No pictures today, as I chose a couple of movies without folks in attendance. It was a scheduling thing - Slow West is already booked for the Brattle in a month, but I'll be out of town for the first half of its run and who knows what will be up for the last three days; it might be gobbled up with moving headaches. Can't very well do much looking for a new place to live while at the festival, but that's going to be what I'm spending a lot of time on after, with June dedicated to getting stuff cleared out of the house before moving it to wherever.
Scheduling must be a tremendous headache for the festival programmers, and one of the many reasons that the people who run the festival must be more clever than those of who go is that I can't imagine trying to estimate demand. I wound up seeing neither of the movies in question, but two in the 7pm slot wound up having to switch theaters - Love Between the Covers went from one of the small even-numbered rooms at the Somerville to the main auditorium, while Being Evel went the other way. Who would have thought that the romance novel industry would draw more curiosity than Evel Kneivel? It's an easy thing to realize in retrospect, especially since the one about the daredevil might have more stuff that looks cooler on the big screen.
Truth be told, I kind of marvel at how festivals are able to judge their audience sizes as well as they do; sure, BUFF has their venue fixed with the Brattle and Fantastic Fest can dynamically allocate screens based upon demand measured the previous day, but I'm always surprised at how well Fantasia, for instance, chooses the right size of auditorium and number of screenings, and IFFBoston does it well enough that having to scramble like this is relatively rare. I am pretty sure I'd screw it up all the time.
Slow West
* * * (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2015 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston 2015, DCP)
I am not sure whether John Maclean narrowly misses the tone he's going for with Slow West or hits it dead-on; even considering that westerns are relatively rare these days, this one feels a little different. I consider that no bad thing, especially since the film co-stars Michael Fassbender, who should be in westerns whenever he's got the chance.
This one starts out following Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a sixteen-year-old kid from an aristocratic family in Scotland who has journeyed to the American West in 1870 to reunite with Rose Ross (Caren Pistorius), the young woman he loves. It is something of a miracle that he has made it as far as he has, and he's probably lucky that when he encounters Silas Selleck (Fassbender) on the trail, the seasoned gunslinger opts to serve as Jay's escort rather than rob him and leave him for dead. It seems like a good arrangement, but since Silas doesn't talk much at all, it's no surprise that there's something he's hiding from Jay.
Slow West doesn't look much like what has come to feel like the typical western, and that is not just because it was shot in New Zealand rather than California. Most westerns focus on the desert landscape, an easy way to evoke the dangers and lawlessness of the frontier, but Jay is optimistic and admittedly fairly sheltered as the film starts, and to him the West is beautiful and fertile, bursting with color and wonder. It's a contrast to the flashbacks to Scotland, where even the heady moments with Rose take place in a grey and worn-down environment, and Maclean is able to use that beauty as fairly explicit camouflage, with danger hiding amid the beauty.
That's important, because even worth the movie running a compact 84 minutes, having Jay remain too trusting would remove any admiration the audience may feel for his positive outlook to make him simply the butt of jokes. Some of his illusions are dashed in horrible fashions, but the way the film evolves is interesting - yes, it gets darker both literally and figuratively, but in a way that gives the audience moments to mull over how the adventure and anarchy of this time exist side by side. Maclean unveils a dark sense of humor as the film proceeds, but occasionally leavens it with the sort of generosity that many more cynical filmmakers would not just avoid, but mock.
The film is seldom just a two-person show, but the nature of being on the trail means that Kodi Smit-McPhee and Michael Fassbender are carrying a lot of weight. They're up to it, with Smit-McPhee especially interesting as a teenager that carries privilege without arrogance, encountering the West with shock but not the near-stupidity often given this sort of character. Fassbender is a little more restrained than one might expect - he's a guy who could do the gravel-voiced, ultra-cynical outlaw without irony and make it stand up - but impressive as a guy apparently carrying enough morality alongside his harsh pragmatism to have to think about his actions. They met a number of interesting folks along the way, with Ben Mendelsohn as an old acquaintance of Silas's and Andrew Robertt as a sort of German anthropologist standing out. A level above them is Caren Pistorius, who makes Rose intriguingly multifaceted for her relatively short time on screen.
They play in a movie that is, had been mentioned, fairly short by modern standards (although it's perfect classic b-movie length), and which often seems to unfurl at a relaxed pace, with room for eccentric bits of camerawork, detours that don't always reveal a greater purpose, and scenes which may have an odd fizzle to their endings contrary to the genre's reputation for decisive action. Despite that (and the film's very name), it's got some impressively tense and thrilling parts, including a pretty great finale that loses little power despite Maclean including a joke that I kind of can't believe he went for.
Doing things like that can throw the audience off; there are times when Slow West seems like it should either crank the tension up or more regularly embrace absurdity. A little more consideration, though, and it's impressive just how much Maclean had made this genre his own thing without being particularly revisionist. It's right on the border between traditional and reinvented westerns, and that process to be a fine frontier to explore.
Formerly at EFC.
(T)error
* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 23 April 2015 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston 2015, DCP)
I suspect that many watching (T)error, even with plentiful assurances to the contrary, will be expecting that, by the end, a curtain will be pulled back to reveal the film as fictitious, heavy on re-enactments, or some other kind of put-on; it seems like the only way that the scenario makes sense. If it is, then the filmmakers are playing things very close to the vest, and the fact that it can exist at all can be as damming as anything it actually shows.
After all, who would believe that someone like Saeed Torres, who was active in the Black Panthers back in the 1960s and now does contact work getting close to suspected terrorists for the FBI - he prefers "citizen operative" to "informant" - would (a) reveal himself to a documentary filmmaker and (b) allow her to tag along on his next assignment? That's the set up for this movie as filmmakers Lyric R. Cabral & David Felix Sutcliffe follow him to Pittsburgh, where he (going by "Shariff") makes contact with Khalifah, a convert to Islam who had been talking big about jihad on social media.
A common complaint about documentaries is that the filmmakers don't always show both sides of the story, and while this one certainly doesn't give the full 360-degree view one might perhaps hope for, it is kind of surprising when Cabral & Sutcliffe jump from making a single-point-of-view picture to one with dual perspectives, with neither subject aware that the directors are also following the other. It's a move that feels daring as they do it, and even though the two perspectives don't remain in direct opposition for very long, it's still unusual in that the shift does not feel like a token acknowledgment of the bigger picture or a complete change in focus that makes the film feel disjointed.
Even after that, the film still belongs in large part to Saeed. He'd be colorful even if he weren't a former Black Panther spy, an energetic ex-con who wants nothing more to start a pastry shop and who gets excited at his son's basketball games, but his background gives the filmmakers a chance to cut over to various colorful moments during in the clash between races in New York City. And though he approached Cabral, he's also fun to watch because he frequently seems to have as little patience with the filmmakers as he does his FBI handlers - he's testy, quick to make corrections but not particularly fond of explaining things, and clearly has a love-hate relationship with the work he does, especially since he seems to have few other options.
The FBI's mandates that he bristles at are what eventually gives the movie a little more weight than just a look at the sort of undercover work that one seldom sees. There's a fair amount of discussion about the difference between pre-empting crime/terrorism and entrapment, especially given how both Saeed and the FBI seem to have reached a point where they look at this as a job where you need to show results, to one extent or another. That's a worrisome attitude for law enforcement to have, especially when it seems as faceless and impossible to negotiate with as the cell phone calls and clandestine meetings portrayed here make it seem.
This isn't necessarily new information, but it's fascinating to see it happen first-hand as opposed to seeing the process reconstructed afterward. I wouldn't be surprised if the fallout from this film was more careful security on operations rather than less zeal in prosecuting not just every offender, but every potential offender, which means we may not see its like again any time soon.
Formerly at EFC.
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