| |
Pre-SIFF
Movies
|
| |
|
| |
Iron
Man
As a genre, the superhero movie has strange and severe restrictions.
It must be a morality tale without deep characters, a drama without
suspense, an action movie that's meant to be unbelievable. Where,
then, is our interest supposed to attach? Too many of these movies
have no idea: they simply show the famous face to draw in the comic
fans, and fill the screen with random mayhem for the rest of us.
But at last comes a superhero movie done right! Jon Favreau's snappy,
agile Iron Man rockets out of the scrap-heap of Spidermans,
X-Mens, and Fantastic Fours to easily become the most satisfying comic-book
adaptation yet made. It's well-written, fast-paced without being dizzying,
its hero is clearly defined, its plot makes sense, and it has a social
conscience to boot. Take note, others: this is how it's done.
Of course, Iron Man respects the restrictions. We get a hero,
a villain, predictable fights and inevitable triumphs. But Favreau
understands the secret: the superhero movie is all about the powers.
The relationship we care about, in this genre, is that of the hero
to his own abilities. Other super-flicks can't wait to get the origin
story out of the way and proceed to the meaningless slugfest. In Iron
Man, in contrast, the focus stays on mastering the power itself--in
this case, a flying suit of super armor. The vast majority of the
movie is devoted to the process of building and testing the armor,
which remains delightfully defective throughout, and even the slugfests
are cast in terms of whether or not the suit will work.
Robert Downey Jr. embraces this spirit in a mesmerizingly eccentric
performance that carries the movie. He plays Tony Stark, wunderkind
scientific genius and billionaire head of Stark Industries, a weapons
manufacturer. Downey's Stark is an egomaniac who treats other human
beings as if they were two-dimensional cutouts in a comic-book world,
which they are. It's a stroke of acting genius. His only real relationship
is with his power, the suit of armor: here he displays the full range
of doubt, pain, desire and frustration. (In another stroke of genius,
the armor is permitted to talk back.) We sympathize with Downey because,
after all, we bought our ticket on the same premise.
The plot hews close to the original 1963 Marvel Comics storyline.
Stark is kidnapped in a war zone (Vietnam has been updated to Afghanistan),
whereupon his captors order him to build them a weapon. Instead, under
their non-engineering noses he constructs the super armor suit, in
which he smashes his way to freedom. He then has a moral awakening,
tries to shut down his weapons company, and, as Iron Man, flies around
the world trying to undo the damage that his own weapons have caused.
This is where the social commentary comes in. Inescapably, Iron Man
is a film about the U.S. military, released in an era when the U.S.
is fighting two wars and often seems to be hungering for a third.
Favreau plays his cards close to the vest: the scenes in Afghanistan
are carefully generic (the kidnappers are simply thugs, apolitical
and apparently unreligious), and he diplomatically refrains from indicting
U.S. militarism as a whole. Indeed, with his suit of supersonic death-dealing
armor, Iron Man himself is a walking military fetish, and the movie
plays to that crowd. Nevertheless, there is something provocative
in a superhero who exists to undo the misuse of American bombs. This
superhero is not exactly fighting for "The American Way."
Even more interesting is the fact that the villain of the piece represents
the U.S. military-industrial complex. This is Obadiah Stane, Stark's
corporate partner (played with avuncular silkiness in an unusual turn
by Jeff Bridges). Stane is no turncoat; he faithfully represents the
interests of the corporation, against Stark who wants to shut down
the profitable weapons sector. It then turns out that the faithful
representative is selling weapons to both sides in the war, i.e.,
fomenting war for its own profitable sake. What exactly is Favreau
trying to say?
These issues loom, but in the background, like the delicately-painted
plateaus behind the primary-color action of a Road Runner cartoon.
In the foreground, Stark perfects his armor through humorous trial
and error in his secret lab, takes it on aerial test runs (insert
superb CGI effects here), and banters with Pepper Potts, his Girl
Friday (insert superb performance by Gwenyth Paltrow here). It's worth
pointing out that Iron Man is by far the most verbal of
the recent superhero movies. The film's best scene comes when Downey
and Paltrow are face to face in the lab, Potts engaged in replacing
the super-battery that's actually connected inside Stark's chest:
the two of them rail non-stop at each other, and it's far more exciting
than Iron Man's CGI dogfight with F-15 jets.
The movie loses steam when Stane dons his own super-suit for the
rock-em-sock-em climax, mostly because Downey stops talking. But it's
saved by a closing monologue in which Stark, at a press conference,
must deny rumous that he's Iron Man. Mumbling at high speed with embarrassment
and secret thrill warring on his face, Downey runs through all the
reasons why the idea of a superhero is "preposterous" and
yet "fantastic," and we realize that he's really talking
about the genre itself. All superhero movies should be preposterous
and yet fantastic: Iron Man is a rare one that suceeds.
|
| |
|
| |
Deathnote
This Japanese live-action film about a supernatural murder weapon
is made from one of my all-time favorite mangas, which gave it a lot
to live up to. I also worried that it would be a difficult one to
bring to the screen. The Deathnote manga is long, grim, intensely
cerebral and procedural, with most of the dialogue in the form of
internal thinking. To make matters worse for a filmmaker, you cannot
hope to improve the original storyboard flow by world-class manga
artist Takeshi Obata. Nevertheless, director Shusuke Kaneko did a
very fair job of bringing the books into cinematic motion.
(The length problem has been handled by breaking the story into two
Deathnote movies--the second one has yet to come to the States--and
looking at the first, it seems that together they will tell only the
first half of the manga storyline. We'll have to see.)
Here's the setup: teenager Light Yagami inherits the notebook of
a Shinigami (death god) and gains the power to kill anyone in the
world by writing their name in the book. He decides to use it to rid
the world of criminals, and quickly becomes "Kira," history's
most elusive mass murderer. The brilliant detective "L,"
also a teenager, is enlisted to solve the unsolveable case, and he
closes in, but Light is an equally brilliant quarry. In a long-range
battle of wits L and Kira begin hunting each other.
The notebook comes complete with its Shinigami, a genial monster
named Ryuk whom only those who touch the deathnote can see. The CGI
Ryuk was a real highlight--he looked perfect, and the special effects
blended him seamlessly into the action.
The live actors had more problems. Throughout the movie the pacing
was a little off, giving it an amateurish and stilted feel. Several
times what were supposed to be normal reactions on the screen brought
collective guffaws from our audience. I think the actual culprit was
the astonishingly poor English dub--and what's interesting is that
the English voices themselves were fine. I have to point the finger
here at someone who's usually safely concealed in the background:
the English dub director, the person in charge of timing and
delivery. This is a crucial role, and it's rare to see it so badly
bungled in a major American translation from the normally high-class
Viz Pictures.
Another Viz flub was that they omitted to provide subtitles for the
Japanese text on screen. Since much of the plot is advanced via newspaper
headlines, this was a real loss. In general I feel like I saw a crippled
version of the film, and I'd like to see it again in its original
Japanese, with subtitles. At the screening I attended, a "making-of"
featurette was shown afterwards that included snippets of the original
dialogue, and I could tell at once that it was a vast improvement.
Despite these flaws, on balance the movie worked. It had a dark look,
appropriate to the noir subject matter, and it handled well both the
initial setup, where Light discovers the notebook and turns to evil,
and the suspense of Kira and L closing in on each other. They pared
the manga plot down intelligently, highlighting the "outdoors"
moments like the scenes on a bus and subway, where Light turns the
tables on a pursuing agent and kills him. Some new scenes, invented
for the movie to bridge gaps and save time, were actually among the
strongest, like a face-off in an art gallery where Light "proves"
his innocence by scripting the death of his own girlfriend.
The delicate point with Deathnote is that the audience should
root for the killer despite themselves. The movie pulls this off,
but at a cost of keeping us at too great a remove. The story is a
little paint-by-numbers: few of the deaths feel real, and Kira and
L make their chessboard moves with no passion behind them. The moral
intensity that drove the manga has been muffled.
All in all, it's not the best Deathnote movie that could have
been made, but it's close enough to satisfy the fans.
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
SIFF
Movies
|
| |
|
| |
A
Man's Job
Juha, a rugged, self-contained factory worker, has been out of work
for three months but can't bring himself to break the news to his
wife and three children. Every day he awakens at dawn, dresses, and
heads off to spend another day hanging out at the town cafeteria,
where he and his friend Ollie wait for a response to their taped-up
handyman ad. Eventually a rich woman hires Juha and takes him home,
but once inside she asks him to brush her hair while standing naked.
Thus begins Juha's new career.
A Man's Job, a Finnish film written and directed by Aleksi
Salmenperä, is surely the sweetest and most profound look at
male prostitution that has ever been brought to the screen. By turns
comic, tender, harrowing and startling, it is devoid of the slightest
hint of glamour or prurience. Entering other women's homes, Juha encounters
loneliness, sadness, and quiet depravity. Some women just need to
be told they're beautiful; others cry on his shoulder; others are
desperate to learn tricks with which to arouse their husbands' waning
interest. Sex in this world is not at all sexy; it is the placeholder
for universal emptiness--whatever has gone missing, whatever can't
be expressed.
Juha at first takes a purely pragmatic approach to the profession:
it brings in good money, so he'll go through whatever motions are
necessary. He attacks the business as a business: he places Internet
ads and puts Ollie, a taxi driver, on commission as his go-between
and driver. But discomfort starts pulling at him from both ends. The
womens' emotional needs force the phlegmatic Juha to open up, to become
an awkward sort of therapist. Meanwhile, the ongoing lies are rapidly
eating away at his home life. His wife Katja is tough and intelligent
and has her own emptinesses, and a prior relationship between her
and Ollie begins reheating, to Juha's mounting alarm.
Tommi Korpela gives a terrific performance as Juha. From his bearded,
pockmarked, caveman-like face he stares out with amusement and wonder
at the world behind closed doors, a workman spying on bourgeois lunacy.
His resolve to soldier through untouched becomes all the fiercer as
he becomes more involved. In one dreadful and hilarious sequence,
he falls off a table while stripping at a bachelorette party and severely
injures himself; undeterred, he marches to his next job, the trials
of which leave him unconscious and bleeding on the floor. But what
finally breaks him is the simple act of waiting in a client's house
while the woman struggles to put her young children to bed: it is
too great a mirror of everything he has destroyed in his own home.
This business, in other words, is no business at all. More than any
movie I've ever seen about prostitution, A Man's Job conveys
the wrongness, the unnaturalness of it, the sense that one can't give
the most intimate part of onesself away to strangers without destruction.
Juha's income has given his wife a new car and washing machine; they
sit, glittering, in his almost-ruined home. Under the surface, this
is also a film about commodification and the relationship of the rich
to the poor.
As Ollie, the helpless Barney-Rubble friend caught in the middle,
Jani Volanen gives a fine display of mounting desperation and desire.
But the real star of the show is Maria Heiskanen as the impoverished,
suffering, lied-to Katja. Her almost wordless performance is the rock
of strength against which all the empty desires of the modern world
must shatter. In the end, she takes action to reunite her home as
only a Viking woman could, and reminds us that the pain of real love
is more powerful than the strongest lure of a substitute.
|
| |
|
| |
Mermaid
The fine line between whimsical and demented gets crossed and re-crossed
in this uneasy film by Russian writer/director Anna Melikyan.
Alisa, a magical waif, grows up in a shack on the seashore in the
company of her mother and grandmother. Bored, she squints one eye,
hooks a finger, and "pushes" ships at sea along. In false-color
dreams she seeks her vanished father, who left behind only a diving
suit. At times she runs down the pier, blows into the waves, and stirs
up storms with her magical power. When her mother takes a lover, Alisa
burns their house down. Tin Drum-like, she determines never
to speak again, and remains mute until their family moves to Moscow,
by which time she's a teenager.
Mermaid has been compared to Amèlie, in that
it features a wide-eyed sylph wandering in an oddball world, who may
or may not be able to cause magical things to happen. Melikyan's film
tries very hard to bounce along with that quirky cheer, and Mariya
Shalayeva, as the grown Alisa, chips in with her tangled green hair,
ragamuffin clothes and big, lost, ditzy smile. It's the kind of movie
where Alisa's Moscow high-rise gets covered over by a mural-sized
advertisement made of translucent cloth, whereupon Alisa triumphantly
cuts out her window, and winds up standing in the eyeball of a gigantic
model. Large-scale, eccentric symbolism is the order of the day.
But this is Amèlie in a much darker world. Post-Soviet
Moscow is an arena of homeless cripples, cutthroat hustlers, meaningless
violence, and the daily struggle for existence. Cars scream past on
the streets like high-speed missiles. The waif's indomitable spirit
does not triumph here, though for a long time the film can't make
up its mind as to whether or not it will. Alisa finds employment walking
around town inside a big cell-phone costume, which is delightful,
but then she's caught up in a riot, beaten, imprisoned, and finally
charged for her wrecked costume by the overbearing shop boss who holds
her passport. In her next costume she walks through the rain, sobbing.
The same dysfunction attaches to her love story. Contemplating suicide
at the edge of a bridge, Alisa is interrupted by a more determined
jumper, whom she leaps in to rescue. Sasha (Yevgeni Tsyganov) is a
hard-drinking, hard-partying young Muscovite on the make; he lives
in a monochrome, cubist, duplex apartment with a pool-sized jacuzzi,
throws industrial-backbeat raves every night, and wakes up with no
memory of the girl who rescued him. Sasha makes his fortune selling
property lots on the moon to the rich; when Alisa point out that no
one owns the moon, he replies, "No one owns the Earth either,
but it hasn't stopped them from selling it." Large-scale, eccentric
symbolism again: very nice. She falls for him, he takes a surly sort
of shine to her: all very charming.
But though the magical girl can save Sasha's life (more than once),
she cannot heal his soul, nor does she win the rivalry with his sexy
blonde girlfriend. Despair and heartbreak push Alisa to a climax in
which the meaningless chaos of Moscow triumphs over her and Sasha
both.
As an indictment of modern capitalist Russia, Mermaid has
some strong things to say. As an urban fairy tale about a magical
waif, it possesses at times a ditzy, off-kilter charm. But as a blend
of the two it creates a disturbing emotional short-circuit, and ultimately
leaves the viewer with a metallic taste in the mouth, unsatisfied
on both counts.
|
| |
|
| |
Gonzo:
The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
Most documentaries about writers tend to fall flat, because most
writers lead very boring lives, at least compared to their characters.
This is emphatically not the case, however, with Hunter S. Thompson,
the notoriously unstable, rip-roaring counterculture author and journalist
who committed suicide in 2005. Thompson's life was every bit as wild,
and made every bit as lasting an impression on the culture, as his
writings.
Given the material, Alex Gibney's biopic, Gonzo: The Life and
Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, would have been interesting no
matter what. But in fact Gibney has crafted a masterpiece of a film,
that unveils Thompson from cradle to grave through a panoply of sources
and a constantly-escalating sense of amazement. (Trust me, the grave
is amazing.)
Gibney is the talented filmmaker who brought us Enron: The Smartest
Guys in the Room (2005), a rare strong entry in a run of disspiritingly
bad anti-Bush movies. More recently, his Taxi to the Dark Side,
chronicling the abuses of America's rendition program, won accolades.
In Gonzo, he turns the power of his leftist vision from critical
to positive, celebrating not only Thompson's rebellious life but the
whole counterculture of the 1960s and '70s that made it possible.
The film tells its story through archival footage, interviews with
a surprising variety of people who knew or worked with Thompson, and
of course Thompson himself, who appears on-camera from within every
stage of his life, rolling his eyes and speaking in his distinctive
shrugging mumble. Sections of his writings are read aloud, superbly,
by Johnny Depp, and clips are shown from the two Thompson movies,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which starred Depp), and Bill
Murray's Where the Buffalo Roam.
The interviewees include relatives and friends--his two wives and
his son, artistic collaborator Ralph Steadman, Rolling Stone editor
Jann Wenner--plus appearances by no less than Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe,
Pat Buchanon, George McGovern, and Gary Hart. They look back on Thompson
with varying degrees of affection, but all have laughing, headshaking
stories to tell about the man.
Many, like me, probably remember Thompson mostly for his embrace
of drugs and firearms, famously exemplified in his book Fear and
Loathing in Las Vegas and the Raoul Duke character from Doonesbury.
That aspect of his life is certainly in the movie. Gibney chronicles
the writing of the book, the start of Thompson's collaboration with
Steadman, and the discovery of "Gonzo journalism," in which
the writer's subjective madness becomes intertwined with the ostensible
subject matter. The film then shows how the "Gonzo" persona
sadly took over Thompson's life, bringing him a distracting celebrity
and eventually interfering with his ability to write at all. Gibney
makes short work of the Doonesbury character, which he considers literary
theft and a slander that helped undermine Thompson's seriousness as
a writer. The last part of Thompson's life was a long alcoholic decline.
But what surprised me was the extent to which Thompson's career was
bound up with politics. A touchstone for him was San Fransisco during
the Haight-Ashbury heyday of the mid-'60s, and Gibney frames the rest
of his life as a deliberate, ultimately losing battle to move that
social revolution into political accomplishment. Thompson covered
the riots of the 1968 Democratic Convention, and a highly entertaining
section of the film follows his 1970 run for Sheriff of Aspen on the
"Freak Power" ticket, where he organized Aspen's hippie
vote and very nearly won office.
The heart of the film is the 1972 Presidential campaign, in which
Thompson was actually an accredited Rolling Stone reporter
on the bus--try that today--and which resulted in the book Fear
and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Gibney gives us perhaps
too much detail here, dredging up names, platforms and passions from
the bygone campaign, but it's in the service of showing that Thompson
himself was passionate about the outcome. He abhorred Nixon, to the
extent that he became a sort of modern-day Madame De Staël in
opposition, and his support for McGovern was probably his last battle
for--and using--counter-culture values. One of the funniest parts
of the movie shows Thompson fabricating reports that Senator Muskie,
McGovern's rival for the nomination, was high on ibogaine.
For all the humor and affection, then, Gibney's film is also a political
documentary, and he makes it clear that he means for it to have contemporary
ramifications. He frames the story with references to the 9/11 terrorist
attacks and George W. Bush, suggesting that the Nixonian evils continue,
and the world could use the presence of a writer like Thompson today.
Thompson did have some perceptive things to say about 9/11, which
are quoted at the beginning of the movie, but in many ways Gibney
is being overly simplistic here and giving Thompson far too much credit.
The Bush administration is running the country under very different
economic and geopolitical conditions than prevailed in the 1960s,
and is it worth repeating that Thompson had, in the end, no effect
on Nixon whatsover? Here Gibney's own opposition to Bush, so acerbic
in denunciation, peters out into wishful hero-worship when he tries
to formulate a positive alternative. It's a failing common to the
American left as whole, whose last touchstone of positive energy remains
Haight-Ashbury.
Thompson himself understood that the counter-culture "wave"
in which he participated was doomed to fall shy of revolution. As
he put it (quoted in the film): "You can go out on a steep hill
in Las Vegas and look West, and, with the right kind of eyes, you
can almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally
broke, and rolled back."
Gibney's film is a superb portrait of an extraodinary man, but one
who must remain an icon of a vanished era.
|
| |
|
| |
Idiots
and Angels
An odd feature of Bill Plympton's animated movies is that they seem
better in retrospect than they do when you're actually watching the
screen.
Plympton, the independent animator whose distinctive hand-drawn style
has appeared in many short films and a previous feature, certainly
offers a lot to admire. He reportedly draws every cell of his films
by hand, and his exaggerated surrealist approach lends itself to humorous
gags, usually involving unexpected transformations of the human body.
His new feature, Idiots and Angels, contains over 25,000 hand-drawn
cells, displays some outstanding animation, and sends one out of the
theater with some memorable after-images.
And yet, in large part, Idiots and Angels is a dreadfully
boring and stupid movie to sit through. Plympton's stock in trade
remains gross-out humor of the most juvenile sort, focusing on lust
and violence. His surrealist sight gags are best suited to short films,
and wore very thin in an 80-minute feature. Worse, there was a steady
decline in the quality of both the animation and the pacing, so that
the last half hour felt like a three-hour movie in itself.
Done in dark tones and entirely without dialogue, the film marks
Plympton's self-proclaimed foray into "noir" themes. It
concerns an unnamed malevolent businessman type, with the kind of
square, squashed features that only Plympton can draw. By far the
best part of the movie is the opening sequence, where the man awakens
angrily in the morning hating the chirping bird on his windowsill,
performs his ablutions in a cleverly-animated montage, and heads off
in his black humpacked car into a traffic jam of identical black humpacked
cars.
That is about where audience interest ends. The man spends all day
in a mostly-empty bar, where he drinks, torments newcomers, and lusts
for the proprietor's hard-working wife. The bar is bare and sketchily
drawn, and there are interminable sequences where, in exaggerated
perspective, the drink is poured, lifted, and deposited into the throat.
The story as such begins when the man finds himself growing angel
wings out of his back, which develop a life of their own and force
him to do good things against his will. It's an interesting conceit,
both symbolically and in its potential for Plymptoonish sight-gags;
it would have made for a good short. But Plympton rapidly runs out
of creativity on both fronts, and the movie devolves into an avalanche
of ever-more-senseless antics, in which artistic and even narrative
logic gets lost. There's a car chase, a gun battle, various bloody
attempts to amputate the wings, the proprietor takes possession of
them and becomes an aerial bomber, the town becomes populated entirely
by bandaged burn victims, now there are two sets of wings, the proprietor's
wife becomes a damsel in distress, the first man is killed and then
reborn out of the proprietor's stomach for a final battle...
It all has the feel of a hyperactive child making things up on the
spur of the moment, with Plympton trusting the appeal of his style
to carry us through. But the animation becomes ever more sketchy and
lugubrious: buildings are mere kindergarten outlines, wounds bleed
in slow-moving lines of red dots. Plympton seems to want to mimic
a child-level drawing style, at the same time as he wants to deal
with adult themes. Neither approach works, and there is an awful boredom
in the combined failure.
|
| |
|
| |
32A
The title refers to bra size in this sweet, small-scale movie about
teenaged girls coming of age in 1979 Ireland.
(It's worth noting that our run of writer/directors continues: in
32A both hats are worn by Marian Quinn, who also plays a supporting
role.)
13-going-on-14 Maeve Brennan has just donned her first bra, and stands
at that delicate age where a girl is almost still a child and not
quite a young woman. She stares compulsively at other women's busts,
even that of the nun at her school, and compares notes on breasts
and boys with her three friends, especially her best friend Ruth,
with whom she shares a tentative practice kiss. The real kiss finally
comes when local heartthrob (and Roger Daltrey lookalike) Brian Power
takes to her. But when Maeve double-books an evening, she chooses
the date with Brian over her friends in need, causing a falling-out
with Ruth even as Brian proves a feckless boyfriend who doesn't stick.
In the end friendship wins out and the girls are squealingly reunited,
just in time for the next one of the group to ger her first
bra.
There's nothing remotely surprising in the movie, then, but neither
are there any missteps. The film isn't concerned with its plot so
much as with capturing the particular feeling of being an early teen,
and in that sense every moment is spot-on and charming. The action
encompasses Maeve's crowded home, with her three siblings, mother,
and a father (the director's brother Aidan Quinn) whose best ruling
tactic is to shout, "Shut up, you!" in a classic Irish brogue.
When Brian comes to visit and has to wait for Maeve outside in the
rain, each family member pops out into the foyer in turn to peek at
him, then disappear with a scamper or an adult sigh. A wonderful scene
shows Maeve lying to her parents over the phone in order to stay late
at a house party where everyone's hanging around in the dark doing
nothing; outside she meets Brian and the two hit it off by zooming
around the yard like airplanes.
It's a world of childish impulses urging toward a mysterious something
more, represented by clubs and boys and drugs, a world governed by
household chores, strict teachers, and snickering from other teens
at a social misstep. Nothing happens, but everything is happening.
The closest thing in the film to false drama, a subplot involving
Ruth's runaway father returning to speak with her, is handled both
tenderly and skillfully: it's done entirely from the teenagers' point
of view, but with just enough light thrown on the adult relationships
to make us understand how Ruth's horizons are widened.
A "just-enough" control is exercised throughout by writer/director
Quinn. We're never quite sure where the girls live--it seems to be
a small city by the sea, and various parts of it don't seem to go
together--but we see exactly what we need to make each scene work,
like backdrops in minimalist theater. Likewise, Quinn chooses to skip
the dialogue in key scenes, like Maeve's first long talk with Brian
in the entryway of her house, or the girlfriends' eventual reconciliation
at Maeve's 14th birthday party. Of course, we know exactly what's
happening--do we really need to hear everything said? These decisions
contribute to a distinct style that, to me, made 32A the most
artistically personal of the "auteur" movies we've seen
so far at SIFF.
As Maeve, Ailish McCarthy carries the movie. With her serious little
face, dark eyes and dark low-hanging bangs, she's self-contained yet
vulnerable, and with little in the way of an emotional outburst she
registers the full internal roller-coaster of what she's going through.
Terrific, believable performances are also delivered by Sophie Jo
Wasson as the troubled Ruth, and Shane McDaid as the grinning denim-clad
dropout Brian. The latter's outfit and golden locks provide the main
clue that that this otherwise timeless movie is set in 1979. In fact
it's a mystery why it was, but I didn't mind--to me, teenagers are
more real in a world without cellphones and text-messaging.
|
| |
|
| |
Jar
City
About halfway through this Icelandic murder mystery, the trail of
clues leads Detective Erlendur to a faceless modern building under
forbidding grey skies. Inside is a genetics laboratory with rooms
full of brains in green-lit fomaldehyde jars, run by a icy-mannered
administrator in an expensive suit whose goal is to tissue-type every
individual in Iceland, and who, when asked about personal liberties,
responds that genetics aren't "personal" at all. In any
American movie, we would know exactly where we stand--we could count
down the minutes until said administrator unleashes his army of zombie
mutants. Here, however, the laboratory is on the side of the good
guys, and it's the criminal with the genetic disease who represents
the threat to a healthy society.
Jar City is an engaging detective film, moody and complicated,
but much of its workings could only make sense in tiny, inter-related
Iceland. When a man turns up bludgeoned to death in a Reykjavik apartment,
the key to the mystery hinges on two young girls who died decades
apart from the same inherited brain disease--the only incidences in
the country. There follows an investigation into a 30-year-old rape
charge, a suicide, police corruption and blackmail, on the trail of
a shadowy figure who may have fathered both girls: it's a world where
the poison of crime spreads hidden through the generations just like
the disease. The strange combination of small-compound ethics and
big-city sinning contributes to the otherworldliness of this movie
at least as much as the landscape of spongy moorland through which
Erlendur drives his black jeep.
Written and directed by Baltasar Kormákur, the film is full
of brooding Icelandic imagery. The grey skies and thundering surf
of the countryside are matched by the faceless apartment projects
and sterile green-lit hallways of the city. As Erlendur, the hard-bitten
detective in a tie and old Scandinavian sweater, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson
looks out through narrowed cat eyes, as if he's absorbed the ability
to see through darkness and salt spray, not to mention human souls.
To Erlendur, the jars full of brains, the child's exhumed skeleton,
and the corpse dug out from under the floorboards go by as unremarkably
as the tendony black meat that passes for his Icelandic meals, and
there's something equal in the director's vision here too.
The plot moves fast and asks you to keep pace. Erlendur's progress
demands that you keep track of multiple characters connected to the
unfolding mystery (all with Icelandic names). There's also a parallel
storyline in which the distraught father of one of the dead girls
secretly starts a medical investigation of his own at the genetics
lab. Meanwhile, Erlendur has his own fatherhood problems, as his estranged
junkie daughter Eva returns home with troubles that may or may not
be related to the case. It's a lot to follow, but the film is tautly
paced and rewards attention, and the multiple angles dovetail nicely
in a satisfying finish.
More interesting than the procedural, and to me more troubling, are
the themes of fatherhood and intergenerational connection that emerge.
Jar City raises good questions about what we owe our children,
but very bad questions about what we inherit from our parents. Any
movie that compares crime to a genetic disease and comes down on the
side of an invasive tissue-typing laboratory is one to watch out for,
even in the small, peculiar world of Iceland. In fact, in recent years
Iceland has experienced an economic boom fueled by a massive, newly-privatized
financial sector, with rising prices and accompanying social instability.
In that context, Jar City looks like law-and-order philosophizing
of a hasty and superficial kind.
Jar City is based on a mystery novel by Arnaldur Indridasun,
and the English subtitling is translated by Bernard Scudder, who also
translated the novel.
|
| |
|
| |
Four
Women
Writer/director Adoor Gopalakrishnan has been making movies since
the mid-'60s, but you would never know it from Four Women.
This Indian production is so stilted and immobile that it had me serial-yawning
in the theater and trying to read my watch in the dark. If I had to
guess, I would have thought it the work of a first-year film school
student--one without much promise.
The film is actually four separate morality tales (drawn from the
short stories of Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai), each concerning the
plight of an archetypal woman in the Kerala region of South India
in the years surrounding independence. In order, and heralded by title
cards, we get: "The Prostitute," "The Virgin,"
"The Housewife," and "The Spinster." We do not
get a story about a woman giving birth, which is odd, because the
scenes are so labored.
Each tale is simple to the point of being simple-minded. The Prostitute
gives up her ways to love a poor drifter, but the two are sent to
prison for living on the streets. The Virgin marries, but her new
husband abandons her. The Housewife keeps losing her children in infancy
and considers sleeping with an old flame for better luck, but chooses
virtue and unhappiness. The Spinster, well, grows old and never marries.
In other words, various women are unhappy for various reasons. It's
hard to tell exactly how unhappy, though, because the acting is so
bad. It's the kind of movie where, when a character has to deliver
a line, the camera is wont to focus on their face, whereupon they
draw breath with a smile and read off the line. Cut to another character's
face for the next line. Or characters come into a room, assume their
marked positions, and pontificate. One has to wonder: are these even
professional actors?
Between the spoken lines there lies an endless sea of silence and
repetition. In "The Virgin," the new husband eats too much.
This is shown by focusing on his plate for fully five minutes as his
fingers stir and pick up the food. Then comes the second course. In
"The Spinster," people come and go by poled gondola on a
canal. Whenever they do, we watch the gondola move slowly, pole by
pole, up or down the canal. Up or down, back and forth. Then the passengers
embark or disembark. At least the canal is pretty.
Granted, I go to Indian movies seeking a slower pace. But this one
had me yearning to rush out and rent the DVD of Transformers.
The stories take place against the lush jungle background of Kerala,
with its constant birdsong, its dirt paths through the forest, and
its ancient houses of weathered stone. It is by far the main attraction
here. The women in their colorful saris all perspire attractively.
The hairy bare-chested men, less so.
|
| |
|
| |
Walt
& El Grupo
I was lured into this so-called "documentary" under something
of false pretences. I had heard that it was about a political tour
Walt Disney and staff took to South America at the behest of Franklin
D. Roosevelt in mid-1941. World War II was raging in Europe, Latin
American alliances were up for grabs, and Roosevelt tapped Disney
as a cultural ambassador to drum up U.S. support. The resulting trip,
according to the SIFF brief, "affects our artistic and political
world to this day." Hmm, I thought: an early look at political/corporate
crossover, media as propaganda. Sounds good!
Forget it. What I didn't realize was that the film is a Walt Disney
Family Foundation production, directed by Ted Thomas, the son of one
of the animators who accompanied Disney on the trip. Walt &
El Grupo is nothing but an in-house Disney lovefest, a scrapbook
travelogue whose only purpose is to celebrate how much fun Disney
and his entourage of artists had on their jaunt through South America.
The political setup is raised as briefly as possible at the beginning
only to be dismissed, and the rest of the film is given over to long
brochure-like montages of Rio, Buenos Aires and parts of Chile, through
the hagiographic lens of Disney artists at work. The chubby-faced
Americans in tan slacks grin at the camera, holding sketchbooks.
In fact, all the group did was attend cocktail parties, floor shows,
and other arranged activities, while living in various expensive hotels.
Yet the film invests the Disney experience with tremendous sentimental
nostalgia. Elderly children of the animators reminisce about how much
the tour meant to their parents, and the parents' old letters are
read aloud. There are long artsy dissolves between old black-and-white
photos and the same locations today, as if to say, "They were
really there!" Home movies of and by the group are deployed with
jangly background music: here are the artists on a hotel patio--aboard
the Sugarloaf Mountain cablecar--at a gaucho exposition. It's a vacation
slide show writ large.
As for Walt himself, he is ominpresent but almost invisible. Though
this is meant to be a personal story, we don't get inside him at all.
His daughter, interviewed, sticks to banalities. Halfway through the
tour Disney's father died; this is given a brief mention and then
we return to the artists' escapades and the animated clips of Goofy
in caballero getup. Disney's face in the photos remains unchanged.
The politics behind the trip are present just enough to aggravate
one by what is left out. Disney's studio was shut down by an animators'
strike at the time, and some attention is paid to that at the beginning,
but mostly in terms of what a personal blow it was to good old Walt.
We learn that the Roosevelt administration underwrote not only the
trip but also the subsequent Latin-American-themed films, but if that
had a lasting impact on the Disney business (they seemed to go from
near-bankruptcy to theme-park-building dominance across that line),
the film doesn't mention it. When the Disney gang visits Brazil we're
told that President Vargas was flirting with both Allied and Axis
powers; no mention is made of how that resolved. (Brazil eventually
joins the allies, due less to Disney's visit than the German U-Boats
attacking Brazilian shipping.) In general Thomas' movie fails to make
the slighest report on how the Disney trip actually affected, or didn't
affect, the political or business situation. The trip was important--that's
all you need to know.
What interest there is in the movie comes from the treatment of artists
making art. Disney and his staff collected impressions for what would
eventually become two animated films, Saludos Amigos and The
Three Caballeros. In the old footage we watch the artists working
in their sketchbooks; we then see the surviving drawings today, along
with contemporary matched footage of the location. There's something
happening here about the process by which experience becomes art.
But again, this is meant for people who already buy into Disney animation
as the seminal art form of modern times. Now, I quite appreciate the
old Disney movies, especially Fantasia. But when a Disney animator
reduces South America to a cartoon-eyed parrot with a funny hat, and
Thomas' film celebrates this on the order of Napoleon's artists encountering
Egypt, well, it's time for me to go.
|
| |
|
| |
The
Wackness
Any movie that treats 1994 as the "old days" must be made
by someone pretty young. I have no idea how old writer/director Jonathan
Levine is, though he attended our SIFF screening and appeared to be
about 19. He's probably older than that, but you wouldn't know it
from The Wackness, an energetic, charismatic train-wreck of
a film, in which everything about it--its charm as well as its enormous,
crippling failures--come from its quality of juvenilia.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not talking about juvenile humor,
which has fueled South Park and any number of comedy blockbusters,
and is a sought-after commodity in Hollywood. The Wackness is
something completely different: it's a work by someone who's actually
too young to know what he's doing.
The film follows a troubled teen in New York City as he tries to
make sense of life and love in his summer before college. It's 1994,
for what I suspect are purely autobiographical reasons; at any rate
this is telegraphed by the carefully-selected hip-hop soundtrack and
some characters complaining about Giuliani.
Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) is the updated Holden Caulfield--a gloomy,
black-sheep kid from the Upper East Side who seems sane compared to
the neurotic adults around him. In the update, he's actually graduated
from high school (I guess standards have fallen since 1951), he speaks
in affected hip-hop slang, and he's a drug dealer. He does have a
therapist, whom he pays with pot. The therapist, Dr. Squires (Ben
Kingsley), is an aging Me-Generationer going through a midlife crisis,
and he and Luke form an unlikely friendship based on a shared dissatisfaction
with life.
The setup has a lot of promise, and actually so does Levine. The
early scenes between Luke and Dr. Squires are tight and humorous,
showing each yearning across the generation gap in search of wisdom
that isn't there. Both of them hit on getting laid as the solution,
which leads to some pretty funny moments, one involving a cameo appearance
by Mark-Kate Olsen as a flower child. Levine has some undeniable talent:
he can fill the screen with energy and still convey something soft.
Unfortunately, there are also women in the movie, and whenever a
female character walks into a scene, Levine's ability flies out the
window. The plot twist has Luke falling for Dr. Squires' hot high-school
stepdaughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). I'm sure that Thirlby, when
she read the script, saw the potential in which her character could
become the lightning rod for male idiocy from both sides. Alas, if
Levine ever had such ideas, he forgot them as soon as he put Thirlby
in a bikini. The Stephanie that emerges onscreen is nothing but a
male fantasy, and a high-school male fantasy to boot (when she and
Luke have sex, she assures him that she's done it "hundreds of
times," and Luke does not run in terror). She is 100% personality-free:
she exists only to look pretty, be conquered sexually by Luke, break
his heart by not returning his calls (for no discernable reason),
and, once Luke's back is turned, sigh prettily for having caused him
pain. The sex scenes are particularly embarrassing: Levine wants to
give a realistic portrayal of teenage sexual dysfunction, but at the
same time he can't help directing Thirlby in a Playboy shoot. The
dysfunction becomes his own.
Two subplots involving women fall even flatter. Dr. Squires fights
and fails to save his marriage, which might have been interesting
if his wife were given more than three lines (Famke Jannsen is criminally
wasted here). Meanwhile, Luke's parents get evicted from their East
Side apartment, in a plotline so appallingly undefined that it resembles
the dialogue for grown-ups in the old Charlie Brown cartoons. Suddenly
they're out on the street; we don't know why...
As a coup de grace, Levine has no idea how or when to end his movie,
and it runs babbling on past at least two satisfying finish-points.
An extended sequence of a drug saturnalia and attempted suicide on
Fire Island goes nowhere, excruciatingly.
In short, The Wackness feels like a high-school creative writing
assignment that has glib wit but enormous blank spots where experience
and human empathy go. Yet, for all its problems, I can't quite support
the mean trick that Ben Kingsley plays on it. As Dr. Squires, Kingsley
turns in a performance delicately calibrated to be far over Levine's
head--completely unimpeachable, yet mocking the movie all the way
through.
|
| |
|
| |
Lakshmi
and Me
In this documentary, Indian filmmaker Nishtha Jain turns her camera
on her longtime household maid, a lower-caste girl named Lakshmi.
What follows is a soft, understated, utterly mesmerizing descent into
a labyrinth of class, status, narrative involvement and unintended
consequences.
Jain, a single professional woman, lives in a high-rise in Mumbai;
from the window of her small apartment at dusk we look across at other
tall buildings, well-spaced, all rising out of a strange mat that
is the mass of shacks below. The mental divide is just as steep: despite
Jain's invitation to join her at the table, Lakshmi prefers eating
her meals on the floor.
She's a bright, cheerful girl, hardworking and stubborn, who calls
Jain "Didi" (big sister) and gradually gets used to the
idea of being the subject of a film. At first Jain shoots her in the
home, doing her work, then follows her to her other wealthy clients,
and finally down into the multicolor chaos of narrow streets where
her family's shack is. But the portrait begins to move: soon Lakshmi
is in love, suddenly she's pregnant, the boy is from a different caste,
and the filmmaker finds herself enmeshed in a family quarrel. Lakshmi
marries him, but soon afterwards comes down with TB, and begins wasting
away before our eyes even as her belly grows. Now Jain is an active
accomplice in getting her to a hospital. When Lakshmi gives birth,
she wonders, "Was I there as an employer, a filmmaker, or a friend?
All the lines had blurred."
In addition to the startling dramas of Lakshmi's life, then--that
shed light on poverty, domestic servitude and intercaste tensions
in modern India--there is a quiet meta-drama going on behind the camera
as Jain tries not to become a character in her own film. Of
course she is, and the final, perfect shot shows how well she knew
it all along. It's a superb piece.
|
| |
|
| |
Cherry
Blossoms - Hanami
Our final film of SIFF was the unambiguous emotional high point of
the festival. In fact, it wasn't supposed to be our final movie--we
had tickets to another film later that night--but we were so wrung
out by this first one that we couldn't go.
Be warned: Cherry Blossoms - Hanami, by German writer/director
Doris Dörrie, is the nuclear weapon of tearjerkers. Only two
films in my life have ever made me cry at the end, and this was one.
I have two pieces of advice for you: you must go see it, and you better
bring Kleenex.
Rudi and Trudi (Elmar Wepper and Hannelore Elsner) are a countryside
couple whose grown children have long since moved away, and they lead
a quiet life based on Rudi's curmudgeonly satisfaction with routine.
But the bottom is knocked out from that life in the opening scene,
when the doctors inform Trudi that her husband has a fatal illness.
Trudi doesn't tell Rudi; instead, she goads him into taking an extended
trip to visit their children in Berlin. She hopes that she can encourage
him all the way to Tokyo to visit their eldest son, she herself having
always wanted to see Mount Fuji ("You've seen one mountain, you've
seen them all," is Rudi's phlegmatic response). There's a delicate
question as to whose horizons Trudi is really trying to widen, but
what's really important in this journey is widening the shared experience.
As Trudi says, struggling to cope with the prospect of life alone,
"When I see something without my husband, I feel like I haven't
seen it."
It's terribly poignant to show a profound love, where only one partner
knows that it's about to end. The whole movie is about accessing the
strength of love that resides below the surface of lives we take for
granted. The children in Berlin, for example, who also aren't told
of the disease, react with irritation to their parents' visit, busy
as they are with jobs and kids of their own. Only Trudi knows how
precious the visit will be to them.
But it would be a mistake to think you know where the film is going.
The trip to Tokyo does occur, but profoundly unexpected elements intrude
that alter the meaning you thought it was going to have. I won't give
away the spoilers. (But beware of reviews that do!) Among other things,
a homeless Japanese Butoh dancer girl (Aya Irizuki) becomes a major
character who helps Rudi and Trudi find a place of union beyond their
separation. The second half of the movie has plenty of humor and absurdity,
including the drunken Hanami (cherry-blossom festival) of the
title, but all the while it's quietly dialing up the tearjerker quotient,
until the beautiful and unwithstandable finale.
The standout performance is by Elmar Wepper as the complacent grouch
Rudi, who's given the longest journey to travel. His not-at-all-smooth
process of opening up--to himself, to his wife, to mortality--leaves
unforgettable scars of pain and wonderment on his face.
But the real accolades here go to longtime auteur Dörrie, who
displays an active cinematic patience rarely seen these days. While
light-footed in the transitions (we travel to Japan without once seeing
an airplane), her movie takes its time where it needs to: getting
to know each family member in Berlin, savoring details, honoring introspection.
It's a little over two hours, and that feels about right--if it lags
at points, that's just where it's gathering force to get you. By the
end, you've been coaxed so deeply into her world that you're entirely
at her mercy--and she doesn't disappoint.
Cherry Blossoms - Hanami won the Golden Space Needle Award
for Best Film of SIFF '08, as voted by the audience.
|
| |
|
| |
Encounters
at the End of the World
In the freezing ocean beneath the ice off the coast of Antarctica,
there exists a microscopic single-celled organism whose string-like
pseudopods pull in particles to form an outer coating. This organism
has the power to precisely select the particles it wants, rejecting
the majority of the debris. Scientist Sam Bowser, who studies the
creatures, looks into Werner Herzog's camera and tells a long story
about how that selection behavior is hard to technically distinguish
from intelligence; then, going further, he mutters aside, "It's
almost art."
Dr. Bowser may not realize it, but his comment has been selected
by Herzog's artistic pseudopods as the self-referential heart of his
extraordinary movie Encounters at the End of the World, one
of the subtlest and most beautiful films I have ever seen.
On the surface a documentary about Antarctica, it is neither a documentary
nor about Antarctica. Herzog warns as much in the opening narration,
when he says that he is not going to Antarctica to make "another
film about penguins." Instead, what follows is a cinematic poem,
fashioned from the selection and arrangement of apparently chance
comments and moments. Though technically "nonfiction" in
that nothing is staged or acted, in the hands of Herzog's editing
genius the result is a purposeful artistic statement, a meditation
on human life and civilization as he contemplates the "end of
the world" in more than one sense.
But yes, the film is set in Antarctica, in and around McMurdo Base,
and at the simple level there are long, beautiful segments dedicated
to the strange world above and (especially) below the great ice sheets.
The extraordinary diving footage, under the luminous ice ceiling that
sometimes hangs in weird stalactites, sometimes billows above like
yellowed cauliflower, is alone worth the price of admission. "I
sink into bliss," is the inscription carved on a wooden beam
at McMurdo, and watching the sheer beauty of this world, we feel the
same way.
The film also focuses on "encounters" with the race of
intellectual misfits who choose to live and work in Antarctica: the
dreamers and seekers and refugees from civilization who clearly have
Herzog's unalloyed sympathy. We meet a philosophy-quoting caterpillar
operator, a plumber who displays his unusually-shaped hands as proof
of descent from Aztec and Incan royalty, a "linguist in a continent
without languages" who works in a greenhouse, and many others.
Even the science here is unusual: we observe work ranging from the
mapping of DNA in quest of the origins of life, to the launching of
stratospheric balloons in search of infinitesimal neutrinos.
So the movie functions perfectly well as a fascinated, slightly random
travelogue of eccentricity, both natural and human. But as with the
ice, there is much more going on under the surface. This is a film
that rewards diving. In fact nothing here is random. We are constantly
encouraged to look again, look closer, look closer again.
Here the kitchen boy jokes about the panic and dismay at McMurdo
when the "Frosty Boy" ice-cream machine breaks down. But
wait--his segment just happens to follow that of the scientist who
is monitoring the breakup of the ice shelf due to global warming.
Here's a scene (mesmerizing in itself), in which we learn about occasional
penguins who break from the herd and begin an unstoppable solitary
march straight toward "certain death" in the uncrossable
interior mountains. "But why?" Herzog asks--and then the
next scene features footage of human volcanologists descending purposefully
into the open magma pit of Mount Erebus.
Anyone who has seen Herzog's Grizzly Man knows that his central
concern is the elusive relationship between Man and nature. Are we
the same? If not, what makes us different? That concern is doubly
alive here, but in Encounters he has taken a quantum leap upward
in subtlety as he explores his subject. The connections between Man
and nature keep appearing in quiet, unexpected forms: the scientists'
distorted electric guitar mimics the sounds of seals; the floating
silver blob of the stratospheric balloon echoes the image of jellyfish
beneath the ice. Scientist Bowser talks about the "horribly violent
world" of the tiny undersea creatures, and we suddenly recall
the busdriver's story about a fellow Peace Corps worker macheted to
death by Mayans.
Herzog assembles everything to a purpose, and over again we see that
the dividing line between Man and nature--yes, even ants--is thinner
than we think.
But like the beautiful fumaroles of scultped snow formed by volcanic
vents that, he says, "can rise to two stories in height"
("avoid the ones containing toxic gases"), Herzog's film
also has "two stories." The second, darker, one addresses
mankind's imminent demise at the hands of an overarching Nature that
is awakening to corrective action.
"The ice is always above us," muses the iceberg analyst,
who (without mentioning global warming by name) describes the Antarctic
as a dynamic system that's "broadcasting change, perhaps in reponse
to the change we're broadcasting."
"Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable,"
Herzog says in his most editorializing moment. The funny scene of
the blizzard-survival school, where students on a rope line try to
navigate with buckets over their heads, and get hopelessly lost, is
clearly a damning metaphor for civilization. "We try to avoid
the cascading error phenomenon," explains the instructor, "where
one error leads to a second, to a third…" Of course that
is exactly what happens, and, Herzog suggests, has happened.
But even here his message is more subtle. He also mourns the diminution
of the nature-conquering human spirit that once drove Shackleton (the
explorer's presence is a recurring one in the movie) and has now been
reduced to the "absurd quests" of Guinness book record-breakers.
Herzog has nothing but admiration for the demented magma-braving volcanologists
and for Peter Gorham, the neutrino scientist, who describes his esoteric
project in terms that suggest the quest to touch God.
So where does Encounters finally come down? Why are we here?
What should our response be? The official last word is given to the
caterpillar-driving philosopher, who quotes Alan Watts on the magnificence
of the larger universe. Again, however, Herzog slides in a hidden,
more personal answer. Interviewed in her dorm room, a wild-eyed world-travelling
scientist named Karen relates how she once crossed Africa inside a
sewer pipe, on the back of a truck. "For days," she says,
"I watched the world go by through an opening this big."
And, unbeknownst to her, she mimics the circle of a movie-camera lens.
|
| |
|
| |
Movie review feedback? Write Matt at contact@privateerprincess.com |
| |
|
