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.

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:



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.

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.

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.

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.

This Week In Tickets: 27 April 2009 to 3 May 2009

The week started with the tail end of the IFFB, and, yeah, it looks like I can't exactly get out of the festival mindset, even to the extent of the ultra-rare two movies at two separate theaters on a weeknight. Note that I didn't consider the humor of doing a double feature of thoroughly dissimilar movies named "Colossus" and "Gigantic" until this very moment:



(Hey, the festival's sponsor isn't paying me, so I've got no compunctions about covering their logo. And they did give me that button... I'll make that a link as soon as I get around to the full review for that one.)

In another bit of coincidence that amused me, Battle for Terra and X-Men Origins: Wolverine were the sixth and seventh movies I saw during the week. I idly considered going to one of the Boston Common, Kendall, or Fenway theaters on Sunday and just seeing whatever was in theater #8 (I guess Arlington might work, too). That might be a fun week sometime - maybe after I get back from Fantasia and I've missed enough that I can do this sort of semi-random catching up.

I wound up with 17 movies seen at IFFB, all told:

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 kind of wish they did the "stand up if you've seen 5 movies... 10..." thing at the closing night show, like they did last year I would have liked to see if anyone managed the 20. I probably could have done 18 or 19 if I opted for two films each in the time I used to see Lost Son of Havana or The Escapist; the full twenty would have required basically camping at the Brattle all weekend, and I'd seen a good chunk of those. I was also curious to see how many the lady who seemed to wind up just ahead of me in line all weekend made (she had a press pass for something called "Get Thee to a Theater!", but I can't find a site by that name right now).

Colossus: The Forbin Project

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2009 at The Brattle Theatre (first-run)

This served as the opening segment of a lecture series put on by Harvard (I think), called "Crossroads: The Future of Human Life in the Universe", which isn't a crazy-broad mandate at all. That said, I wish I had been able to get to some of the talks given at Zero Arrow, as they had some downright great names there, capped off with Buckminster Fuller. They had to have been more exciting than the one David Agular gave, which ground to a dead halt with a long excerpt from The Matrix that was hard to see and included cheap shots at A.I. even as he talked about how it had grand ideas to it.

(Is there any movie in the last ten or so years that has been treated as unfairly as A.I.? It's downright brilliant, one of the most intelligent science fiction films in years, but Spielberg's real movie can't help but fall short of the movie everyone imagines Kubrick making - despite the fact that Kubrick acknowledged that he couldn't make it!)

The movie itself is pretty entertaining, for an "OMFG, computers are scary!" picture from when computers maybe were kind of scary (you'd think we'd be past that, but stuff like Eagle Eye and Echelon Conspiracy still comes out). It's a pretty decent example of that sort of early-seventies grim sci-fi, although it is kind of goofy at a strictly mechanical level. Like many movies considered classics of the sci-fi genre, it doesn't quite hold up when viewed through modern eyes, even when you can tell it was something special back then.

As another aside, someone at the Brattle or Harvard needs to be called out on the presentation - the movie was screened from Universal's cropped DVD, which was terribly obvious during some scenes. That's understandable if this was a fallback position after a print failed to arrive, but there should have been signage at the box office saying so - when one goes to the theater, one expects film projected right.

Gigantic

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #3 (first-run)

One I rushed to see because it came and tanked the same weekend as IFFB (note to Landmark: Scheduling a director Q&A for a quirky movie co-starring Zooey Deschanel for the same time that the IFFB was playing 500 Days of Summer may not have been a great idea). I don't exactly regret it; I'd liked what I saw in the trailer and the movie is more of that: Plenty of low-key, maybe somewhat forced quirk from actors I like. Sadly, it's not quirk that really comes together into a story, and it defines the characters so much that it stops being eccentricity and starts to feel like mental illness. It feels like the writers (including star Paul Dano) came up with characters and scenes but no real way to put them together.

Battle For Terra

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2009 at Showcase Cinemas Revere #6 (first-run, digital 3-D)

Yes, I am a complete mark for sci-fi, animation, and 3-D, which is why I hauled my butt out to Revere to see this one, even though I remembered the short film as being something of a confusion (to be fair, it felt like it could benefit from fleshing out). The feature-length version is better, and when it goes into full 3-D spaceships flying around mode, it's even kind of fun.

The rest of the time, though, it's kind of weak. It's grim and violent at points, but simplistically moralistic at others. The rendering of people is not up to the standards one expects when paying for a $12 movie ticket; there only seem to be slight variations in the models used for human characters (none of whom have difficult-to-render hair), and the Terrians float weirdly despite humans walking as if the planet has normal gravity. The voice acting seems to have been dubbed in later, to match characters animated to bland, affect-less temp tracks. And the script includes characters using units like "cubic pounds" to measure oxygen.

There were moments early on when I tried to check my disappointment, thinking that if it were limited cel animation from Japan, I'd probably give it mroe of a chance, but by the end, I think I'd decided that the movie had enough real faults to just be a disappointment.

(One thing I thought by the end, though - I'd love to see George Lucas 3-D-ify the Star Wars prequels. Say what you will about his weaknesses in working with actors, the eye candy would be off the charts)

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2009 at Regal Fenway #7 (first-run)

I'm not as reflexively against giving Wolverine an origin story as some comic fans are - I think, at a certain point, having him be mysterious while pulling out more bits of Marvel history reaches a tipping point - but it should be better than this. This one more or less just feels like folks ticking items off on a checklist, and the story they concentrate on is kind of disappointing. It zips past 150 years of history as nothing more than a continuous string of wars that Logan & Creed fight in as indestructible soldiers, then gives us yet another story about mutant superheroes doing nothing but fighting mutant villains to protect mutant-kind.

And the movie's got, like, ten minutes of Ryan Reynolds as proto-Deadpool. You know, the part that promised to be really fun.

IFFB 2009 Day Three: Johny Cash at Folsom Prison, In The Loop, and Pontypool

Given a chance for a do-over, I'd probably trade Johnny Cash for Kim Jong-Il, at least for the festival. Well, I probably would in real life, if it meant Johnny Cash alive and playing music as opposed to Kim Jong-Il alive and presiding over North Korea like some sort of dynastic communist cult leader. The Cash doc wasn't bad, but it's already on video, sort of (included with the deluxe CD of Live at Folsom Prison.

In the Loop was a ton of fun, and I imagine it would be even more so for those who've seen Ianucci's BBC series The Thick of It. Certainly, I'm going to have to find out if that's available here in Region 1 (apparently not. Disappointing). Ianucci had a pretty entertaining Q&A, making the first of the roughly fifty prison references I heard over the course of the festival about the Liberty Hotel.

Pontypool was also quite entertaining, and not just to the guys I know with a Canadian film fetish. It is a sign of how I not only drink, but generally don't go places where people are drinking, that I failed to recognize that the producers were drunk off their asses during the Q&A. I basically need to see someone sober for comparison purposes, because for all I know these guys were just excitable.

Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Johnny Cash never did time, but his name will forever be associated with California's Folsom State Prison; a great song and a great album will do that. The Folsom Prison concert is a definitive moment in Cash's career, but as with all events, that moment has a lead-up and a postscript, as well as import to people beyond Johnny Cash. To call Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison the untold story of the concert would be overstating the case, but it is an interesting telling of what went on around it.

There's not necessarily a great deal said about Johnny Cash that fans don't already know and others wouldn't have learned from recent biographical film Walk the Line, but it is interesting to see it presented (compared to that movie) in less obvious service to a romantic or redemptive storyline. A fair amount comes from Cash himself, in a voiceover taken from a 1990s radio interview. He talks about his time in Germany transcribing Russian Morse code with a bit of pride, and describes his first prison show as being in the middle of a downpour at a prison rodeo. We also get some nifty insights into the writing of "Folsom Prison Blues" from the surviving musicians, including how the melody was "adapted" from "Crescent City Blues" by Gordon Jenkins.

Cash and his band weren't the only people in the room, of course, and we get a number of stories from the audience. There's a guard by the name of Jim Brown, as well as a pair of inmates. Millard Dedmond doesn't seem to have any particular connection to Johnny Cash aside from having been in the audience, but Glen Sherley attracts Cash's attention. Cash sees a kindred spirit in Serley - the filmmakers take pains to show that their initial creative processes are very similar - and playing a song written by the inmate during the concert, later going to bat for him with the penal system and giving him a place on the tour when he's released. We also hear from Merle Haggard, a country and western star who, as he points out, had lived what Cash sang about.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

In the Loop

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2009 at the Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

In the Loop is sharp satire, likely sharp enough to draw blood whenever it makes the attempt. Given how divisive politics have become, that's probably enough to put off those who align themselves with the targets being skewered, which is sort of a shame, as I suspect many of them might enjoy its constant barrage of mean humor.

The film opens with the Prime Minister's Director of Communications, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), flipping his lid because a government minister said that a situation in the Middle East escalating to war was "unforeseeable", a dangerously absolute phrase at the best of times and likely soon to be off-message. He calls this Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) on the carpet and tries to squelch it, but Foster just proceeds to make things worse every time he opens his mouth, especially in a meeting with American Undersecretary Karen Clarke (Mimi Kennedy). A paper written by her assistant, Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky), which states that the benefits of war are far outstripped by the risks and costs, has started to circulate within the US State Department, much to the chagrin of Clarke's boss, Linton Barwick (David Rasche). Tucker tasks Foster and his new assistant Toby Wright (Chris Addison) with damage control, but these things are tricky.

The plot is tangled - the above description does not include James Gandolfini as an American general who, having seen war, is none to keen to see any more, or that Weld and Wright met in college/university, or an absurd subplot featuring Steve Coogan about a crumbling wall in Foster's home district. That is how it should be, of course - even though we often visualize government as a top-down hierarchy, it is a complex web where the links and relationships between people are often more personal than ideological, and what those people do is often strangely disconnected from their stated purpose. Director Armando Ianucci and his co-writers do a good job of making their story feel more complex than it actually is: They avoid unnecessary details that would further complicate matters and do a good job of making sure the audience understands what they need to without slowing down the pace.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

Pontypool

* * * (out of four)
Seen 24 April 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival of Boston After Dark)

Pontypool is adapted from a small part of the novel Pontypool Changes Everything - according to the producers taking part in the Q&A, a tiny part. Paragraphs, supposedly. That's actually a really nifty idea - zoom in a large-scale story to find one that is just as big to the people caught up in it.

This is the story from the perspective of Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a radio announcer who has the morning shift on a low-power station operating out of the basement of a church in Pontypool, Ontario. It's a stripped-down operation, with just producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and technician Laurel Ann (Georgina Reilly) in the studio with him, and Ken Loney (Rick Roberts) calling in with traffic updates. Mazzy's a pro but it's boring most of the time, so he jumps at the opportunity to talk about something more exciting when reports start trickling in at a riot in and around a local doctor's office - a riot that turns out to be something out of a George Romero movie.

Pontypool has two somewhat unique features, one executed very well and one more of a mixed bag. The excellent one is the way that, once Mazzy arrives at the station, the camera never looks outside. Everything we know about the situation out there comes from callers and news reports, and even those are often filtered in that they're Laurel Ann reading from the wire rather than first-hand. This gives writer Tony Burgess and director Bruce McDonald time to let us get to make the first half of the movie about Mazzy and his ego without the audience feeling either like we're waiting for something to happen or that he's a one-dimensional jerk for thinking of his career despite immediate danger. What's going on is real and scary but not yet immediately so, so we can wait a while for this to turn into a siege movie. The filmmakers do a fantastic job of giving us a personal stake in what's going on with Ken Loney, even though he never actually appears on screen.

Complete review at eFilmCritic.

This Week In Tickets: 20 April 2009 to 26 April 2009

Festivals collide! I had high hopes of finishing my SXSW reviews before starting IFFB, but a rained-out Red Sox game on Tuesday led to me rising early to work from home before heading to the rescheduled game on Wednesday, depriving me that distraction-free hour on the bus where most of the work gets done. Still, two more:

* The Way We Get By
* The Slammin' Salmon



So, pretty crazy week for a person who likes baseball and movies. Naturally, I was outside and exposed to the elements at Fenway Park on the days when the whether was cold, windy, and rainy; the weekend of the festival, when I was inside apart from waiting in line, were ridiculously beautiful for April. At least I wasn't having to choose between them, which is always a peril.

(Like in a couple weeks, where I have tickets for both games against the Rays on the weekend when the new Star Trek opens in IMAX. Oooowwwww.)

So far, I've seen 14 movies at IFFB, with three more on tap for the next couple of days. I figure you can max out this year's schedule at 20 movies, but that basically means camping out at the Brattle on Saturday and Sunday, and I'd already seen 4 of those movies and was less than enthusiastic about a couple others. The final schedule wound up as:

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 must say, if I weren't also working a real job on the weekdays, that bell-curve shape would make IFFB one of the more relaxing festivals I do, with the build and slow tailing off, in stark comparison to, say, SXSW, which slams you from start to finish all week (see how much more "square" a similar list here is).

State of Play

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 April 2009 at Regal Fenway #2 (first-run)

I am reasonably sure that I would have an easier time writing reviews for movies I saw a month ago at SXSW than this one, and not just because IFFB has more or less overwhelmed my short-term memory; this is a decent-enough thriller that nevertheless fails to make much of an impression. It's not obviously cut down from a longer miniseries, but it still feels kind of half-baked. No-one actually yells "stop the presses!", but the last act has enough "stop the presses!" moments that I was giggling by the last one. Despite personally believing that Blackwater is a scary organization, I'm not sure I need to see another thinly disguised analog used as a villain any time soon, unless a writer comes up with a really interesting take on the private army. And for all the odes to newspapers this film has inspired, it really doesn't have much of a take on the old-media/new-media conflict at all - Rachel McAdams's Della Frye seems less like a blogger whose style and methods clash with Russell Crowe's character than a character invented to do all the physical activity that Crowe is at the wrong extreme of his eating disorder to do.

IFFB Closing Night 2008: Encounters at the End of the World

I love Werner Herzog. I've previously described him as my favorite crazy person and as an utterly fantastic deadpan comedian, but I also love that he's got this adventurous spirit as well. He commits strange, unpredictable cinema. Even though he can tell a story with the best of them - last year's Rescue Dawn is a rock-solid narrative in addition to being visually arresting - but so many of his films seem to come from him getting an idea and seeing where it takes him. There may not be a story in going to Antarctica, but he's sure he can find interesting things to show the audience.

And with that, we pretty much reach the end of IFFB. I'm still waiting on a list of credits for Twelve (if you're making a movie in English, why wouldn't you put as much as you could in the IMDB as soon as possible?), and I've got a screener for another movie that played the festival. As usual, it was a ton of fun. It's amazing how fast and big the festival has grown in just a few years.

Encounters at the End of the World

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2008 at Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

A couple years ago, Werner Herzog made a peculiar little film called The Wild Blue Yonder, with Brad Dourif as an alien who has been marooned on Earth for some time. Herzog used photography taken under the ice shelves of Antarctica to create the alien's apparently unearthly home, and it was effective enough to make the audience wonder why some movies spend tens of millions of dollars on special effects. Now Herzog has gone to Antarctica himself, looking for and sometimes finding a land as strange as those where his fictional films have been set.

Herzog is unimpressed with McMurdo Base when he arrives; it has all the visual charm of a run-down mining community. He was expecting something like a frontier town, perhaps, something completely unlike the conventional world, but instead he finds "abominations" such as an aerobics center, yoga classes, and even an ATM machine. He is, as might be imagined, quite happy to get away from the base and visit some of the smaller camps where people are doing nifty science and there are interesting things to aim his camera at.

And there are amazing sights to see. He came in part on the suggestion of a friend who is a master diver, so the camera goes under the Ross ice shelf to see the strange creatures living there, including armored starfish with long, fleshy tentacles that would look quite at home in a science fiction film. We spend time on the lip of an active volcano, one of only three in the world with an exposed magma pool. There are penguins, of course, but also great seals, and the perfectly preserved cabin from Shackleton's doomed expedition. There are people with buckets on their heads to train for white-out conditions, and even the tightly-packed cargo plane from New Zealand excites Herzog's curiosity.

The encounters of the title aren't just with the local wildlife, of course; we also meet the people who live and work in Antarctica. Many are brilliant, among the best in the world in their chosen fields. Others tell tales of hitchhiking across Africa and South America, professional wanderers who may have come to Antarctica because they've been everywhere else. It's clear that ordinary people don't come to this place, and Herzog presents them in all their eccentricity. Herzog walks an interesting line with his cast of characters; the easy routes might be fetishizing their oddness or mocking them as freaks, but we're allowed to see them as singular folks who have found their way to the environment that best suits them. We get a lot of laughs at their expense; the scene of a half-dozen men, likely experts in their fields, wearing buckets on their heads and utterly failing to follow a rope back to their shed is brilliant comedy. There's always respect for their abilities, though, even if it is sometimes so specialized that Herzog has to ask if he's just witnessed a big moment.

All this talk of peculiar characters would be complete without mentioning director and narrator Werner Herzog himself as one of them. Herzog is a man who knows his reputation, and he doesn't shy away from playing on it. As weird a guy as he might actually be, I sort of doubt that his proposal to the National Science Foundation referenced The Lone Ranger, ants keeping other insects as slaves, and why chimpanzees don't ride goats. It makes a fantastic bit of narration for the beginning, and his dry, deadpan way of saying it combined with his reputation makes it seem possible. He transitions from one scene to another by stating that his interview subject's story seemed to go on forever. He asks questions of the penguin expert that the G-rated March of the Penguins overlooked. He idly muses on what an alien civilization would think of Earth if they found these installations.

Herzog portrays himself as a bit of a nut, but in some ways that serves as cover for the sort of pure, far-ranging curiosity that led him to join these scientists for a few weeks. Almost every detail can catch his eye, from the labels on the cans still sitting in the Shackleton cabin's shelf to a penguin wandering away from its flock, and he usually has something funny and interesting to say about it. As is usually the case with Herzog, what we see on screen is entrancing. He captures the strange and bizarre, but also makes interview segments interesting, veering into random subjects or holding a shot a second longer than usual to point out how odd the previous answer was rather than just letting it stand. Even the shots of McMurdo under his disgusted narration are hard to peel one's eyes from.

Very few of us are ever going to get to Antarctica, so Herzog's film is a delight just from the perspective of seeing new and different things. The documenting of its unusual community that makes it even more special; we're able to feel a kinship with them while still admiring what a different sort of person is drawn to that hostile, far-off land.

Also on EFC.

IFFB 2008: My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin is not a weirdo.

If you've seen his movies, that might be a bit of a surprise, but it's true. I expected him to be something like David Lynch, or what I imagine David Lynch must be like. But, no, he's an affable, funny, self-deprecating guy who took a bunch of questions after My Winnipeg, with a ready smile and joke. The Chlotrudis folks were excited to meet him, and he seemed sincere about wanting to come back to Boston more often. I suspect he'll be next year's Chlotrudis Awards honoree.

My Winnipeg

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2008 at Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Guy Maddin has long had a love-hate relationship with his home town of Winnipeg; most of his previous films have been set there and portrayed it as a place nearly as dreary as it is bizarre. My Winnipeg isn't very different from his purely fictional films in that respect. The affection comes across more clearly here than in those films, even as it is delivered with a kick.

Maddin describes My Winnipeg as "docu-fantasia", which is as good a term as any. He inserts himself into the film with a couple of peculiar devices - in one, he is on a train out of town hoping to escape before the hypnotic snow causes him to sleepwalk back home; in another, he is renting his childhood home and hiring actors to play his siblings so that he and his mother can re-enact crucial moments from his childhood in a scientific experiment to determine the cause of his neuroses (Darcy Fehr plays Maddin, noir actress Ann Savage plays his mother). He posits that not only do rail lines and rivers converge in in Winnipeg - "the forks", he repeats, like a dozy mantra - but so do the ley lines along which mystic energy flows. This is Maddin's world, after all, and therefore peculiar.

It's so peculiar that the audience has to wonder how far the tall tales Maddin tells have evolved from reality. Does Winnipeg really have an uncommonly high population of sleepwalkers, and if so, do the city laws requiring their accommodation actually exist? Was a team of horses flash-frozen in the river after a fire, their protruding heads forming a grotesque yet arousing backdrop for the locals' evening promenades? Did "What If?" Day, with its simulated Nazi invasion, actually panic the city? One could look such things up, but does it really matter? These legends may say more about the city and Maddin's relation with it than mere facts might, and the stories themselves are uniformly hilarious. There's a great collection of anecdotes here, and they absolutely make Winnipeg a memorable city.

Other sections of the movie focus on how the city has changed over the years, and there's something kind of universal about those segments. He talks about how the diminishing importance of river and rail transport have reduced Winnipeg's importance as a shipping hub. There's a section on the city's uniquely constructed public swimming pool. Local department stores close and are replaced with chains. But for all that, the real passion comes out when it comes time to discuss how the city's hockey fans have been treated. We hear how the Winnipeg Arena was a major part of Maddin's youth, and there's a certain satisfaction when the 2006 implosion only destroys the additions to the original structure. There's no such love for the MTS Centre that replaced it, which isn't even large enough to host an NHL team should the Jets be replaced.

Anger fairly drips from Maddin's voice when he talks about the Jets leaving the city, a change from the whimsical or resigned tones he uses through much of the rest of the feature. It's a bit odd to hear Maddin's voice so directly; for as much as many of his films contain autobiographical material, he would distance himself by having an actor portray him, placing the stories in a fantastic context, and a visual style that suggests the first third of the twentieth century. That's all still there; My Winnipeg's black and white photography mostly looks like a long-lost movie, frequently grainy but sometimes sharp. The action itself is often silent, with just Jason Staczek's music and Madidn's narration, with the exception being the recreated scenes from Maddin's youth, where we get to enjoy femme fatale Ann Savage's first major role in fifty years.

To a certain extent, this verbiage is kind of unnecessary; this film is mainly going to appeal to those with an interest in Winnipeg and Guy Maddin's fans. If you're in the first group, remember that the title does promise that it's Maddin's Winnipeg and expect strangeness (although this may be Maddin's most mainstream film). For those in the second, well, enjoy. This is Maddin at his funniest and most playful.

Also on EFC.

IFFB 2008: Frontrunner

I wish I was able to get my thoughts about something sorted out much quicker than I do. Whenever there's a Q&A or other discussion about a film right after seeing it, I find I have no questions. It took me a bit of time to figure out just why I didn't think that much of Frontrunner, although someone in the audience did ask just what Dr. Falal's platform was. That's when I found out that leaving such things out was a deliberate decision.

It makes sense, although I think it makes the film weaker. Ms. Williams said they wanted to focus on what it was like for a woman to be running for office in Afghanistan, and that's a laudable goal. I think we could have learned more from looking at this woman and her platform more closely. Put it this way - if a similar documentary were being made about the 2008 U.S. election, how compelling would we find Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama if their only apparent selling points were being female or black? Not very, right?

I also thought that this film presents a much tamer Afghanistan than Beyond Belief. I wonder if it's a matter of Frontrunner mostly being filmed in Kabul while Beyond Belief went to smaller villages; perhaps the cities are less conservative and more cosmopolitan.

Frontrunner

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2008 at Somerville Theater #4 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

The ending of Frontrunner is a matter of the public record, so I don't feel like I'm spoiling much of anything by saying that it does not have a triumphant fairy-tale ending: In Afghanistan's first democratic ever, after the ouster of the ouster of the Taliban, a woman is not elected president. But, to be blunt, we're not given a compelling case that she deserves to be.

That woman is Dr. Massouda Jalal; as the movie starts, we're shown that she was a surprising second-place finisher when a group of Afghani representatives got together to choose an interim president after the fall of the Taliban government. Four years later, she runs in the general election. She is the only woman on the nineteen-candidate ballot, and as such faces problems that the others don't, such as soldiers removing her campaign posters and religious leaders who flatly declares that the Koran forbids a woman from being in a position of authority over men, making her potential election sacreligious. Jalal points out other women who have led Muslim nations, but it's clear that some of her foes are not to be dissuaded, making it an uphill battle.

That Jalal is a woman running for president of a nation that until very recently had codified the oppression of women into law is remarkable, but it's far from the only remarkable thing going on. Consider that not only has this nation never had a democratic election before, but it has an extremely high rate of illiteracy. Experts from oversees have to be brought in to advise not only the candidates but the officials running the election. Ballots have to include pictures. The incumbent has an even greater advantage than usual; he appears on television every night, has international backing, and what seems like an almost unlimited budget compared to Jalal and others who are running their campaigns from their living rooms; Dr. Jalal's young children regularly running in and jumping on her lap during meetings. The election itself serves as a referendum on the very belief in democracy; hints of impropriety could cost the nation its faith in the process.

Where the film ultimately disappoints is in presenting Dr. Jalal's candidacy as much more than a novelty. She's an intelligent, capable person, but we never get a sense of what her individual accomplishments are such that she, rather than some of the other educated women we see, is a viable candidate for office. Director Virginia Williams takes great care to omit anything that would tell us about her platform or that of the other candidates. Her goal, I suppose, is to keep the focus on the challenges faced by a female candidate in this country, but it backfires; we wind up with "vote for the woman" and questionable logic along the lines of "well, men were in charge during the decades of war..." There's also something disheartening about her assertion that if she fails, she'll run again and again and again; it presents her as a candidate with no purpose other than running for office, which is hardly inspiring.

That's especially frustrating, because it's a very nicely made documentary otherwise. Williams has great access to her principle subject and the later parts of the film are very interesting: Voting irregularities start appearing, leading to Dr. Jalal having to engage in some politics in terms of how she'll react to the situation. It's the sort of in-the-trenches documentation of the nation's emerging political process that would have been much more interesting than the bland praise of her female-ness and motherliness we get.

Williams must have footage of that, but we rarely get to see anything that makes Dr. Jalal individual and interesting. That's not to diminish her accomplishment; even the 1.1% of the vote she did manage was remarkable. It might have seemed even more so if we'd gotten a chance to know her and her views a little better.

Also on EFC.

IFFB 2008: Triangle and Severed Ways

At some point in any festival, unless you're made of sterner stuff than I, you're probably going to hit the wall. There's just a point where the running between theaters (whether in the same building or in three neighboring cities), waiting in line, going through the rigamarole of getting a full house crammed into the room, and sitting through movies which demand a bit more than the usual matinee fare becomes tiring, and you maybe can't write an honest review because there's a very good chance that you napped through fifteen or twenty minutes.

For Triangle, I'm placing the blame solidly on my decision to go home, eat something marginally closer to a balanced meal than Cherry Coke and Twizzlers, and watch the Red Sox postgame show in the time between the Q&A for Turn the River in Somerville and the start of Triangle in Brookline. I must have fooled my body into thinking I was done for the day, when, no, there was still an hour and a half of Hong Kong action to go. For Severed Ways (where I don't think I missed much important), there's still being tired from not getting home until two-thirty-ish, rushing to Somerville, and winding up in a seat so far toward the front that you have to lean back to see the picture, way closer than digital projection was meant to be seen.

I spent the next couple hours really wishing I had waited a bit and gone to see the jump-rope movie instead. People need to be warned about this turd. (Note that the review for Severed Ways contains coarser language than usual - not my usual, but it's the best words for the job.)

Speaking of projection, I must confess that by the time Triangle showed, I was starting to get a little cranky about the first "F" in "IFFB" being kind of inaccurate; I think the opening night showing of Transsiberian was the only thing I saw on actual film rather than digital video up to that point. It kind of surprised me when Triangle wound up not being digital. Apparently the American movies with people in attendence couldn't get a print shipped, but the one from Hong Kong could. It just doesn't figure.

Tie Saam Gok (Triangle)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2008 at the Coolidge Corner Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston After Dark)

I hope to get a chance to see Triangle again sometime soon, because the idea behind it is a lot of fun - getting three big-name action-adventure directors to make one film, handing the reins off to each other, allowing them to change styles to do what they do best... Well, that sounds like a lot of fun, and from the way the credits are arranged, it looks like each director had his own writers, too, and I know that's a lot of fun.

The story starts out as looking like a crime movie, as three down on their luck men are recruited for what initially looks like a robbery but either becomes a treasure hunt or was one all along (my subtitle comprehension does kind of go to heck after midnight). There's complications, of course, with one of the trio's wife having an affair with a corrupt cop who appears to be in on everything.

As it turns out, I think I missed the entire middle segment. I saw most of the set-up which led to the robbery, which is good, gritty crime; it could have been either Ringo Lam or Johnnie To. Then I missed the middle act, picking up for the end, which is much more a caper bit, as the getaway cars break down outside the city, the wife starts acting weird (she may just have one heck of a concussion), and there's a bunch of identical-looking bags, one containing rare coins, one smuggled guns, the other someone's dinner that keep getting mixed up. I'm pretty sure this leg is directed by Tsui Hark, if only because he's the one I most associate with being funny.

Taken on its own, that last act is a lot of goofy fun, but it might not play so well put together with two other acts that I assume are being played more or less straight. Hopefully I'll get a chance to find out soon; Magnolia's "Magnet" label seems to be putting it out sometime later this year.

Of course, they're also listed as distributor for...

Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2008 at the Somerville Theater #5 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

Believe it or not, Severed Ways was one of the movies I was initially fairly excited about when the IFFB announced their roster of films. How many Viking movies do you get at the typical independent film festival, after all, and the fact that it wasn't banished to the "After Dark" segment of the program held out hope that it might be pretty good. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a miserable enough experience that I would have happily traded Vikings for the documentary about competitive jump-roping next door if I could have.

The text at the beginning sounds enticing - it sets up the backstory from the Vinland Sagas, telling us of a group of Norsemen who by 1007 AD had made a settlement in what is now Canada sending a further expedition south, only to be beset by "Skraelings" (the Abenaki) and driven back home. Two scouts, Orn (Tony Stone) and Volnard (Fiore Tedesco) were left behind and must survive off the land while they try to make their way back north, with hundreds of miles of wilderness, natives, and Christian missionaries between them and their goal.

I wonder if I might have enjoyed this movie a little more had it appeared at the Underground Film Festival rather than the Independent Film Festival. It would seem to fit there better; Severed Ways is very much a backyard film, which Tony Stone shot in Vermont and at Viking ruins in Newfoundland. Stone does practically everything, writing, directing, producing, and editing as well as starring in the picture. Costumes and props do look like they were made in his basement - probably more true to life than something from an elaborate Hollywood production, but still feeling like stuff they cobbled together out of what was lying around. It also feels a little underpopulated, as homemade movies tend to be.

Still, seeing it in a context where I'm more inclined to be generous would not have made it a good movie. Even discounting the question of what those Catholic missionaries are doing in the New World something like five hundred years too early, Stone makes a lot of decisions that maybe seemed to make sense at the time but don't quite work. The heavy metal soundtrack is a good idea, but actually showing Orn headbanging is weird. The actors speak in Greenlandic, apparently the closest thing going to ancient Norse, but it sounds stilted, and the subtitles are in idiomatic twenty-first century English ("we're toast if we stay here!"), further breaking the spell. The overblown chapter titles don't help, either - the small act of mayhem that follows the proclamation of "Conquest" is laughable.

A lot of that can be overcome, but Stone loses his audience pretty decisively early on. There are certain on-screen images you have to earn, and actual shit coming out of your ass is one of them. There was a palpable wave of revulsion that went through the audience at that, and smaller ones when Orn/Stone killed and dressed chickens and fish on-screen, and as much as you can try to defend that by saying it has documentary value, it just feels gratuitous, and no matter how much merit the rest of the film might have, there's no getting over that the audience just doesn't want any part of it any more.

That sort of thing throws the rest of the movie's faults into greater relief. Severed Ways runs nearly two hours but it's generally a slow, introspective 110 minutes, and the audience feels trapped by a performer who mistakenly thinks that every minute detail of his character's actions is just that fascinating. Stone isn't a good enough actor to pull it off, though, and the way he cavorts on screen makes the film seem like a sustained act of egotism. Which is too bad, because there is material for an interesting film here - the idea of being lost that far from home is powerful, as is Volnard's spiritual growth from encountering the Christian monks.

Maybe Stone is a guy to watch, even if his ambition greatly outstrips his resources and skill right now. Someday after working with and learning from the right people, he could become a decent filmmaker. In the meantime, though, I can't think of any good reason for someone to actually watch this movie.

Also on EFC.

IFFB 2008: Turn The River

Sunday afternoon, I was IMing Matt and mentioned that Famke Janssen was letting folks take pictures with her and signing autographs after the screening of Turn the River, but I didn't go in for that. I don't remember the exact conversation, but I believe the word "coward" was used.

It's apt; I've long been a fan, apparently since that guest appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation, since I remember being disappointed that she was the bad Bond girl in GoldenEye, rather than the one that got all the screen time. To be fair, I was 18, a big sci-fi fan, and she was aptly cast as the ideal woman. It's not unreasonable that she could have made that sort of impression.

What I say in the first paragraph of the review below is totally true, though - The Brattle's Ivy Moylun gave me the "I know!" reaction when I mentioned it a couple days later, but look at her filmography on IMDB, and try to figure out exactly why we packed it in to see her (and Eigeman). She really has not had big parts in many movies that were both good and high-profile since GoldenEye aside from the X-Men flicks, and people talked about her being sort of wasted there.

Well, okay, there's Deep Rising, which I love unreservedly, but still...

Anyway, Turn the River was one of the things I made my festival plans around, since Janssen and Eigeman are folks I really like and seeing them in person was just too good to pass up.

Bonus festival fun: The line for Turn the River and American Teen was around the block at the Somerville Theater, and was being held up by Paramount Vantage insisting on a bunch of security for American Teen's print (aside - yes, something at the IFFB actually screened on film!), so the line got pretty long. I wound up waiting just around the second corner, and after about ten minutes, my line-mates and I were cracking up laughing every time someone would turn that corner, after having walked from the theater's door, past Mr. Crepe, and down the side of the building only to see that the line just kept going, letting out some "holy crap, are there even this many seats?" or "are we in Arlington yet?" comment. We weren't laughing at you, specifically, guys - just the waves of people making the same comment.

Turn the River

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2008 at Somerville Theater #1 (Independent Film Festival of Boston)

When talking to people waiting in line for Turn the River and at other screenings over the weekend, a certain consensus emerged: We loved Famke Janssen, but couldn't name very many movies she was in that were very good or where she was the lead. Chris Eigeman, apparently, was similarly perplexed by this situation after working with her in The Treatment; fortunately, he was able to write and direct Turn the River to remedy that.

The part Eigeman wrote for her is Kailey Sullivan, a small-time Long Island pool and card hustler who hates the city but makes trips in anyway because that's where her son Gully (Jaymie Dornan) lives with his father David (Matt Ross) and stepmother Ellen (Marin Hinkle). Kailey has only recently been a part of Gully's life, and she doesn't like what she's seeing - a private school he hates a domineering, hard-line Catholic grandmother (Lois Smith), and having to communicate with him by dropping letters off at a pool hall owned by Teddy Quinette (Rip Torn). Having been pressured into giving up custody when she and David divorced, there's only one thing Kailey can think of to do - win enough to pay for good papers, grab him, and head to Canada.

Put that way, it doesn't sound like the wisest decision. Kailey is a nomad without the kind of money her paper guy needs, and Gully doesn't exactly seem to be in danger at his home - Grandmother Abigail seems to relish making things uncomfortable and David makes it worse by being suspicious of everything Gully says (the fact that Gully is hiding something in this case makes it no less overbearing), but Ellen does seem to be trying to do well by him in her ineffectual way. There's something about those scenes in Gully's home that makes it seem like a set of pipes ready to burst, but we can't tell where the pressure is being relieved or where the explosion is going to come.

Then there's Kaylie. It was created specifically for Janssen, and unsurprisingly fits her like a glove. Kailey's tough but not quite hard, which is not quite the ideal it sounds like. This is not a lady who tears up, or ever seems to let her guard down, but Janssen still manages to convey her unconditional love for her son in her scenes with Dornan even when she's also looking over her shoulder. There's also this sad but wonderful cockiness to Kailey - as much as we see that she's barely able to keep her head above water, she's able to keep convincing both herself and the audience that she can come out ahead - even though it's pretty clear that she's overreaching, again.

Matt Ross is also quite good as David; the guy has to be both ground-down and a bit menacing, and he covers that divide nicely. Jaymie Dornan is good as Gully, too, especially toward the end. Terry Kinney brings some welcome comic relief as the guy getting fake passports for Kaylie. A couple of the most memorable performances come from veterans playing somewhat against type. Lois Smith, for instance, is quietly vicious as Abigail; she's only in three or four scenes, but makes such an impression in that brief time that the character is able to cast a large shadow over the rest of the movie. Meanwhile, Rip Torn is almost cuddly as Quinette, his growls something more like a protective papa bear than usual.

Chris Eigeman opts to stay mostly behind the camera in his first film as a writer and director, and it looks like he could make a pretty good living there if he chooses to continue. He's not particularly flashy, but he and his cinematographer do a nice job of making the film easy to follow even though a lot of it takes place in dark rooms and alleys. It's also good to see that even though he is known, as an actor, for playing talky, sarcastic roles, he doesn't fall into the trap of trying to get the same thing from his cast. He gives each member of that cast a character to can sink his or her teeth into, though, and the plotting is really nice - I love the last act, where we see just how fragile Kailey's plan is. Getting away with something is tough, after all, and it's in Kailey's nature to push it.

I think this is the first time Janssen's has a bona fide starring role, and it's great to see that she's up to it. And that's not even taking into account what she and Eigeman told us in the double play - that the scene every pool movie has to have was shot in one take, without special effects. That probably doesn't change the quality of the movie any, but as cool bits of trivia goes, it's a nice one.

Also on EFC.