Toronto Film Festival Day Seven: Micmas, Trash Humpers, Lourdes, and To the Sea
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/21/2009 17:10:00 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Micmacs: To judge from his films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet couldn't tie his shoelaces without first devising a Rube Goldberg contraption of toothpaste, waffle makers, and jars full of bees to do so. Jerry-rigged doodads dominate the Gallic auteur's new clockwork confection, which retains some of the anti-militarism of A Very Long Engagement while scrambling to outdo the sugary excesses of Amélie. The prologue, with its collision of disobedient landmines, prison-like schools, and a video clerk (Dany Boon) with a bullet in his noggin while classic film noir plays on his telly is breathless in its one-idea-per-shot inventiveness. Unfortunately, it takes no time for the inventiveness to turn antic and oppressive as the hero sets out to take down a pair of nefarious ammunition magnates with the help of a gang of adorable junkyard dwellers, and an onslaught of balloon-thought puns, contortionist gamines, and lavishly wasteful camera movement is unleashed. The one clear feeling is that Jeunet hates the human damage of warmongers and that he hates parting with his goony gizmos even more.
Trash Humpers: After Jeunet's wantonly prettified toy cities, Harmony Korine's pageant of belligerent grubbiness is almost welcome. Almost. Like Gummo, it's explicitly offered as an act of vandalism, with creatures ignored by the rest of society and cinema taking over the spotlight and tap-dancing all over notions of "taste." The joke is that the adolescent hellions from his debut have become rubbery prunefaces, wearing grotesque geriatric masks that turn them into hideous parodies of horny retirement-home troglodytes. Korine's world is a squalid stage, his characters are shock-artists channeling madness into performance: People hump trash bins (and trees and fences), smash TVs with hammers, molest dolls, deliver monologues, fill the air with cackling mantras and Beavis and Butt-Head giggles, and basically act like the Manson family shooting their version of Cocoon. (Mock-porno/snuff VHS graininess is the aggressively ugly aesthetic, complete with tracking problems.) Some of it has a grimy elation, but in the end the wrinkled masks serve mainly as a metaphor for a spastic enfant terrible in danger of aging without maturing.
Lourdes: Miracles are the most difficult things to depict on screen, according to Godard, who posited Hitchcock and Dreyer as the only ones able to pull it off. Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner's tour of the titular sacred site may not be invited into the pantheon just yet, but her balance of earnestness, irony, gravity, and wry humor is consistently captivating. Lourdes here is a tranquil, teeming playground. People go to confessionals, watch inspirational videos, tell each other their dreams, pray for miracles, and look on in envy as someone else gets them. Part of a group of pilgrims, the wispy, wheelchair-bound heroine (Sylvie Testud) isn't after wonders but people to meet (she unfavorably compares the city to Rome). A seemingly wondrous event takes place, though she remains, as one biddy puts it, "not as pious as she might be." Suspense grows, coolly but firmly: "The Lord giveth…" Composed with an eye for telling gesture within crowded frames and anchored by Testud's emotional purity, it's a modest but trenchant investigation of the spiritual.
To the Sea: A discovery and a revelation, Pedro González-Rubio's micro-budget seaside idyll shows how swollen and synthetic many of the festival's pricier entries are. Straddling the line between fiction and documentary with as much tenderness and sensuality as Robert Flaherty's works, the film takes three real individuals—separated couple Jorge and Roberta and their young son Natan—and has them not so much "play" themselves on screen as add their innate essences to González-Rubio's vivacious play of nature, people, and camera. Set in the Mexican-Caribbean reef of Chinchorro, where Jorge stays with Natan before the boy moves to Rome with his mother ("I'm unhappy with your reality, you're unhappy with mine" is how Roberta sums up the end of the couple's romance), it provides lambent views of underwater crustaceans, the boy's graceful bond with a white egret, and the vérité spectacle of seawater splashing the lens as a great barracuda is wrestled onto a boat. Immersive yet as fluid as the ocean, it's a movie André Bazin would have loved.
Micmacs, Trash Humpers, Lourdes, and To the Sea @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Micmacs: To judge from his films, Jean-Pierre Jeunet couldn't tie his shoelaces without first devising a Rube Goldberg contraption of toothpaste, waffle makers, and jars full of bees to do so. Jerry-rigged doodads dominate the Gallic auteur's new clockwork confection, which retains some of the anti-militarism of A Very Long Engagement while scrambling to outdo the sugary excesses of Amélie. The prologue, with its collision of disobedient landmines, prison-like schools, and a video clerk (Dany Boon) with a bullet in his noggin while classic film noir plays on his telly is breathless in its one-idea-per-shot inventiveness. Unfortunately, it takes no time for the inventiveness to turn antic and oppressive as the hero sets out to take down a pair of nefarious ammunition magnates with the help of a gang of adorable junkyard dwellers, and an onslaught of balloon-thought puns, contortionist gamines, and lavishly wasteful camera movement is unleashed. The one clear feeling is that Jeunet hates the human damage of warmongers and that he hates parting with his goony gizmos even more.
Trash Humpers: After Jeunet's wantonly prettified toy cities, Harmony Korine's pageant of belligerent grubbiness is almost welcome. Almost. Like Gummo, it's explicitly offered as an act of vandalism, with creatures ignored by the rest of society and cinema taking over the spotlight and tap-dancing all over notions of "taste." The joke is that the adolescent hellions from his debut have become rubbery prunefaces, wearing grotesque geriatric masks that turn them into hideous parodies of horny retirement-home troglodytes. Korine's world is a squalid stage, his characters are shock-artists channeling madness into performance: People hump trash bins (and trees and fences), smash TVs with hammers, molest dolls, deliver monologues, fill the air with cackling mantras and Beavis and Butt-Head giggles, and basically act like the Manson family shooting their version of Cocoon. (Mock-porno/snuff VHS graininess is the aggressively ugly aesthetic, complete with tracking problems.) Some of it has a grimy elation, but in the end the wrinkled masks serve mainly as a metaphor for a spastic enfant terrible in danger of aging without maturing.
Lourdes: Miracles are the most difficult things to depict on screen, according to Godard, who posited Hitchcock and Dreyer as the only ones able to pull it off. Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner's tour of the titular sacred site may not be invited into the pantheon just yet, but her balance of earnestness, irony, gravity, and wry humor is consistently captivating. Lourdes here is a tranquil, teeming playground. People go to confessionals, watch inspirational videos, tell each other their dreams, pray for miracles, and look on in envy as someone else gets them. Part of a group of pilgrims, the wispy, wheelchair-bound heroine (Sylvie Testud) isn't after wonders but people to meet (she unfavorably compares the city to Rome). A seemingly wondrous event takes place, though she remains, as one biddy puts it, "not as pious as she might be." Suspense grows, coolly but firmly: "The Lord giveth…" Composed with an eye for telling gesture within crowded frames and anchored by Testud's emotional purity, it's a modest but trenchant investigation of the spiritual.
To the Sea: A discovery and a revelation, Pedro González-Rubio's micro-budget seaside idyll shows how swollen and synthetic many of the festival's pricier entries are. Straddling the line between fiction and documentary with as much tenderness and sensuality as Robert Flaherty's works, the film takes three real individuals—separated couple Jorge and Roberta and their young son Natan—and has them not so much "play" themselves on screen as add their innate essences to González-Rubio's vivacious play of nature, people, and camera. Set in the Mexican-Caribbean reef of Chinchorro, where Jorge stays with Natan before the boy moves to Rome with his mother ("I'm unhappy with your reality, you're unhappy with mine" is how Roberta sums up the end of the couple's romance), it provides lambent views of underwater crustaceans, the boy's graceful bond with a white egret, and the vérité spectacle of seawater splashing the lens as a great barracuda is wrestled onto a boat. Immersive yet as fluid as the ocean, it's a movie André Bazin would have loved.
Micmacs, Trash Humpers, Lourdes, and To the Sea @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival Day Six: Mother, Enter the Void, and The Hole
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/19/2009 20:15:02 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Mother: Further memories of murder with Bong Joon-ho. The mother (Kim Hye-ja) is a middle-aged, small-town store clerk running a little clandestine acupuncture on the side, the son (Won Bin) is a man-child who gets distracted by golf balls while seeking revenge on hit-and-run millionaires. Won is hauled off to jail after a schoolgirl is found murdered, and Kim, sure that her boy is innocent, turns amateur sleuth. Park Chan-wook would have wrung the Grand Guignol hell out of this premise, but Bong is less interested in shocks than in the synergy between vast Korean fields and the equally mysterious inner landscape of the dazed matriarch making her way across them. A welter of motifs and clues (a sluggish psyche's gradually unclogged remembrances, tell-tale snapshots in a promiscuous high schooler's cell phone, a key scene played from different angles) fused by superb filmmaking, it at times suggests a dark-humored lampoon of one of Naruse's odes to maternal diligence, but with a tarantula sting of its own.
Enter the Void : 2001: A Space Odyssey as a stoner's trip between life and death and assorted altered states? That's the setup for Gaspar Noé's mammoth pothead doodle, an all-sensation marathon that alternates between dazzling and unendurable. "They say you fly when you die." Sutured and lubed to give the feel of a single POV shot, it follows a faceless, drone-voiced American fuck-up as he marvels at the phosphorescent Tokyo cityscape, gets shot during a drug bust, and watches his own corpse being dragged away as his soul hovers around other characters, slides past walls, and rummages through incestuous relationships, star-children, and light shows. Seeking cosmic transcendence (or at least a Keanu-like "whoa"), Noé pulverizes screen space: The screen flickers, blurs, rotates, turns liquid, and stretches like taffy. I should confess I walked out not long after the first hour, so the already infamous vagina-cam shot of a ginormous incoming penis will have to remain for me the imagined stuff of dreams and nightmares.
The Hole: The void in Joe Dante's ebullient family-horror flick, meanwhile, is a bottomless pit in the basement of a fractured family's new home. Moving into yet another city with their restless mom (Teri Polo), two brothers (Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble) ward off boredom by exploring the new surroundings with their vivacious neighbor (Haley Bennett), which leads to the eponymous pitch-black portal. After peeking in, the three find their fears taking physical and increasingly baroque form: a grinning clown puppet, a blue-skinned, sad-faced little girl out of a J-horror yarn, a looming patriarch wielding a serpentine belt in a Caligari-styled living room. The plot takes heavy-handed turns toward the end, but Dante's sense of mischievous fright, cinephiliac erudition (Orlac Glove Factory, anyone?) and never-condescending use of adolescent anxieties and 3D giddiness, make this a welcome return to the big screen for a director who has never missed a chance to locate the skewed abyss under the placid surfaces of suburbia, and wink at it.
Mother, Enter the Void, and The Hole @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Mother: Further memories of murder with Bong Joon-ho. The mother (Kim Hye-ja) is a middle-aged, small-town store clerk running a little clandestine acupuncture on the side, the son (Won Bin) is a man-child who gets distracted by golf balls while seeking revenge on hit-and-run millionaires. Won is hauled off to jail after a schoolgirl is found murdered, and Kim, sure that her boy is innocent, turns amateur sleuth. Park Chan-wook would have wrung the Grand Guignol hell out of this premise, but Bong is less interested in shocks than in the synergy between vast Korean fields and the equally mysterious inner landscape of the dazed matriarch making her way across them. A welter of motifs and clues (a sluggish psyche's gradually unclogged remembrances, tell-tale snapshots in a promiscuous high schooler's cell phone, a key scene played from different angles) fused by superb filmmaking, it at times suggests a dark-humored lampoon of one of Naruse's odes to maternal diligence, but with a tarantula sting of its own.
Enter the Void : 2001: A Space Odyssey as a stoner's trip between life and death and assorted altered states? That's the setup for Gaspar Noé's mammoth pothead doodle, an all-sensation marathon that alternates between dazzling and unendurable. "They say you fly when you die." Sutured and lubed to give the feel of a single POV shot, it follows a faceless, drone-voiced American fuck-up as he marvels at the phosphorescent Tokyo cityscape, gets shot during a drug bust, and watches his own corpse being dragged away as his soul hovers around other characters, slides past walls, and rummages through incestuous relationships, star-children, and light shows. Seeking cosmic transcendence (or at least a Keanu-like "whoa"), Noé pulverizes screen space: The screen flickers, blurs, rotates, turns liquid, and stretches like taffy. I should confess I walked out not long after the first hour, so the already infamous vagina-cam shot of a ginormous incoming penis will have to remain for me the imagined stuff of dreams and nightmares.
The Hole: The void in Joe Dante's ebullient family-horror flick, meanwhile, is a bottomless pit in the basement of a fractured family's new home. Moving into yet another city with their restless mom (Teri Polo), two brothers (Chris Massoglia, Nathan Gamble) ward off boredom by exploring the new surroundings with their vivacious neighbor (Haley Bennett), which leads to the eponymous pitch-black portal. After peeking in, the three find their fears taking physical and increasingly baroque form: a grinning clown puppet, a blue-skinned, sad-faced little girl out of a J-horror yarn, a looming patriarch wielding a serpentine belt in a Caligari-styled living room. The plot takes heavy-handed turns toward the end, but Dante's sense of mischievous fright, cinephiliac erudition (Orlac Glove Factory, anyone?) and never-condescending use of adolescent anxieties and 3D giddiness, make this a welcome return to the big screen for a director who has never missed a chance to locate the skewed abyss under the placid surfaces of suburbia, and wink at it.
Mother, Enter the Void, and The Hole @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival Day Five: My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, White Material, and Survival of the Dead
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/18/2009 19:32:42 In: Festivals Comments: 0
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: The other half of the Werner Herzog Nutty Procedural Double Feature, this David Lynch-produced thriller offers far more controlled absurdism than Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but is easily the lesser work. One of the supporting actors playing straight man to Cage's cyclonic clowning in Lieutenant, Michael Shannon takes center stage here as a San Diego momma's boy who returns "different" from a trip to Peru and takes an unhealthy interest in playing the matricidal protagonist in a production of The Oresteia. The setting is a hostage negotiation between Shannon and police officer Willem Dafoe, with Chloe Sevigny, Brad Dourif, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and other kooks duly dropping by. Smooshing near-parodic versions of tropes by both Herzog (maddening jungles, incongruous animals) and Lynch (promiscuous coffee-drinking, tuxedoed dwarves), it's strenuously deadpan where the other film was organically hysterical. It works most intriguingly as a curious meeting between simpatico but ultimately incompatible artists, not unlike Dali doing his own version of Millet's Angelus.
White Material: Based on the reactions of many of my Toronto colleagues, it seems that Claire Denis has reached the point of artistry and expectations at which a merely excellent film could be seen as something of a disappointment. Indeed, next to the best of her extraordinarily vivid previous works, this story of French colonials and civil war violence in an unnamed African country is an uncharacteristically open-and-shut case for the auteur. Still, the beauties are numerous. Isabelle Huppert plays the owner of a coffee plantation struggling to keep both business and family together in the midst of gun-toting rebels and insurrection-squashing militias. There is a plot (Denis is a splendid storyteller), but her question, as usual, is not "Where are we going?" but "What are we seeing?" From the first image of a car's headlights revealing a dirt road full of wild dogs to the blissful view of Huppert riding her bicycle, this is sinewy, elliptical, ethereal filmmaking. If this is lesser Denis, that's still miles above just about everyone else out there.
Survival of the Dead: Are George Romero's late-career ghoul operas fatigued retreads of his seminal undead movies, or eccentrically satirical twists on the horror subgenre he virtually created? When a zombified heroine gallops across the screen on horseback and barely any of the characters bats an eye, it's damn near impossible to tell the difference. Kicking off "six days after the dead began to walk," the latest Dead chapter picks up on a strand from the previous one, following the rogue soldiers who had previously crossed paths with the vlogging youngsters in Diary of the Dead as they head into the Hatfield-McCoy territory of dueling patriarchs and cowboy bellicosity. There are trenchant bits (like the landowner's "dead-head" wife kept chained in the kitchen) amid the erupting viscera, but for the most part Romero settles for pleasing fans who cheer every drip of gore but couldn't care less about political subtext.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, White Material, and Survival of the Dead @ the Tribeca Film Festival
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done: The other half of the Werner Herzog Nutty Procedural Double Feature, this David Lynch-produced thriller offers far more controlled absurdism than Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but is easily the lesser work. One of the supporting actors playing straight man to Cage's cyclonic clowning in Lieutenant, Michael Shannon takes center stage here as a San Diego momma's boy who returns "different" from a trip to Peru and takes an unhealthy interest in playing the matricidal protagonist in a production of The Oresteia. The setting is a hostage negotiation between Shannon and police officer Willem Dafoe, with Chloe Sevigny, Brad Dourif, Grace Zabriskie, Udo Kier, and other kooks duly dropping by. Smooshing near-parodic versions of tropes by both Herzog (maddening jungles, incongruous animals) and Lynch (promiscuous coffee-drinking, tuxedoed dwarves), it's strenuously deadpan where the other film was organically hysterical. It works most intriguingly as a curious meeting between simpatico but ultimately incompatible artists, not unlike Dali doing his own version of Millet's Angelus.
White Material: Based on the reactions of many of my Toronto colleagues, it seems that Claire Denis has reached the point of artistry and expectations at which a merely excellent film could be seen as something of a disappointment. Indeed, next to the best of her extraordinarily vivid previous works, this story of French colonials and civil war violence in an unnamed African country is an uncharacteristically open-and-shut case for the auteur. Still, the beauties are numerous. Isabelle Huppert plays the owner of a coffee plantation struggling to keep both business and family together in the midst of gun-toting rebels and insurrection-squashing militias. There is a plot (Denis is a splendid storyteller), but her question, as usual, is not "Where are we going?" but "What are we seeing?" From the first image of a car's headlights revealing a dirt road full of wild dogs to the blissful view of Huppert riding her bicycle, this is sinewy, elliptical, ethereal filmmaking. If this is lesser Denis, that's still miles above just about everyone else out there.
Survival of the Dead: Are George Romero's late-career ghoul operas fatigued retreads of his seminal undead movies, or eccentrically satirical twists on the horror subgenre he virtually created? When a zombified heroine gallops across the screen on horseback and barely any of the characters bats an eye, it's damn near impossible to tell the difference. Kicking off "six days after the dead began to walk," the latest Dead chapter picks up on a strand from the previous one, following the rogue soldiers who had previously crossed paths with the vlogging youngsters in Diary of the Dead as they head into the Hatfield-McCoy territory of dueling patriarchs and cowboy bellicosity. There are trenchant bits (like the landowner's "dead-head" wife kept chained in the kitchen) amid the erupting viscera, but for the most part Romero settles for pleasing fans who cheer every drip of gore but couldn't care less about political subtext.
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, White Material, and Survival of the Dead @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival Day Four: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Soul Kitchen, and The Neil Young Trunk Show
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/16/2009 23:05:30 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: The title makes it sound less like a remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 masterpiece than a coming-this-fall-to-CBS cop show, yet Werner Herzog's dizzying comedy is its own unruly beast. It may have taken somebody who's wrangled Klaus Kinski five times before, but Nicholas Cage's bruise-purple twitchiness is employed fruitfully for the first time in ages: Playing the titular dope-snorting, high-gambling, granny-terrorizing homicide detective, Cage offers a deranged high-wire act that is unmistakably part of the director's singular world even as it keeps spilling over the edges of that world. By the time the lieutenant is lurching across the screen like a broken-backed Nosferatu, even seasoned weirdoes like Brad Dourif and Fairuza Balk are stepping out of the way. Herzog's New Orleans is even more aggressively eccentric than Tsai's Paris in Face: Visions of demented lyricism (an alligator's view of a roadside crash, a pair of iguanas seemingly breaking into a Big Easy aria) giddily punch through the film's hack-policier surface.
The Neil Young Trunk Show: Next to their previous collaboration, 2006's luminous Heart of Gold, Jonathan Demme's new film of a Neil Young concert might seem like a minor work, though in its own way it presents fans with nearly as many blissful moments. Shot in Pennsylvania's Tower Theater during the grizzled singer's 2008 Chrome Dreams II tour, the pictures combines performances of classic favorites ("Cowgirl in the Sand," "Cinnamon Girl"), overlooked tunes ("The Sultan," "Mexico"), and autumnal numbers ("No Hidden Path") on a stage bare but for a few props (mementos from the singer's spiritual "trunk") and Young's guitar-thrusting physicality. Compared to the Young who was facing an open grave in the mortality-infused Heart of Gold, the performer here glows with lifeworn vigor, haloed by the spotlight and set off by vibrant stage colors, his hair thinning and unkempt yet still sweeping. Captured by Demme, it's a beautifully crafted and profoundly emotive spectacle.
Soul Kitchen: This year, Toronto has largely been a festival of extremes, with several films either minimalist-morphing-into-wallpaper or with adrenaline leaking out of their ears. Like Lieutenant, Fatih Akin's two-fisted culinary comedy falls (dropkicks, really) into the latter slot. Closer to the high-decibel exoticism of the director's breakout hit Head-On than to the border-busting gravity of his previous The Edge of Heaven, the picture sets up camp at a ramshackle Hamburg restaurant run by a frazzled Greek bruiser (Adam Bousdoukos) and takes in the hotheaded chefs, paroled relatives, and corporate scumbags pushing through. The whirring multiethnic textures are more exhausting than exhilarating: Akin's camera-in-heat keeps slamming, always rushing to cram in one more canted angle, one more musical cue, one more smackdown between squabbling characters. Still, it's something of a relief to see Edge of Heaven's we-are-the-world solemnity giving way to gags about massage-room boners and aphrodisiac-laced desserts.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Neil Young Trunk Show, and Soul Kitchen @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: The title makes it sound less like a remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 masterpiece than a coming-this-fall-to-CBS cop show, yet Werner Herzog's dizzying comedy is its own unruly beast. It may have taken somebody who's wrangled Klaus Kinski five times before, but Nicholas Cage's bruise-purple twitchiness is employed fruitfully for the first time in ages: Playing the titular dope-snorting, high-gambling, granny-terrorizing homicide detective, Cage offers a deranged high-wire act that is unmistakably part of the director's singular world even as it keeps spilling over the edges of that world. By the time the lieutenant is lurching across the screen like a broken-backed Nosferatu, even seasoned weirdoes like Brad Dourif and Fairuza Balk are stepping out of the way. Herzog's New Orleans is even more aggressively eccentric than Tsai's Paris in Face: Visions of demented lyricism (an alligator's view of a roadside crash, a pair of iguanas seemingly breaking into a Big Easy aria) giddily punch through the film's hack-policier surface.
The Neil Young Trunk Show: Next to their previous collaboration, 2006's luminous Heart of Gold, Jonathan Demme's new film of a Neil Young concert might seem like a minor work, though in its own way it presents fans with nearly as many blissful moments. Shot in Pennsylvania's Tower Theater during the grizzled singer's 2008 Chrome Dreams II tour, the pictures combines performances of classic favorites ("Cowgirl in the Sand," "Cinnamon Girl"), overlooked tunes ("The Sultan," "Mexico"), and autumnal numbers ("No Hidden Path") on a stage bare but for a few props (mementos from the singer's spiritual "trunk") and Young's guitar-thrusting physicality. Compared to the Young who was facing an open grave in the mortality-infused Heart of Gold, the performer here glows with lifeworn vigor, haloed by the spotlight and set off by vibrant stage colors, his hair thinning and unkempt yet still sweeping. Captured by Demme, it's a beautifully crafted and profoundly emotive spectacle.
Soul Kitchen: This year, Toronto has largely been a festival of extremes, with several films either minimalist-morphing-into-wallpaper or with adrenaline leaking out of their ears. Like Lieutenant, Fatih Akin's two-fisted culinary comedy falls (dropkicks, really) into the latter slot. Closer to the high-decibel exoticism of the director's breakout hit Head-On than to the border-busting gravity of his previous The Edge of Heaven, the picture sets up camp at a ramshackle Hamburg restaurant run by a frazzled Greek bruiser (Adam Bousdoukos) and takes in the hotheaded chefs, paroled relatives, and corporate scumbags pushing through. The whirring multiethnic textures are more exhausting than exhilarating: Akin's camera-in-heat keeps slamming, always rushing to cram in one more canted angle, one more musical cue, one more smackdown between squabbling characters. Still, it's something of a relief to see Edge of Heaven's we-are-the-world solemnity giving way to gags about massage-room boners and aphrodisiac-laced desserts.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, The Neil Young Trunk Show, and Soul Kitchen @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival Day Three: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Face, and Police, Adjective
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/15/2009 16:22:27 In: Festivals Comments: 0
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: Bound to get the lion's share of media attention, Heath Ledger in his final (uncompleted) role is actually just one of the copious phantasmagoric elements in Terry Gilliam's impassioned farrago. Troubled productions are nothing new to the director, but Gilliam forges ahead and gets his Fellini freak on as soon as a rickety caravan of saltimbanques materializes to regale modern-day night clubbers. A millenniums-old fabulist cursed by immortality, Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is not only the new incarnation of Gilliam's obsession with addled visionaries, but also his most personal examination of artistic endurance, from the Faustian deals struck for survival to the melancholy of spinning yarns to increasingly jaded audiences. A character's carny pitch ("Do you dream?") becomes the director's inquiry, ringing throughout as both question and invitation. Cluttered with shifting CG canvases, Monty Pythonish revues, and cameos patching up Ledger's absence, the film's sideshow illusionism is often ungainly but rarely less than deeply felt.
Face: Following in the footsteps of Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, Tsai Ming-liang comes to Paris and makes it his. Like Doctor Parnassus, it's a memory film largely composed of mementos—pet themes and images—from the auteur's past, fragmented and bluntly personal. The crux is the filming of the Salome story presided over by a Truffaut-worshipping director (Lee Kang-sheng), overseen by a frazzled producer (Fanny Ardant), and starring a befuddled old-timer (Jean-Pierre Léaud). A matriarch expires in an apartment flooded by a wayward faucet, an actor falls asleep and the snowy set is suddenly stacked with mirrors and chorines, the starlet (Laetitia Costa) who had previously stared sullenly at the camera winks and bobs and lip-synchs to a sugary Chinese song. Filming in the Louvre, Tsai finds a haunted house: People appear as reflections on glass panes or encircled by darkness, Truffaut's muses (Ardant, Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye) are like visiting apparitions. Nothing connects, but much of it ravishes.
Police, Adjective: Leave it for the Romanian New Wavers to turn the act of leafing through a dictionary into one of the year's most riveting cinematic moments. Corneliu Porumboiu's great moral inquiry (disguised as a dreary police procedural) swiftly and unobtrusively sketches a Kafkaesque cosmos by simply following its protagonist, a young cop (Dragos Bucur), from the overcast streets of Bucharest to the phosphorescent greens of his cramped office. Investigating a minor case of pot-smoking high schoolers with increasing reluctance, the drudging hero gradually grows engaged in the interpretation of the moral signs and meanings around him, whether irritably debating a song's symbolism with his girlfriend, scrambling to rush a computer report from an uncooperative co-worker, or humoring a petty tyrant of a police captain's impromptu semantics lesson. Not just a wry portrait of the clash between changing attitudes and rigid laws, but also a call for active consciousness in life and in cinema.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Face, and Police, Adjective @ the Tribeca Film Festival
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: Bound to get the lion's share of media attention, Heath Ledger in his final (uncompleted) role is actually just one of the copious phantasmagoric elements in Terry Gilliam's impassioned farrago. Troubled productions are nothing new to the director, but Gilliam forges ahead and gets his Fellini freak on as soon as a rickety caravan of saltimbanques materializes to regale modern-day night clubbers. A millenniums-old fabulist cursed by immortality, Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) is not only the new incarnation of Gilliam's obsession with addled visionaries, but also his most personal examination of artistic endurance, from the Faustian deals struck for survival to the melancholy of spinning yarns to increasingly jaded audiences. A character's carny pitch ("Do you dream?") becomes the director's inquiry, ringing throughout as both question and invitation. Cluttered with shifting CG canvases, Monty Pythonish revues, and cameos patching up Ledger's absence, the film's sideshow illusionism is often ungainly but rarely less than deeply felt.
Face: Following in the footsteps of Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon, Tsai Ming-liang comes to Paris and makes it his. Like Doctor Parnassus, it's a memory film largely composed of mementos—pet themes and images—from the auteur's past, fragmented and bluntly personal. The crux is the filming of the Salome story presided over by a Truffaut-worshipping director (Lee Kang-sheng), overseen by a frazzled producer (Fanny Ardant), and starring a befuddled old-timer (Jean-Pierre Léaud). A matriarch expires in an apartment flooded by a wayward faucet, an actor falls asleep and the snowy set is suddenly stacked with mirrors and chorines, the starlet (Laetitia Costa) who had previously stared sullenly at the camera winks and bobs and lip-synchs to a sugary Chinese song. Filming in the Louvre, Tsai finds a haunted house: People appear as reflections on glass panes or encircled by darkness, Truffaut's muses (Ardant, Jeanne Moreau, Nathalie Baye) are like visiting apparitions. Nothing connects, but much of it ravishes.
Police, Adjective: Leave it for the Romanian New Wavers to turn the act of leafing through a dictionary into one of the year's most riveting cinematic moments. Corneliu Porumboiu's great moral inquiry (disguised as a dreary police procedural) swiftly and unobtrusively sketches a Kafkaesque cosmos by simply following its protagonist, a young cop (Dragos Bucur), from the overcast streets of Bucharest to the phosphorescent greens of his cramped office. Investigating a minor case of pot-smoking high schoolers with increasing reluctance, the drudging hero gradually grows engaged in the interpretation of the moral signs and meanings around him, whether irritably debating a song's symbolism with his girlfriend, scrambling to rush a computer report from an uncooperative co-worker, or humoring a petty tyrant of a police captain's impromptu semantics lesson. Not just a wry portrait of the clash between changing attitudes and rigid laws, but also a call for active consciousness in life and in cinema.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Face, and Police, Adjective @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival Day Two: The White Ribbon, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/13/2009 16:40:42 In: Festivals Comments: 1
The White Ribbon: Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks from Funny Games? Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer, or, rather, to make the audience's collective skin crawl at the question. Something of a distant Teutonic relative to H.G. Clouzot's caustic Le Corbeau, the story traces the "horror and perplexity" contaminating a small village after a series of mysteriously interconnected events inexorably suggests the oppressive rot lurking under the townspeople's unsmiling, puritanical façade and spreading into the next generation. (Shot in monochromatic tones peculiarly reminiscent of Dreyer's Gertrud, it's Haneke's most visually polished picture yet, though the buzz of flies seeking decay is never far.) Unfolding like a finely wrought adaptation of a sprawling, detail-rich novel, the film showcases Haneke's undeniable technical mastery and is thankfully light on the filmmaker's patented hectoring shocks. The lingering feeling, however, is ultimately less of a portrait of encroaching dread than of a Children of the Corn prequel played as rigid thesis.
A Serious Man: The camera descends onto a snowy village, and then slowly zooms from the pitch-black inside of a character's head toward the light of an earpiece playing Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love." These two showy camera movements appear early in the Coen brothers' latest tragicomedy, visualizing my recurring problem with the filmmakers (they're always looking down on their own characters) and perhaps their riposte to that line of criticism (they're working from deep within those characters). The two views are more in harmony here than in any of their other movies since The Big Lebowski, though where Jeff Bridges's Dude endured his tribulations with a rumpled suavity, Michael Stuhlbarg's Larry Gopnick watches in helpless terror as enough indignities are piled on top of him to make Job himself cry, "Uncle!" The film navigates its protagonist through a late-'60s sea of bullies, yentas, backstabbers, and parasites, hitting moments of pitiless cosmic doubt that shame No Country for Old Men's frigid cynicism. Bleak, hilarious, remarkable.
Up in the Air: Be a capitalist asshole, but don't be alone. That's the message in Jason Reitman's glib crowd-pleaser, which takes the most facile bits of Thank You for Smoking and Michael Clayton and stitches them together with a potpourri of musical montages. The jet-set dislocation of a moneyed frequent flyer is the presiding metaphor, as a Golden Club prick (George Clooney) who makes his living firing people and delivering relationship-whittling motivational speeches is made to face his own emotional isolation. Clooney's early scenes with Vera Farmiga promise sexy, satirical amorality, but it soon becomes clear that the actor's attempts to suggest emptiness behind handsomeness are really an excuse for narcissistic cuteness, just as Reitman's use of the crumbling economy is quickly exposed as white noise for yet another tale of an aging bachelor's redemption.
The White Ribbon, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air @ the Tribeca Film Festival
The White Ribbon: Ever wonder about the ancestors of the murderous jocks from Funny Games? Michael Haneke time travels to rural Germany on the cusp of WWI to find the answer, or, rather, to make the audience's collective skin crawl at the question. Something of a distant Teutonic relative to H.G. Clouzot's caustic Le Corbeau, the story traces the "horror and perplexity" contaminating a small village after a series of mysteriously interconnected events inexorably suggests the oppressive rot lurking under the townspeople's unsmiling, puritanical façade and spreading into the next generation. (Shot in monochromatic tones peculiarly reminiscent of Dreyer's Gertrud, it's Haneke's most visually polished picture yet, though the buzz of flies seeking decay is never far.) Unfolding like a finely wrought adaptation of a sprawling, detail-rich novel, the film showcases Haneke's undeniable technical mastery and is thankfully light on the filmmaker's patented hectoring shocks. The lingering feeling, however, is ultimately less of a portrait of encroaching dread than of a Children of the Corn prequel played as rigid thesis.
A Serious Man: The camera descends onto a snowy village, and then slowly zooms from the pitch-black inside of a character's head toward the light of an earpiece playing Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love." These two showy camera movements appear early in the Coen brothers' latest tragicomedy, visualizing my recurring problem with the filmmakers (they're always looking down on their own characters) and perhaps their riposte to that line of criticism (they're working from deep within those characters). The two views are more in harmony here than in any of their other movies since The Big Lebowski, though where Jeff Bridges's Dude endured his tribulations with a rumpled suavity, Michael Stuhlbarg's Larry Gopnick watches in helpless terror as enough indignities are piled on top of him to make Job himself cry, "Uncle!" The film navigates its protagonist through a late-'60s sea of bullies, yentas, backstabbers, and parasites, hitting moments of pitiless cosmic doubt that shame No Country for Old Men's frigid cynicism. Bleak, hilarious, remarkable.
Up in the Air: Be a capitalist asshole, but don't be alone. That's the message in Jason Reitman's glib crowd-pleaser, which takes the most facile bits of Thank You for Smoking and Michael Clayton and stitches them together with a potpourri of musical montages. The jet-set dislocation of a moneyed frequent flyer is the presiding metaphor, as a Golden Club prick (George Clooney) who makes his living firing people and delivering relationship-whittling motivational speeches is made to face his own emotional isolation. Clooney's early scenes with Vera Farmiga promise sexy, satirical amorality, but it soon becomes clear that the actor's attempts to suggest emptiness behind handsomeness are really an excuse for narcissistic cuteness, just as Reitman's use of the crumbling economy is quickly exposed as white noise for yet another tale of an aging bachelor's redemption.
The White Ribbon, A Serious Man, and Up in the Air @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Toronto Film Festival Day One: Antichrist, Bright Star, and Vision
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 09/12/2009 14:04:04 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Antichrist: Let it not be said that I prefer to ease my way into things. For my first screening on my first day at the Toronto International Film Festival, I dived right into Lars von Trier's Antichrist, the hound from hell that has polarized viewers since its cause célèbre debut in Cannes. As usual with overhyped shockers, the Rite of Spring promised turns out to be closer to ominous Muzak. Still, filled with psychosexual wounds and scored to a cacophony of growls and moans, it's a bravura jumble of concentrated bad vibes. Flower vases hold primordial slime, CGI critters warn about doom, cocks ejaculate blood. As if taunting his critics, von Trier's horrific-wacky tale of a grieving nameless couple (Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg) alone with their fears in a woods cabin evokes not just misogyny, but medieval misogyny. As with Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, there's no anchor to the cataract of malevolent images other than the director's own crawling neuroses. Gainsbourg's mutilating succubus is far preferable to von Trier's usual brand of suffering maidens though.
Bright Star: At the opposite pole from von Trier's raging therapy session lies Jane Campion's delicate period embroidery. Staying in the realm of 19th-century poets after having played a snippy version of Rimbaud in I'm Not There, Ben Whishaw offers an appropriately pallid John Keats, a penniless artiste alternating between brainstorming odes to beauty and bouts of tubercular cough. The film traces his final years with his beloved Fanny Brawne (a gracefully passionate Abbie Cornish), a young society woman who quickly takes center stage as the latest of Campion's individualist heroines. "I have two luxuries to brood over," Keats tells her. "Your loveliness and the hour of my death." Had it fused the romanticism and morbidity of that swooning declaration, the film might have achieved the sense of lyrical danger that Campion's work has at its best. Unfortunately, its drawing rooms and blossoming fields remain so prettily tasteful that the slightest bit of energy, like the broad Scottish accent of Paul Schneider's Charles Armitage Brown, comes as a relief.
Vision: Sisterhood (familial, political, spiritual) has been Margarethe von Trotta's recurring theme for over 30 years, so it's no surprise to see the veteran feminist auteur examining society's gender hierarchies from within the walls of a cloister. A biopic of Hildegard von Bingen (Barbara Sukowa, fierce and luminous), it paints the 12th-century magistra, writer, and composer as an instinctive visionary with a profound hunger for knowledge, endowed with intense, even possessive emotions and, in her struggle to lead her fellow nuns onto a commune of their own, something of a Moses complex. Visually stolid (too often the film settles for blocky robed figures hitting their marks against stony walls) but generous-spirited, von Trotta scrupulously contemplates von Binden's controversial apparitions, aching relationships, and multiple deathbed resurrections not as signs of sainthood, but as proof of an all-too-human search for illumination and love.
Antichrist, Bright Star, and Vision @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Antichrist: Let it not be said that I prefer to ease my way into things. For my first screening on my first day at the Toronto International Film Festival, I dived right into Lars von Trier's Antichrist, the hound from hell that has polarized viewers since its cause célèbre debut in Cannes. As usual with overhyped shockers, the Rite of Spring promised turns out to be closer to ominous Muzak. Still, filled with psychosexual wounds and scored to a cacophony of growls and moans, it's a bravura jumble of concentrated bad vibes. Flower vases hold primordial slime, CGI critters warn about doom, cocks ejaculate blood. As if taunting his critics, von Trier's horrific-wacky tale of a grieving nameless couple (Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg) alone with their fears in a woods cabin evokes not just misogyny, but medieval misogyny. As with Bergman's Hour of the Wolf, there's no anchor to the cataract of malevolent images other than the director's own crawling neuroses. Gainsbourg's mutilating succubus is far preferable to von Trier's usual brand of suffering maidens though.
Bright Star: At the opposite pole from von Trier's raging therapy session lies Jane Campion's delicate period embroidery. Staying in the realm of 19th-century poets after having played a snippy version of Rimbaud in I'm Not There, Ben Whishaw offers an appropriately pallid John Keats, a penniless artiste alternating between brainstorming odes to beauty and bouts of tubercular cough. The film traces his final years with his beloved Fanny Brawne (a gracefully passionate Abbie Cornish), a young society woman who quickly takes center stage as the latest of Campion's individualist heroines. "I have two luxuries to brood over," Keats tells her. "Your loveliness and the hour of my death." Had it fused the romanticism and morbidity of that swooning declaration, the film might have achieved the sense of lyrical danger that Campion's work has at its best. Unfortunately, its drawing rooms and blossoming fields remain so prettily tasteful that the slightest bit of energy, like the broad Scottish accent of Paul Schneider's Charles Armitage Brown, comes as a relief.
Vision: Sisterhood (familial, political, spiritual) has been Margarethe von Trotta's recurring theme for over 30 years, so it's no surprise to see the veteran feminist auteur examining society's gender hierarchies from within the walls of a cloister. A biopic of Hildegard von Bingen (Barbara Sukowa, fierce and luminous), it paints the 12th-century magistra, writer, and composer as an instinctive visionary with a profound hunger for knowledge, endowed with intense, even possessive emotions and, in her struggle to lead her fellow nuns onto a commune of their own, something of a Moses complex. Visually stolid (too often the film settles for blocky robed figures hitting their marks against stony walls) but generous-spirited, von Trotta scrupulously contemplates von Binden's controversial apparitions, aching relationships, and multiple deathbed resurrections not as signs of sainthood, but as proof of an all-too-human search for illumination and love.
Antichrist, Bright Star, and Vision @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: The Yes Men Fix the World
By: Bill Weber On: 06/24/2009 13:38:23 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Returning for a second feature-length tilt at gleefully executing anti-corporate hoaxes, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno follow up the inflatable penis suit and feces-generated fast food of The Yes Men with a little more showbiz (staged comic interludes in their debris-filled "underground headquarters") to prank unsuspecting business conferees with fraudulent rollouts of a bulbous rubber survival cocoon (ostensibly from Halliburton) and a new energy source: candles made from the flesh of a gallant, industrially-poisoned Exxon janitor. Proving repeatedly that a passable wardrobe and camera-ready clichés can get them into any chair normally reserved for experts and bureaucrats, the Yes Men most satisfyingly bring temporary but unaccustomed chaos through a BBC News interview where Bichlbaum's offer of Dow Chemical billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster sends the company's stock plunging; the post-catastrophic "SurvivaBall" garb draws straight-faced questions about marketability and long-term wear; and a New York Times print parody exploits Obama-victory ecstasy by trumpeting headlines of instant Iraq withdrawal and sweeping progressive reforms. (This climactic project, though accurately conceived and read as a "dream paper," may have dated fastest of all.)
Even more so than in the previous film, The Yes Men Fix the World indulges in faux-naïve disappointment that, after garnering priceless double-takes of white-collar audiences confronted with the "Golden Skeleton" of monetary human-life calculus or the hypothesis that global warming can be as positively transformative as the Black Plague was in clearing the decks for the Renaissance, the duo hasn't shamed The Man into changing his deregulated, market-dictated ways. Given that Bichlbaum and Bonanno aren't above funny cheap shots like green-screening Tom of Finland art behind a solemn Milton Friedman-school economist, their exposure of ossified free-market mindsets seems more in line with their skills than a call to activism against a global capitalist oligarchy. Careful to elicit blessings upon their deceptions from the downtrodden, be they health activists in Bhopal or the post-Katrina poor being squeezed out in money-mad New Orleans reconstruction plans, the Yes Men ultimately admit to "failure" to fix the world except in the pages of their utopian Times, but their true success comes in discovering a Gulf Coast-rehab expo where the only shelters being marketed are yurts from Kyrgyzstan, or in getting a climate-change skeptic to offer, "Cold-related deaths will decrease significantly."
[The Yes Men Fix the World premieres June 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Returning for a second feature-length tilt at gleefully executing anti-corporate hoaxes, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno follow up the inflatable penis suit and feces-generated fast food of The Yes Men with a little more showbiz (staged comic interludes in their debris-filled "underground headquarters") to prank unsuspecting business conferees with fraudulent rollouts of a bulbous rubber survival cocoon (ostensibly from Halliburton) and a new energy source: candles made from the flesh of a gallant, industrially-poisoned Exxon janitor. Proving repeatedly that a passable wardrobe and camera-ready clichés can get them into any chair normally reserved for experts and bureaucrats, the Yes Men most satisfyingly bring temporary but unaccustomed chaos through a BBC News interview where Bichlbaum's offer of Dow Chemical billions to treat victims of the 1984 Bhopal chemical disaster sends the company's stock plunging; the post-catastrophic "SurvivaBall" garb draws straight-faced questions about marketability and long-term wear; and a New York Times print parody exploits Obama-victory ecstasy by trumpeting headlines of instant Iraq withdrawal and sweeping progressive reforms. (This climactic project, though accurately conceived and read as a "dream paper," may have dated fastest of all.)
Even more so than in the previous film, The Yes Men Fix the World indulges in faux-naïve disappointment that, after garnering priceless double-takes of white-collar audiences confronted with the "Golden Skeleton" of monetary human-life calculus or the hypothesis that global warming can be as positively transformative as the Black Plague was in clearing the decks for the Renaissance, the duo hasn't shamed The Man into changing his deregulated, market-dictated ways. Given that Bichlbaum and Bonanno aren't above funny cheap shots like green-screening Tom of Finland art behind a solemn Milton Friedman-school economist, their exposure of ossified free-market mindsets seems more in line with their skills than a call to activism against a global capitalist oligarchy. Careful to elicit blessings upon their deceptions from the downtrodden, be they health activists in Bhopal or the post-Katrina poor being squeezed out in money-mad New Orleans reconstruction plans, the Yes Men ultimately admit to "failure" to fix the world except in the pages of their utopian Times, but their true success comes in discovering a Gulf Coast-rehab expo where the only shelters being marketed are yurts from Kyrgyzstan, or in getting a climate-change skeptic to offer, "Cold-related deaths will decrease significantly."
[The Yes Men Fix the World premieres June 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Good Fortune
By: Bill Weber On: 06/23/2009 13:35:37 In: Festivals Comments: 0
"You guys will go from last to first," Dominion Farms CEO Calvin Burgess condescendingly tells a crowd of Kenyans at an outdoor PR carnival in Good Fortune as he pumps up enthusiasm for his American company's project to turn a swath of the Yala Swamp into a $30 million rice farm. But Dominion's plan to flood 1100 acres of arable land and construct an irrigation dam takes little account of the area's farmers who are losing their homes and livelihood; they're a collateral nuisance. "My life is based on this soil...We don't want to become [Burgess's] laborers," says farmer and schoolteacher Jackson Omondi, one of three citizen protagonists in Landon Van Soest's documentary who object to the impact that purported anti-poverty programs, devised by foreign corporations or NGOs with the carefully negotiated participation of Kenya's government, will have on their lives. Are they short-sighted, unwilling to see that the status quo blocks "big-picture" progress in the modernization of Africa's continental economy? Perhaps, as a Dominion director sunnily puts it, the Yala farmers simply need to see that the submerging of their land provides a golden opportunity for "changing their careers into fishing and other pursuits."
Lacking any narrator or audible off-camera interrogators, van Soest's film is occasionally wanting in terms of contextual data and confirmation of the Kenyans' assertions (e.g. the link between Dominion's sprayed chemicals and the local incidence of miscarriages). But the crises and dilemmas in the three-part chronicle are informed by the familiar past failings of Western corporate culture and the Kenya regime's prioritization of profit—along with the nation's bloody post-election mayhem in 2007, seen here in the final reels. In the capital of Nairobi, where the Kibera slum neighborhood that's home to one million is being "upgraded" by a joint UN-government effort, a hairdresser threatened with eviction points to local high-rises that were similarly supposed to elevate quality of life for the poor, but were ultimately occupied by the upper class or abandoned amid embezzlement revelations. And in perhaps the most desperate segments, fishing communities on the shores of Lake Victoria are confronted not only by stocks critically depleted by a World Bank-funded export industry and environmental degradation, but the spread of AIDS as increasingly alienated men patronize prostitutes and expose their wives to HIV.
Not merely questioning if a corporate, Western model of aid to Africa can penetrate to the grassroots, Good Fortune sees those most egregiously treated as pawns by outsiders (of varying motives) and domestic powers-that-be as fully aware of their underdog status, and often bleakly resigned to the limits of resistance. "It's better to leave without a fight," sighs the Kibera salon owner, even as the film unexpectedly shows Western ingenuity receiving a near-karmic comeuppance in the Yala Swamp.
[Good Fortune premieres June 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
"You guys will go from last to first," Dominion Farms CEO Calvin Burgess condescendingly tells a crowd of Kenyans at an outdoor PR carnival in Good Fortune as he pumps up enthusiasm for his American company's project to turn a swath of the Yala Swamp into a $30 million rice farm. But Dominion's plan to flood 1100 acres of arable land and construct an irrigation dam takes little account of the area's farmers who are losing their homes and livelihood; they're a collateral nuisance. "My life is based on this soil...We don't want to become [Burgess's] laborers," says farmer and schoolteacher Jackson Omondi, one of three citizen protagonists in Landon Van Soest's documentary who object to the impact that purported anti-poverty programs, devised by foreign corporations or NGOs with the carefully negotiated participation of Kenya's government, will have on their lives. Are they short-sighted, unwilling to see that the status quo blocks "big-picture" progress in the modernization of Africa's continental economy? Perhaps, as a Dominion director sunnily puts it, the Yala farmers simply need to see that the submerging of their land provides a golden opportunity for "changing their careers into fishing and other pursuits."
Lacking any narrator or audible off-camera interrogators, van Soest's film is occasionally wanting in terms of contextual data and confirmation of the Kenyans' assertions (e.g. the link between Dominion's sprayed chemicals and the local incidence of miscarriages). But the crises and dilemmas in the three-part chronicle are informed by the familiar past failings of Western corporate culture and the Kenya regime's prioritization of profit—along with the nation's bloody post-election mayhem in 2007, seen here in the final reels. In the capital of Nairobi, where the Kibera slum neighborhood that's home to one million is being "upgraded" by a joint UN-government effort, a hairdresser threatened with eviction points to local high-rises that were similarly supposed to elevate quality of life for the poor, but were ultimately occupied by the upper class or abandoned amid embezzlement revelations. And in perhaps the most desperate segments, fishing communities on the shores of Lake Victoria are confronted not only by stocks critically depleted by a World Bank-funded export industry and environmental degradation, but the spread of AIDS as increasingly alienated men patronize prostitutes and expose their wives to HIV.
Not merely questioning if a corporate, Western model of aid to Africa can penetrate to the grassroots, Good Fortune sees those most egregiously treated as pawns by outsiders (of varying motives) and domestic powers-that-be as fully aware of their underdog status, and often bleakly resigned to the limits of resistance. "It's better to leave without a fight," sighs the Kibera salon owner, even as the film unexpectedly shows Western ingenuity receiving a near-karmic comeuppance in the Yala Swamp.
[Good Fortune premieres June 24 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Tapologo
By: Joseph Jon Lanthier On: 06/22/2009 13:02:28 In: Festivals Comments: 0
A stone's throw from the Impala Platinum mine in South Africa, Freedom Park is a shanty town hell inhabited by sub-Saharan migrant workers that lacks even the most rudimentary community developments (running water, agriculture), and possesses a makeshift economy existing primarily to serve the whims of sexual predators. As a result, roughly 50% of the female citizenry, all of whom are de facto prostitutes, has contracted HIV. The documentary Tapologo circuitously follows a collection of nurses—most of whom are rehabilitated sex workers with AIDS themselves—who collectively founded the Tapologo Hospice in Freedom Park under the wing of a small group of doctors-cum-missionaries from the United Kingdom.
The objective of the hospice seems, at first glance, rather defeatist: The women who man the small pharmacies and make house calls throughout the disease-riddled town are fully aware of the infected population's mortality rate, and in spite of attempts at prevention therapy (condom distribution, AIDS education sessions) the epidemic's grip on the community has not slackened. The dignity of their efforts, however, is aptly summed up by a visiting Irish priest: After an individual has contracted the virus, he observes, Christianly care is the only useful ecclesiastical reaction. The Tapologo nurses not only prolong and improve the quality of their patients' lives but of their own as well, and the smattering of oral histories in the film emphasize the medicinal properties of fraternal strength even in the face of moribund despair.
Structurally, the film would have benefited from pruning; much information is repeated out of necessity as we revisit the same characters multiple times and gradually piece together their autobiographies. And the attempt in the center of the documentary at representing a full day at the hospice with title cards heralding the start of each hour features far too many distractions—for example, cutaways to lengthy monologues from figures outside the facility—to properly capture the frenzied cadence of the profession. But the directors' judicious patience with their subjects allows them to capture some remarkable storytelling, and even more impressive are the silent montages cycling through five-second video portraits of the hospice's non-English speaking staff. Their worldly, fatigued stares are the most eloquent thing about Tapologo: They communicate the experience of having one foot in the grave but marching forward, regardless.
[Tapologo premieres June 23 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
A stone's throw from the Impala Platinum mine in South Africa, Freedom Park is a shanty town hell inhabited by sub-Saharan migrant workers that lacks even the most rudimentary community developments (running water, agriculture), and possesses a makeshift economy existing primarily to serve the whims of sexual predators. As a result, roughly 50% of the female citizenry, all of whom are de facto prostitutes, has contracted HIV. The documentary Tapologo circuitously follows a collection of nurses—most of whom are rehabilitated sex workers with AIDS themselves—who collectively founded the Tapologo Hospice in Freedom Park under the wing of a small group of doctors-cum-missionaries from the United Kingdom.
The objective of the hospice seems, at first glance, rather defeatist: The women who man the small pharmacies and make house calls throughout the disease-riddled town are fully aware of the infected population's mortality rate, and in spite of attempts at prevention therapy (condom distribution, AIDS education sessions) the epidemic's grip on the community has not slackened. The dignity of their efforts, however, is aptly summed up by a visiting Irish priest: After an individual has contracted the virus, he observes, Christianly care is the only useful ecclesiastical reaction. The Tapologo nurses not only prolong and improve the quality of their patients' lives but of their own as well, and the smattering of oral histories in the film emphasize the medicinal properties of fraternal strength even in the face of moribund despair.
Structurally, the film would have benefited from pruning; much information is repeated out of necessity as we revisit the same characters multiple times and gradually piece together their autobiographies. And the attempt in the center of the documentary at representing a full day at the hospice with title cards heralding the start of each hour features far too many distractions—for example, cutaways to lengthy monologues from figures outside the facility—to properly capture the frenzied cadence of the profession. But the directors' judicious patience with their subjects allows them to capture some remarkable storytelling, and even more impressive are the silent montages cycling through five-second video portraits of the hospice's non-English speaking staff. Their worldly, fatigued stares are the most eloquent thing about Tapologo: They communicate the experience of having one foot in the grave but marching forward, regardless.
[Tapologo premieres June 23 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Mrs. Goundo's Daughter
By: Joseph Jon Lanthier On: 06/21/2009 13:15:15 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Bestriding the line between global documentary and social exposé, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter lingers for one squeamish hour on the resilient African tradition of female genital mutilation (or FGM, as it is bureaucratically abbreviated). Juxtaposing interviews with the immigrant of the title—a Malian excision victim seeking asylum in the United States to protect her daughter from a similar fate—and footage captured in her homeland during FGM rituals, the film ponderously examines the practice's tribal significance.
The expected observations are repeated, ad nauseam, including not only vocal support of clitoridectomy as a device to mitigate the natural proclivity of women toward sexual perfidy, but step-by-step descriptions of the procedure itself as well—which up until a decade ago was performed en masse with a single blood-laden scalpel. This provides a wealth of teeth-gritting moments, but the filmmakers neglect to provide more nuanced context that might tourniquet their audience's befuddlement after the initial shock wears off. We're never told, for example, precisely how FGM proliferated so profusely in Islamic nations, so while it appears to possess an aura of sanctity comparable to male circumcision, the lack of historical detail recklessly demonizes its practitioners (both male and female) rather than discovering how they came to inherit the tradition.
Still, the facts of the ritual's steadfast observance are as culturally fascinating as they are tragic (for example, it's common for young girls to be abducted by relatives or neighbors and excised without their parents' knowledge or permission), and in its frequent conversations with female refugees, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter probes the subaltern core of Mali's feminine psychology. Victims of FGM need to convince themselves that they have been abused—by counting the number of weekly deaths from excision, or by recounting the resulting difficulty in childbirth, or by complaining that while husbands support FGM, they favor the sensation of a complete vulva. It occurs to none of these women that even the concept of mutilation may be inherently damaging or subjugating without the attached risks. What Malian society needs is a distaff system of corporeal demystification and celebration—only a culture saturated with intense yonic fear could view asexualizing violence as empowering.
[Mrs. Goundo's Daughter premieres June 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Bestriding the line between global documentary and social exposé, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter lingers for one squeamish hour on the resilient African tradition of female genital mutilation (or FGM, as it is bureaucratically abbreviated). Juxtaposing interviews with the immigrant of the title—a Malian excision victim seeking asylum in the United States to protect her daughter from a similar fate—and footage captured in her homeland during FGM rituals, the film ponderously examines the practice's tribal significance.
The expected observations are repeated, ad nauseam, including not only vocal support of clitoridectomy as a device to mitigate the natural proclivity of women toward sexual perfidy, but step-by-step descriptions of the procedure itself as well—which up until a decade ago was performed en masse with a single blood-laden scalpel. This provides a wealth of teeth-gritting moments, but the filmmakers neglect to provide more nuanced context that might tourniquet their audience's befuddlement after the initial shock wears off. We're never told, for example, precisely how FGM proliferated so profusely in Islamic nations, so while it appears to possess an aura of sanctity comparable to male circumcision, the lack of historical detail recklessly demonizes its practitioners (both male and female) rather than discovering how they came to inherit the tradition.
Still, the facts of the ritual's steadfast observance are as culturally fascinating as they are tragic (for example, it's common for young girls to be abducted by relatives or neighbors and excised without their parents' knowledge or permission), and in its frequent conversations with female refugees, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter probes the subaltern core of Mali's feminine psychology. Victims of FGM need to convince themselves that they have been abused—by counting the number of weekly deaths from excision, or by recounting the resulting difficulty in childbirth, or by complaining that while husbands support FGM, they favor the sensation of a complete vulva. It occurs to none of these women that even the concept of mutilation may be inherently damaging or subjugating without the attached risks. What Malian society needs is a distaff system of corporeal demystification and celebration—only a culture saturated with intense yonic fear could view asexualizing violence as empowering.
[Mrs. Goundo's Daughter premieres June 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Look Into My Eyes
By: Nick Schager On: 06/20/2009 13:48:51 In: Festivals Comments: 0
The title of Naftaly Gliksberg's Look Into My Eyes is an overt reference to its climax, in which the director—outside the courtroom where Holocaust denier Horst Mahler is standing trial—compels one of Mahler's "followers" to stare into his eyes, an act the man doggedly avoids because "Jewish people are part of the devil." Yet moreover, the documentary's moniker functions as an articulation of Gliksberg's modus operandi of visiting an assortment of locales (some of which he has ties to) and candidly discussing prevailing attitudes about Jews and Israel.
Given that the director places himself squarely in the camera's gaze, as well as chooses certain extreme-case examples who deliver familiar over-the-top soundbites, the doc resembles Bill Maher's button-pushing nonfiction comedy Religulous. Whereas Maher approached his non-representational interviewees with condescension, however, Gliksberg proceeds with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and dismay, the latter becoming increasingly palpable during chats with people who profess fondness for Jews and then advocate ugly, clichéd stereotypes. A West Virginian big shot with the white supremacist National Alliance—whose anti-Semitism is of a predictable sort—proves far less chilling than a nearby church pastor who assures Gliksberg about his tolerance, only to then add that Israelis are a rude lot who only treat Christians well in order to earn their tourist money, and that by not following the 1914 Balfour Declaration the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves.
Still, by only cursorily concentrating on himself, the son of an Israeli rabbi who cast aside his orthodoxy (and his religious wife) upon moving to Paris in his early 20s, Gliksberg forgoes providing highly personal context that might have made up for the haphazard nature of his inquiry, which plucks out topics—the 1991 Crown Heights conflict between blacks and Jews, a notorious French comedian—seemingly at random. Though positioned more as one man's private investigation than as a definitive survey of current global anti-Semitism, the film somewhat falters on both counts, expressing its grief and horror over the persistence of irrational hate frankly and poignantly, but via an easy-target framework from which one can draw only superficial conclusions.
[Look Into My Eyes premieres June 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
The title of Naftaly Gliksberg's Look Into My Eyes is an overt reference to its climax, in which the director—outside the courtroom where Holocaust denier Horst Mahler is standing trial—compels one of Mahler's "followers" to stare into his eyes, an act the man doggedly avoids because "Jewish people are part of the devil." Yet moreover, the documentary's moniker functions as an articulation of Gliksberg's modus operandi of visiting an assortment of locales (some of which he has ties to) and candidly discussing prevailing attitudes about Jews and Israel.
Given that the director places himself squarely in the camera's gaze, as well as chooses certain extreme-case examples who deliver familiar over-the-top soundbites, the doc resembles Bill Maher's button-pushing nonfiction comedy Religulous. Whereas Maher approached his non-representational interviewees with condescension, however, Gliksberg proceeds with a mixture of curiosity, apprehension, and dismay, the latter becoming increasingly palpable during chats with people who profess fondness for Jews and then advocate ugly, clichéd stereotypes. A West Virginian big shot with the white supremacist National Alliance—whose anti-Semitism is of a predictable sort—proves far less chilling than a nearby church pastor who assures Gliksberg about his tolerance, only to then add that Israelis are a rude lot who only treat Christians well in order to earn their tourist money, and that by not following the 1914 Balfour Declaration the Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves.
Still, by only cursorily concentrating on himself, the son of an Israeli rabbi who cast aside his orthodoxy (and his religious wife) upon moving to Paris in his early 20s, Gliksberg forgoes providing highly personal context that might have made up for the haphazard nature of his inquiry, which plucks out topics—the 1991 Crown Heights conflict between blacks and Jews, a notorious French comedian—seemingly at random. Though positioned more as one man's private investigation than as a definitive survey of current global anti-Semitism, the film somewhat falters on both counts, expressing its grief and horror over the persistence of irrational hate frankly and poignantly, but via an easy-target framework from which one can draw only superficial conclusions.
[Look Into My Eyes premieres June 21 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Afghan Star
By: Joseph Jon Lanthier On: 06/19/2009 13:22:02 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Afghan Star sets out with a delectably postmodern agenda: Closely following four contestants in the eponymous television program, Afghanistan's burqa-busting answer to American Idol, the documentary compassionately argues that one region's pop detritus is another's ideological maturation. After NATO chased the Taliban out of their war torn, totalitarian playground at the urging of the U.S. in 2001, remaining inhabitants were faced with the perplexing novelty of freedom of speech—at least as far as the Qur'an would allow. Broadcasting companies were quickly organized but overcome with the awkwardness of rebuilding media outlets after nearly two generations of stifled silence. The solution was, naturally, to seek a preexisting entertainment model and adapt it for Islamic viewers, and since a flood of American imports had already captivated the celebrity-starved nation, Afghan Star was developed—not only as a source of euphonic escapism, but as a sly way of uniting Afghanistan's collection of perpetually embattled provinces (contestants on the show are drawn from as many diverse corners of the country as possible).
Director Havana Marking's social observations resonate most effectively when she concentrates on the titular TV show itself, and its widespread cult, much of which diagonally illuminates the political context of the populous. After years of enduring unrewarded labor and ubiquitous terrorism, even the most indigent and rural of citizens are obsessed with which member of the ragtag pool of singers on Afghan Star will go home next, especially since the population's own text message votes make the choices. And the performers themselves—despite appearing astoundingly aged in spite of their twentysomethingness—seem to represent the resurrection of what has been for the last 30 years a dormant Afghan culture: A conservative but nonetheless jubilant and even campy musical celebration of Middle-Eastern consciousness (connecting these dots for us, the film shows clips of hilariously kinetic mid-'80s music videos from Afghani TV, most of which sound and look like outtakes from "Addicted to Love"-era Robert Palmer).
There are also, however, reminders that Afghanistan doesn't need the Taliban to subjugate women—they can manage it well enough on their own. Setara, a youthful female contestant, doffs her head-wrap during a passionate number and dances with her hair freely jostling along to her hip rotations. The response from even the girl's fans is spontaneously brutal, with droves of Afghan Star viewers willing to uphold their Muslim taboos with the death penalty. This subplot is essential to understanding the warped, transitional state of Afghan psychology, but it causes the film to lose focus and ethical perspective: Stalling the pop competition's optimistic trajectory, the directors occasionally even sink so low as to use the uncertainty of the alleged heretic's fate for visceral tension.
This misfired episode isn't quite enough to sour the entire documentary, but it does effectively curdle one of its most admirable points: That the voting system of Afghan Star could be viewed as nascent democracy. As the final winner is announced and the end credits roll our thoughts turn not to Thomas Paine or Montesquieu, but the sadistically topsy-turvy republic of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Regardless of the governing method, Islamic nations will forever function within the autocratic grip of intransigent fatwas.
[Afghan Star premieres June 20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Afghan Star sets out with a delectably postmodern agenda: Closely following four contestants in the eponymous television program, Afghanistan's burqa-busting answer to American Idol, the documentary compassionately argues that one region's pop detritus is another's ideological maturation. After NATO chased the Taliban out of their war torn, totalitarian playground at the urging of the U.S. in 2001, remaining inhabitants were faced with the perplexing novelty of freedom of speech—at least as far as the Qur'an would allow. Broadcasting companies were quickly organized but overcome with the awkwardness of rebuilding media outlets after nearly two generations of stifled silence. The solution was, naturally, to seek a preexisting entertainment model and adapt it for Islamic viewers, and since a flood of American imports had already captivated the celebrity-starved nation, Afghan Star was developed—not only as a source of euphonic escapism, but as a sly way of uniting Afghanistan's collection of perpetually embattled provinces (contestants on the show are drawn from as many diverse corners of the country as possible).
Director Havana Marking's social observations resonate most effectively when she concentrates on the titular TV show itself, and its widespread cult, much of which diagonally illuminates the political context of the populous. After years of enduring unrewarded labor and ubiquitous terrorism, even the most indigent and rural of citizens are obsessed with which member of the ragtag pool of singers on Afghan Star will go home next, especially since the population's own text message votes make the choices. And the performers themselves—despite appearing astoundingly aged in spite of their twentysomethingness—seem to represent the resurrection of what has been for the last 30 years a dormant Afghan culture: A conservative but nonetheless jubilant and even campy musical celebration of Middle-Eastern consciousness (connecting these dots for us, the film shows clips of hilariously kinetic mid-'80s music videos from Afghani TV, most of which sound and look like outtakes from "Addicted to Love"-era Robert Palmer).
There are also, however, reminders that Afghanistan doesn't need the Taliban to subjugate women—they can manage it well enough on their own. Setara, a youthful female contestant, doffs her head-wrap during a passionate number and dances with her hair freely jostling along to her hip rotations. The response from even the girl's fans is spontaneously brutal, with droves of Afghan Star viewers willing to uphold their Muslim taboos with the death penalty. This subplot is essential to understanding the warped, transitional state of Afghan psychology, but it causes the film to lose focus and ethical perspective: Stalling the pop competition's optimistic trajectory, the directors occasionally even sink so low as to use the uncertainty of the alleged heretic's fate for visceral tension.
This misfired episode isn't quite enough to sour the entire documentary, but it does effectively curdle one of its most admirable points: That the voting system of Afghan Star could be viewed as nascent democracy. As the final winner is announced and the end credits roll our thoughts turn not to Thomas Paine or Montesquieu, but the sadistically topsy-turvy republic of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. Regardless of the governing method, Islamic nations will forever function within the autocratic grip of intransigent fatwas.
[Afghan Star premieres June 20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: My Neighbor, My Killer
By: Andrew Schenker On: 06/18/2009 13:49:02 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Fast on the heels of Munyurangabo's brief New York run comes Anne Aghion's My Neighbor, My Killer, a documentary that, like Lee Isaac Chung's fictional film, examines the legacy of Rwanda's 1994 genocide. What the movies have in common is that, while directed by outsiders (Chung is Korean-American, Aghion French-American), both scrupulously avoid the glossy reductivism of higher-budget American productions that tend to render historical atrocity both overly familiar (because of recognizable genre tropes) and comfortably distant (because a lack of immediacy). While Chung uses local actors, films in the Kinyarwanda language, and confines the bulk of the action to a single local setting, Aghion deliberately avoids making concessions to viewers unfamiliar with the conflict and, with the exception of a few brief radio snippets, provides very little contextualizing information. Despite the films' weaknesses (in Munyurangabo, a last-minute plot development that seems to absolve the protagonist of having to kill, in My Neighbor a fragmented fly-on-the-wall perspective that, while illuminating, also risks a certain amount of confusion), what is at stake in the two projects is a new authenticity lacking from other Western treatments of the genocide, a respect for the Rwandan people and an understanding of the ways in which tragedy must give way to reconciliation in order for the devastated nation to continue.
Reconciliation is the watchword for the villagers in My Neighbor whether they like it or not. Aghion's video feature, her third project to treat the aftermath of the genocide, tracks the implementation of Gacaca, a unique judicial process instituted by the Rwandan government designed to force an understanding between victim and perpetrator, as it unfolds in a single village. A collection of filmed fragments taken over several years, My Neighbor begins with the release of several alleged war criminals from prison and their return to their native village where they live side-by-side with their victims. Then after eliding several years of (at least hypothetical) reintegration, Aghion films the villages holding open air trials in which townspeople stand up and directly confront the alleged murderers of their husbands and children.
Although the director takes a deliberately nonjudgmental approach, the trial process as it's presented seems of at least questionable efficacy. In the first stage, the returned prisoners mostly avoid contact with the victims and, in the second, mostly deny their direct involvement in atrocity. Along the way Aghion captures some revealing moments of conflict—a gathering in a makeshift bar in which victims sit beside an alleged perpetrator uneasily sharing a beer, the entire concluding trial sequence in which the words of the victims ring out with enough measured outrage to counter the defendants' weak denials—which speak more to the difficulty of reconciliation than to its possibility, or even desirability. If ultimately the work's fragments—like the Gacaca process itself—fail to fully cohere, then the project's privileged look into a unique experiment makes it at least valuable as a document in our ongoing understanding of the lasting implications of genocide.
[My Neighbor, My Killer premieres June 20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Fast on the heels of Munyurangabo's brief New York run comes Anne Aghion's My Neighbor, My Killer, a documentary that, like Lee Isaac Chung's fictional film, examines the legacy of Rwanda's 1994 genocide. What the movies have in common is that, while directed by outsiders (Chung is Korean-American, Aghion French-American), both scrupulously avoid the glossy reductivism of higher-budget American productions that tend to render historical atrocity both overly familiar (because of recognizable genre tropes) and comfortably distant (because a lack of immediacy). While Chung uses local actors, films in the Kinyarwanda language, and confines the bulk of the action to a single local setting, Aghion deliberately avoids making concessions to viewers unfamiliar with the conflict and, with the exception of a few brief radio snippets, provides very little contextualizing information. Despite the films' weaknesses (in Munyurangabo, a last-minute plot development that seems to absolve the protagonist of having to kill, in My Neighbor a fragmented fly-on-the-wall perspective that, while illuminating, also risks a certain amount of confusion), what is at stake in the two projects is a new authenticity lacking from other Western treatments of the genocide, a respect for the Rwandan people and an understanding of the ways in which tragedy must give way to reconciliation in order for the devastated nation to continue.
Reconciliation is the watchword for the villagers in My Neighbor whether they like it or not. Aghion's video feature, her third project to treat the aftermath of the genocide, tracks the implementation of Gacaca, a unique judicial process instituted by the Rwandan government designed to force an understanding between victim and perpetrator, as it unfolds in a single village. A collection of filmed fragments taken over several years, My Neighbor begins with the release of several alleged war criminals from prison and their return to their native village where they live side-by-side with their victims. Then after eliding several years of (at least hypothetical) reintegration, Aghion films the villages holding open air trials in which townspeople stand up and directly confront the alleged murderers of their husbands and children.
Although the director takes a deliberately nonjudgmental approach, the trial process as it's presented seems of at least questionable efficacy. In the first stage, the returned prisoners mostly avoid contact with the victims and, in the second, mostly deny their direct involvement in atrocity. Along the way Aghion captures some revealing moments of conflict—a gathering in a makeshift bar in which victims sit beside an alleged perpetrator uneasily sharing a beer, the entire concluding trial sequence in which the words of the victims ring out with enough measured outrage to counter the defendants' weak denials—which speak more to the difficulty of reconciliation than to its possibility, or even desirability. If ultimately the work's fragments—like the Gacaca process itself—fail to fully cohere, then the project's privileged look into a unique experiment makes it at least valuable as a document in our ongoing understanding of the lasting implications of genocide.
[My Neighbor, My Killer premieres June 20 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Youth Producing Change
By: Eric Henderson On: 06/17/2009 13:38:22 In: Festivals Comments: 0
A second collection of short films created by youth from every far-flung corner of the world and packaged for the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Youth Producing Change is almost self-evidently something of a grab bag. But even if the point is obviously to celebrate the intent more than the final product, it's always surprising to hear the state of world affairs as reflected by those who, at least as far as politicians are typically concerned, see more than they tell. The opening piece, I Live in Mozambique, plays a little like a brief addendum to Jean Rouch's Moi, un Noir. Admittedly, Rouch's first-person ethnography took place on the other side of the continent in the Ivory Coast, but both films share a vibrant sort of optimism, all the more impressive in the case of Mozambique's Alcides for the fact that he has seen both his parents die in the previous year to AIDS. His is a rare sort of optimism that can admit his brother collects discarded bottles so he can fill them with contaminated water and sell them. On the flip side in every possible sense is Aquafinito, an American student's exposé of the bottled water industry and its Chinatown-esque machinations against humanity's inherent right to have access to public water supplies. Though it comes off a tad privileged when held against the likes of Mozambique, the animated fable Leila, or, closer to home, In My Shoes (a stylish and all-too-brief dual-pronged portrait of teen homelessness in New York City), Aquafinito is likely still more informative and thorough than any investigative journalism you're likely to see from most American mass media today. Nevertheless, the anthology's true heart reveals itself in pieces such as Noe's Story and Sako, unfettered and determined self-portraits of children who have to fight for their right to be represented by what remains one of the most powerful forms of mass communication in the entire world.
[Youth Producing Change premieres June 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
A second collection of short films created by youth from every far-flung corner of the world and packaged for the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, Youth Producing Change is almost self-evidently something of a grab bag. But even if the point is obviously to celebrate the intent more than the final product, it's always surprising to hear the state of world affairs as reflected by those who, at least as far as politicians are typically concerned, see more than they tell. The opening piece, I Live in Mozambique, plays a little like a brief addendum to Jean Rouch's Moi, un Noir. Admittedly, Rouch's first-person ethnography took place on the other side of the continent in the Ivory Coast, but both films share a vibrant sort of optimism, all the more impressive in the case of Mozambique's Alcides for the fact that he has seen both his parents die in the previous year to AIDS. His is a rare sort of optimism that can admit his brother collects discarded bottles so he can fill them with contaminated water and sell them. On the flip side in every possible sense is Aquafinito, an American student's exposé of the bottled water industry and its Chinatown-esque machinations against humanity's inherent right to have access to public water supplies. Though it comes off a tad privileged when held against the likes of Mozambique, the animated fable Leila, or, closer to home, In My Shoes (a stylish and all-too-brief dual-pronged portrait of teen homelessness in New York City), Aquafinito is likely still more informative and thorough than any investigative journalism you're likely to see from most American mass media today. Nevertheless, the anthology's true heart reveals itself in pieces such as Noe's Story and Sako, unfettered and determined self-portraits of children who have to fight for their right to be represented by what remains one of the most powerful forms of mass communication in the entire world.
[Youth Producing Change premieres June 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Back Home Tomorrow
By: Eric Henderson On: 06/16/2009 16:14:48 In: Festivals Comments: 0
The documentary Back Home Tomorrow blazes out of the gates with a form/content double-shot—high-contrast, Meirellesian HD images capturing every spec of dirt and grue clinging to the petrified face and heaving torso of a seven-year-old Afghan boy injured after playing with an undetonated mine. "Call my father! I'm dying," he sobs, as premature awareness of his own mortality dawns incongruously on his cherubic face before directors Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini show the right arm that now ends at the halfway point and the flaps of skin that used to be his left hand's fingers. The boy, Murtaza, is at the center of two parallel stories. The other involves Yagoub, a 15-year-old boy refugee from Khartoum whose medical crisis—he needs an expensive surgery or else his heart will continue to expand within his chest, killing him within a year's time—is presented against the imposing aftermath of the second Sudanese Civil War. Lazzaretti and Santolini frame Yagoub's struggle against his own suggestively symbolic heart muscle within scenes depicting his mother's resigned reaction to the price tag ($5,000, which may as well be a million...and, in fact, is, in Sudanese pounds) and his community's emphasis on highly physical, full-contact masculinity (the filmmakers dwell at length on an almost balletic wrestling match). Both Murtaza and Yagoub are victims of war; the former is trapped inside a hospital during a long and painful rehabilitation, while the latter is kept outside by the alternately prohibitive and exploitive costs of medical care. That said, their stories are unique enough that one wishes they'd each been given their own individual film. While it doesn't diminish the inherent emotional power of each boy's plight to put them through the gauntlet of crosscuts, there is enough disjoint to put the entire project's narrative thrust in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Lazzaretti and Santolini are diligent enough documentarians that they capture moments of moral clarity, such as when the weeping mother of a mine victim thumbprints her consent to the surgery, using a piece of her own anatomy to allow doctors permission to remove the same piece from her son.
[Back Home Tomorrow premieres June 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
The documentary Back Home Tomorrow blazes out of the gates with a form/content double-shot—high-contrast, Meirellesian HD images capturing every spec of dirt and grue clinging to the petrified face and heaving torso of a seven-year-old Afghan boy injured after playing with an undetonated mine. "Call my father! I'm dying," he sobs, as premature awareness of his own mortality dawns incongruously on his cherubic face before directors Fabrizio Lazzaretti and Paolo Santolini show the right arm that now ends at the halfway point and the flaps of skin that used to be his left hand's fingers. The boy, Murtaza, is at the center of two parallel stories. The other involves Yagoub, a 15-year-old boy refugee from Khartoum whose medical crisis—he needs an expensive surgery or else his heart will continue to expand within his chest, killing him within a year's time—is presented against the imposing aftermath of the second Sudanese Civil War. Lazzaretti and Santolini frame Yagoub's struggle against his own suggestively symbolic heart muscle within scenes depicting his mother's resigned reaction to the price tag ($5,000, which may as well be a million...and, in fact, is, in Sudanese pounds) and his community's emphasis on highly physical, full-contact masculinity (the filmmakers dwell at length on an almost balletic wrestling match). Both Murtaza and Yagoub are victims of war; the former is trapped inside a hospital during a long and painful rehabilitation, while the latter is kept outside by the alternately prohibitive and exploitive costs of medical care. That said, their stories are unique enough that one wishes they'd each been given their own individual film. While it doesn't diminish the inherent emotional power of each boy's plight to put them through the gauntlet of crosscuts, there is enough disjoint to put the entire project's narrative thrust in jeopardy. Nonetheless, Lazzaretti and Santolini are diligent enough documentarians that they capture moments of moral clarity, such as when the weeping mother of a mine victim thumbprints her consent to the surgery, using a piece of her own anatomy to allow doctors permission to remove the same piece from her son.
[Back Home Tomorrow premieres June 19 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Remnants of a War
By: Bill Weber On: 06/15/2009 15:30:16 In: Festivals Comments: 0
"I should have a normal job," gripes a young Lebanese man to one of his teammates on a bomb-clearance squad in Remnants of a War, and the flat, unsentimental reply comes: "You talk like we're in Europe." In the wake of Israel's 33-day invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 (in response to Hezbollah kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, and only six years after Israel had withdrawn forces that had occupied Lebanon since 1982), thousands of cluster munitions fired or dropped in the southern part of the country had left uncounted unexploded "bomblets" in orchards, homes, and roads. With casualties mounting after residents returned from exile in Beirut, only to be maimed or killed by a hidden "dud" that was stepped on or dislodged, private companies recruited citizens to assume the bulk of "de-mining" patrols from an overwhelmed United Nations disposal unit. The title of Jawad Metni's documentary refers doubly to the legacy of the bomblets' menace and the crippled economy that forces the film's trainees to turn to bomb clearance—it's postwar Lebanon's only growth industry. (One engaged couple works together on a bomb team in the hope that their marriage will finally come off when they've earned enough to buy a house, after seeing earlier savings eaten up by wartime relocation and the fizzling of their pre-bombardment careers.) Academics and Human Rights Watch analysts place the population's struggles into historical and geopolitical context, and despite perhaps an excess of atmospheric down-time dancing scenes, Metni foregrounds the ever-present threat the Lebanese are trying to erase by punctuating his footage with isolated, medium-long shots of the crack and puff of another munition being detonated by the de-miners in a verdant, sunny landscape. Remnants of a War's explicit questions linger: What would another occupation bring, and when will Israel and the U.S. join 111 nations in signing a cluster-bomb ban agreement?
[Remnants of a War premieres June 17 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
"I should have a normal job," gripes a young Lebanese man to one of his teammates on a bomb-clearance squad in Remnants of a War, and the flat, unsentimental reply comes: "You talk like we're in Europe." In the wake of Israel's 33-day invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 (in response to Hezbollah kidnappings of Israeli soldiers, and only six years after Israel had withdrawn forces that had occupied Lebanon since 1982), thousands of cluster munitions fired or dropped in the southern part of the country had left uncounted unexploded "bomblets" in orchards, homes, and roads. With casualties mounting after residents returned from exile in Beirut, only to be maimed or killed by a hidden "dud" that was stepped on or dislodged, private companies recruited citizens to assume the bulk of "de-mining" patrols from an overwhelmed United Nations disposal unit. The title of Jawad Metni's documentary refers doubly to the legacy of the bomblets' menace and the crippled economy that forces the film's trainees to turn to bomb clearance—it's postwar Lebanon's only growth industry. (One engaged couple works together on a bomb team in the hope that their marriage will finally come off when they've earned enough to buy a house, after seeing earlier savings eaten up by wartime relocation and the fizzling of their pre-bombardment careers.) Academics and Human Rights Watch analysts place the population's struggles into historical and geopolitical context, and despite perhaps an excess of atmospheric down-time dancing scenes, Metni foregrounds the ever-present threat the Lebanese are trying to erase by punctuating his footage with isolated, medium-long shots of the crack and puff of another munition being detonated by the de-miners in a verdant, sunny landscape. Remnants of a War's explicit questions linger: What would another occupation bring, and when will Israel and the U.S. join 111 nations in signing a cluster-bomb ban agreement?
[Remnants of a War premieres June 17 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: In the Holy Fire of Revolution
By: Lauren Wissot On: 06/14/2009 16:23:20 In: Festivals Comments: 0
On its surface, Masha Novikova's In the Holy Fire of Revolution, which follows the Russian chess champion and activist/politician Garry Kasparov as he and his comrades in The Other Russia movement wage a campaign battle against Vladimir Putin and his supporters, would suggest The War Room Russky-style. Unfortunately, the doc doesn't sizzle like its title, but merely fizzles out. Novikova, instead of digging deep into the heart of the former Soviet Union, is merely content to toe the party line, trotting out all the usual dissident suspects to needlessly remind us that Putin's Russia is a thug state. The main problem with Revolution is that it tells us nothing new, but merely shows us what anyone who's tuned in to any international media outlet since the turn of the century already knew. That Kasparov's contingent would hold their meetings in a crumbling, commie-drab building by candlelight since the electricity was cut off, and that a young mother working for the Kasparov side could be brutally attacked with a baseball bat, is sad, but not the least bit surprising or illuminating.
Not to mention the least bit cinematic—and trying to liven up the boring proceedings by interspersing footage of Kasparov's sedate chess matches with propagandistic rallies doesn't do much to help Novikova's cause. While white subtitles on a usually white background make the translation nearly impossible to discern, the straightforward interviews with Kasparov are even more frustrating. Here is a gregarious man every bit as media savvy as Vladimir Putin, who knows when to play the strongman and how to soothe an insulted war vet. And yet Kasparov's manipulation of his own image—revealed when he shows a photojournalist which poses work best—doesn't even occur until an hour and a half into the film! Though The Other Russia refers to the 85% of the population not benefiting economically from Putin's reign, Novikova's exclusive focus on Kasparov and his fight for this hardworking silent majority comes at the expense of the other 15% that could have given her doc the dramatic tension it sorely lacks.
Indeed, Kasparov's party's first clash with Putin's supporters doesn't happen until a full 45 minutes into the film. And Revolution only gets interesting when Kasparov begins to lose his chess player's cool, calling members of Putin's Young Guard "worthless" people with "vacant eyes." And speaking of youth, where is the Internet in all this political organizing? While Kasparov is forever complaining that state-run media keeps his message from getting heard, not once is anyone in The Other Russia shown attempting to organize young activists online. With such wild accusations of Kasparov as an "American pawn" and a "journalist for The Washington Post" being thrown by Putin's youth movement, there is no doubt that these "vacant-eyed" twentysomethings are tuning in and logging on. So if anemic activist filmmaking like this, as uninspired as the monotonous protests that probably make Putin chuckle, is any indication of Russian apathy, it's no wonder the chess champ lost to a master political player—who won with the same percentage of the total vote as the number of squares on a chessboard.
[In the Holy Fire of Revolution premieres June 15 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
On its surface, Masha Novikova's In the Holy Fire of Revolution, which follows the Russian chess champion and activist/politician Garry Kasparov as he and his comrades in The Other Russia movement wage a campaign battle against Vladimir Putin and his supporters, would suggest The War Room Russky-style. Unfortunately, the doc doesn't sizzle like its title, but merely fizzles out. Novikova, instead of digging deep into the heart of the former Soviet Union, is merely content to toe the party line, trotting out all the usual dissident suspects to needlessly remind us that Putin's Russia is a thug state. The main problem with Revolution is that it tells us nothing new, but merely shows us what anyone who's tuned in to any international media outlet since the turn of the century already knew. That Kasparov's contingent would hold their meetings in a crumbling, commie-drab building by candlelight since the electricity was cut off, and that a young mother working for the Kasparov side could be brutally attacked with a baseball bat, is sad, but not the least bit surprising or illuminating.
Not to mention the least bit cinematic—and trying to liven up the boring proceedings by interspersing footage of Kasparov's sedate chess matches with propagandistic rallies doesn't do much to help Novikova's cause. While white subtitles on a usually white background make the translation nearly impossible to discern, the straightforward interviews with Kasparov are even more frustrating. Here is a gregarious man every bit as media savvy as Vladimir Putin, who knows when to play the strongman and how to soothe an insulted war vet. And yet Kasparov's manipulation of his own image—revealed when he shows a photojournalist which poses work best—doesn't even occur until an hour and a half into the film! Though The Other Russia refers to the 85% of the population not benefiting economically from Putin's reign, Novikova's exclusive focus on Kasparov and his fight for this hardworking silent majority comes at the expense of the other 15% that could have given her doc the dramatic tension it sorely lacks.
Indeed, Kasparov's party's first clash with Putin's supporters doesn't happen until a full 45 minutes into the film. And Revolution only gets interesting when Kasparov begins to lose his chess player's cool, calling members of Putin's Young Guard "worthless" people with "vacant eyes." And speaking of youth, where is the Internet in all this political organizing? While Kasparov is forever complaining that state-run media keeps his message from getting heard, not once is anyone in The Other Russia shown attempting to organize young activists online. With such wild accusations of Kasparov as an "American pawn" and a "journalist for The Washington Post" being thrown by Putin's youth movement, there is no doubt that these "vacant-eyed" twentysomethings are tuning in and logging on. So if anemic activist filmmaking like this, as uninspired as the monotonous protests that probably make Putin chuckle, is any indication of Russian apathy, it's no wonder the chess champ lost to a master political player—who won with the same percentage of the total vote as the number of squares on a chessboard.
[In the Holy Fire of Revolution premieres June 15 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Kabuli Kid
By: Nick Schager On: 06/13/2009 13:40:01 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Kabuli Kid boasts the neorealism of contemporary Iranian cinema (and its American practitioners, like Ramin Bahrani), a mode that lends its story authenticity even during excessively didactic moments. In a beaten-up Kabul where citizens bemoan the fallout of U.S. bombings with a resignation born from familiarity with conflict, taxi driver Khaled (Hadji Gul) picks up a woman wearing a blue veil, who then leaves her newborn son in his cab. Unable to find the missing mother, Khaled—who criticizes women for covering their faces, yet nonetheless treats his wife as a servant and openly wishes she had begat him sons instead of daughters—finds himself stuck with the infant. It's a scenario Afghan director Barmak Akram mines for neither cutesy humor nor undue mawkishness, the filmmaker delivering a story not about a man redeemed by an adorable cherub, but rather, about the grim realities of life in war-ravaged Kabul. Losing work and income because of his babysitting duties, the strain compounded by his father's complaints about his chosen job, Khaled goes to increasingly desperate and unpleasant ends to relieve himself of his newfound burden, attempting to pass off on others the problem that's landed in his lap.
The film's socio-political chatter frequently lacks subtlety, raising issues with a bluntness at odds with the otherwise patient, naturalistic atmosphere. If too eager to italicize its larger concerns, however, the film's attention to detail is redeeming, frankly capturing a national mood comprised of pride, bitterness, self-interest, and defeatism. The exploitative greed of Kabul's marketplace vendors operates hand-in-hand with the not-my-problem selfishness exhibited by social service workers, with Akram depicting his milieu and its inhabitants as struggling to face the obligations that arise from their complicated circumstances. Refusing to resort to bogus uplift, the director posits characters as recognizably flawed individuals, and his tale as one—ending with the articulation of a child's name—whose happy ending remains in question.
[Kabuli Kid premieres June 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Kabuli Kid boasts the neorealism of contemporary Iranian cinema (and its American practitioners, like Ramin Bahrani), a mode that lends its story authenticity even during excessively didactic moments. In a beaten-up Kabul where citizens bemoan the fallout of U.S. bombings with a resignation born from familiarity with conflict, taxi driver Khaled (Hadji Gul) picks up a woman wearing a blue veil, who then leaves her newborn son in his cab. Unable to find the missing mother, Khaled—who criticizes women for covering their faces, yet nonetheless treats his wife as a servant and openly wishes she had begat him sons instead of daughters—finds himself stuck with the infant. It's a scenario Afghan director Barmak Akram mines for neither cutesy humor nor undue mawkishness, the filmmaker delivering a story not about a man redeemed by an adorable cherub, but rather, about the grim realities of life in war-ravaged Kabul. Losing work and income because of his babysitting duties, the strain compounded by his father's complaints about his chosen job, Khaled goes to increasingly desperate and unpleasant ends to relieve himself of his newfound burden, attempting to pass off on others the problem that's landed in his lap.
The film's socio-political chatter frequently lacks subtlety, raising issues with a bluntness at odds with the otherwise patient, naturalistic atmosphere. If too eager to italicize its larger concerns, however, the film's attention to detail is redeeming, frankly capturing a national mood comprised of pride, bitterness, self-interest, and defeatism. The exploitative greed of Kabul's marketplace vendors operates hand-in-hand with the not-my-problem selfishness exhibited by social service workers, with Akram depicting his milieu and its inhabitants as struggling to face the obligations that arise from their complicated circumstances. Refusing to resort to bogus uplift, the director posits characters as recognizably flawed individuals, and his tale as one—ending with the articulation of a child's name—whose happy ending remains in question.
[Kabuli Kid premieres June 14 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Snow
By: Bill Weber On: 06/13/2009 13:38:03 In: Festivals Comments: 0
The desolate and benumbed shell of an eastern Bosnian village in 1997 is the setting for Snow, as a population of a dozen survivors of the Balkan strife—save for one elder, all women and children—wait in vain for their missing husbands and children to return. Young widow Alma (Zana Marjanovic), occupied with the daily work of preparing fruit and vegetables for difficult-to-reach markets, is seen in recurring sequences twisting her scarf slowly around her head, bathing her limbs hurriedly en route to morning prayer, attempting to crowd out her fresh trauma with the everyday. She and her fellow mourners are pushed to resolve their pain when a Serbian representative of foreign developers offers to buy their land, touching off existential confrontations within the community as well as in the hearts of these scarred mothers and wives, who venerate even the eyeglasses and disposable razors left behind by their lost mates. Director Aida Begic does well in establishing the women's dogged labor as grief put into memorial, kinetic action, as well as with the magical-realist figure of the village's sole, terrified young boy, whose rapidly growing hair and panicked dashes through the countryside are spurred by the terror of his nightmares. Less smooth is the heavy weight put on the visiting land-sale agents, whose final confrontation with the matriarchs leads to an awful revelation and the falling of the previously allusive snow. Alma's punishing, weak-hearted mother-in-law (Vesna Masic) unexpectedly rallies from illness to unleash her will to remain in her native place; told condescendingly, "You deserve better living conditions," she snaps, "Yeah!" and orders the land buyers about like lackeys. Snow finds unity of purpose in different responses to its villagers' tragic inheritance—the Muslim elder's "Allah sees it all," and Alma's visceral answer to what constitutes a normal existence: "Us."
[Snow premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
The desolate and benumbed shell of an eastern Bosnian village in 1997 is the setting for Snow, as a population of a dozen survivors of the Balkan strife—save for one elder, all women and children—wait in vain for their missing husbands and children to return. Young widow Alma (Zana Marjanovic), occupied with the daily work of preparing fruit and vegetables for difficult-to-reach markets, is seen in recurring sequences twisting her scarf slowly around her head, bathing her limbs hurriedly en route to morning prayer, attempting to crowd out her fresh trauma with the everyday. She and her fellow mourners are pushed to resolve their pain when a Serbian representative of foreign developers offers to buy their land, touching off existential confrontations within the community as well as in the hearts of these scarred mothers and wives, who venerate even the eyeglasses and disposable razors left behind by their lost mates. Director Aida Begic does well in establishing the women's dogged labor as grief put into memorial, kinetic action, as well as with the magical-realist figure of the village's sole, terrified young boy, whose rapidly growing hair and panicked dashes through the countryside are spurred by the terror of his nightmares. Less smooth is the heavy weight put on the visiting land-sale agents, whose final confrontation with the matriarchs leads to an awful revelation and the falling of the previously allusive snow. Alma's punishing, weak-hearted mother-in-law (Vesna Masic) unexpectedly rallies from illness to unleash her will to remain in her native place; told condescendingly, "You deserve better living conditions," she snaps, "Yeah!" and orders the land buyers about like lackeys. Snow finds unity of purpose in different responses to its villagers' tragic inheritance—the Muslim elder's "Allah sees it all," and Alma's visceral answer to what constitutes a normal existence: "Us."
[Snow premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: Crude
By: Fernando F. Croce On: 06/12/2009 16:03:05 In: Festivals Comments: 0
At the center of Joe Berlinger's Crude are distressing images of Ecuador's Amazonian soil and water turned sludgy and toxic from foreign oil drilling. Concisely and infuriatingly illustrating the link between ecological devastation and corporate colonialism, these scabrous views of rainforest-turned-waste-pits are the starting point for the veteran documentarian's tough-minded chronicle of a court case that has spun decades and showcased the most viscous effects of conglomerate interest. The protracted tug of war depicted is between Ecuadorean activists (led by lawyer Pablo Fajardo and environmentalist Luis Yanza) and Chevron over the contaminating effects of the oil company's maneuvers on the land. Despite 30,000 indigenous people acting as plaintiffs and Chevron's own estimation of 17 million gallons of spilled petrol, the class action lawsuit endures endless delays, judicial labyrinths, and prevaricating officials.
Following a still-unresolved case over the course of three years, Berlinger gives voice to both sides of the conflict. As personal accounts of birth defects and cancerous deaths contrast with Chevron spokespersons denying effects and passing blame, however, the outraged compassion in the filmmaker's reportage becomes evident. A polished and haunting work of humanistic journalism, the film is passionate enough to follow its subjects in the ground-level combat of street demonstrations and office showdowns, and astute enough to understand the important roles a Vanity Fair article or a Trudie Styler endorsement can play in a cause. Crude is both a tribute to human-rights tenacity and a sobering account of the multinational-Moloch greed that can keep justice in limbo.
[Crude premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
At the center of Joe Berlinger's Crude are distressing images of Ecuador's Amazonian soil and water turned sludgy and toxic from foreign oil drilling. Concisely and infuriatingly illustrating the link between ecological devastation and corporate colonialism, these scabrous views of rainforest-turned-waste-pits are the starting point for the veteran documentarian's tough-minded chronicle of a court case that has spun decades and showcased the most viscous effects of conglomerate interest. The protracted tug of war depicted is between Ecuadorean activists (led by lawyer Pablo Fajardo and environmentalist Luis Yanza) and Chevron over the contaminating effects of the oil company's maneuvers on the land. Despite 30,000 indigenous people acting as plaintiffs and Chevron's own estimation of 17 million gallons of spilled petrol, the class action lawsuit endures endless delays, judicial labyrinths, and prevaricating officials.
Following a still-unresolved case over the course of three years, Berlinger gives voice to both sides of the conflict. As personal accounts of birth defects and cancerous deaths contrast with Chevron spokespersons denying effects and passing blame, however, the outraged compassion in the filmmaker's reportage becomes evident. A polished and haunting work of humanistic journalism, the film is passionate enough to follow its subjects in the ground-level combat of street demonstrations and office showdowns, and astute enough to understand the important roles a Vanity Fair article or a Trudie Styler endorsement can play in a cause. Crude is both a tribute to human-rights tenacity and a sobering account of the multinational-Moloch greed that can keep justice in limbo.
[Crude premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: The Age of Stupid
By: Andrew Schenker On: 06/12/2009 14:51:49 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Looking back from the vantage point of a devastated, CG-crafted future, Franny Armstrong's cautionary climate change tale The Age of Stupid outlines the present day ills that, in the film's hypothetical setting, effectively made the world uninhabitable by 2055. As the Sydney opera house burns and the Taj Mahal lies in ruins, Pete Postlethwaite sits in the global archives—a digital repository of all that's valuable in our vanished civilization—recording a jeremiad against our current age of willful ignorance. In between teary laments, the actor, playing some combination of last survivor and himself, introduces clips from the archive, documentary snippets from the present day that make up the bulk of the film's content.
Taking the form of individual profiles, these segments chronicle the collateral damage of global warming and its principal agent, the unending quest for oil (Iraqi children seeking refuge from the war in Jordan, a Nigerian village decimated by Shell's involvement in their area) as well as the efforts of a few activists to combat climate change, both locally and globally. But if Armstrong seems to endorse these gestures of individual activism, her film nonetheless registers a largely pessimistic attitude toward their efficacy, as in a lengthy segment chronicling the dogged efforts and eventual defeat of one man's project to install a wind powered farm in the English countryside. Only a global system of carbon rationing, a plan outlined in a voiceover interlude, seems to earn Armstrong's full endorsement as a means of averting the film's imagined apocalypse, but given the oil companies' stranglehold on world government that the director outlines throughout the movie, the implementation of such a program seems hopelessly quixotic.
Moving between macro-level interludes and micro-level portraits, framed by a worst case future scenario (though one that, per an introductory title, is "based on mainstream scientific projections"), Age of Stupid communicates something of the massive global impact of our careless, though officially encouraged, consumption as well as the human cost of such a program, even if Armstrong's outsized ambitions threaten to dissipate some of the movie's force. Still, while steeped in an inevitable negativity, her film is nothing if not rousing (though less through its sci-fi scare tactics and more via its portrait of the widespread damage already being inflicted on the planet), and if its mode is unapologetically didactic, then in a society in which 60 percent of the people believe, scientific evidence to the contrary, that man has no appreciable impact on climate change, then perhaps a round of didacticism is precisely what we need.
[The Age of Stupid premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Looking back from the vantage point of a devastated, CG-crafted future, Franny Armstrong's cautionary climate change tale The Age of Stupid outlines the present day ills that, in the film's hypothetical setting, effectively made the world uninhabitable by 2055. As the Sydney opera house burns and the Taj Mahal lies in ruins, Pete Postlethwaite sits in the global archives—a digital repository of all that's valuable in our vanished civilization—recording a jeremiad against our current age of willful ignorance. In between teary laments, the actor, playing some combination of last survivor and himself, introduces clips from the archive, documentary snippets from the present day that make up the bulk of the film's content.
Taking the form of individual profiles, these segments chronicle the collateral damage of global warming and its principal agent, the unending quest for oil (Iraqi children seeking refuge from the war in Jordan, a Nigerian village decimated by Shell's involvement in their area) as well as the efforts of a few activists to combat climate change, both locally and globally. But if Armstrong seems to endorse these gestures of individual activism, her film nonetheless registers a largely pessimistic attitude toward their efficacy, as in a lengthy segment chronicling the dogged efforts and eventual defeat of one man's project to install a wind powered farm in the English countryside. Only a global system of carbon rationing, a plan outlined in a voiceover interlude, seems to earn Armstrong's full endorsement as a means of averting the film's imagined apocalypse, but given the oil companies' stranglehold on world government that the director outlines throughout the movie, the implementation of such a program seems hopelessly quixotic.
Moving between macro-level interludes and micro-level portraits, framed by a worst case future scenario (though one that, per an introductory title, is "based on mainstream scientific projections"), Age of Stupid communicates something of the massive global impact of our careless, though officially encouraged, consumption as well as the human cost of such a program, even if Armstrong's outsized ambitions threaten to dissipate some of the movie's force. Still, while steeped in an inevitable negativity, her film is nothing if not rousing (though less through its sci-fi scare tactics and more via its portrait of the widespread damage already being inflicted on the planet), and if its mode is unapologetically didactic, then in a society in which 60 percent of the people believe, scientific evidence to the contrary, that man has no appreciable impact on climate change, then perhaps a round of didacticism is precisely what we need.
[The Age of Stupid premieres June 13 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009: The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court
By: Lauren Wissot On: 06/11/2009 15:22:35 In: Festivals Comments: 0
"Without justice, people have no respect for each another," one victim of the atrocities in the Congo offers in Pamela Yates's The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court. "If this is left unpunished, it will happen again," he adds. Opening the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival with a whimper rather than a bang (as did last year's underwhelming cinematic salvo), Yates's film follows ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and his dedicated deputies as they seek to bring to trial the worst of the worst war criminals of our time. Unfortunately, the doc is no fascinatingly addictive character study a la Sin City Law writ large, but rather a clinical procedural better suited to classroom use than for theatrical release.
The problem with a dry, straightforward examination of the ICC, established in 2002, is that its daily workings, like that of any bureaucratic body, move at a snail's pace. Sure, traveling to Uganda to investigate the Lord's Resistance Army (one of the ICC's first cases), then to the Congo, Colombia, and finally Darfur, gives the film a global context, but simply talking to victims in those countries to gather evidence is not as visceral an experience as actually witnessing those crimes through a photojournalist's lens. A picture is worth a thousand words and Reckoning has more substantive words than compelling images. And this lack of artistry in the filmmaking is actually hurting Yates's cause. It's hard to see how many would be driven to log onto her "IJCentral social network for global justice," a link for which is given at the end of the film, merely by watching overworked prosecutors watch atrocity footage on computers at their sleek, modern desks. The effect is less disturbing than distancing.
As is the numerous scenes of those justice seekers sitting around tables pouring over the cases. Shots of monolithic government buildings seen while a description is given of the involvement of Colombia's top officials in the paramilitaries are uninventive. A scene of soldiers standing around (as the word "Paramilitary" superfluously appears onscreen) is as ho-hum as the oft-repeated historical footage of the Nuremberg Tribunal and of Argentina's trial of its Junta. Rather than grab us by the throats and hearts, Yates's unemotional doc has the effect of lulling us into complacency. Even the sad string score and soothing sound of the smooth narration—seemingly taken from a textbook, with lines like "This court would be shaped by the office of the prosecutor" spoken as if the narrator were addressing a middle school class—do nothing to make us want to learn more about this critical institution that faces as much apathy and antagonism from the global community as it does from the international baddies. If the best the director can do to represent the ICC is to cut from press conference speeches to boardroom meetings (between the ICC and NGOs, between the ICC and the communities seeking justice, between the ICC and the UN), it's doubtful the film will tilt the snubbing superpowers of Russia, China, and the United States into joining. Reckoning renders this crucial judiciary of last resort about as inspiring as a conference call.
[The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court premieres June 12 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
"Without justice, people have no respect for each another," one victim of the atrocities in the Congo offers in Pamela Yates's The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court. "If this is left unpunished, it will happen again," he adds. Opening the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival with a whimper rather than a bang (as did last year's underwhelming cinematic salvo), Yates's film follows ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo and his dedicated deputies as they seek to bring to trial the worst of the worst war criminals of our time. Unfortunately, the doc is no fascinatingly addictive character study a la Sin City Law writ large, but rather a clinical procedural better suited to classroom use than for theatrical release.
The problem with a dry, straightforward examination of the ICC, established in 2002, is that its daily workings, like that of any bureaucratic body, move at a snail's pace. Sure, traveling to Uganda to investigate the Lord's Resistance Army (one of the ICC's first cases), then to the Congo, Colombia, and finally Darfur, gives the film a global context, but simply talking to victims in those countries to gather evidence is not as visceral an experience as actually witnessing those crimes through a photojournalist's lens. A picture is worth a thousand words and Reckoning has more substantive words than compelling images. And this lack of artistry in the filmmaking is actually hurting Yates's cause. It's hard to see how many would be driven to log onto her "IJCentral social network for global justice," a link for which is given at the end of the film, merely by watching overworked prosecutors watch atrocity footage on computers at their sleek, modern desks. The effect is less disturbing than distancing.
As is the numerous scenes of those justice seekers sitting around tables pouring over the cases. Shots of monolithic government buildings seen while a description is given of the involvement of Colombia's top officials in the paramilitaries are uninventive. A scene of soldiers standing around (as the word "Paramilitary" superfluously appears onscreen) is as ho-hum as the oft-repeated historical footage of the Nuremberg Tribunal and of Argentina's trial of its Junta. Rather than grab us by the throats and hearts, Yates's unemotional doc has the effect of lulling us into complacency. Even the sad string score and soothing sound of the smooth narration—seemingly taken from a textbook, with lines like "This court would be shaped by the office of the prosecutor" spoken as if the narrator were addressing a middle school class—do nothing to make us want to learn more about this critical institution that faces as much apathy and antagonism from the global community as it does from the international baddies. If the best the director can do to represent the ICC is to cut from press conference speeches to boardroom meetings (between the ICC and NGOs, between the ICC and the communities seeking justice, between the ICC and the UN), it's doubtful the film will tilt the snubbing superpowers of Russia, China, and the United States into joining. Reckoning renders this crucial judiciary of last resort about as inspiring as a conference call.
[The Reckoning: The Battle for the International Criminal Court premieres June 12 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival 2009. Click here for screening information.]
Tribeca Film Festival: Don McKay
By: Adam Keleman On: 05/03/2009 17:09:49 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Clearly a quiet and lonely man, Don McKay (Thomas Haden Church) sluggishly scrubs the paint off a high school art class's floor, with a loser shrug affixed to his face. He's employed in janitorial services, and this being a not-too-stirring existence, he jumps at the chance to go back to his hometown after receiving a letter from a cancer-stricken first love, Sonny (Elisabeth Shue), who beckons his return. Upon arriving at her childhood home, Don is greeted by a suspiciously tidy, anal-retentive maid, Marie (Melissa Leo), who has been Sonny's caretaker since the cancer spread. When Don finally sees Sonny, still marvelously angelic, his eyes widen in glee as fond memories are recalled, but Don McKay is no glorious reunion story, as this town and girl he once knew belie a much deeper, far-reaching truth than the artificial welcoming party may let on.
Writer-director Jake Goldberger has lassoed a great cast to ham it up in this comical homage to Billy Wilder's classic noirs Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Church imbues his steamrolled schlub, so visibly defeated by past tragedy, with everyman wisdom, and he and Shue display great chemistry: As her femme-fatale acrobatics dance all over Church in the culminating scene that reveals her character's true nature, there's a slight glimpse at what could have been if this charade continued—that is, if she hadn't threatened to kill him. In a welcomed return to leading-role status, Shue exhibits devilish camp as a sickly gimp Sonny, and then switching to manipulative temptress when the tables are turned, while Leo gives another golden, meticulous performance as the double-dealer Marie, even if a noticeable departure from her Oscar-nominated, more serious work in Frozen River. The world Goldberger creates can be contrived at times, but it's also frenetically enthralling, and as such the few mangled twists are easily overlooked. And though it may wear its references on its sleeves, as sheer, thrilling entertainment, Don McKay deceives like the best of them.
Don McKay @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Clearly a quiet and lonely man, Don McKay (Thomas Haden Church) sluggishly scrubs the paint off a high school art class's floor, with a loser shrug affixed to his face. He's employed in janitorial services, and this being a not-too-stirring existence, he jumps at the chance to go back to his hometown after receiving a letter from a cancer-stricken first love, Sonny (Elisabeth Shue), who beckons his return. Upon arriving at her childhood home, Don is greeted by a suspiciously tidy, anal-retentive maid, Marie (Melissa Leo), who has been Sonny's caretaker since the cancer spread. When Don finally sees Sonny, still marvelously angelic, his eyes widen in glee as fond memories are recalled, but Don McKay is no glorious reunion story, as this town and girl he once knew belie a much deeper, far-reaching truth than the artificial welcoming party may let on.
Writer-director Jake Goldberger has lassoed a great cast to ham it up in this comical homage to Billy Wilder's classic noirs Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Church imbues his steamrolled schlub, so visibly defeated by past tragedy, with everyman wisdom, and he and Shue display great chemistry: As her femme-fatale acrobatics dance all over Church in the culminating scene that reveals her character's true nature, there's a slight glimpse at what could have been if this charade continued—that is, if she hadn't threatened to kill him. In a welcomed return to leading-role status, Shue exhibits devilish camp as a sickly gimp Sonny, and then switching to manipulative temptress when the tables are turned, while Leo gives another golden, meticulous performance as the double-dealer Marie, even if a noticeable departure from her Oscar-nominated, more serious work in Frozen River. The world Goldberger creates can be contrived at times, but it's also frenetically enthralling, and as such the few mangled twists are easily overlooked. And though it may wear its references on its sleeves, as sheer, thrilling entertainment, Don McKay deceives like the best of them.
Don McKay @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: Shadow Billionaire
By: Adam Keleman On: 05/02/2009 14:29:07 In: Festivals Comments: 0
As one of the three founders of the worldwide mailing service DHL (he was the "H"), Larry Hillblom, labeled eccentrically brilliant from an early age, had a knack for business and the brain for innovation. He also had a peculiar, perverse attraction to adolescent, native girls from Saipan and the Philippines. First-time director Alexis Manya Spraic deftly explores both Hillblom's entrepreneurial genius and the lurid underbelly of his mischievous weekend trips to certain Filipino night clubs in her debut feature documentary Shadow Billionaire.
Admired and respected by many, Hillblom became a millionaire by his late 20s, finding a niche in the package-delivery industry as one of the first to exploit an early model of globalism with his international parcel service DHL Express. Not one to hold his eggs in one basket, Hillblom began investing his millions, eventually gaining billionaire status. But as his money grew, so did his penchant for adventure and travel overseas, which landed him on the island of Saipan, where Hillblom, in his 40s, settled and expanded his business model to the East and gained the respect of locals. But after a deadly plane crash (his second accident piloting a plane), several Saipan and Filipino women came out of the woodwork, claiming to have birthed heirs to his still-growing fortunes, and as the legal suits piled up, the true nature of Hillblom's sexual activities on Saipan soil and abroad became apparent.
Spraic leaves no stone unturned in her exposé of Hillblom. With her extensive breadth of interview subjects, from Hillblom's old colleagues to his family friends, she documents a vivid tale of deceitful, sexual obsession—and even racial prejudice. Often painted as slumming, sly gold-diggers by the lawyers of Hillblom's estate, the indigenous, poverty-stricken women of Saipan and the Philippines—including some prostitutes—account for "the little guy" in this David-versus-Goliath struggle for the truth. Shadow Billionaire distinguishes itself as a fine example of investigative journalism, both in sprawling, revelatory scope and penetrating consequence, proving the unspoken few may have something to say after all.
Shadow Billionaire @ the Tribeca Film Festival
As one of the three founders of the worldwide mailing service DHL (he was the "H"), Larry Hillblom, labeled eccentrically brilliant from an early age, had a knack for business and the brain for innovation. He also had a peculiar, perverse attraction to adolescent, native girls from Saipan and the Philippines. First-time director Alexis Manya Spraic deftly explores both Hillblom's entrepreneurial genius and the lurid underbelly of his mischievous weekend trips to certain Filipino night clubs in her debut feature documentary Shadow Billionaire.
Admired and respected by many, Hillblom became a millionaire by his late 20s, finding a niche in the package-delivery industry as one of the first to exploit an early model of globalism with his international parcel service DHL Express. Not one to hold his eggs in one basket, Hillblom began investing his millions, eventually gaining billionaire status. But as his money grew, so did his penchant for adventure and travel overseas, which landed him on the island of Saipan, where Hillblom, in his 40s, settled and expanded his business model to the East and gained the respect of locals. But after a deadly plane crash (his second accident piloting a plane), several Saipan and Filipino women came out of the woodwork, claiming to have birthed heirs to his still-growing fortunes, and as the legal suits piled up, the true nature of Hillblom's sexual activities on Saipan soil and abroad became apparent.
Spraic leaves no stone unturned in her exposé of Hillblom. With her extensive breadth of interview subjects, from Hillblom's old colleagues to his family friends, she documents a vivid tale of deceitful, sexual obsession—and even racial prejudice. Often painted as slumming, sly gold-diggers by the lawyers of Hillblom's estate, the indigenous, poverty-stricken women of Saipan and the Philippines—including some prostitutes—account for "the little guy" in this David-versus-Goliath struggle for the truth. Shadow Billionaire distinguishes itself as a fine example of investigative journalism, both in sprawling, revelatory scope and penetrating consequence, proving the unspoken few may have something to say after all.
Shadow Billionaire @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: Love the Beast
By: Nick Schager On: 05/01/2009 21:23:04 In: Festivals Comments: 1
You never forget your first love, which in the case of Eric Bana was a 1974 Ford XB Falcon Couple nicknamed "the Beast." In the auto-romantic Love the Beast, Bana documents his lifelong amour for his ride, a model which first entranced him while watching Australia's famed Bathurst race in 1977, and again two years later by its appearance in Mad Max. As a teen, Bana convinced his father to buy him one, instigating an affair that soon also ensnared his mates as well, as the actor recounts how working on the car became their collective adolescent pastime and turned his parents' garage into their de facto clubhouse. Three decades and three overhauls later, Bana and his beloved auto enter Tasmania's renowned five-day off-track Targa rally (which he had completed years prior), though Beast isn't after the drama of Bana's race performance, but, instead, the way in which his participation proves a further extension of his deep affinity for the car.
Through narration, interviews, and cinematographic fawning over their chassis, classic American cars are celebrated for their imperfect character, which makes them seem vibrantly alive. Similarly, the act of working under the hood is depicted as an act of spiritual bonding that for Bana feels akin to a committed relationship—unlike aficionado Jay Leno, who adores his cars while they're being restored only to leave them in his warehouse so he can move on to the next project. Shots from the tires, hood, bumper, and cab of the speeding Falcon Coupe stirringly complement Bana's thoughts about the thrill and freedom that he experiences behind the wheel, and address his passion far more evocatively than his conversations with Dr. Phil, whose obvious observations drive the sentimental proceedings to the brink of squishiness. Still, archival photos and clips of a teenage Bana with the Beast, as well as the film's portrait of the car's role in maintaining his connection to childhood friends (who continually reunite to work on the vehicle) and his father (who boasts his own half-century-long affair with a T-Bird) affectionately express the potent allure that classic American muscle cars had, and continue to have, on the male imagination and heart.
Love the Beast @ the Tribeca Film Festival
You never forget your first love, which in the case of Eric Bana was a 1974 Ford XB Falcon Couple nicknamed "the Beast." In the auto-romantic Love the Beast, Bana documents his lifelong amour for his ride, a model which first entranced him while watching Australia's famed Bathurst race in 1977, and again two years later by its appearance in Mad Max. As a teen, Bana convinced his father to buy him one, instigating an affair that soon also ensnared his mates as well, as the actor recounts how working on the car became their collective adolescent pastime and turned his parents' garage into their de facto clubhouse. Three decades and three overhauls later, Bana and his beloved auto enter Tasmania's renowned five-day off-track Targa rally (which he had completed years prior), though Beast isn't after the drama of Bana's race performance, but, instead, the way in which his participation proves a further extension of his deep affinity for the car.
Through narration, interviews, and cinematographic fawning over their chassis, classic American cars are celebrated for their imperfect character, which makes them seem vibrantly alive. Similarly, the act of working under the hood is depicted as an act of spiritual bonding that for Bana feels akin to a committed relationship—unlike aficionado Jay Leno, who adores his cars while they're being restored only to leave them in his warehouse so he can move on to the next project. Shots from the tires, hood, bumper, and cab of the speeding Falcon Coupe stirringly complement Bana's thoughts about the thrill and freedom that he experiences behind the wheel, and address his passion far more evocatively than his conversations with Dr. Phil, whose obvious observations drive the sentimental proceedings to the brink of squishiness. Still, archival photos and clips of a teenage Bana with the Beast, as well as the film's portrait of the car's role in maintaining his connection to childhood friends (who continually reunite to work on the vehicle) and his father (who boasts his own half-century-long affair with a T-Bird) affectionately express the potent allure that classic American muscle cars had, and continue to have, on the male imagination and heart.
Love the Beast @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia
By: Nick Schager On: 05/01/2009 21:18:32 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Even those with a soft spot for The Dancing Outlaw, the 1991 cult PBS documentary about tap-dancing West Virginian Jesco White, will likely have a hard time warming up to The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a feature-length portrait of a year in the life of Jesco's regionally notorious clan. The enduring comedy and charm of Dancing Outlaw stems largely from the borderline-surrealism of its deranged mountain-man subject, the son of local dancing legend D. Ray White, and a loon whose boogieing skills, opinions on marriage and madness, and bizarre obsession with Elvis make him seem like a fancifully strange fictional caricature come to real life.
While Jesco also appears in Wild and Wonderful (executive produced by Johnny Knoxville), director Julien Nitzberg expands his purview to include the rest of the hell-raising, live-free-and-die-young family, celebrated by Hank Williams III as "the true rebels of the South" for living an unrepentant existence of partying, crime, and mischief. As far as people-behaving-badly docs go, the disreputable film has its mild pleasures, with the sheer brazenness of the White clan's actions—decried by local public defenders, prosecutors, and sheriffs, and typified by Jesco and burly sister Mamie turning their mother's 85th birthday party into a coke and pot-fueled bash—casting the plot-less proceedings as a breakneck, amusing R-rated Jerry Springer nightmare.
Wild and Wonderful is smitten with the redneck brood, but its nonjudgmental stance leads to a sobering warts-and-all depiction of their rampant "fun," exemplified by husband-slashing Kirk White snorting lines of crushed prescription pills in a hospital room mere moments after putting her newborn daughter to sleep. Kirk's decision to head to rehab after the state confiscates her baby, as well as the story of a younger White awaiting sentencing for repeatedly shooting his uncle in the face and then engaging in an armed standoff with the police, are merely two examples of the dark side to the family's hell-raising lifestyles.
The argument is advanced that their misconduct stems from the coal-mining industry's exploitation of their ancestors, as well as the hazardous profession itself, which is so dangerous that one's mortality is thrown into sharp relief and, in turn, engenders a reckless, devil-may-care attitude. No doubt such analysis holds a bit of water, but it nonetheless falls far short of affording an exculpatory explanation. As a result, it's nearly impossible to feel empathy for, or remain amused by, the Whites—living on the dole thanks to D. Ray's shrewd decision to have them all classified as legally insane—and the destructive, entitled irresponsibility which they proudly pass down to their kids. A mixture of pity and disgust, however, is elicited just fine.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Even those with a soft spot for The Dancing Outlaw, the 1991 cult PBS documentary about tap-dancing West Virginian Jesco White, will likely have a hard time warming up to The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia, a feature-length portrait of a year in the life of Jesco's regionally notorious clan. The enduring comedy and charm of Dancing Outlaw stems largely from the borderline-surrealism of its deranged mountain-man subject, the son of local dancing legend D. Ray White, and a loon whose boogieing skills, opinions on marriage and madness, and bizarre obsession with Elvis make him seem like a fancifully strange fictional caricature come to real life.
While Jesco also appears in Wild and Wonderful (executive produced by Johnny Knoxville), director Julien Nitzberg expands his purview to include the rest of the hell-raising, live-free-and-die-young family, celebrated by Hank Williams III as "the true rebels of the South" for living an unrepentant existence of partying, crime, and mischief. As far as people-behaving-badly docs go, the disreputable film has its mild pleasures, with the sheer brazenness of the White clan's actions—decried by local public defenders, prosecutors, and sheriffs, and typified by Jesco and burly sister Mamie turning their mother's 85th birthday party into a coke and pot-fueled bash—casting the plot-less proceedings as a breakneck, amusing R-rated Jerry Springer nightmare.
Wild and Wonderful is smitten with the redneck brood, but its nonjudgmental stance leads to a sobering warts-and-all depiction of their rampant "fun," exemplified by husband-slashing Kirk White snorting lines of crushed prescription pills in a hospital room mere moments after putting her newborn daughter to sleep. Kirk's decision to head to rehab after the state confiscates her baby, as well as the story of a younger White awaiting sentencing for repeatedly shooting his uncle in the face and then engaging in an armed standoff with the police, are merely two examples of the dark side to the family's hell-raising lifestyles.
The argument is advanced that their misconduct stems from the coal-mining industry's exploitation of their ancestors, as well as the hazardous profession itself, which is so dangerous that one's mortality is thrown into sharp relief and, in turn, engenders a reckless, devil-may-care attitude. No doubt such analysis holds a bit of water, but it nonetheless falls far short of affording an exculpatory explanation. As a result, it's nearly impossible to feel empathy for, or remain amused by, the Whites—living on the dole thanks to D. Ray's shrewd decision to have them all classified as legally insane—and the destructive, entitled irresponsibility which they proudly pass down to their kids. A mixture of pity and disgust, however, is elicited just fine.
The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: Original
By: Bill Weber On: 05/01/2009 19:58:28 In: Festivals Comments: 0
A twee Danish comedy that alternates trite New Age psychological moves with outbursts of cartoonish violence, Original has for a hero Henry (Sverrir Gudnason), a doe-eyed, high-cheekboned man-boy whose middle-class, unexamined life veers into reconstruction mode when he suddenly becomes jobless and single. Mugging sweetly without ever being particularly funny or compelling, he enters upon a Peter Pan identity crisis with preachy self-awareness ("Life should be lived," he waxes in Buelleresque narration). Burdened with an institutionalized, delusional mother (after his father's demise in a grotesquely unfunny hunting accident), he does his best to prop up her fantasy image of him as a successful military officer by shooting faux home videos in IKEA. Determined to spring Mom from the clutches of a callous clinical hypnotist, he's aided by a tracksuited gourmet (David Dencik) who spins a grand scheme of the two of them opening a restaurant in Spain, and a fiercely feminist performance artist (Tuva Novotny) whose heart Henry melts with a seductive swap of cooking tips. If this sounds like writer-directors Alexander Brøndsted and Antonio Tublén have a severe case of the cutes, they do, and while their visuals possess a hint of Aki Kaurismaki's grainy Scandinavian absurdism, their more desperate antic passages more closely resemble wacky beer commercials. Novotny scores with a strip-club act, sneering, "You fuck! You suck!," while costumed as Rosie the Riveter, but her character softens too quickly; Dejan Cukic draws a few laughs as her moronic drug-dealing manager. Alas, Henry's mom-saving crusade is as heavy-handed and lugubrious as Sam Rockwell's in last year's Choke, and then the filmmakers pull an 11th-hour gimmick that compares badly with one from Fight Club. Henry may aspire to be "a brilliant original and not a pale copy," but Original plays like a weak Chuck Palahniuk plot stuffed with coyness.
Original @ the Tribeca Film Festival
A twee Danish comedy that alternates trite New Age psychological moves with outbursts of cartoonish violence, Original has for a hero Henry (Sverrir Gudnason), a doe-eyed, high-cheekboned man-boy whose middle-class, unexamined life veers into reconstruction mode when he suddenly becomes jobless and single. Mugging sweetly without ever being particularly funny or compelling, he enters upon a Peter Pan identity crisis with preachy self-awareness ("Life should be lived," he waxes in Buelleresque narration). Burdened with an institutionalized, delusional mother (after his father's demise in a grotesquely unfunny hunting accident), he does his best to prop up her fantasy image of him as a successful military officer by shooting faux home videos in IKEA. Determined to spring Mom from the clutches of a callous clinical hypnotist, he's aided by a tracksuited gourmet (David Dencik) who spins a grand scheme of the two of them opening a restaurant in Spain, and a fiercely feminist performance artist (Tuva Novotny) whose heart Henry melts with a seductive swap of cooking tips. If this sounds like writer-directors Alexander Brøndsted and Antonio Tublén have a severe case of the cutes, they do, and while their visuals possess a hint of Aki Kaurismaki's grainy Scandinavian absurdism, their more desperate antic passages more closely resemble wacky beer commercials. Novotny scores with a strip-club act, sneering, "You fuck! You suck!," while costumed as Rosie the Riveter, but her character softens too quickly; Dejan Cukic draws a few laughs as her moronic drug-dealing manager. Alas, Henry's mom-saving crusade is as heavy-handed and lugubrious as Sam Rockwell's in last year's Choke, and then the filmmakers pull an 11th-hour gimmick that compares badly with one from Fight Club. Henry may aspire to be "a brilliant original and not a pale copy," but Original plays like a weak Chuck Palahniuk plot stuffed with coyness.
Original @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: An Englishman in New York
By: Adam Keleman On: 05/01/2009 19:45:10 In: Festivals Comments: 0
In Richard Laxton's An Englishman in New York, Quentin Crisp (John Hurt)—the notable makeup-wearing gay activist who was raised in the brutal, prejudice-filled streets of Sutton, England and brought over, at the tender age of 70, to the slightly more welcoming boroughs of New York City—is filled with generous, perceptive philosophies regarding the nature of human beings and relationships, gay and straight. After the success of the made-for-British-TV movie The Naked Civil Servant, which was based on his memoir, Crisp is commissioned by a small theater in Manhattan's Bowery to perform a one-man show; word-of-mouth spreads about his unfiltered wit and shrewd observations about the gay community and cultural zeitgeist at large, which lands him gigs on late-night TV chat shows via his newly acquired agent (Swoosie Kurtz). His cult-like status grows, but when he calls the impending AIDS epidemic "a fad" in an off-the-cuff moment during one of his performances, he turns a faction of the gay community sour.
Englishman is a studied testament to the splintered state of the gay community: It understands how homosexuals may seem like a collective, parading around and screaming for inclusion, but how they can be oppressive within their very own community. During one fish-out-of-water moment when Quentin and his editor friend, Phillip Steele (Denis O'Hare), visit a gay bar filled with construction workers and buffed-up guys, they haltingly realize these men won't converse with them because the two are not cut from the same muscle-rippling mold. These "clones," as Quentin puts it, willfully draw lines down the center of the homosexual pack, and though he's perplexed by this immediate cruelty from his own clan, Quentin overcomes it, proceeding again through life in a jolly old fashion.
A BAFTA-winner for Naked Civil Servant, in which he played a much younger version of Crisp, Hurt is utterly spellbinding, sinking back into this colorful and iconic persona with rousing form. Laxton smartly frames the film around Hurt's dedicated performance, allowing Crisp to remain the cinematic focus as he was in his own world. This fresh look at the gay culture and its desired goals establishes profound insight into what it means to be a true-to-spirit man these days, no matter if he happens to wear a little lipstick and maybe a scarf or two.
An Englishman in New York @ the Tribeca Film Festival
In Richard Laxton's An Englishman in New York, Quentin Crisp (John Hurt)—the notable makeup-wearing gay activist who was raised in the brutal, prejudice-filled streets of Sutton, England and brought over, at the tender age of 70, to the slightly more welcoming boroughs of New York City—is filled with generous, perceptive philosophies regarding the nature of human beings and relationships, gay and straight. After the success of the made-for-British-TV movie The Naked Civil Servant, which was based on his memoir, Crisp is commissioned by a small theater in Manhattan's Bowery to perform a one-man show; word-of-mouth spreads about his unfiltered wit and shrewd observations about the gay community and cultural zeitgeist at large, which lands him gigs on late-night TV chat shows via his newly acquired agent (Swoosie Kurtz). His cult-like status grows, but when he calls the impending AIDS epidemic "a fad" in an off-the-cuff moment during one of his performances, he turns a faction of the gay community sour.
Englishman is a studied testament to the splintered state of the gay community: It understands how homosexuals may seem like a collective, parading around and screaming for inclusion, but how they can be oppressive within their very own community. During one fish-out-of-water moment when Quentin and his editor friend, Phillip Steele (Denis O'Hare), visit a gay bar filled with construction workers and buffed-up guys, they haltingly realize these men won't converse with them because the two are not cut from the same muscle-rippling mold. These "clones," as Quentin puts it, willfully draw lines down the center of the homosexual pack, and though he's perplexed by this immediate cruelty from his own clan, Quentin overcomes it, proceeding again through life in a jolly old fashion.
A BAFTA-winner for Naked Civil Servant, in which he played a much younger version of Crisp, Hurt is utterly spellbinding, sinking back into this colorful and iconic persona with rousing form. Laxton smartly frames the film around Hurt's dedicated performance, allowing Crisp to remain the cinematic focus as he was in his own world. This fresh look at the gay culture and its desired goals establishes profound insight into what it means to be a true-to-spirit man these days, no matter if he happens to wear a little lipstick and maybe a scarf or two.
An Englishman in New York @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: The Exploding Girl
By: Bill Weber On: 05/01/2009 14:30:51 In: Festivals Comments: 1
Exasperating for its mundane narrative of youthful non-courtship camouflaged by Manhattan street-video naturalism, The Exploding Girl occasionally suggests mumblecore with less improvisation and heaps of undergrad preciousness in place of snarky irony. Zoe Kazan is Ivy, a Björkish-pigtailed college student home in New York for the summer, where she gives her displaced BFF Al (Mark Rendall), a gangly pothead and enthusiastic biology student, space on the couch. In between visits to her dance-teacher mother's class and largely unanswered phone calls to a neglectful, obviously exit-seeking boyfriend, Ivy encourages a compulsively lingering Al to party through the season without her, and assures her doctor that she's careful about managing her epilepsy, which results in a seizure only when she's "stressed out." Bradley Rust Gray's feature shares some themes with his wife So Yong Kim's winter portrait of a young couple at a crossroads, In Between Days, which he co-wrote and produced, but Exploding Girl is a less forceful variation on the earlier work's patterns, partly because Ivy and Al's passivity seems like a side effect of larger, unstated issues. (Or perhaps such pure fear and clumsiness in fledgling affairs of the heart is most compelling to 20-year-olds.) Ivy's regularly vibrating cell phone, over which she conducts a score of trivial negotiations with Al, marks her primarily as a buzzing girl at the core, but Gray's awkward title metaphor ensures that once Al stops dithering about evolutionary theory and asks to know where he stands, Ivy will physically manifest their dual stress before it can be cornily resolved at a rooftop bird coop and in a backseat. It's a ponderous inflation of a couple of cute white kids slacking around Gotham 'til September.
The Exploding Girl @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Exasperating for its mundane narrative of youthful non-courtship camouflaged by Manhattan street-video naturalism, The Exploding Girl occasionally suggests mumblecore with less improvisation and heaps of undergrad preciousness in place of snarky irony. Zoe Kazan is Ivy, a Björkish-pigtailed college student home in New York for the summer, where she gives her displaced BFF Al (Mark Rendall), a gangly pothead and enthusiastic biology student, space on the couch. In between visits to her dance-teacher mother's class and largely unanswered phone calls to a neglectful, obviously exit-seeking boyfriend, Ivy encourages a compulsively lingering Al to party through the season without her, and assures her doctor that she's careful about managing her epilepsy, which results in a seizure only when she's "stressed out." Bradley Rust Gray's feature shares some themes with his wife So Yong Kim's winter portrait of a young couple at a crossroads, In Between Days, which he co-wrote and produced, but Exploding Girl is a less forceful variation on the earlier work's patterns, partly because Ivy and Al's passivity seems like a side effect of larger, unstated issues. (Or perhaps such pure fear and clumsiness in fledgling affairs of the heart is most compelling to 20-year-olds.) Ivy's regularly vibrating cell phone, over which she conducts a score of trivial negotiations with Al, marks her primarily as a buzzing girl at the core, but Gray's awkward title metaphor ensures that once Al stops dithering about evolutionary theory and asks to know where he stands, Ivy will physically manifest their dual stress before it can be cornily resolved at a rooftop bird coop and in a backseat. It's a ponderous inflation of a couple of cute white kids slacking around Gotham 'til September.
The Exploding Girl @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: Vegas: Based on a True Story
By: Nick Schager On: 05/01/2009 13:05:20 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Told with an unfussy minimalism that doesn't eclipse its metaphor's somewhat creaky obviousness, Vegas: Based on a True Story presents a microcosm of American greed and addiction via a family living on the dusty outskirts of Sin City. Eddie (Mark Greenfield) and Tracy (Nancy La Scala) are recovering gambling junkies whose lives, along with 12-year-old son Mitch (Zach Thomas), are tenuously stable, with Eddie's surreptitious plays on the slots—his face pressed close to the glittering screen—the only minor indiscretions in an otherwise routine working-class life. A visit from a Marine interested in buying their house leads to the revelation that a crime gang's suitcase full of $1 million may be buried on their property, which Tracy has diligently nurtured from a rectangle of dry desert into a green grassy yard. Smelling wealth, Eddie begins digging, which in turn leads to ruin in a manner that, after an opening act that gently and authentically establishes the characters, steers things into an overtly symbolic realm. The family's maniacal pursuit of a monetary pipe dream, and the destruction of their unity, security, and sanity, reverberates as a commentary on the country's insatiable avarice, whether that be the kind that drives people to Vegas—whose twinkling nighttime skyline, frequently seen in the distance across a stretch of barren soil, functions as a kind of entrancing bug zapper—or to gamble their futures on the market or in real estate. The game is fixed, but we're too blinded by gluttony to see it, warns Vegas. Director Amir Naderi, an Iranian who's spent the past 20 years making quasi-experimental films in the States, employs a discreet aesthetic full of long takes and no score to reinforce his argument, never more beautifully than in a shot from the back of a pickup truck that pans from the Vegas strip, to the vehicle's cabin, and then (after Eddie and Tracy have finished discussing their daily wagers and "recovery") to the arid nowhereland on the opposite side of the highway. Yet despite such graceful directorial gestures, the film's scenario unavoidably devolves into a treatise that, though timely, feels a tad too on the nose.
Vegas: Based on a True Story @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Told with an unfussy minimalism that doesn't eclipse its metaphor's somewhat creaky obviousness, Vegas: Based on a True Story presents a microcosm of American greed and addiction via a family living on the dusty outskirts of Sin City. Eddie (Mark Greenfield) and Tracy (Nancy La Scala) are recovering gambling junkies whose lives, along with 12-year-old son Mitch (Zach Thomas), are tenuously stable, with Eddie's surreptitious plays on the slots—his face pressed close to the glittering screen—the only minor indiscretions in an otherwise routine working-class life. A visit from a Marine interested in buying their house leads to the revelation that a crime gang's suitcase full of $1 million may be buried on their property, which Tracy has diligently nurtured from a rectangle of dry desert into a green grassy yard. Smelling wealth, Eddie begins digging, which in turn leads to ruin in a manner that, after an opening act that gently and authentically establishes the characters, steers things into an overtly symbolic realm. The family's maniacal pursuit of a monetary pipe dream, and the destruction of their unity, security, and sanity, reverberates as a commentary on the country's insatiable avarice, whether that be the kind that drives people to Vegas—whose twinkling nighttime skyline, frequently seen in the distance across a stretch of barren soil, functions as a kind of entrancing bug zapper—or to gamble their futures on the market or in real estate. The game is fixed, but we're too blinded by gluttony to see it, warns Vegas. Director Amir Naderi, an Iranian who's spent the past 20 years making quasi-experimental films in the States, employs a discreet aesthetic full of long takes and no score to reinforce his argument, never more beautifully than in a shot from the back of a pickup truck that pans from the Vegas strip, to the vehicle's cabin, and then (after Eddie and Tracy have finished discussing their daily wagers and "recovery") to the arid nowhereland on the opposite side of the highway. Yet despite such graceful directorial gestures, the film's scenario unavoidably devolves into a treatise that, though timely, feels a tad too on the nose.
Vegas: Based on a True Story @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: Stay Cool
By: Adam Keleman On: 05/01/2009 04:11:07 In: Festivals Comments: 0
Invoking every John Hughes movie under the sun, the Polish brothers' Stay Cool chronicles the return of a successful writer, Henry McCarthy (Michael Polish), to his hometown and high school, reunited with longtime friends and confronted with his past—and still clinging—inadequacies. Pulling up to the airport in a flamboyantly decorated mini cooper are Henry's two old high school buds, a supremely gay hairdresser (Sean Astin) and a rebellious tattoo artist (Josh Holloway); despite the 15-year leap forward, everyone appears frozen in a mundane, unchallenged existence, and when Henry reemerges he cleanly slips back into that role of nerdy son that everyone was used to, even with a bestselling novel on the shelves and an ever-expanding bank account. Flipping through an old yearbook, he comes across the photo of Scarlett Smith (Winona Ryder), the popular girl he once fawned after and who inspired his book How Lionel Got Me Laid. With his planned commencement speech coming up for his alma mater's graduating class, Henry now must make a decision: leave his hometown with dignity intact or reconnect with an unrequited old flame that more burned than lit ablaze.
Written by Mark Polish and directed by his brother Michael, this is thoroughly a family affair, but with their upcoming film Manure just around the corner, Stay Cool feels a bit rushed, suggesting nothing more than an homage to Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful. The saving graces are the cinematography and production design, as the style is nearly pitch-perfect, with bold, popping color filling up the frames, taking us back to a time and aesthetic we cinematically know oh-so-well. Polish and Ryder give soulful performances, but suited in rubbery, one-note caricatures, the supporting cast, mainly Astin and Holloway, come off a bit grating. This may be attributed to the thin direction: Virtually xeroxing past '80s films into his HDcam-shot frames, the filmmakers can't find any new twists on this proverbial tale of going back to your hometown and hoping someone is still waiting for you.
Stay Cool @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Invoking every John Hughes movie under the sun, the Polish brothers' Stay Cool chronicles the return of a successful writer, Henry McCarthy (Michael Polish), to his hometown and high school, reunited with longtime friends and confronted with his past—and still clinging—inadequacies. Pulling up to the airport in a flamboyantly decorated mini cooper are Henry's two old high school buds, a supremely gay hairdresser (Sean Astin) and a rebellious tattoo artist (Josh Holloway); despite the 15-year leap forward, everyone appears frozen in a mundane, unchallenged existence, and when Henry reemerges he cleanly slips back into that role of nerdy son that everyone was used to, even with a bestselling novel on the shelves and an ever-expanding bank account. Flipping through an old yearbook, he comes across the photo of Scarlett Smith (Winona Ryder), the popular girl he once fawned after and who inspired his book How Lionel Got Me Laid. With his planned commencement speech coming up for his alma mater's graduating class, Henry now must make a decision: leave his hometown with dignity intact or reconnect with an unrequited old flame that more burned than lit ablaze.
Written by Mark Polish and directed by his brother Michael, this is thoroughly a family affair, but with their upcoming film Manure just around the corner, Stay Cool feels a bit rushed, suggesting nothing more than an homage to Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful. The saving graces are the cinematography and production design, as the style is nearly pitch-perfect, with bold, popping color filling up the frames, taking us back to a time and aesthetic we cinematically know oh-so-well. Polish and Ryder give soulful performances, but suited in rubbery, one-note caricatures, the supporting cast, mainly Astin and Holloway, come off a bit grating. This may be attributed to the thin direction: Virtually xeroxing past '80s films into his HDcam-shot frames, the filmmakers can't find any new twists on this proverbial tale of going back to your hometown and hoping someone is still waiting for you.
Stay Cool @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: Dazzle
By: Adam Keleman On: 05/01/2009 00:12:42 In: Festivals Comments: 1
Dutch filmmaking provocateur Cyrus Frisch opens his new film Dazzle with a pixilated shot of a man walking down a sun-glistening beach, revealing the current world in a fractured state, but with slight glimmers of hope lingering in the background. Frisch's cinematic kaleidoscope presents a voyeuristic look at a city's many scattered, sidelined street dwellers from the view of a girl's apartment. The twentysomething girl is hardly seen, but her voice is overlaid on the disparate—essentially documentary—video recordings taken throughout Amsterdam as she feverishly rants on the phone with a doctor who initially calls to speak with her missing-in-action boyfriend Christian. Her disembodied voice proves a telling vehicle, almost God-like, and as she looks on from above, judging the desperate fools who sit on her block corner, guilt takes over her mind.
The film's images are supplied by everything from a camera phone to a consumer digital camera, and as he sporadically cuts to a starkly black, void-like frame, Frisch uses negative space to suggest a kind of sanctuary from the ugly dirge of street life, sufficiently establishing a dire mood wherever a city's lost souls congregate and their unclean bodies fester. The filmmaker melds together a myriad of archival footage and video effects, deftly exhibiting a gritty, grainy texture on the screen, which cements the dour tone of this compelling, experimental work.
In a half-hearted attempt to reconstruct his own version of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Frisch sees the well-meaning girl and doctor who converse over the phone as deeply concerned observers, sharing maddening descriptions of decay and, in effect, narrating the routine existence of the countless meandering, displaced vagabonds who deal drugs in the daytime and howl in the streets when the darkness settles. As abstract modes manifest a deluge of unearthly creatures and madness, Dazzle reveals the crack in the walls of humanity, delicately reflecting upon man's inability to survive when emotional burden becomes too much to handle.
Dazzle @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Dutch filmmaking provocateur Cyrus Frisch opens his new film Dazzle with a pixilated shot of a man walking down a sun-glistening beach, revealing the current world in a fractured state, but with slight glimmers of hope lingering in the background. Frisch's cinematic kaleidoscope presents a voyeuristic look at a city's many scattered, sidelined street dwellers from the view of a girl's apartment. The twentysomething girl is hardly seen, but her voice is overlaid on the disparate—essentially documentary—video recordings taken throughout Amsterdam as she feverishly rants on the phone with a doctor who initially calls to speak with her missing-in-action boyfriend Christian. Her disembodied voice proves a telling vehicle, almost God-like, and as she looks on from above, judging the desperate fools who sit on her block corner, guilt takes over her mind.
The film's images are supplied by everything from a camera phone to a consumer digital camera, and as he sporadically cuts to a starkly black, void-like frame, Frisch uses negative space to suggest a kind of sanctuary from the ugly dirge of street life, sufficiently establishing a dire mood wherever a city's lost souls congregate and their unclean bodies fester. The filmmaker melds together a myriad of archival footage and video effects, deftly exhibiting a gritty, grainy texture on the screen, which cements the dour tone of this compelling, experimental work.
In a half-hearted attempt to reconstruct his own version of Hiroshima Mon Amour, Frisch sees the well-meaning girl and doctor who converse over the phone as deeply concerned observers, sharing maddening descriptions of decay and, in effect, narrating the routine existence of the countless meandering, displaced vagabonds who deal drugs in the daytime and howl in the streets when the darkness settles. As abstract modes manifest a deluge of unearthly creatures and madness, Dazzle reveals the crack in the walls of humanity, delicately reflecting upon man's inability to survive when emotional burden becomes too much to handle.
Dazzle @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: The Eclipse
By: Bill Weber On: 04/30/2009 19:07:51 In: Festivals Comments: 0
A much duller tale than its Irish literary festival setting would suggest, The Eclipse is the third feature film directed by award-winning playwright Conor McPherson, who has further damaged the proceedings by clumsily inserting jump-in-your-seat ghost-story thrills into a wan character study. In a picturesque seaport town, woodworking teacher Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds, imposing and largely wasted) operates on several levels of denial, burdened by his unresolved grief for his recently deceased wife, demonstrations of authoritarian bluster to his two tween kids, longings to resurrect collegiate writing ambitions, and horror-movie visions of his institutionalized father-in-law. Michael pauses in furtively adapting his spectral encounters at his icy attic's desk long enough to work as driver and gofer at the annual lit shindig for both a supernatural-fiction hottie (Iben Hjejle) and a loutish American drunk who pens bestsellers (Aidan Quinn, hamming like a sitcom Hemingway). Hinds and Hjejle do a coy mating dance, he predictably ends up in a knockdown ball-squeezing brawl with jealous Quinn, and has his zombie nightmares interrupted by a slip on a real pool of blood—though a suicide in this context is just a plot point to facilitate the tearful, healing embrace of a spouse's apparition. The dialogue and situations all tend to the generic and mechanical, shaken up far too infrequently by Hjejle's tipsy smile or Hinds's slapstick tumble into a lakeside hilltop's man-sized pothole. The types played by the three leads never bridge their insurmountable distance from reality, and Hjejle's familiarity with the spirit world implies a survivor's trauma equal to Hinds's, but one is never revealed. Attempting to darken its touristy middlebrow sensibility with shocks and farce, this Eclipse characteristically doesn't illuminate anything.
The Eclipse @ the Tribeca Film Festival
A much duller tale than its Irish literary festival setting would suggest, The Eclipse is the third feature film directed by award-winning playwright Conor McPherson, who has further damaged the proceedings by clumsily inserting jump-in-your-seat ghost-story thrills into a wan character study. In a picturesque seaport town, woodworking teacher Michael Farr (Ciarán Hinds, imposing and largely wasted) operates on several levels of denial, burdened by his unresolved grief for his recently deceased wife, demonstrations of authoritarian bluster to his two tween kids, longings to resurrect collegiate writing ambitions, and horror-movie visions of his institutionalized father-in-law. Michael pauses in furtively adapting his spectral encounters at his icy attic's desk long enough to work as driver and gofer at the annual lit shindig for both a supernatural-fiction hottie (Iben Hjejle) and a loutish American drunk who pens bestsellers (Aidan Quinn, hamming like a sitcom Hemingway). Hinds and Hjejle do a coy mating dance, he predictably ends up in a knockdown ball-squeezing brawl with jealous Quinn, and has his zombie nightmares interrupted by a slip on a real pool of blood—though a suicide in this context is just a plot point to facilitate the tearful, healing embrace of a spouse's apparition. The dialogue and situations all tend to the generic and mechanical, shaken up far too infrequently by Hjejle's tipsy smile or Hinds's slapstick tumble into a lakeside hilltop's man-sized pothole. The types played by the three leads never bridge their insurmountable distance from reality, and Hjejle's familiarity with the spirit world implies a survivor's trauma equal to Hinds's, but one is never revealed. Attempting to darken its touristy middlebrow sensibility with shocks and farce, this Eclipse characteristically doesn't illuminate anything.
The Eclipse @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Tribeca Film Festival: The House of the Devil
By: Nick Schager On: 04/30/2009 17:36:23 In: Festivals Comments: 1
Yet another of this year's homage-facsimiles, The House of the Devil forgoes campy self-awareness in favor of reverential faithfulness—and in doing so, implicitly critiques contemporary horror cinema. With its cinematography combining unadorned realism and angular expressionism, and its title sequence emblazoned with yellow title cards and marked by synth music, freeze frames, and sudden zooms, Ti West's latest mimics '80s horror flicks with a straight face. Its rhythms, dialogue, and period detail are so finely attuned to the style of its chosen era that, were it not for a technical dexterity generally absent from its predecessors, the film might pass as an exhumed relic.
West clearly knows his stuff, but isn't out to flaunt it with a smirk, and thus there's great pleasure to be had from his introductory passages, in which college sophomore Samantha (Margot Kidder lookalike Jocelin Donahue) rents a house (from Dee Wallace's landlady) and, strapped for cash, responds to a campus flyer for a babysitter. West, however, doesn't rush his heroine into a situation that—as confirmed by the title, and the fact that when she calls about the gig, it's Tom Noonan's sinister voice that answers—is destined for horror, laying out Samantha's friendship with Megan (Greta Gerwig) and her dire financial motivations with methodical patience. "I promise to make this as painless for you as possible," says Mr. Ulman (Noonan) in convincing Samantha to accept the job, a comment rife with black humor. Yet West plays his material not for giggles, but for slow-burn chills, employing languorous long takes and pitched, frequently low-positioned camera setups to build a sense of unreal terror. Upon arriving at the rural Ulman estate, located right past a cemetery, Samantha learns that the job involves watching an elderly woman while Mr. Ulman and his wife (Mary Woronov) enjoy the evening's historic full-moon eclipse.
As the tale unfolds, a debt to not only '80s horror films, but also Rosemary's Baby, The Amityville Horror, and Hammer's gothic '70s classics also emerges: food (specifically, pizza) is a source of fetid disgust; murderous mysteries are discovered in the remote mansion's nooks and crannies; and Satanism is revealed as a malevolent force with which Samantha must ultimately reckon. Before that confrontation can occur, however, House of the Devil proves content to simply spend time in Samantha's company. And though she's a rather one-dimensional audience proxy, West's leisurely depiction of her exploring the Ulman residence—highlighted by a sequence in which she dances about, cumbersome walkman affixed to hip, listening to the Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another"—allows his story's dread to slowly creep under one's skin.
If West's unhurried pace can occasionally be trying, his refusal to indulge in cheap jolt scares or force his protagonist to behave in ludicrously nonsensical ways—aside, of course, from the never-quite-plausible decision to accept any offer from Noonan's cane-wielding weirdo—seems not only a welcome antidote to today's current spate of disposable hack-and-slashers, but something of a direct rebuke. The House of the Devil elicits fear not from knife-wielding maniacs, but, rather, from a sense of macabre unease that spews forth from, among other moments, Mrs. Ulman's unseemly, sex-fixated initial conversation with Samantha, or the preceding shot of the girls being greeted at the front door by Noonan, their unsettled looks directed upward at an imposing face cut off by West's frame. Throughout, the director employs conventions with an assuredness that's never tainted by look-at-me egotism, his fidelity to the genre marked by an admiration that carries through to the very, bloody end, which—true to its forbearers—is mildly anticlimactic, resorting as it does to images of monstrous satanic evil that can't quite match what one's own imagination had already cooked up. No matter. As evidenced by the care taken with its establishing chapters, House of the Devil knows that, even with regard to hell, the destination isn't half as terrifying as the journey.
House of the Devil @ the Tribeca Film Festival
Yet another of this year's homage-facsimiles, The House of the Devil forgoes campy self-awareness in favor of reverential faithfulness—and in doing so, implicitly critiques contemporary horror cinema. With its cinematography combining unadorned realism and angular expressionism, and its title sequence emblazoned with yellow title cards and marked by synth music, freeze frames, and sudden zooms, Ti West's latest mimics '80s horror flicks with a straight face. Its rhythms, dialogue, and period detail are so finely attuned to the style of its chosen era that, were it not for a technical dexterity generally absent from its predecessors, the film might pass as an exhumed relic.
West clearly knows his stuff, but isn't out to flaunt it with a smirk, and thus there's great pleasure to be had from his introductory passages, in which college sophomore Samantha (Margot Kidder lookalike Jocelin Donahue) rents a house (from Dee Wallace's landlady) and, strapped for cash, responds to a campus flyer for a babysitter. West, however, doesn't rush his heroine into a situation that—as confirmed by the title, and the fact that when she calls about the gig, it's Tom Noonan's sinister voice that answers—is destined for horror, laying out Samantha's friendship with Megan (Greta Gerwig) and her dire financial motivations with methodical patience. "I promise to make this as painless for you as possible," says Mr. Ulman (Noonan) in convincing Samantha to accept the job, a comment rife with black humor. Yet West plays his material not for giggles, but for slow-burn chills, employing languorous long takes and pitched, frequently low-positioned camera setups to build a sense of unreal terror. Upon arriving at the rural Ulman estate, located right past a cemetery, Samantha learns that the job involves watching an elderly woman while Mr. Ulman and his wife (Mary Woronov) enjoy the evening's historic full-moon eclipse.
As the tale unfolds, a debt to not only '80s horror films, but also Rosemary's Baby, The Amityville Horror, and Hammer's gothic '70s classics also emerges: food (specifically, pizza) is a source of fetid disgust; murderous mysteries are discovered in the remote mansion's nooks and crannies; and Satanism is revealed as a malevolent force with which Samantha must ultimately reckon. Before that confrontation can occur, however, House of the Devil proves content to simply spend time in Samantha's company. And though she's a rather one-dimensional audience proxy, West's leisurely depiction of her exploring the Ulman residence—highlighted by a sequence in which she dances about, cumbersome walkman affixed to hip, listening to the Fixx's "One Thing Leads to Another"—allows his story's dread to slowly creep under one's skin.
If West's unhurried pace can occasionally be trying, his refusal to indulge in cheap jolt scares or force his protagonist to behave in ludicrously nonsensical ways—aside, of course, from the never-quite-plausible decision to accept any offer from Noonan's cane-wielding weirdo—seems not only a welcome antidote to today's current spate of disposable hack-and-slashers, but something of a direct rebuke. The House of the Devil elicits fear not from knife-wielding maniacs, but, rather, from a sense of macabre unease that spews forth from, among other moments, Mrs. Ulman's unseemly, sex-fixated initial conversation with Samantha, or the preceding shot of the girls being greeted at the front door by Noonan, their unsettled looks directed upward at an imposing face cut off by West's frame. Throughout, the director employs conventions with an assuredness that's never tainted by look-at-me egotism, his fidelity to the genre marked by an admiration that carries through to the very, bloody end, which—true to its forbearers—is mildly anticlimactic, resorting as it does to images of monstrous satanic evil that can't quite match what one's own imagination had already cooked up. No matter. As evidenced by the care taken with its establishing chapters, House of the Devil knows that, even with regard to hell, the destination isn't half as terrifying as the journey.
House of the Devil @ the Tribeca Film Festival
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