Friday, May 29, 2009

SXSW Flashback: Drag Me to Hell

I don't generally make a point of seeing festival films again once they hit the regular theaters, but I will probably make an exception this weekend or next for Drag Me to Hell. The digital file projected in Austin was, well, a digital file, and I'd like to see it on film, from a better seat (I was sitting with some of the eFilmCritic and Cinematical folks, and they wanted to be able to get in and out for photography and the like). It was also a work-in-progress presentation, and though it looked pretty good, there were some scenes that were a little rough. One looks a bit better in the ads being shown, although coming as it does very late in the movie, it's got no business being in the ads.

Having set this review for time-release on HBS/EFC, it's a little amusing to see that while I'm talking about Raimi not losing any of his edge, part of the conversation about this movie has been how some want to skip it in the theater and wait for an unrated DVD/Blu-ray since the theatrical version has a PG-13 rating. I'd advise against that, because this is a tremendously fun audience movie; this sort of horror works much better with a crowd than alone in one's living room. PG-13 is also the movie's natural state; it's not looking to gross the audience out as much as creep them out, and it's not working on a slasher paradigm where most of the characters are cannon fodder to be bumped off in ever more disgusting ways.

As a side note to that, I don't know whether Universal is premiering a new logo with this or whether it's just a one-time thing, but the screening at SXSW didn't have the familiar "sun rising over CGI Earth" bit. Instead, it was a newly-rendered version of the old "zooming in on Earth through cosmic dust clouds" logo. That's kind of fitting, since the movie is a bit of a throwback to the sort of horror movie Universal did back in the day, which had jumps and scares but wasn't looking to exclude kids and teens.

Drag Me To Hell

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Special Screenings)

Can you believe it's been over twenty years since Evil Dead 2? Considering how much of Sam Raimi's reputation and career is built on that movie and its particular style (he was considered an inspired choice for the Spider-Man films because of it), one would think he'd done more like it, but in fact he's ranged pretty far afield. Even Army of Darkness was something rather different, more PG-13-ish Ray Harryhausen tribute than horror. So while seeing him return to this genre is exciting, it's not unreasonable to wonder whether he's still got something like that in him.

Thankfully, he does. Drag Me to Hell is the Evil Dead 2-iest thing he's done since Darkman, if not ED2 itself, and reassuring in how it demonstrates that his time in the world of of big stars and big budgets hasn't changed him, but rather given him access to and mastery of new tools. Part of the reason why this one manages to retain the feel of an old-school Raimi movie is that it sort of is one - the script was first written years ago, and (I believe) pulled out during the 2007 writers' strike - but give Raimi (along with brother and co-writer Ivan) credit for not deciding to tone it down too much now that they're older and wiser.

When we meet Christine (Alison Lohman), the loan officer is up for a promotion to assistant manager of a Los Angeles bank; the branch manager (David Paymer) has it down to her and less senior but more aggressive Stu (Reggie Lee). An old woman (Lorna Raver) comes in seeking an extension on her mortgage payments; Christine hems and haws but ultimately refuses, noting Mrs. Ganush has had two already. The woman is upset, attacking Christine in the bank's parking garage. Boyfriend Clay (Justin Long) is just glad she's okay, but Christine doesn't think it's over, as weird things start happening and a slick-talking fortune teller (Dileep Rao) tells her she's been made the target of a lamia, a demon which will torment her for a few days before pulling her into Hell.

Full review at EFC, along with several others.

One week at the Kendall: The Merry Gentleman and Adoration

Back when I worked in a movie theater, we almost never had these sort of one-week bookings: Even if a show was a colossal bomb, it would hang around for two weeks minimum, even if the second week was in Theater #3 (at Showcase Cinemas Worcester Downtown (Now the Hanover Theatre), a long narrow closet of a room) for one show a day. It was booked for two weeks, and Sumner Redstone wasn't going to have that print sitting in the booth not earning any money for the second week!

Of course, that was a mainstream theater, while Kendall Square is more of a boutique house, and distributors of independent films are likely happy for any screen they can get, even if it's just for one week - especially if the film is on a calendar, rather than just a random booking the audience knows nothing about. Still, we're lucky enough in the Boston area that the second-run places will pick up independent stuff: The Merry Gentleman only lasted the one week, but Adoration moved over the the Arlington Capitol (though it will already be gone by the time this gets posted). Sugar, after hanging around for a bit at the Kendall, also got its time extended, over at the Somerville Theater.

The Merry Gentleman

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

The Merry Gentleman is one of those movies that appears at the local boutique theater for a blink-and-miss-it one-week engagement with just about zero fanfare, and I probably would have missed it if I hadn't noticed Michael Keaton's name in the credits, both as star and director. He's not the best reason to see the movie - co-star Kelly Macdonald is - but he is the one that got me into a film I might have otherwise skipped.

Keaton plays Frank Logan, a Chicago hitman whose job is making him despondent to the point of being suicidal; he doesn't talk much. Macdonald is Kate Frazier, a nice Scottish girl who, as the film opens, has packed up and left her abusive husband (who is also a policeman, which tends to smooth over any domestic violence reports). One night in December, Kate looks up to see Frank perched on a ledge (she doesn't know someone in her building has just been shot); her shout causes him to fall backward rather than forward. A few days later, they meet again - Frank has a target in her building, and winds up helping her with her Christmas tree. They grow close, but there are secrets and complications: Dave Murcheson (Tom Bastounes), the detective investigating Frank's hits, is also attracted to Kate, and as an audience, we kind of know that they didn't hire Bobby Cannavale to play Kate's husband if he's only going to appear in one wordless scene.

Writer Ron Lazzeretti doesn't fill us in much on how Frank and Kate got to their positions: We never learn why Logan is knocking various people off (or even whether he's a hired gun versus and interested party), nor how Kate wound up in America and married to Michael. We don't need to; our initial introductions to the pair tell us pretty much all we need to about who they are right now, and that's all we need to know. In fact, we probably learn as much about Dave's background as we do about Frank and Kate put together, because Dave is chatty and self-justifying in a way that Frank and Kate are not.

Frank's laconic nature is probably Keaton's biggest stumble as both actor and director, and it's on display early on. It takes what seems like forever for Frank to speak his first lines, including a couple of scenes where he's obviously staying silent to some effect because talking would make much more sense, and all it does is call attention to a gimmick that doesn't have much in the way of payoff. Keaton often seems to be trying very hard to be low-key, and it occasionally looks too studied.

He may just have problems with directing himself, because most of his direction is good, if not necessarily attention-grabbing. He can work various types of tension fairly well, and the rest of the cast seldom falters. He also makes sure to choose some fine collaborators: Lazzeretti's script is peppered with interesting characters, most of whom act in a reasonable way most of the time, and between them Lazzeretti and Keaton avoid spelling more out than necessary. Chris Seager's photography is also very nice; the film has a properly chilly atmosphere, but can still put across the beauty of falling snow, for instance.

That's good, because Macdonald's Kate is the sort who would appreciate it. Macdonald makes it very clear early on that Kate is not defined by her history of domestic violence. She's got that down cold, from Kate always seeming to have her guard up to the earnest but transparent way she tries to explain her black eye, but that's not the entire character. She's a naturally cheerful, good-hearted person, but doesn't overdo it.

The rest of the cast does their jobs well. Bobby Cannavale has a small part but it's an absolutely memorable one (really, you don't want to see anyone with the sort of certainty he does). Darlene Hunt is pleasant in the role of Kate's friend and co-worker. Tom Bastounes has a nifty supporting role as Murcheson, making him likable enough but with just enough hints of maybe being humanly selfish in his dealings with Kate. It's a thoroughly convincing, intriguingly linked group of characters, and the cast does a fine job of bringing them to life.

Looked at as a movie about a sad assassin, the movie is only so-so. The half of the movie that features Kelly Macdonald, though, has a sneaky way of pulling one in, even if it's not what initially caught the eye.

Also at HBS.

Adoration

* * (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

Adoration is a movie about unreliable narrators, though it does not necessarily feature one. That sets it up for a bit of trouble, since it isn't quite clever enough to impress with its storytelling gimmick. Using that gimmick takes time away from the actual story, so that falls just a bit short. It's also heavy-handed but kind of vague with the moralizing, so while it has good intentions all around, it's never up to its ambitions.

The narrator is Simon (Devon Bostick), a teenager being raised by his Uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) who, when given an assignment in French class to translate a news story about a Canadian woman whose Middle-Eastern husband placed a bomb in her luggage on her flight to Israel fifteen years ago, does so in the first person; if the bomb had exploded, he concludes, he would never have been born. His teacher Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) encourages him to explore it further, and the discussion eventually makes its way online, where it spreads from classmates to academics to the general public.

Despite some provocative comments made by Simon's dying grandfather (Kenneth Welsh) which are included in a way as to be misleading, the actual facts become clear fairly rapidly. The film plays it cute for a little while longer, eventually introducing other, even weaker mysteries/ambiguities to unravel. It spends so much time on getting to notice that characters are lying about or omitting events or otherwise emphasizing perspective that when it does present us with a scene that Simon and Tom couldn't possibly know about, it may feel like a cheat, even though writer/director Atom Egoyan has not placed third person omniscient out of bounds.

It's not just the storytelling tricks that Egoyan uses that cause trouble, but the motivation of the characters for using them and the way they go about it. It basically comes down to some characters stirring the pot for the express purpose of stirring the pot, although the profile of agitator doesn't quite fit them. It works well enough in the case of Simon, I suppose - losing his parents the way he did can make a kid dark and the influence of his rather nasty grandfather (both through words and genes) could make up the rest, but I would have liked to be more convinced. It's Sabine that's the real stretch; her deal isn't so far-fetched or unpleasant as to damage the film, but it doesn't provoke the best of reactions. I found myself thinking "really, Atom? that's the way you want to go with this?"

Arsinée Khanjian gets saddled with a lot of stuff like that, frankly, and that Sabine is still being taken somewhat seriously by the audience near the end says good things about her performance. She's helped immensely in this by Scott Speedman, whose character has to actually see the strange stuff up close, acknowledge it, and move past it. He's a good everyman, convincing us of details like how Tom handles a job that sees him despised (tow truck driver). He's nicely unsure of himself, in contrast to Welsh, who is all too confident in his beliefs.

There are other fairly well-done things sprinkled throughout the film. There's some sharp satire of how people respond to these sort of visceral ideas (Maury Chaykin has a sort-of funny cameo here). The flashbacks to a fateful family dinner are fascinating. Bostick plays his role fairly well. As is the case in much of Egoyan's work, what's done well isn't always pleasant, so even when Adoration works, it is more something to be admired than to be enjoyed.

It just doesn't work often enough to rate as a top feel-bad movie. It's got plenty of interesting and/or provocative ideas, but none are given a chance to really get under the audience's skin, and they could be put together much better.

Also at HBS.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

This Week In Tickets: 18 May 2009 to 24 May 2009

I'd like to say this got pushed off until Tuesday because I spent the holiday weekend traveling or otherwise doing something out of the ordinary, but I really can't. I mostly spent it right on my own back porch, making a dent in the pile of manga and collected comics I've purchased over the past year. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon or two, although when they started playing baseball, I certainly wished I had some sort of portable radio. It kind of surprises me that I don't; everyone had one or two of those when I was a kid, but nowadays, who needs them when you can carry every song you might want to hear in your pocket, and the vast majority of stations are chain-owned blandness or noxious talk? That includes the sports stations most of the time, but for live sports when you don't want to be chained to the TV, they're pretty useful.

This Week In Tickets!

Anyway, I did take a bit of a break from reviewing stuff when I finished the IFFB reviews, using my bus time to finish the first Lensman volume. Triplanetary also included "Masters of Space", and, good gravy... I'd love to see movies or TV made of these stories, because for all E.E. "Doc" Smith could come up with thrilling, cliff-hanging adventure stories, he could not write about people at all. Triplanetary was bearable, in part because it's the 1930s and this is pure pulp and the lurid prose is sincere. It's a total engineer's fantasy, with ideas going form concept to flawless production model in days without management, QA, cost & availability of materials, etc., being an issue. "Masters of Space", though, was written in the sixties, and tries to have soapy elements in it, but everyone is so self-aware that it's maddening. The characters talk about how and why they love each other in this purely rational way that never once rings true, and can we please get back to the ancient astronauts, galaxy-conquering marauders, scientists ascending to near-godhood, and villains intending to use one planet as a bullet to take out another?

Final IFFB update:

22 April 2009 (Wednesday): The Brothers Bloom
23 April 2009 (Thursday): Children of Invention, The Missing Person
24 April 2009 (Friday): Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, In The Loop, Pontypool
25 April 2009 (Saturday): Still Walking, Nollywood Babylon, Lost Son of Havana, Grace
26 April 2009 (Sunday): Herb and Dorothy, Helen, Unmistaken Child, The Escapist
27 April 2009 (Monday): For the Love of Movies, Art & Copy
28 April 2009 (Tuesday): World's Greatest Dad

Finished! Now, to start making reservations and vacation plans for Fantasia. I really need to find some way to get paid to travel the world, going to film festivals and reporting back (c'mon, entertainment websites... just think how much content I could generate for you if I didn't have my day job slowing me down!).

Adoration

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 May 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

I don't think I've seen anything of Atom Egoyan's other than The Sweet Hereafter, and I was young enough then that I missed about half of what was going on. There's some similar themes at play here - survivor's guilt, unhappy families, etc. - but it's never as quietly devastating, and some of the storytelling tools seem... unfair, I guess?

Of course, it's not as if a movie is obligated to play fair, and just because certain things are conventions doesn't mean a specific work has to follow them. So, just because Adoration establishes early on that bits have an unreliable narrator doesn't mean the film can't later on show us an unwitnessed event definitively, especially given how the "unreliable" scenes are shown as being completely untrue. Similarly, a piece of information revealed toward the end seems kind of out of left field, and I found myself sitting there thinking "really? you want to go with that?" It's not a terribly ridiculous coincidence, in retrospect, but when you consider that one of the main themes of this movie is how easy it is to manipulate people with false or incomplete information, it's perhaps not unreasonable to wish the filmmakers did it more artfully.

Also, Egoyan perhaps should have chosen his ending scenes a little more carefully. I didn't come out of the film thinking about media manipulation or prejudice, but about how that kid really did not appreciate the value of nice things. That's a fine violin and phone gone to waste.

Terminator Salvation

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 23 May 2009 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

For years, I've been hearing from various sci-fi/film fans about how cool it would be to do a Terminator film that focused on the future war, and I didn't get it. Even when I was younger, I knew a bit about the whole "less is more" thing, and that by giving us small glimpses, James Cameron made it worse than we could imagine. And that was before anybody even considered the idea that there might be a PG-13 Terminator sequel, with the future war a bloodless affair conducted in bright sunlight.

That's part of the problem with Terminator Salvation, a competently made sci-fi action movie with some nice effects and a ridiculously overqualified cast. It leeches the horror out of the idea. In my mind, Skynet never took prisoners - why would they need more than a handful? - and the resistance was always scattered guerrillas, not folks with bunkers and helicopters and the like. They probably weren't as dumb as the characters in this movie could be, but let's be honest - they're really just average sci-fi movie dumb, not recognizing an obvious trap and communicating over frequencies that their enemy could easily eavesdrop on.

The bigger problem is that this movie is conceptually smaller than all the others. All three previous movies hit the audience with the idea that the end was the beginning: It's literally the case for the first and (under-rated) third; they used the time-travel storyline to make the movies closed loops, so that the denouement also happens to be the backstory. The second inverts the idea to suggest that the future was now unpredictable, a wide-open road on which the characters are just now starting their journey. This one is just a disposable side-story, something that happened to John Connor during the part of the story that James Cameron deemed relatively unimportant in The Terminator. It's the stuff of comic book tie-ins, not a story worthy of standing alongside Cameron's films or even Jonathan Mostow's.

The funny thing is, it's not really a bad cyborg wondering about his humanity in a post-apocalyptic future movie; remove the brand name and stop trying to force it into the Terminator mythology (which does hurt the story), and there's a potentially fun movie here. Terminator demands more, though.

Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 May 2009 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

I've mentioned before that it's not a good idea to see movies out of a sense of obligation, which is why I've consciously started scaling back on feeling the need to catch all the Oscar or Chlotrudis or what have you nominees during the first couple months of the year. Movies shouldn't be homework. Still, I often look at stuff on the Brattle's schedule, and I figure I should see some of this stuff, even if it's not something I'm particularly enthused about. Like a retrospective of François Truffaut, focusing on the Antoine Doinel films.

So, maybe I just wasn't in the mood for The 400 Blows this past weekend. I found myself losing patience early and often, and Doinel often felt like a blank to me. I get that it's a movie about a kid getting into trouble because he's got nobody to focus him, but I also don't get a sense of who he would be or could be otherwise. He makes jumps that don't even seem to make sense by kid logic. The story doesn't end so much as it stops, or so it seems.

On another day, I might have enjoyed The 400 Blows a little more, but I'd walked to and from the Common for Terminator, and wasn't exactly in the mood for something abstract (a smidge less so than usual). Obviously, it's a film that can be dissected and studied, but I don't find myself of a mind to.

Baisers Volés (Stolen Kisses)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 May 2009 at AMC Boston Common #1 (first-run)

I liked Stolen Kisses a little more, though I was glad I didn't see it back-to-back with The 400 Blows. The two star the same actor as the same character, but aren't connected very tightly. It might have worked better if the Brattle was able to show "Antoine et Colette", which was made between the two features and establishes Antoine's tendency to fall for entire families.

This one is a collection of anecdotes, not strongly connected, and while some of them are fairly entertaining, there's also a sense of annoying randomness to it, as if Truffaut had a bunch of events that didn't really gel into a story, but he wanted to film them all. It also established Doinel as the sort of character who annoys the heck out of me, because he seems to succeed without ever doing anything well.

On the other hand, this film does introduce us to the lovely Claude Jade as Christine, who will be the highlight of this film and the next; I found myself wishing we were spending as much time with her as with him

AdorationTerminator SalvationThe 400 BlowsStolen Kisses

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

IFFB 2009 Closing Night: World's Greatest Dad

I think I may have said this at the end of the SXSW postings, but it bears repeating: The end of a film festival is a weird feeling. Or maybe a weird lack of feeling; as much as I can't ever remember feeling like I wished the whole thing was done already before the end, I've also never walked out of the closing night film and said I wished there was more. I've wished I could stay longer at Fantasia, when I was doing half-festivals, but that's a different thing.

Writing up the reviews is a different thing, though. I can't wait to occasionally spend my bus ride home just reading a book, and not feeling like I've got some obligation to review something I was given a pass for.

The last night of IFFB 09 was a lot of fun, though. It was the only night at the Coolidge, the rain (aside from a few very tiny sprinkles) held off while everybody was waiting in the outside line, and Bobcat Goldthwait, as one might expect of a professional funny person, was a massively entertaining guest. His speech is pretty normal now, although bits of his on-the-edge-of-a-breakdown stand-up delivery still appear now and again. I don't know if you'd say he's hit middle age gracefully, but he'll jokingly refer to himself as "grandpa" whenever he hits a point in a story where he, as a guy once considered cool and edgy, seems conservative or behind the times.

Of course, he can still bust out the inappropriate jokes - that's the bread and butter of World's Greatest Dad, after all. Also, during the Q&A, someone asked if a certain character was played by one of the former members of Nirvana, and he said yeah, he told the guy he was making a movie about someone who died and everyone acted like he was smarter and more important than he was... sound like anything you can identify with?

He apologized after that, of course, and didn't even attempt to hide that he was really nervous about the screening. The Coolidge was a favorite theater of his growing up, and this sort of movie must terrify a filmmaker; hit the wrong note and its a disaster. He was genuinely relieved that we laughed in the right places and didn't in the others, and said that he'd called star Robin Williams during the screening to say it was going well. I guess maybe there really is a rich vein of insecurity in most comedians.

For Love of the Movies

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2009 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston Closing Night)

World's Greatest Dad is deliciously black comedy, the sort that revels not just in how horrible the characters can be, but also regularly raises that bar by going for absurdity as well. That's not terribly uncommon; lots of filmmakers, comedians, and other creative types have a bunch of mean jokes inside them. What's kind of amazing about this one is that writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait and star Robin Williams manage to create a great deal of empathy for the title character even as he goes so very wrong.

Williams' Lance Clayton dreams not of being a writer, but of being published (he's got multiple rejection slips for each manuscript). In the meantime, he teaches high-school English at the high school his son Kyle (Daryl Sabara) attends, and though the principal has just told him that they'll be dropping his poetry class if enrollment doesn't improve, things aren't all bad. He's got a good thing going with fellow teacher Claire (Alexie Gilmore), and a son who... Well, who quite honestly, is a rude, porn-obsessed jackass. After a night out with Claire, he returns home to find he's lost Kyle. Crushed, and not wanting to face awkward questions, he writes a note to explain; when students respond to it and ask if Kyle had written anything else, Lance fakes a journal. The journal becomes a sensation, and Lance is only too happy to bask in the attention his writing is finally receiving - even if Kyle's best friend Andrew (Evan Martin) questions whether a slow, pervy tool like Kyle could possibly have written it.

Over the course of his career, Robin Williams's most notable roles have been extreme types: He's best known for hyperactive, motormouthed characters in movies that slather the sentiment on with a ladle, but has enough against-type, creepy parts that you can't mention the first without the latter. Here, he finds an unusually good balance between the two. Lance is quick-witted and frequently funny, but never gets so into it that the audience just dismisses it as Williams doing his shtick, but he's also unnerving as he goes down a path that is maybe not quite dark, in the traditional sense, but certainly questionable. The result is that he convinces us that a series of choices that immediately seem wrong also seem, given this situation and this character, reasonable. He's a believable guy amid a fair amount of unbelievable situations.

Complete review at eFilmCritic, along with one other review.

Monday, May 18, 2009

This Week In Tickets: 11 May 2009 to 17 May 2009

West coast baseball just messes things up in every way possible. You stay up until 1am, get to work a little late, leading to staying a little late, and even if there is time to catch a movie after, you're kind of dragging, so, repeat. Then plans get messed up by print problems, leading to something this sparse:

This Week In Tickets!

Aside from baseball, it was a pretty uninspiring week for new releases - just Angels & Demons at the multiplexes, and good gravy no. Aside from how much The Da Vinci Code bored me, I really don't get the trailer: Tom Hanks is playing the hero, right? And the backstory is that the Catholic Church did terribly things to the scientists of the Illuminati, who are now striking back. So, why's Hanks working for the Church in this one? Wouldn't his sympathies naturally be with the Illuminati? Or is it about grudge-holding being bad?

The stuff at the boutique houses was a little more inspiring, but not enough to get me to go. I'll see Adoration with the usual group this Tuesday, but otherwise was only really drawn to The Merry Gentleman, and that on the basis of "Michael Keaton! I like that guy! What's he been up to since that White Noise debacle... Oh, directing? That's interesting." It had a one-week run at the Kendall and I'll come back and review it anyway, because there's nothing on HBS/EFC, and seeing a Keaton movie pass unnoticed makes me a bit sad.

This weeks IFFB update:

22 April 2009 (Wednesday): The Brothers Bloom
23 April 2009 (Thursday): Children of Invention, The Missing Person
24 April 2009 (Friday): Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, In The Loop, Pontypool
25 April 2009 (Saturday): Still Walking, Nollywood Babylon, Lost Son of Havana, Grace
26 April 2009 (Sunday): Herb and Dorothy, Helen, Unmistaken Child, The Escapist
27 April 2009 (Monday): For the Love of Movies, Art & Copy
28 April 2009 (Tuesday): World's Greatest Dad

I'll finish writing up World's Greatest Dad sometime in the next couple of days and then festival crunch will be over... Well, at least until NYAFF or Fantasia.

The Merry Gentleman

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 May 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #8 (first-run)

I wanted to like The Merry Gentleman more than I did; its two leads are folks I really like and Michael Keaton, in particular, seems to deserve a comeback. Sad to say, this morose movie isn't going to be it. Keaton seems to go overboard reigning his natural infectious energy in, and while being cheerful wouldn't have been appropriate for this character, his Frank Logan is so deliberately dour as to raise suspicion, especially considering the artificially long time before we hear him speak.

Maybe he just can't judge his own performance while directing, because much of the rest of the movie is quite good. Kelly Macdonald, for instance, is absolutely fantastic as Kate Frazier, a battered wife who has fled halfway across the country, and he does nice things with Ron Lazzeretti's screenplay. I liked the little choices it made, like everything involving Kate's Christmas tree, and some of the cinematography is just fantastic. I wished the hitman stuff had been given a little more background - as much as the movie needs Kate involved with something violent, the movie seems to take this sort of activity for granted.

Still, it's nice to see Keaton dong something interesting. I didn't love A Shot at Glory or Game 6, but they're worth seeing, and better than all the crud or The Dad Roles he's been playing around them.

The Merry GentlemanSleep Dealer

IFFB 2009 Day Six: For Love of the Movies and Art & Copy

Monday was the second-to-last day of the festival, and took place at the ICA. In previous years, the festival would show a full slate of films on this day, but the organizers felt that this was spreading everything too thin - both the staff and the attendees. I admit, I've run myself ragged going between Somerville, Cambridge, and Brookline in previous years, but I also would have liked some other choices on Monday night, even if it was just repeats from earlier in the festival.

The two movies I did see weren't bad, and they made for an interesting double feature: Both film criticism and advertising are about an attempt to be creative and memorable with a specific purpose in mind. Both had a good number of clips, a history lesson, and plentiful interviews with the folks who do it for a living. I think Art & Copy winds up the better movie, as it doesn't have so many obvious biases and doesn't seem like quite so obvious a lecture.

An entertaining part of Doug Pray's Q&A after Art & Copy (the one for Peary's For the Love of Movies was mostly his friends telling him how wonderful he/his film was) was Pray getting excited about the theater he was showing it in, and I have to agree - the ICA theater is a pretty amazing space. The screen is lowered into the middle of a stage area, and the stage not only has curtains at the front, but at the back; when opened, they give a fantastic view of the harbor. Even if you take it as a multi-purpose room, I'm not sure exactly what purpose it serves.

But I love it. Aside from just being a beautiful space, there's something delightful about the way that the thin screen which you can see behind from certain angles reminds the audience of the projection mechanism. In most theaters, your mind can process the screen as a window; a television is a box that has things in it. At the ICA, your movie is just hanging in mid-air, like a special effect, a spell that a wizard has cast to see something far away. Some may take seeing the edges of the illusion so clearly as spoiling the magic of the movies, but I must admit, I kind of like it.

For Love of the Movies

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism takes on a century of its subject in less than ninety minutes, and as is almost inevitable, feels a little uneven. There are places where seems to do little more than scratch the surface, and even when filmmaker Geary Peary does dig a little deeper, it often doesn't seem deep enough. Whether this means the movie should have had a tighter focus on some specific thread or been expanded (and then, perhaps, broken into six half-hour chunks, as a PBS series), I'm not sure.

Aside from being a film critic for the Boston Phoenix, Peary is also a college professor, and he structures his film like a college course. "Dawn (1907-1929)" focuses on the early days of cinema, with particular attention paid to Frank E. Woods, the first critic of note who went on to co-write Birth of a Nation. "Cult Critics and Crowther (1930-1953)" shows film reviewing evolving into the form we recognize today, with star ratings and the championing of worthy independent and foreign films. "Auteurism and After (1954-1967)" introduces us to the rivalry between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, which carries over into "When Criticism Mattered (1968-1980). That time period overlaps with "TV, Fans, and Videotape (1975-1995)", which covers the rise of the fanzine. Finally, the film finishes up with "Digital Rebellion (1996+)".

With a scant ten or fifteen minutes with which to cover each of these segments, there's some limitations on what Peary can include. Some are right up there in the title - this is the story of American film criticism, so the groundbreaking work being done in France is mostly excluded, except in terms of how it pitted Sarris and Kael against each other. Perhaps a more subtle selection bias is how much time is how focused the film is on newspapers' reviews of new releases. Criticism that emerges from academia gets very short shrift, and while "TV, Fans, and Videotape" mentions Siskel & Ebert and how video led to the revisiting of older films by enthusiasts as much as professionals, it doesn't do much more than that, even though these are factors which would have a major influence on the film's concluding chapter.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Art & Copy

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2009 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

If there's high art and low art, advertising must be considered the lowest of them, with perhaps only grudging admission that any part of it can be considered art at all. Advertising is creative work, though, and for better or worse, a good ad probably has a much larger impact than a good piece of non-commercial artwork.

Director Doug Pray's Art & Copy focuses on the good ads, whether you measure that by artistic merit or commercial success. Those looking for an examination of the rightness and wrongness of pervasive advertising as a phenomenon should look elsewhere; this is an overview of how the medium works combined with a look at some of its more noteworthy practitioners. A key example of both comes early, as we're told about Bill Bernbach, who changed the face of advertising by putting the art director and copywriter in the same room. Before this, ads were very text-heavy, a far cry form the punchy, slickly-designed ads of today.

We get insight on some of the simpler, and most pervasive, advertising campaigns of recent years. Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, who describe their job as "entertaining society using clients' products" talk about their "got milk?" campaign, pointing out how the much-imitated catchphrase was originally the punchline to a very elaborate commercial, while also breaking down how it evolved from the client's specific needs. Pray also talks to Dan Wieden, who came up with "Just Do It". His stories are less about how they built the campaign (although the inspiration for the phrase is amusing), and more about how it took on a life of its own.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Sleep Dealer

Strange things happen with small films from small distributors. I intended to see this Friday night, but when I got to the ticket counter, was told the theater had gotten a bad print; the subtitles from reel 2 were duplicated on reel 4, which could make the movie rough going if you don't speak Spanish. Rough deal for the theater, I imagine: Not only does this kill Friday night, but who knows how many folks come back, even though they said a corrected print would be in Saturday morning? Heck, the loss of word-of-mouth must hurt.

I did come back Saturday afternoon, though, and quite enjoyed the film. It's the sort of thing I get really excited about seeing in Montreal every summer, an odd little sci-fi film from a relatively unexpected place, so getting to see it in a theater near home is a treat.

Sleep Dealer

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 May 2009 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagement)

Science fiction on film is tricky. The money to do spectacle generally comes with strings attached, but without it, a filmmaker runs the risk of having their world look unconvincing or settling for using their big ideas to tell a small story. Alex Rivera's Sleep Dealer has managed to scrape together enough to have some scope even as it tells a ground-level story.

Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) starts out on his father's farm in Santa Ana del Rio, Oaxaca, Mexico. It used to be impressive, but now it's marginal; an American company has dammed the nearby river and the Cruzes are forced to buy their water from the reservoir. When Memo's ham radio is mistaken for a terrorist spy, he heads north to Tijuana, intending to find work tele-operating robots in wealthier nations. Along the way, he meets Luz (Leonor Varela), a writer whose blog entries are commentary on her memories uploaded directly to the net. Not many people are buying, although her entries on Memo have attracted the attention of Rudolfoz "Rudy" Rodriguez (Jacob Vargas), who, ironically, teleoperates weaponry in Mexico from San Diego.

If there's a theme to the future of Sleep Dealer, it's that the more things change, the more they stay the same, at least for poor countries like Mexico; the indignities just creep in closer. America dams the rivers and then sells locals their own water back at inflated prices, and now they can get cheap Mexican labor and still have the border locked down tight (the film's title is the term for the warehouses along the border where low-paid workers manipulate robots around the world, despite the toll so much VR takes on their bodies and eyesight). If you thought Cops was exploitative, wait until you see Drones.

That's an earnedly cynical view of the future, and that's before getting to the Matrix-style nodes the characters have implanted in their bodies for interfacing with the net. As creepy as the pods in The Matrix were, there's something even more uncaring about the sleep factories, as the workers stand for hours on end, wearing oxygen masks to keep them alert and milky contact lenses. It's not an anti-technology movie, though - although there are slight hints of body horror as we're introduced to the nodes, it's mostly treated as an ethically neutral technology: A little unsettling at first, but fascinating and useful. Those spots of silver are our main reminder that we're in the future, but there's a lot of nice details that establish the period while also sneaking in the occasional bit of satire.

It's good that Rivera's setting gives the audience a fair amount of food for thought, because the story is kind of lightweight. The cast does well enough by the characters, never pulling the audience out of the movie. There are straightforward parallels in the guilt both Memo and Rudy feel over what happens in the first half of the movie as well as how they each work in the other's country without crossing the border. I do like how Rivera winds up kick-starting the story out of something that had been introduced as black comedy, and though the end is a bit contrived, it's enough fun that I wish there had been a little more room in the effects budget for it. The effects themselves are actually pretty decent - it's impressive what can be done on a small budget these days, so long as the director chooses his spots right, which Rivera, by and large, does.

Rivera's put together a nice science fiction story here, from a perspective not frequently seen in the genre, at least on film. Sleep Dealer is both good speculation and allegory, well worth seeking out for those interested in science fiction that does more than overpower them.

Also at HBS.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Star Trek

It's true - I've wanted something like this for something like fifteen years. There's likely no way to prove it, unless Google has archived message board archives from the early nineties from Portland, Maine area BBSes on whatever pre-dated newsgroups. Please don't go look for them - I was a teenager typing on a 64K Atari 800XL with a 1200-baud modem. My argument at the time was that it would have been a crying shame if Hamlet had died with Richard Burbage, but apparently the franchise had to go dormant before Paramount would consider giving it the fresh coat of paint.

I have to admit, I was kind of surprised to show up at the comic shop on Wednesday and find that the other folks there who had seen it over the weekend were disappointed, especially after hearing how stoked my brother and his girlfriend had been (they saw it at a regular cineplex after missing the train to the furniture store). The easy response is that this is to be expected and maybe a good thing - if the mainstream audience digs it, it doesn't matter what a bunch of bitter nerds think. The Picnic's clientele isn't all bitter nerds, though, and I'll readily admit - their complaints about the script were things I would normally rip into and then get pissed when someone told me to just turn my brain off and enjoy the ride.

Why does Star Trek get a pass from me on this in a way that, say, Transformers 2 likely won't? Beats me. I'm not a blind fanboy on the subject of Star Trek - I bailed on both Voyager and Enterprise, although the latter lured me back when it started openly pandering to long-time fans - but this really is the first time Star Trek has felt right in years, if not decades.

Star Trek

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2009 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)

Back in high school or college, talking with fellow fans, I tossed out the idea that a fun thing for Paramount to do for Star Trek's upcoming thirtieth anniversary would be to make a new movie, set during the original five-year mission, with new people playing the familiar characters but modern production values. While it made for a fun fantasy casting game (I think I wanted Keifer Sutherland to play Kirk), most claimed that it shouldn't be any more than that, because The Original Series was untouchable. So, if any of you are reading this, 15-odd years later, it is a great pleasure to say I told you so.

Happily, the pleasure comes less from personal validation than the fact that I got to watch the 2009 edition of Star Trek in a packed theater with a giant screen and a bunch of people who seemed to be having nearly as much fun as I was. Like others have done with Batman Begins and Casino Royale before them, the makers of Star Trek have gone back to the beginning to tell a first chapter which had never appeared on film, jettisoned all the bits that made for easy parody, and refocused on the things that made these worlds appealing in the first place. And as good as those other two movies are, the process is especially revelatory for Star Trek: Batman and James Bond have either had various soft resets or been kept in a sort of enforced stasis, but Star Trek had not only allowed forty years (or three times as much, depending how you want to reckon these things) of restrictive details to accumulate, but it achieved a crushing level of solemnity that was not in the original playbook. Even leaving aside how the sequel series converted ideals into dogma, there is, in retrospect, something very wrong about how the features made a show about boldly going forward into meditations on aging, death, and obsolescence.

To hell with that, say director J.J. Abrams and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They open with the moments leading to James T. Kirk's birth as a Romulan mining ship emerges from a strange anomaly with its captain, Nero (Eric Bana), demanding to speak to "Ambassador Spock". The U.S.S. Kelvin and its first officer, George Kirk, hold Nero back at great cost. We're then treated to scenes of Kirk's son James and the half-human, half-Vulcan Spock as children and young adults, following their paths to Starfleet Academy, where Kirk makes friends with the recently-divorced, space-phobic Dr. Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban). Word of a crisis on Spock's home planet forces Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) and Commander Spock to crew the just-completed starship Enterprise with junior officers and cadets, including Kirk, McCoy, Helmsman Sulu (John Cho), 17-year-old whiz kid Pavel Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and xenolinguist Uhura (Zoe Saldana). When they get there, they discover that Nero is back, and the stakes are higher than they could have imagined.

They're also higher than the fans could have imagined, because it's at this point that the movie announces loud and clear that the familiar future history of Star Trek is no longer set in stone. This will greatly annoy a certain variety of fan, but it gets the franchise back to where it started in the sixties, when Gene Roddenberry and his crew were making it up as they went along and could do anything that crossed their minds. Abrams and crew restore that sense of seeming recklessness, and it's a good match to their main character.

Chris Pine nails that part of Kirk, too. His Kirk isn't the same as William Shatner's - he's still young and headstrong, overestimating himself, a cocky son of a gun not yet matured into the sly fellow we know. What comes across is that, whether he's being cunning, foolhardy, a horndog or a fighter, Kirk is decisive, but can afford to be because he's got the brains and charisma to back it up. Zachary Quinto's Spock is the same way, although there tends to be more overt self-examination to him. He does the expected thing of holding his emotions in check, as the Vulcans prize logic above all, but he also gets Spock's dry sarcasm right (others playing Vulcans in the franchise have had a hard time stopping short of smug).

The rest of the cast does a similarly good job of recreating the characters without doing simple impersonations. Karl Urban's McCoy is the closest to his predecessor visually, although he turns the crotchetiness down: For all Urban's McCoy complains, he's also excited about his fresh start and the potential for adventure. Yelchin and Saldana perhaps make characters who mainly warmed seats in the sixties more memorable this time around, although John Cho has a hard time emerging from the background. Simon Pegg provides a late energy boost as Scotty, and Bruce Greenwood a nice mentor figure as Pike. Unfortunately, Eric Bana is sort of all over the map as Nero; it's not just that much of his backstory has been off-loaded into a comic book tie-in, but Bana sometimes doesn't seem sure whether he wants Nero fierce or laid-back, a working-class guy goaded into supervillainy by circumstance.

Original series star Leonard Nimoy is here, too, as an aged Spock, lending a little more legitimacy to an idea that, at times, met with a lot of resistance. It's clear that, as much as they are attempting to create something new and modern, the filmmakers are being careful not to mess with the formula too much, not just to avoid alienating the built-in audience, but because it has worked for forty-plus years. They load the movie up with easter eggs that fans will enjoy, and keep things moving along at a brisk enough pace that some of the holes in the script won't be noticed until after the closing credits. I won't lie - there are more than a few moments when one has to wonder if that's really what someone as intelligent as the characters are supposed to be would do. Hopefully they'll do better next time, because I suspect that my fellow fans and I might not be quite so forgiving.

I am inclined to be forgiving this time, though, because this is the first bit of Star Trek filmed in my lifetime that feels like the original. It's fast-paced, sexy, funny, and takes place in a galaxy filled with danger, but also excitement and adventure. The various incarnations of Star Trek have been a number of good things (and some bad things), but it's been a while since they've felt this wide-open and unpredictable.

Also at HBS, along with seven other reviews.

Monday, May 11, 2009

This Week In Tickets: 4 May 2009 to 10 May 2009

Not much in the way of movies this week. I am actually at a loss as to why not. Mainly, I wasn't interested in any of the mainstream stuff coming out aside from Star Trek, and the other days... Huh. Don't know.

This Week In Tickets!

It was an eventful weekend. First, an ugly baseball game. Sometime during the fifth inning I sent my brother a text message saying that the crowd was likely to kill Julio Lugo. Roughly forty balls seemed to go through the hole in the left side, and although my seat wasn't really lined up well, I did spend a little time pondering whether or not I, if I worked up a sufficient berzerker rage, I could dash from my seat, leap onto the field, and injure him enough to get him back on the DL before security stopped me. I'm still not sure it was actually a bad idea.

Sunday afternoon, Matt wound up paying $35 for me to see Star Trek in IMAX. The plan was he pays for tickets, I get the food, but he had a nightmarish morning with the T and didn't have the backup plans worked out to get to Reading. He and Morgan wound up seeing it in 35mm, and I gather he enjoyed it nearly as much as I did.

I did meet him for the Sunday night game; unfortunately, I was in and out of the house to fast to grab something useful like a coat or sweatshirt. It was really cold, although the game itself was pretty exciting.

This weeks SXSW update:

22 April 2009 (Wednesday): The Brothers Bloom
23 April 2009 (Thursday): Children of Invention, The Missing Person
24 April 2009 (Friday): Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, In The Loop, Pontypool
25 April 2009 (Saturday): Still Walking, Nollywood Babylon, Lost Son of Havana, Grace
26 April 2009 (Sunday): Herb and Dorothy, Helen, Unmistaken Child, The Escapist
27 April 2009 (Monday): For the Love of Movies, Art & Copy
28 April 2009 (Tuesday): World's Greatest Dad

Ah, I'll be glad to finish writing these things up. With something like a month before the New York Asian Film Festival, if I opt to do anything there.

Star Trek

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 10 May 2009 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (The IMAX Experience)

I had a big, happy, I feel like I'm ten years old again smile on my face throughout this entire movie. I'm going to spend tomorrow's bus ride writing up why, but I've been spending the last day or so figuring out where they could go next with the series and how much I loved everything about it.

Tokyo SonataSox Lose!Star TrekSox Win!

IFFB 2009 Day Five: Herb and Dorothy, Helen, Unmistaken Child, and The Escapist

I was looking forward to all the movies I saw on the festival's last day in Somerville, but I was looking to something else, too. Dinner.

Good food is wasted on me, but I love a good burger more than just about everything else. And while I'm not yet willing to put The Boston Burger Company in the same category as Bartley's or Mr. Steer, it had one thing that made my mouth water.

That would be "The King". A burger with bacon, peanut butter, and fried bananas. I'm pretty sure the one I had had cheese as well. So, basically, we're talking about everything that makes eating pleasurable under one bun. I had to have a regular burger on Saturday to make sure that we were talking about a good foundation, in order to figure out whether this was actually the greatest thing ever, or a case of the whole not being the sum of its parts.

I think I may be falling on the side of greatest thing ever. Now I've just got to figure out how to get it right at home.

Herb and Dorothy

* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Herbert and Dorothy Vogel are a treasure, and most people will likely decide that's the case just from hearing about the couple, without the need for a movie to convince them. They're a working-class couple that managed to become a fixture in the New York City art scene and amass a staggering collection, and as such it's very easy to fall in love with just the idea of them. It's nice that Megumi Sasaki's film assures us that the reality is as charming as the legend.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel met in 1960; he was a postal worker who had dropped out of high school, she a librarian who had moved to the city from Elmira. They fell in love and were married a year later, and while Herb had never hidden his interest in art, it wasn't until they went to the National Gallery on their honeymoon that Dorothy saw the full extent of his enthusiasm. She came to share it, and soon they were taking classes together. Creating art wasn't their thing, but they loved being around art and artists, and in 1965 they bought their first Sol Lewitt piece. Others followed, mostly minimal and conceptual; their only rules were that the art had to be affordable and had to fit in their apartment.

That apartment is a frightening wonder; it's not just crammed with art - and make no mistake, crammed is the right word. Nearly every possible bit of surface area has something hanging on it, sometimes with a blanket over it to protect it from the elements, but there are boxes filling other spaces and art stacked under the bed. There are also aquariums and terrariums for their fish and turtles, and cats as well. By necessity or design, Sasaki makes it seem even more cramped, with many of the interviews with Herb and Dorothy conducted around their tiny kitchen table, which is really only big enough for one and also has the couple's television and internet appliance - it's as if the artwork is pushing their living space into that tiny area.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Helen

* * (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #2 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

I'd like to think I'm generous when reviewing and rating movies: If I enjoy a movie while watching it, but it loses something on later examination, I make sure to emphasize that this doesn't undo the initial good time. If it rises in my estimation upon reflection, that's a positive too. Although Helen falls into the latter category, I'm sad to say that the way it came together in my head afterward isn't quite enough for me to recommend it.

Though Helen is named for one girl, it opens with another, as we watch Joy Thompson separate from a group of friends, cross a park, and then continue off-screen. She's off in the distance throughout this shot, then there's a cut to her eye-catching yellow jacket lying on the ground, and she's missing. The police plan to film a reconstruction to air on television, and wind up recruiting another student at the college, Helen (Annie Townsend), to stand in for her. She's about the same size and coloration, and she's encouraged to speak to Joy's parents (Sandie Malia and Denis Jobling) and boyfriend Danny (Danny Groenland) for tips. Helen being a lonely girl - she lives in a group home and works at a hotel when other teenagers are hanging out with friends - she finds herself gravitating toward Danny and the Thompsons.

And there you have something perilously close to the whole story. It's not a bad framework for a film, actually, but it seems like there should be something more. This could be the first act of a thriller, for instance, and even if only one in ten of the scripts that go that route would be any good, it's worth a shot. Even if that wasn't where filmmakers Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy wanted to go, they could have taken this weird situation and worked it somehow. Instead, we get the occasional baby step toward something dramatic happening, but for the most part, the movie remains passive. Indeed, there are multiple scenes of Helen just lying on the ground where Joy's jacket was found, just thinking or maybe trying to form some connection to the other girl for the re-enactment we never see filmed.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Unmistaken Child

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Unmistaken Child is an example of my favorite sort of documentary, the fly-on-the-wall film that looks and feels like a narrative feature. It tells its story by marshaling extraordinary access and patience, rather than cutting cutting away to various talking heads and bits of archive footage. What makes it an especially intriguing film, though, is a caption in the early going that suggests that the audience not take it at face value.

It's not the opening description of Buddhist monk Geshe Lama Konchog, who died recently at the age of 84. He was notable for spending 26 years in a cavern retreat, pondering spiritual matters. Nor is it the description of rinpoches, which means "the precious ones", reincarnated masters whom the other monks seek out. In the case of "Geshe-la", the man charged with finding his reincarnation will be Tenzin Zopa, who served as the passed masters heart disciple for twenty-one years, and whose quest will take him to the Tsim Valley on the border of Nepal and Tibet until he finds baby Tenzin Ngodrop.

The line that makes this all so intriguing comes just after we've been told that young Tenzin Zopa was the master's close companion for the last two decades of their lives: "Tenzin feels terribly alone."

Without this line, or with it merely implied, Unmistaken Child would still be an intriguing documentary. It follows Tenzin Zopa as he goes through the process of searching for the child, from consulting with Tagri Rinpoche, the senior relic master, and an astrological center in Taiwan. We see Zopa return to his home village and traverse great distances on foot, asking if there are children of the right age and examining them to see if they show the signs of being the reincarnated Geshe-la. There's the test in front of other lamas, encounters with the Dalai Lama, and more. There is just enough captioning to fill us in on background or religious details that might not be obvious, and Tenzin Zopa is a genial protagonist, charmingly full of self-doubt about his suitability for the task ahead. Director Nati Baratz shows us the process with clarity; one can come out of the film learning a lot.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

The Escapist

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

It's a terrible pun with which to lead off a review of a jailbreak movie, but in this case it is literally true: The Escapist hits the ground running.

The movie kicks off with the sound of alarms competing with Benjamin Wallfisch's exhilarating score, as four cons scramble to remove a grate from the floor and dive in, while a fifth - lifer Frank Perry (Brian Cox), brings up the rear, obviously injured. The film then jumps back in time, showing us how this came to be. Perry was, if not a model prisoner, no trouble-maker, until he gets word that his daughter has been hospitalized. Not allowed to see her, he hatches a plan to escape - just him, boxer Lenny Drake (Joseph Fiennes), and near-release Brodie (Liam Cunningham), who knows the sewer systems they'll be traversing. It, as these things always do, gets more complicated when Frank gets a new cellmate, Lacey (Dominic Cooper). Sociopath Tony (Steven Mackintosh) has taken a fancy to Lacey, which is bad enough, but Tony's brother is Rizza (Damian Lewis), the crime kingpin who has his fingers in everything that goes on inside. Avoiding his attention means making a deal with Viv Batista (Seu Jorge), the incarcerated chemist who keeps the jail's drug trade going.

Director Rupert Wyatt and co-writer Daniel Hardy divide their time between between the jail and the tunnels, and while that may seem like it may drain the prison scenes of some of their suspense, it's actually a pretty great set-up. The story being told inside the prison is one kind of story, about Frank confronting his decisions to go along when he could stand up, and while the escape is not empty action scenes, it's long enough and different enough that the movie might have seemed to undergo a big shift midway through if the same scenes had been arranged in the obvious chronological order. This way, the two halves of the story can each stand somewhat separately, and the first half does a nice job of holding back just how the second winds up with the set-up it has until something close to the last minute.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

International Secrets: Revanche and Tokyo Sonata

This pair of films is a true testament to how incredibly little interest I have in seeing Every Little Step. I was sort of planning to hit the Coolidge on Sunday because I was trying to find a comic shop with a copy of Star Trek Coundown #3 and there are two between my house and the theater (neither of which had that particular issue; it seems to have completely skipped Boston). ELS was the Chlotrudis Monday night movie, but I opted to meet Gil & Amanda for supper and then see this thing I had a pass for by a director I really like.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Every Little Thing is a nice enough movie. But I'm pretty sure A Chorus Line by itself is more "love the theater! Love it!!!" than my low tolerance can take, and this, then, would be a documentary of the casting process of a Broadway play about casting a Broadway play. If there's a making-of feature on the eventual DVD, it could collapse into a singularity of self-referentiality.

Revanche

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2009 at Coolidge Corner Theater #2 (first-run)

The Best Foreign Language Film Oscar often drives film nuts crazy. The countries' film boards don't submit the movie we consider their nation's masterpiece for the year, and then at every cut (short list, nominees, winner) we get a little more agitated, wondering how this film which we haven't heard a single decibel of buzz on makes the cut, and we can't even see it to form an opinion. At least, not until it sneaks unheralded into a boutique cinema for a week and we say, okay, maybe Revanche belonged there.

Revanche was Austria's submission, and after a brief glimpse at a quietly domestic scene in the country with policeman Robert (Andreas Lust) and his wife Susanne (Ursula Strauss), we're in Vienna, where ex-con Alex (Johannes Krisch) works at the Cinderella club/brothel, tidying the rooms and keeping the bar stocked. He's dating one of the more visible employees, Ukranian immigrant Tamara (Irina Potapenko). Alex isn't really a bad guy; he rides out to his grandfather Hausner's farm on his days off to cut the old man's firewood. When Cinderella's "manager" Konecny (Hanno Poschl) starts pressuring her to leave the club and into an apartment he'd rent for her, Alex decides to push their plan to move to Spain forward. That takes money, though Alex has a plan for that, one that just can't fail.

Let's stop there, because that brings us up to the point where everything changes. Writer/director Götz Spielmann doesn't so much throw a plot twist our way as allow a scene we've seen hundreds of times to play out realistically, and then track the aftermath of it. The movie slows down for this, pushing one set of subplots aside for another, but for the most part this works. One development seems kind of arbitrary and forced, but most of the rest seems natural. The second half of the movie becomes much more somber when we realize that we haven't heard from this character in a while, so maybe Alex and Tamara just aren't as important as a movie would generally make them. The pressures on the characters in the second half are internal and self-inflicted, rather than the result of outside pressure.

The cast handles that wonderfully. Johannes Krisch and Irina Potapenko have a chemistry that is passionate but private; they've each come to an understanding of what is and isn't safe in the quasi-legal world they live in. Krisch manages to infuse a little more optimism into his character despite his being worn-down by years and jail time, while Potapenko manages to communicate a pragmatic intelligence despite speaking imperfect German, if the subtitles are a proper guide. Andreas Lust and Ursula Strauss give us a couple that is a bit more strained; they're in a newly-completed house with a nursery that was completed before Susi miscarried in her third month of pregnancy, but going through the motions of their life. Lust does a fine job of playing Robert as a proud cop who feels unmanned, and Strauss gives perhaps the best in a film full of fine performances as the wife who finds a certain amount of happiness opening up to her elderly neighbor. Hannes Thanheiser has a nice bead on that old farmer, too, playing Hausner's pride and physical fragility in a believable balance, giving him enough individuality that he's always "Hausner", rather than just "the old man".

As impressive as Spielmann's story and cast is, though, what impressed me the most was how he put the movie together. The lovemaking scenes of the movie's various couples establish their relationships and the tone of that section of the film, for instance, and I think it's actually a while before we learn Tamara's actual name (she's referred to as "Angel" often enough that we don't realize it's her "work name" until Alex calls her something else, cementing that he is not like the other men in her life). The pacing he and editor Karina Ressler establish is impressive; this is a two hour movie whose second half is filled with more introspection than activity that almost never seems to drag. Spielmann, Ressler, and cinematographer Marti Gschlacht also put on a clinic on how to establish the details of a location when the action of a scene may depend on that information. The photography itself is striking and put to good use; I'm a little bit in awe of a crucial shot where the play of light across a lake's surface seems to further bury something that has been thrown in.

I saw Revanche a bit by accident; the theater was in the direction I felt like walking that afternoon and I was actively avoiding the other film playing there. It's a thoroughly impressive film, well deserving of the bit of attention its nomination has given it here, and then some.

Also at eFilmCritic.

Tokyo Sonata

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 4 May 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #2 (preview)

There have been many sequences in movies where someone loses his or her job, but few have been so callously cruel as the one that opens Tokyo Sonata: A pretty girl walks through an office, drawing all eyes. She goes into a room and briefly greets an executive, who is impressed with her Japanese; they can move this division to China and hire three like her for what one of their current Japanese employees costs. Before she's left the building, Ryuhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa), a twenty-year employee, has been called into the Vice President's office and asked what position he can fill in the company with his department being outsourced. None? Then pack your things and go.

That this is happening all over doesn't make it any more palatable for Sasaki, and doesn't keep him from considering it a shameful failure on his part. He tries to sneak into his house that evening, and the next morning leaves without telling wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) that anything has changed. Meanwhile, Megumi continues to keep house, with older son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) coming and going at odd hours and younger son Kenji (Inowaki Kai) getting in trouble with his teacher before his chance passing of a piano teacher's house inspires him to ask for lessons, which his father refuses. He signs up anyway, paying Ms. Kaneko (Haruka Igawa) with his monthly lunch money.

This may not sound like the material for a movie by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, one of Japan's most popular horror filmmakers, at least not at first glance. Look a little closer, though, and it doesn't seem like such a stretch: Kurosawa's films straddle the art-house and the grindhouse, and they've seldom been entirely or even primarily about ghosts and monsters. The source of the unease in his films is less something hideous that may jump out at you, but a world that no longer operates by familiar or logical rules. Tokyo Sonata presents us with a world where the rules no longer apply because of economic malaise rather than the supernatural, but this is still prime Kurosawa territory.

Which is not to say it is a horror movie in disguise. It is, instead, a family drama with frequent streaks of bone-dry comedy. There's a frequently hilarious recurring joke about how Ryuhei isn't the only man pretending that he is still employed, which even manages a nice call-back after we've seen the worst of where that line of thinking can lead. Kenji is less than thrilled by how his talking back to his teacher effectively destroys order at his school, although the complete shift in the class's behavior is pretty funny. Koji Yakusho has a bizarrely funny role.

The cast is great at showing the audience what this strange situation is doing to the the family. Kagawa radiates embarrassment and shame as Ryuhei, cranking it up a notch in job interview scenes, where we see that working at the same place for so long has made it almost impossible to look for another job. Kagawa also does a nice job of transforming that shame to anger when called upon to do so. Kyoko Koizumi is excellent as Megumi, gradually revealing her as the down-to-earth glue that holds the family together, without making her early simplicity seem out-of-character. Inowaki Kai is wonderfully awkward as Kenji, just this awkward kid trying to do well and do the right thing and not understanding why the adults just won't let him.

As great as much of the movie is, it threatens to go completely off the rails in the last act. A good chunk of the audience seemed to feel like it did at the time, as things get very strange for all three of the main characters at once, and they do things that on the face of it don't seem to make a whole lot of sense. I think it works, playing on the idea that things just seem so out of whack for the Sasakis that running away is what makes the most sense. It comes together, especially with how Kurosawa makes use of the repeated shot of an intersection on the Sasakis' street, but it's such a severe shift toward downright strange events and dark tone that he may lose a chunk of the audience there.

I admit, he nearly lost me; as much as I enjoy the occasional "what the hell, Japan? what the hell?" movie, it didn't seem like the right time. Kurosawa makes it work, though, well enough to pull the whole thing together.

Also at eFilmCritic.

Monday, May 04, 2009

IFFB 2009 Day Four: Still Walking, Nollywood Babylon, Lost Son of Havana, and Grace

Saturday was a beast of a day to schedule; going in, all I really knew was that I would end with Grace at the Brattle, since that was the only midnight movie option. In the end, I chose Still Walking over The Answer Man because the latter is scheduled for a release this summer, even if it is smack dab in the middle of Fantasia. I figure that's just the New York/L.A. release date and it will hit Boston a couple weeks later, when I'm home. I asked whether the various guests would be around for the second showing of Last Son of Havana, was told they probably wouldn't be, and decided to go with this screening. There were a couple other decisions, but Nollywood Babylon looked kind of interesting and would give me time to have a burger between screenings.

Last Son of Havana was the festival's centerpiece film, the type we don't really get a lot of opportunities for in Boston - the sort that attracts celebrities, media attention, and the like. The Brothers Bloom was a packed house; Last Son was a packed house where I'm sitting five seats away from Luis Tiant and Fred Lynn, a couple rows from Peter Gammons, and the Farrelly Brothers and Chris Cooper were in the house. There had been rumors that some Red Sox players would come, but the game against the Yankees ran forever - there was a lot of checking the score on mobile phones in the line and in the theater.

I wonder how much films like these bring outside attention to the festival; it's a very different crowd, people just there for the one film. Hopefully some come back or spread the word.

Aruitemo Aruitemo (Still Walking)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Among my moviegoing friends, I have gained a not-undeserved reputation for lacking patience with French dysfunctional family dramas. I contend that this is a bit unfair; while I did, in fact, bang my head against the back of my seat during the likes of A Christmas Tale and The Secret of the Grain while muttering my wishes that the characters do something, it has nothing to do with the subtitles. I do the same thing when watching English-language mumblecore, after all. These friends naturally assumed I hated Still Walking, but that's not the case. I rather enjoyed it.

Why is this? The setting, perhaps. Where watching American or French people stew in their own resentment just frustrates me, as I have too clear an idea of how I would not put up with that sort of situation (at least in my mind), Japanese culture is just different enough that it excites my curiosity. Yokohama is also a neat-looking city, as photographed by Yutaka Yamasaki. Yet I think the biggest difference is something else - I don't get the sense that most of the characters in Still Walking have surrendered to their issues; family relationships are tricky, but not a trap.

The family here is the Yokoyamas. Patriarch Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) is a retired doctor in his late sixties. As the film starts, his wife Toshiko (Kirin Kiki) is preparing food with their daughter Chinami (the singly-named You) while Kyohei stays in his office, pretending to attend to patient records despite his clinic being closed. Chinami's husband Nobuo (Kazuya Takahashi) soon arrives with their children Satsuki and Mutsu. Also on the way is second son Ryota (Hiroshi Abe), along with wife Yukari (Yui Natsukawa) and stepson Atsushi (Shohei Tanaka). First son Junpei died a twelve years ago, rescuing a floundering swimmer, and the family is gathering to mark the anniversary. There are, of course, tensions lurking between the Yokoyamas. The house shrine features a photograph of Junpei in his lab coat, highlighting Kyohei's disappointment that Ryota did not also follow in his footsteps and inherit the clinic, instead choosing a career in art restoration. There's prejudice against marrying a widow, and somewhat self-righteous debate among the other family members over whether or not Ryota and Yukari having children of their own would be a good idea.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Nollywood Babylon

* * * (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Asked to name the top three film industries in the world, nearly everybody would come up with the United States right away. A good chunk would probably mention India next; the word's gotten out in the past few years. After that, though, most people would likely rattle off a half-dozen or so countries - Japan, China/Hong Kong, France, South Korea, maybe Russia, Italy, and the U.K. - and likely give up before even considering Nigeria. That's because "Nollywood" isn't particularly concerned about exporting, but dominates its native land.

Nollywood's birthdate is given as 1992, financed by electronics merchants in Lagos, the country's largest city. It's a direct-to-video business - though Lagos is a city of fourteen million people, there are only three operating theaters, and none of them show Nollywood movies. It thrives because it's good business - deliver something the audience wants (films that speak directly to African audiences) for a cost low enough to make it profitable. That means shooting on video, quickly, and with perhaps a less-than-experienced cast and crew.

The movie is framed, in large part, around watching Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen shoot one of the dozens of Nollywood movies he's directed. He's one of Nigeria's most popular directors, and we get a front row seat to just how bare-bones Nollywood filmmaking is. The crew is very young - many don't look to be out of their teens - and Imasuen points out that they will likely move up in the industry quickly, maybe even directing movies themselves within a couple years. Sometimes folks on film crews get mistaken for gangsters.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

The Lost Son of Havana

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

If The Lost Son of Havana were fictional, there's a good chance that people would call its screenplay ridiculous. After all, it features the World Series, the Negro Leagues, multiple incredible returns from injury, baseball bringing about a reunion of fathers and sons, escapes from Cuba, and a comedic return. It is, more or less, everything a person might try to fit into a baseball movie, and the fact that it's all true doesn't diminish director Jonathan Hock's work at all.

It's worth remembering Hock's name, because it will probably be overshadowed in any promotion by the producers, Bobby and Peter Farrelly. The beginning of the film has a bit that's off-the-wall funny enough that the brothers should absolutely consider poaching it for a feature: In order for the documentary crew to travel with baseball great Luis Tiant on a trip to Cuba to visit old friends and family for the first time in 46 years, they must come in with a baseball team playing a goodwill exhibition game in Havana suburb Piñar del Rio - and while Tiant is allowed to come as a coach, the filmmakers must play. Tell me there's not a movie funnier than The Heartbreak Kid in there.

That's not the movie Hock's making, though. The initial levity of the game passes, and the filmmakers get to the main business of why they came: Following Tiant into Havana as he returns to his old neighborhood to seek out the family and friends he left behind when in 1961, at the age of 20, he followed his father's advice and opted not to return to Cuba after Fidel Castro took power. The people he meets on his quest are interesting: There's Juan Carlos Oliva, brother of Minnesota Twins star Tony Oliva, who played ball as a youth, was a tank commander in Castro's army, and later became a coach. There's a childhood friend by the name of Fermin, who displays a fascinating mix of sentiment and envy when he encounters Tiant. And there's his family; his aunts are sometimes unable to stand and embrace him, but there are plenty of members of the younger generation to fill out the house.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Grace

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 25 April 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival of Boston After Dark)

When a child is born in a fantastical serial, whether it be television, comics, or movie sequels, there is almost inevitably some plot twist that ages him/her rapidly, or jumps the audience forward in time, or otherwise presents us with a walking, talking, parent-resenting tween/teen/adult because, as the writers will tell you, babies are boring. I've never thought that necessarily had to be the case, but Grace is pretty good evidence that they're right and I'm wrong - although it's got both enough other problems and enough things that work that I'm not quite willing to concede the point yet.

Madeline Matheson (Jordan Ladd) is excited to become a mother, and is determined to do right for her baby. Her husband Michael (Stephen Park) is a little unsure about Madeline's plans to give birth at a midwife's office rather than a hospital, which only makes sense with her organic vegan diet and all the other principled stands that go with it. Michael's mother Vivian (Gabrielle Rose), a judge, is by no means unsure; she's upset enough that this hippie chick has somehow taken her son away from her, and a child means there will be no getting rid of her. Not satisfied with Madeline using midwife Patricia Lang (Samantha Ferris) as their obstetrician, she tries to force family friend Dr. Richard Sohn (Malcolm Stewart) on the couple. The topic seems moot after an accident on the road, though Madeline insists on carrying the baby to term. During the birth, she somehow seems to will the stillborn Grace back to life, but as she finds out during her first feeding, something is very strange about this little girl.

When you start a movie like Grace, there's a number of obvious hurdles, and writer/director Paul Solet doesn't get past them with the greatest of ease. A baby needing blood rather than mother's milk is a problem which shows up more or less immediately, and that sort of puts the storytellers into a corner. Newborns are, after all, not especially active creatures; unless you give the kid some sort of superhuman capabilities, it can be tough to build suspense in a who-lives-and-who-dies way. The story also relies pretty strongly on an idiot plot (when baby wants blood, call the doctor) compounded by convenient difficulties.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.