOM is uncommonly bad.
Although I was foiled in my Netflix search for THE ROOM, I've since learned that it can be purchased on DVD. (How else would a projected DVD have been shown this evening?) I wouldn't have wanted to have watched this for the first time at home by myself.
THE ROOM is something that's best seen with a lot of people. Witnessing an astonishingly inept movie with the small group gathered tonight in Surly Girl Saloon's party room made for the kind of fun, communal experience that moviegoing is supposed to be but often isn't. Here's one time when talking during the movie added to the ambience.
Perhaps an enterprising Columbus movie theater will give THE ROOM a midnight movie run. I've got to think this thing would play like crazy.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Ebertfest 2009: Day 3
The two academic panels that commenced day three of the 11th annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival couldn't have been more apropos for my film critic self. The discussions, titled Movies & Everyday Life and Film Criticism & the Internet, would seem to get to the fundamentals of what I do: thinking about the movies (and seeing them) on a regular basis and writing about them online.The broadly titled first panel was less about how movies might be incorporated into one's daily life--something I'd propose is increasingly common due to the features and clips available for immediate access online--and more about how films reflect ordinary people and if general audiences are willing to see them. This seems to be a recurring topic for debate at Ebertfest. Much of the talk was familiar to me, especially the dragged out audience comments/questions that needed to be kept in check by Robert's Rules of Order, but it was interesting to hear Ramin Bahrani's thoughts because he's someone who thinks deeply about these issues and can articulate himself well.
(Frozen River actress Misty Upham)The film criticism discussion suffered from having ten people on the panel. With all those highly opionated people and a broad subject, keeping focus and letting everyone get their say was a challenge. Presumably all of the critics on the panel make a living writing about films, but the current state of the profession suggests to me that for most it is a labor of love and will only become more of a hobbyist's pursuit as newspaper positions are eliminated and paying gigs dry up even more.
(Festival director Nate Kohn, Begging Naked director Karen Gehres, festival blogger Lisa Rosman)The screening side of the festival's day kicked off with another documentary. It's arguable that everything shown at Ebertfest to this point has been a doc of a sort. Even the lone fiction narrative shown so far, Chop Shop, incorporated a naturalistic style meant to evoke real experiences, and Frozen River, screened later in the day, also possessed a feel for documentary truth. Usually the festival isn't so singleminded, so I wonder if it was purposeful this year.
For nine years Begging Naked director Karen Gehres interviewed her friend Elise Bainbridge Hill to tell her story. The unvarnished look at this woman's life reveals that she ran away from home to New York City at the age of fifteen and quickly became a prostitute and heroin addict. Eventually she cleaned up and made a home in the tight space of a converted air shaft of an apartment building. This was also where she worked on her art, whether painting or making jewelry.
At 30 Hill reentered the sex industry as a stripper in Times Square, but NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani was working on clearing out those businesses. She was eventually left without a job. Her mental condition detiorated, she was evicted, and moved into Central Park where she now lives.
Begging Naked is an unvarnished documentary with great sympathy for and dedication to the person at the center of it. Clearly the film could not have been made without the close relationship between the filmmaker and her subject, but that intimacy breeds an incompleteness in this woman's story. The film feels a lot of righteous anger at how Giuliani's cleaning up of 42nd Street left her friend unemployed and how Hill's eviction pushed her into a deeper set of problems, although it's unclear from the information provided whether the eviction was justified.
My main issue with Begging Naked is one that is far too common with documentaries. Enchanted with the subject, the filmmaker sets up the story but doesn't have enough material to shape it into an arc. Thus the film gets stuck in a loop repeating the same information. In this case that means seeing over the course of years that Hill is living in Central Park and still doing her art. It's fine to a point, but without Hill's scandalous background, I don't know what makes this an exceptional individual story or what the film has to say about homelessness and mental illness in general.
(The Alloy Orchestra's set-up)
Now for something completely different... The Alloy Orchestra's accompaniment of a silent movie is almost an annual occurrence at Ebertfest. It's one of my favorite parts of the festival, perhaps because this is the one time during the year I can experience it, perhaps because they're awfully good at what they do. Their score for The Last Command was more melodic than their typically percussive music, but it was a wonderful complement to the action on screen.
This year the trio wrote and played a score for Josef von Sternberg's 1928 melodrama about a Russian general who led the czar's armies but fled the country when the revolutionists overthrew imperial rule. In The Last Command the once-powerful Grand Duke (Emil Jannings) is now one of many scrabbling for work as an extra in Hollywood films.
It's a vibrant, beautifully crafted film that I feel like I'd have more to say about with the proper time outside of festival fever. Rather than slop together some poorly supported thoughts, I'd rather share some of great intertitles written by Herman J. Mankiewicz, who went on to write some other Hollywood picture. I didn't scribble these down until the movie concluded, but I think I remembered these pretty closely:
-"You are my prisoner of war...and my prisoner of love." (The general says this to a female revolutionist who improbably reciprocates his feelings of affection.)
-"The woman belongs to me. She goes with the coat." (Uttered by a soldier who has taken the general's coat.)
-"And so the backwash of a tortured nation carries another extra to Hollywood." (How's that for describing the general's path from military leadership to one of many Russians in a stack of headshots.)
-"Is that beard supposed to be Russian? It looks like an ad for cough drops." (Hair and makeup people in Hollywood just don't get any respect, do they?)
A happy surprise was that Guy Maddin, whose My Winnipeg screened on day two, joined the post-film discussion on stage. This kind of movie is clearly something near and dear to him, so it was fun to listen to him expound on it.
(WGN's Dean Richards, Frozen River director Courtney Hunt, Misty Upham, and Sony Pictures Classics co-president Michael Barker)
During the post-film discussion for Frozen River director Courtney Hunt joked that there would not be a TV series based on the film. There would not be weekly episodes built upon whoever climbed into and out of the trunk of Ray's car. The thing is that having seen the film a second time, the parallels to AMC television series Breaking Bad were apparent.
Like Breaking Bad's cancer-stricken science teacher Walt (Bryan Cranston) joining up with his burnout former student Jesse (Aaron Paul) to cook and sell meth, Melissa Leo's Ray and Misty Upham's Lila are unlikely partners in smuggling illegals into the United States through Mohawk territory. Both sets of characters are involved in the criminal enterprise out of desperation to survive and provide for their families. They all are largely unconcerned about the ramifications of their actions as long as they get paid. Walt and Ray have a set point they're trying to reach where they get out. Of course, things don't work out how any of them plan, and the suspense comes from identifying with and rooting on main characters doing despicable things in the name of their family's best interest.
Leo and Upham's performances are critical to the success of Frozen River. Seeing Upham in person at the festival presents startling proof of how she deglamorized herself to transform into the character. It would be easy to write off the film's achievement due to powerhouse acting alone, but Hunt's attentive direction and concise and detailed screenplay announces that she's one to watch as much as her lead actresses.
(Grades: The Last Command and Frozen River: B+; Begging Naked: C)
Friday, April 24, 2009
Ebertfest 2009: Day 2
(Morning panel discussion at the Illini Union Pine Lounge)While nearly all of the 1600 seats in the Virginia Theatre are usually filled for each screening, a smaller group turns out for the morning panel discussions held on campus at the University of Illinois. Most of the seats are taken, but the numbers simply don't compare.
The lone Thursday panel was titled Movie Making & Distribution in Times of Turmoil. The panelists, pictured above, were Warner Home Video vice-president Ronnee Sass, Woodstock director Michael Wadleigh, Begging Naked director Karen Gehres, Trouble the Water co-directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, Sita Sings the Blues director Nina Paley, My Winnipeg director Guy Maddin, and moderator and festival director Nate Kohn. The discussion produced interesting comments from time to time, but since most of the panelists were either first-time feature directors or, in Wadleigh's case, no longer working in the system, perspective on the topic seemed fairly limited.
Having a distributor certainly helps in getting a movie seen, but a better topic might have probed the problem of finding viewers even when a film has distribution. Arthouse theaters have fallen victim to the same kind of model that bigger films have where an opening weekend splash is essential. In the case of these smallers films it's even more important because those first couple days determine if they'll stick in the theaters for another week. With limited promotion, it's an uphill battle for these kinds of movies to stay long enough to reach moviegoers through word of mouth.
(Time Out Chicago film critic Hank Sartin, Guy Maddin, and Ramin Bahrani)Over at the Virginia Theatre the day began with Maddin's My Winnipeg. I'd seen the film before, although I had found myself in a bit of a fog during that screening. Watching this remembrance of his Canadian hometown I again found myself being lulled into a dream-like state. Maybe there's something in the movie to inspire such haziness. The film itself plays out like an uninhibited lucid dream that gets stuck in loops like the Winnipeg trains that never allow escape from town, and the repetition of words in Maddin's narration seems like a willful attempt to hypnotize.
Maddin's surreal pastiche doesn't resemble what is conventionally thought of as a documentary, yet it would seem that My Winnipeg is factual in spirit and has more basis in truth than I expected. For instance, If Day, in which a fake Nazi invasion of Manitoba was staged to drum up support for the Allies and sell war bonds really happened and wasn't some comedic conceit Maddin dreamed up.
The thin line between documentary and fiction filmmaking continued with Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop. The neorealist filmmaker--or neo-neorealist, as has been suggested since neorealism is most often associated with post-World War II Italian filmmaking--uses nonprofessional actors and captures something akin to documentary stories even though he's meticulous in crafting scripted narratives.The story focuses on an orphaned brother and sister living at and working in and around a junkyard's auto body shop in Willet's Point, Queens. Particularly in Chop Shop and Man Push Cart, Bahrani demonstrates his strength for dropping the audience into locations both real and foreign, even if in both instances he's exploring worlds that exist in the United States.
The great economic disparity that exists in the country underlies much of the film, and the looming presence of Shea Stadium visible from the garage provides quiet reminders of the multi-millionaire's playground nearby where kids scrape to survive a daily existence. To say that the kids in the film have been discarded like the piles of parts around them is an obvious metaphor, although it's not presented as blatantly or heavyhandedly in the film.
While I may be making Chop Shop sound like run-of-the-mill independent film miserabilism, Bahrani doesn't dwell on the tough conditions or strive to inspire liberal guilt in viewers. He's interested in seeing what these characters' lives are like and uncovering how they may through day after day. In the end the film's siblings have no choice but to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and do what's necessary. In it's own way, that's a kind of hope amid the rust and filth.
(Scott Roberts, Kimberly Rivers Roberts with her daughter, Richard Roeper, Tia Lessin, and Carl Deal)While the day's two previous films dabble in documentary truth and realism, it was fitting for the day to conclude with traditional doc Trouble the Water. Kimberly Rivers Roberts and her family were stuck in their home when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. She used a Hi-8 camera to document the storm and flooding after the levees broke. Directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal incorporate this frequently stunning footage into a story about the Roberts and their struggle to recover from the hurricane's devastation. It's the toll of Hurricane Katrina and the government's response (or lack of one) in miniature.
I'd seen Trouble the Water before the festival and mistakenly believed that I had rated it "mixed"/C+. (I actually was lowercase pro/B-.) Maybe it looks a little better to me after seeing a lot of mediocre documentaries in the last month, but Trouble the Water isn't happy to settle for having landed incredible video and spinning into righteous outrage. It tells the story of these people with care and concern. I appreciate the lack of cheap shots that the film takes and the aspirational and inspirational tack the directors find. For as massively frustrating and frightening as the experience must have been, the Roberts and others depicted in the film don't come off as angry people, which they have every right to be.
Ebertfest possesses the feel of a family reunion, and with Trouble the Water the festival was able to welcome co-director Deal, a hometown boy, back to the area. The fest has also featured its share of post-film musical performances over the years, and this film provided the opportunity for another. Kimberly Rivers Roberts is pursuing a career as a hip hop artist. She capped the evening with a two-song performance that had a predominantly gray-haired audience bouncing along. It was kind of a strange scene, but it was a nice, upbeat note on which to wrap the festival's second day.
(Grades: My Winnipeg and Chop Shop: B; Trouble the Water: B-)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Ebertfest 2009: Opening Night
(Festival Director Nate Kohn, Chaz Ebert, and Roger Ebert/April 22, 2009)The 11th annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival welcomed back the man in the event's name. A program on an Apple computer allowed him to deliver some introductory comments. The Urbana, Illinois native's new electronic voice has given him a British accent. Maybe Ebert's just following Madonna's lead. Anyway, it was nice to see him back where he belongs, and the crowd gave him appreciative applause when he appeared on the Virginia Theatre's stage.
The festival kicked off with a screening appropriate for Earth Day: Woodstock, 3 Days of Peace & Music. Honestly, when I saw this title on the list, I wasn't thrilled even though I'd never seen the film before tonight. I like plenty of 1960s music well enough, but my fear was that the movie would be one big self-congratulatory love-in to the flower child generation. Tonight I was further dismayed to discover that we would not be seeing the 184-minute original cut but the longer director's cut. (The festival program lists the running time at 225 minutes. I assume this is the same as the 228-minute director's cut listed on the Internet Movie Database.) Slightly over three hours sounded long enough; verging on four seemed like too much.
Still, I approached Woodstock with an open mind and found it to be a fairly compelling mix of concert film and event documentary. Woodstock is a refreshing change from contemporary music videos and concert films whose directors and editors try to show off their skills to the detriment of watching the performances. Here, whether it's a single camera's intimate, unbroken take of Canned Heat or the three superimposed screens of Ten Years After, seeing the musicians in action is primary. It's a lot easier to get lost in the performance when the visuals are in service to the content rather than the other way around.
That's not to say the film is stylistically austere. The use of split screen was innovative at the time. The mix of music and spot news storytelling--interviewees include affected locals, concert attendees, and the man cleaning the chemical toilets--give an expansive view of the scope and impact of the concert beyond the typical rock and roll movie. The photography in the film is phenomenal and looked fantastic in the pristine high definition source that was screened. (Of course the sound was fabulous too.)
As with any movie in which music is front and center, how much one enjoys it will color the overall experience. There's a lot of good to great stuff. Jimi Hendrix's concluding set proves every single bit why it and he are legendary. The photography, much of it from a low angle that emphasizes his guitar god status, shows how hard he works on his instrument yet how effortless it seems. The close-up of the frets while he interprets "The Star Spangled Banner" does the heavy lifting of music criticism to understand how the sounds the guitar makes ties in with the unsung lyrics. Santana blazes through its one song. The Who tear through three classics. I know it's sacrilege, but I could have done without the folkies, John Sebastian in particular, and Country Joe and the Fish.
(As an aside, is it me or is Sha Na Na a send-up of 1950s youth culture and older America, or is it supposed to be a loving recreation? The performance in the film makes it look like the former.)
As someone who wasn't born when the summer of love took place, I've sort of had enough of hearing how committed and important the Woodstock generation was/is and blah blah blah blah blah. While the film doesn't lack for idealism or sweeping statements about what this concert meant, I was pleasantly surprised to see that these sentiments are mostly kept in check. It was interesting that the festival audience's only applause for a non-performer came when the Port-o-san cleaner was proud to mention he had a son attending the concert and one serving in Vietnam.
The post-film discussion with director Michael Wadleigh, associate producer Dale Bell, and a member of Sha Na Na ventured more into the territory that I was dreading, but fortunately the film speaks well enough for itself. The most interesting thing to come from the talk was the idea that the film's structure roughly takes the shape of The Canterbury Tales in how it weaves together the different stories and perspectives.
(Grade: Woodstock: Director's Cut: B)
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Once more with feeling
In a couple hours I will line up outside the Virginia Theatre in Champaign, Illinois for the start of the 11th annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival. As hard as it is for me to believe, it will be the ninth consecutive year I've come to this university town for the five-day event. Nine years! Where has the time gone?
Prior to 2001, the festival's third year and my first visit to it, I had never attended a film festival of any kind. To be sure, Ebertfest is not like what most people think of when the talk turns to film festivals, and those differences might be what make this event a contender for the ideal film festival experience.
There are no studio bidding wars for the scheduled films or even a prize competition among the pictures. You're not forced to choose among scads of conflicting screenings and rush off to different theaters across the city. Every film is shown once at the Virginia to the entire festival audience. The audiovisual presentation is second to none. The relaxed atmosphere probably helps in making the visiting filmmakers more accessible to festivalgoers. While the price has gone up from the $40 pass I bought to see 14 films in 2001, it's still reasonably priced. People aren't coming to see and be seen. (Well, that's not exactly true when bigger stars come to Champaign-Urbana...) All attention and festival talk is focused on the films and the people who make them rather than the marketplace, which is the way it should be.
I was spoiled the first year I came here. Opening night featured 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm. Seated within the first five rows of the cavernous theater, I finally made sense of the film. Its stunning images and powerful sound captivated me and the approximately 1600 other people in the room. (Make no mistake, seeing a big movie with that big of an audience has a different effect than watching something on TV home alone.) Keir Dullea was on stage for a post-film discussion with Ebert, and Arthur C. Clarke chimed in from Sri Lanka via telephone. And this was just the first night of the festival.
I was hooked and have come back each year to try and bottle some of the same cinematic magic that I felt. The films screened in 70mm are often revelatory, and the silents accompanied by The Alloy Orchestra typically rank among each year's highlights. Since Ebert curates the festival, the chance of seeing stinkers is significantly lower, although there are some selected films with which I would take exception with the thumbed critic.
Nowadays returning to Ebertfest is like a reunion at a film festival. There are those who I've become friends with over the years and whose company I get to enjoy for a few days. I was among the younger festivalgoers when I first attended (and still am) since boomers make up an overwhelming percentage of the audience. In that way there's a bit of a Dorian Gray-like experience in coming to the festival. I'll just assume my aging portrait must be squirreled away in the hotel's maintenance room.
In recent years Ebert's health issues have raised concern among those attending the festival--he was unable to attend at all last year--but with his voluminous writing of late and seemingly high spirits, his return should provide a nice lift. The festival has his name on it, and he is obviously part of the attraction for many who show up for five days of movies. Nevertheless, it's the love of films that he possesses and has helped cultivate in those coming to his festival that makes Ebertfest special. I can't wait to feel that buzz of excitement again as I take my spot in the line snaking around the theater.
Prior to 2001, the festival's third year and my first visit to it, I had never attended a film festival of any kind. To be sure, Ebertfest is not like what most people think of when the talk turns to film festivals, and those differences might be what make this event a contender for the ideal film festival experience.
There are no studio bidding wars for the scheduled films or even a prize competition among the pictures. You're not forced to choose among scads of conflicting screenings and rush off to different theaters across the city. Every film is shown once at the Virginia to the entire festival audience. The audiovisual presentation is second to none. The relaxed atmosphere probably helps in making the visiting filmmakers more accessible to festivalgoers. While the price has gone up from the $40 pass I bought to see 14 films in 2001, it's still reasonably priced. People aren't coming to see and be seen. (Well, that's not exactly true when bigger stars come to Champaign-Urbana...) All attention and festival talk is focused on the films and the people who make them rather than the marketplace, which is the way it should be.
I was spoiled the first year I came here. Opening night featured 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm. Seated within the first five rows of the cavernous theater, I finally made sense of the film. Its stunning images and powerful sound captivated me and the approximately 1600 other people in the room. (Make no mistake, seeing a big movie with that big of an audience has a different effect than watching something on TV home alone.) Keir Dullea was on stage for a post-film discussion with Ebert, and Arthur C. Clarke chimed in from Sri Lanka via telephone. And this was just the first night of the festival.
I was hooked and have come back each year to try and bottle some of the same cinematic magic that I felt. The films screened in 70mm are often revelatory, and the silents accompanied by The Alloy Orchestra typically rank among each year's highlights. Since Ebert curates the festival, the chance of seeing stinkers is significantly lower, although there are some selected films with which I would take exception with the thumbed critic.
Nowadays returning to Ebertfest is like a reunion at a film festival. There are those who I've become friends with over the years and whose company I get to enjoy for a few days. I was among the younger festivalgoers when I first attended (and still am) since boomers make up an overwhelming percentage of the audience. In that way there's a bit of a Dorian Gray-like experience in coming to the festival. I'll just assume my aging portrait must be squirreled away in the hotel's maintenance room.
In recent years Ebert's health issues have raised concern among those attending the festival--he was unable to attend at all last year--but with his voluminous writing of late and seemingly high spirits, his return should provide a nice lift. The festival has his name on it, and he is obviously part of the attraction for many who show up for five days of movies. Nevertheless, it's the love of films that he possesses and has helped cultivate in those coming to his festival that makes Ebertfest special. I can't wait to feel that buzz of excitement again as I take my spot in the line snaking around the theater.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Coming up at the Wexner Center
Want to be among the first to find out what's on the Wexner Center's Film/Video calendar this summer?
The Wexner Center will announce its slate of summer films—both the indoor and outdoor series—next Wednesday, April 15 at 2 PM via streaming video at http://www.wexarts.org/live. Film curators Dave Filipi and Chris Stults will announce both the highly anticipated Wex Drive-in Outdoor Film Fest titles and the indoor summer film series. Along with the names of the films, Filipi and Stults will be giving background on the series and taking questions from those viewing the stream via live chat. Information on the films being screened is being kept under wraps until the announcement, but the series are expected to set the “tone” for the summer this year.Something else to keep an eye on is a June 4 showing of Melvin and Howard as part of A Tribute to Frank Gabrenya. Showing one of the longtime Columbus Dispatch film critic's favorites seems like a fitting way to honor his recently ended career at the paper.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Dragonball Evolution
DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION (James Wong, 2009)
Aside from awareness of the DRAGONBALL name, I come to this particular manga/anime universe completely cold. Even as an outsider I can ascertain that DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION suffers the pitfalls all niche properties want to avoid in their bids to go mainstream. It's too bland and convoluted for new viewers to recognize what all the fuss is about and, I suspect, too simplified and disrespectful of the source material for the fan base. Except for the presence of Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat, this shoddy live-action film is no different or bigger than the sort of junk kids plop down to watch on TV after school.
After two thousand years of imprisonment the alien Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) somehow frees himself and begins a search for all seven dragonballs. When united the glowing orbs grant the possessor one true wish. Seeing as Piccolo is an evil warrior, his heart's desire is more along the lines of world annihilation than a pony or a bicycle.
Standing in Piccolo's way is eighteen-year-old orphan Goku (Justin Chatwin). When his Grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) is murdered by one of Piccolo's minions, Goku follows the old man's dying wish for him to seek Master Roshi (Chow) for help in continuing his martial arts training and finding the dragonballs. If Goku collects them first, he can use their power to defeat the warlord. Also along to assist with the quest are fame-seeking scientist Bulma (Emmy Rossum), who has developed a dragonball locator, and thief Yamcha (Joon Park).
Fantasy films with complicated backstories can get bogged down in mythological minutiae, so it is to DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION'S partial credit that following the origin mumbo jumbo isn't oppressive for newcomers. Unfortunately, the streamlining that makes the film coherent for the uninitiated also removes all traces of personality and depth. This is a boilerplate epic with single trait characters whose plights are hard to get caught up in because Goku and crew come directly from the cardboard cutout factory.
DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION'S basic story is as old as time, so this sturdy construct needs compelling heroes and villains to distinguish itself from others of this ilk. The characters don't evolve but merely complete tasks on a to-do list. For director James Wong and screenwriter Ben Ramsey the least explanation of character accomplishments and motivations is best.
The ungainly dialogue can be easily imagined coming out of cartoon mouths, especially with these actors' voices. Chow emerges unscathed from this dud because some mischief flickers in his eyes throughout the schematic nonsense. Little of DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION is funny, but at least his performance acknowledges the film for what it is: a quick, inexpensive cash-in on a cult series.
The cheap effects and bargain backlot action wouldn't have wowed anyone twenty years ago, let alone today, proving that going from animation to live-action isn't an advancement for DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION.
Grade: D
Aside from awareness of the DRAGONBALL name, I come to this particular manga/anime universe completely cold. Even as an outsider I can ascertain that DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION suffers the pitfalls all niche properties want to avoid in their bids to go mainstream. It's too bland and convoluted for new viewers to recognize what all the fuss is about and, I suspect, too simplified and disrespectful of the source material for the fan base. Except for the presence of Hong Kong star Chow Yun-Fat, this shoddy live-action film is no different or bigger than the sort of junk kids plop down to watch on TV after school.
After two thousand years of imprisonment the alien Lord Piccolo (James Marsters) somehow frees himself and begins a search for all seven dragonballs. When united the glowing orbs grant the possessor one true wish. Seeing as Piccolo is an evil warrior, his heart's desire is more along the lines of world annihilation than a pony or a bicycle.
Standing in Piccolo's way is eighteen-year-old orphan Goku (Justin Chatwin). When his Grandpa Gohan (Randall Duk Kim) is murdered by one of Piccolo's minions, Goku follows the old man's dying wish for him to seek Master Roshi (Chow) for help in continuing his martial arts training and finding the dragonballs. If Goku collects them first, he can use their power to defeat the warlord. Also along to assist with the quest are fame-seeking scientist Bulma (Emmy Rossum), who has developed a dragonball locator, and thief Yamcha (Joon Park).
Fantasy films with complicated backstories can get bogged down in mythological minutiae, so it is to DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION'S partial credit that following the origin mumbo jumbo isn't oppressive for newcomers. Unfortunately, the streamlining that makes the film coherent for the uninitiated also removes all traces of personality and depth. This is a boilerplate epic with single trait characters whose plights are hard to get caught up in because Goku and crew come directly from the cardboard cutout factory.
DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION'S basic story is as old as time, so this sturdy construct needs compelling heroes and villains to distinguish itself from others of this ilk. The characters don't evolve but merely complete tasks on a to-do list. For director James Wong and screenwriter Ben Ramsey the least explanation of character accomplishments and motivations is best.
The ungainly dialogue can be easily imagined coming out of cartoon mouths, especially with these actors' voices. Chow emerges unscathed from this dud because some mischief flickers in his eyes throughout the schematic nonsense. Little of DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION is funny, but at least his performance acknowledges the film for what it is: a quick, inexpensive cash-in on a cult series.
The cheap effects and bargain backlot action wouldn't have wowed anyone twenty years ago, let alone today, proving that going from animation to live-action isn't an advancement for DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION.
Grade: D
Friday, March 27, 2009
CIFF 2009, Day Eight: Love and death
Back into the bubble. Here's more inelegant but timely reporting on the films seen Thursday at the Cleveland International Film Festival.
-The Candidate (Kandidaten) (Kasper Barfoed, 2008)
Country: Denmark
Genre: Thriller
Synopsis: A lawyer investigating his father's suspicious death is set up to look like a murderer.
Notes: This conventional thriller does nothing to distinguish itself from the many other boilerplate suspense pics that Hollywood churns out. Substitute English for Danish and Mark Wahlberg for this film's lead and you'd have something not only that looks wholly familiar but also wouldn't be deemed worth the time at a festival. Few surprises greet the nondescript main character. As urgent as the circumstances would seem to be, there isn't much tension as he runs around seeking the truth. I've been hoping to come across a solid genre movie, something the fest is light on, but the bland, mechanical Candidate fails to fit the bill.
Grade: C-
-All Around Us (Gururi no koto) (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 2008)
Country: Japan
Genre: Marital drama
Synopsis: A couple experiences ups and downs during the first eight years of their marriage.
Notes: This is a nicely observed portrait of married opposites and the push and pull of their relationship through new and recurring challenges. Amid all of the misery the husband observes at his job as a courtroom sketch artist, the trauma the wife feels based on expectations of herself and the marriage, and the noncommunication between them, they discover what it takes to make it through the hard times. Unfortunately the image disappeared for a few minutes during a pivotal scene--if not the pivotal scene--so I feel like I may be slightly underrating this based on missing some key moments.
Grade: B
-Melodrama Habibi (Une chanson dans la tête) (Hany Tamba, 2008)
Countries: France, Lebanon
Genre: Melodrama (?)
Synopsis: A washed-up French singer who charted just one song in the 1970s and a lonely 30-year-old Lebanese beautician cross paths when a coffee magnate brings him to Beirut to sing at his wife's birthday party.
Notes: If my synopsis doesn't make this sound hopelessly convoluted, suffice it to say that there's even more nonsense that makes this a film in search of main characters and tone. (I didn't even mention the wheelchair-bound coffee baron's wife being accidentally carjacked and held for ransom along with the Mercedes.) At times it opts for wacky gags. Other moments mine a lightly mournful element. The larger problem, though, is the lack of a firm identification of whose story (or stories) it is. It's too scattered to belong to the singer, played by Patrick Chesnais, or the beautician but just concentrated on them enough to avoid being an ensemble piece. The conclusion seems particularly bizarre considering the relative lightness of everything preceding the downbeat ending.
Grade: C-
-Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 2008)
Country: USA
Genre: Music documentary
Synopsis: The Sengalese pop superstar records, releases, and tours in support of his album Egypt.
Notes: Although the film provides a brief overview of N'Dour's career--most, like me, will know him from collaborations with Peter Gabriel--the bulk of the doc covers his album about the Sufi Islam saints. Reception outside of his homeland is favorable, but in Senegal the album is met with controversy because of the intermingling of popular music and religion. The film can be a bit repetitive, but there's plenty of joyful music to move things along and keep it enjoyable.
Grade: B-
-Quiet Chaos (Caos calmo) (Antonio Luigi Grimaldi, 2008)
Country: Italy
Genre: Grieving process dramedy
Synopsis: A man figures out his own method of dealing with his wife's death and raising their daughter on his own.
Notes: A gentle touch is deployed as Nanni Moretti's executive sets his own process and timeline for responding to the unexpected death of his wife. The actor's placid appearance and demeanor presents a character who must put on a brave face for his child, yet it's also a reflection of his own uncertainty regarding how he should be reacting. The film also utilizes some heartwarming humor, although nothing about Quiet Chaos could be construed as reaching for easy tugs at the heartstrings. With more time to reflect on it, I might be willing to bump up the grade a hair for this splendid film.
Grade: B+
-The Chaser (Chugyeogja) (Na Hong-jin, 2008)
Country: South Korea
Genre: Crime drama
Synopsis: A former police detective turned pimp searches for the man who he believes is capturing and selling his women.
Notes: My genre description and synopsis don't really do justice to what is an unusual movie in a familiar form. Director Na Hong-jin plays to the audience with liberal sprinklings of humor throughout and plays with the viewers as he frustrates satisfying expectations. It's a film that can be goofy in one scene and fairly brutal in the next. I'm not sure that these abrupt shifts are always successful, but it's a compelling film because of its loose spirit. I especially liked how the chases and fights are sloppy in ways that they might actually be in real life rather than the perfectly choreographed and executed action we're accustomed to seeing. One other observation...what is it with South Korean filmmakers and hammers?
Grade: B
-The Candidate (Kandidaten) (Kasper Barfoed, 2008)
Country: Denmark
Genre: Thriller
Synopsis: A lawyer investigating his father's suspicious death is set up to look like a murderer.
Notes: This conventional thriller does nothing to distinguish itself from the many other boilerplate suspense pics that Hollywood churns out. Substitute English for Danish and Mark Wahlberg for this film's lead and you'd have something not only that looks wholly familiar but also wouldn't be deemed worth the time at a festival. Few surprises greet the nondescript main character. As urgent as the circumstances would seem to be, there isn't much tension as he runs around seeking the truth. I've been hoping to come across a solid genre movie, something the fest is light on, but the bland, mechanical Candidate fails to fit the bill.
Grade: C-
-All Around Us (Gururi no koto) (Ryosuke Hashiguchi, 2008)
Country: Japan
Genre: Marital drama
Synopsis: A couple experiences ups and downs during the first eight years of their marriage.
Notes: This is a nicely observed portrait of married opposites and the push and pull of their relationship through new and recurring challenges. Amid all of the misery the husband observes at his job as a courtroom sketch artist, the trauma the wife feels based on expectations of herself and the marriage, and the noncommunication between them, they discover what it takes to make it through the hard times. Unfortunately the image disappeared for a few minutes during a pivotal scene--if not the pivotal scene--so I feel like I may be slightly underrating this based on missing some key moments.
Grade: B
-Melodrama Habibi (Une chanson dans la tête) (Hany Tamba, 2008)
Countries: France, Lebanon
Genre: Melodrama (?)
Synopsis: A washed-up French singer who charted just one song in the 1970s and a lonely 30-year-old Lebanese beautician cross paths when a coffee magnate brings him to Beirut to sing at his wife's birthday party.
Notes: If my synopsis doesn't make this sound hopelessly convoluted, suffice it to say that there's even more nonsense that makes this a film in search of main characters and tone. (I didn't even mention the wheelchair-bound coffee baron's wife being accidentally carjacked and held for ransom along with the Mercedes.) At times it opts for wacky gags. Other moments mine a lightly mournful element. The larger problem, though, is the lack of a firm identification of whose story (or stories) it is. It's too scattered to belong to the singer, played by Patrick Chesnais, or the beautician but just concentrated on them enough to avoid being an ensemble piece. The conclusion seems particularly bizarre considering the relative lightness of everything preceding the downbeat ending.
Grade: C-
-Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, 2008)
Country: USA
Genre: Music documentary
Synopsis: The Sengalese pop superstar records, releases, and tours in support of his album Egypt.
Notes: Although the film provides a brief overview of N'Dour's career--most, like me, will know him from collaborations with Peter Gabriel--the bulk of the doc covers his album about the Sufi Islam saints. Reception outside of his homeland is favorable, but in Senegal the album is met with controversy because of the intermingling of popular music and religion. The film can be a bit repetitive, but there's plenty of joyful music to move things along and keep it enjoyable.
Grade: B-
-Quiet Chaos (Caos calmo) (Antonio Luigi Grimaldi, 2008)
Country: Italy
Genre: Grieving process dramedy
Synopsis: A man figures out his own method of dealing with his wife's death and raising their daughter on his own.
Notes: A gentle touch is deployed as Nanni Moretti's executive sets his own process and timeline for responding to the unexpected death of his wife. The actor's placid appearance and demeanor presents a character who must put on a brave face for his child, yet it's also a reflection of his own uncertainty regarding how he should be reacting. The film also utilizes some heartwarming humor, although nothing about Quiet Chaos could be construed as reaching for easy tugs at the heartstrings. With more time to reflect on it, I might be willing to bump up the grade a hair for this splendid film.
Grade: B+
-The Chaser (Chugyeogja) (Na Hong-jin, 2008)
Country: South Korea
Genre: Crime drama
Synopsis: A former police detective turned pimp searches for the man who he believes is capturing and selling his women.
Notes: My genre description and synopsis don't really do justice to what is an unusual movie in a familiar form. Director Na Hong-jin plays to the audience with liberal sprinklings of humor throughout and plays with the viewers as he frustrates satisfying expectations. It's a film that can be goofy in one scene and fairly brutal in the next. I'm not sure that these abrupt shifts are always successful, but it's a compelling film because of its loose spirit. I especially liked how the chases and fights are sloppy in ways that they might actually be in real life rather than the perfectly choreographed and executed action we're accustomed to seeing. One other observation...what is it with South Korean filmmakers and hammers?
Grade: B
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
CIFF 2009, Day Five: All in the family
Four days of film festival attendance have pretty much turned my brain to mush. Fourteen hours, six films, and some scattered thoughts...
-Dunya & Desie (Dana Nechushtan, 2008)
Countries: Netherlands, Belgium
Genre: Cross-cultural, coming-of-age crowd-pleaser
Synopsis: Best friends search for their identities through their pasts.
Notes: Set in Holland, the film features polar opposite best friends. Eighteen-year-old Dunya comes from a conservative family of Moroccan heritage trying to arrange her marriage while Dutch native Desie is something of a wild child who casually picks up and drops boyfriends. Like Bend It Like Beckham, it's a comedy in which the cultural outsider wants to become more like those in her adopted homeland, much to the consternation of her traditional parents. Dunya & Desie can be broad and predictable, but I found it to be a pleasant break from weightier fest fare.
Grade: B-
-It's Not Me, I Swear! (C'est pas moi, je le jure!) (Philippe Falardeau, 2008)
Countries: Canada
Genre: Coming-of-age dark comedy
Synopsis: A boy misbehaves in order to restore normalcy to his fractured family.
Notes: This offbeat kid's eye-view of the effects of divorce and family dysfunction features a ten-year-old protagonist with sociopathic and suicidal tendencies...and it's supposed to be mostly funny. Amazingly, director Philippe Falardeau pulls it off due to a strong lead performance from Antoine L'Écuyer. He indicates that there's a good kid fighting to get out, but with all of the unhappiness around him, acting destructively is the only way to rid of his sadness and gain the attention and love he desires.
Grade: B+
-Boogie (Radu Muntean, 2008)
Country: Romania
Genre: Male crisis movie/a day in the life drama
Synopsis: A run-in with old friends causes a man to assess his life as a husband and father.
Notes: Consider Boogie to be the Romanian response to Hollywood's male crisis movies. The film takes its title from the main character Bogdan's nickname, which suggests his untamed youthful days. Meeting up with two old pals while he and his pregnant wife are on a seaside vacation with their young son leads to a spousal argument and Bogdan evaluating what his life has become compared to his still unattached friends. The guys prod Bogdan into being who they used to know, although it becomes apparent that they wish they had what he possesses. It's an austere, well-observed film that maintains Romania's recent track record for uncompromising realism.
Grade: B+
-Prom Night in Mississippi (Paul Saltzman, 2009)
Country: Canada, United States
Genre: (genre)
Synopsis: A Mississippi high school is challenged to hold its first integrated prom in 2008.
Notes: Charleston, Mississippi native and current resident Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the school's prom if they will have just one dance rather than separate events for white and black students. Prom Night in Mississippi has some affecting moments in how it shows students who seem willing to get past the racism of their parents and grandparents yet feel constrained by their small town elders' attitudes. The subject matter lends itself to scenes that elicit strong reactions--the lone interracial couple's interviews can be heartbreaking--although overall the doc plays like a less substantial version of The Order of Myths, another nonfiction film exploring current segregation perpetuated in part by tradition.
Grade: B-
-Tulpan (Sergei Dvortsevoy, 2008)
Countries: Germany, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland
Genre: Anthropological drama
Synopsis: A family struggles with life on a Kazakh steppe.
Notes: To my eyes, films this "real" make it impossible to determine where documentary ends and fiction begins. (I've come across some notes that call Tulpan a narrative feature, but some of this is surely documented reality.) Similar in style to The Story of the Weeping Camel, the film settles into a family's yurt and watches the problems these people face. Pregnant sheep are delivering stillborn lambs. The head of the family's single brother-in-law returns from the navy and tries to find a wife in an area with few young, single women. As a depiction of a way of life, Tulpan can be a pretty amazing film that peaks with a sheep birthing scene. To emphasize the anthropological and documentary elements would be to overlook the humor in the film. Tulpan shows the difficulties these people face, but it also finds room for laughter at a rambunctious child, a cranky camel, and the sailor's overblown tales of sea creatures.
Grade: B
-Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke, 2008)
Country: Mexico
Genre: A day in the life deadpan comedy
Synopsis: A teenager has a minor car wreck and tries to get someone to repair it, but everybody he meets wants a favor of some sort.
Notes: There's definitely a strong directorial vision at work in Lake Tahoe, but as with other deadpan comedies I've run into at the festival, I'm just not in tune them. The film is gorgeously photographed and eventually peels back an emotional core that seemed missing previously. I just wish I found it funnier.
Grade: C
-Dunya & Desie (Dana Nechushtan, 2008)
Countries: Netherlands, Belgium
Genre: Cross-cultural, coming-of-age crowd-pleaser
Synopsis: Best friends search for their identities through their pasts.
Notes: Set in Holland, the film features polar opposite best friends. Eighteen-year-old Dunya comes from a conservative family of Moroccan heritage trying to arrange her marriage while Dutch native Desie is something of a wild child who casually picks up and drops boyfriends. Like Bend It Like Beckham, it's a comedy in which the cultural outsider wants to become more like those in her adopted homeland, much to the consternation of her traditional parents. Dunya & Desie can be broad and predictable, but I found it to be a pleasant break from weightier fest fare.
Grade: B-
-It's Not Me, I Swear! (C'est pas moi, je le jure!) (Philippe Falardeau, 2008)
Countries: Canada
Genre: Coming-of-age dark comedy
Synopsis: A boy misbehaves in order to restore normalcy to his fractured family.
Notes: This offbeat kid's eye-view of the effects of divorce and family dysfunction features a ten-year-old protagonist with sociopathic and suicidal tendencies...and it's supposed to be mostly funny. Amazingly, director Philippe Falardeau pulls it off due to a strong lead performance from Antoine L'Écuyer. He indicates that there's a good kid fighting to get out, but with all of the unhappiness around him, acting destructively is the only way to rid of his sadness and gain the attention and love he desires.
Grade: B+
-Boogie (Radu Muntean, 2008)
Country: Romania
Genre: Male crisis movie/a day in the life drama
Synopsis: A run-in with old friends causes a man to assess his life as a husband and father.
Notes: Consider Boogie to be the Romanian response to Hollywood's male crisis movies. The film takes its title from the main character Bogdan's nickname, which suggests his untamed youthful days. Meeting up with two old pals while he and his pregnant wife are on a seaside vacation with their young son leads to a spousal argument and Bogdan evaluating what his life has become compared to his still unattached friends. The guys prod Bogdan into being who they used to know, although it becomes apparent that they wish they had what he possesses. It's an austere, well-observed film that maintains Romania's recent track record for uncompromising realism.
Grade: B+
-Prom Night in Mississippi (Paul Saltzman, 2009)
Country: Canada, United States
Genre: (genre)
Synopsis: A Mississippi high school is challenged to hold its first integrated prom in 2008.
Notes: Charleston, Mississippi native and current resident Morgan Freeman offers to pay for the school's prom if they will have just one dance rather than separate events for white and black students. Prom Night in Mississippi has some affecting moments in how it shows students who seem willing to get past the racism of their parents and grandparents yet feel constrained by their small town elders' attitudes. The subject matter lends itself to scenes that elicit strong reactions--the lone interracial couple's interviews can be heartbreaking--although overall the doc plays like a less substantial version of The Order of Myths, another nonfiction film exploring current segregation perpetuated in part by tradition.
Grade: B-
-Tulpan (Sergei Dvortsevoy, 2008)
Countries: Germany, Switzerland, Kazakhstan, Russia, Poland
Genre: Anthropological drama
Synopsis: A family struggles with life on a Kazakh steppe.
Notes: To my eyes, films this "real" make it impossible to determine where documentary ends and fiction begins. (I've come across some notes that call Tulpan a narrative feature, but some of this is surely documented reality.) Similar in style to The Story of the Weeping Camel, the film settles into a family's yurt and watches the problems these people face. Pregnant sheep are delivering stillborn lambs. The head of the family's single brother-in-law returns from the navy and tries to find a wife in an area with few young, single women. As a depiction of a way of life, Tulpan can be a pretty amazing film that peaks with a sheep birthing scene. To emphasize the anthropological and documentary elements would be to overlook the humor in the film. Tulpan shows the difficulties these people face, but it also finds room for laughter at a rambunctious child, a cranky camel, and the sailor's overblown tales of sea creatures.
Grade: B
-Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke, 2008)
Country: Mexico
Genre: A day in the life deadpan comedy
Synopsis: A teenager has a minor car wreck and tries to get someone to repair it, but everybody he meets wants a favor of some sort.
Notes: There's definitely a strong directorial vision at work in Lake Tahoe, but as with other deadpan comedies I've run into at the festival, I'm just not in tune them. The film is gorgeously photographed and eventually peels back an emotional core that seemed missing previously. I just wish I found it funnier.
Grade: C
CIFF 2009, Day Four: The system
The truth is that there's nothing terribly smart about putting yourself through the full paces of a film festival's schedule for several days in a row. For nine of the eleven days at the single location Cleveland International Film Festival you can inhabit the theaters for six sessions beginning around 9:15 a.m. and lasting for about fourteen hours. Four of those nine days have midnight screenings that allow you to stick around until 1:30/2:00 a.m. the following day. That's seventeen hours in and around the theater and seven movies.
Carrying this heavy load is for the strong-willed and, let's face it, foolish--myself included. Although all that's being done is watching movies, sitting through that many films in a day, let alone for multiple days, takes a special kind of stamina. Even "just" five films in a day is a lot.
While some days are easier than others, I have found that I will reach a rhythm that may be the moviegoing equivalent to, in athletic terms, being in the zone. The mind becomes clear--or maybe empty is a better word--and you enter a stage where you're on automatic. That may explain why I've had trouble putting down my thoughts on these films. I lack the mental energy to do so.
I hit this level today, although as the end of the day approached, I also started to feel the weariness that catches up with you. The idea is to push through it, but the smart thing would be to do something as novel as take a break or even skip a session or two.
Not today.
-Children of Invention (Tze Chun, 2009)
Country: United States
Genre: Immigant drama/children at risk drama
Synopsis: Single immigrant mother often overlooks her children as she focuses on work.
Notes: A divorced Hong Kong native falls prey to direct marketing schemes as a way of supporting her kids. She sinks her limited resources into direct marketing schemes, which cause bigger problems for her than loss of money and time. Meanwhile, her young son and daughter must amuse and care for themselves while she's physically and mentally away. Although there is a whiff of Nobody Knows in Children of Invention, the circumstances and potential outcome are never as dire. On the film's plus side are the unforced child performances and bright, clean cinematography. The downside is the split focus and shallow depth. The film concentrates on the mother's story for the first half, but just when it presents a major crisis, attention shifts to the kids. Picking one of the perspectives--parent or children--and sticking to it for the duration would have made a stronger movie and allowed it to go beyond surface level.
Grade: C+
-Crude (Joe Berlinger, 2009)
Countries: United States, Ecuador
Genre: Environmental activism documentary
Synopsis: Lawyers sue oil company for environmental damages in Ecuador.
Notes: The title refers to oil, but it could just as well mean how the legal process operates in this case. The suit against Chevron has been fought for at least fifteen years and may continue for that many more. Texaco, now owned by Chevron, operated oil wells in the Amazon jungle and is now being blamed for causing contaminated conditions that lead to severe health problems and premature deaths among the people living in the area. Crude is primarily about the legal battle, and it stirs up plenty of anger at corporations, although it's always hard in situations like this to know what they can rightfully be blamed for and what is bluster.
Grade: B-
-Sin By Silence (Olivia Klaus, 2008)
Countries: United States
Genre: Women's issue documentary
Synopsis: Battered women convicted and imprisoned for killing their husbands work to make their voices heard about domestic abuse.
Notes: Chalk up attending this screening to a confluence of the right circumstances. I didn't plan to see this, but my desire to watch the Dayton-Kansas NCAA Tournament game, this film's short running time (49 minutes), and a Twitter follow convinced me to give it a chance. Sin By Silence is a solid piece probably best suited to fill an hour on PBS. The short is centered on the Convicted Women Against Abuse, a prison group that helps these inmates come to terms with the harm they suffered and try to earn retrials for those prosecuted when battered women's syndrome was not recognized by the courts. The film doesn't excuse what they did or paint them as victims. Rather it explains the silence that led to the actions they felt they needed to carry out and tries to find the answer for preventing abusive situations.
Grade: B
-Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008)
Countries: Belgium, France
Genre: Road movie/deadpan comedy
Synopsis: Weird people are encountered on a trip when a loner auto restorer gives a ride home to the man who tried to steal from his house.
Notes: It very well may be that movies like this play better outside of a film festival's pell mell, or maybe Eldorado simply isn't that funny. It's a slow, stone-faced comedy broken up occasionally by unexpected bits of oddity. The film owes a lot to Jim Jarmusch, but as much as I like his films, I'm not sure how well they'd play in the middle of a scheduled six movie day.
Grade: C
-Sugar (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2008)
Country: United States
Genre: Baseball movie/neorealist drama
Synopsis: A prospect from the Dominican Republic faces challenges upon coming to the United States to play in the minor leagues.
Notes: The studio and festival have requested no reviews of the film--never mind that it premiered at Sundance in 2008--but I think it's worth pointing out that this is a must-see for baseball fans when its limited release begins on April 3. Jose Rijo's appearance in the film and his involvement in the scandal with the Dominican Republic camps and player signings makes Sugar very timely even if it was completed more than a year ago. With the number of Latin American players in the majors and trying to break in, this tells a story that impacts the game but with which many of the fans, like me, are unfamiliar.
Grade: A
-Machan (Uberto Pasolini, 2008)
Countries: Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany
Genre: Sports comedy/based on a true story/social concern drama
Synopsis: Poor Sri Lankans fake being on the nonexistent national handball team to get them out of the country so they can look for work in Europe.
Notes: An enterprising studio exec looking to cash in on the success of Slumdog Millionaire might want to think about picking up the remake rights to Machan. Yes, I'm aware that Sri Lankans and Indians are not the same, but this plucky underdog story has the potential to appeal to those who like Danny Boyle's film and are interested in other tales from this corner of the globe. Based on a true story, this feel-good film about poor people trying to find better opportunities and pulling a fast one on government officials fits into the The Full Monty mold. A nice Hollywood polish could tighten up this genial but overly broad, slowly paced, and diffused focus film.
Grade: C+
Carrying this heavy load is for the strong-willed and, let's face it, foolish--myself included. Although all that's being done is watching movies, sitting through that many films in a day, let alone for multiple days, takes a special kind of stamina. Even "just" five films in a day is a lot.
While some days are easier than others, I have found that I will reach a rhythm that may be the moviegoing equivalent to, in athletic terms, being in the zone. The mind becomes clear--or maybe empty is a better word--and you enter a stage where you're on automatic. That may explain why I've had trouble putting down my thoughts on these films. I lack the mental energy to do so.
I hit this level today, although as the end of the day approached, I also started to feel the weariness that catches up with you. The idea is to push through it, but the smart thing would be to do something as novel as take a break or even skip a session or two.
Not today.
-Children of Invention (Tze Chun, 2009)
Country: United States
Genre: Immigant drama/children at risk drama
Synopsis: Single immigrant mother often overlooks her children as she focuses on work.
Notes: A divorced Hong Kong native falls prey to direct marketing schemes as a way of supporting her kids. She sinks her limited resources into direct marketing schemes, which cause bigger problems for her than loss of money and time. Meanwhile, her young son and daughter must amuse and care for themselves while she's physically and mentally away. Although there is a whiff of Nobody Knows in Children of Invention, the circumstances and potential outcome are never as dire. On the film's plus side are the unforced child performances and bright, clean cinematography. The downside is the split focus and shallow depth. The film concentrates on the mother's story for the first half, but just when it presents a major crisis, attention shifts to the kids. Picking one of the perspectives--parent or children--and sticking to it for the duration would have made a stronger movie and allowed it to go beyond surface level.
Grade: C+
-Crude (Joe Berlinger, 2009)
Countries: United States, Ecuador
Genre: Environmental activism documentary
Synopsis: Lawyers sue oil company for environmental damages in Ecuador.
Notes: The title refers to oil, but it could just as well mean how the legal process operates in this case. The suit against Chevron has been fought for at least fifteen years and may continue for that many more. Texaco, now owned by Chevron, operated oil wells in the Amazon jungle and is now being blamed for causing contaminated conditions that lead to severe health problems and premature deaths among the people living in the area. Crude is primarily about the legal battle, and it stirs up plenty of anger at corporations, although it's always hard in situations like this to know what they can rightfully be blamed for and what is bluster.
Grade: B-
-Sin By Silence (Olivia Klaus, 2008)
Countries: United States
Genre: Women's issue documentary
Synopsis: Battered women convicted and imprisoned for killing their husbands work to make their voices heard about domestic abuse.
Notes: Chalk up attending this screening to a confluence of the right circumstances. I didn't plan to see this, but my desire to watch the Dayton-Kansas NCAA Tournament game, this film's short running time (49 minutes), and a Twitter follow convinced me to give it a chance. Sin By Silence is a solid piece probably best suited to fill an hour on PBS. The short is centered on the Convicted Women Against Abuse, a prison group that helps these inmates come to terms with the harm they suffered and try to earn retrials for those prosecuted when battered women's syndrome was not recognized by the courts. The film doesn't excuse what they did or paint them as victims. Rather it explains the silence that led to the actions they felt they needed to carry out and tries to find the answer for preventing abusive situations.
Grade: B
-Eldorado (Bouli Lanners, 2008)
Countries: Belgium, France
Genre: Road movie/deadpan comedy
Synopsis: Weird people are encountered on a trip when a loner auto restorer gives a ride home to the man who tried to steal from his house.
Notes: It very well may be that movies like this play better outside of a film festival's pell mell, or maybe Eldorado simply isn't that funny. It's a slow, stone-faced comedy broken up occasionally by unexpected bits of oddity. The film owes a lot to Jim Jarmusch, but as much as I like his films, I'm not sure how well they'd play in the middle of a scheduled six movie day.
Grade: C
-Sugar (Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, 2008)
Country: United States
Genre: Baseball movie/neorealist drama
Synopsis: A prospect from the Dominican Republic faces challenges upon coming to the United States to play in the minor leagues.
Notes: The studio and festival have requested no reviews of the film--never mind that it premiered at Sundance in 2008--but I think it's worth pointing out that this is a must-see for baseball fans when its limited release begins on April 3. Jose Rijo's appearance in the film and his involvement in the scandal with the Dominican Republic camps and player signings makes Sugar very timely even if it was completed more than a year ago. With the number of Latin American players in the majors and trying to break in, this tells a story that impacts the game but with which many of the fans, like me, are unfamiliar.
Grade: A
-Machan (Uberto Pasolini, 2008)
Countries: Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, Italy, Germany
Genre: Sports comedy/based on a true story/social concern drama
Synopsis: Poor Sri Lankans fake being on the nonexistent national handball team to get them out of the country so they can look for work in Europe.
Notes: An enterprising studio exec looking to cash in on the success of Slumdog Millionaire might want to think about picking up the remake rights to Machan. Yes, I'm aware that Sri Lankans and Indians are not the same, but this plucky underdog story has the potential to appeal to those who like Danny Boyle's film and are interested in other tales from this corner of the globe. Based on a true story, this feel-good film about poor people trying to find better opportunities and pulling a fast one on government officials fits into the The Full Monty mold. A nice Hollywood polish could tighten up this genial but overly broad, slowly paced, and diffused focus film.
Grade: C+
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
CIFF 2009, Day Three: Trouble every day
To varying degress each of the films I saw on this day were concerned with problems in front of us or lurking in the shadows.
-At the Edge of the World (Dan Stone, 2008)
Countries: Antarctica, Australia, United States
Genre: Environmental activism documentary
Synopsis: Anti-whaling activists pursue Japanese whaling ships near Antarctica.
Notes: The Sea Shepherd organization takes aggressive action to stop whalers, who they insist are violating international treaties under the guise of killing the creatures for research. Their efforts, on display in this approving doc, involve using two ships and a helicopter to scan the sea for the whaling fleet and then using smaller boats to drop lines in the water to seize up the whalers' propellers. Oh yeah, they're not above ramming the other ships. Some consider the group eco-terrorists. They sail without a nation's flag,which effectively make them a pirate ship. (The group claims that whaling interests pressure countries to strip them of the flags they have flown under.) Also, while it's not fully clear why, there's tension between Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. Regardless of one's opinion on the matter, this is dangerous work being undertaken, and the film's strongest element is the camerawork that shows with startling immediacy how risky the mission is. At the Edge of the World speaks more about the mission than eco-politics, and honestly, that's what makes a more interesting film.
Grade: B-
-Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann (Bienvenido a Farewell-Gutmann) (Xavi Puebla, 2008)
Country: Spain
Genre: Workplace drama/dark comedy
Synopsis: Three human resources employees have the tables turned on them as they compete for their deceased boss's job.
Notes: Tagging this as a black comedy may be somewhat generous as the film's deadpan tone doesn't have (or shoot for) much in the way of laughs or jokes. It makes some efforts at humor in the form of bleak recognition and suspicion of corporate culture but is a little more serious-minded than what most think of when they hear "comedy". The most immediate comparison that comes to mind is Neil LaBute's body of work, although Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann lacks the delight in cruelty and sense of furor that his films possess. With its talky, performance-oriented style, Farewell-Gutmann plays like a play, but there's little to take from actors whose characters are unpleasant and, more egregiously, uninteresting. Ten mintures or so into it I felt like I had this film pegged as a non-starter. If the schedule had permitted walking out to see something else, I would have.
Grade: D
-The Last Days of Shishmaref (Jan Louter, 2008)
Countries: Netherlands, United States
Genre: Anthropological and environmental concern documentary
Synopsis: Climate change is expected to wipe away an Alaskan island community in a decade or so.
Notes: This frustrating doc observes the lives of the approximately 500 residents of the small Alaskan village of Shishmaref. The film spends the bulk of its time looking at the people's subsistent and poverty-filled way of life, yet the thrust of it is that global warming is causing storms and erosion that will lead to the sea swallowing the place in ten to fifteen years. The only information regarding the enviornmental impact comes from an ABC news report, a Climate Channel piece, and a segment of Al Gore on Oprah, all of which echo one another. The Last Days of Shishmaref is made in the traditional neutral approach (even though it obviously isn't).
The story is told through watching and listening to the affected people, but after awhile the lack of outside information and perspective becomes glaring. Where are people who could speak to what is happening and what might be done? Blame is leveled at the Bush administration, but the film doesn't detail what is needed and why it would cost $180 million--or $100 million, depending on the source--to move a 500-person community that has unpaved roads, no running water or sewers, and no roads into it. The film is nicely shot and gives a sense of the Shishmaref people's removal from society and distrust of the larger culture, but it provides an incomplete view of the problem and its solutions.
Grade: C-
-Three Blind Mice (Matthew Newton, 2008)
Country: Australia
Genre: One crazy night dramedy
Synopsis: An evening of shore leave changes everything for three Australian sailors.
Notes: The overlapping dialogue and freewheeling style borrows from Altman and, most recently, Rachel Getting Married, but its biggest shortcoming is fleshing out the characters through the slow leak of information. One of the sailors has been harmed by others in the navy---tortured might be a more apt way of putting it--but rather than building to something like Rachel's rehearsal dinner scene or the revelatory moment in A Celebration, Three Blind Mice stumbles along with minor nonsensical moments. The characters aren't developed enough to care about what happens to them. It doesn't help that none of them are particularly likable. The night's forward momentum keeps the film reasonably engaging. In general it's solidly made but at arm's length.
Grade: C+
-Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig) (Henrik Ruben Genz, 2008)
Country: Denmark
Genre: Secrets in a small town noir/dark comedy
Synopsis: A new marshal finds out how that residents of a small Danish town have their own way of dealing with things.
Notes: The oddball locals, the mix of noir and black humor, and the lighting are strongly reminiscent of the Coen brothers' films. If only the screenplay had the rigor and jokes. Terribly Happy gets by for awhile on its resemblance to Fargo and the like, but this riff on small town provincialism doesn't hold enough surprises or laughs to distinguish itself. The stretched out ending doesn't help either.
Grade: C+
-Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-ho, and Leos Carax, 2008)
Countries: Japan, France
Genre: Omnibus film
Synopsis: Three directors make Tokyo-centric shorts.
Notes: Michel Gondry's delightful first segment about finding one's place in the big city is the kind of funny, creative, handcrafted item that's become his stock in trade. As with the sweded films in Be Kind Rewind, the short film within Gondry's short is a hoot. Leos Carax's middle segment is a weird but tolerable story of a sewer-dwelling creature that terrorizes the city. Bong Joon-ho's concluding short about choosing separation from and feeling loneliness amid a large population provides a nice capper.
Grade: B
-At the Edge of the World (Dan Stone, 2008)
Countries: Antarctica, Australia, United States
Genre: Environmental activism documentary
Synopsis: Anti-whaling activists pursue Japanese whaling ships near Antarctica.
Notes: The Sea Shepherd organization takes aggressive action to stop whalers, who they insist are violating international treaties under the guise of killing the creatures for research. Their efforts, on display in this approving doc, involve using two ships and a helicopter to scan the sea for the whaling fleet and then using smaller boats to drop lines in the water to seize up the whalers' propellers. Oh yeah, they're not above ramming the other ships. Some consider the group eco-terrorists. They sail without a nation's flag,which effectively make them a pirate ship. (The group claims that whaling interests pressure countries to strip them of the flags they have flown under.) Also, while it's not fully clear why, there's tension between Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace. Regardless of one's opinion on the matter, this is dangerous work being undertaken, and the film's strongest element is the camerawork that shows with startling immediacy how risky the mission is. At the Edge of the World speaks more about the mission than eco-politics, and honestly, that's what makes a more interesting film.
Grade: B-
-Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann (Bienvenido a Farewell-Gutmann) (Xavi Puebla, 2008)
Country: Spain
Genre: Workplace drama/dark comedy
Synopsis: Three human resources employees have the tables turned on them as they compete for their deceased boss's job.
Notes: Tagging this as a black comedy may be somewhat generous as the film's deadpan tone doesn't have (or shoot for) much in the way of laughs or jokes. It makes some efforts at humor in the form of bleak recognition and suspicion of corporate culture but is a little more serious-minded than what most think of when they hear "comedy". The most immediate comparison that comes to mind is Neil LaBute's body of work, although Welcome to Farewell-Gutmann lacks the delight in cruelty and sense of furor that his films possess. With its talky, performance-oriented style, Farewell-Gutmann plays like a play, but there's little to take from actors whose characters are unpleasant and, more egregiously, uninteresting. Ten mintures or so into it I felt like I had this film pegged as a non-starter. If the schedule had permitted walking out to see something else, I would have.
Grade: D
-The Last Days of Shishmaref (Jan Louter, 2008)
Countries: Netherlands, United States
Genre: Anthropological and environmental concern documentary
Synopsis: Climate change is expected to wipe away an Alaskan island community in a decade or so.
Notes: This frustrating doc observes the lives of the approximately 500 residents of the small Alaskan village of Shishmaref. The film spends the bulk of its time looking at the people's subsistent and poverty-filled way of life, yet the thrust of it is that global warming is causing storms and erosion that will lead to the sea swallowing the place in ten to fifteen years. The only information regarding the enviornmental impact comes from an ABC news report, a Climate Channel piece, and a segment of Al Gore on Oprah, all of which echo one another. The Last Days of Shishmaref is made in the traditional neutral approach (even though it obviously isn't).
The story is told through watching and listening to the affected people, but after awhile the lack of outside information and perspective becomes glaring. Where are people who could speak to what is happening and what might be done? Blame is leveled at the Bush administration, but the film doesn't detail what is needed and why it would cost $180 million--or $100 million, depending on the source--to move a 500-person community that has unpaved roads, no running water or sewers, and no roads into it. The film is nicely shot and gives a sense of the Shishmaref people's removal from society and distrust of the larger culture, but it provides an incomplete view of the problem and its solutions.
Grade: C-
-Three Blind Mice (Matthew Newton, 2008)
Country: Australia
Genre: One crazy night dramedy
Synopsis: An evening of shore leave changes everything for three Australian sailors.
Notes: The overlapping dialogue and freewheeling style borrows from Altman and, most recently, Rachel Getting Married, but its biggest shortcoming is fleshing out the characters through the slow leak of information. One of the sailors has been harmed by others in the navy---tortured might be a more apt way of putting it--but rather than building to something like Rachel's rehearsal dinner scene or the revelatory moment in A Celebration, Three Blind Mice stumbles along with minor nonsensical moments. The characters aren't developed enough to care about what happens to them. It doesn't help that none of them are particularly likable. The night's forward momentum keeps the film reasonably engaging. In general it's solidly made but at arm's length.
Grade: C+
-Terribly Happy (Frygtelig lykkelig) (Henrik Ruben Genz, 2008)
Country: Denmark
Genre: Secrets in a small town noir/dark comedy
Synopsis: A new marshal finds out how that residents of a small Danish town have their own way of dealing with things.
Notes: The oddball locals, the mix of noir and black humor, and the lighting are strongly reminiscent of the Coen brothers' films. If only the screenplay had the rigor and jokes. Terribly Happy gets by for awhile on its resemblance to Fargo and the like, but this riff on small town provincialism doesn't hold enough surprises or laughs to distinguish itself. The stretched out ending doesn't help either.
Grade: C+
-Tokyo! (Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-ho, and Leos Carax, 2008)
Countries: Japan, France
Genre: Omnibus film
Synopsis: Three directors make Tokyo-centric shorts.
Notes: Michel Gondry's delightful first segment about finding one's place in the big city is the kind of funny, creative, handcrafted item that's become his stock in trade. As with the sweded films in Be Kind Rewind, the short film within Gondry's short is a hoot. Leos Carax's middle segment is a weird but tolerable story of a sewer-dwelling creature that terrorizes the city. Bong Joon-ho's concluding short about choosing separation from and feeling loneliness amid a large population provides a nice capper.
Grade: B
We interrupt this festival coverage for...
...sleep.
I'm back from four days at the festival but have only written about one of them here. Never fear, more coverage will appear in this space, but I simply couldn't keep up. Being at Tower City Center for up to seventeen hours a day doesn't leave much time for writing or sleeping, so I opted for scribbling some thoughts on a steno pad and stealing four or five hours sleep when I got to the hotel.
I'm back from four days at the festival but have only written about one of them here. Never fear, more coverage will appear in this space, but I simply couldn't keep up. Being at Tower City Center for up to seventeen hours a day doesn't leave much time for writing or sleeping, so I opted for scribbling some thoughts on a steno pad and stealing four or five hours sleep when I got to the hotel.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
CIFF 2009, Day Two: Auteur Day
Typically I do not associate the Cleveland International Film Festival with showcasing a lot of films from name directors. It's not that they don't have them. They're just not in the abundance that larger fests have. I mention this because each of the films I saw today has a recognizable name (in cinephile circles) at the helm.
Since this is my first update from the fest, I feel like I ought to point out that:
a) Sleep is very much at a premium.
b) I'm recovering from some creeping crud that does not have me at peak energy.
c) Time for writing is slim. Time for editing or thoughtfulness is basically nil.
In other words, don't expect high caliber writing. This is mostly seat-of-the-pants stuff written in spare moments or in the rush to get to bed.
-Achilles and the Tortoise (Akiresu to kame) (Takeshi Kitano, 2008)
Country: Japan
Genre: Art theory 101.
Synopsis: Artist embarks on a lifelong search for his creative breakthrough.
Notes: Kitano jabs the art world and artists themselves for pretentiousness, particularly based on their insulated existences in which any old experiment is congratulated as brilliant. Essentially the film is a call for art to be born out of life experiences rather than through imitation or messing around with technique. It's intermittently funny on a modest level and sort of diverting as Kitano goes through the various styles of painting, but ultimately he hammers away at his points without much variation. It could also be filed under "vanity project" as the actor-director's paintings are front and center in the film, but I didn't dislike the film so much to feel like it deserves a catty label like that.
Grade: C
-Night and Day (Bam gua nat) (Hong Sang-soo, 2008)
Country: South Korea
Genre: Male crisis art film
Synopsis: A man runs from trouble and a stable life but wonders if the temptations in his new freedom are worth the consequences.
Notes: I started writing how this is very much of a piece with Hong's other films and male protagonists, but without doing the leg work to confirm that I'm not confusing him with someone else, I'll put a qualifier on that claim. This episodic look at a painter conjures his sense of boredom and aimlessness without the film feeling boring or unfocused. More interestingly, Hong digs into the tension between longterm wishes to be moral through resistance to temptation and the instinct that craves immediate satisfaction.
Grade: B
-24 City (Er shi si cheng ji) (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008)
Country: China
Genre: Social commentary fictional dramatization/documentary
Synopsis: One city is an example of an evolving China.
Notes: Having not read the festival program notes recently, I wasn't sure if this film was a fictional narrative or a documentary. Save for the presence of Joan Chen, without foreknowledge it's not always clear which parts are mere reportage and which are performances. Three generations of Chengdu residents tell their stories about their ties to a government-run aeronautics factory that is being converted into luxury apartments and a business park. This one can be demanding of the viewer's patience but eventually won me over as it became clearer how Jia was demonstrating China's shift to a more capitalist or consumer-oriented way of life.
Grade: B
Since I only had time for restroom breaks between the first three films, I bailed on the day's fourth session for lunch/dinner and watching the second half of the Dayton Flyers' NCAA Tournament game. I was going to see Orz Boyz (Jiong nan hai), but hunger and hoops won out. Then it was back to the grind.
-Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani, 2008)
Country: United States
Genre: Neorealist drama
Synopsis: Cab driver takes an interest in his seemingly suicide-determined customer.
Notes: Bahrani has been tabbed Someone to Watch by the festival, and he continues to show why with this, his third feature. Bahrani tends to spotlight people and places who exist in the background or who aren't given much consideration, like Man Push Cart's food cart operator or Goodbye Solo's Sengalese immigrant taxi driver. Souleyman Sy Savane is extremely charismatic as Solo, an amiable cabbie who agrees to a stranger's request to drive him into the mountains and what must certainly be the spot where he will commit suicide. Through Savane's performance and Bahrani's subtle revealing of the changing relationship between Solo and William, his fare, the film gains quiet power and builds to an uncertain conclusion.
Grade: B+
-La Belle personne (Christophe Honoré, 2008)
Country: France
Genre: French romantic fatalism
Synopsis: Love hurts in all forms, especially among beautiful people at a Parisian high school.
Notes: The Class this isn't. French teens (and one of their teachers in the form of Louis Garrel) brood and lust for each other in the kind of doomed romanticist movie that only the French can pull off convincingly. (Seriously, Garrel's character would not be viewed in the same terms in a U.S. movie.) Oh yeah, several Nick Drake songs underscore the complicated matters of the heart. I have a soft spot for the French New Wave and its inheritors, so keep that in mind in regard to my favorable assessment.
Grade: B-
I'd planned on seeing The Disappeared at midnight, but I figured there was no way I'd get this entry done or hit the hay at a reasonable hour if I did. (I also thought skipping it would leave me freshed for Tokyo!, tomorrow's midnight pic.) One of the weird things that happens at film festivals is that I'm compelled to see films I'd circled on my schedule even if I'd probably have little interest in seeing them outside this setting. Chalk up one win for sanity tonight in scratching this one off the list.
Since this is my first update from the fest, I feel like I ought to point out that:
a) Sleep is very much at a premium.
b) I'm recovering from some creeping crud that does not have me at peak energy.
c) Time for writing is slim. Time for editing or thoughtfulness is basically nil.
In other words, don't expect high caliber writing. This is mostly seat-of-the-pants stuff written in spare moments or in the rush to get to bed.
-Achilles and the Tortoise (Akiresu to kame) (Takeshi Kitano, 2008)
Country: Japan
Genre: Art theory 101.
Synopsis: Artist embarks on a lifelong search for his creative breakthrough.
Notes: Kitano jabs the art world and artists themselves for pretentiousness, particularly based on their insulated existences in which any old experiment is congratulated as brilliant. Essentially the film is a call for art to be born out of life experiences rather than through imitation or messing around with technique. It's intermittently funny on a modest level and sort of diverting as Kitano goes through the various styles of painting, but ultimately he hammers away at his points without much variation. It could also be filed under "vanity project" as the actor-director's paintings are front and center in the film, but I didn't dislike the film so much to feel like it deserves a catty label like that.
Grade: C
-Night and Day (Bam gua nat) (Hong Sang-soo, 2008)
Country: South Korea
Genre: Male crisis art film
Synopsis: A man runs from trouble and a stable life but wonders if the temptations in his new freedom are worth the consequences.
Notes: I started writing how this is very much of a piece with Hong's other films and male protagonists, but without doing the leg work to confirm that I'm not confusing him with someone else, I'll put a qualifier on that claim. This episodic look at a painter conjures his sense of boredom and aimlessness without the film feeling boring or unfocused. More interestingly, Hong digs into the tension between longterm wishes to be moral through resistance to temptation and the instinct that craves immediate satisfaction.
Grade: B
-24 City (Er shi si cheng ji) (Jia Zhang-ke, 2008)
Country: China
Genre: Social commentary fictional dramatization/documentary
Synopsis: One city is an example of an evolving China.
Notes: Having not read the festival program notes recently, I wasn't sure if this film was a fictional narrative or a documentary. Save for the presence of Joan Chen, without foreknowledge it's not always clear which parts are mere reportage and which are performances. Three generations of Chengdu residents tell their stories about their ties to a government-run aeronautics factory that is being converted into luxury apartments and a business park. This one can be demanding of the viewer's patience but eventually won me over as it became clearer how Jia was demonstrating China's shift to a more capitalist or consumer-oriented way of life.
Grade: B
Since I only had time for restroom breaks between the first three films, I bailed on the day's fourth session for lunch/dinner and watching the second half of the Dayton Flyers' NCAA Tournament game. I was going to see Orz Boyz (Jiong nan hai), but hunger and hoops won out. Then it was back to the grind.
-Goodbye Solo (Ramin Bahrani, 2008)
Country: United States
Genre: Neorealist drama
Synopsis: Cab driver takes an interest in his seemingly suicide-determined customer.
Notes: Bahrani has been tabbed Someone to Watch by the festival, and he continues to show why with this, his third feature. Bahrani tends to spotlight people and places who exist in the background or who aren't given much consideration, like Man Push Cart's food cart operator or Goodbye Solo's Sengalese immigrant taxi driver. Souleyman Sy Savane is extremely charismatic as Solo, an amiable cabbie who agrees to a stranger's request to drive him into the mountains and what must certainly be the spot where he will commit suicide. Through Savane's performance and Bahrani's subtle revealing of the changing relationship between Solo and William, his fare, the film gains quiet power and builds to an uncertain conclusion.
Grade: B+
-La Belle personne (Christophe Honoré, 2008)
Country: France
Genre: French romantic fatalism
Synopsis: Love hurts in all forms, especially among beautiful people at a Parisian high school.
Notes: The Class this isn't. French teens (and one of their teachers in the form of Louis Garrel) brood and lust for each other in the kind of doomed romanticist movie that only the French can pull off convincingly. (Seriously, Garrel's character would not be viewed in the same terms in a U.S. movie.) Oh yeah, several Nick Drake songs underscore the complicated matters of the heart. I have a soft spot for the French New Wave and its inheritors, so keep that in mind in regard to my favorable assessment.
Grade: B-
I'd planned on seeing The Disappeared at midnight, but I figured there was no way I'd get this entry done or hit the hay at a reasonable hour if I did. (I also thought skipping it would leave me freshed for Tokyo!, tomorrow's midnight pic.) One of the weird things that happens at film festivals is that I'm compelled to see films I'd circled on my schedule even if I'd probably have little interest in seeing them outside this setting. Chalk up one win for sanity tonight in scratching this one off the list.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Cinema paradiso
The next week and a half is a good time to be a cinephile in central Ohio. Tonight the Wexner Center is screening HUNGER, the debut film of writer-director Steve McQueen. I've yet to see it, but advance word, such as J. Hoberman's rave review, is strong. At last year's Cannes Film Festival McQueen won the Caméra D'Or for this film about a hunger strike in a Northern Ireland prison.
I'm regularly impressed with the world-class filmmakers the Wexner Center is able to bring in for visits, so it comes as no surprise that they landed one of only two appearances that McQueen is making to promote the U.S. opening of the film. (The other is in New York, naturally.) McQueen will introduce HUNGER at this evening's screening. More information is available here.
If you're willing to drive a couple hours north and stay indoors while the weather is becoming more spring-like, more than 300 films await at the 33rd Cleveland International Film Festival. Opening night is Thursday, March 19, with the jam-packed daily schedules commencing on Friday the 20th and lasting through Sunday, March 29.
I've been attending CIFF since 2005 and have felt it's particularly good at finding interesting Scandinavian films that often never reach Columbus. For instance, Joachim Trier's REPRISE played CIFF in 2007 and had a cursory commercial release in 2008 but never opened here.
This year their Pacific Pearls sidebar looks potentially strong, with new films from Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Sang-soo, and Johnnie To. CIFF also has some of the IFC Festival direct titles, like Joe Swanberg's ALEXANDER THE LAST, which just premiered at SXSW.
Other higher profile titles include the baseball drama SUGAR from the co-directors of HALF NELSON; 2009 Sundance buzz film MOON with Sam Rockwell; James Toback's docu-biography about Mike Tyson; and Joe Berlinger's oil documentary CRUDE. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani has been tabbed as Someone to Watch, and all three of his feature films will be screened, including his latest GOODBYE SOLO.
Keep an eye on this space during the festival as I plan to cover eight of CIFF's eleven days as best as can be done with catching up to seven films in a day and not having time for much else, including sleep. Coverage will begin on March 20, although my first post will probably not hit the web until I get to the hotel on the 21st.
I'm regularly impressed with the world-class filmmakers the Wexner Center is able to bring in for visits, so it comes as no surprise that they landed one of only two appearances that McQueen is making to promote the U.S. opening of the film. (The other is in New York, naturally.) McQueen will introduce HUNGER at this evening's screening. More information is available here.
If you're willing to drive a couple hours north and stay indoors while the weather is becoming more spring-like, more than 300 films await at the 33rd Cleveland International Film Festival. Opening night is Thursday, March 19, with the jam-packed daily schedules commencing on Friday the 20th and lasting through Sunday, March 29.
I've been attending CIFF since 2005 and have felt it's particularly good at finding interesting Scandinavian films that often never reach Columbus. For instance, Joachim Trier's REPRISE played CIFF in 2007 and had a cursory commercial release in 2008 but never opened here.
This year their Pacific Pearls sidebar looks potentially strong, with new films from Jia Zhang-ke, Hong Sang-soo, and Johnnie To. CIFF also has some of the IFC Festival direct titles, like Joe Swanberg's ALEXANDER THE LAST, which just premiered at SXSW.
Other higher profile titles include the baseball drama SUGAR from the co-directors of HALF NELSON; 2009 Sundance buzz film MOON with Sam Rockwell; James Toback's docu-biography about Mike Tyson; and Joe Berlinger's oil documentary CRUDE. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani has been tabbed as Someone to Watch, and all three of his feature films will be screened, including his latest GOODBYE SOLO.
Keep an eye on this space during the festival as I plan to cover eight of CIFF's eleven days as best as can be done with catching up to seven films in a day and not having time for much else, including sleep. Coverage will begin on March 20, although my first post will probably not hit the web until I get to the hotel on the 21st.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Big screen/small screen
Let's get this out of the way upfront. Ideally, seeing a film at the movie theater is the best viewing experience. As big as televisions have become and as clear as their pictures can be, they cannot compare to the size of a theater's screen and the rich images presented from light projected through celluloid.
Whenever possible, I try to watch films, especially new releases, at the theater rather than viewing screener DVDs. Although I usually don't have the choice between theatrical or home viewing, more screener opportunities are available to me. There's also the entirely different matter of awards season when DVDs of in-release and upcoming films arrive in the mail as frequently as circulars featuring pizza coupons and tire sales prices.
For instance, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and THE WRESTLER showed up at my home Thanksgiving weekend. I waited until the local press screening to watch the Danny Boyle film. I felt that was the best way to see and evaluate it. Granted, this was no noble sacrifice. Holding off meant I enjoyed a better audio-visual experience than I could get at home.
Such thinking probably stems from well-meaning (and possibly snobbish) senses of purism and directorial intent--films are meant for the theater and should be seen there--although by no means have I lived by a hardline stance of projected film or nothing. There's respecting the art, and then there's trying to abide by an impossible standard. Film is better than video, but seeing is better than not seeing.
As an operating principle I still keep a preference for going to the cinema, but an HDTV and Blu-ray player have considerably weakened my resolve when both options are available. The small (or smaller) screen may not be better than or equal to the big screen, but the difference is much less noticeable than it used to be. I'm amazed at how stunning Blu-ray discs and upconverted DVDs look. Even non-anamorphic DVDs can deliver nice pictures.
With local theaters rapidly churning through specialty films that often open unscreened for press or available only on screeners, I've found it much harder to keep up with smaller arthouse fare with a theater-as-primary-option mindset. I suppose that's one reason why the theatrical vs. home viewing issue is on my mind. If I want to see these movies, chances are I'll need to do so at home. Additionally, IFC Festival Direct skips theatrical runs for video-on-demand, and Gigantic Digital is trying the strategy of opening in large markets while doing day-and-date online streaming for the rest of the country. A trip to the movie theater won't be an available choice.
While I hold the theatrical experience in high esteem--yes, even with the talkers and texters that threaten to, and do, ruin it on occasion--I'm ready to declare home viewing is now good enough to make me more flexible regarding what I'll watch where. (I've used home video primarily for watching films I couldn't see elsewhere.) Sure, HDTV and Blu-ray can't reach the thrilling heights of my personal moviegoing highlights, such as seeing 70mm prints of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and PLAYTIME on huge screens, but technology can now come closer than ever before to replicating the AV splendor at home. What a great time it is to be a cinephile.
Whenever possible, I try to watch films, especially new releases, at the theater rather than viewing screener DVDs. Although I usually don't have the choice between theatrical or home viewing, more screener opportunities are available to me. There's also the entirely different matter of awards season when DVDs of in-release and upcoming films arrive in the mail as frequently as circulars featuring pizza coupons and tire sales prices.
For instance, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and THE WRESTLER showed up at my home Thanksgiving weekend. I waited until the local press screening to watch the Danny Boyle film. I felt that was the best way to see and evaluate it. Granted, this was no noble sacrifice. Holding off meant I enjoyed a better audio-visual experience than I could get at home.
Such thinking probably stems from well-meaning (and possibly snobbish) senses of purism and directorial intent--films are meant for the theater and should be seen there--although by no means have I lived by a hardline stance of projected film or nothing. There's respecting the art, and then there's trying to abide by an impossible standard. Film is better than video, but seeing is better than not seeing.
As an operating principle I still keep a preference for going to the cinema, but an HDTV and Blu-ray player have considerably weakened my resolve when both options are available. The small (or smaller) screen may not be better than or equal to the big screen, but the difference is much less noticeable than it used to be. I'm amazed at how stunning Blu-ray discs and upconverted DVDs look. Even non-anamorphic DVDs can deliver nice pictures.
With local theaters rapidly churning through specialty films that often open unscreened for press or available only on screeners, I've found it much harder to keep up with smaller arthouse fare with a theater-as-primary-option mindset. I suppose that's one reason why the theatrical vs. home viewing issue is on my mind. If I want to see these movies, chances are I'll need to do so at home. Additionally, IFC Festival Direct skips theatrical runs for video-on-demand, and Gigantic Digital is trying the strategy of opening in large markets while doing day-and-date online streaming for the rest of the country. A trip to the movie theater won't be an available choice.
While I hold the theatrical experience in high esteem--yes, even with the talkers and texters that threaten to, and do, ruin it on occasion--I'm ready to declare home viewing is now good enough to make me more flexible regarding what I'll watch where. (I've used home video primarily for watching films I couldn't see elsewhere.) Sure, HDTV and Blu-ray can't reach the thrilling heights of my personal moviegoing highlights, such as seeing 70mm prints of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, and PLAYTIME on huge screens, but technology can now come closer than ever before to replicating the AV splendor at home. What a great time it is to be a cinephile.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
2009 Oscars predictions
Fearless predictions for a night of Academy Awards:
Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Actress: Kate Winslet, The Reader
Best Supporting Actress: Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Best Adapted Screenplay: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Original Screenplay: Milk
Best Animated Feature: WALL-E
Best Animated Short Film: La Maison en petits cubes
Best Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Costume Design: The Duchess
Best Documentary Feature: Man on Wire
Best Documentary Short Subject: The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306
Best Film Editing: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Foreign-Language Film: Waltz with Bashir
Best Live-Action Short Film: Spielzeugland (Toyland)
Best Makeup: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Best Original Score: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Original Song: "Jai Ho", Slumdog Millionaire
Best Sound Editing: The Dark Knight
Best Sound Mixing: The Dark Knight
Best Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Best Actress: Kate Winslet, The Reader
Best Supporting Actress: Penélope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Best Adapted Screenplay: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Original Screenplay: Milk
Best Animated Feature: WALL-E
Best Animated Short Film: La Maison en petits cubes
Best Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Costume Design: The Duchess
Best Documentary Feature: Man on Wire
Best Documentary Short Subject: The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306
Best Film Editing: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Foreign-Language Film: Waltz with Bashir
Best Live-Action Short Film: Spielzeugland (Toyland)
Best Makeup: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Best Original Score: Slumdog Millionaire
Best Original Song: "Jai Ho", Slumdog Millionaire
Best Sound Editing: The Dark Knight
Best Sound Mixing: The Dark Knight
Best Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Must Read After My Death
MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH (Morgan Dews, 2007)
Conservative politicians and social commentators love to hold up the good old days of post-World War II America as the golden age of family values that contemporary society has abandoned. Men were the hard-working breadwinners, and women cheerfully attended to domestic duties, be it watching over the couple's precious little angels or serving as the perfect homemaker and hostess. The film adaptation of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and the television series MAD MEN are recent examples of the many challenges to the LEAVE IT TO BEAVER myth of family life. Now comes the documentary MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH, which exposes the howling inner voices in a frayed marriage.
Filmmaker Morgan Dews' maternal grandmother left an archive of Dictaphone and tape recordings, silent 8mm home movies, photographs, and journals from the 1960s with the stipulation "must read after my death". Contrary to the smiling faces in the pictures and films, these source materials reveal a deeply unhappy home life completely unknown to Dews.
From outward appearances Charley and Allis were a typical couple. He slaved at a job that sometimes took him out of the country for four months a year. She stayed home in Hartford, Connecticut with their four children, three boys and a girl. The Dictaphone letters provided a way of communicating privately and were thought to be something the kids might cherish later, especially when Charley and Allis passed on.
While these recordings might sound like romantic correspondence, audio love letters from afar, they are anything but. Their words seep with anger and disappointment. The recordings may have permitted Charley to assert long distance control--he repeatedly stresses the importance of good housekeeping--while also revealing that he and Allis had an open marriage. Charley freely speaks of his dalliances in Australia, going so far as to have one woman sit in and appear on a recording, while Allis is more careful in describing the release she gets from being with another man.
The Dictaphone gives way to a reel-to-reel tape recorder that Allis uses to document her innermost thoughts, some of which were for the purpose of sharing with her psychiatrist. In naked detail she spells out family problems and frustrations with her own failings as a mother and a woman. The story she tells is a familiar one. Charley hates work, drinks too much, and accuses her of raising the children poorly. Allis feels trapped in having to conform to society's expectations and wishes she could run away. From what she says, her psychiatrist cautions against bucking the system but rather finding a way to meet what the culture demands from her as a wife and parent.
Credited as producer, director, writer, and editor, Dews builds MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH through the unhappy recorded voices atop counterpoint images more befitting of Norman Rockwell paintings. The obvious but effective tactic of contrasting words and visuals scrapes off the veneer of domestic bliss that people put on for the world and which gets pasted in scrapbooks and hung on walls. Dews wisely limits the narration to the Dictaphone letters and tapes to maintain the sense of being told secrets about lives of quiet desperation. Including other voices, even a neutral narrator, or perspectives with the benefit of intervening years, would break the confessional-like quality that makes the film so intimate.
MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH comes mostly from Allis' viewpoint, although Dews' editorial choices must be factored into the equation as well. Eventually one wonders how reliable her reporting is and what her purpose is in not only documenting her feelings but also in saving these recordings and desiring they be heard. It's fair to assume that she is speaking from the heart and considers these tapes to be a way for her to vent about the things that she cannot (or will not) say to her husband. Nevertheless, how calculated is it that the amassed materials provide the final word on Charley? This is her truth, but is it the truth or a full representation of it? Dews leaves these questions unanswered, which is all he can do as he tries to reconcile the grandmother he knew with the anguished woman uncovered to him.
This raises the question of what today's archived online lives consisting of blog posts, YouTube videos, and tweets will mean to future generations. For better or worse, interior lives have become more public. Will our self-penned MRS. DALLOWAY-like remembrances pull back the curtain on common human fears and desires through the ages and liberate us from social mythmaking, or is it all merely self-indulgent slop that sullies us in the memories of our descendants?
As a 1960s housewife's distressed expression of suburban ennui, MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH must be difficult for her family to hear and see, but her grandson has assembled these private thoughts into a compelling reminder that the challenges of marriage and parenting are the same now as they were in supposedly rosier times.
Grade: B
(On February 20 MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH is receiving a day-and-date opening in theaters and online from Gigantic Releasing. For those in markets where this independent film has not opened, a three-day, commercial-free, unlimited stream can be purchased at Gigantic Digital for $2.99.)
Conservative politicians and social commentators love to hold up the good old days of post-World War II America as the golden age of family values that contemporary society has abandoned. Men were the hard-working breadwinners, and women cheerfully attended to domestic duties, be it watching over the couple's precious little angels or serving as the perfect homemaker and hostess. The film adaptation of REVOLUTIONARY ROAD and the television series MAD MEN are recent examples of the many challenges to the LEAVE IT TO BEAVER myth of family life. Now comes the documentary MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH, which exposes the howling inner voices in a frayed marriage.
Filmmaker Morgan Dews' maternal grandmother left an archive of Dictaphone and tape recordings, silent 8mm home movies, photographs, and journals from the 1960s with the stipulation "must read after my death". Contrary to the smiling faces in the pictures and films, these source materials reveal a deeply unhappy home life completely unknown to Dews.
From outward appearances Charley and Allis were a typical couple. He slaved at a job that sometimes took him out of the country for four months a year. She stayed home in Hartford, Connecticut with their four children, three boys and a girl. The Dictaphone letters provided a way of communicating privately and were thought to be something the kids might cherish later, especially when Charley and Allis passed on.
While these recordings might sound like romantic correspondence, audio love letters from afar, they are anything but. Their words seep with anger and disappointment. The recordings may have permitted Charley to assert long distance control--he repeatedly stresses the importance of good housekeeping--while also revealing that he and Allis had an open marriage. Charley freely speaks of his dalliances in Australia, going so far as to have one woman sit in and appear on a recording, while Allis is more careful in describing the release she gets from being with another man.
The Dictaphone gives way to a reel-to-reel tape recorder that Allis uses to document her innermost thoughts, some of which were for the purpose of sharing with her psychiatrist. In naked detail she spells out family problems and frustrations with her own failings as a mother and a woman. The story she tells is a familiar one. Charley hates work, drinks too much, and accuses her of raising the children poorly. Allis feels trapped in having to conform to society's expectations and wishes she could run away. From what she says, her psychiatrist cautions against bucking the system but rather finding a way to meet what the culture demands from her as a wife and parent.
Credited as producer, director, writer, and editor, Dews builds MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH through the unhappy recorded voices atop counterpoint images more befitting of Norman Rockwell paintings. The obvious but effective tactic of contrasting words and visuals scrapes off the veneer of domestic bliss that people put on for the world and which gets pasted in scrapbooks and hung on walls. Dews wisely limits the narration to the Dictaphone letters and tapes to maintain the sense of being told secrets about lives of quiet desperation. Including other voices, even a neutral narrator, or perspectives with the benefit of intervening years, would break the confessional-like quality that makes the film so intimate.
MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH comes mostly from Allis' viewpoint, although Dews' editorial choices must be factored into the equation as well. Eventually one wonders how reliable her reporting is and what her purpose is in not only documenting her feelings but also in saving these recordings and desiring they be heard. It's fair to assume that she is speaking from the heart and considers these tapes to be a way for her to vent about the things that she cannot (or will not) say to her husband. Nevertheless, how calculated is it that the amassed materials provide the final word on Charley? This is her truth, but is it the truth or a full representation of it? Dews leaves these questions unanswered, which is all he can do as he tries to reconcile the grandmother he knew with the anguished woman uncovered to him.
This raises the question of what today's archived online lives consisting of blog posts, YouTube videos, and tweets will mean to future generations. For better or worse, interior lives have become more public. Will our self-penned MRS. DALLOWAY-like remembrances pull back the curtain on common human fears and desires through the ages and liberate us from social mythmaking, or is it all merely self-indulgent slop that sullies us in the memories of our descendants?
As a 1960s housewife's distressed expression of suburban ennui, MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH must be difficult for her family to hear and see, but her grandson has assembled these private thoughts into a compelling reminder that the challenges of marriage and parenting are the same now as they were in supposedly rosier times.
Grade: B
(On February 20 MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH is receiving a day-and-date opening in theaters and online from Gigantic Releasing. For those in markets where this independent film has not opened, a three-day, commercial-free, unlimited stream can be purchased at Gigantic Digital for $2.99.)
Monday, February 09, 2009
The Muriel Awards
The 2008 year-end awards keep trickling out. I'm one of the participants in Paul Clark's brainchild The Muriels. The winners are being rolled out on a daily basis through February 22, so check out what this ragtag bunch has selected as last year's finest contributions to cinema as well as 10th, 25th, and 50th anniversary picks.These awards are voted on by a collection of cinephiles/critics from around the country. Unlike a lot of other awards, The Muriels aren't about influencing and predicting the Oscars or being the first one on the scene. While I'll be finding out the winners at the same time you are, past history tells me that they should be an interesting and eclectic bunch.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
#1
Next Tuesday Paul Markoff and I will tape our annual Academy Awards preview and Best and Worst Films of 2008 episodes of Now Playing. Our first show, taped in March 1997, was an hour-long special debating the Oscar nominees and predicting the winners. At the end we tacked on our own Top Ten lists for 1996.
Neither of us were seeing movies at the rate at what has become the norm with the show in production. It goes without saying that the movies I chose to see and pay for in my pre-critic days went through a filtering process more than the practically limitless abundance made available to me as a critic.
Naturally, that first pre-critic Top Ten list probably looked much different than it would have if I'd been reviewing films. For '96 I picked BIG NIGHT as the best film of the year. Would I still keep it in that lofty spot? I don't know--I think I've only seen it once--but I suspect I probably wouldn't. It takes time to develop critical faculties, and the person on the verge of reviewing films and engaging in the practice in those early years isn't the same person I am now.
As Now Playing nears the start of its 13th production year, it is interesting to look back at those films I've chosen to laud as the year's best with a critic's authority. I think it's a pretty respectable list--of course I would--and I don't regret any of these picks even if I wouldn't be averse to a tweak here or there.
If I were to replace any, the likeliest candidate is 2000 topper TRAFFIC, although what would assume its spot--off the top of my head, ALMOST FAMOUS, DANCER IN THE DARK, GEORGE WASHINGTON, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, and WONDER BOYS would challenge--is hard to say.
My Top Ten lists prior to 2003 are not on this website. I'm not sure if I even have all of them still. Nevertheless, I thought it might be fun to share what movies I selected each year. Perhaps there's a pattern to discern, perhaps there isn't. Anyway, enjoy.
1997: The Ice Storm
1998: The Truman Show
1999: Being John Malkovich
2000: Traffic
2001: Mulholland Dr.
2002: Punch-Drunk Love
2003: Gerry
2004: Dogville
2005: Kings & Queen (Rois et reine)
2006: The Prestige
2007: There Will Be Blood
2008: WALL-E
Neither of us were seeing movies at the rate at what has become the norm with the show in production. It goes without saying that the movies I chose to see and pay for in my pre-critic days went through a filtering process more than the practically limitless abundance made available to me as a critic.
Naturally, that first pre-critic Top Ten list probably looked much different than it would have if I'd been reviewing films. For '96 I picked BIG NIGHT as the best film of the year. Would I still keep it in that lofty spot? I don't know--I think I've only seen it once--but I suspect I probably wouldn't. It takes time to develop critical faculties, and the person on the verge of reviewing films and engaging in the practice in those early years isn't the same person I am now.
As Now Playing nears the start of its 13th production year, it is interesting to look back at those films I've chosen to laud as the year's best with a critic's authority. I think it's a pretty respectable list--of course I would--and I don't regret any of these picks even if I wouldn't be averse to a tweak here or there.
If I were to replace any, the likeliest candidate is 2000 topper TRAFFIC, although what would assume its spot--off the top of my head, ALMOST FAMOUS, DANCER IN THE DARK, GEORGE WASHINGTON, IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, and WONDER BOYS would challenge--is hard to say.
My Top Ten lists prior to 2003 are not on this website. I'm not sure if I even have all of them still. Nevertheless, I thought it might be fun to share what movies I selected each year. Perhaps there's a pattern to discern, perhaps there isn't. Anyway, enjoy.
1997: The Ice Storm
1998: The Truman Show
1999: Being John Malkovich
2000: Traffic
2001: Mulholland Dr.
2002: Punch-Drunk Love
2003: Gerry
2004: Dogville
2005: Kings & Queen (Rois et reine)
2006: The Prestige
2007: There Will Be Blood
2008: WALL-E
Thursday, January 29, 2009
The Best Films of 2008
1. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
Both a sensitive depiction of loneliness and a stinging rebuke of consumerism, WALL-E is an ambitious family film with plenty of humor and a cute-as-a-bug protagonist to amuse the kids and thougthfulness to engage adults. WALL-E is packed with physical comedy and sight gags as old as the silent films that provide inspiration for a hero in the tradition of Chaplin's Little Tramp. The sleek space-age design and graceful moments of quiet, such as a lovely robot dance among the stars, give comfort and peace from the heavy themes. WALL-E'S echo of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY--call it the second dawn of man--serves as a cunning tribute to Kubrick's film and an optimistic note for the future of slumbering mankind. Writer-director Andrew Stanton packages the fun and high-mindedness in dazzling ways to make WALL-E successful as popular entertainment for all ages and art that merits serious discussion.
2. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
THE DARK KNIGHT upends the traditional view of the blockbuster as possessing all brawn and no brain. Director Christopher Nolan administers the visceral stimulation required of an action movie and contemplates the urgent questions regarding the use of power to combat evil and the importance of imagery in the fight. Heath Ledger's riveting turn as The Joker, a sociopath conducting fear experiments on the public for his anarchic amusement, provides a terrifying reminder that the social fabric can be easily torn.
3. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
A simple story of a woman on the verge of losing everything, WENDY AND LUCY gains quiet power in how director Kelly Reichardt depicts the immediacy and peril in living day-to-day. As Wendy, a strapped young woman driving across the country in search of work with her dog her lone companion, Michelle Williams gives a heartbreaking performance. While the film deals Wendy the indignities of her economic situation, acts of decency and compassion provide the most stirring moments in a gorgeously photographed film.
4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
The challenge of a drug addicted past and family tensions in the present is beautifully elucidated in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. The handheld camerawork draws us into an intimate and suffocating look at what it can be like to hurt many people and desire redemption. The stylistic choice allows the camera to get close while having the freedom to wander within a confined setting, which is precisely the situation Anne Hathaway's Kym finds herself in. Director Jonathan Demme unfolds RACHEL GETTING MARRIED like a novel that gives the immersive experience of being in an environment. The wedding and reception scenes are, in a sense, superfluous to the main narrative, yet this multicultural celebration of community and family is precisely what Kym feels outside of even while in its midst.
5. FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 2007)
Provocateur Michael Haneke didn't need to remake his 1997 Austrian thriller, especially a decade later as an English-language clone, but as multiplex performance art FUNNY GAMES is a wickedly amusing joke on viewers not expecting a film to toy with them so mercilessly. Coming on the heels of the torture porn trend in horror movies and amid countless reality TV programs, the timing couldn't be better for Haneke's stern lecture decrying the audience's bloodlust and the phoniness and debasement passing for realism in pop culture. Uncomfortable yet ultimately exhilirating, FUNNY GAMES uses suggested violence, intense moralizing, and dark humor to jolt modern moviegoers into recognizing what we consume for entertainment and question whether it's edifying.
6. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh, 2008)
It's clear from the beginning of the documentary MAN ON WIRE that French wirewalker Philippe Petit survived the forty-five minutes he spent performing on the cable strung between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers without a net or any safety measures, but knowing this doesn't diminish the tension. Director James Marsh employs a heist film's structure to lay out the specifics of how the high wire artist and his friends schemed to get to the top of the towers, let alone pull off this inconceivable feat. Recreated scenes, home movies, and photographs are expertly edited together to heighten the sense of daring and danger.
7. A CHRISTMAS TALE (UN CONTE DE NOËL) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
French auteur Arnaud Desplechin makes gloriously messy films about human interactions, so what better hothouse of domestic clashes is there for him to examine than the dysfunctional family Christmas movie? Featuring a who's who of France's finest actors, including Catherine Deneuve as the clan's matriarch and Desplechin surrogate Mathieu Amalric, A CHRISTMAS TALE unpacks a familial history of grudges, joys, disappointments, and fears that would keep a psychoanalyst busy for decades. For as brutally honest or supposedly truthful as the characters are with each other--with Desplechin it can be hard to discern between the real and the imagined--the airing of grievances is quite playful in tone and the director's inventive cinematic techniques.
8. TRANSSIBERIAN (Brad Anderson, 2008)
Emiliy Mortimer and Woody Harrelson find more adventure than they desired during a week-long trip aboard the Trans-Siberian Express in Brad Anderson's Hitchcockian thriller. TRANSSIBERIAN is a superb suspense film with plenty of intriguing developments to challenge the characters and keep viewers on the edges of their seats. As usual Mortimer is terrific playing a woman struggling to resist indulging her wild old ways as temptations and pressures mount.
9. DOUBT (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)
Writer-director John Patrick Shanley's moral drama actively involves the viewer in assessing the truth of a nun's allegation of a priest. In DOUBT the truth gets tossed about like a kite on a blustery day. It shifts direction abruptly, is difficult to control, and gets battered in the process. However, Shanley's film is not an argument against doubt but a reasoned case for a healthy dose of skepticism to balance out faith, even if such thoughts are unsettling. DOUBT inspires more uncertainty than it resolves, but unquestionably it houses philosophical inquiries and top-notch acting from Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis to mark it as a compelling piece of cinema.
10. AMERICAN TEEN (Nanette Burstein, 2008)
Nanette Burstein's sharply-felt documentary about Warsaw, Indiana high school seniors visits the hallways, bedrooms, and basements where the formative years are spent and finds things are not all that different regardless of when one is a teenager. The primary participants resemble their fictional teen movie analogues--Hannah, the artistically-minded outsider; popular mean girl Megan; Colin, the star basketball player in a hoops-mad community; and lovelorn band geek Jake--but are depicted with greater complexity than their central casting counterparts often receive. Burstein captures teenage angst and hope with such emotional potency that it is unlikely to make viewers wistful for a frequently idealized time in life.
Both a sensitive depiction of loneliness and a stinging rebuke of consumerism, WALL-E is an ambitious family film with plenty of humor and a cute-as-a-bug protagonist to amuse the kids and thougthfulness to engage adults. WALL-E is packed with physical comedy and sight gags as old as the silent films that provide inspiration for a hero in the tradition of Chaplin's Little Tramp. The sleek space-age design and graceful moments of quiet, such as a lovely robot dance among the stars, give comfort and peace from the heavy themes. WALL-E'S echo of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY--call it the second dawn of man--serves as a cunning tribute to Kubrick's film and an optimistic note for the future of slumbering mankind. Writer-director Andrew Stanton packages the fun and high-mindedness in dazzling ways to make WALL-E successful as popular entertainment for all ages and art that merits serious discussion.
2. THE DARK KNIGHT (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
THE DARK KNIGHT upends the traditional view of the blockbuster as possessing all brawn and no brain. Director Christopher Nolan administers the visceral stimulation required of an action movie and contemplates the urgent questions regarding the use of power to combat evil and the importance of imagery in the fight. Heath Ledger's riveting turn as The Joker, a sociopath conducting fear experiments on the public for his anarchic amusement, provides a terrifying reminder that the social fabric can be easily torn.
3. WENDY AND LUCY (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
A simple story of a woman on the verge of losing everything, WENDY AND LUCY gains quiet power in how director Kelly Reichardt depicts the immediacy and peril in living day-to-day. As Wendy, a strapped young woman driving across the country in search of work with her dog her lone companion, Michelle Williams gives a heartbreaking performance. While the film deals Wendy the indignities of her economic situation, acts of decency and compassion provide the most stirring moments in a gorgeously photographed film.
4. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED (Jonathan Demme, 2008)
The challenge of a drug addicted past and family tensions in the present is beautifully elucidated in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. The handheld camerawork draws us into an intimate and suffocating look at what it can be like to hurt many people and desire redemption. The stylistic choice allows the camera to get close while having the freedom to wander within a confined setting, which is precisely the situation Anne Hathaway's Kym finds herself in. Director Jonathan Demme unfolds RACHEL GETTING MARRIED like a novel that gives the immersive experience of being in an environment. The wedding and reception scenes are, in a sense, superfluous to the main narrative, yet this multicultural celebration of community and family is precisely what Kym feels outside of even while in its midst.
5. FUNNY GAMES (Michael Haneke, 2007)
Provocateur Michael Haneke didn't need to remake his 1997 Austrian thriller, especially a decade later as an English-language clone, but as multiplex performance art FUNNY GAMES is a wickedly amusing joke on viewers not expecting a film to toy with them so mercilessly. Coming on the heels of the torture porn trend in horror movies and amid countless reality TV programs, the timing couldn't be better for Haneke's stern lecture decrying the audience's bloodlust and the phoniness and debasement passing for realism in pop culture. Uncomfortable yet ultimately exhilirating, FUNNY GAMES uses suggested violence, intense moralizing, and dark humor to jolt modern moviegoers into recognizing what we consume for entertainment and question whether it's edifying.
6. MAN ON WIRE (James Marsh, 2008)
It's clear from the beginning of the documentary MAN ON WIRE that French wirewalker Philippe Petit survived the forty-five minutes he spent performing on the cable strung between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers without a net or any safety measures, but knowing this doesn't diminish the tension. Director James Marsh employs a heist film's structure to lay out the specifics of how the high wire artist and his friends schemed to get to the top of the towers, let alone pull off this inconceivable feat. Recreated scenes, home movies, and photographs are expertly edited together to heighten the sense of daring and danger.
7. A CHRISTMAS TALE (UN CONTE DE NOËL) (Arnaud Desplechin, 2008)
French auteur Arnaud Desplechin makes gloriously messy films about human interactions, so what better hothouse of domestic clashes is there for him to examine than the dysfunctional family Christmas movie? Featuring a who's who of France's finest actors, including Catherine Deneuve as the clan's matriarch and Desplechin surrogate Mathieu Amalric, A CHRISTMAS TALE unpacks a familial history of grudges, joys, disappointments, and fears that would keep a psychoanalyst busy for decades. For as brutally honest or supposedly truthful as the characters are with each other--with Desplechin it can be hard to discern between the real and the imagined--the airing of grievances is quite playful in tone and the director's inventive cinematic techniques.
8. TRANSSIBERIAN (Brad Anderson, 2008)
Emiliy Mortimer and Woody Harrelson find more adventure than they desired during a week-long trip aboard the Trans-Siberian Express in Brad Anderson's Hitchcockian thriller. TRANSSIBERIAN is a superb suspense film with plenty of intriguing developments to challenge the characters and keep viewers on the edges of their seats. As usual Mortimer is terrific playing a woman struggling to resist indulging her wild old ways as temptations and pressures mount.
9. DOUBT (John Patrick Shanley, 2008)
Writer-director John Patrick Shanley's moral drama actively involves the viewer in assessing the truth of a nun's allegation of a priest. In DOUBT the truth gets tossed about like a kite on a blustery day. It shifts direction abruptly, is difficult to control, and gets battered in the process. However, Shanley's film is not an argument against doubt but a reasoned case for a healthy dose of skepticism to balance out faith, even if such thoughts are unsettling. DOUBT inspires more uncertainty than it resolves, but unquestionably it houses philosophical inquiries and top-notch acting from Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis to mark it as a compelling piece of cinema.
10. AMERICAN TEEN (Nanette Burstein, 2008)
Nanette Burstein's sharply-felt documentary about Warsaw, Indiana high school seniors visits the hallways, bedrooms, and basements where the formative years are spent and finds things are not all that different regardless of when one is a teenager. The primary participants resemble their fictional teen movie analogues--Hannah, the artistically-minded outsider; popular mean girl Megan; Colin, the star basketball player in a hoops-mad community; and lovelorn band geek Jake--but are depicted with greater complexity than their central casting counterparts often receive. Burstein captures teenage angst and hope with such emotional potency that it is unlikely to make viewers wistful for a frequently idealized time in life.
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