Lassie
Written and Directed
by Charles Sturridge
Remember, this is a kid's film. Sure this is pure unadulterated schmaltz. It's supposed to be. After all, Eric Knight's original 1938 novel was schmaltzy, the first movie version, which introduced Elizabeth Taylor to the world, was also, and the 756,342 remakes, redos, TV shows and gawd knows what else, also are. It's the nature of the beast.
What matters here is if the film is done well, which it is. The plot follows that of the original book. We're in Yorkshire, England, where little Joe Carraclough(Jonathan Mason) is living with his working-class parents(Samantha Morton and John Lynch) and not doing very well at school. Things are happy anyway, until Dad is laid off at the mine and they're forced to sell their eponymous collie to the crotchety-yet-lovable Duke of Rudling(Peter O'Toole), who wants it for his cute-yet-formidable granddaughter Cilla(Hester Odgers).
Lassie, that Einstein of canines, doesn't like the situation very much, especially since the Duke has given Lassie's care over to the evil Eddie Hynes (Steve Pemberton), who runs his kennels. But he's not match for Lassie, who can dig tunnels and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
After she's escaped several times to return to the Carraclough's tiny apartment, The Duke and Cilla take the bitch up to Scotland, five hundred miles to the north. Lassie escapes yet again, and begins the epic journey where she testifies in court, outwits Glascow dog catchers, testifies in court, and helps an itinerant dwarf(Peter Dinklage) with his puppet theater and fending off ignorant muggers. Lassie can do anything except maybe fly a plane, but then again we knew that from the beginning…at least those of us who are old enough to remember the various TV shows or were forced to read the book in grade school do.
With the exception of a brief appearance by a CGI Loch Ness monster, this is moviemaking of the old school, and is worth taking the little ones to before they get too cynical.
One Last Thing…
Directed by
Alex Steyermark
Drama-dy is hard to do, especially when we've got one of those made-for-TV tearjerker ones which are too cute by half. Barry Stringfellow's script manages to do it successfully, and not bad for a first time screenwriter.
Dylan Jameison(Michael Angarano) in the final stages of some sort of cancer. He's applied to the “United Wish Givers” society for one last good time, and on the day he's to have his wish announced, he's realized he's made a mistake, he doesn't really want to go fishing with football star Jason O'Malley(Johnny Messner), he wants a rollicking weekend with supermodel Nikki Sinclair(Sunny Mabrey).
This, of course, mortifies both his mother Karen(Cynthia Nixon) and the foundation. But Nikki's agent Arlene(Gina Gershon) thinks that a visit would make for good publicity for one of the most troublesome models in the fashion biz, and a brief visit is quickly arranged. It doesn't go all that well, because she keeps dreaming about the boyfriend she dumped and who then killed himself.
Through a typical movie-of-the-week style plot twist, our hero and his two best friends(Matt Bush and Gideon Glick) head off to New York to basically stalk Nikki and see what the city is all about. Being teenagers, the friends behave wackilly. Nothing really wrong with that. The whole thing has a spiritual dimension that kind'a works under the circumstances, especially with Buddhist shopkeeper from
Brooklyn explaining reincarnation and Dylan's visions of his dead father(an uncredited Ethan Hawke) all over the place. The ending is sweet, and there's no real happy ending, which under the circumstances is also rather good.
Since the thing is coming out on DVD three weeks after the theatrical release, wait and rent it.
The Heart of the Game
Directed by
Ward Serrill
One thing about documentaries is that the filmmakers don't always know how the film is going to end. When Ward Serril began working on the film seven years ago, it was supposed to be about a guy named Bill Resler, who was a tax attorney teaching tax law at a university who decided to moonlight as a coach for a girl's basketball team, and to a small extent it still is, but then, a couple of years after Serrill started filming, something happened.
What that was was the arrival of Darnellia Russell, an extremely talented freshman who basically takes over the plot. She's not one of those perky poor heroines who's only flaw is her economic background. Since this is a documentary rather than one of those “inspired by a true story” fluffers, she has a number of problems which are her own damn fault.
There are also other girls who have problems, and since Daranellia wasn't the focus of the film for the first few years of the project, we get to see what those were as well. We also see the team's archrivals as well, and they're pretty inspirational was well.
But the focus of the film becomes Darnellia and her problems, which turns into a court case and a fight with the governing body of the Washington state high school basketball league, who wind up looking like a bunch of intolerant fools.
This is one of the best docs of this sort I've seen since “Murderball,” and one could probably see a dramatization sometime in the next few years. In the meantime, see it now.
Akeelah and the Bee
Written and Directed
by Doug Atchison
Too cute by half, that's the whole film in a nutshell. Of course the plot is exactly what you'd expect it to be as this is an inspirational kiddy flick. Call me jaded, but one would expect that a film with this cast would deserve a better script.
So, we've got cute-as-a-button little Akeelah(Keke Palmer), an underachiever living in the ghetto in LA, who's English teacher knows that she is a possible genius if only she puts her mind to it. Her love of words is great and she can whip pretty much everyone's butt in Scrabble®. So the principal of her run-down sorry-ass school, Mr. Welch(Curtis Armstrong), decides to force her to get into the school's first Scripps® Spelling Bee. The obvious happens.
Here's where the film begins to fall apart. Akeela's mom Tanya (Angela Bassett) hates her. Not HATES her, but there's a tension that doesn't ring true, here. Mom doesn't want her to achieve in school, so Akeela has to study behind her back. When Mr. Welch gets the eminent and erudite academic Dr. Larabee(Laurence Fishburne) to tutor her over the summer.
When Fishburne and Palmer are working together the film is magic, they have chemistry together and the acting is both subtle and moving. Same thing when she's with the other “brainiacs” she begins to hang out with in Beverly hills.
But we get back to the insane relationship with the mother which ruins the whole movie. There's a scene during the state finals where the mother tries to destroy Akeela's chances. Not only doesn't ring true, but it's absurd as hell. It's one of THE wasted scenes in the entire history of cinema, destroying whatever credibility that follows and lets the writer-director sleepwalk through the rest of the film in a particularly formulistic way.
From that point on, it's not only stupid, it's dim-witted, brainless and obtuse to the point of being insulting to the audience.
This film is, quite simply, a gilded turd. Geez!
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
The Brooklyn international film festival
The Brooklyn film festival is calling itself Enigma 9, why is an enigma. Now back to tribeca....
Tribeca VI: The opening night
Considering that the Tribeca film festival was founded as a response to the horrific attacks of 9/11/01, it's perfectly understandable that the first major cinematic tribute to the heroes of that day open it. Since there are no real movie starts in the film, the red carpet gala at the Zigfield tonight is going to be somewhat subdued.
Also, I'm not that much into celebrity watching and I'm generally not invited to the parties anyway.
However, as you've undoubtably already noticed, I'm going to be at as many screenings as his humanly possible.
Here's the review for:
United 93
Written and Directed
by Paul Greengrass
People are saying that this is too early to relive the events of Sept. 11, 2001. After all, the wound is still very deep and the war that was started by the attacks is still going on, but on the other hand, we’ve already had lots and lots of takes on the attacks, including at least two TV movies and dozens of books and documentary films, including one that made over a hundred million dollars at the box office. So there’s really nothing to complain about, at least on that account.
So what are we to make of the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” of World War III?
Well, this is docudrama at it’s best. Done in real time, we see the hijackers(Louis Alsamari, Jamie Harding, Omar Berdouni and Khalid Abdalla) praying in their hotel rooms while everybody else goes on about their business. Except for SNL vet Denny Dillon and David Rasche, as passengers on the ill-fated flight, there’s no one who can actually claim to be anything close to being a movie star, and in fact auteur Paul Greengrass actually got FAA operations manager Ben Sliney and a number of other people to play themselves. Not that it helped any, but it didn’t detract either. There are so many parts here, that except for the hijacker who actually is flying the plane(Abdalla), everyone is just a face in the crowd, and considering the events of that day, that’s the way it should have been…
The best thing about the film is the tension. Like, say, “Titanic,” we know how the thing is going to end before we get in, the plane crashes in Pennsylvania, but since the film just doesn’t take place on the plane, but in the control towers in New York and New Jersey, the FAA headquarters in Virginia and the Military air lanes monitoring station in upstate New York, we get the full blown confusion and horror as the crisis gets bigger and more horrific.
This is an exceptionally fine film, and is going to be as close as we’re ever going to get when it comes to recreating the events of 9/11. There’s no politics here, just memory. It’s going to be seen eventually, and when the public is ready, it’ll be considered a classic.
Also, I'm not that much into celebrity watching and I'm generally not invited to the parties anyway.
However, as you've undoubtably already noticed, I'm going to be at as many screenings as his humanly possible.
Here's the review for:
United 93
Written and Directed
by Paul Greengrass
People are saying that this is too early to relive the events of Sept. 11, 2001. After all, the wound is still very deep and the war that was started by the attacks is still going on, but on the other hand, we’ve already had lots and lots of takes on the attacks, including at least two TV movies and dozens of books and documentary films, including one that made over a hundred million dollars at the box office. So there’s really nothing to complain about, at least on that account.
So what are we to make of the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” of World War III?
Well, this is docudrama at it’s best. Done in real time, we see the hijackers(Louis Alsamari, Jamie Harding, Omar Berdouni and Khalid Abdalla) praying in their hotel rooms while everybody else goes on about their business. Except for SNL vet Denny Dillon and David Rasche, as passengers on the ill-fated flight, there’s no one who can actually claim to be anything close to being a movie star, and in fact auteur Paul Greengrass actually got FAA operations manager Ben Sliney and a number of other people to play themselves. Not that it helped any, but it didn’t detract either. There are so many parts here, that except for the hijacker who actually is flying the plane(Abdalla), everyone is just a face in the crowd, and considering the events of that day, that’s the way it should have been…
The best thing about the film is the tension. Like, say, “Titanic,” we know how the thing is going to end before we get in, the plane crashes in Pennsylvania, but since the film just doesn’t take place on the plane, but in the control towers in New York and New Jersey, the FAA headquarters in Virginia and the Military air lanes monitoring station in upstate New York, we get the full blown confusion and horror as the crisis gets bigger and more horrific.
This is an exceptionally fine film, and is going to be as close as we’re ever going to get when it comes to recreating the events of 9/11. There’s no politics here, just memory. It’s going to be seen eventually, and when the public is ready, it’ll be considered a classic.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Tribeca V: Foreign language flicks part one
The Promise
Directed by
Chen Kaige
Mythological films area hit-and-miss affair. A lot of myths don't make all that much sense evenwithout the cultural hoo-ha which tends to make things even worse. Now Iread somewhere that this film was based on a genuine ancient myth and elsewherethat it wasn't, but the whole thing is so weird that it still might be.
Thefilm takes place in the age of myth “when the world was young and gods andhumans lived together.” We meet young Qingcheng(Guan Xiaotong), a young ragamuffinlooting a battlefield of food and clothing. She's captured by young Wuhuan(ShiLei), who agrees to let her out of the trap she's fallen into if she agreesto be his slave forever. She agrees, and as soon as he lets her out, shebonks him on the head and runs off, taking the food with her.
Nowto us modern westerners, little Q did the right thing, as promises made underduress, like being caught in a trap, aren't legally or morally binding, especiallyone like that, but to the ancient Chinese, this was a horrible faux pas.
As Q is walking on the stones crossing a lake, she's confronted by
GoddessManshen (Hong Chen), who rewards her by not only informing her of her mothersdeath, but offering her a life of wealth and riches, the only condition beingthat she's going to lose all her lovers. Q readily agrees.
Cut to20 years later, we're in the middle of the war between the army of the kingdom[of what, we're not told], and the evil duke of the north, who it turns outis a grown up Wuhuan(Nicholas Tse), his opponent is the great General Guangming(HiroyukiSanada), master of the crimson armor [which was the title of the film fora while], who's tactic is to steal an army of slaves [okay, bought, but thedealer(Qian Bo) is immediately conscripted as part of the gang], and havethem run over by a massive hoard of stampeding bulls.
The tactic works,but only because one of the slaves, Kunlun(Jang Dong-Kun) is a superherowith the power of lighting speed. This impresses the General, who offersto make him his personal slave. Since Kunlun doesn't know any better, heagrees.
Then Wuhaun sends a supernatural assassin named Snow Wolf(LiuYe) to kill the great General, but is defeated by Kunlun, who dons the crimsonarmor at his master's order and goes off to save the king(Cheng Qian) fromWuhaun's army. But the army is enthralled by the grown up Qingcheng (CeciliaCheung) striptease, and that confuses Kunlun, who kills his majesty in orderto save Q, who's hanging by her fingernails from the roof.
The mistakenidentity romantic comedy plot is combined by the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey®one and we've got a relatively perverse romantic quadrangle.
Thisisn't nearly as good as it claims to be. The plot is hackneyed, the actingis good, but not great, the CGI is mediocre, and the fighting-while-suspended-by-wireschoreography is kind of boring. This is purported to be the most expensivemovie ever made in China, but it doesn't look it. Unless you're really intochopsocky, don't bother.
Brasilia 18% (Brazil) - International Premiere.
Written and Directed by
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
This might be called “The Case of the Hallucinating detective.”
Isn'ta detective, he's a coroner, called by the Brazillian government from hispractice in LA in order to identify a body that might be a a famous missingperson that would make it a lurid murder case.
We meet Dr. Olavo Bilac(Carlos Alberto Ricelli) on the plane, which is about to land at Brasilia's airport,and here he starts to hallucinate visions of his dead wife Laura(Bruna Lombardi),who as this film is Brazillian, is stark naked. He's met at the airport byhis sister(Laura Lustosa) and the head coroner(), and he's taken to see thecorpse, and is informed that the DNA doesn't match that of the victim, EugeniaCâmara(Karine Carvalho), who may or may not be actually dead.
Butthe powers that be want Eugenia dead and want the body to be declared hersin order to cover up the scandal, which, Eugenia, who is both a major moviestar and a fearless government investigator, had been threatening to be madepublic. The guy accused, Augusto(Michel Melamed), subscribes to this theory,but Congresswoman Georgesand Romero(Malu Mader) is willing to give up hervirtue to Olavo in order to convince our hero otherwise.
Unfortunatelyfor him, Eugenia telepathically contacts our hero and he's convinced she'salive. The whole thing is silly as hell, but in Brazil, there's lots of corruption,so who knows? However, the supernatural element really takes away from thepolitical corruption angle. It could have been better, obviously, but it'sstill a lot of fun in spots.
Men at Work (Kargaran Mashgoul-e Karand) (Iran)
Written and Directed
by Mani Haghighi
Comedycomes as much from situation as from character, and that's why it's so popularon television. One doesn't expect such things from Iran, where the governmentis not known for it's sense of humor, or even tolerating it in others.
Butthis is Mani Haghighi, the Woody Allen of Persia, who's previous films havebeen banned by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and still managesto get his stuff financed. Good for him!
There's no real politicsor blasphemy here as we meet four rich friends returning from a skiing tripin the mountains surrounding Teheran stop for a pee break and come upon alarge monolith, which they vow to vandalize and overthrow.
In otherwords they decide to move an immovable object, and the rest of the worldcomes to watch them in this absurd and impossible task, well, not the world,actually, but wives, girlfriends, strangers and the occasional old man witha donkey show up and either try to help or critique the project, which becomes more and more difficult to achieve.
We discover bits and pieces ofthe lives of the original four as they plow ahead with their quest. The jokes work, and the acting is great. This is farce at it's finest.
The Mist in the Palm Trees (La Niebla en las Palmeras) (Spain) - International Premiere.
written and directed by
Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador
Avant-gardefilmmaking is one of the hardest of genres to do. The reason is that mostof the tricks have been done already and almost always done better. In general these so-called “experiments” are horrid. There's no entertainment valueusually, and what you get is boring acts of masturbation that gives the audiencea headache.
Only very rarely does a film of this type appeal to anaudience of normal people, and those are the ones that the snooty are mostlikely to reject and thus never see the light of day at even film festivals.This is almost unique in that this is actually GOOD.
Lola Salvador'sfather was mythical to her. Both her parents died when she was very young,but her father, who died in the second world war, was special. He was a physicistwho may have been asked by both sides to work on their nuclear bomb programs.
Sowhat she and co-conspirator did was to construct a narrative as to what happenedto him, using old photographs, home movie footage, and stuff she found invarious vaults and waste dumps to create a dreamscape of a soul caught inlimbo, slowly losing it's grip on the life it once lead.
Also, there'shome video footage from the 1980s and '90s, where Ms. Salvador goes to Havana,Cuba, where she grew up, and Spain, France and Germany to search for theremains of her father's life.
They also add things like title cards,to make parts of the film flow like an old silent film. The effect is striking.That the stock footage and home movies are rotting away is for once a positivething, as gives an impression of memory and consciousness fading into nothingness.It's far more beautiful than it has a right to be.
Directed by
Chen Kaige
Mythological films area hit-and-miss affair. A lot of myths don't make all that much sense evenwithout the cultural hoo-ha which tends to make things even worse. Now Iread somewhere that this film was based on a genuine ancient myth and elsewherethat it wasn't, but the whole thing is so weird that it still might be.
Thefilm takes place in the age of myth “when the world was young and gods andhumans lived together.” We meet young Qingcheng(Guan Xiaotong), a young ragamuffinlooting a battlefield of food and clothing. She's captured by young Wuhuan(ShiLei), who agrees to let her out of the trap she's fallen into if she agreesto be his slave forever. She agrees, and as soon as he lets her out, shebonks him on the head and runs off, taking the food with her.
Nowto us modern westerners, little Q did the right thing, as promises made underduress, like being caught in a trap, aren't legally or morally binding, especiallyone like that, but to the ancient Chinese, this was a horrible faux pas.
As Q is walking on the stones crossing a lake, she's confronted by
GoddessManshen (Hong Chen), who rewards her by not only informing her of her mothersdeath, but offering her a life of wealth and riches, the only condition beingthat she's going to lose all her lovers. Q readily agrees.
Cut to20 years later, we're in the middle of the war between the army of the kingdom[of what, we're not told], and the evil duke of the north, who it turns outis a grown up Wuhuan(Nicholas Tse), his opponent is the great General Guangming(HiroyukiSanada), master of the crimson armor [which was the title of the film fora while], who's tactic is to steal an army of slaves [okay, bought, but thedealer(Qian Bo) is immediately conscripted as part of the gang], and havethem run over by a massive hoard of stampeding bulls.
The tactic works,but only because one of the slaves, Kunlun(Jang Dong-Kun) is a superherowith the power of lighting speed. This impresses the General, who offersto make him his personal slave. Since Kunlun doesn't know any better, heagrees.
Then Wuhaun sends a supernatural assassin named Snow Wolf(LiuYe) to kill the great General, but is defeated by Kunlun, who dons the crimsonarmor at his master's order and goes off to save the king(Cheng Qian) fromWuhaun's army. But the army is enthralled by the grown up Qingcheng (CeciliaCheung) striptease, and that confuses Kunlun, who kills his majesty in orderto save Q, who's hanging by her fingernails from the roof.
The mistakenidentity romantic comedy plot is combined by the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey®one and we've got a relatively perverse romantic quadrangle.
Thisisn't nearly as good as it claims to be. The plot is hackneyed, the actingis good, but not great, the CGI is mediocre, and the fighting-while-suspended-by-wireschoreography is kind of boring. This is purported to be the most expensivemovie ever made in China, but it doesn't look it. Unless you're really intochopsocky, don't bother.
Brasilia 18% (Brazil) - International Premiere.
Written and Directed by
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
This might be called “The Case of the Hallucinating detective.”
Isn'ta detective, he's a coroner, called by the Brazillian government from hispractice in LA in order to identify a body that might be a a famous missingperson that would make it a lurid murder case.
We meet Dr. Olavo Bilac(Carlos Alberto Ricelli) on the plane, which is about to land at Brasilia's airport,and here he starts to hallucinate visions of his dead wife Laura(Bruna Lombardi),who as this film is Brazillian, is stark naked. He's met at the airport byhis sister(Laura Lustosa) and the head coroner(), and he's taken to see thecorpse, and is informed that the DNA doesn't match that of the victim, EugeniaCâmara(Karine Carvalho), who may or may not be actually dead.
Butthe powers that be want Eugenia dead and want the body to be declared hersin order to cover up the scandal, which, Eugenia, who is both a major moviestar and a fearless government investigator, had been threatening to be madepublic. The guy accused, Augusto(Michel Melamed), subscribes to this theory,but Congresswoman Georgesand Romero(Malu Mader) is willing to give up hervirtue to Olavo in order to convince our hero otherwise.
Unfortunatelyfor him, Eugenia telepathically contacts our hero and he's convinced she'salive. The whole thing is silly as hell, but in Brazil, there's lots of corruption,so who knows? However, the supernatural element really takes away from thepolitical corruption angle. It could have been better, obviously, but it'sstill a lot of fun in spots.
Men at Work (Kargaran Mashgoul-e Karand) (Iran)
Written and Directed
by Mani Haghighi
Comedycomes as much from situation as from character, and that's why it's so popularon television. One doesn't expect such things from Iran, where the governmentis not known for it's sense of humor, or even tolerating it in others.
Butthis is Mani Haghighi, the Woody Allen of Persia, who's previous films havebeen banned by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and still managesto get his stuff financed. Good for him!
There's no real politicsor blasphemy here as we meet four rich friends returning from a skiing tripin the mountains surrounding Teheran stop for a pee break and come upon alarge monolith, which they vow to vandalize and overthrow.
In otherwords they decide to move an immovable object, and the rest of the worldcomes to watch them in this absurd and impossible task, well, not the world,actually, but wives, girlfriends, strangers and the occasional old man witha donkey show up and either try to help or critique the project, which becomes more and more difficult to achieve.
We discover bits and pieces ofthe lives of the original four as they plow ahead with their quest. The jokes work, and the acting is great. This is farce at it's finest.
The Mist in the Palm Trees (La Niebla en las Palmeras) (Spain) - International Premiere.
written and directed by
Carlos Molinero and Lola Salvador
Avant-gardefilmmaking is one of the hardest of genres to do. The reason is that mostof the tricks have been done already and almost always done better. In general these so-called “experiments” are horrid. There's no entertainment valueusually, and what you get is boring acts of masturbation that gives the audiencea headache.
Only very rarely does a film of this type appeal to anaudience of normal people, and those are the ones that the snooty are mostlikely to reject and thus never see the light of day at even film festivals.This is almost unique in that this is actually GOOD.
Lola Salvador'sfather was mythical to her. Both her parents died when she was very young,but her father, who died in the second world war, was special. He was a physicistwho may have been asked by both sides to work on their nuclear bomb programs.
Sowhat she and co-conspirator did was to construct a narrative as to what happenedto him, using old photographs, home movie footage, and stuff she found invarious vaults and waste dumps to create a dreamscape of a soul caught inlimbo, slowly losing it's grip on the life it once lead.
Also, there'shome video footage from the 1980s and '90s, where Ms. Salvador goes to Havana,Cuba, where she grew up, and Spain, France and Germany to search for theremains of her father's life.
They also add things like title cards,to make parts of the film flow like an old silent film. The effect is striking.That the stock footage and home movies are rotting away is for once a positivething, as gives an impression of memory and consciousness fading into nothingness.It's far more beautiful than it has a right to be.
Saturday, April 22, 2006
Tribeca IV: Docs about the middle east, part one
Dear Father, Quiet, We're Shooting... (Avi Hayakar, Sheket yorim...)
(Israel) - North American Premiere.
A documentery Written and Directed by
David Benchetrit and Senyora Bar David
The greatness of a country is how it treats dissent. Making a film about “conscientious objectors” in and actually showing it in that country is evidence that the filmmakers are living in a democracy.
David Benchetrit is a Moroccan refugee who never really fit into the country he fled to in order to escape the extreme bigotry of the Arab world. He was briefly in the Army in and refused to defend his adopted country in the 1973 war, that was the one where Syria and Egypt nearly won and then would have been able to attempt genocide.
This anti-Semitic hypocrite became a filmmaker in order to produce propaganda, and over the years became pretty good. The Israeli government hates is guts, as one might imagine, and he was beaten up by military police when caught trying to look through classified documents in the ministry of Defense's archives back in 2004. He was looking for evidence of “war crimes” of course. 99% of (including Denmark and Canada) countries wouldn't have even let him in the building.
Most of the film concentrates on the 1982-2000 Lebanese Civil war and the Israeli intervention thereof. There is no doubt that the whole thing was badly bungled, and the interviews of the with the people who spent time in jail for refusing to serve or deserting from their posts (again, would Canada or Denmark give these people medals for that kind of thing), give clear evidence of that, but there's no context. Benchetrit makes it seem that Lebanon was peacefully minding it's own business when the evil Prime Minister Begin decided to invade just for the fun of it.
True this film was meant for Israeli eyes and most of the population knows their own history rather well. While it's interesting, the film is worse than useless when trying to understand the situation in the Middle East.
The Play (Oyun) (Turkey) - North American Premiere.
Directed by
Pelin Esmer
In Arslankoy, a mountain village in southern Turkey. some women decided take their constant complaining up a notch and put on a play dramatizing the problems they have in order to do something about it. So Ummuye, Behiye, Ummu, Fatma K., Cennet, Saniye, Fatma F., Zeynep and Nesim go to the local high school and ask the principal, a certain Mr. Huseyin, to help them produce it.
He agrees, and obviously he contacted Pelin Esmer to film the whole thing, and for the most part the women in question have not only their conciesnesses raised, but have a real blast as well.
The film is nothing much, but everyone seems to have a good time, and it's an interesting glimpse into the lives of women in a very different culture than our own.
Encounter Point (U.S.A., Israel) - World Premiere.
a documentary written and directed
by Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha
Good intentions are sometimes just are not enough. The peace movement in Israel/Palestine is of course on the side of the angels, and the Bereaved Families Forum certainly is that. Robi Damelin's son was killed by a sniper and is now running what's basically a self help group.
Sami Al Jundi, a retired Palestinian terrorist (he was jailed when the bomb his pals and he were making exploded prematurely) and has founded an organization called Seeds of Peace
We follow them, Shlomo Zagman, Israeli (former settler and founder of the Movement for Realistic Religious Zionism), and Ali Aboawwad, a Palestinian and currently co-director of the Bereaved Families Forum) as they go about trying to promote reconcilliation.
The stories are heartbreaking but it's not anything we haven't heard before, and considering what has happened in the months since this film was completed, there's less cause for hope than ever.
After all, nobody in the film seems to get what's going on.
The Blood of My Brother: A Story of Death in Iraq (USA, Iraq) - North American Premiere. A LifeSize Entertainment Release.
Directed by
Andrew Berends
One of the problems with this film is that there's a bit of murkiness about exactly what happened during the inciting incident. Was Ra'ad actually killed in response to something or did the Americans just do it for fun as the director implies?
This is the real question that follows Andrew Berends' rather schizophrenic propaganda documentary. The film concentrates on Ra'ad's survivors, mostly young Ibrahim, who has to take over the family business. Ra'ad was a portrait photographer and had a shop, but Ibrahim isn't very good at it, and soon the shop is going under. And he can't provide for his mother and two sisters, who are constantly depressed and weeping. One can sympathize.
Berends pretends to be “even handed” interviewing some American soldiers, but for the most part, the Americans are portrayed as unhuman machines, unthinking and unknowing.
There is a lot of footage of political rallies, and we see Muqtada al-Sadr, a leader of the Shiites and a supporter of the elected interim goverment giving speeches and Ibrahim and his friends dancing in the streets and chanting “Allah akbar” and the like. We also see the Sunnis shooting at a Shiite procession, or at least that's what it appears to be. It's possible Berends wants us to think it's another gratuitous American attack on people who are denouncing Saddam.
Denouncing Saddam? It's strange because it's apparent that Barends is to some extent PRO Saddam in his leanings.
Doesn't matter, even at an hour and a half, the thing seems really long. While Ibrahim and his family are very sympathetic, they're not exactly interesting.
(Israel) - North American Premiere.
A documentery Written and Directed by
David Benchetrit and Senyora Bar David
The greatness of a country is how it treats dissent. Making a film about “conscientious objectors” in and actually showing it in that country is evidence that the filmmakers are living in a democracy.
David Benchetrit is a Moroccan refugee who never really fit into the country he fled to in order to escape the extreme bigotry of the Arab world. He was briefly in the Army in and refused to defend his adopted country in the 1973 war, that was the one where Syria and Egypt nearly won and then would have been able to attempt genocide.
This anti-Semitic hypocrite became a filmmaker in order to produce propaganda, and over the years became pretty good. The Israeli government hates is guts, as one might imagine, and he was beaten up by military police when caught trying to look through classified documents in the ministry of Defense's archives back in 2004. He was looking for evidence of “war crimes” of course. 99% of (including Denmark and Canada) countries wouldn't have even let him in the building.
Most of the film concentrates on the 1982-2000 Lebanese Civil war and the Israeli intervention thereof. There is no doubt that the whole thing was badly bungled, and the interviews of the with the people who spent time in jail for refusing to serve or deserting from their posts (again, would Canada or Denmark give these people medals for that kind of thing), give clear evidence of that, but there's no context. Benchetrit makes it seem that Lebanon was peacefully minding it's own business when the evil Prime Minister Begin decided to invade just for the fun of it.
True this film was meant for Israeli eyes and most of the population knows their own history rather well. While it's interesting, the film is worse than useless when trying to understand the situation in the Middle East.
The Play (Oyun) (Turkey) - North American Premiere.
Directed by
Pelin Esmer
In Arslankoy, a mountain village in southern Turkey. some women decided take their constant complaining up a notch and put on a play dramatizing the problems they have in order to do something about it. So Ummuye, Behiye, Ummu, Fatma K., Cennet, Saniye, Fatma F., Zeynep and Nesim go to the local high school and ask the principal, a certain Mr. Huseyin, to help them produce it.
He agrees, and obviously he contacted Pelin Esmer to film the whole thing, and for the most part the women in question have not only their conciesnesses raised, but have a real blast as well.
The film is nothing much, but everyone seems to have a good time, and it's an interesting glimpse into the lives of women in a very different culture than our own.
Encounter Point (U.S.A., Israel) - World Premiere.
a documentary written and directed
by Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha
Good intentions are sometimes just are not enough. The peace movement in Israel/Palestine is of course on the side of the angels, and the Bereaved Families Forum certainly is that. Robi Damelin's son was killed by a sniper and is now running what's basically a self help group.
Sami Al Jundi, a retired Palestinian terrorist (he was jailed when the bomb his pals and he were making exploded prematurely) and has founded an organization called Seeds of Peace
We follow them, Shlomo Zagman, Israeli (former settler and founder of the Movement for Realistic Religious Zionism), and Ali Aboawwad, a Palestinian and currently co-director of the Bereaved Families Forum) as they go about trying to promote reconcilliation.
The stories are heartbreaking but it's not anything we haven't heard before, and considering what has happened in the months since this film was completed, there's less cause for hope than ever.
After all, nobody in the film seems to get what's going on.
The Blood of My Brother: A Story of Death in Iraq (USA, Iraq) - North American Premiere. A LifeSize Entertainment Release.
Directed by
Andrew Berends
One of the problems with this film is that there's a bit of murkiness about exactly what happened during the inciting incident. Was Ra'ad actually killed in response to something or did the Americans just do it for fun as the director implies?
This is the real question that follows Andrew Berends' rather schizophrenic propaganda documentary. The film concentrates on Ra'ad's survivors, mostly young Ibrahim, who has to take over the family business. Ra'ad was a portrait photographer and had a shop, but Ibrahim isn't very good at it, and soon the shop is going under. And he can't provide for his mother and two sisters, who are constantly depressed and weeping. One can sympathize.
Berends pretends to be “even handed” interviewing some American soldiers, but for the most part, the Americans are portrayed as unhuman machines, unthinking and unknowing.
There is a lot of footage of political rallies, and we see Muqtada al-Sadr, a leader of the Shiites and a supporter of the elected interim goverment giving speeches and Ibrahim and his friends dancing in the streets and chanting “Allah akbar” and the like. We also see the Sunnis shooting at a Shiite procession, or at least that's what it appears to be. It's possible Berends wants us to think it's another gratuitous American attack on people who are denouncing Saddam.
Denouncing Saddam? It's strange because it's apparent that Barends is to some extent PRO Saddam in his leanings.
Doesn't matter, even at an hour and a half, the thing seems really long. While Ibrahim and his family are very sympathetic, they're not exactly interesting.
Tribeca III: the first batch of indies
Choking Man (USA) - World Premiere.
Written and Directed
by Steve Barron
Ah, a sitcom about the mentally ill. Very strange indeed.
Steve Barron, who at one time used to be in the big time,[ he directed “Coneheads,” “Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles” and a whole bunch of those hallmark fantasy series for television, ] has decided to bid Hollywood adeau and do something cheap and personal.
Jorge (Octavio Gómez Berríos) is “morbidly” shy. He works as a dishwasher at the Olympic diner in Queens. When he goes home in the evening, his alter ego, the imaginary “Choking Man” (Paolo Andino) critiques his day for him as Jorge cowers in the background.
One day, Rick (Mandy Patinkin) hires a new waitress named Amy (Eugenia Yuan). She's one of those bubbly people who has a sunny disposition, and everybody at the Olympic falls, if not in love with her, at least in like.
Jorge would like to make a move, but as was said before, is morbidly shy, but the fry-cook, Jerry (Aaron Paul) is not. He's one of those obnoxious guys who in most films gets his comeuppance, but this isn't one of these. Things go slowly.
There is clearly an ambivalence on the part of the auteur about the love triangle. This is because, there are intimations of a violence that never takes place, and weird animated sequences that may or may not advance the plot. If it was all in the perspective of Jorge, then it might have worked, but we get a few subplots which have nothing to do with Jorge, including the courtship between Amy and Jerry. He's a bit of a jerk, but mostly he's a nice guy. Where's the fun in that. The ending is one of those where a breakthrough is made, but not the one we were expected.
This is not entirely worthless, but it's not as lyrical as we might want from a thing like this. Sad.
Mentor (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Directed by
David Carl Lang
Sex in achedemia, now that's a new concept!!! This has been done to death, but then again good, old fashioned melodrama can always be entertaining, especially if done just right. This comes close.
We go time tripping back and forth between the middle 1990s Carter Baines(Matt Davis) is a grad student taking a writing seminar with famous novelist Sanford Pollard(Rutger Hauer), and 2005, where Carter is a professor and Pollard has just died.
Starting with a confrontation in 1995, we find out that Carter's written a novel about the previous summer and that Sanford has bribed him with a cushy job at another university. Then we go forward to the second timeframe where Carter has to put up with his comic relief colleague Howard(Matt Servitto) and the student Carter's currently schtupping(Lynn Chen) when he gets the news.
So we follow the journey to the funeral on the one hand, and his romances with fellow student Marilyn(Susan Misner) and more importantly, Sanford's research assistant Julia(Dagmara Dominczyk) on the other. Thus we have a ménage-a-quart which is both intellectual and sexual, and while there's no hint of homosexuality anywhere, we've got lots of sexual tension between the three principles [Marilyn drops out of the group rather quickly-only to reappear at the funeral]. Other than the romantic relationship between Julia and Carter, and a maguffin that changes everything.
While the acting for the most part is rather good, Davis appears completely out of his league, as Haur, Dominczyk and even Servitto wipe the floor with him for the entire film. It's pitiful. William Whitehurst's screenplay, on the other hand works, and we're interested in what happens between point D and point G after we get to point D from point A.
Not bad for a cheap indie, not bad at all.
Kiss Me Again (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Written and Directed by
William Tyler Smith
Normality is the enemy at faux NYU, home of PC. Julian(Jeremy London) is a neo-communist professor of history there and is in a spot of trouble. He's just burned an American flag in front of his class and not everyone there thinks that this is a wonderful thing. This is the subplot. Neo-commies are considered normal in this version of the universe, and it forms the backdrop for s nasty little soap opera.
Julian is married to Chalice(Katheryn Winnick), and they live in the Alphabet city neighborhood with Chal's former best friend Malika (Elisa Donovan), a tattooed bisexual slut of a photographer who's hated Julian ever since she met him. Jealously, natch.
While our hero is discussing the ramifications of his political statement with friends Michael(Darrell Hammond) and Szabo(Fred Armisen), he comes across Elena(Mirelly Taylor), a Spanish post graduate who he met while he was in Europe before his marriage.
A kiss is stolen in Washington Square park, but, as is always the case, Milika is doing a photo shoot and…you get the idea.
So feeling guilty and not having done anything beyond a chaste kiss, Julian decides to convince Chal to start experimenting with sexuality, a threesome is just the thing to keep a marriage fresh. So, he contrives to get Elena to be the third person.
The far-left politics as normal situation aside, this film is actually extremely predictable. Everything that happens is telegraphed at the very beginning, and it all goes exactly as one might expect.
The acting is fine, We haven't seen Hammond in much of anything in ages, and it seems he's losing his hair.
This'll only be out a couple of weeks before going to cable.
Kettle of Fish (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Written and Directed
by Claudia Meyers
There is one truly great scene in this here movie and I'm not too sure if sitting through the awful-to-mediocre crap that precedes and follows it is actually worth the trouble.
Mel(Matthew Modine) a professional saxophonist and lifelong bachelor who's getting on in years and is wondering if he's going to settle down or not, so he decides to move in with his latest girlfriend(Ewa Da Cruz), who he really doesn't like, but hey, you know…so he decides to sublet his apartment for a short time to see if things work out, and the first person to come in is Ginger(Gina Gershon) a fetching biologist who's studying the sex lives of frogs.
But on the way to a job working a wedding, our hero falls in love with the bride(Gloria Reuben) and is determined to destroy her newly minted marriage and run away with her, something his best friend and band-mate Sean(Eddie Kaye Thomas) thinks is a horrible idea. It is, and it's almost a cliché, what can you do?
The acting is fine, and it's cute in parts, but Mel is such a horrible person that we don't actually know whether to root for him and hope he gets the crap beat out of him. This is a romantic comedy, and since Meyers isn't a total wuss as a writer, we get that one glorious scene were he metaphorically does indeed get what's coming to him. Unfortunately it goes back to being a bad cliché for the rest of the film and the ending, while expected, is really dumb.
Don't waste your time.
Written and Directed
by Steve Barron
Ah, a sitcom about the mentally ill. Very strange indeed.
Steve Barron, who at one time used to be in the big time,[ he directed “Coneheads,” “Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles” and a whole bunch of those hallmark fantasy series for television, ] has decided to bid Hollywood adeau and do something cheap and personal.
Jorge (Octavio Gómez Berríos) is “morbidly” shy. He works as a dishwasher at the Olympic diner in Queens. When he goes home in the evening, his alter ego, the imaginary “Choking Man” (Paolo Andino) critiques his day for him as Jorge cowers in the background.
One day, Rick (Mandy Patinkin) hires a new waitress named Amy (Eugenia Yuan). She's one of those bubbly people who has a sunny disposition, and everybody at the Olympic falls, if not in love with her, at least in like.
Jorge would like to make a move, but as was said before, is morbidly shy, but the fry-cook, Jerry (Aaron Paul) is not. He's one of those obnoxious guys who in most films gets his comeuppance, but this isn't one of these. Things go slowly.
There is clearly an ambivalence on the part of the auteur about the love triangle. This is because, there are intimations of a violence that never takes place, and weird animated sequences that may or may not advance the plot. If it was all in the perspective of Jorge, then it might have worked, but we get a few subplots which have nothing to do with Jorge, including the courtship between Amy and Jerry. He's a bit of a jerk, but mostly he's a nice guy. Where's the fun in that. The ending is one of those where a breakthrough is made, but not the one we were expected.
This is not entirely worthless, but it's not as lyrical as we might want from a thing like this. Sad.
Mentor (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Directed by
David Carl Lang
Sex in achedemia, now that's a new concept!!! This has been done to death, but then again good, old fashioned melodrama can always be entertaining, especially if done just right. This comes close.
We go time tripping back and forth between the middle 1990s Carter Baines(Matt Davis) is a grad student taking a writing seminar with famous novelist Sanford Pollard(Rutger Hauer), and 2005, where Carter is a professor and Pollard has just died.
Starting with a confrontation in 1995, we find out that Carter's written a novel about the previous summer and that Sanford has bribed him with a cushy job at another university. Then we go forward to the second timeframe where Carter has to put up with his comic relief colleague Howard(Matt Servitto) and the student Carter's currently schtupping(Lynn Chen) when he gets the news.
So we follow the journey to the funeral on the one hand, and his romances with fellow student Marilyn(Susan Misner) and more importantly, Sanford's research assistant Julia(Dagmara Dominczyk) on the other. Thus we have a ménage-a-quart which is both intellectual and sexual, and while there's no hint of homosexuality anywhere, we've got lots of sexual tension between the three principles [Marilyn drops out of the group rather quickly-only to reappear at the funeral]. Other than the romantic relationship between Julia and Carter, and a maguffin that changes everything.
While the acting for the most part is rather good, Davis appears completely out of his league, as Haur, Dominczyk and even Servitto wipe the floor with him for the entire film. It's pitiful. William Whitehurst's screenplay, on the other hand works, and we're interested in what happens between point D and point G after we get to point D from point A.
Not bad for a cheap indie, not bad at all.
Kiss Me Again (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Written and Directed by
William Tyler Smith
Normality is the enemy at faux NYU, home of PC. Julian(Jeremy London) is a neo-communist professor of history there and is in a spot of trouble. He's just burned an American flag in front of his class and not everyone there thinks that this is a wonderful thing. This is the subplot. Neo-commies are considered normal in this version of the universe, and it forms the backdrop for s nasty little soap opera.
Julian is married to Chalice(Katheryn Winnick), and they live in the Alphabet city neighborhood with Chal's former best friend Malika (Elisa Donovan), a tattooed bisexual slut of a photographer who's hated Julian ever since she met him. Jealously, natch.
While our hero is discussing the ramifications of his political statement with friends Michael(Darrell Hammond) and Szabo(Fred Armisen), he comes across Elena(Mirelly Taylor), a Spanish post graduate who he met while he was in Europe before his marriage.
A kiss is stolen in Washington Square park, but, as is always the case, Milika is doing a photo shoot and…you get the idea.
So feeling guilty and not having done anything beyond a chaste kiss, Julian decides to convince Chal to start experimenting with sexuality, a threesome is just the thing to keep a marriage fresh. So, he contrives to get Elena to be the third person.
The far-left politics as normal situation aside, this film is actually extremely predictable. Everything that happens is telegraphed at the very beginning, and it all goes exactly as one might expect.
The acting is fine, We haven't seen Hammond in much of anything in ages, and it seems he's losing his hair.
This'll only be out a couple of weeks before going to cable.
Kettle of Fish (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Written and Directed
by Claudia Meyers
There is one truly great scene in this here movie and I'm not too sure if sitting through the awful-to-mediocre crap that precedes and follows it is actually worth the trouble.
Mel(Matthew Modine) a professional saxophonist and lifelong bachelor who's getting on in years and is wondering if he's going to settle down or not, so he decides to move in with his latest girlfriend(Ewa Da Cruz), who he really doesn't like, but hey, you know…so he decides to sublet his apartment for a short time to see if things work out, and the first person to come in is Ginger(Gina Gershon) a fetching biologist who's studying the sex lives of frogs.
But on the way to a job working a wedding, our hero falls in love with the bride(Gloria Reuben) and is determined to destroy her newly minted marriage and run away with her, something his best friend and band-mate Sean(Eddie Kaye Thomas) thinks is a horrible idea. It is, and it's almost a cliché, what can you do?
The acting is fine, and it's cute in parts, but Mel is such a horrible person that we don't actually know whether to root for him and hope he gets the crap beat out of him. This is a romantic comedy, and since Meyers isn't a total wuss as a writer, we get that one glorious scene were he metaphorically does indeed get what's coming to him. Unfortunately it goes back to being a bad cliché for the rest of the film and the ending, while expected, is really dumb.
Don't waste your time.
Friday, April 21, 2006
Tribeca II: Domestic documenteries
The Cats of Mirikitani (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Directed by
Linda Hattendorf
Jimmy Mirikitani is an old coot who was homeless in the spring of 2001. Linda Hattendorf decided to adopt him and get him back in the system where he could have a house and a home.
He is also an artist who, as the title of the film implies, likes to draw pictures of cats. But primarily, he's a surviver of the Japanese internment camps that were set up during World War II.
He's still justifiably bitter about it. While he isn't talking about or painting about the camps, he's watching TV or walking around outside talking to either Hattendorf or some social worker.
The film isn't all that interesting, as Mirikitani isn't. He might have been made so had Hattendorf tried, but this is nothing more than a glorified home movie, and the journeys of an itinerant artist could have been so much moreso.
A waste of celluloid and potential.
The Hip Hop Project
AKA Word.Life
Directed by
Matt Ruskin
The better part of a decade ago, a Bahamian immigrant and would-be rap star named Chris "Kharma Kazi" Rolle came into the offices of ArtStart, a charity serving impoverished kids with an idea, why not get a bunch of teenagers from the 'hood and teach them how to make it in the music business? They liked the idea, and decided to have the whole process filmed.
This, and an album, is the result.
What Ruskin did was, basically, to follow about five of the nine kids who were working their dream, as well as Rolle, and show what went down.
The kids had it hard, but they all seemed nice enough, and they got lots better as the years went by and they got out of high school and went on to bigger things. It's a nice documentery and worth a look.
A Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus (U.S.A.)
A documentary directed
by Randy Olson
Faith is a powerful thing. Decades and decades after the theory of evolution was proved beyond the shadow of a doubt there are a bunch of religious people who believe the bible trumps a century and a half of scientific research. Apparently, over half the population of the US doesn't believe that the world is billions of years old.
So why are we in this situation? Biologist/filmmaker Randy Olson and his mommy go off to find out.
The center of the controversy is in Kansas where a bunch of really cute and friendly fanatics who control the state school board have been trying to ram “Intelligent design,” the new name for creationism, down the throats of innocent schoolchildren.
So what Olson and Mom do is interview as many people involved in the alleged controversy as is possible, from the lawyers who actually get paid to advocate this, to scientists from Harvard and the University of Kansas, to members of the school boards of the Sunflower state and Dover, Pennsylvania, which was publicly humiliated by the publicity surrounding it's adoption of the ID-curriculum.
While the ID people are clearly wrong and scientists right, the former are portrayed as nicer people and scientists bad at popular communication. That's half the ballgame right there.
The interstitial animation is rather good, and Olsen actually tries to be fair to both sides, which is an almost impossible task.
This is, in fact, one of the better documentaries of the year and should be seen by as many people as possible.
The Sci-Fi Boys (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
a documentary written and
directed by Paul Davids
Great men sometimes wax poetic about their influences, and this is what that is, a cinematic valentine to Forrest J. Ackerman's “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” the most influential fanzine in the history of cinema.
The film is a cut-and-paste job. Paul Davids has gotten the rights to a whole bunch of interviews with such luminaries as Peter Jackson, John Landis, Stephen Sommers and Steven Spielberg, He also managed to get the rights to a number of the childhood amateur efforts by some of the top special effects artists in cinema.
This is a film for lovers of the genre only, and I'm not exactly sure whether or not it's for them. It's nice to see a bunch of famous men reminisce about the magazine and it's cute to see the animation done by highly talented children back in the late 1950s and early '60s, but exactly what purpose does this film serve?
None really, which is why this film will never actually be seen again outside of a few festivals and conventions.
Al Franken: God Spoke
A film by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus
Al Franken is a grade-C celebrity who's decided to change his career from comedian and SNL writer to political hack and pundit.
I'm not saying that he's bad at it. He's just as good as many of the right-wing blatherers, heaven knows, and the lefties need a coherent counterweight to the likes of Shaun Hannity and Rush Limbagh heaven knows, and his books are actually quite readable.
So about three years ago, he was first to join up with the new “Air America” radio network, and got to go to the two political conventions.
The film begins in a really stupid way with Franken claiming to be on a mission from God and dressing up as Moses to emphasize the point. This isn't a good way to begin, but it gets better.
We get clips from “Saturday Night Live,” his book tours and stand up acts, most of which is really funny, especially when he does his Stuart Smiley act with Al and Tipper Gore soon after the 2000 election. He also manages to rhetorically beat the crap out of Ann Coulter, who deserves that sort of thing at least once a day.
Where it's weak is when we're backstage and he's just walking around acting peeved, but that sort of “reality” stuff is always kind of boring. When he's on, he's hot, and when he's not, he's not.
Which is why when he goes to the two national conventions the film is so schizophrenic. When he does a radio show with Sean Hannity, he's great, and when he's at a party talking to Henry Kissinger or is being taunted by Republican bigwigs while he's making a phone call, he's rather pathetic.
Of course the film ends on a downer note, as Bush was reelected, and we don't really know if he's going to carry out his threat to run for the Senate in Minnesota, but it's good enough to be a fundraiser for the Democrats. Eh.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
Directed by
Stanley Nelson
Do you remember where the term “drinking the kool-aide” came from? If you're of a certain age, you'd know. It came from the biggest mass suicide in modern history: Jonestown, Guyana November 18, 1978. Every now and again, we have to be reminded about such things.
Over nine hundred people were coerced into killing themselves on that day, and Nelson and his assistant Marcia Smith have used formerly forgotten footage and interviews with both former cultists and relations of them and false messiah Jim Jones to tell the story of an extremely intelligent lunatic and his otherwise sane followers.
Going back to his youth in the suburbs of Indianapolis in the 1930s, we follow Jones from his alienation from his family and friends and his becoming a Pentecostal preacher teaching racial tolerance and his moving to California and how he managed to grow his flock.
It also shows that he was a charlatan, and how gullible everyone was. Even major politicians fell for it, including San Francisco mayor George Moscone, who gave Jones a major city job.
But, of course, the film rightfully focuses on Jones' utopian community in South America, his becoming a megalomaniac, and the events leading to the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan.
The sad and shocking story of the rise and fall of the People's Temple is one which should be told again and again, just to warn people of what might happen because someone could try it again.
Directed by
Linda Hattendorf
Jimmy Mirikitani is an old coot who was homeless in the spring of 2001. Linda Hattendorf decided to adopt him and get him back in the system where he could have a house and a home.
He is also an artist who, as the title of the film implies, likes to draw pictures of cats. But primarily, he's a surviver of the Japanese internment camps that were set up during World War II.
He's still justifiably bitter about it. While he isn't talking about or painting about the camps, he's watching TV or walking around outside talking to either Hattendorf or some social worker.
The film isn't all that interesting, as Mirikitani isn't. He might have been made so had Hattendorf tried, but this is nothing more than a glorified home movie, and the journeys of an itinerant artist could have been so much moreso.
A waste of celluloid and potential.
The Hip Hop Project
AKA Word.Life
Directed by
Matt Ruskin
The better part of a decade ago, a Bahamian immigrant and would-be rap star named Chris "Kharma Kazi" Rolle came into the offices of ArtStart, a charity serving impoverished kids with an idea, why not get a bunch of teenagers from the 'hood and teach them how to make it in the music business? They liked the idea, and decided to have the whole process filmed.
This, and an album, is the result.
What Ruskin did was, basically, to follow about five of the nine kids who were working their dream, as well as Rolle, and show what went down.
The kids had it hard, but they all seemed nice enough, and they got lots better as the years went by and they got out of high school and went on to bigger things. It's a nice documentery and worth a look.
A Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus (U.S.A.)
A documentary directed
by Randy Olson
Faith is a powerful thing. Decades and decades after the theory of evolution was proved beyond the shadow of a doubt there are a bunch of religious people who believe the bible trumps a century and a half of scientific research. Apparently, over half the population of the US doesn't believe that the world is billions of years old.
So why are we in this situation? Biologist/filmmaker Randy Olson and his mommy go off to find out.
The center of the controversy is in Kansas where a bunch of really cute and friendly fanatics who control the state school board have been trying to ram “Intelligent design,” the new name for creationism, down the throats of innocent schoolchildren.
So what Olson and Mom do is interview as many people involved in the alleged controversy as is possible, from the lawyers who actually get paid to advocate this, to scientists from Harvard and the University of Kansas, to members of the school boards of the Sunflower state and Dover, Pennsylvania, which was publicly humiliated by the publicity surrounding it's adoption of the ID-curriculum.
While the ID people are clearly wrong and scientists right, the former are portrayed as nicer people and scientists bad at popular communication. That's half the ballgame right there.
The interstitial animation is rather good, and Olsen actually tries to be fair to both sides, which is an almost impossible task.
This is, in fact, one of the better documentaries of the year and should be seen by as many people as possible.
The Sci-Fi Boys (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
a documentary written and
directed by Paul Davids
Great men sometimes wax poetic about their influences, and this is what that is, a cinematic valentine to Forrest J. Ackerman's “Famous Monsters of Filmland,” the most influential fanzine in the history of cinema.
The film is a cut-and-paste job. Paul Davids has gotten the rights to a whole bunch of interviews with such luminaries as Peter Jackson, John Landis, Stephen Sommers and Steven Spielberg, He also managed to get the rights to a number of the childhood amateur efforts by some of the top special effects artists in cinema.
This is a film for lovers of the genre only, and I'm not exactly sure whether or not it's for them. It's nice to see a bunch of famous men reminisce about the magazine and it's cute to see the animation done by highly talented children back in the late 1950s and early '60s, but exactly what purpose does this film serve?
None really, which is why this film will never actually be seen again outside of a few festivals and conventions.
Al Franken: God Spoke
A film by Nick Doob and Chris Hegedus
Al Franken is a grade-C celebrity who's decided to change his career from comedian and SNL writer to political hack and pundit.
I'm not saying that he's bad at it. He's just as good as many of the right-wing blatherers, heaven knows, and the lefties need a coherent counterweight to the likes of Shaun Hannity and Rush Limbagh heaven knows, and his books are actually quite readable.
So about three years ago, he was first to join up with the new “Air America” radio network, and got to go to the two political conventions.
The film begins in a really stupid way with Franken claiming to be on a mission from God and dressing up as Moses to emphasize the point. This isn't a good way to begin, but it gets better.
We get clips from “Saturday Night Live,” his book tours and stand up acts, most of which is really funny, especially when he does his Stuart Smiley act with Al and Tipper Gore soon after the 2000 election. He also manages to rhetorically beat the crap out of Ann Coulter, who deserves that sort of thing at least once a day.
Where it's weak is when we're backstage and he's just walking around acting peeved, but that sort of “reality” stuff is always kind of boring. When he's on, he's hot, and when he's not, he's not.
Which is why when he goes to the two national conventions the film is so schizophrenic. When he does a radio show with Sean Hannity, he's great, and when he's at a party talking to Henry Kissinger or is being taunted by Republican bigwigs while he's making a phone call, he's rather pathetic.
Of course the film ends on a downer note, as Bush was reelected, and we don't really know if he's going to carry out his threat to run for the Senate in Minnesota, but it's good enough to be a fundraiser for the Democrats. Eh.
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
Directed by
Stanley Nelson
Do you remember where the term “drinking the kool-aide” came from? If you're of a certain age, you'd know. It came from the biggest mass suicide in modern history: Jonestown, Guyana November 18, 1978. Every now and again, we have to be reminded about such things.
Over nine hundred people were coerced into killing themselves on that day, and Nelson and his assistant Marcia Smith have used formerly forgotten footage and interviews with both former cultists and relations of them and false messiah Jim Jones to tell the story of an extremely intelligent lunatic and his otherwise sane followers.
Going back to his youth in the suburbs of Indianapolis in the 1930s, we follow Jones from his alienation from his family and friends and his becoming a Pentecostal preacher teaching racial tolerance and his moving to California and how he managed to grow his flock.
It also shows that he was a charlatan, and how gullible everyone was. Even major politicians fell for it, including San Francisco mayor George Moscone, who gave Jones a major city job.
But, of course, the film rightfully focuses on Jones' utopian community in South America, his becoming a megalomaniac, and the events leading to the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan.
The sad and shocking story of the rise and fall of the People's Temple is one which should be told again and again, just to warn people of what might happen because someone could try it again.
Tribeca I: The obligitory Ramones documentery
Every year at the Tribeca festival there's at least one documentery on the Ramones. Now I like the Ramones and have since they were in their prime. Maybe next year they'll have "Rock and Roll High School" as a revival a the family festival....in the meantime:
Too Tough to Die (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Directed By
Mandy Stein
In the summer of 2004, Johnny Ramone realized he was dying, so he decided to throw himself a wake. This was a rather good idea, and he and Rob Zombie got together, rented out the legendary Avalon Theatre in Los Angeles, and sent out a call for volunteers.
The result was a concert blowout concert featuring the likes of Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins [who we discover uses hair dye], Peter Yorn, some of the replacement Ramones, and a whole bunch of others I don't exactly remember cover the original punker's greatest hits.
In between the music, and sometimes interrupting it at the wrong places, director Mady Stein interviews friends and family reminiscing about Johnny and how wonderful the Ramones really were. One thing remains clear throughout the film. The only people who actually could do the Ramones right were the Ramones themselves. If you want to see what the fuss was all about there have been plenty of films on the subject and a rental would be worth the money.
Too Tough to Die (U.S.A.) - World Premiere.
Directed By
Mandy Stein
In the summer of 2004, Johnny Ramone realized he was dying, so he decided to throw himself a wake. This was a rather good idea, and he and Rob Zombie got together, rented out the legendary Avalon Theatre in Los Angeles, and sent out a call for volunteers.
The result was a concert blowout concert featuring the likes of Eddie Vedder, Henry Rollins [who we discover uses hair dye], Peter Yorn, some of the replacement Ramones, and a whole bunch of others I don't exactly remember cover the original punker's greatest hits.
In between the music, and sometimes interrupting it at the wrong places, director Mady Stein interviews friends and family reminiscing about Johnny and how wonderful the Ramones really were. One thing remains clear throughout the film. The only people who actually could do the Ramones right were the Ramones themselves. If you want to see what the fuss was all about there have been plenty of films on the subject and a rental would be worth the money.
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Tribeca film festival: history and logistics
It’s been five years now. The Tribeca Film Festival is opens with a film which reminds everyone why there’s one in the first place. Not that we really need to be, but it was there, and to be perfectly frank, the thing needs a boost.
While it’s been growing ever since the first one opened at the Regal Cinemas at Battery Park City’s mall in May of 2002. The goal of the project has been met with mixed results. The hole in the ground that was being emptied of debreas on day one of the first festival is still there. The huge multiplex that housed it is now mostly shoe and drug stores, and while business in the downtown area has recovered it’s not nearly as good as it should have been this far down the road.
One of the problems was that the various venues were hard to get to. There was the west side highway to cross, and the subway was a goodly distance from most of the venues, many of which were damn far from one another and it was almost impossible to get from one screening to another by foot. There was a free bus, but that was rather erratic in scheduling and for the most part was worse than useless. If one screening was at the Regal, and the next one you wanted to get to was at the Tribeca Cinema at Canal and Varrick, there was no way in hell you could get there in time besides taking an expensive taxicab. The tickets were expensive, and missing one was a real bitch.
The ancillary events were okay. There’s a street fair again this year, but the grand live concert in Battery Park that was the glory of the first three festivals is gone. The panels are all over the place, and in downtown that means it’s hard to get from any of the theaters to where they are, which was a real pain for the entire history of the festival.
This year, the festival outgrows Tribeca and moves uptown. This leads to even more problems without a weekly subway pass. There are screenings on the west side just west of Penn station and waay up on 68th street and Broadway, which makes the logistics even worse. While the subway is actually pretty easy, it’s not all that consistent, and one can spend quite a while waiting at the station.
The films themselves aren’t always the best. True at one film last year got an oscar nomination, and some others received acclaim, there’s very few of them and in general there’s almost no buzz aside from a number of Hollywood films who’ve had a print lent to the festival a day or two before release. I mean who would want to pay extra in order to see “RV” a day early? But for the most part, people are going to go for the stuff they’ll never have a chance to see again, and there’s plenty of that. Two hundred and seventy something films all in all.
The best thing to do is get a weeklong Metrocard® and make sure you remember the subway or bus routes.
While it’s been growing ever since the first one opened at the Regal Cinemas at Battery Park City’s mall in May of 2002. The goal of the project has been met with mixed results. The hole in the ground that was being emptied of debreas on day one of the first festival is still there. The huge multiplex that housed it is now mostly shoe and drug stores, and while business in the downtown area has recovered it’s not nearly as good as it should have been this far down the road.
One of the problems was that the various venues were hard to get to. There was the west side highway to cross, and the subway was a goodly distance from most of the venues, many of which were damn far from one another and it was almost impossible to get from one screening to another by foot. There was a free bus, but that was rather erratic in scheduling and for the most part was worse than useless. If one screening was at the Regal, and the next one you wanted to get to was at the Tribeca Cinema at Canal and Varrick, there was no way in hell you could get there in time besides taking an expensive taxicab. The tickets were expensive, and missing one was a real bitch.
The ancillary events were okay. There’s a street fair again this year, but the grand live concert in Battery Park that was the glory of the first three festivals is gone. The panels are all over the place, and in downtown that means it’s hard to get from any of the theaters to where they are, which was a real pain for the entire history of the festival.
This year, the festival outgrows Tribeca and moves uptown. This leads to even more problems without a weekly subway pass. There are screenings on the west side just west of Penn station and waay up on 68th street and Broadway, which makes the logistics even worse. While the subway is actually pretty easy, it’s not all that consistent, and one can spend quite a while waiting at the station.
The films themselves aren’t always the best. True at one film last year got an oscar nomination, and some others received acclaim, there’s very few of them and in general there’s almost no buzz aside from a number of Hollywood films who’ve had a print lent to the festival a day or two before release. I mean who would want to pay extra in order to see “RV” a day early? But for the most part, people are going to go for the stuff they’ll never have a chance to see again, and there’s plenty of that. Two hundred and seventy something films all in all.
The best thing to do is get a weeklong Metrocard® and make sure you remember the subway or bus routes.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
The Plan
Well, we've got a week of pre-festival screenings left (more, if you as the festival starts on a tuesday), and I'm going to start putting them up for syndication and the edification of those five or six of you who actually are reading this for other than sending me spam on Saturday.
As to that, do you really think I will go to any of those sites? there are a very few real comments and I appreciate those.
So let's see what happens. I"ve already seen about seventeen films and will do another ten or twelve between now and friday. That should be enough to do decent coverage even if I go on vacation during the real one, which I won't.
As to that, do you really think I will go to any of those sites? there are a very few real comments and I appreciate those.
So let's see what happens. I"ve already seen about seventeen films and will do another ten or twelve between now and friday. That should be enough to do decent coverage even if I go on vacation during the real one, which I won't.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
The Tribeca film festival starts in two weeks
They've already started the pre-festival screenings.
Also, you can tell that a film is awful if the audience is laughing it's guts out and the film is a romantic melodrams.
Also, you can tell that a film is awful if the audience is laughing it's guts out and the film is a romantic melodrams.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Gen Art concluded
FUCK
Directed by
Steve Anderson
After the success of “The Aristocrats” it was inevitable that someone would do a documentary detailing the fascinating history of everyone’s favorite expletive. [I remember a poll from somewhere and shit is a distant second]. A linguistic romp, if ever there was one! So what do we know about the history and uses of that ever popular word? Why do some people fear it’s very use even as an adjective?
Anderson interviews many people from both sides of the controversy, and there actually is one, after all, Howard Stern didn’t even use it, and he got his company fined by the FCC for millions!
We’ve got the likes of Bill Maher, Kevin Smith, Alanis Morissette, Drew Carey, Ice-T, Janeane Garofalo, Ron Jeremy, Sam Donaldson and Pat Boone (!) discussing why fuck is either such a wonderful word or why it should be completely banned from all discourse.
In addition to the interviews, which are skillfully edited in order to simulate conversations between people who showed up on different days, we’ve got clips from a bunch of various films and cable TV shows, which date back all the way to Lenny Bruce’s penultimate performance in 1965 and George Carlin’s legendary 1978 first HBO special to puppets simulating fucking in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” from a couple of years ago.
The FCC takes a beating, as everybody, including President Bush himself uses the term [we’ve got the video tape] and the word is so ubiquitous in American, if not ALL English-speaking societies, that it shouldn’t have any shock value anymore.
Also, Bill Plympton animates some demonstrations of how the word is used, as well as chapter headings, all of which are really cute. Obviously this film is going to be rated NC-17, to protect children who have already used the term hundreds of times a month, from hurting their dear little ears with the horrid profanity.
It’s definitely worth the bucks.
At the Beach
Written and Directed
by Andrew Lloyd
Horror has been a major staple of the cinema like forever. The depiction of fear has been varied, and what works best in the genre has been debated endlessly. One way to depict it is by misdirection, in which almost nothing is actually shown and everything is showed askance. It’s more creepy that way.
Little Max (Raum-Aron) and his parents(Marlene O'Haire and Joel Nagle) are driving to the beach house on Long Island for a summer vacation when their car accidentally runs over a poor schnook(Ethan Baum) walking in the middle of the road. There’s blood on the car, but the victim is nowhere to be seen.
They leave the scene of the accident, call the police anonymously, and then when Max goes to bed, his imagination goes wild, imagining that the victim has turned into Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, thirsting for revenge. This is reminiscent of “The Blair Witch Project” and the kid is really good. Lloyd has a future in the horror game for sure.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Written and directed
by Scott Glosserman
One thing that I would never think of describing a slasher film as is “cute.” Yet that is exactly what describes this one. This is very cute indeed. It’s nice to see something actually new under the sun.
This valentine and parody of the genre begins in the usual way, a comely young waitress named Krissy (Carlson Lauren) taking out the garbage, when the door mysteriously shuts and we see a mysterious figure in the distance. She then runs away….
Cut to an old house in the villiage of Glen Echo, where college journalism student Taylor Gentry(Angela Goethals) and her camera crew(Ben Pace and Britain Spellings) are going to do a documentary about a deranged supernatural psycho killer named Leslie Vernon, who had been killed years before by an angry mob after he killed his parents. So out comes Leslie(Nathan Baesel), looking not like an evil zombie, but a pixieish, happy fellow, who wants to be just like his heroes Freddy, Jason and Mike, who are real people in this alternate reality.
What follows is a giddy deconstruction of the slasher/horror genre, with Vernan taking Taylor and her crew to the home of his mentor (Scott Wilson), who’s wife(Bridgett Newton) makes them all a lovely dinner and we get to hear them talk shop. Being a supernatural psycho is hard work!!!! Lots of preparation has to be done on the house where the dirty deed will be done, and we have to make sure that Kelly is going to be made properly paranoid. So we go on a stalking, where Vernan’s going to make his first real appearance, and suddenly, the graininess of the filmstock changes turning from faux video to 35MM glory as Kelly is told about the legend by a librarian played by Zelda Rubinstein and all of a sudden
Doc Halloran(Robert Englund), the Ahab [the shrinks who’s been following the psycho, a stock figure in slasher flicks]. Vernan tells his mentor about it and everybody does a happy dance.
Before it turns into a real slasher flick about three quarters the way through, this film is one of the most joyous parodies that I’ve ever seen. Then it turns out that all this preparation is for a reason, and the film stock changes. This is actually a cue to start the blood and gore, and the transition works. It’s not as absolutely brilliant as the mockumentery part, but it’s actually rather good in and of itself.
This is going to be considered a classic and the filmmakers have a long and successful career ahead of them.
She She She She's A Bombshell
An animated short
by Ben Levin
There’s at least one stinker in every film festival. So, it’s best to get it over with with an animated short, and make it as painless as possible.
In this case we’ve got some people driving home from a rock concert. The two people in the front seat can’t stand the guy in the back who’s ranting and ranting about nothing much whatsoever.
The animation is mediocre, the design is as well, and the joke doesn’t work. This is entirely useless and I’m not sure how this managed to get so much play at so many festivals. Feh.
The Intervention
Directed by
Jay Duplass
Mark and Jay Duplass are going to have their first feature, which was nominated for two independent spirit awards, in theaters in the summer, but as with every other filmmaker, they’ve done a number of shorts prior to it.
Steve’s(Steve Zissis) friends “love” him, therefore they’re forcing him to admit that he’s gay. This is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not at all funny. This is an uncomfortable mess, which is probably improv. I wouldn’t like a bunch of friends like this. Jeez….
Shut Up and Sing
Written and Directed
by Bruce Leddy
In hollywoodese, this would be described as “The Big Chill Musical.” A cute comedy, this is mostly about the midlife crisis we all go through sometime between 21 and 60.
When they were in college back in the early ‘90s, the group in question were an a cappella group and still sing on occasion. The person with the first midlife crisis we learn about is David(David Harbour), a computer techie, who doesn’t want fatherhood because he’s afraid that he’s getting old and hasn’t done all that he’s wanted to by this point in his life, a point of view his wife(Rosemarie DeWitt) isn’t too tolerant of. Meanwhile, we learn that the rest of the group isn’t doing much better, Will(Samrat Chakrabarti) is working as a gopher in the recording industry while he fails to get acting parts beyond “second terrorist on the right; Richard(Reg Rogers) is newly divorced and hasn’t gotten laid in almost five hundred days; Ted’s(Alexander Chaplin) marriage to Trish(Molly Shannon) isn’t going all that well either, and things are about to get worse when he’s fired after many years loyal service. Spooner(Chris Bowers), on the other hand, is doing really well doing whatever it is he does, and Steven(David Alan Basche) produces reality shows on the left coast.
The last member of the group, Greg(Mark Feuerstein), is going to get married in a couple of weeks and wants the gang to get back together and serenade his bride and him.
The film is a light comedy, which means nothing all that much happens. Sure there’s personal growth and everyone winds up living happily ever after, but then again, what else do we want from a trifle like this? Cute is as cute does. Not much more. Eh.
The Shirt
Written and Directed
by Drake Doremus
Made for the princely sum of five hundred bucks, this story of the quest for perfection is not one of the more brilliant efforts out there. It’s about a librarian(Tobias McKinney) who is under the delusion that by finding the perfect shirt he would have a life-changing experience. This doesn’t happen, but he does meat a clothing store clerk(Leslie Zang), with whom he begins to have a romance.
It’s kind of pointless, but the acting is okay, and at only eight minutes long you don’t have time to fall asleep, which is a good thing. This is a nice calling card, but not anything to write home about.
Live Free or Die
Written and Directed by
Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin
Nothing succeeds like success, and that helps when the inevitable crash landing takes place. Tin the case of “Seinfeld” writers Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin, that was when their “The Michael Richards Show” was cancelled after only eight episodes. So what to do?
Quite simple: do a cheap independent film, of course! So they got some money together, went up to New Hampshire, and filmed this minor crime comedy.
John "Rugged" Rudgate(Aaron Stanford) is a legend in his own mind. A small time crook in “the first-in-the-nation-primary state, he makes a living by selling stolen stereo speakers out if his van and getting refunds for stuff he never bought. He also likes to take credit for crimes he didn’t commit, that way it makes him look tougher.
While hanging out with his dimwitted friend Lagrand(Paul Schneider), he gets insulted by a local bully(R.E. Rodgers), and gets revenge by poisoning his well. Little does he know that the guy has already been poisoned, and thus, our antihero freaks out, thinking he’s actually killed the guy. Mayhem, as expected, ensues and the cops(Kevin Dunn and Michael Rapaport) are in not exactly hot pursuit and Rugged winds up a legend.
The film is kind of slow, and despite Schneider’s channeling Will Ferrell for a good performance, there’s nothing really to hold our interest. It’s not worth the cost of full price, but maybe cable.
Directed by
Steve Anderson
After the success of “The Aristocrats” it was inevitable that someone would do a documentary detailing the fascinating history of everyone’s favorite expletive. [I remember a poll from somewhere and shit is a distant second]. A linguistic romp, if ever there was one! So what do we know about the history and uses of that ever popular word? Why do some people fear it’s very use even as an adjective?
Anderson interviews many people from both sides of the controversy, and there actually is one, after all, Howard Stern didn’t even use it, and he got his company fined by the FCC for millions!
We’ve got the likes of Bill Maher, Kevin Smith, Alanis Morissette, Drew Carey, Ice-T, Janeane Garofalo, Ron Jeremy, Sam Donaldson and Pat Boone (!) discussing why fuck is either such a wonderful word or why it should be completely banned from all discourse.
In addition to the interviews, which are skillfully edited in order to simulate conversations between people who showed up on different days, we’ve got clips from a bunch of various films and cable TV shows, which date back all the way to Lenny Bruce’s penultimate performance in 1965 and George Carlin’s legendary 1978 first HBO special to puppets simulating fucking in Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” from a couple of years ago.
The FCC takes a beating, as everybody, including President Bush himself uses the term [we’ve got the video tape] and the word is so ubiquitous in American, if not ALL English-speaking societies, that it shouldn’t have any shock value anymore.
Also, Bill Plympton animates some demonstrations of how the word is used, as well as chapter headings, all of which are really cute. Obviously this film is going to be rated NC-17, to protect children who have already used the term hundreds of times a month, from hurting their dear little ears with the horrid profanity.
It’s definitely worth the bucks.
At the Beach
Written and Directed
by Andrew Lloyd
Horror has been a major staple of the cinema like forever. The depiction of fear has been varied, and what works best in the genre has been debated endlessly. One way to depict it is by misdirection, in which almost nothing is actually shown and everything is showed askance. It’s more creepy that way.
Little Max (Raum-Aron) and his parents(Marlene O'Haire and Joel Nagle) are driving to the beach house on Long Island for a summer vacation when their car accidentally runs over a poor schnook(Ethan Baum) walking in the middle of the road. There’s blood on the car, but the victim is nowhere to be seen.
They leave the scene of the accident, call the police anonymously, and then when Max goes to bed, his imagination goes wild, imagining that the victim has turned into Freddy Kruger or Jason Voorhees, thirsting for revenge. This is reminiscent of “The Blair Witch Project” and the kid is really good. Lloyd has a future in the horror game for sure.
Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
Written and directed
by Scott Glosserman
One thing that I would never think of describing a slasher film as is “cute.” Yet that is exactly what describes this one. This is very cute indeed. It’s nice to see something actually new under the sun.
This valentine and parody of the genre begins in the usual way, a comely young waitress named Krissy (Carlson Lauren) taking out the garbage, when the door mysteriously shuts and we see a mysterious figure in the distance. She then runs away….
Cut to an old house in the villiage of Glen Echo, where college journalism student Taylor Gentry(Angela Goethals) and her camera crew(Ben Pace and Britain Spellings) are going to do a documentary about a deranged supernatural psycho killer named Leslie Vernon, who had been killed years before by an angry mob after he killed his parents. So out comes Leslie(Nathan Baesel), looking not like an evil zombie, but a pixieish, happy fellow, who wants to be just like his heroes Freddy, Jason and Mike, who are real people in this alternate reality.
What follows is a giddy deconstruction of the slasher/horror genre, with Vernan taking Taylor and her crew to the home of his mentor (Scott Wilson), who’s wife(Bridgett Newton) makes them all a lovely dinner and we get to hear them talk shop. Being a supernatural psycho is hard work!!!! Lots of preparation has to be done on the house where the dirty deed will be done, and we have to make sure that Kelly is going to be made properly paranoid. So we go on a stalking, where Vernan’s going to make his first real appearance, and suddenly, the graininess of the filmstock changes turning from faux video to 35MM glory as Kelly is told about the legend by a librarian played by Zelda Rubinstein and all of a sudden
Doc Halloran(Robert Englund), the Ahab [the shrinks who’s been following the psycho, a stock figure in slasher flicks]. Vernan tells his mentor about it and everybody does a happy dance.
Before it turns into a real slasher flick about three quarters the way through, this film is one of the most joyous parodies that I’ve ever seen. Then it turns out that all this preparation is for a reason, and the film stock changes. This is actually a cue to start the blood and gore, and the transition works. It’s not as absolutely brilliant as the mockumentery part, but it’s actually rather good in and of itself.
This is going to be considered a classic and the filmmakers have a long and successful career ahead of them.
She She She She's A Bombshell
An animated short
by Ben Levin
There’s at least one stinker in every film festival. So, it’s best to get it over with with an animated short, and make it as painless as possible.
In this case we’ve got some people driving home from a rock concert. The two people in the front seat can’t stand the guy in the back who’s ranting and ranting about nothing much whatsoever.
The animation is mediocre, the design is as well, and the joke doesn’t work. This is entirely useless and I’m not sure how this managed to get so much play at so many festivals. Feh.
The Intervention
Directed by
Jay Duplass
Mark and Jay Duplass are going to have their first feature, which was nominated for two independent spirit awards, in theaters in the summer, but as with every other filmmaker, they’ve done a number of shorts prior to it.
Steve’s(Steve Zissis) friends “love” him, therefore they’re forcing him to admit that he’s gay. This is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not at all funny. This is an uncomfortable mess, which is probably improv. I wouldn’t like a bunch of friends like this. Jeez….
Shut Up and Sing
Written and Directed
by Bruce Leddy
In hollywoodese, this would be described as “The Big Chill Musical.” A cute comedy, this is mostly about the midlife crisis we all go through sometime between 21 and 60.
When they were in college back in the early ‘90s, the group in question were an a cappella group and still sing on occasion. The person with the first midlife crisis we learn about is David(David Harbour), a computer techie, who doesn’t want fatherhood because he’s afraid that he’s getting old and hasn’t done all that he’s wanted to by this point in his life, a point of view his wife(Rosemarie DeWitt) isn’t too tolerant of. Meanwhile, we learn that the rest of the group isn’t doing much better, Will(Samrat Chakrabarti) is working as a gopher in the recording industry while he fails to get acting parts beyond “second terrorist on the right; Richard(Reg Rogers) is newly divorced and hasn’t gotten laid in almost five hundred days; Ted’s(Alexander Chaplin) marriage to Trish(Molly Shannon) isn’t going all that well either, and things are about to get worse when he’s fired after many years loyal service. Spooner(Chris Bowers), on the other hand, is doing really well doing whatever it is he does, and Steven(David Alan Basche) produces reality shows on the left coast.
The last member of the group, Greg(Mark Feuerstein), is going to get married in a couple of weeks and wants the gang to get back together and serenade his bride and him.
The film is a light comedy, which means nothing all that much happens. Sure there’s personal growth and everyone winds up living happily ever after, but then again, what else do we want from a trifle like this? Cute is as cute does. Not much more. Eh.
The Shirt
Written and Directed
by Drake Doremus
Made for the princely sum of five hundred bucks, this story of the quest for perfection is not one of the more brilliant efforts out there. It’s about a librarian(Tobias McKinney) who is under the delusion that by finding the perfect shirt he would have a life-changing experience. This doesn’t happen, but he does meat a clothing store clerk(Leslie Zang), with whom he begins to have a romance.
It’s kind of pointless, but the acting is okay, and at only eight minutes long you don’t have time to fall asleep, which is a good thing. This is a nice calling card, but not anything to write home about.
Live Free or Die
Written and Directed by
Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin
Nothing succeeds like success, and that helps when the inevitable crash landing takes place. Tin the case of “Seinfeld” writers Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin, that was when their “The Michael Richards Show” was cancelled after only eight episodes. So what to do?
Quite simple: do a cheap independent film, of course! So they got some money together, went up to New Hampshire, and filmed this minor crime comedy.
John "Rugged" Rudgate(Aaron Stanford) is a legend in his own mind. A small time crook in “the first-in-the-nation-primary state, he makes a living by selling stolen stereo speakers out if his van and getting refunds for stuff he never bought. He also likes to take credit for crimes he didn’t commit, that way it makes him look tougher.
While hanging out with his dimwitted friend Lagrand(Paul Schneider), he gets insulted by a local bully(R.E. Rodgers), and gets revenge by poisoning his well. Little does he know that the guy has already been poisoned, and thus, our antihero freaks out, thinking he’s actually killed the guy. Mayhem, as expected, ensues and the cops(Kevin Dunn and Michael Rapaport) are in not exactly hot pursuit and Rugged winds up a legend.
The film is kind of slow, and despite Schneider’s channeling Will Ferrell for a good performance, there’s nothing really to hold our interest. It’s not worth the cost of full price, but maybe cable.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
Gen Art: The shorts, or at least some of them...
The Genart festival has been going on for a while now, and we're now going to get to see some films I haven't seen yet, last night we saw a documenter called Fuck, about, well, the history, entemology and glory of the word in question. But they demanded no reviews as the thing's coming out into theaters in the fall.
Pity, it's a really good film.
The films are all preceded by shorts, here are the two I've seen aleady. Tomarrow I go see "encore" screenings of two films which haven't been shown yet. That way I can see the west wing and the Supranos. Now the reviews:
Wet
Written and Directed
by Hannah Beth King
For her MFA at Columbia University, Hannah Beth King made this film about a little girl named Jane (Alexandra Lowcher) who’s being pulled in two directions, towards God on the one hand, and to adolescent sexuality on the other. She likes to swim in her grandma’s pool and her best friend Sandy (Nastassja Schmiedt)
introduces her to the wonderful world of masturbation while her grandmother Betty (Nancy Tait) prepares her for a fundimentalist baptism.
Now aside from the really good cinematography, there’s a real suspense about how the film will end, and it’s actually a surprise in a nice bit of misdirection by the director. It’s a nice calling card for all involved, and one can see why it was nominated for a student academy award.
This Morning
Directed by
Lucy Mulloy
When is a home movie not a home movie? When it’s a student Oscar-nominated short! Then it’s a documentery. Lucy Mulloy was visiting a friend, just filming the friend’s kids, when Jay's toy is broken. Jay isn’t there yet, so Mulloy lets the girls who broke the little Wolverine action figure hide it, knowing that Jay has ADD or some such thing needing pills, and is going to throw one heck of a temper tantrum. His sister Dafeney gets the blame, but Dafeney blames it on her friend, who’s now gone. The promised tantrum lasts for much of the fifteen minute film.
Now instead of sending this film to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” [mainly because it’s not the least bit funny], Mulloy gets kudos and money on the festival circuit. I at least hope she got the kid a new action figure.
Pity, it's a really good film.
The films are all preceded by shorts, here are the two I've seen aleady. Tomarrow I go see "encore" screenings of two films which haven't been shown yet. That way I can see the west wing and the Supranos. Now the reviews:
Wet
Written and Directed
by Hannah Beth King
For her MFA at Columbia University, Hannah Beth King made this film about a little girl named Jane (Alexandra Lowcher) who’s being pulled in two directions, towards God on the one hand, and to adolescent sexuality on the other. She likes to swim in her grandma’s pool and her best friend Sandy (Nastassja Schmiedt)
introduces her to the wonderful world of masturbation while her grandmother Betty (Nancy Tait) prepares her for a fundimentalist baptism.
Now aside from the really good cinematography, there’s a real suspense about how the film will end, and it’s actually a surprise in a nice bit of misdirection by the director. It’s a nice calling card for all involved, and one can see why it was nominated for a student academy award.
This Morning
Directed by
Lucy Mulloy
When is a home movie not a home movie? When it’s a student Oscar-nominated short! Then it’s a documentery. Lucy Mulloy was visiting a friend, just filming the friend’s kids, when Jay's toy is broken. Jay isn’t there yet, so Mulloy lets the girls who broke the little Wolverine action figure hide it, knowing that Jay has ADD or some such thing needing pills, and is going to throw one heck of a temper tantrum. His sister Dafeney gets the blame, but Dafeney blames it on her friend, who’s now gone. The promised tantrum lasts for much of the fifteen minute film.
Now instead of sending this film to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” [mainly because it’s not the least bit funny], Mulloy gets kudos and money on the festival circuit. I at least hope she got the kid a new action figure.
Gen Art festival: The shorts, or at least some of them...
The Genart festival has been going on for a while now, and we're now going to get to see some films I haven't seen yet, last night we saw a documenter called Fuck, about, well, the history, entemology and glory of the word in question. But they demanded no reviews as the thing's coming out into theaters in the fall.
Pity, it's a really good film.
The films are all preceded by shorts, here are the two I've seen aleady. Tomarrow I go see "encore" screenings of two films which haven't been shown yet. That way I can see the west wing and the Supranos. Now the reviews:
the Wet
Written and Directed
by Hannah Beth King
For her MFA at Columbia University, Hannah Beth King made this film about a little girl named Jane (Alexandra Lowcher) who’s being pulled in two directions, towards God on the one hand, and to adolescent sexuality on the other. She likes to swim in her grandma’s pool and her best friend Sandy (Nastassja Schmiedt)
introduces her to the wonderful world of masturbation while her grandmother Betty (Nancy Tait) prepares her for a fundimentalist baptism.
Now aside from the really good cinematography, there’s a real suspense about how the film will end, and it’s actually a surprise in a nice bit of misdirection by the director. It’s a nice calling card for all involved, and one can see why it was nominated for a student academy award.
This Morning
Directed by
Lucy Mulloy
When is a home movie not a home movie? When it’s a student Oscar-nominated short! Then it’s a documentery. Lucy Mulloy was visiting a friend, just filming the friend’s kids, when Jay's toy is broken. Jay isn’t there yet, so Mulloy lets the girls who broke the little Wolverine action figure hide it, knowing that Jay has ADD or some such thing needing pills, and is going to throw one heck of a temper tantrum. His sister Dafeney gets the blame, but Dafeney blames it on her friend, who’s now gone. The promised tantrum lasts for much of the fifteen minute film.
Now instead of sending this film to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” [mainly because it’s not the least bit funny], Mulloy gets kudos and money on the festival circuit. I at least hope she got the kid a new action figure.
Pity, it's a really good film.
The films are all preceded by shorts, here are the two I've seen aleady. Tomarrow I go see "encore" screenings of two films which haven't been shown yet. That way I can see the west wing and the Supranos. Now the reviews:
the Wet
Written and Directed
by Hannah Beth King
For her MFA at Columbia University, Hannah Beth King made this film about a little girl named Jane (Alexandra Lowcher) who’s being pulled in two directions, towards God on the one hand, and to adolescent sexuality on the other. She likes to swim in her grandma’s pool and her best friend Sandy (Nastassja Schmiedt)
introduces her to the wonderful world of masturbation while her grandmother Betty (Nancy Tait) prepares her for a fundimentalist baptism.
Now aside from the really good cinematography, there’s a real suspense about how the film will end, and it’s actually a surprise in a nice bit of misdirection by the director. It’s a nice calling card for all involved, and one can see why it was nominated for a student academy award.
This Morning
Directed by
Lucy Mulloy
When is a home movie not a home movie? When it’s a student Oscar-nominated short! Then it’s a documentery. Lucy Mulloy was visiting a friend, just filming the friend’s kids, when Jay's toy is broken. Jay isn’t there yet, so Mulloy lets the girls who broke the little Wolverine action figure hide it, knowing that Jay has ADD or some such thing needing pills, and is going to throw one heck of a temper tantrum. His sister Dafeney gets the blame, but Dafeney blames it on her friend, who’s now gone. The promised tantrum lasts for much of the fifteen minute film.
Now instead of sending this film to “America’s Funniest Home Videos” [mainly because it’s not the least bit funny], Mulloy gets kudos and money on the festival circuit. I at least hope she got the kid a new action figure.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Gen Art film festival
Today is the first night of the Gen Art Film festival, which isn't always here in NYC. I"ve seen three of the films already, and since I'm lazy and I generally reprint stuff from a while ago, here are they are:
NEVERWAS
Written and Directed by
Joshua Michael Stern
Once upon a time, long, long ago. There was a boy named Christopher Robin. His father wrote a beloved fantasy book for children about him, and thus ruined poor C.R. Milne’s life forever.
When Zachary Pierson(Ryan Drescher) was a little boy, his father, T.L. Pierson (Nick Nolte) wrote and illustrated a series of books on a magical place called Neverwas before they took him away to the looney bin. His death was one of those things that can ruin a kid’s life, so he took his mother’s maiden name as his own and when we meet Dr. Zach Riley (Aaron Eckhart) again, he’s all grown up and a psychiatrist to boot, arriving at the hospital where his father spent most of his last years in order to help clean the place up and find out what exactly happened with his old man, something his mother
(Jessica Lange) heartily disapproves of. His new boss(William Hurt)
wouldn’t have approved either.
But there are forces out there lying in wait for our hero. Maggie Paige (Brittany Murphy), an old friend from childhood, is a big fan of his father’s books and is surreptitiously working on an article on the late TL. Also, is one Gabriel Finch (Ian McKellen) an inmate at the hospital who also has a fixation on T. L’s books, but for slightly different reasons…
This is perfect material for someone like Terry Gilliam and is the film he probably should have made instead of “Tideland” or the “Brothers Grimm.” This is lots of fun as well as deep, and the characters are ones we can identify with. The acting is wonderful, Eckhart and McKellan give one of their best performances. Gandolf lives, and it’s here. This is worth seeing twice.
Dreamland
Directed by
Jason Matzner
It’s tough being a saint. Audrey(Agnes Bruckner) is stuck in the dreamland trailer park somewhere in New Mexico living with her physically fit but mentally damaged father(John Corbett) and thus she has nowhere to go. Her best friend and neighbor Cindy, er, Calista (Kelli Garner) is dying of some horrible desease and thus she has to take care of her as well.
Is a talented poet who should be going to college in the fall, but her responsibilities to these two needy people is too great. Poor, poor Audrey! Then Mookie(Justin Long) comes along, and there’s love, but Callista is in lust with him too, so gives way. Pure soap. But don’t worry, she works in the local bodega with a nerd named Abraham (Brian Klugman) and they have hot sex.
The problem with this trailer trash version of “Days of Our Lives” is that it’s too predictable. Tom Willett’s screenplay tries to bring nobility into this piece of fluff, but the third act is far too stupid to really keep one interested. The ending is entirely predictable, that everyone lives happily ever after, or at least achieves a minor enlightenment, is something we can see coming within the first fifteen minutes of the film. While the performances are quite good, Kelly Gerner is hot, the piss-poor script just isn’t worth the time and trouble to get out of the house and go to the theater. Pass it by.
WRISTCUTTERS – A LOVE STORY
Written and Directed
By Goran Dukic
According to the Catholic Church, if you kill yourself you wind up in Hell. So when Zia(Patrick Fugit) offs himself, he goes to someplace less bad. A place much like Earth, but grayer and without any stars.
So with no Heaven in sight, our hero is stuck in a dead-end job and spends his spare time getting drunk in the local bar, and here he meets a Russian rock musician Eurgene(Shea Whigharn) who electrocuted himself with a guitar on stage. He still lives with his parents, who are also suicides. They’re hanging out when Zia’s old friend Brian(Jake Busey) informs our hero that his long lost love(Mary P. Gleeson) has also put herself to death. So, now Zia has a mission, taking Eugene’s car and it’s owner on a quest to find her.
On the way, he and Eugene pick up a pretty young hitchhiker named Mikal(Shannon Sossamon), who died of a drug overdose and wants to find the People In Charge, and appeal her eternal sentence as the death wasn’t intentional.
So we have a longish road trip into the world of magical realism, where we meet all sorts of eccentric characters, including a guy named Kneller(Tom Waits) who runs a holiday camp where minor miracles are performed, and a cult leader(John Hawkes) tries to off himself again and find the next level…and yes, there is the expected romance.
This is actually a fun film and worth at least a matinee.
NEVERWAS
Written and Directed by
Joshua Michael Stern
Once upon a time, long, long ago. There was a boy named Christopher Robin. His father wrote a beloved fantasy book for children about him, and thus ruined poor C.R. Milne’s life forever.
When Zachary Pierson(Ryan Drescher) was a little boy, his father, T.L. Pierson (Nick Nolte) wrote and illustrated a series of books on a magical place called Neverwas before they took him away to the looney bin. His death was one of those things that can ruin a kid’s life, so he took his mother’s maiden name as his own and when we meet Dr. Zach Riley (Aaron Eckhart) again, he’s all grown up and a psychiatrist to boot, arriving at the hospital where his father spent most of his last years in order to help clean the place up and find out what exactly happened with his old man, something his mother
(Jessica Lange) heartily disapproves of. His new boss(William Hurt)
wouldn’t have approved either.
But there are forces out there lying in wait for our hero. Maggie Paige (Brittany Murphy), an old friend from childhood, is a big fan of his father’s books and is surreptitiously working on an article on the late TL. Also, is one Gabriel Finch (Ian McKellen) an inmate at the hospital who also has a fixation on T. L’s books, but for slightly different reasons…
This is perfect material for someone like Terry Gilliam and is the film he probably should have made instead of “Tideland” or the “Brothers Grimm.” This is lots of fun as well as deep, and the characters are ones we can identify with. The acting is wonderful, Eckhart and McKellan give one of their best performances. Gandolf lives, and it’s here. This is worth seeing twice.
Dreamland
Directed by
Jason Matzner
It’s tough being a saint. Audrey(Agnes Bruckner) is stuck in the dreamland trailer park somewhere in New Mexico living with her physically fit but mentally damaged father(John Corbett) and thus she has nowhere to go. Her best friend and neighbor Cindy, er, Calista (Kelli Garner) is dying of some horrible desease and thus she has to take care of her as well.
Is a talented poet who should be going to college in the fall, but her responsibilities to these two needy people is too great. Poor, poor Audrey! Then Mookie(Justin Long) comes along, and there’s love, but Callista is in lust with him too, so gives way. Pure soap. But don’t worry, she works in the local bodega with a nerd named Abraham (Brian Klugman) and they have hot sex.
The problem with this trailer trash version of “Days of Our Lives” is that it’s too predictable. Tom Willett’s screenplay tries to bring nobility into this piece of fluff, but the third act is far too stupid to really keep one interested. The ending is entirely predictable, that everyone lives happily ever after, or at least achieves a minor enlightenment, is something we can see coming within the first fifteen minutes of the film. While the performances are quite good, Kelly Gerner is hot, the piss-poor script just isn’t worth the time and trouble to get out of the house and go to the theater. Pass it by.
WRISTCUTTERS – A LOVE STORY
Written and Directed
By Goran Dukic
According to the Catholic Church, if you kill yourself you wind up in Hell. So when Zia(Patrick Fugit) offs himself, he goes to someplace less bad. A place much like Earth, but grayer and without any stars.
So with no Heaven in sight, our hero is stuck in a dead-end job and spends his spare time getting drunk in the local bar, and here he meets a Russian rock musician Eurgene(Shea Whigharn) who electrocuted himself with a guitar on stage. He still lives with his parents, who are also suicides. They’re hanging out when Zia’s old friend Brian(Jake Busey) informs our hero that his long lost love(Mary P. Gleeson) has also put herself to death. So, now Zia has a mission, taking Eugene’s car and it’s owner on a quest to find her.
On the way, he and Eugene pick up a pretty young hitchhiker named Mikal(Shannon Sossamon), who died of a drug overdose and wants to find the People In Charge, and appeal her eternal sentence as the death wasn’t intentional.
So we have a longish road trip into the world of magical realism, where we meet all sorts of eccentric characters, including a guy named Kneller(Tom Waits) who runs a holiday camp where minor miracles are performed, and a cult leader(John Hawkes) tries to off himself again and find the next level…and yes, there is the expected romance.
This is actually a fun film and worth at least a matinee.
Friday, March 31, 2006
The Tupac Shakur national monument
Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) has tabled a bill to fund such a project in Stone Mountain GA.
Well, I guess it's no worse than that bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
Well, I guess it's no worse than that bridge to nowhere in Alaska.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
The Israeli election
The Likud party is now fifth in the number of seats in the Knesset. This is the end of Netanyahu. Also, it's the end of Hamas, as the Israelis are going to declare unilateral borders.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
NDNF 6
TEXAS Italy 2005; 104 min.
Written and Directed
by Fausto Paravidino
First off, the film has absolutely nothing to do with any of the states of the union. “Texas,” if this film is to be believed, is a synonym for “the middle of nowhere, and the middle of this nowhere is the outer suburbs of Genoa, Italy, where little of importance happens and a merry band of post-teenagers likes to hang out and get drunk. Little do we know we're going to get blindsided.
For the first third of the film, Enrico (Fausto Paravidino) takes us on a tour of the people in his life. Apparently one of them is going away for military service and everybody is going to get stinking drunk, something they do all the time. We get to know these people as we prepare ourselves for the merry romp that's advertised at the beginning of the film.
But then one of them, a hansome slacker named Gianluca (Ricardo Scamarcio) starts two-timing his girlfriend. Cinzia (Iris Fusetti) with a married schoolteacher named Maria (Valeria Golino), who's husband Alessandro(Valerio Rinasco) isn't too happy with the situation. This could have been, and has in other films, been treated with a very light hearted touch, but Paravidino doesn't. What he does, is basically drop himself from the film somewhere near the beginning of the middle and change the tone of the film dramatically. In other words, the comedy vanishes and we have a romantic tragedy,
As a minor character says “This is getting too heavy, man.”
Indeed it does, but we've got some terrific performances here, and when we finally get into the real plot, as opposed to the party of a prologue, what might be termed “the second movie” becomes really dramatic.
Worth a look.
INTO GREAT SILENCE Germany, 2005; 162 min.
Written and Directed
by Philip Gröning
As a novice filmmaker, Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monks of the Grand Chartreuse, a monastery in the French Alps, for permission to make a documentary about them. They said, “we'll think about it” and a dozen years later they actually said yes.
So, he actually goes there and starts filming. Now if you were expecting a gay romp through the Alps with happy-go-lucky monks dancing in the snow, you've got another thing coming.
What's coming is almost three hours of deathly dull tediousness, the Carthusians have taken a modified vow of silence, in which they can only use their vocal cords when singing hymns or praying in the chapel or during a once-weekly walk through the woods. Otherwise thy just do chores and read, entirely in silence.
If you really want to know what it's like to be a monk or nun in one of the strictest orders, see this, but beware, being bored out of your skull is not anyone's idea of entertainment.
THINGS THAT HANG FROM TREES USA, 2006; 98 min.
Directed by
Ido Mizrahy
Life in a small town can be painful if you're weird. We're in St. Augustine, Florida, and it's September, 1969, The city is going to be major fireworks display to celebrate the place's anniversary and everybody's excited. Tommy Wheeler (Cooper Musgrove) is an odd duck for sure. His best friend Bear Hadley(Ryan Parker) loves nothing more than to torture our hero, something his other pal Tony Mazziati(Antony Del Rio) tolerates. Only the town drunk, Ump (Peter Gerety) is willing to stand up to this kiddie injustice.
But for the most part, we've got a gritty little comic soap opera, as Tommy's
his dreamy mother Connie Mae(Deborah Kara Unger) poses in sexy laingeree in the window of her sex shop and George Burgess (Daniel von Bargen), the local barber and religious fanatic, eats his lunch in front.
This was supposed to be adapted from an award-winning novel for children, but if it was, the adaptation isn't particularly good. The film is, in fact, quite a snorer, and we don't really care what's going on with the grownups and even with his eccentricities, Tommy just isn't that interesting a kid to really stay awake for.
The ending is a bit of a shocker, as it comes completely out of left field. The whole experience is something that's not worth the time or money.
MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY USA, 2005; 90 min.
Directed by
Laura Poitras
What's perplexing about this film is the point of view. Is Laura Poitras in favor of the event she is filming or against it? We're never entirely sure as we follow her around from place to place around Iraq as it prepares for it's first free election in decades, if ever.
Her main focus is a certain Dr. Riyadh, a notable in the neighborhood where he lives, he's a doctor in the old school, and everyone in his neighborhood loves him. Fine. So he decides to run for the Baghdad city council and lets Laura Poitras and her crew follow him around for while he runs for office.
This is not the only thing Piotras does. She goes to a number of Iraqi cities and follows the election process elsewhere, and it's all very interesting. The picture she paints is actually pretty positive, even though the outside security firm as to by weapons on the black market in order to protect the ballots and polling stations from
WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN USA, 2006; 93 min.
Written and Directed
by Cam Archer
Logan(Malcolm Stumpf) is one of those kids who doesn't have it all that good in Junior high. Come to think of it, almost nobody has it really good in Junior high. The asshole gene begins to kick in just before the hair starts growing in the groin and armpits and except for the top ranks in the clic system, pretty much everyone has a lousy time.
Of course, our hero lives with his single mother(Fairuza Balk) and is gay. Now, with most of the kids being homophobic and all, he gets pretty much razzed about it, but then he meets the über-cool rebel of the 10th grade, whom everyone calls Rodeo(Patrick White). Soon Logan has a major crush and is soon disguising his voice and having phone sex(using the voice of ). Soon Logan is dressing up in Mom's clothing and even former best pal Joey (Max Paradise) is wondering about his sexuality. This only makes things worse for his almost non-existent social life.
This thing is too poetic for it's own damn good. While we feel for Logan at the beginning, his actions soon become annoying and near the end the film becomes almost unwatchable, making you actually sympathize with the evil straight prom queen-type. It's pretty sure that Cam Archer is going to graduate to bigger things, like gay soft porn, or homicidal gay screenwriter psychodramas.
Meanwhile pass this by. It's all old hat.
Written and Directed
by Fausto Paravidino
First off, the film has absolutely nothing to do with any of the states of the union. “Texas,” if this film is to be believed, is a synonym for “the middle of nowhere, and the middle of this nowhere is the outer suburbs of Genoa, Italy, where little of importance happens and a merry band of post-teenagers likes to hang out and get drunk. Little do we know we're going to get blindsided.
For the first third of the film, Enrico (Fausto Paravidino) takes us on a tour of the people in his life. Apparently one of them is going away for military service and everybody is going to get stinking drunk, something they do all the time. We get to know these people as we prepare ourselves for the merry romp that's advertised at the beginning of the film.
But then one of them, a hansome slacker named Gianluca (Ricardo Scamarcio) starts two-timing his girlfriend. Cinzia (Iris Fusetti) with a married schoolteacher named Maria (Valeria Golino), who's husband Alessandro(Valerio Rinasco) isn't too happy with the situation. This could have been, and has in other films, been treated with a very light hearted touch, but Paravidino doesn't. What he does, is basically drop himself from the film somewhere near the beginning of the middle and change the tone of the film dramatically. In other words, the comedy vanishes and we have a romantic tragedy,
As a minor character says “This is getting too heavy, man.”
Indeed it does, but we've got some terrific performances here, and when we finally get into the real plot, as opposed to the party of a prologue, what might be termed “the second movie” becomes really dramatic.
Worth a look.
INTO GREAT SILENCE Germany, 2005; 162 min.
Written and Directed
by Philip Gröning
As a novice filmmaker, Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monks of the Grand Chartreuse, a monastery in the French Alps, for permission to make a documentary about them. They said, “we'll think about it” and a dozen years later they actually said yes.
So, he actually goes there and starts filming. Now if you were expecting a gay romp through the Alps with happy-go-lucky monks dancing in the snow, you've got another thing coming.
What's coming is almost three hours of deathly dull tediousness, the Carthusians have taken a modified vow of silence, in which they can only use their vocal cords when singing hymns or praying in the chapel or during a once-weekly walk through the woods. Otherwise thy just do chores and read, entirely in silence.
If you really want to know what it's like to be a monk or nun in one of the strictest orders, see this, but beware, being bored out of your skull is not anyone's idea of entertainment.
THINGS THAT HANG FROM TREES USA, 2006; 98 min.
Directed by
Ido Mizrahy
Life in a small town can be painful if you're weird. We're in St. Augustine, Florida, and it's September, 1969, The city is going to be major fireworks display to celebrate the place's anniversary and everybody's excited. Tommy Wheeler (Cooper Musgrove) is an odd duck for sure. His best friend Bear Hadley(Ryan Parker) loves nothing more than to torture our hero, something his other pal Tony Mazziati(Antony Del Rio) tolerates. Only the town drunk, Ump (Peter Gerety) is willing to stand up to this kiddie injustice.
But for the most part, we've got a gritty little comic soap opera, as Tommy's
his dreamy mother Connie Mae(Deborah Kara Unger) poses in sexy laingeree in the window of her sex shop and George Burgess (Daniel von Bargen), the local barber and religious fanatic, eats his lunch in front.
This was supposed to be adapted from an award-winning novel for children, but if it was, the adaptation isn't particularly good. The film is, in fact, quite a snorer, and we don't really care what's going on with the grownups and even with his eccentricities, Tommy just isn't that interesting a kid to really stay awake for.
The ending is a bit of a shocker, as it comes completely out of left field. The whole experience is something that's not worth the time or money.
MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY USA, 2005; 90 min.
Directed by
Laura Poitras
What's perplexing about this film is the point of view. Is Laura Poitras in favor of the event she is filming or against it? We're never entirely sure as we follow her around from place to place around Iraq as it prepares for it's first free election in decades, if ever.
Her main focus is a certain Dr. Riyadh, a notable in the neighborhood where he lives, he's a doctor in the old school, and everyone in his neighborhood loves him. Fine. So he decides to run for the Baghdad city council and lets Laura Poitras and her crew follow him around for while he runs for office.
This is not the only thing Piotras does. She goes to a number of Iraqi cities and follows the election process elsewhere, and it's all very interesting. The picture she paints is actually pretty positive, even though the outside security firm as to by weapons on the black market in order to protect the ballots and polling stations from
WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN USA, 2006; 93 min.
Written and Directed
by Cam Archer
Logan(Malcolm Stumpf) is one of those kids who doesn't have it all that good in Junior high. Come to think of it, almost nobody has it really good in Junior high. The asshole gene begins to kick in just before the hair starts growing in the groin and armpits and except for the top ranks in the clic system, pretty much everyone has a lousy time.
Of course, our hero lives with his single mother(Fairuza Balk) and is gay. Now, with most of the kids being homophobic and all, he gets pretty much razzed about it, but then he meets the über-cool rebel of the 10th grade, whom everyone calls Rodeo(Patrick White). Soon Logan has a major crush and is soon disguising his voice and having phone sex(using the voice of ). Soon Logan is dressing up in Mom's clothing and even former best pal Joey (Max Paradise) is wondering about his sexuality. This only makes things worse for his almost non-existent social life.
This thing is too poetic for it's own damn good. While we feel for Logan at the beginning, his actions soon become annoying and near the end the film becomes almost unwatchable, making you actually sympathize with the evil straight prom queen-type. It's pretty sure that Cam Archer is going to graduate to bigger things, like gay soft porn, or homicidal gay screenwriter psychodramas.
Meanwhile pass this by. It's all old hat.
Monday, March 20, 2006
NDNF 5
PAVEE LACKEEN Ireland, 2005; 87 min.
Written and Directed
by Perry Ogden
The” Travelers” are an Irish subculture akin to the Gypsies. They aren't treated very well by the Irish government, and are therefore not a very happy bunch.
The story, as much as there is one, is about Winnie Maughan, a ten year old girl who gets suspended from a “special” school just for Travelers because she fights back with kids who call her names. Her mother Rose is a drunk, at least for the film, and Winnie's nine siblings are either in jail or our on the street causing trouble. So what we do is follow Winnie around as she goes around Dublin hanging out while things get worse for the family as they're forced to travel to a worse campsite where the government doesn't have to do anything for them anymore.
The film doesn't show what exactly the Traveler experience is and what difference it is from the regular Irish experience aside from the fact that they live in a trailer and speak with a particularly think accent. There's really no plot to this thing, and the characters have absolutely no development at all. There's a feeling of hopelessness about the film, which begs the question of purpose. What exactly is the filmmaker trying to do here? Is it a propaganda plea for help, and indictment of the Irish government for the treatment of these people? A pre-teen adventure film?
In all these things, it's a failure. We don't really care too much for these people and it seems neither does anyone else, including the filmmaker who wants to show their plight to the world.
FIRST ON THE MOON Russia, 2005; 75 min.
Directed by
Alexey Fedorchenko
I was really looking forward to this film. The idea was a hoot, a pseudo-documentary on a mysterious Soviet space flight in the 1930s was something which should not only be brilliant, but hilarious. Sadly, it's neither.
What they have is somewhat stilted and pedestrian. Following a brief history of rocketry, The narrator mentions a mysterious meteorite that fell in Chile in 1938, and then using a combination of real and faked footage begins to piece together a story of a secret soviet space program, where four heroes are chosen for a secret mission into outer space. Unfortunately, only one of them(Alexei Slavnin) is still alive, and he isn't very interesting.
The group of cosmonauts training to be the first person in space consists of a circus dwarf(Andrei Osipov), a female athlete(Viktoria Ilyinskaya) and two pilots, the interviewee (Anatoly Otradnov) and Ivan Kharlamov (Boris Vlasov), who is eventually picked to become the first person into space.
This could have been really fun and interesting, but instead it's actually rather boring. Most of the film concentrates on the training of the quartet, and we don't see too much of that, and the description of the flight's aftermath, with Kharlamov's travels and subsequent mental state shown with faux clippings and some “archival” footage, together with that taken by Fedorchenko's trip to the South Pacific, or at least it should have been because it would have been a really good excuse to go there.
This is a snooze.
Still World The Netherlands, 2005; 30 min.
Written and Directed
by Elbert van Strien
You've gotta have a gimmick. Here, we've got a tale of parinoia told through a series of still photos, which symbolizes the detachment the hero of the piece(Fedja van Huêt) from the world when he discovers his rival(Daan Schuurmans) and not he is was the first to have a book published.
Our hero then decides that there's a secret conspiracy to keep the world mediocre, and tries to prove it. Aside from the gimmick, there's really no story that makes sense except the ravings of a paranoid lunatic. It reminds one of the ending of “Fight Club” but isn't nearly as interesting or fun.
IRON ISLAND Iran 2005; 90 min. - A Kino International release.
Written and Directed
by Mohammad Rasoulof
Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, the Persian gulf to be exact, is a rusting, derelict oil tanker which has been converted into a village. It's on this titular “iron island” where the fatherly Captain Nemat (Ali Nasirian) presides over a few hundred tenants living their lives. Cannibalizing the ship for money, raising kids and other sundry things while a few eccentrics here and there make life on board not completely boring.
This has the making of a sitcom, sort of “Star Trek” meets “Northern Exposure.” For most of the time, we follow the good captain as he makes his rounds about the ship, and tries to fend off the actual owners of the vessel, who want to sell it for scrap. It's all very cute, but there's a darker plot thread.
Since this is an Iranian film about Sunni Arabs, the mores are very different than here in the west, which is why a clandestine romance between the captain's protégé Ahmad (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh) and the daughter of an occasional resident of vessel (Neda Pakdaman) can turn tragic. Ahmad has, like most of the people on the ship, nothing, while the captain has promised to get the girl a rich husband… the otherwise lovable captain treats this situation not with distinctly nasty attention.
The film ends on a hopeful note. This is what cinema is about. Taking the viewer into a completely alien world and trying to make some sense out of it. Definitely worth a matinee.
Written and Directed
by Perry Ogden
The” Travelers” are an Irish subculture akin to the Gypsies. They aren't treated very well by the Irish government, and are therefore not a very happy bunch.
The story, as much as there is one, is about Winnie Maughan, a ten year old girl who gets suspended from a “special” school just for Travelers because she fights back with kids who call her names. Her mother Rose is a drunk, at least for the film, and Winnie's nine siblings are either in jail or our on the street causing trouble. So what we do is follow Winnie around as she goes around Dublin hanging out while things get worse for the family as they're forced to travel to a worse campsite where the government doesn't have to do anything for them anymore.
The film doesn't show what exactly the Traveler experience is and what difference it is from the regular Irish experience aside from the fact that they live in a trailer and speak with a particularly think accent. There's really no plot to this thing, and the characters have absolutely no development at all. There's a feeling of hopelessness about the film, which begs the question of purpose. What exactly is the filmmaker trying to do here? Is it a propaganda plea for help, and indictment of the Irish government for the treatment of these people? A pre-teen adventure film?
In all these things, it's a failure. We don't really care too much for these people and it seems neither does anyone else, including the filmmaker who wants to show their plight to the world.
FIRST ON THE MOON Russia, 2005; 75 min.
Directed by
Alexey Fedorchenko
I was really looking forward to this film. The idea was a hoot, a pseudo-documentary on a mysterious Soviet space flight in the 1930s was something which should not only be brilliant, but hilarious. Sadly, it's neither.
What they have is somewhat stilted and pedestrian. Following a brief history of rocketry, The narrator mentions a mysterious meteorite that fell in Chile in 1938, and then using a combination of real and faked footage begins to piece together a story of a secret soviet space program, where four heroes are chosen for a secret mission into outer space. Unfortunately, only one of them(Alexei Slavnin) is still alive, and he isn't very interesting.
The group of cosmonauts training to be the first person in space consists of a circus dwarf(Andrei Osipov), a female athlete(Viktoria Ilyinskaya) and two pilots, the interviewee (Anatoly Otradnov) and Ivan Kharlamov (Boris Vlasov), who is eventually picked to become the first person into space.
This could have been really fun and interesting, but instead it's actually rather boring. Most of the film concentrates on the training of the quartet, and we don't see too much of that, and the description of the flight's aftermath, with Kharlamov's travels and subsequent mental state shown with faux clippings and some “archival” footage, together with that taken by Fedorchenko's trip to the South Pacific, or at least it should have been because it would have been a really good excuse to go there.
This is a snooze.
Still World The Netherlands, 2005; 30 min.
Written and Directed
by Elbert van Strien
You've gotta have a gimmick. Here, we've got a tale of parinoia told through a series of still photos, which symbolizes the detachment the hero of the piece(Fedja van Huêt) from the world when he discovers his rival(Daan Schuurmans) and not he is was the first to have a book published.
Our hero then decides that there's a secret conspiracy to keep the world mediocre, and tries to prove it. Aside from the gimmick, there's really no story that makes sense except the ravings of a paranoid lunatic. It reminds one of the ending of “Fight Club” but isn't nearly as interesting or fun.
IRON ISLAND Iran 2005; 90 min. - A Kino International release.
Written and Directed
by Mohammad Rasoulof
Somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, the Persian gulf to be exact, is a rusting, derelict oil tanker which has been converted into a village. It's on this titular “iron island” where the fatherly Captain Nemat (Ali Nasirian) presides over a few hundred tenants living their lives. Cannibalizing the ship for money, raising kids and other sundry things while a few eccentrics here and there make life on board not completely boring.
This has the making of a sitcom, sort of “Star Trek” meets “Northern Exposure.” For most of the time, we follow the good captain as he makes his rounds about the ship, and tries to fend off the actual owners of the vessel, who want to sell it for scrap. It's all very cute, but there's a darker plot thread.
Since this is an Iranian film about Sunni Arabs, the mores are very different than here in the west, which is why a clandestine romance between the captain's protégé Ahmad (Hossein Farzi-Zadeh) and the daughter of an occasional resident of vessel (Neda Pakdaman) can turn tragic. Ahmad has, like most of the people on the ship, nothing, while the captain has promised to get the girl a rich husband… the otherwise lovable captain treats this situation not with distinctly nasty attention.
The film ends on a hopeful note. This is what cinema is about. Taking the viewer into a completely alien world and trying to make some sense out of it. Definitely worth a matinee.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
NDNF 4
Sangre (Blood)
Written and Directed
By Amat Escalante
Diego(Cirilo Recio) is a sad sack security guard working for the Mexican government. He and his wife Blanca(Laura Saldana) live in a run-down apartment in Mexico city and lead a very boring life indeed. They fight, shag and watch TV. Before going to bed or eating. That's pretty much the first two-thirds of the film right there.
There is a bit of a twist, however. Diego has a daughter, Karina(Claudia Orozco), from a previous marrage. She wants to move in, but Blanca won't have it. She hates anything or anyone that reminds Diego of his previous existence. So…there's not much that goes on here either until near the end. But even with this we're bored to tears. I myself had a tough time staying awake.
Don't waste your money.
MAN PUSH CART USA 2005; 87 min.
Written and Directed
by Ramin Bahrani
Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) is a failure. Once upon a time, he was a major star back in Pakistan, but he came to America with his wife and kid and she died, the in-laws (Arun Lal and Razia Mujahid), took the kidand now he's selling bagels and coffee in a pushcart in Manhattan while living in a tiny apartment in Queens.
So he gets up early every morning to push his cart to the appointed spot, and sell coffee, tea and bagels to the commuters on their way to work. It's a boring life, but he sees no real choice in the matter. A friend of his working in a newspaper stand has mysteriously disappeared and has been replaced by Noemi(Leticia Dolera), who's from Spain and is just off the plane. The romance is tentative, and there's of course, complications,
The complication is opportunity knocking at the door in the form of Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), a yuppie from Lahore back in Pakistan who was a fan of our hero back before he emigrated. He offers Ahmad some work here and there, and tries to help him network with the Indo/Pak entertainment industry, for what it is, in order to get Ahmad back on track as far as his singing career goes.
Mohammad has some ulterior motives, as he tries to get into Noemi's pants and begins treating Ahmad as more or less a servant. In the meantime Ahmad continues to live his “Groundhog Day” existence pushing his cart to the spot every day. It's both enthralling and boring as hell. Then it turns to shit in the end.
The performance by Raziya is very subdued. There's this air of quiet suffering that pervades the entire film, and we begin to wonder if the character, though trapped wants to get out of where he's at. It's a very sad film and very well done.
A SOAP Denmark, 2006; 104 min.
Written and Directed
by Fischer Christensen
Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) has just left her live-in boyfriend Kristian(Frank Thiel) and has brought him over to her new digs in order to have him move the bed, he refuses. And leaves in a huff. Meanwhile, downstairs, a drag queen named Ulrik,who calls himself Veronica (David Dencik), is plying her trade as a dominatrix. “Will they ever find what they're looking for?” The narrator(voice of Christian Mosbæk) asks. I hope not.
The problem with this thing is that it doesn't have any really likeable characters. An unconventional romance, we're expected to hope against hope that Charlotte can cure Veronica of his transexuality and become a real man. At least that's what appears to be happening during much of the film, and appearances are everything in cinema, right?
The acting is rather good. Dencik's Victoria is a thoroughly miserable person who hates his body. Clearly when Charlotte begins coming on to him, he WANTS to respond in kind, but he just can't. Dyrholm just plays Charotte as a bitch pure and simple. She has some endearing qualities, but for the most part, she's a manipulative jerk who's the homosexual caricature of what womanhood's all about. The story goes ahead in a decent pace ,but in general there's large masses of dead space between events. The episodic nature of the films structure [the narration is a total waste of time]
The ending is pretty much expected. Fortunately this film isn't how Our tax dollars are spent, only Denmark's. But they shouldn't have to be forced to finance this crap either.
ELEVEN MEN OUT Iceland/Finland/United Kingdom, 2005; 90 min.
Directed by
Robert I. Douglas
This is supposed to be an uplifting tale of self-empowerment, but winds up just the opposite. In fact, this is one of the most misanthropic sports films I've ever seen.
Ottar Thor (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) is a star. He's the number one footballer in Iceland, and everyone loves him with maybe the exception of his ex-wife Gugga (Lilja Nott), a former Miss Iceland, but she seems to be okay with the status quo,having joint custody of their son Magnus (Arnmundur Ernst), whom we see as a normal kid. That is until a female reporter tells him that coverage of him and his team is going to be near the back to lack of interest.
So, in order to get on the cover, he comes out of the closet. His entire family is devistaed. His father(Sigurdur Skulason) is furious for not only the expected reasons, but for being blindsided in such a way. He decides on an intervention and we meet the rest of the family, a repulsive brother(co-scenarist Jon Atli Jonasson), who treats his wife like dirt, and when that doesn't work, he, as the coach of the club, throws his son of the team.
A friend invites Ottar to join one of the local amateur clubs, and pretty soon all the straight players have run away and are replaced by gays. The team is dubbed “Pride Untied.” Now if this were a Hollywood movie, we'd concentrate on the team and how they went from success to success with a bump here and there, but this is a government-sponsored European drama, and thus when Ottar has custody of Magnus, the latter arrives to see Dad getting head from a teammate. Mom starts going to pot and winds up in rehab.
Meanwhile, Pride United gets to the top of the league by having most of the other teams default. This is mean spirited. Nobody comes out looking the least bit good, with the possible exception of Magnus's new girlfriend.
The climax is somewhat satisfying, but had the rest of the film not been such a mess, it would have been a lot moreso.
Written and Directed
By Amat Escalante
Diego(Cirilo Recio) is a sad sack security guard working for the Mexican government. He and his wife Blanca(Laura Saldana) live in a run-down apartment in Mexico city and lead a very boring life indeed. They fight, shag and watch TV. Before going to bed or eating. That's pretty much the first two-thirds of the film right there.
There is a bit of a twist, however. Diego has a daughter, Karina(Claudia Orozco), from a previous marrage. She wants to move in, but Blanca won't have it. She hates anything or anyone that reminds Diego of his previous existence. So…there's not much that goes on here either until near the end. But even with this we're bored to tears. I myself had a tough time staying awake.
Don't waste your money.
MAN PUSH CART USA 2005; 87 min.
Written and Directed
by Ramin Bahrani
Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi) is a failure. Once upon a time, he was a major star back in Pakistan, but he came to America with his wife and kid and she died, the in-laws (Arun Lal and Razia Mujahid), took the kidand now he's selling bagels and coffee in a pushcart in Manhattan while living in a tiny apartment in Queens.
So he gets up early every morning to push his cart to the appointed spot, and sell coffee, tea and bagels to the commuters on their way to work. It's a boring life, but he sees no real choice in the matter. A friend of his working in a newspaper stand has mysteriously disappeared and has been replaced by Noemi(Leticia Dolera), who's from Spain and is just off the plane. The romance is tentative, and there's of course, complications,
The complication is opportunity knocking at the door in the form of Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), a yuppie from Lahore back in Pakistan who was a fan of our hero back before he emigrated. He offers Ahmad some work here and there, and tries to help him network with the Indo/Pak entertainment industry, for what it is, in order to get Ahmad back on track as far as his singing career goes.
Mohammad has some ulterior motives, as he tries to get into Noemi's pants and begins treating Ahmad as more or less a servant. In the meantime Ahmad continues to live his “Groundhog Day” existence pushing his cart to the spot every day. It's both enthralling and boring as hell. Then it turns to shit in the end.
The performance by Raziya is very subdued. There's this air of quiet suffering that pervades the entire film, and we begin to wonder if the character, though trapped wants to get out of where he's at. It's a very sad film and very well done.
A SOAP Denmark, 2006; 104 min.
Written and Directed
by Fischer Christensen
Charlotte (Trine Dyrholm) has just left her live-in boyfriend Kristian(Frank Thiel) and has brought him over to her new digs in order to have him move the bed, he refuses. And leaves in a huff. Meanwhile, downstairs, a drag queen named Ulrik,who calls himself Veronica (David Dencik), is plying her trade as a dominatrix. “Will they ever find what they're looking for?” The narrator(voice of Christian Mosbæk) asks. I hope not.
The problem with this thing is that it doesn't have any really likeable characters. An unconventional romance, we're expected to hope against hope that Charlotte can cure Veronica of his transexuality and become a real man. At least that's what appears to be happening during much of the film, and appearances are everything in cinema, right?
The acting is rather good. Dencik's Victoria is a thoroughly miserable person who hates his body. Clearly when Charlotte begins coming on to him, he WANTS to respond in kind, but he just can't. Dyrholm just plays Charotte as a bitch pure and simple. She has some endearing qualities, but for the most part, she's a manipulative jerk who's the homosexual caricature of what womanhood's all about. The story goes ahead in a decent pace ,but in general there's large masses of dead space between events. The episodic nature of the films structure [the narration is a total waste of time]
The ending is pretty much expected. Fortunately this film isn't how Our tax dollars are spent, only Denmark's. But they shouldn't have to be forced to finance this crap either.
ELEVEN MEN OUT Iceland/Finland/United Kingdom, 2005; 90 min.
Directed by
Robert I. Douglas
This is supposed to be an uplifting tale of self-empowerment, but winds up just the opposite. In fact, this is one of the most misanthropic sports films I've ever seen.
Ottar Thor (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) is a star. He's the number one footballer in Iceland, and everyone loves him with maybe the exception of his ex-wife Gugga (Lilja Nott), a former Miss Iceland, but she seems to be okay with the status quo,having joint custody of their son Magnus (Arnmundur Ernst), whom we see as a normal kid. That is until a female reporter tells him that coverage of him and his team is going to be near the back to lack of interest.
So, in order to get on the cover, he comes out of the closet. His entire family is devistaed. His father(Sigurdur Skulason) is furious for not only the expected reasons, but for being blindsided in such a way. He decides on an intervention and we meet the rest of the family, a repulsive brother(co-scenarist Jon Atli Jonasson), who treats his wife like dirt, and when that doesn't work, he, as the coach of the club, throws his son of the team.
A friend invites Ottar to join one of the local amateur clubs, and pretty soon all the straight players have run away and are replaced by gays. The team is dubbed “Pride Untied.” Now if this were a Hollywood movie, we'd concentrate on the team and how they went from success to success with a bump here and there, but this is a government-sponsored European drama, and thus when Ottar has custody of Magnus, the latter arrives to see Dad getting head from a teammate. Mom starts going to pot and winds up in rehab.
Meanwhile, Pride United gets to the top of the league by having most of the other teams default. This is mean spirited. Nobody comes out looking the least bit good, with the possible exception of Magnus's new girlfriend.
The climax is somewhat satisfying, but had the rest of the film not been such a mess, it would have been a lot moreso.
They're rioting in Francia!!!
With the Moslems no longer rioting, the students are at it again. In fact two groups were rioting against different things and began fighting with each other. Cute.
NDNF 3
ICEBERG Belgium, 2005; 84 min.
Written and Directed by Dominique Abel,
Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy
Dominique Abel, and Fiona Gordon were, for a time, professional circus clowns, and this greatly informs and restricts their abilities as filmmakers. This film proves that editing is important part of the filmmaking process, and that what sometimes works on stage or TV doesn't work on the big screen. Not that the gags don't work, they actually do much of the time, but there's lots of scenes with people just sitting (or standing) there waiting for the scene to start. Dead air almost never works, especially in Belgium.
The film begins with an Eskimo woman(Lucy Tulugarjuk) explaining that she's one of the last speakers of a native language and then explains that she's going to tell how she met her husband. We soon forget about her, as it appears she has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie
Fioana (Gordon) is cleaning up her fast food restaurant, when she gets locked in the freezer, and is discovered the next morning by an employee. It looks like a Carol Burnett episode without the dialogue. What happens next looks like it was inspired by Speilberg's “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and like the characters in the aforementioned film, she becomes obsessed with a distant iceberg somewhere in the far north.
Fiona's husband (Dominique Abel) and two kids(Ophélie Rousseau and Robin Goupil) are worried, but soon she escapes, and winds up on a town on the coast, where she pursues a mute sailor (Philippe Martz), whom she wants to hire to take her to her dream while her husband arrives to take her home.
The big problem with the film is pacing. Even though Gordon and Abel have been doing comedy for years and years, the film is a series of tableaus and gags which may indeed work by themselves but are done in a way where there's a great deal of dead air. The final third of the film, which takes place at sea, is especially so, and gets really old really quick. What was crucial to slapstick comedy in “ancient times” was timing, something this film doesn't really have. Pity.
Terra Incognita Switzerland, 2005; 18 min.
Written and Directed
by Peter Volkart,
“In the Amazon, the prophylactics prowl! In the Amazon, the hypodermics Howl!”-The guy who wrote “American Pie.”
The reason for the above quote is that it's germane. This a mockumentery about the notorious pataphysicist Igor Leschenko,(Paul Avondet) who in the 1920s proved that the laws of gravity were all wrong and had to travel to Nanopol Island, past the distant land of upper Suburbia, and where gravity stops, in order to prove his theories correct. Yeah, sure, and the Russians got to the moon in 1938…Jeez!
This is one of those films that is going to at least make it to the semi-finals for the Oscars next year for the best live-action short subject. It's a hoot.
CAVITE Philippines/USA, 2005; 80 min
Written and Directed by
Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Llana
Adam(Ian Gamazon) is a security guard living in San Diego. His girlfriend (Dominique Gonzalez) is about to leave him and abort their unborn baby at a most inopportune time, His father has just died and has to go all the way back to the Philippines to attend the funeral. He calls his girlfriend in Taipei during the stopover, but that's just a red herring. It's when he arrives in Manilla and he hears a mysterious cel-phone ringing in his suitcase that things begin to get interesting.
A genuine terrorist is on the other end. Tariq(uncredited!) is with a renegade faction of the Abu Sayyif -Al Qaeda's franchise in the Philippines. He's kidnapped Adam's mother and sister, and if our hero doesn't do exactly what he's told, then mom and sis are going to bite the big one.
So begins a trip through various Philippine slums, where Adam is forced to re-engage in a life he had long ago left behind. In the meantime, he has to engage in a dialogue with an abusive Tariq, who seems to be walking alongside him and noticing everything that's going on. This is one of the most omniscient villains ever to almost make it onscreen. Whoever it is who did this has given the performance of a lifetime. Gamazon, who's onscreen for all but a few minutes, is also amazing, giving as good as he gets and running the gambit of emotions.
They said that he didn't want the job of “star” but he didn't have the money to hire anybody else. That may have been a blessing in disguise, because everything is perfect, and the dilemma he has to face near the end is truly horrifying
There is a reason why this won the Independent Spirit Award® for best foreign film. This is one scary thriller!!! It's amazing what you can do with almost no money nowadays.
Detail Germany 2005; 7 min
Directed by
Kanwal Sethi
A large brick is moved in the territories. This is the way the Germans denounce the Jews nowadays. Don't they know they'll never have any credibility on this subject?
Written and Directed by Dominique Abel,
Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy
Dominique Abel, and Fiona Gordon were, for a time, professional circus clowns, and this greatly informs and restricts their abilities as filmmakers. This film proves that editing is important part of the filmmaking process, and that what sometimes works on stage or TV doesn't work on the big screen. Not that the gags don't work, they actually do much of the time, but there's lots of scenes with people just sitting (or standing) there waiting for the scene to start. Dead air almost never works, especially in Belgium.
The film begins with an Eskimo woman(Lucy Tulugarjuk) explaining that she's one of the last speakers of a native language and then explains that she's going to tell how she met her husband. We soon forget about her, as it appears she has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie
Fioana (Gordon) is cleaning up her fast food restaurant, when she gets locked in the freezer, and is discovered the next morning by an employee. It looks like a Carol Burnett episode without the dialogue. What happens next looks like it was inspired by Speilberg's “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” and like the characters in the aforementioned film, she becomes obsessed with a distant iceberg somewhere in the far north.
Fiona's husband (Dominique Abel) and two kids(Ophélie Rousseau and Robin Goupil) are worried, but soon she escapes, and winds up on a town on the coast, where she pursues a mute sailor (Philippe Martz), whom she wants to hire to take her to her dream while her husband arrives to take her home.
The big problem with the film is pacing. Even though Gordon and Abel have been doing comedy for years and years, the film is a series of tableaus and gags which may indeed work by themselves but are done in a way where there's a great deal of dead air. The final third of the film, which takes place at sea, is especially so, and gets really old really quick. What was crucial to slapstick comedy in “ancient times” was timing, something this film doesn't really have. Pity.
Terra Incognita Switzerland, 2005; 18 min.
Written and Directed
by Peter Volkart,
“In the Amazon, the prophylactics prowl! In the Amazon, the hypodermics Howl!”-The guy who wrote “American Pie.”
The reason for the above quote is that it's germane. This a mockumentery about the notorious pataphysicist Igor Leschenko,(Paul Avondet) who in the 1920s proved that the laws of gravity were all wrong and had to travel to Nanopol Island, past the distant land of upper Suburbia, and where gravity stops, in order to prove his theories correct. Yeah, sure, and the Russians got to the moon in 1938…Jeez!
This is one of those films that is going to at least make it to the semi-finals for the Oscars next year for the best live-action short subject. It's a hoot.
CAVITE Philippines/USA, 2005; 80 min
Written and Directed by
Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Llana
Adam(Ian Gamazon) is a security guard living in San Diego. His girlfriend (Dominique Gonzalez) is about to leave him and abort their unborn baby at a most inopportune time, His father has just died and has to go all the way back to the Philippines to attend the funeral. He calls his girlfriend in Taipei during the stopover, but that's just a red herring. It's when he arrives in Manilla and he hears a mysterious cel-phone ringing in his suitcase that things begin to get interesting.
A genuine terrorist is on the other end. Tariq(uncredited!) is with a renegade faction of the Abu Sayyif -Al Qaeda's franchise in the Philippines. He's kidnapped Adam's mother and sister, and if our hero doesn't do exactly what he's told, then mom and sis are going to bite the big one.
So begins a trip through various Philippine slums, where Adam is forced to re-engage in a life he had long ago left behind. In the meantime, he has to engage in a dialogue with an abusive Tariq, who seems to be walking alongside him and noticing everything that's going on. This is one of the most omniscient villains ever to almost make it onscreen. Whoever it is who did this has given the performance of a lifetime. Gamazon, who's onscreen for all but a few minutes, is also amazing, giving as good as he gets and running the gambit of emotions.
They said that he didn't want the job of “star” but he didn't have the money to hire anybody else. That may have been a blessing in disguise, because everything is perfect, and the dilemma he has to face near the end is truly horrifying
There is a reason why this won the Independent Spirit Award® for best foreign film. This is one scary thriller!!! It's amazing what you can do with almost no money nowadays.
Detail Germany 2005; 7 min
Directed by
Kanwal Sethi
A large brick is moved in the territories. This is the way the Germans denounce the Jews nowadays. Don't they know they'll never have any credibility on this subject?
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Muslim Groups to Bring Denmark Before Human-Rights Court Over Prophet Cartoons
The gift that keeps on giving. Now they want the European court of human rights to cite Denmark for not arresting cartoonists for violating Islamic law. Ik.
Muslim Groups to Bring Denmark Before Human-Rights Court Over Prophet Cartoons
A network of Danish Muslim organizations will bring Denmark before an international human-rights court for not pressing charges against the newspaper that first published the contentious Prophet Mohammed cartoons, Danish radio reported Friday . .
NDNF two
OCTOBER 17, 1961 France, 2005; 106 min
Directed by
Alain Tasma
From 1954 to 1962, France was at war with the world. It's colonial empire was crumbling, and that sparked revolution at home. The Fifth French Republic was less than three years old in the summer of 1961, and the war with the Algerian separatists wasn't going very well.
The Front de Libération Natunal (FLN), as the separatists called themselves, had taken to killing policemen in the Paris area, terrorism being an old tactic even then, and the cops were, to put it mildly, pissed off.
Martin(Jean-Michel Portal) is a cop, who's been targeted by the FLN. He doesn't like the situation, and is going to retire as soon as possible, as the terror is working quite efficiently, and his comrades-in-arms do the same thing with poor Algerians like Abde (Ouassini Embarek), who only wants to get his elementary education certificate so he can get into a real job training program.
But the terrorists and the French government are negotiating offstage, and police chief Papon (Thierry Fortineau), who's a genuine war criminal, wants to keep things relatively quiet until an agreement could be reached.
So on the one hand, you have the Algerian terrorists, and on the other you have the cops, who see every Algerian as a terrorist and act accordingly…and sometimes even moreso. What is amazing here is that the NLF leadership decided to have a spontaneous protest on the evening of October 17,1961. It was supposed to be peaceful, with no one having weapons of any kind.
Now if the protest had been voluntary, and the there had been some sort of agreement with the authorities the atrocities of the evening on the part of the police wouldn't have happened, but the whole thing was botched on the part of the Algerians and quite a few were killed.
The cover-up of the incident continued for years.
The film is quite even handed. We get to sympathize with elements of both sides, but since this is a film about French history for the French, we don't get the context. Its also a bit to pat and not dramatic enough. There should be a lesson somewhere, but sadly, there isn't.
LOOK BOTH WAYS Australia 2005
Written and Directed
by Sarah Watt
Sarah Watt is primarily an animator, she's done a number of award-winning shorts, but for some reason, she decided that cartooning is enough and has gone forward to directing and writing “real” films. But not quite yet ready to abandon her animated roots, she's kept some in to provide some balance. It works.
This, is a really morbid film. Death and destruction are everywhere. Just the setting for a romantic comedy, I guess, which is what this is.
Meryl (Justine Clarke) is a cartoonist working for a greeting card company, therefore she thinks in cartoons, and these are all about death and destruction. She sees a train, and in her mind it crashes into a mountainside, Cute dogs attack her, sharks do too. But then as she's walking home along the railroad tracks, an extra gets run over by a train offstage.
Nick (William McInness) has just been told by his doctor that he's got testicular cancer and it's metastasized throughout his body. He goes to work, he's a photographer for the local newspaper and tells his editor Phil (Andrew S. Gilbert) about the situation. He's told to go home, but just then Andy(Anthony Hayes), who's going off to cover the abovementioned fatal accident. Andy doesn't think that it's an accident at all. He's ticked off about his life, and thinks that lots of men in his position just throw themselves in front of trains and off bridges and the like and these are counted as accidents.
While Andy interviews Meryl, Nick takes pictures of the site, and along comes the widow(Daniela Farinacci),, and gets a great photo, which is critical to the proceedings, for Andy thinks that it doesn't illustrate the point of his column, and the widow and a number of other minor characters react to it in different ways.
It seems that Nick and Meryl live near each other, and he walks her home, and soon there's a romance blossoming. We get into his head too, and he thinks in photos. Unfortunatly, nobody else gets to imagine out loud, as this is an ensemble piece, going back and forth between the various characters including Andy's wife and his newly pregnant girlfriend Anna (Lisa Flanagan) who isn't sure how to handle the situation.
The romance that develops is the counterpoint from the overwhelming air of depression that pervades the film. Everyone feels awful, Meryl has just got home from her dad's funeral, but for some reason, this is a joyful affirmation of life. How the director manages to do it is a minor miracle. See it when it comes out on cable in the summer.
Pia Ecuador 2005; 9 min.
Written and Directed
by Javier Andrade
Pia, and Ecuadorian teenager has just had an abortion before her quitacera (a kind of bat mitzvah kind of thing), and confronts her ex-boyfriend about it. It's not that great a film, but it shows promice from a place which doesn't have any real native industry. Not bad.
Directed by
Alain Tasma
From 1954 to 1962, France was at war with the world. It's colonial empire was crumbling, and that sparked revolution at home. The Fifth French Republic was less than three years old in the summer of 1961, and the war with the Algerian separatists wasn't going very well.
The Front de Libération Natunal (FLN), as the separatists called themselves, had taken to killing policemen in the Paris area, terrorism being an old tactic even then, and the cops were, to put it mildly, pissed off.
Martin(Jean-Michel Portal) is a cop, who's been targeted by the FLN. He doesn't like the situation, and is going to retire as soon as possible, as the terror is working quite efficiently, and his comrades-in-arms do the same thing with poor Algerians like Abde (Ouassini Embarek), who only wants to get his elementary education certificate so he can get into a real job training program.
But the terrorists and the French government are negotiating offstage, and police chief Papon (Thierry Fortineau), who's a genuine war criminal, wants to keep things relatively quiet until an agreement could be reached.
So on the one hand, you have the Algerian terrorists, and on the other you have the cops, who see every Algerian as a terrorist and act accordingly…and sometimes even moreso. What is amazing here is that the NLF leadership decided to have a spontaneous protest on the evening of October 17,1961. It was supposed to be peaceful, with no one having weapons of any kind.
Now if the protest had been voluntary, and the there had been some sort of agreement with the authorities the atrocities of the evening on the part of the police wouldn't have happened, but the whole thing was botched on the part of the Algerians and quite a few were killed.
The cover-up of the incident continued for years.
The film is quite even handed. We get to sympathize with elements of both sides, but since this is a film about French history for the French, we don't get the context. Its also a bit to pat and not dramatic enough. There should be a lesson somewhere, but sadly, there isn't.
LOOK BOTH WAYS Australia 2005
Written and Directed
by Sarah Watt
Sarah Watt is primarily an animator, she's done a number of award-winning shorts, but for some reason, she decided that cartooning is enough and has gone forward to directing and writing “real” films. But not quite yet ready to abandon her animated roots, she's kept some in to provide some balance. It works.
This, is a really morbid film. Death and destruction are everywhere. Just the setting for a romantic comedy, I guess, which is what this is.
Meryl (Justine Clarke) is a cartoonist working for a greeting card company, therefore she thinks in cartoons, and these are all about death and destruction. She sees a train, and in her mind it crashes into a mountainside, Cute dogs attack her, sharks do too. But then as she's walking home along the railroad tracks, an extra gets run over by a train offstage.
Nick (William McInness) has just been told by his doctor that he's got testicular cancer and it's metastasized throughout his body. He goes to work, he's a photographer for the local newspaper and tells his editor Phil (Andrew S. Gilbert) about the situation. He's told to go home, but just then Andy(Anthony Hayes), who's going off to cover the abovementioned fatal accident. Andy doesn't think that it's an accident at all. He's ticked off about his life, and thinks that lots of men in his position just throw themselves in front of trains and off bridges and the like and these are counted as accidents.
While Andy interviews Meryl, Nick takes pictures of the site, and along comes the widow(Daniela Farinacci),, and gets a great photo, which is critical to the proceedings, for Andy thinks that it doesn't illustrate the point of his column, and the widow and a number of other minor characters react to it in different ways.
It seems that Nick and Meryl live near each other, and he walks her home, and soon there's a romance blossoming. We get into his head too, and he thinks in photos. Unfortunatly, nobody else gets to imagine out loud, as this is an ensemble piece, going back and forth between the various characters including Andy's wife and his newly pregnant girlfriend Anna (Lisa Flanagan) who isn't sure how to handle the situation.
The romance that develops is the counterpoint from the overwhelming air of depression that pervades the film. Everyone feels awful, Meryl has just got home from her dad's funeral, but for some reason, this is a joyful affirmation of life. How the director manages to do it is a minor miracle. See it when it comes out on cable in the summer.
Pia Ecuador 2005; 9 min.
Written and Directed
by Javier Andrade
Pia, and Ecuadorian teenager has just had an abortion before her quitacera (a kind of bat mitzvah kind of thing), and confronts her ex-boyfriend about it. It's not that great a film, but it shows promice from a place which doesn't have any real native industry. Not bad.
New Directors, New Films series
The "New Directors, New Films" series at the Museum of Modern art is considered one of the top film festivals in the US, and last year, two of the films here got an Oscar nomination. So here we are again, today, we've got two features:
HALF NELSON USA, 2006; 106 min.
Directed by
Ryan Fleck
“I am not now, nor have ever been…”
“What?
“A communist.”
So says our hero Dan Dunne(Ryan Gosling) when he arrives to a colleague's
(Monique Gabriela Curnen) apartment in order to apologize and get laid.
This is not the pivotal moment in what's basically misbegotten look at education and what redemption means. Actually, Dan is indeed a communist of sorts. He's a history teacher working in an inner city school, where he tries to indoctrinate his students in the truth of the Hegelian dialectic, that shows history will inevitably wind up with a Communist government led by the party.
What is, is very near the beginning of the film, when Dan gets caught smoking crack and is caught by his student Drey (Shareeka Epps). He's far more damaged than she is, and even so, he decides to “save” her. Obviously, she's the one to attempt to save him.
Dave's former girlfriend Rachel (Tina Holmes),; who he, of course, met in rehab; is engaged to someone else, his mom keeps demanding that he come to dinner, and his boss wants him to teach the curriculum instead of Marxism-for-tweens. It's enough to drive one to drink or worse.
Dre is a typical stereotype. Extremely precocious, she and her mother(Karen Chilton) is raising her alone, as Dad is off somewhere, and, with few friends except a local drug dealer named Frank (Anthony Mackie), she's into basketball and wants to make something of herself.
They make a bit of an odd couple these two. The problem is that there isn't much chemistry between the two leads, and this is primarily due to Miss Epps, who despite her age, is a terrible actress. Secondarily, it's the script, which is overly sanctimonious, especially with the use of archival footage, to give the appearance of Dave's methods being somehow true. It's not.
This is the usual waste of celluloid that many in the indie world like so much for some reason. This isn't worth the bucks.
THE BLOSSOMING OF MAXIMO OLIVEROS , Philippines, 2006;
Directed by
Auraeus Solito
One of the reasons people go to film festivals is to see exotic films from distant lands, and this qualifies as such. Maxi (Nathan Lopez) is an extremely gay twelve-year old who lives in the slums of Manila with his widowed father Paca (Soliman Cruz) and brothers Boy (Neil Ryan Sese) and Bogs (Ping Medina). Dad and the two older brothers are minor hoods, trafficking in stolen cel phones and pirate DVDs. It's not that bad a life for the area, Maxi likes to hang out with the local girls and participate in their activities. In fact, for the first third of the film, this is pretty much a comedy.
Then it begins to turn dark. Maxi is attacked by some local tuffs, and is rescued by a new local cop named Victor (JR Valentin). It's love at first sight…or rather a girlish crush on a hunky guy. Even though Paca and his older sons are more than okay with the fact that Maxi is as queer as they come [he does the cooking, cleaning and the like], they don't really like that the crush is a cop, and when Bogs accidentally kills a robbery victim, Things begin to turn ugly very quickly and poor Maxi is soon in a quandary, should he stay loyal to his family, who loves him, or follow his heart and stand by his crush, who clearly doesn't.
Okay, aside from the gay angle, this is actually a rather conventional film. Had Maxi been a girl, no one would have even thought of exporting this thing. But it isn't and it's saved by the brilliant work of young Nathen Lopez, who swishes and preens his way into our hearts. The relationship between him and Victor is a complex one, and Victor begins as all white and then turns distinctly grey.
One can see why it made it into the international festival circuit.
HALF NELSON USA, 2006; 106 min.
Directed by
Ryan Fleck
“I am not now, nor have ever been…”
“What?
“A communist.”
So says our hero Dan Dunne(Ryan Gosling) when he arrives to a colleague's
(Monique Gabriela Curnen) apartment in order to apologize and get laid.
This is not the pivotal moment in what's basically misbegotten look at education and what redemption means. Actually, Dan is indeed a communist of sorts. He's a history teacher working in an inner city school, where he tries to indoctrinate his students in the truth of the Hegelian dialectic, that shows history will inevitably wind up with a Communist government led by the party.
What is, is very near the beginning of the film, when Dan gets caught smoking crack and is caught by his student Drey (Shareeka Epps). He's far more damaged than she is, and even so, he decides to “save” her. Obviously, she's the one to attempt to save him.
Dave's former girlfriend Rachel (Tina Holmes),; who he, of course, met in rehab; is engaged to someone else, his mom keeps demanding that he come to dinner, and his boss wants him to teach the curriculum instead of Marxism-for-tweens. It's enough to drive one to drink or worse.
Dre is a typical stereotype. Extremely precocious, she and her mother(Karen Chilton) is raising her alone, as Dad is off somewhere, and, with few friends except a local drug dealer named Frank (Anthony Mackie), she's into basketball and wants to make something of herself.
They make a bit of an odd couple these two. The problem is that there isn't much chemistry between the two leads, and this is primarily due to Miss Epps, who despite her age, is a terrible actress. Secondarily, it's the script, which is overly sanctimonious, especially with the use of archival footage, to give the appearance of Dave's methods being somehow true. It's not.
This is the usual waste of celluloid that many in the indie world like so much for some reason. This isn't worth the bucks.
THE BLOSSOMING OF MAXIMO OLIVEROS , Philippines, 2006;
Directed by
Auraeus Solito
One of the reasons people go to film festivals is to see exotic films from distant lands, and this qualifies as such. Maxi (Nathan Lopez) is an extremely gay twelve-year old who lives in the slums of Manila with his widowed father Paca (Soliman Cruz) and brothers Boy (Neil Ryan Sese) and Bogs (Ping Medina). Dad and the two older brothers are minor hoods, trafficking in stolen cel phones and pirate DVDs. It's not that bad a life for the area, Maxi likes to hang out with the local girls and participate in their activities. In fact, for the first third of the film, this is pretty much a comedy.
Then it begins to turn dark. Maxi is attacked by some local tuffs, and is rescued by a new local cop named Victor (JR Valentin). It's love at first sight…or rather a girlish crush on a hunky guy. Even though Paca and his older sons are more than okay with the fact that Maxi is as queer as they come [he does the cooking, cleaning and the like], they don't really like that the crush is a cop, and when Bogs accidentally kills a robbery victim, Things begin to turn ugly very quickly and poor Maxi is soon in a quandary, should he stay loyal to his family, who loves him, or follow his heart and stand by his crush, who clearly doesn't.
Okay, aside from the gay angle, this is actually a rather conventional film. Had Maxi been a girl, no one would have even thought of exporting this thing. But it isn't and it's saved by the brilliant work of young Nathen Lopez, who swishes and preens his way into our hearts. The relationship between him and Victor is a complex one, and Victor begins as all white and then turns distinctly grey.
One can see why it made it into the international festival circuit.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Sunday, March 05, 2006
The Oscars
I'm going to watch tonight, although I don't really carea all that much who wins.If you go back to my review ofBrokeback Mountain from last September, I didn't like it all that much. I liked Crash, but I saw it back in '04 and don't really remember it all that well.
I'm rooting for King Kong to win the technical awards because it was stiffed on all the big ones.
The next film festival is "New Directors/New Films, which starts having press screenings tomarrow.
I'm rooting for King Kong to win the technical awards because it was stiffed on all the big ones.
The next film festival is "New Directors/New Films, which starts having press screenings tomarrow.
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