The House Next Door

Archive: Festivals

Rotterdam 2012: Boca Porn

Snuff, Victims of PleasureWalter Hugo Khouri is an undervalued master. I had seen two of his films before watching a third in the Boca do Lixo series. Both 1964's Eros and 1968's The Amorous Ones are strangely disquieting films about casanovas facing mortality. In both films men use and abuse women to compete with each other, and then, upon realizing that the women are human beings, get slapped with their own desperation. The films' tones shift from light to dark while the characters keep consistent. Men end alone, lost in nature, their charm wound up.

One could say many of the same things about 1980's Invitation to Pleasure, which played at Rotterdam. Its two male leads are a middle-aged dentist and his businessman friend who set up a bachelor's loft to have sex with young women together, each man glancing at the other as they go. In time, one wife finds out; the other's known all along. And just as the men are trapped inside their desires, the women are trapped inside a social condition. "Don't fool yourself into thinking it's better out there," the younger wife hears, and fears she's heard right; the older has long since decided not to give up the big house and nice clothes. These women's minds are dying. Is their place better than that of the screaming girls in the loft? Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: The Pornographer and Lilian M: Confidential Report

The PornographerThe Pornographer could also be called The Movie Buff. This 1970 film's hero, Miguel Metralha (Stênio Garcia), is a wannabe gangster whose head dances with images of Cagney and Bogart shootouts. He's also unemployed. One day he walks into a publisher's office and says he'd be great for the magazine. As he unveils horrific tales of nude ladies in strange positions (male coworkers giggling, almost cheering with delight), we see pornography, like Hollywood, as a fantasy.

The film is exemplary of the Boca do Lixo's comic style, much of which revolves around fantasy. Boca characters keep escaping into pop-culture references, and at times the entire movies do. The Pornographer is literally pastiche; its director, João Callegaro (who's spent the rest of his life since making the film in advertising), found scenes from The Public Enemy, Angels with Dirty Faces, and other classic gangster films in the trash outside the American consulate and edited them in. Callegaro then used slapstick to crash the fantasy into reality, as when the hero opens a wonderful looking gift box and a spring-wound boxing glove smacks him. Like many Boca comedies, the film gets more melancholic, in a creepy way, as it goes. The dreamer earns the wrath of real gangsters, who chase him through a fun house. As he turns and turns, fleeing certain death, he keeps confronting in mirrors what a life's worth of fantasies have helped him create: distorted images of himself. Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: The Red Light Bandit

The Red Light Bandit

"It's a western about the third world," the news ticker says at the start of 1968's The Red Light Bandit. Its hero, played by Pablo Villaça, is a soulful, slim rapist and murderer from a favela, whose mother tried to abort him so that he wouldn't starve. He's here to complete "the most complete of all criminal districts": the Boca do Lixo.

The Red Light Bandit is an electric, legendary movie, one Brazilian cinephiles know practically by heart. Its director, Rogério Sganzerla, was 21 years old when he made it, and the anarchic energy of his "Zorro of the poor" could only have been captured by someone so young. Imagine a city kid drunk on comic books and radio plays and getting the neighbors to act them out with him. Then imagine, through the fantasy, a city revealed. "A punk tried to take a wallet from another punk," a cop says. "However, both were penniless." Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: The Comedy

The Comedy

Programmatically joyless, more cringe-inducing than laugh-drawing, Rick Alverson's The Comedy does everything it possibly can to disclaim its title. Featuring Tim Heidecker of the Tim and Eric comic team, it focuses on Swanson, a 35-year-old man living off his comatose father's wealth and engaging in a series of outrageous (anti)social interactions that just about make Ben Stiller's hellish Greenberg look like a paragon of civility.

Alverson buries all hope of audience identification with his obnoxious protagonist right at the start: Following a slow-motion drunken-sumo-party intro (almost abstract in its imbibed nuttiness), Swanson verbally abuses his father's male nurse by suggesting he may inadvertently carry his patients' feces under his fingernails. After that, none of the multiple upcoming indiscretions seem shocking—save, maybe, for a throwaway endorsement of Hitler as "a great cheerleader for his nation." Part immoral Seth Rogen-esque slob, part kissing cousin to Lars Von Trier's prankish Idiots, Heidecker's character willfully violates rules of social conduct in order to follow his own, however twisted, pleasure principle. Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: The Margin

The Margin

The films we consider historically vital are usually films we can easily see. For every movement an Intro to Film course might deem major, from Russian Formalism (Battleship Potemkin) to Italian Neorealism (Bicycle Thieves), there's at least one exemplar that can be easily procured. In an alternate universe, The Margin would be deemed every bit as integral to the history of the avant-garde as Meshes of the Afternoon. But how many have seen The Margin? Very few people saw the film in Brazil, let alone abroad, after its release in 1967, but many of its viewers were deeply inspired by it, and built Cinema Marginal off of its example, from essence to name. For those who know this hidden history, the film is totemic. Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: Orgy or: the Man Who Gave Birth

Orgy or: the Man Who Gave Birth

The story of Boca do Lixo filmmaking began a few years before any of its movies. In 1962, The Given Word, the story of a man who becomes a local hero for demanding entry into a church despite authority's refusal, became the first Brazilian film to win the Palme D'Or at Cannes. The film insightfully analyzed Brazilian social inequalities of religion, gender, class, and race, but also humanized its characters well enough to give the film mass appeal. In a way similar to how Rashomon's top prize at Venice a decade earlier created a profile for Japanese cinema in the West, The Given Word's prize alerted European cultural elites to Brazilian film. Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: small roads

small roads

As modest and self-explanatory as its lower-case title suggests, small roads is James Benning's latest contemplation of American landscape as an awesome man-made sculpture. In contrast to RR, which was focused on moving railway vehicles, small roads examines the ways in which paths—firmly asserted in asphalt and only occasionally traversed—shape the visible world.

Shot with digital camera over the course of two years (even as Benning was working on other projects), the movie arrives barely annotated, so that you need the director himself to point out its underlying geographical journey—starting in California and headed first to the South, then to the Midwest. What we see are 47 immobile shots of roads in a roughly organized order that follows the succession of the seasons. At first, the structuring principle seems to be that each shot has one moving car in it before the image peters out. It comes as a minor shock, then, when shot number eight ends with no vehicle appearance whatsoever. From then on, all bets are off—in a manner of speaking. Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: Room 514

Room 514

Sharon Bar-Ziv's debut feature, shot over the course of five days after an intense period of rehearsals, strives for a handheld immediacy and raw emotional power that it only intermittently achieves. More than anything else, Room 514 plays like a stripped-down, if not downright impoverished, version of A Few Good Men, in which an army newcomer's zeal is pitted against the unwritten, near-atavistic code of old timers and their ruthlessly programmed minions.

When Anna (Asia Neifeld), a Russian-born Israeli soldier serving as an MP, starts to interrogate members of an elite "Samaria Wolves" battalion about an alleged incident of excessive anti-Palestinian violence, she opens a can of worms quite impossible to handle. A young woman standing up to her supposed peers, she has to deal with a torrent of verbal abuse, ranging from sexist remarks ("You cunt") to political allegations ("You leftie") to ethnic slurs ("You little Russian"). Her dignity undermined but her resolve undaunted, Anna grows steadier in her sense of purpose after one of the soldiers decides to cooperate. But then things take a unexpectedly tragic turn. Continue Reading »




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Rotterdam 2012: The Option

The Option

In the 1960s, a branch of Brazilian cinema emerged so daring, thrilling, and varied that in hindsight people disagreed even over what to call it. For critic-filmmaker Jairo Ferreira, who chronicled the movement, its unconventional narratives and formal audacity made it the "cinema of invention"; for filmmaker-critic Glauber Rocha, briefly a member but chiefly part of the rival Cinema Novo movement, its films were "udigrudi," a Brazilian spin on the American underground. The consensus term, finally, was Cinema Marginal, and though many of the movement's titles were censored by Brazil's military dictatorship, it meant marginal and not marginalized. To be marginalized implies a passive victimization; to be marginal can—and often did—suggest a proud self-definition. Continue Reading »




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Sundance Film Festival 2012: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Wrong

Beasts of the Southern Wild

As a Southern-gothic fairy tale about post-Katrina New Orleans, Beasts of the Southern Wild could have easily turned out to be a crass and unwittingly exploitative work. Co-writer/director Ben Zeitlin's fanciful approach to his understandably touchy subject matter theoretically seems glib. Thankfully, every time Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar threaten to oversimplify their story with mawkishly twee sentimentality, they steer the film's elemental narrative in another direction. The hopefulness that viewers take away from the film, the most buzzed-about title at this year's Sundance, feels earned thanks to Zeitlin and Alibar's focus on their characters' fears of imminent abandonment and annihilation. As a film about the seductive and essential power of hope, Beasts of the Southern Wild is a warm, accomplished, and fitting tribute to the fighting spirit of New Orleans.

This is the film you might get if Terry Gilliam conflated David Gordon Green's George Washington with Alice in Wonderland. We follow Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), a six-year-old girl that lives with her single father, Wink (Dwight Henry), in a remote region of New Orleans only referred to as "The Bathtub." Since Hushpuppy spends much of her time by herself, all of her fears are filtered through a convoluted system of icons and symbols. This proves that she's a product of her environment. She listens to animals and people's hearts because her father has a heart condition, fears cannibalism after a Bathtub resident teaches her that all living things are "meat," and even fantasizes about wild rampaging boars because Wink has a big fat black hog on his farm. Continue Reading »




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Sundance Film Festival 2012: Shut Up and Play the Hits and V/H/S

Shut Up and Play the Hits

Shut Up and Play the Hits, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern's documentary about the emotional toll that LCD Soundsytem's final live show had on frontman James Murphy, dances around the fact that the band was essentially a solo act. (Though Murphy performed all of the instruments on LCD Soundsystem's self-titled debut, a number of people, Nancy Whang and Pat Honey among them, became an integral part of the band's sound after Murphy took the album on the road.) This is presumably the reason why Murphy is the only person associated with LCD Soundsystem who's interviewed in the film and therefore gets to tell us what the end of the band signifies.

Since we know Murphy isn't retiring from making music, why are we seriously mourning the death of what was originally a one-man band? The answer is we're not really mourning, because Murphy isn't completely serious about burying the band. The doc starts with a sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek epitaph: "If it's a funeral, let's have the best funeral ever." Still, there's genuine sentiment behind that opening intertitle. This is shown in footage of Murphy dazedly walking around after the band's final performance and later during a lunchtime interview conducted by Chuck Klosterman. He also tells the crowd at Madison Square Garden that he wears his father's watch while performing for good luck, which suggests he's sentimental about the prospect of ditching the band. But isn't it enough that Murphy will just move on to his next project? Continue Reading »




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Sundance Film Festival 2012: Room 237

Room 237

With Rodney Ascher's fantastic hoot of a movie, this year's omnipresent Sundance tagline ("Look Again") has finally lived up to its promise. Room 237 is a sustained act of tireless scrutiny, representing a near-kabbalistic approach to cinema, in which a sacred celluloid text is all that matters, and one can only aspire to offer a tentative interpretation of it—if only to then reread it yet again.

The text in question is Stanley Kubrick's supremely conceptual mind-fuck The Shining, and Room 237 serves largely as a hospitable soapbox for a few devoted fans and scholars who are free to unravel their theories on the film's "hidden meanings." The scale of devotion at play is indicated early on, when one of the speakers describes a childhood screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey as the "first religious experience" of his life. The entire movie—the full title of which actually reads Room 237: Being an Inquiry into "The Shining" in 9 Parts—plays a bit like an awe-stricken medieval exegesis of the Bible, taking the chilly story of Jack Torrance's legendary psychological meltdown as a mere starting point to comment on the nature of, well, everything. Continue Reading »




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Sundance Film Festival 2012: The Surrogate and John Dies at the End

The Surrogate

"Cleansing…but victorious" is how the lead protagonist of The Surrogate describes his first sexual experience. The former emotion comes close to describing the resonance of writer-director Ben Lewin's film about the libidinal awakening of Mark O'Brien (John Hawkes), a real-life polio-afflicted poet and journalist. Thanks to Hawkes's fantastic performance as Mark and Lewin's clever, nuanced dialogue, The Surrogate is an accomplished portrait of a resilient man that, through sex therapy, was able to experience something new and extraordinary.

Mark, a Catholic with all kinds of stereotypical faith-based hang-ups about sex, first starts thinking about doing it after he develops a crush on Amanda (Annika Marks), a pretty young woman who briefly serves as his caretaker and assistant. Mark's temporarily crushed when Amanda doesn't reciprocate his feelings, but after he starts to research an article about how the handicapped have sex, repressed passions are suddenly aroused within him. So after talking candidly with Father Brendan (William H. Macy), a conflicted by empathetic Catholic priest, Mark agrees to meet with Cheryl Greene (a frequently naked Helen Hunt), a sexual surrogate that teaches Mark about his body and how to stimulate a woman's body too. Continue Reading »




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Sundance Film Festival 2012: 2 Days in New York and For a Good Time, Call…

2 Days in New York

When it comes to Julie Delpy, the key question remains the old Barbra Streisand one. Namely, how much of her can you take in one sitting? A dedicated movie-polymath, effortlessly bilingual and scooping the best of both Old and New World, Delpy resembles a bizarre version of Miranda July: Instead of celebrating lonely quirks of a self-centered sensibility, she throws herself (and the viewer) into a comic vortex of agitated, super-busy scenes of noisy familial squabbles and cerebral lovers' quarrels, which seems a projection of her own coyly humane view of life.

Her new movie is a sequel to 2 Days in Paris, in which she played a fabulously promiscuous European chick to Adam Goldberg's perpetually shocked American straight man. Five years have passed, and Goldberg is no longer in the picture: Delpy's character, Marion, is now living in New York with a new partner, Mingus (Chris Rock), and two children—one of hers and one of his. As befits a typical New York couple, Mingus is a radio-show host (and a Village Voice reporter, no less), while Marion prepares to open a debut photo exhibition, frankly examining her previous sexual relationships and involving a public act of a (literal) "selling of her soul" to an anonymous buyer. Continue Reading »




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Sundance Film Festival 2012: Keep the Lights On

Keep the Lights On

There's such a world of difference between Ira Sachs's second and third features—Forty Shades of Blue is as beautifully delicate as Married Life is self-consciously smarmy—that I approached his new movie with anxious trepidation. I'm happy to report that Keep the Lights On is a major achievement that puts Sachs back where Forty Shades of Blue left him: as a supreme observer of the perils of shared intimacy. The paradox at the heart of his style seems to be that lyricism doesn't make him foggy-eyed; the grainy haze he bathes his scenes in doesn't blur the edges of the masterfully rendered personalities of his characters.

The new film shares some thematic concerns with Forty Shades of Blue, again focusing on a foreign-born character living in the U.S. and undergoing a severely confusing relationship, in which strong sexual connection goes hand in hand with self-destruction. But where Forty Shades of Blue told a story of marital infidelity, Keep the Lights On explores the ways in which one lover's drug abuse steadily undermines a couple's mutual trust. Continue Reading »




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