Based on a true story whose underlying themes prove too obvious and one-note in translation, In the Beginning creates tension not only from its saga of an unlikely con, but from the nagging sense that more urgency and surprise should be forthcoming from such an amazing tale. After robbing his fence colleague (Gérard Depardieu), two-bit swindler Paul (François Cluzet) continues roaming the northern French countryside perpetrating a profitable scam in which he poses as a construction conglomerate employee. It's a reasonably profitable ruse that leads to unexpected, lucrative opportunities when he winds up in a small community where said conglomerate abandoned a highway construction project two years prior, in the process leaving the area in economic ruin. The arrival of Paul, now going by the alias Philippe, is immediately viewed by the locales as a sign that their asphalt-laying endeavor will resume, an assumption that Paul doesn't immediately refute—in part because of the contractors eager to dole out cash bribes for work—and soon gets swept up in, leading to the commencement of a major enterprise all predicated on a big fat lie. Continue Reading »
Sprinting ahead with an urgency that belies its remarkable attention to detail, writer-director Lucas Belvaux's taut political thriller Rapt is a top-heavy but exceptional action film. Emulating Costa-Gavras's Z, Belvaux relates the emotional impact of the kidnapping and ransoming of wealthy industrialist Stanislas Graff (Yvan Attal) on Graff, his associates, and his family with the loutish grace of a skilled sports commentator. Everything, from the emotional breakdowns his wife and daughters suffer to heated arguments held between the shareholders of Graff's company about whether they should pay his ransom or not, boils down to cold, hard information. Continue Reading »
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
As demeaning as it may be to present French Kissers as a Gallic version of Gregg Mottola's Superbad, the comparison is necessary to show how Riad Sattouf's film differs from Mottola's in its hormone-crazed nostalgia. Like many films forged from the Judd Apatow mold, Superbad assumes that the travails of its dickhead protagonists are at an end once they've fulfilled their dreams of either asking out or scoring with the girl of their wet dreams. French Kissers recognizes the simplicity of that simple logic and veers in another direction. Hervé (Vincent Lacoste), a loveably greasy little loser that beats off to the French equivalent of the Sears catalogue, does eventually make it with Laura (Julie Scheibling). The trouble is he doesn't know what to do with her—or himself, for that matter—once he has. Continue Reading »
"I was working at this Japanese restaurant. I was really miserable. These Korean guys kept staring at my tits."
"So I told her, what if you added Jewish non-fiction?"
"Working at a Japanese restaurant sounds really good to me right now."
[Gas station clerk]: "Have a good night."
[Man buying cigarettes and Trojan Sensitives]: "Oh, I will."
"Dude, Drew's about to get a tattoo right now. Do you wanna come? If you give me $100, you can tell me what initials I'm getting on my chest. WE'RE GOING NOW."
[Guy bouncing over to me]: "I made you a sandwich today!" [Name: Jackie.]
[275 lb. man with a Bud Light six-pack and another he was drinking at the Hampton desk at 1:15 when I arrived, not to mention the 10-gallon Stetson and unaffected Larry The Cable Guy accent]: "I'm not going to lie. She is so hot. I would love to fuck her. Does that cab have a cigarette lighter so I can charge my phone?"
"I used to live on Metropolitan and Grand with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They told me they were in a band, but I didn't care. Then I went to Boston to visit the guy I was dating and he said 'You have to hear these guys before they get too popular and you can't listen to them.' And it was them!"
[Me]: "Did he literally say that? Was he kidding at all?" "Yeah. He was a philosophy grad student."
"I had this friend in high school who was obsessed with Rod Stewart. He had a whole wall covered with him."Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is partnering with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) to highlight the films in IFFR's prestigious VPRO Tiger Awards competition (given to first- or second-time filmmakers). A weeklong series, encompassing 15 films, as well as a "shorts" program, Rotterdam @ BAM gives New Yorkers (and New York's close neighbors) an unprecedented opportunity to take a look at these award-winning films from all over the world.]
Autumn Adagio is Tsuki Inoue’s first feature, and except for some awkward dissolves and an overuse of fades-to-black, she has a strong directorial hand and a perceptive eye for character and mood. Autumn Adagio, along with La vie au Ranch, felt like the most blatantly personal of the films in the festival. Inoue writes in her Director’s Statement: “After I turned thirty years old, I have started to hear internal voices little by little. Because I will be middle-thirties soon, these voices have been crying, mourning, and trying to take over the voices of my brain…” Inoue describes having seen a nun cross a busy street: “She looked different from anyone there with her monochrome dress in the chaotic place. I saw something special in her face—wearing no makeup and showing no hesitation—I thought it had something to do with the film.” And indeed it does. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is partnering with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) to highlight the films in IFFR's prestigious VPRO Tiger Awards competition (given to first- or second-time filmmakers). A weeklong series, encompassing 15 films, as well as a "shorts" program, Rotterdam @ BAM gives New Yorkers (and New York's close neighbors) an unprecedented opportunity to take a look at these award-winning films from all over the world.]
La Vie au Ranch, a debut feature by Sophie Letourneur, is the story of a group of young college-age girls living pig-piled in an apartment on the Left Bank in Paris that they call “the Ranch.” Life is one long party interspersed with writing intellectual papers last-minute for Sociology class. There is no story here, not really. It is a group character study filmed in an improvisatory way. Moments feel “caught” rather than planned. I am not sure if there was a set script (most of the scenes are group scenes, with everyone talking at once), but whether or no, there are some very funny lines. A hung-over guy, lying on a mattress at “the Ranch”, the morning after a crazy rave, wakes up and announces, “I need an Alka Seltzer. I feel like I’m speaking German.” The group of actors has a totally unselfconscious dynamic with one another, and while the film doesn’t have much substance (nothing really happens), I found myself very moved by it. It is an accurate and affectionate portrait of that precarious time in a young person’s life (in this case, young girls) when you can still get away with acting silly and immature, but at the same time, the adult world is starting to call to you. You start to want to, you know, make choices. But what choice? If you make one choice, does that mean other choices will be closed to you? And, most importantly to a 20-year-old girl, what will this do to the group? The group is paramount. People pour from party to rave to Ranch in a huge hilarious group, and the beginning scenes of the film are filled with people wondering loudly where everyone else is. “Where’s Pam?” “Where’s Manon?” “Where’s Raffy?” People wake up the next morning and want to know where everyone is. Who stayed over? Did anyone get laid? Let’s all get back together again and have some breakfast! Continue Reading »
Start off the day with Girish Shambu's latest post ("The Genius of the System"), which is of course already generating a healthy discussion. Go and join.
Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.
If the films nominated for Academy Awards in 2010 were Olympic sports, figure skating—full of sights, sounds, and lots of media attention—would be Avatar, the halfpipe—entertaining and edgy—Inglourious Basterds, and hockey—an unglamorous study in grinding perseverance—The Hurt Locker. For Americans, curling wouldn’t appear until “The Best Animated Short” category: "A Matter of Loaf and Death" starring Wallace and Gromit.
One of the noteworthy, albeit minor, stories coming out of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver was some unexpectedly positive murmuring about curling. The genuine curiosity exhibited about the sport could very well be a precursor for more mainstream American interest. U.S. team captain John Shuster expressed satisfaction that Vancouver had helped to put curling “on the map.” Of course, a lot of the attention curling received this year was due to things having nothing to do with the sport itself. Such as the tittering over the Norwegian team’s garishly patterned pants. So, it remains to be seen if curling has the potential to attain more than hacky sack-like fad status in the U.S.
I’ve never set foot on a curling surface myself but I’ve been a closet fan for years. Although, I didn’t realize I was in the closet or that such a closet even existed. Continue Reading »
Grown Up Movie Star is a story of frustration and abandonment in an isolated, hopeless community, with a pair of teenage sisters virtually deserted by their mother and raised by their reluctant father. While the substance is hardly a revelation, the film's circumstances are: It marks one of the strongest offerings to emerge from the small island province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
In the pantheon of Canadian cinema, the onscreen realization of Newfoundland and Labrador, the little island off the Atlantic, has been a long time coming. The province is known for its curious culture—a mishmash of Irish ancestry and tragic histories you come to expect from an isolated culture built around the fickle Atlantic Ocean. Much of Newfoundland's cinema to date has suffered under the burden of translating that unique culture to the screen so that it enhanced, rather than overpowered the storytelling. Recent ventures such as 2006's Young Triffie's Been Made Away With have been felled by largely esoteric storytelling and mannered presentation. Thus, the cinema of the province has never quite surfaced to the kind of universal story necessary to find much appeal outside the province's borders. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is partnering with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) to highlight the films in IFFR's prestigious VPRO Tiger Awards competition (given to first- or second-time filmmakers). A weeklong series, encompassing 15 films, as well as a "shorts" program, Rotterdam @ BAM gives New Yorkers (and New York's close neighbors) an unprecedented opportunity to take a look at these award-winning films from all over the world.]
“Respect our grey hairs,” says a junkie to a teenage kid in the Georgian film Street Days, directed by Levan Koguashvili. Georgia, birthplace of Stalin (a master at erasing unpleasant history, including his own), has a tortured recent past and a present of casual criminality and gangster ethics. The gap between the “grey hairs” and the youngsters is the main theme of the gritty well-done Street Days, which depicts the difficulties of living a moral life in such an environment. Checkie (played by Guga Kotetishvili) and his friends are junkies who spend their days hanging out on a street corner in Tbilisi. They have nowhere to go. Checkie is recently divorced, has a son in school, and he struggles to keep them afloat. Checkie owes money to some scary drug dealers. There is a police informant among them. The cops, one of whom is a steely-eyed Rutger Hauer lookalike, aren’t much better than the criminals. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is partnering with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) to highlight the films in IFFR's prestigious VPRO Tiger Awards competition (given to first- or second-time filmmakers). A weeklong series, encompassing 15 films, as well as a "shorts" program, Rotterdam @ BAM gives New Yorkers (and New York's close neighbors) an unprecedented opportunity to take a look at these award-winning films from all over the world.]
C'est Déjà L'ete is the first feature by Dutch documentarian Martijn Maria Smits, and tells the story of Jean, a laid-off Belgian steelworker (Patrick Descamps), and his two aimless teenage kids, Benjamin and Marie. The style is bleak, and Smits’ documentary background shows, especially in the long panning shots of endless unemployment lines, where people glance directly at the camera, as if caught, invaded upon by the observer in a vulnerable moment. The action is interspersed with grainy stock footage of smokestacks belching black smoke, smoldering factories, barbed wire fences. The color palette of the film is foggy green. Smits has a great eye for landscape: a shoe floating in sludgy water, blue fire coming out of a smokestack, the piles of garbage Benjamin wanders through. Continue Reading »
[Editor's Note: Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) is partnering with the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) to highlight the films in IFFR's prestigious VPRO Tiger Awards competition (given to first- or second-time filmmakers). A weeklong series, encompassing 15 films, as well as a "shorts" program, Rotterdam @ BAM gives New Yorkers (and New York's close neighbors) an unprecedented opportunity to take a look at these award-winning films from all over the world.]
Mama, co-directed by Russian husband and wife Yelena and Nicolay Renard, shows a couple of days in the life of a mother and her obese 40-year-old son. There is no dialogue in the film. There is no overt plot, although there are clues that something is about to happen (one scene shows the mother packing a suitcase with the son’s clothes), and the film is made up of long silent takes, one after the other after the other, observing the rhythms of these two characters as they go through their daily lives.
The mother is overly protective of her son, although maybe he really does need it. Mama shows the dangers of babying an adult. The two of them sit at a table as the rain batters the window, and he eats the hard-boiled eggs that she has cooked for him, and she reaches out and wipes his mouth after every bite. He sits in the tub, naked, and she gives him a bath, a startlingly intimate scene. She crouches on the linoleum shining his shoes. These are not scenes so much as extended tableaux. Continue Reading »
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