Not going to lie - it's satisfying to get my write-ups of IFFBoston 2017 finished up just before refilling my plate with another film festival. I have not done that often enough of late.
It's a bit odd to finish up with night #7, though - there would be one more show, but I wrote that up in advance of Closing Night Film Band Aid opening up. That means we end with the second-to-last day, which has changed character over time to become a relatively-big-name showcase, with both The Trip to Spain and Landline already having distribution and released dates lined up. I might have liked a chance to catch more shorts or things which I didn't feel I'd get a chance to see later, but I suspect seeing stuff early is more of a draw for some folks and the distributors want plum positioning to give the festival that draw.
On the other hand, a night of this sort of mainstream, brand-name indie has good odds of being enjoyable and I laughed a lot over these hours. The Trip to Spain is very funny and Landline has its moments. That it's not for me is a little surprising and a little not - I'm not far from the main target audience for things playing on 1990s nostalgia, but generally not much for nostalgia anyway - but it's worth noting that a lot of women just a few years younger than me really seemed to love it going by the reaction outside the theater and on social media the next day. I guess sometimes you've got to be right on the target and not just a bit off.
Anyway, thanks to Nancy and Brian and all of the other volunteers for another great festival; I"m already looking forward to next year and all the things that they'll be doing this year, including October's Fall Focus.
The Trip to Spain
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2017 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
I am tempted to see just how much of my review for 2014's The Trip to Italy I could cut and paste into this one because it still applies, maybe changing a few details. Michael Winterbottom, Rob Brydon, and Steve Coogan have not shaken things up here at all, sticking close to the formula that made the first two "Trip" films (and presumably the television series that the films are edited down from) work, and that's not a problem at all for those that simply want more of them.
So it's been another three years, and when Steve calls Rob to ask if he's down for another week of travel, stopping in restaurants, and then writing the trip up as a serial for the newspaper, Rob looks at his house full of small, unruly children and says, sure, where to? Spain is the answer this time, and they get started by taking the ferry. After praising the boat as a great, authentic way to get away from the bustle of modern life, Coogan soon becomes seasick, which turns out to be a bit of an omen: Aside from how it looks as if his son won't be able to join them on the last few days of the trip this year, there's a shakeup going on with his management in America that seems to be leading him behind (though they seem to be interested in Rob).
It seems likely that, however autobiographical The Trip may have been to start, it's become a sort of alternate universe for these to British comedians, though one that is sometimes oddly static: Coogan still twists himself up with the pressure he feels to advance his career, craving recognition and success in Hollywood, while Brydon seems more well-balanced, content to be a middle-class entertainer rather than a star - or, possibly, too timid to make the leap. It's a solid core that, perhaps, works better in the original sitcom form, where a set-up like that is more readily accepted as a relatively unchanging hook to hang jokes from, rather than a film series where one perhaps expects a bit more advancement. Coogan, Brydon, and Winterbottom recognize that, occasionally pointing out that Brydon has actually appeared in big Hollywood movies a few times since The Trip to Italy, though it's the sort of thing that the filmmakers eventually shrug their shoulders over because, on the other side, there's something to Steve's story of being nominated for an Oscar for Philomena's screenplay and having to fret over some newcomer being brought in to polish his latest that will certainly speak to the audience, even if a lot of the other things going on where their careers are concerned is kind of inside business.
Full review on EFC.
Landline
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 May 2017 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
It wouldn't be a proper film festival without a movie in which New Yorkers did nothing but fret about their relationships, and as those go, this one isn't so bad. It's got a few funny moments, and there's a nice chemistry between Jenny Slate and Abbie Quinn as well-cast sisters. Folks don't wind up seeming so self-absorbed that one winds up hating them and wanting to get out of the theater at any cost, which is my usual reaction. That's a bit of a win.
It starts out on Labor Day 1995 and follows sisters Ali (Abby Quinn) and Dana (Jenny Slate). Abby is starting her senior year of high school but doesn't give it a whole lot of thought, cutting class and hanging out with good boy and bad girl best friends. while Dana's marriage to dependable but dull Ben (Jay Duplass) doesn't seem to be going anywhere, except maybe backwards when college friend Nate (Finn Wittrock) re-enters the picture. This leads to both sisters winding up at the family's vacation house one night and crossing paths a lot more after that, eventually discovering the love poems their father (John Turturro) is writing to someone who is not their mother (Edie Falco), a mystery they determine to solve.
It's not necessarily a bad situation, but there's kind of nothing to it once you try to give it any sort of close look. Director Gillian Robespierre and her co-writers have more than a few funny scenes to play out, a game cast, and a situation that may be what gets something like 8% of indie comedy-dramas started but which ideally strikes a chord in terms of how can be uncertain about long relationships. Unfortunately, there is too much of that uncertainty as the film starts making its way to its conclusion. Nothing about either relationship that is in danger strongly suggests that it is worth saving or needs destroying. A lot of the last act seems to be Dana trying to reconcile with Ben more by default than any reason that's compelling to the audience and though the 1990s may have been a generation ago, this seems like a cosmopolitan enough group that the audience should expect a little more than inertia at that point.
Full review on EFC.
Showing posts with label IFFBoston 2017. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IFFBoston 2017. Show all posts
Saturday, July 01, 2017
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.06: Gook and "Shorts Juliett"
Best two-screening day of the film festival, although perhaps the worst photography.
I was kind of undecided what I was going to watch Monday night, and I joked on Twitter that I opted for Gook because I would be able to just go into the theater when someone else called the film's name and just let them direct me to the proper theater without actually having to walk up to a box office and say "hey, give me a ticket to the movie named for a racial slur", even if the movie itself explains how "guk" in Korean is just "me" or "person". In actuality, it didn't work that way - I got off the train just as people were being let in - but it's a story good enough to tell regardless.
Regulars at the festival likely already know Nancy Campbell; joining her in Theater #5 are producers James Yi and Alex Chi. For a personal film on a serious subject, where a lot of people in the audience were eager to show just how much doing seeing something like this meant, it was a pretty loose, often-funny Q&A. It probably says something that at one point, Yi's phone rang and it was writer/director Justin Chon, who cursed Yi out when he tried to put him on speaker to talk to the audience. It fits with the story Yi told about what got Chon off his butt to actually make this movie: Chon was getting a bunch of calls from his agent about auditions for the parts of Korean-Americans in little side-stories of various other Rodney King anniversary projects, so he might as well make his own story.
They also talked about how lucky they were to get Simone Baker, because they were getting a lot of girls who had decent-sized parts on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon things, and they just didn't bring quite the same realism that Baker did. Looking at IMDB, her credits are scant, but she does pretty good work here.
The short filmmakers in attendance for this screening of the "Shorts Juliet" package (I think the festival labels like that so there's no confusion when they call out "shorts Bravo" or "shorts Delta" to the folks in line, but they still wind up just yelling "shorts B" and "shorts D") - "When Jeff Tried to Save the World" producer Shane Simmons and writer/director Kendall Goldberg, "So It Goes" writer/director Justin Carlton and co-star Ryan Kattner, and "The Privates" writer/director Dylan Allen.
I try to get to at least one shorts program every year, and I wound up opting for the one that had a short with an actress I liked. There's a group of folks in line every year that are all about the shorts, and I should probably try to do more of that next year - really focus on not bothering with features that have distribution, even if I do keep a list to watch when they hit Amazon or some other on-demand service. You just aren't going to see the shorts elsewhere without a fair chunk of luck or digging.
It was a lucky choice - this was a bunch of generally entertaining shorts that led to an entertaining Q&A. Goldberg & Simmons said straight-up that their movie was a feature script cut down to short length which they had hopes of using to fund a feature version, and also had a lot of good words for the bowling alley they shot in. Kattner talked about how he wasn't usually an actor or a particular fan of Van Morrison, so of course his friend had him laying around in bushes on an unseasonably cold day, getting lots of weird looks. Allen actually didn't talk much about The Privates as a band - from what I can tell poking around the Internet, the guys they cast aren't much like the old band, but raved about his miniature-makers.
Made for a very fun evening, even if it wasn't the one I originally planned (I think I had originally mapped out a night at the Brattle for Menashe and The Force). Shows how the full-festival pass is the way to go, so you can make these last-minute decisions as circumstance and opportunity allow.
Gook
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
You may feel uncomfortable asking for a ticket for this one by name, and knowing there's a scene that explains the title's etymology may not be much help. It's absolutely worth doing if you get the chance to do so, and if saying the title aloud stops you, then that's what the touchscreen kiosks at the front of the theater are for. It's a pretty terrific little film that does an excellent job of zooming in on what felt like a sidebar to a bigger news story and making it the focus.
It mainly takes place over the course of one day in Paramount, California, but that day is 29 April 1992, the day the verdict came down on the police officers charged with assaulting Rodney King and the community erupted in response. For Eli (Justin Chon), it starts out a little out of the ordinary, as he buys a few pairs of in-demand sneakers off the back of a truck in the hopes that it will give a boost to the struggling shoe store he and brother Daniel (David So) inherited from their father. Just down the street, Regina (Omono Okojie) is telling her baby sister Kamilla (Simone Baker) not to cut class and spend all day hanging around at the shoe store, although that what winds up happening after Daniel intervenes after she tries to shoplift from Mr. Kim (Sang Chon) at the convenience store again. It's not an entirely uneventful day - Eli and Daniel are at odds, and Eli winds up having to explain the word "gook" to Kamilla after some of her brother's associates tag Eli's car with it - but it's set up to be a powder keg.
A lot of Americans like to describe their country as a melting pot, but it's been aptly described as more like a stew than a fondue on occasion; rather than everything winding up together and evenly distributed, you get something chunky, and some of those metaphorical chunks don't always mix well. In this case, it often proves fascinating to observe how the Korean-American community that Eli, Daniel, and Mr. Kim belong to rubs up against the neighborhood's predominantly African-American population; it's hinted the borders have shifted a bit since Mr. Kim and the boys' father arrived, and it's an often-painful truth that, while Eli and Daniel are second-generation and fully-assimilated, the line between assimilation and appropriation changes based upon one's perspective.
Full review on EFC.
"Cycles"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
I wound up liking "Cycles" more when it was finished than when it started, and that's a pretty decent turn-around to make in less than five minutes. That's what this type of short has to do, as it can't help but be clear from the beginning that it's working on visual style, with two doppelgangers doing something halfway between mime and dance as filmmaker Joe Cobden cuts from one location to another, with the pair (Cobden & Marc Bendavid) always in the same position but sometimes missing a seat as the scenery changes. It's a neat trick, but seems abstract in a way that doesn't really click until Romina D'Ugo shows up. The implication is that one of them having a new girlfriend sends things out of whack for the other.
At least, that's the story I got out of it; there's no dialogue or exposition or the like. That Cobden can communicate an idea and a story here is a genuine accomplishment; it gives the short a little bit more soul than it might have had, even if it would have been an impressive display of choreography and physical acting.
"A Favor for Jerry"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
Though every piece of art is in some way influenced by the events of the world around them, there is something kind of fascinating in how director D.W. Young opted to potentially put the tone of "A Favor for Jerry" so far out of his control. At least, that is, if he shot the film sequentially on Election Day 2016 as we are meant to think, as opposed to getting a shot or three on the day (say, when its protagonist is walking through Times Square) and then playing back recorded news coverage when shooting the rest.
In some ways, it's more interesting to think about that than anything which actually happens on-screen, as Khan Baykal (playing, like most everyone on-screen, a similarly-named character) sets out to deliver weed to hippies, high-strung rehearsing actors, a guy solving a Rubik's Cube in a nightclub, and others. These encounters themselves aren't particularly interesting, small jokes or attempted exercises in tension that never quite aggregate into a particularly insightful look at New York City. There's something kind of intriguing about it as an exercise, though - this group of actors and characters is probably not pleased about the surprising Trump victory that is playing out on TVs in the background, and it's something they've got to improvise with. How does this change if Hillary Clinton is winning?
I don't really think that would make a better short film - there's something about people getting marijuana when something is going wrong from their perspective that seems like it fits better than if that thing was going right - but as improvisational exercises go, and letting fate determine a film's story the way it does real life, it's an intriguing effort.
"When Jeff Tried to Save the World"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
This is one of at least a couple of films in this block that was made as a sort of pilot for a feature, and while it's the one that would probably be easier to expand, it's also the one where I'm not really interested in seeing 80 more minutes. It tells its story well enough while leaving room for more detail, but even at 22 minutes, it just feels like another indie-ish tale of an underachiever who is putting off joining the adult world, right down to 40-ish Jon Heder playing a guy the story suggests just dropped out of college a year or so ago.
As those things go, it's not bad - writer/director/producer/editor Kendall Goldberg and her co-writer Rachel Borgo give it a fun bowling-alley setting with a group of colorful characters, and a cast that isn't afraid to go kind of big with them. There's even something enjoyable about the way that the story is clearly rushed, like they're skipping over the boring parts and the padding to give you a beginning, middle, and end as well as a nice moment for everyone in the cast. It works in large part because Goldberg has an excellent handle on the idealistic desperation that motivates Heder's Jeff, like he and everybody else are just self-aware enough to know that their attempts to save the bowling alley are quixotic, but it's worth pushing certainty back by another few hours.
It's indie comedy-drama type #4, and if you've seen enough of them to recognize it as a distinct subgenre but not enough to just groan at the sight of another one, it may be kind of refreshing to plow through it in a half hour rather than three or four times that much. Doesn't mean I'll be looking forward to the feature-length version if and when it gets made in a few years, though.
"So It Goes"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
That Mary Elizabeth Winstead has not yet become a big star, rather than someone whose name generally implies good things for whatever movie or TV show she's signed on for this year, is still a bit of a surprise to me, but it means she can occasionally pop up in something like this, a musical little lark from Justin Carlton that combines a bright, lovely sincerity with enjoyably silly slapstick to good effect.
The slapstick is, admittedly, kind of a trade-off. The center of the movie has Winstead's frustrated vocalist Sam taking a walk to clear her head, stumbling upon a guy (Ryan Kattner) with a bicycle somehow chained to his leg, and doing a song-and-dance number to Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said". It's a case where you worry that the comedic conceit takes a little more from the basic concept than it gives - the number takes place in the sort of park full of footbridges, whimsical shapes, and bright green grass that it could be a golden-age-of-Hollywood film set imagining that kind of park, and Winstead, it turns out, can sing and dance a little, so it's quite easy to feel that while there's a bit of fun to be had spoofing the sort of idealized musical number most recently flogged by La La Land, it's not necessarily as much fun as there is in doing that sort of thing really well. It mostly works by splitting the difference; it's a nice number, with some nice bits of choreography and performance, and that sometimes a guy gets tripped up because he's got an unweildy object chained to him generally contributes more in the way of laughs than it takes in the way of grace.
But it's the nice heart that impresses the most. The struggling-artist narrative is a hard sell with me - it often combines characters who seem to see the sort of life most in the audience lead as beneath them with actors who can't quite convince that this person is a brilliant exception. But I like Sam; Carlton and Winstead present her with far more doubt than entitlement, and her musical number scans much more as her regaining her confidence through an encounter with a random guy than some angel in disguise telling her that good things are coming. And, though it's kind of cheesy, I like the way that this re-found self-esteem seems to get shared with the viewer. It's a bit of a fourth-wall break to have Sam look directly out the screen and use "we" when telling her engineer that she's going to try again, but you get at least that much leeway in a musical, I think, and it seems to fit the form to end on that sort of generous note.
"The Privates"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
I mentioned above that I could easily see "When Jeff Tried to Save the World" expanded to feature length even if I had little interest in watching such a movie; the converse is that while I strongly suspect that "The Privates" would flame out if you made it eight times longer and gave it any sort of coherent backstory or plot, I would watch the heck out of that thing if it promised even half of the outright nuttiness that Dylan Allen's short offers.
It just dumps you into things, quickly introducing the band - guitars and vocals by Ben Farkus (Omar Maskati) and Max Wakefield (Alex Herrald), bass and mad science by Sasha "Kep" Kepler (Lilli Stein), with drums and lab assistance provided by her sister Roka (Rachel Trachtenburg) and quickly showing how their music seems to be literally radioactive. Equipment melts, they've got to jerry-rig special equipment to keep their amps from melting, and they can't figure out why because, for all her geek chic and enthusiasm, Kep isn't really a scientist. And Allen never really bothers to explain. He just pushes on to the next bit of absurdity, doing a really fine job of escalation as crazy things happen while the Privates really can't see giving up rock and roll.
It's small pushes until an obvious but fantastic cut that you probably couldn't get away with in a feature gets a huge laugh. It's a funny cast that can either play or can mime their instruments well enough to make it work, with Lilli Stein especially great as Kep. Allen and his crew do some nifty miniature work as well, which gives their world a funky personality that fits right in with the story.
I've got no idea whether Allen intends to expand this into a feature - it feels like it could collapse under its own weight. But it's a ton of fun at this length and will hopefully get seen.
I was kind of undecided what I was going to watch Monday night, and I joked on Twitter that I opted for Gook because I would be able to just go into the theater when someone else called the film's name and just let them direct me to the proper theater without actually having to walk up to a box office and say "hey, give me a ticket to the movie named for a racial slur", even if the movie itself explains how "guk" in Korean is just "me" or "person". In actuality, it didn't work that way - I got off the train just as people were being let in - but it's a story good enough to tell regardless.
Regulars at the festival likely already know Nancy Campbell; joining her in Theater #5 are producers James Yi and Alex Chi. For a personal film on a serious subject, where a lot of people in the audience were eager to show just how much doing seeing something like this meant, it was a pretty loose, often-funny Q&A. It probably says something that at one point, Yi's phone rang and it was writer/director Justin Chon, who cursed Yi out when he tried to put him on speaker to talk to the audience. It fits with the story Yi told about what got Chon off his butt to actually make this movie: Chon was getting a bunch of calls from his agent about auditions for the parts of Korean-Americans in little side-stories of various other Rodney King anniversary projects, so he might as well make his own story.
They also talked about how lucky they were to get Simone Baker, because they were getting a lot of girls who had decent-sized parts on Disney Channel and Nickelodeon things, and they just didn't bring quite the same realism that Baker did. Looking at IMDB, her credits are scant, but she does pretty good work here.
The short filmmakers in attendance for this screening of the "Shorts Juliet" package (I think the festival labels like that so there's no confusion when they call out "shorts Bravo" or "shorts Delta" to the folks in line, but they still wind up just yelling "shorts B" and "shorts D") - "When Jeff Tried to Save the World" producer Shane Simmons and writer/director Kendall Goldberg, "So It Goes" writer/director Justin Carlton and co-star Ryan Kattner, and "The Privates" writer/director Dylan Allen.
I try to get to at least one shorts program every year, and I wound up opting for the one that had a short with an actress I liked. There's a group of folks in line every year that are all about the shorts, and I should probably try to do more of that next year - really focus on not bothering with features that have distribution, even if I do keep a list to watch when they hit Amazon or some other on-demand service. You just aren't going to see the shorts elsewhere without a fair chunk of luck or digging.
It was a lucky choice - this was a bunch of generally entertaining shorts that led to an entertaining Q&A. Goldberg & Simmons said straight-up that their movie was a feature script cut down to short length which they had hopes of using to fund a feature version, and also had a lot of good words for the bowling alley they shot in. Kattner talked about how he wasn't usually an actor or a particular fan of Van Morrison, so of course his friend had him laying around in bushes on an unseasonably cold day, getting lots of weird looks. Allen actually didn't talk much about The Privates as a band - from what I can tell poking around the Internet, the guys they cast aren't much like the old band, but raved about his miniature-makers.
Made for a very fun evening, even if it wasn't the one I originally planned (I think I had originally mapped out a night at the Brattle for Menashe and The Force). Shows how the full-festival pass is the way to go, so you can make these last-minute decisions as circumstance and opportunity allow.
Gook
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
You may feel uncomfortable asking for a ticket for this one by name, and knowing there's a scene that explains the title's etymology may not be much help. It's absolutely worth doing if you get the chance to do so, and if saying the title aloud stops you, then that's what the touchscreen kiosks at the front of the theater are for. It's a pretty terrific little film that does an excellent job of zooming in on what felt like a sidebar to a bigger news story and making it the focus.
It mainly takes place over the course of one day in Paramount, California, but that day is 29 April 1992, the day the verdict came down on the police officers charged with assaulting Rodney King and the community erupted in response. For Eli (Justin Chon), it starts out a little out of the ordinary, as he buys a few pairs of in-demand sneakers off the back of a truck in the hopes that it will give a boost to the struggling shoe store he and brother Daniel (David So) inherited from their father. Just down the street, Regina (Omono Okojie) is telling her baby sister Kamilla (Simone Baker) not to cut class and spend all day hanging around at the shoe store, although that what winds up happening after Daniel intervenes after she tries to shoplift from Mr. Kim (Sang Chon) at the convenience store again. It's not an entirely uneventful day - Eli and Daniel are at odds, and Eli winds up having to explain the word "gook" to Kamilla after some of her brother's associates tag Eli's car with it - but it's set up to be a powder keg.
A lot of Americans like to describe their country as a melting pot, but it's been aptly described as more like a stew than a fondue on occasion; rather than everything winding up together and evenly distributed, you get something chunky, and some of those metaphorical chunks don't always mix well. In this case, it often proves fascinating to observe how the Korean-American community that Eli, Daniel, and Mr. Kim belong to rubs up against the neighborhood's predominantly African-American population; it's hinted the borders have shifted a bit since Mr. Kim and the boys' father arrived, and it's an often-painful truth that, while Eli and Daniel are second-generation and fully-assimilated, the line between assimilation and appropriation changes based upon one's perspective.
Full review on EFC.
"Cycles"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
I wound up liking "Cycles" more when it was finished than when it started, and that's a pretty decent turn-around to make in less than five minutes. That's what this type of short has to do, as it can't help but be clear from the beginning that it's working on visual style, with two doppelgangers doing something halfway between mime and dance as filmmaker Joe Cobden cuts from one location to another, with the pair (Cobden & Marc Bendavid) always in the same position but sometimes missing a seat as the scenery changes. It's a neat trick, but seems abstract in a way that doesn't really click until Romina D'Ugo shows up. The implication is that one of them having a new girlfriend sends things out of whack for the other.
At least, that's the story I got out of it; there's no dialogue or exposition or the like. That Cobden can communicate an idea and a story here is a genuine accomplishment; it gives the short a little bit more soul than it might have had, even if it would have been an impressive display of choreography and physical acting.
"A Favor for Jerry"
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
Though every piece of art is in some way influenced by the events of the world around them, there is something kind of fascinating in how director D.W. Young opted to potentially put the tone of "A Favor for Jerry" so far out of his control. At least, that is, if he shot the film sequentially on Election Day 2016 as we are meant to think, as opposed to getting a shot or three on the day (say, when its protagonist is walking through Times Square) and then playing back recorded news coverage when shooting the rest.
In some ways, it's more interesting to think about that than anything which actually happens on-screen, as Khan Baykal (playing, like most everyone on-screen, a similarly-named character) sets out to deliver weed to hippies, high-strung rehearsing actors, a guy solving a Rubik's Cube in a nightclub, and others. These encounters themselves aren't particularly interesting, small jokes or attempted exercises in tension that never quite aggregate into a particularly insightful look at New York City. There's something kind of intriguing about it as an exercise, though - this group of actors and characters is probably not pleased about the surprising Trump victory that is playing out on TVs in the background, and it's something they've got to improvise with. How does this change if Hillary Clinton is winning?
I don't really think that would make a better short film - there's something about people getting marijuana when something is going wrong from their perspective that seems like it fits better than if that thing was going right - but as improvisational exercises go, and letting fate determine a film's story the way it does real life, it's an intriguing effort.
"When Jeff Tried to Save the World"
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
This is one of at least a couple of films in this block that was made as a sort of pilot for a feature, and while it's the one that would probably be easier to expand, it's also the one where I'm not really interested in seeing 80 more minutes. It tells its story well enough while leaving room for more detail, but even at 22 minutes, it just feels like another indie-ish tale of an underachiever who is putting off joining the adult world, right down to 40-ish Jon Heder playing a guy the story suggests just dropped out of college a year or so ago.
As those things go, it's not bad - writer/director/producer/editor Kendall Goldberg and her co-writer Rachel Borgo give it a fun bowling-alley setting with a group of colorful characters, and a cast that isn't afraid to go kind of big with them. There's even something enjoyable about the way that the story is clearly rushed, like they're skipping over the boring parts and the padding to give you a beginning, middle, and end as well as a nice moment for everyone in the cast. It works in large part because Goldberg has an excellent handle on the idealistic desperation that motivates Heder's Jeff, like he and everybody else are just self-aware enough to know that their attempts to save the bowling alley are quixotic, but it's worth pushing certainty back by another few hours.
It's indie comedy-drama type #4, and if you've seen enough of them to recognize it as a distinct subgenre but not enough to just groan at the sight of another one, it may be kind of refreshing to plow through it in a half hour rather than three or four times that much. Doesn't mean I'll be looking forward to the feature-length version if and when it gets made in a few years, though.
"So It Goes"
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
That Mary Elizabeth Winstead has not yet become a big star, rather than someone whose name generally implies good things for whatever movie or TV show she's signed on for this year, is still a bit of a surprise to me, but it means she can occasionally pop up in something like this, a musical little lark from Justin Carlton that combines a bright, lovely sincerity with enjoyably silly slapstick to good effect.
The slapstick is, admittedly, kind of a trade-off. The center of the movie has Winstead's frustrated vocalist Sam taking a walk to clear her head, stumbling upon a guy (Ryan Kattner) with a bicycle somehow chained to his leg, and doing a song-and-dance number to Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said". It's a case where you worry that the comedic conceit takes a little more from the basic concept than it gives - the number takes place in the sort of park full of footbridges, whimsical shapes, and bright green grass that it could be a golden-age-of-Hollywood film set imagining that kind of park, and Winstead, it turns out, can sing and dance a little, so it's quite easy to feel that while there's a bit of fun to be had spoofing the sort of idealized musical number most recently flogged by La La Land, it's not necessarily as much fun as there is in doing that sort of thing really well. It mostly works by splitting the difference; it's a nice number, with some nice bits of choreography and performance, and that sometimes a guy gets tripped up because he's got an unweildy object chained to him generally contributes more in the way of laughs than it takes in the way of grace.
But it's the nice heart that impresses the most. The struggling-artist narrative is a hard sell with me - it often combines characters who seem to see the sort of life most in the audience lead as beneath them with actors who can't quite convince that this person is a brilliant exception. But I like Sam; Carlton and Winstead present her with far more doubt than entitlement, and her musical number scans much more as her regaining her confidence through an encounter with a random guy than some angel in disguise telling her that good things are coming. And, though it's kind of cheesy, I like the way that this re-found self-esteem seems to get shared with the viewer. It's a bit of a fourth-wall break to have Sam look directly out the screen and use "we" when telling her engineer that she's going to try again, but you get at least that much leeway in a musical, I think, and it seems to fit the form to end on that sort of generous note.
"The Privates"
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 1 May 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston: Shorts J, DCP)
I mentioned above that I could easily see "When Jeff Tried to Save the World" expanded to feature length even if I had little interest in watching such a movie; the converse is that while I strongly suspect that "The Privates" would flame out if you made it eight times longer and gave it any sort of coherent backstory or plot, I would watch the heck out of that thing if it promised even half of the outright nuttiness that Dylan Allen's short offers.
It just dumps you into things, quickly introducing the band - guitars and vocals by Ben Farkus (Omar Maskati) and Max Wakefield (Alex Herrald), bass and mad science by Sasha "Kep" Kepler (Lilli Stein), with drums and lab assistance provided by her sister Roka (Rachel Trachtenburg) and quickly showing how their music seems to be literally radioactive. Equipment melts, they've got to jerry-rig special equipment to keep their amps from melting, and they can't figure out why because, for all her geek chic and enthusiasm, Kep isn't really a scientist. And Allen never really bothers to explain. He just pushes on to the next bit of absurdity, doing a really fine job of escalation as crazy things happen while the Privates really can't see giving up rock and roll.
It's small pushes until an obvious but fantastic cut that you probably couldn't get away with in a feature gets a huge laugh. It's a funny cast that can either play or can mime their instruments well enough to make it work, with Lilli Stein especially great as Kep. Allen and his crew do some nifty miniature work as well, which gives their world a funky personality that fits right in with the story.
I've got no idea whether Allen intends to expand this into a feature - it feels like it could collapse under its own weight. But it's a ton of fun at this length and will hopefully get seen.
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.05: Street Fighting Men, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, Dolores and The Little Hours
Another long day, this one kicking off with Sleight before getting to the festival itself, but thankfully the Sunday schedule at IFFBoston tends to give a little more time for getting back and forth between venues if you need it, even if the MBTA has inconsiderately replaced the Red Line between Harvard and Alewife with shuttle buses for the weekend. That was an okay movie; I kind of wish I'd been able to fit The Mayor into its slot instead, but weekends that are a crush of movies can sometimes mean you don't see the Korean thing.
So, starting in Somerville:
Left to right, you have director Andrew James, producer Sara Archambault, produce Katie Tibaldi, and producer Jolyn Schleiffarth. Nice folks, who talked a bit about how making a documentary like this, without a real plan but needing to stick close to the subjects, was a tricky thing to manage; there were other potential subjects who weren't used, they occasionally had to bail people out because that's how close they've grown, on top of making a film. You shoot for months to years and it winds up being a bit odd to split time between Detroit and home, especially when something important happens there.
The rest of the day was spent going back and forth, with Abacus at the Brattle and then Dolores back at the Somerville, and I'm sorry about not doing a more detailed review of that one, but for some reason I lost my notes for this day's movies and it's getting to be long enough that I really need my notes.
At least I had time to eat some before hitting the Brattle for the last film of the day, and, hey, it was a late-ish film that didn't disappoint!
This isn't really the sort of film where it would fittingly bizarre to have the Q&A be with a tiny Max Headroom that Ned wheels out on stage, although I think I'd almost want to insist on that if I were ever to see a movie where Terry Gilliam does a skype Q&A afterward. No, writer/director Jeff Baena got the full Brattle screen, but this is more fun as a picture.
It was a fun Q&A, though kind of the expected one - you apparently have fun on a set where lots of funny people get to wear costumes in the Italian countryside and say/do funny things. There was a little surprise from the audience that this was adapted from The Decameron, but Baena said that a movie like this had been kicking around in his head since he first read it, because it's one of those cases where there's a lot of funny, sexy stuff in the material that is somewhat hidden by its age and prose style.
Street Fighting Men
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
You could make a heck of an intersecting-plotlines drama with the subjects of Andrew James's Street Fighting Men, and someone probably would if he'd written a magazine article about the people he met trying to get by in Detroit rather than filmed them. But he did pick up a camera, so the folks he follows all have their own stories that maybe don't play out as neatly and connectedly as a dramatist would have it, but that works for his film. A community with troubles has people with troubles.
James's cameras primarily follow three people. James "Jack Rabbit" Jackson is a retired cop, running a small plumbing and septic system business, at least during the day; at night he stakes out the drug dealers in his neighborhood, calling his old friends on the force when he thinks he can make a dent. Deris Solomon is the unmarried father of a girl who is six months old when the film starts, trying to go to school despite being an ex-con. Luke Williams works salvage and demolition in the city's abandoned houses, trying to save up enough to start his own business, but he'll soon be trying to figure out some more basic things when his own house burns down.
Their stories are frustratingly familiar, to the point where if this was a fictional film, one might ask what the angle was; Luke's house burning down down might almost seem a little too on-the-nose for a Detroit story. That ability to fit a template has its uses, of course - when a viewer thinks they know the story, then the bits that don't conform can surprise. They also don't intersect in particularly memorable ways, making the film often feel like three similar projects cut together. But that, in fact, is useful, and perhaps at the heart of the film: For all that these things are all taking place in physical proximity, and for all that the three subjects are African-American, each person is one man against a system much larger than him and mostly indifferent to his struggle. They can't do it alone, and there's not that many people who have their backs.
Full review on EFC.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
The story of the one bank to get charged with crimes as a result of the 2008 mortgage crisis may seem like potentially dry material, but it turns out to be involving and entertaining, in no small part because the Sung family who founded the bank are sympathetic and winning. They and their trial are the sort of subjects where a documentarian must feel like they're hit a jackpot early on, knowing the audience will have a personal stake even when the broader issues of what motivated out influenced the prosecution are a bit abstract. Watching it, one might almost think that the hardest part for director Steve James was worrying about which ending he was going to have to lead up to.
That bank was Abacus Federal Savings Bank, founded in the 1990s by Thomas Sung, an attorney who had been a pillar of New York's Chinatown community. It was, for the most part, a fairly well-performing lender, in large part because Sung knew his community and had a good eye for seeing which loans might be better risks than they appeared to be on paper. Of course, even if founded the business for noble reasons, by the mid-aughts Abacus had grown to be a big enough concern that the amount of money coming through was a temptation. Bad loans from one particular officer triggers a larger investigation against the backdrop of larger crimes, and soon District Attorney Cyrus Vance has decided to follow charges. Abacus is not the easy target he might have expected, though - not only is Thomas Sung a lawyer, but so are three of his daughters (two of them bank executives), and they are not the types to back down from a fight.
It's fairly clear from the start where James's sympathies lie - you don't have Thomas and his wife Hwei Lin watching It's a Wonderful Life in a film's opening minutes without drawing the line between him and George Bailey. It's a comparison that he has opportunity to return to later, when telling the story of a run on Abacus, and while it's a simple comparison, it gives the audience a fair amount of easy reference without seeming to sensationalize the story too much. This is not the same David-and-Goliath story, but it's similar, and by framing it that way, it keeps the audience from worrying too much about whatever minutiae the Sungs may have overlooked and focused on the main story of them fighting off what seems like an opportunistic prosecution of a vulnerable population.
Full review on EFC.
Dolores
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
If nothing else, Dolores is an informative documentary about someone who has had her accomplishments and importance understated that also focuses on just how much various injustices are related without diminishing it as a story of an individual. After all, while Dolores Huerta was in many ways just as vital to the labor movement as Cesar Chavez, her name isn't quite so familiar.
Director Peter Bratt does what he can to change that here, and generally does fairly well by her. Though Ms. Huerta was able to participate in the production (and still seemed pretty sharp), Bratt mostly tells her story from the vantage point of those who came after her, whether her actual children or those who were inspired by her to become labor activists or other Latinx leaders. It's often an interesting division of labor, as her successors will praise and describe her clarity of vision and focused action, while her children will provide context for what the rest of her life was like as a result It's often done with a sort of resigned admiration, pointing out how they were often drafted into the movement or left with family friends for months on end. Sometimes, the viewer might raise an eyebrow at how her personal life is being downplayed at times - even while being generally sympathetic to how critics wouldn't have made as much of an issue of her primary dedication being to the cause or the multiple children she had with several different partners had they applied to a man, it certainly speaks to a tumultuous life that could not but help influence her activism.
Putting it together, Bratt manages a nice balance of mostly telling the story via archival footage while still keeping a foot in the present for context. He also seems to have a decent handle on making the material accessible to both those who recognize her name but not the full scope of her work and those of us who could perhaps use a primer on labor activism in the Twentieth Century: There's enough basic information given that one can start from close to zero before getting to uncovering the less well-known information, but it never feels remedial.
Will many people who need to be caught up on how hard people fought for some things that they take for granted? Seems unlikely; this film will likely appeal mostly to those who know a certain amount but would like to learn a little more, or who are keen to learn more about a Latina who had an impact. It does a good job of getting its information out, at least, so it's worth a watch for those who are curious.
The Little Hours
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
I might not have known I needed a movie about foul-mouthed nuns and the hunk hiding in their convent as a deaf-mute before seeing The Little Hours, but I did, especially at the end of a day of serious documentaries about societal inequity. This movie is tremendously funny, but also has a weirdly sweet core under the sarcastic exterior.
Based (perhaps loosely) on a tale from The Decameron, it opens with three young women living in a convent near Lamporecchio - caustic Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) tends to shirk her chores and is the one most likely to snap at the handyman if she even thinks he is looking at her; Genevra (Kate Micucci) is eager to please, whether it be by following Fernanda like a puppy or tattling to the more senior Sisters; and Alessandra (Alison Brie) figures she's only there temporarily because her merchant father (Paul Reiser) has not yet matched her with a proper suitor. Meanwhile, in town, Lady Francesca (Lauren Weedman) has gotten flagrant enough in her dalliance with guard Massetto (Dave Franco) that Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman) orders the young man put to death. Massetto escapes and encounters Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) on the road, and after Massetto does him a good turn, offers him the handyman's job, having him pose as a deaf-mute so that the nuns will not see him as a temptation. This, obviously, overestimates just how pious and dedicated to celibacy a group of women pushed out of sight by men who don't know what do with them are.
There's a certain delight in how writer/director Jeff Baena has his film set up expectations and defy them without ever actually seeming like a spoof - as much as the really beautiful shots of parts of Italy that may not be particularly changed since the film's medieval setting and simple, humble costumes may get put the audience in the mind of a certain sort of art-house picture until Fernanda starts violently berating the help on just who he thinks he is ogling the f---ing brides of Jesus Christ, that's on the viewer - he's primarily just making a raunchy comedy with a specific setting, even if he is willing to get a bit of an extra jolt by doing things contrary to the usual. So, without being anachronistic, he has the cast speak in colloquial-but-not-anachronistic American English as comes natural to them, with the one character speaking with a British accent (as Americans often do in period pieces) attacked as a foreigner despite her claims to the contrary. Baena is translating what is going on to its modern equivalents and letting the cast communicate, not trying to approximate something else that obscures how the characters would understand each other.
Full review on EFC.
So, starting in Somerville:
Left to right, you have director Andrew James, producer Sara Archambault, produce Katie Tibaldi, and producer Jolyn Schleiffarth. Nice folks, who talked a bit about how making a documentary like this, without a real plan but needing to stick close to the subjects, was a tricky thing to manage; there were other potential subjects who weren't used, they occasionally had to bail people out because that's how close they've grown, on top of making a film. You shoot for months to years and it winds up being a bit odd to split time between Detroit and home, especially when something important happens there.
The rest of the day was spent going back and forth, with Abacus at the Brattle and then Dolores back at the Somerville, and I'm sorry about not doing a more detailed review of that one, but for some reason I lost my notes for this day's movies and it's getting to be long enough that I really need my notes.
At least I had time to eat some before hitting the Brattle for the last film of the day, and, hey, it was a late-ish film that didn't disappoint!
This isn't really the sort of film where it would fittingly bizarre to have the Q&A be with a tiny Max Headroom that Ned wheels out on stage, although I think I'd almost want to insist on that if I were ever to see a movie where Terry Gilliam does a skype Q&A afterward. No, writer/director Jeff Baena got the full Brattle screen, but this is more fun as a picture.
It was a fun Q&A, though kind of the expected one - you apparently have fun on a set where lots of funny people get to wear costumes in the Italian countryside and say/do funny things. There was a little surprise from the audience that this was adapted from The Decameron, but Baena said that a movie like this had been kicking around in his head since he first read it, because it's one of those cases where there's a lot of funny, sexy stuff in the material that is somewhat hidden by its age and prose style.
Street Fighting Men
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
You could make a heck of an intersecting-plotlines drama with the subjects of Andrew James's Street Fighting Men, and someone probably would if he'd written a magazine article about the people he met trying to get by in Detroit rather than filmed them. But he did pick up a camera, so the folks he follows all have their own stories that maybe don't play out as neatly and connectedly as a dramatist would have it, but that works for his film. A community with troubles has people with troubles.
James's cameras primarily follow three people. James "Jack Rabbit" Jackson is a retired cop, running a small plumbing and septic system business, at least during the day; at night he stakes out the drug dealers in his neighborhood, calling his old friends on the force when he thinks he can make a dent. Deris Solomon is the unmarried father of a girl who is six months old when the film starts, trying to go to school despite being an ex-con. Luke Williams works salvage and demolition in the city's abandoned houses, trying to save up enough to start his own business, but he'll soon be trying to figure out some more basic things when his own house burns down.
Their stories are frustratingly familiar, to the point where if this was a fictional film, one might ask what the angle was; Luke's house burning down down might almost seem a little too on-the-nose for a Detroit story. That ability to fit a template has its uses, of course - when a viewer thinks they know the story, then the bits that don't conform can surprise. They also don't intersect in particularly memorable ways, making the film often feel like three similar projects cut together. But that, in fact, is useful, and perhaps at the heart of the film: For all that these things are all taking place in physical proximity, and for all that the three subjects are African-American, each person is one man against a system much larger than him and mostly indifferent to his struggle. They can't do it alone, and there's not that many people who have their backs.
Full review on EFC.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
The story of the one bank to get charged with crimes as a result of the 2008 mortgage crisis may seem like potentially dry material, but it turns out to be involving and entertaining, in no small part because the Sung family who founded the bank are sympathetic and winning. They and their trial are the sort of subjects where a documentarian must feel like they're hit a jackpot early on, knowing the audience will have a personal stake even when the broader issues of what motivated out influenced the prosecution are a bit abstract. Watching it, one might almost think that the hardest part for director Steve James was worrying about which ending he was going to have to lead up to.
That bank was Abacus Federal Savings Bank, founded in the 1990s by Thomas Sung, an attorney who had been a pillar of New York's Chinatown community. It was, for the most part, a fairly well-performing lender, in large part because Sung knew his community and had a good eye for seeing which loans might be better risks than they appeared to be on paper. Of course, even if founded the business for noble reasons, by the mid-aughts Abacus had grown to be a big enough concern that the amount of money coming through was a temptation. Bad loans from one particular officer triggers a larger investigation against the backdrop of larger crimes, and soon District Attorney Cyrus Vance has decided to follow charges. Abacus is not the easy target he might have expected, though - not only is Thomas Sung a lawyer, but so are three of his daughters (two of them bank executives), and they are not the types to back down from a fight.
It's fairly clear from the start where James's sympathies lie - you don't have Thomas and his wife Hwei Lin watching It's a Wonderful Life in a film's opening minutes without drawing the line between him and George Bailey. It's a comparison that he has opportunity to return to later, when telling the story of a run on Abacus, and while it's a simple comparison, it gives the audience a fair amount of easy reference without seeming to sensationalize the story too much. This is not the same David-and-Goliath story, but it's similar, and by framing it that way, it keeps the audience from worrying too much about whatever minutiae the Sungs may have overlooked and focused on the main story of them fighting off what seems like an opportunistic prosecution of a vulnerable population.
Full review on EFC.
Dolores
* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
If nothing else, Dolores is an informative documentary about someone who has had her accomplishments and importance understated that also focuses on just how much various injustices are related without diminishing it as a story of an individual. After all, while Dolores Huerta was in many ways just as vital to the labor movement as Cesar Chavez, her name isn't quite so familiar.
Director Peter Bratt does what he can to change that here, and generally does fairly well by her. Though Ms. Huerta was able to participate in the production (and still seemed pretty sharp), Bratt mostly tells her story from the vantage point of those who came after her, whether her actual children or those who were inspired by her to become labor activists or other Latinx leaders. It's often an interesting division of labor, as her successors will praise and describe her clarity of vision and focused action, while her children will provide context for what the rest of her life was like as a result It's often done with a sort of resigned admiration, pointing out how they were often drafted into the movement or left with family friends for months on end. Sometimes, the viewer might raise an eyebrow at how her personal life is being downplayed at times - even while being generally sympathetic to how critics wouldn't have made as much of an issue of her primary dedication being to the cause or the multiple children she had with several different partners had they applied to a man, it certainly speaks to a tumultuous life that could not but help influence her activism.
Putting it together, Bratt manages a nice balance of mostly telling the story via archival footage while still keeping a foot in the present for context. He also seems to have a decent handle on making the material accessible to both those who recognize her name but not the full scope of her work and those of us who could perhaps use a primer on labor activism in the Twentieth Century: There's enough basic information given that one can start from close to zero before getting to uncovering the less well-known information, but it never feels remedial.
Will many people who need to be caught up on how hard people fought for some things that they take for granted? Seems unlikely; this film will likely appeal mostly to those who know a certain amount but would like to learn a little more, or who are keen to learn more about a Latina who had an impact. It does a good job of getting its information out, at least, so it's worth a watch for those who are curious.
The Little Hours
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
I might not have known I needed a movie about foul-mouthed nuns and the hunk hiding in their convent as a deaf-mute before seeing The Little Hours, but I did, especially at the end of a day of serious documentaries about societal inequity. This movie is tremendously funny, but also has a weirdly sweet core under the sarcastic exterior.
Based (perhaps loosely) on a tale from The Decameron, it opens with three young women living in a convent near Lamporecchio - caustic Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza) tends to shirk her chores and is the one most likely to snap at the handyman if she even thinks he is looking at her; Genevra (Kate Micucci) is eager to please, whether it be by following Fernanda like a puppy or tattling to the more senior Sisters; and Alessandra (Alison Brie) figures she's only there temporarily because her merchant father (Paul Reiser) has not yet matched her with a proper suitor. Meanwhile, in town, Lady Francesca (Lauren Weedman) has gotten flagrant enough in her dalliance with guard Massetto (Dave Franco) that Lord Bruno (Nick Offerman) orders the young man put to death. Massetto escapes and encounters Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) on the road, and after Massetto does him a good turn, offers him the handyman's job, having him pose as a deaf-mute so that the nuns will not see him as a temptation. This, obviously, overestimates just how pious and dedicated to celibacy a group of women pushed out of sight by men who don't know what do with them are.
There's a certain delight in how writer/director Jeff Baena has his film set up expectations and defy them without ever actually seeming like a spoof - as much as the really beautiful shots of parts of Italy that may not be particularly changed since the film's medieval setting and simple, humble costumes may get put the audience in the mind of a certain sort of art-house picture until Fernanda starts violently berating the help on just who he thinks he is ogling the f---ing brides of Jesus Christ, that's on the viewer - he's primarily just making a raunchy comedy with a specific setting, even if he is willing to get a bit of an extra jolt by doing things contrary to the usual. So, without being anachronistic, he has the cast speak in colloquial-but-not-anachronistic American English as comes natural to them, with the one character speaking with a British accent (as Americans often do in period pieces) attacked as a foreigner despite her claims to the contrary. Baena is translating what is going on to its modern equivalents and letting the cast communicate, not trying to approximate something else that obscures how the characters would understand each other.
Full review on EFC.
Friday, June 09, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.04: Edgar Allen Poe: Buried Alive, City of Ghosts, Dealt, and Lemon
Not included: Love Off the Cuff, where I caught the early show at Boston Common because, beloved local film festival or no beloved local film festival, I'm not missing the new Pang Ho-cheung movie. Sure, it wound up playing for another two or three weeks after the festival, but I've been burned on Hong Kong movies not hanging around before. I was at 10am or so, and the MBTA was dinking around with buses replacing the Red Line between Alewife and Harvard this weekend so I had to be out and about early, which may be kind of important later.
At any rate, that made the choice of which film to start with easier, going for Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive at the Brattle. It was okay, the sort of documentary you know is going to PBS eventually, but that's a useful-enough thing.
Left to right, editor Peter Rhodes, writer/director Eric Stange, and producer Jen Pearce. Nice folks who stuck around to answer a bunch of questions. It had the feel of a bit of a friends-and-family crowd, many very impressed that they were able to land Denis O'Hare, who is sort of recognizable but by no means a big star. Plenty of genuine curiosity about what they learned about 19th-Century America in general.
It lasted long enough that by the time I could get out and onto the bus, not only was my plan A for the rest of the afternoon sunk (I really do hope to see Spettacolo, by the folks who made Marwencol, sometime later this year), but I wound up breezing into City of Ghosts just as it started. It's a pretty strong documentary.
The evening film was Dealt, probably my favorite documentary of the fest. Maybe not the best, but my favorite. Director Luke Korem, Jack Laquerez (or so my terrible notes say), and subject Richard Turner attended, and I'm sorry about the truly egregious necessity of the "horrible photography" tag, but Turner just doesn't keep still. He is, however, pretty much exactly the guy you would expect from the film, charismatic and funny, and, yes, he was practicing his card-deck manipulation throughout the entire Q&A session, probably throughout the movie. He was much more willing to talk about his blindness than he would have been at various points during the film, although that's not terribly surprising; once he's made a decision, he runs with it, and though he'd rather talk about his achievements on their own, being open about this and being a role model to other unsighted people is something to which he has committed.
We did get some card tricks, and, yeah, even from the third row, knowing that his thing is dealing the second card in the deck rather than the top card, good luck catching him. There was also a fair amount of jargon - he'd now a consultant to the biggest manufacturer of playing cards in the U.S., in part on the basis of contacting them repeatedly one year about how sheets of cards were going through the cutting device upside down, because he could feel they were wrong. He's got a fairly narrow specification of how he likes his cards in terms of thickness and slickness, although he's not completely dependent upon that; he once won a good-sized piece of furniture by betting the guy at the store that he could cut a stack of business cards to a specified number.
After that, back on the bus to the Brattle Theatre for the last in a string of three disappointing 9:30-9:45pm screenings. Maybe Lemon plays a bit better for me if I'm not on movie five of the day with everything since 1:30pm documentaries that were enjoyable straightforward, but I did feel trapped in the middle of a row by the time it was halfway through. Not quite zonked for this one, but not exactly digging it, either.
And then, back to Davis and to bed to do the same thing the next day, only more so!
Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
It's somewhat ironic, but inevitable, that despite Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive leading with the idea that much of the conventional wisdom about Poe is greatly influenced by an obituary written by a rival as character assassination, writer/director Eric Stange winds up going back to the familiar. There is more to Poe than everyone knows, but it turns out that what makes him flawed also made him interesting.
In positioning his film in opposition to the history as set out by Reverend Rufus W. Griswold from the start, Stange sometimes finds himself backed into a tricky position where Poe still has a fair amount of weird stuff in his history and it comes off as kind of odd when the thesis of the movie is that Poe wasn't the fiend that Griswold portrayed. It particularly comes off as strange when talking about his relationship with Sarah Helen Whitman - the film opens by talking about how Poe was about to return home to his childhood sweetheart at the time of his death, and the down-the-middle telling of what sounds like a man looking to marry into money to finance his ambitions seems a bit in opposition to this.
Whether they reflect well or poorly on Poe, things like that are interesting stories, and Stange does a decent job of stringing them together, pointing out a lot of the other parts of the writer's career that sometimes gets lost in the shadow of his justifiably more famous horror stories - the literary criticism, the comedic and romantic material, the less-overshadowed-but-still-possibly-not-given-its-due invention of the detective story - as well as his early life. Not every chapter is thrilling, and the tracking of his vagabond progress up and down the East coast doesn't make for the sort of clear landmarks one might hope. Often, Poe's specific history is less interesting than the looks at 19th-Century America needed to put it into context, from the precarious financial positions of writers in that environment to the kidnappings which might explain his mysterious, erratic last days.
Full review on EFC.
City of Ghosts
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
A solid documentary centered on the founders of the blog "Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently", City of Ghosts gives a brief introduction to the city in question, allows the citizen journalists to tell their own story, and, while allowing the subjects to be even-tempered, friendly people, never lets up is disdain for Daesh. It will not fully educate one on the causes and effects of what is happening in Syria, but it presents a human face to a crisis that can often seem abstract from the other side of the world.
Raqqa, the subjects point out, is not a large city, which is why, when the group known in the West as ISIS declared a caliphate with Raqqa as the capital in June of 2014, it didn't get a lot of the sort of on-site news coverage that helps shape the sense of an urgent crisis (note that "ISIS" is often called "Daesh" by Arabic speakers in opposition to the organization, as this Arabic acronym meaning "one who tramples"). To bridge the gap, a number of locals started a blog anonymously documenting what was happening, which expanded as more people began contributing video. The film introduces the viewers to several, most notably three of the founders: Aziz, a college student who was not initially of an activist bent; Mohammed, a high school teacher who becomes a reporter; and Hamoud, an introvert whose work as a cameraman gives him a taste for danger. As they become wanted men, they eventually flee across the border to Turkey, and will have to go farther to escape their foes' reach.
Filmmaker Matthew Heineman, who produces, shoots, and edits on top of serving as director, understands the perils of perspective that his sort of movie can face, a kind of survivorship bias that comes of talking to those who escaped a bad situation to be honored. He attempt to head it off early, revealing the blog's name after a photographer at an award ceremony asks the correspondents to smile for a photograph, a contrast which both pointedly indicates that, even if these guys are okay, their home is still being "slaughtered", and maybe gets audiences thinking about how much impact these stories make on them. It's one of the few times where the way he presents information is as much the point as simply putting things in front of the audience, but it's effective.
Full review on EFC.
Dealt
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Dealt is a frequently-delightful documentary on Richard Turner, an intriguing and entertaining man at the top of his corner of the magic business despite a major handicap to work around. It's a nifty little story that, in addition to featuring some really astounding close-up magic, manages to take a few nifty narrative turns. Indeed, it arguably wouldn't have been half the movie it is if Turner didn't change between the beginning and the end.
Turner doesn't think of himself as a magician, but a "card mechanic"; the phrase literally means he knows how to manipulate cards, but as he puts in, you get an auto mechanic to fix a car, and you get him to fix a card game. In the opening bit, he performs some amazing bits of trickery - he is the best in the world at dealing the second card from the top of a deck rather than the first, and can un-shuffle a deck - but what both the audience at the show and the one watching the movie soon realizes is that he's not really looking at them, but just a little above. It slowly dawns on them that Turner is visually-impaired. In fact, he is completely blind, having lost his vision as a result of macular dystrophy when he was a child.
Turner, to put it mildly, does not have the healthiest relationship with his disability. Early on, the main impression is that he is practical and surprisingly not bitter; there's an easy rapport to how his son Asa doesn't just warn his father about obstructions, but describes things to Richard's rapt, genuine interest. Director Luke Korem lets the audience coast on the general "that's amazing" good feeling of the premise for a while before starting to play up that Turner's desire to not be defined by his disability can border on denial, as he gets incensed when news stories about him as a card shark even mention that he is blind and he refuses on principle to use the tools that many other visually impaired folks do. This includes his sister Lori Dragt, whose own vision practically disappeared overnight at roughly the same time. By about midway through the film, the audience is starting to wonder just when their discomfort started making a dent in their admiration.
Full review on EFC.
Lemon
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Whatever the heck that was, I can't say I liked it. It feels like a couple dozen ideas for jokes that were not attached to a character recognizable as an actual human being, so even when the gags themselves were executed fairly well, they still only felt like ideas: Co-writer/director Janicza Bravo and the cast worked out all the blocking, delivery, and visual presentation, but without attaching them to interesting characters, that winds up being technical exercises.
Heck of a cast wasted, too. Maybe someone other than co-writer and star Brett Gelman makes his fringe actor appealing or at least interesting enough to serve as the center of the movie, but his Isaac is a drag and in every scene. There are some good bits with Michael Cera and Gillian Jacobs as two younger students in his acting workshop whose individual talent is inversely proportional to the amount of attention and praise he gives each of them, Nia Long is appealing as a potential new girlfriend after Judy Greer's Ramona dumps him - and Marla Gibbs does excellent silent misery as the wheelchair-bound, stroke-victim grandmother at her family's cookout. The best performance probably comes from David Paymer as a heartbroken family friend trying to grab onto some sort of replacement connection as the guest at a seder.
Somewhere in that mess of characters and situations, there's potential in finding something universal in African-American and Jewish family traditions, unrequited love and loneliness, but Bravo and Gelman always go for the gag, and most of the time that joke seems too inside and never quite able to root out the funny part of weird things and situations.
At any rate, that made the choice of which film to start with easier, going for Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive at the Brattle. It was okay, the sort of documentary you know is going to PBS eventually, but that's a useful-enough thing.
Left to right, editor Peter Rhodes, writer/director Eric Stange, and producer Jen Pearce. Nice folks who stuck around to answer a bunch of questions. It had the feel of a bit of a friends-and-family crowd, many very impressed that they were able to land Denis O'Hare, who is sort of recognizable but by no means a big star. Plenty of genuine curiosity about what they learned about 19th-Century America in general.
It lasted long enough that by the time I could get out and onto the bus, not only was my plan A for the rest of the afternoon sunk (I really do hope to see Spettacolo, by the folks who made Marwencol, sometime later this year), but I wound up breezing into City of Ghosts just as it started. It's a pretty strong documentary.
The evening film was Dealt, probably my favorite documentary of the fest. Maybe not the best, but my favorite. Director Luke Korem, Jack Laquerez (or so my terrible notes say), and subject Richard Turner attended, and I'm sorry about the truly egregious necessity of the "horrible photography" tag, but Turner just doesn't keep still. He is, however, pretty much exactly the guy you would expect from the film, charismatic and funny, and, yes, he was practicing his card-deck manipulation throughout the entire Q&A session, probably throughout the movie. He was much more willing to talk about his blindness than he would have been at various points during the film, although that's not terribly surprising; once he's made a decision, he runs with it, and though he'd rather talk about his achievements on their own, being open about this and being a role model to other unsighted people is something to which he has committed.
We did get some card tricks, and, yeah, even from the third row, knowing that his thing is dealing the second card in the deck rather than the top card, good luck catching him. There was also a fair amount of jargon - he'd now a consultant to the biggest manufacturer of playing cards in the U.S., in part on the basis of contacting them repeatedly one year about how sheets of cards were going through the cutting device upside down, because he could feel they were wrong. He's got a fairly narrow specification of how he likes his cards in terms of thickness and slickness, although he's not completely dependent upon that; he once won a good-sized piece of furniture by betting the guy at the store that he could cut a stack of business cards to a specified number.
After that, back on the bus to the Brattle Theatre for the last in a string of three disappointing 9:30-9:45pm screenings. Maybe Lemon plays a bit better for me if I'm not on movie five of the day with everything since 1:30pm documentaries that were enjoyable straightforward, but I did feel trapped in the middle of a row by the time it was halfway through. Not quite zonked for this one, but not exactly digging it, either.
And then, back to Davis and to bed to do the same thing the next day, only more so!
Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive
* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
It's somewhat ironic, but inevitable, that despite Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive leading with the idea that much of the conventional wisdom about Poe is greatly influenced by an obituary written by a rival as character assassination, writer/director Eric Stange winds up going back to the familiar. There is more to Poe than everyone knows, but it turns out that what makes him flawed also made him interesting.
In positioning his film in opposition to the history as set out by Reverend Rufus W. Griswold from the start, Stange sometimes finds himself backed into a tricky position where Poe still has a fair amount of weird stuff in his history and it comes off as kind of odd when the thesis of the movie is that Poe wasn't the fiend that Griswold portrayed. It particularly comes off as strange when talking about his relationship with Sarah Helen Whitman - the film opens by talking about how Poe was about to return home to his childhood sweetheart at the time of his death, and the down-the-middle telling of what sounds like a man looking to marry into money to finance his ambitions seems a bit in opposition to this.
Whether they reflect well or poorly on Poe, things like that are interesting stories, and Stange does a decent job of stringing them together, pointing out a lot of the other parts of the writer's career that sometimes gets lost in the shadow of his justifiably more famous horror stories - the literary criticism, the comedic and romantic material, the less-overshadowed-but-still-possibly-not-given-its-due invention of the detective story - as well as his early life. Not every chapter is thrilling, and the tracking of his vagabond progress up and down the East coast doesn't make for the sort of clear landmarks one might hope. Often, Poe's specific history is less interesting than the looks at 19th-Century America needed to put it into context, from the precarious financial positions of writers in that environment to the kidnappings which might explain his mysterious, erratic last days.
Full review on EFC.
City of Ghosts
* * * (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
A solid documentary centered on the founders of the blog "Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently", City of Ghosts gives a brief introduction to the city in question, allows the citizen journalists to tell their own story, and, while allowing the subjects to be even-tempered, friendly people, never lets up is disdain for Daesh. It will not fully educate one on the causes and effects of what is happening in Syria, but it presents a human face to a crisis that can often seem abstract from the other side of the world.
Raqqa, the subjects point out, is not a large city, which is why, when the group known in the West as ISIS declared a caliphate with Raqqa as the capital in June of 2014, it didn't get a lot of the sort of on-site news coverage that helps shape the sense of an urgent crisis (note that "ISIS" is often called "Daesh" by Arabic speakers in opposition to the organization, as this Arabic acronym meaning "one who tramples"). To bridge the gap, a number of locals started a blog anonymously documenting what was happening, which expanded as more people began contributing video. The film introduces the viewers to several, most notably three of the founders: Aziz, a college student who was not initially of an activist bent; Mohammed, a high school teacher who becomes a reporter; and Hamoud, an introvert whose work as a cameraman gives him a taste for danger. As they become wanted men, they eventually flee across the border to Turkey, and will have to go farther to escape their foes' reach.
Filmmaker Matthew Heineman, who produces, shoots, and edits on top of serving as director, understands the perils of perspective that his sort of movie can face, a kind of survivorship bias that comes of talking to those who escaped a bad situation to be honored. He attempt to head it off early, revealing the blog's name after a photographer at an award ceremony asks the correspondents to smile for a photograph, a contrast which both pointedly indicates that, even if these guys are okay, their home is still being "slaughtered", and maybe gets audiences thinking about how much impact these stories make on them. It's one of the few times where the way he presents information is as much the point as simply putting things in front of the audience, but it's effective.
Full review on EFC.
Dealt
* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Dealt is a frequently-delightful documentary on Richard Turner, an intriguing and entertaining man at the top of his corner of the magic business despite a major handicap to work around. It's a nifty little story that, in addition to featuring some really astounding close-up magic, manages to take a few nifty narrative turns. Indeed, it arguably wouldn't have been half the movie it is if Turner didn't change between the beginning and the end.
Turner doesn't think of himself as a magician, but a "card mechanic"; the phrase literally means he knows how to manipulate cards, but as he puts in, you get an auto mechanic to fix a car, and you get him to fix a card game. In the opening bit, he performs some amazing bits of trickery - he is the best in the world at dealing the second card from the top of a deck rather than the first, and can un-shuffle a deck - but what both the audience at the show and the one watching the movie soon realizes is that he's not really looking at them, but just a little above. It slowly dawns on them that Turner is visually-impaired. In fact, he is completely blind, having lost his vision as a result of macular dystrophy when he was a child.
Turner, to put it mildly, does not have the healthiest relationship with his disability. Early on, the main impression is that he is practical and surprisingly not bitter; there's an easy rapport to how his son Asa doesn't just warn his father about obstructions, but describes things to Richard's rapt, genuine interest. Director Luke Korem lets the audience coast on the general "that's amazing" good feeling of the premise for a while before starting to play up that Turner's desire to not be defined by his disability can border on denial, as he gets incensed when news stories about him as a card shark even mention that he is blind and he refuses on principle to use the tools that many other visually impaired folks do. This includes his sister Lori Dragt, whose own vision practically disappeared overnight at roughly the same time. By about midway through the film, the audience is starting to wonder just when their discomfort started making a dent in their admiration.
Full review on EFC.
Lemon
* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 29 April 2017 in the Brattle Theatre #3 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Whatever the heck that was, I can't say I liked it. It feels like a couple dozen ideas for jokes that were not attached to a character recognizable as an actual human being, so even when the gags themselves were executed fairly well, they still only felt like ideas: Co-writer/director Janicza Bravo and the cast worked out all the blocking, delivery, and visual presentation, but without attaching them to interesting characters, that winds up being technical exercises.
Heck of a cast wasted, too. Maybe someone other than co-writer and star Brett Gelman makes his fringe actor appealing or at least interesting enough to serve as the center of the movie, but his Isaac is a drag and in every scene. There are some good bits with Michael Cera and Gillian Jacobs as two younger students in his acting workshop whose individual talent is inversely proportional to the amount of attention and praise he gives each of them, Nia Long is appealing as a potential new girlfriend after Judy Greer's Ramona dumps him - and Marla Gibbs does excellent silent misery as the wheelchair-bound, stroke-victim grandmother at her family's cookout. The best performance probably comes from David Paymer as a heartbroken family friend trying to grab onto some sort of replacement connection as the guest at a seder.
Somewhere in that mess of characters and situations, there's potential in finding something universal in African-American and Jewish family traditions, unrequited love and loneliness, but Bravo and Gelman always go for the gag, and most of the time that joke seems too inside and never quite able to root out the funny part of weird things and situations.
Saturday, June 03, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.08: Band Aid
Doing a quick skip to the end for IFFBoston postings because closing night film Band Aid is opening in some cities this weekend. Not Boston - it kind of looks like the festival was it, between what looks like a quick turnaround to VOD and the Kendall being short-screened right now. Maybe not a huge shame, although it underlines how it can be easier for Chinese romantic comedies to play here than American ones.
Left to right, writer/director/star Zoe Lister-Jones, producer Natalia Anderson, and Boston Globe "Love Letters" columnist Meredith Goldstein. Nothing against her, but I'm not sure what unique expertise she brought to moderating this Q&A, but I tend to wonder that about guest moderators anyway (and I don't recall the Globe being listed as a sponsor for the other explanation). But, hey, it was the last night, Brian, Nancy, and everyone else was probably wiped, so why not bring a fresh mic in?
The most interesting nugget to come out of the Q&A is that the film had an all-woman crew, which is pretty unusual but kind of fun to note, especially since the film is not as entirely about female-specific issues as the hypothetical film that does that, and while I (being a guy) tend to feel kind of odd about that, I do hope that the line on their résumé that they may not have had otherwise as producers perhaps follow unconscious biases helps them in the future.
The other fun question was that, yes, she and Adam Pally were going to do some shows as part of the promotion for the movie and the songs would be available on BandCamp (although I couldn't find it, not remembering the band name from the movie). Maybe a novelty that wears off quickly, but fun, which perhaps puts it in line with the film as a whole.
Band Aid
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2017 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Zoe Lister-Jones has kind of a cute idea for a movie, and for the most part manages to get it to 90 minutes without having to load too much extra into it. It can be kind of a near thing; it's a fair number of quick hits at easy targets and not a whole lot of insight when the time comes to get serious, so a lot winds up riding on how its jokes play for the audience. But that is ever the way with comedies, and this one hits more often than it misses.
It's about Anna (Zoe Lister-Jones) and Ben (Adam Pally), married a while, feeling like they've underachieved career-wise, and getting to the point where it's kind of annoying that the only time they ever see their friends is at baby showers and kids' birthday parties, and that they aren't throwing those is a source of some tension. So they fight a lot. After goofing around with toy instruments at one of those parties, Ben finds his old guitar in the garage, Anna reminds him that she plays bass, and they decide to make songs out of all their fights, to get them out there and not directed at each other. It goes well enough to form a band with weird neighbor Dave (Fred Armisen) on drums, but they can't outrun the fact that, even if they've been making a game of it, they still clearly have problems.
Writer/director/star Zoe Lister-Jones doesn't get cute about building up to the movie's one-sentence description, nor does she drift far from it; at one point Anna says "we should make our fights into songs and sing them" and then the meat of the movie is them making songs about their fights and singing them. And even if these fights are often the staples of relationship-based stand-up comedy, the presentation is just different enough to make the punchlines work a little better and the point of view is just skewed enough in some cases to make a weird gag funny. That straightforward mission statement sometimes seems like it can lead to missed opportunities and misjudging how funny the other stuff is - Anna's rideshare fares seem like they'd work better as a running gag than a quick montage to illustrate how much her doing this rather than writing for a TV show like she should sucks (both spouses often seem to have only-in-Hollywood career issues), and there are also a fair number of drug gags that seem to operate on the assumption that watching people who are high is inherently funny as opposed to something that gets old fast..
Full review on EFC.
Left to right, writer/director/star Zoe Lister-Jones, producer Natalia Anderson, and Boston Globe "Love Letters" columnist Meredith Goldstein. Nothing against her, but I'm not sure what unique expertise she brought to moderating this Q&A, but I tend to wonder that about guest moderators anyway (and I don't recall the Globe being listed as a sponsor for the other explanation). But, hey, it was the last night, Brian, Nancy, and everyone else was probably wiped, so why not bring a fresh mic in?
The most interesting nugget to come out of the Q&A is that the film had an all-woman crew, which is pretty unusual but kind of fun to note, especially since the film is not as entirely about female-specific issues as the hypothetical film that does that, and while I (being a guy) tend to feel kind of odd about that, I do hope that the line on their résumé that they may not have had otherwise as producers perhaps follow unconscious biases helps them in the future.
The other fun question was that, yes, she and Adam Pally were going to do some shows as part of the promotion for the movie and the songs would be available on BandCamp (although I couldn't find it, not remembering the band name from the movie). Maybe a novelty that wears off quickly, but fun, which perhaps puts it in line with the film as a whole.
Band Aid
* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 May 2017 in Coolidge Corner Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Zoe Lister-Jones has kind of a cute idea for a movie, and for the most part manages to get it to 90 minutes without having to load too much extra into it. It can be kind of a near thing; it's a fair number of quick hits at easy targets and not a whole lot of insight when the time comes to get serious, so a lot winds up riding on how its jokes play for the audience. But that is ever the way with comedies, and this one hits more often than it misses.
It's about Anna (Zoe Lister-Jones) and Ben (Adam Pally), married a while, feeling like they've underachieved career-wise, and getting to the point where it's kind of annoying that the only time they ever see their friends is at baby showers and kids' birthday parties, and that they aren't throwing those is a source of some tension. So they fight a lot. After goofing around with toy instruments at one of those parties, Ben finds his old guitar in the garage, Anna reminds him that she plays bass, and they decide to make songs out of all their fights, to get them out there and not directed at each other. It goes well enough to form a band with weird neighbor Dave (Fred Armisen) on drums, but they can't outrun the fact that, even if they've been making a game of it, they still clearly have problems.
Writer/director/star Zoe Lister-Jones doesn't get cute about building up to the movie's one-sentence description, nor does she drift far from it; at one point Anna says "we should make our fights into songs and sing them" and then the meat of the movie is them making songs about their fights and singing them. And even if these fights are often the staples of relationship-based stand-up comedy, the presentation is just different enough to make the punchlines work a little better and the point of view is just skewed enough in some cases to make a weird gag funny. That straightforward mission statement sometimes seems like it can lead to missed opportunities and misjudging how funny the other stuff is - Anna's rideshare fares seem like they'd work better as a running gag than a quick montage to illustrate how much her doing this rather than writing for a TV show like she should sucks (both spouses often seem to have only-in-Hollywood career issues), and there are also a fair number of drug gags that seem to operate on the assumption that watching people who are high is inherently funny as opposed to something that gets old fast..
Full review on EFC.
Thursday, June 01, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.03: Whose Streets? and Tormenting the Hen
I had some pretty rough 9pm shows at IFFBoston this year. It wasn't all bad, but out of the eight days, there were two without late shows, two I liked, two I actively disliked, and two shoulder-shruggers where I suppose I could have gotten a couple extra hours of sleep or drilled down into my DVR or not missed The Mayor, but, hey, might as well get value for that pass I purchased. It's a bit of a bummer of a way to end the evening, especially when you see a pattern emerging.
Anyway, much as I'd like to spend more of this post championing Whose Streets?, I'm a bit more nervous about being the white guy diving into what made the Ferguson documentary work, because I know I'll be missing a lot. Besides, Tormenting the Hen was the one that had guests and a Q&A that was at times interesting and at times tremendously frustrating.
Left to right, that's writer/director/many-other-things Theodore Collatos, producer Ben Umstead, star Carolina Monnerat, co-star Matthew Shaw, and supporting guy Brian Harlan Brooks. Theodore and Carolina are married, by the way.
To be completely honest, I was more wary about this movie early than it perhaps deserved, with an alarm light going off when I saw Josephine Decker as part of the cast in the opening titles. A screening of two of her short features, Butter on the Latch and Thou Art Mild and Lovely, made for a pretty dreary two and a half hours at Fantasia a couple years ago, so I spent a few precious formative seconds thinking about how all the mumblecore folks appeared in each other's movies a decade ago, and now maybe a new generation of pointless ramblers who can't even be bothered to get the picture in focus may be doing the same.
The film, fortunately, wasn't quite so dreary as all that, but I can't say I really liked it, and the Q&A illustrated a few reasons why: Though I don't remember any talk of it being improvised, it was constructed out of anecdotes and, basically, what can we do with these folks and this location in a few weeks? That's not often a winning formula unless someone does something downright brilliant, and nothing had that spark here. He also talked about how the tendency toward extreme close-ups was a matter of "when the shot is bad, pull the camera in", and that can't be a good reflection on the film.
On the other hand, several people in the audience told Shaw that he did a very good job capturing a person with Asperger's Syndrome, which is good to hear; that's a thing that can easily be done poorly. Shaw was one of the liveliest parts of the Q&A, talking not just about how he had a relative to base the performance on, but how he was originally going to just be running sound, and wound up playing Mutty when someone else dropped out.
Whose Streets?
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Starting as it does in the immediate aftermath of the Mike Brown shooting, Whose Streets? cannot help but be chaotic as it chronicles the immediate aftermath and the emergence of a local civil rights movement (or the rekindling of such) over the ensuing months. As such, many will find it unsatisfying; it answers few questions definitively and provides little resolution. But, perhaps, that's also what makes the movie successful; the chaos and confusion is honest.
Though it took a long time to sort out the Brown shooting (to the extent that it has been done), the aftermath played out on nearly every screen in America, but, for many, it was just the broad strokes, large anonymous masses clashing, with some anonymous member of the groups standing out when they did something particularly noteworthy in one direction or another. For their film, Sabaah Folayan and co-director Damon Davis embed themselves at the local level, looking at the activism of Ferguson, Missouri natives such as single mother Brittany Ferrell and one-man "CopWatch" David Whitt.
Folayan, Davis, and cinematographer Lucas Alvarado-Farrar were either on the scene quickly or local, because they seem to embed themselves into the nascent Black Lives Matter movement and the protesters fast enough to get the story from the start. By doing so, they get a particularly focused, close-up view that not only spends much of its time focusing on the way Ferrell and Whitt integrate their activism into their everyday lives, but often makes a point of showing how sometimes the broader movement can be seen as a nuisance by the locals, with Whitt in particular bristling at how it seems people from outside of Ferguson move to the center of the line when he's been the one documenting law enforcement's excesses for some time. At times, this winds up being a film about how, despite having a clear end goal, civil rights movements can have a lot of what is, ironically, called Brownian Motion in the sciences, with more chaotic activity in the middle of what should be a simple stream. Many locals worried about what lots of outsiders will stir up in their neighborhood or - especially in the case of the younger people - bristling at older figures expecting them to act as cogs in their long-term plan.
Full review on EFC.
Tormenting the Hen
* * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
I did not enjoy Tormenting the Hen when it initially seemed to just be an attempted work of discomfort, and I found myself liking it less when it seemed to end by delegitimizing that discomfort, even if I did grudgingly respect the way it did so. The film's unusual rhythms and often-confrontational nature may score points with those who count being non-mainstream as a virtue in and of itself, but something can be both peculiar and tedious, something that is too often the case here.
It starts in New York City but soon moves to Long Island, where would-be patron of the arts Sarah (Josephine Decker) has invited Claire (Dameka Hayes) to be the playwright-in-residence at the local theater. While she attempts to get actors Joel (Brian Harlan Brooks) and Adam (Dave Malinsky) on the same page as her, her fiancee Monica (Carolina Monnerat) is back at the rented guest house, unable to fully enjoy studying the trees in the nearby woods because Mutty (Matthew Shaw), the groundskeeper for the property that his family owns, quickly goes from being a bit odd to being downright intrusive, and Claire doesn't quite see how it's actually starting to scare Monica.
Filmmaker Theodore Collatos has some potentially interesting places to go here, especially when his imagination is leading him to genuinely odd places. Mutty tells Monica early on that the guest house used to be a chicken coop, and that results in her and the audience occasionally jumping to thinking opening doors and strange noises may be ghost chickens, a delightfully original and absurd cause of unease. The theater stuff may be a little inside-baseball at times, but the way it presents everybody involved as kind of puffed-up and self-important though still not egomaniacal monsters. There is a nice balance of obviously imposing and absurd about the way Mutty intrudes upon the guests' desire for a little peace and quiet.
Full review on EFC.
Anyway, much as I'd like to spend more of this post championing Whose Streets?, I'm a bit more nervous about being the white guy diving into what made the Ferguson documentary work, because I know I'll be missing a lot. Besides, Tormenting the Hen was the one that had guests and a Q&A that was at times interesting and at times tremendously frustrating.
Left to right, that's writer/director/many-other-things Theodore Collatos, producer Ben Umstead, star Carolina Monnerat, co-star Matthew Shaw, and supporting guy Brian Harlan Brooks. Theodore and Carolina are married, by the way.
To be completely honest, I was more wary about this movie early than it perhaps deserved, with an alarm light going off when I saw Josephine Decker as part of the cast in the opening titles. A screening of two of her short features, Butter on the Latch and Thou Art Mild and Lovely, made for a pretty dreary two and a half hours at Fantasia a couple years ago, so I spent a few precious formative seconds thinking about how all the mumblecore folks appeared in each other's movies a decade ago, and now maybe a new generation of pointless ramblers who can't even be bothered to get the picture in focus may be doing the same.
The film, fortunately, wasn't quite so dreary as all that, but I can't say I really liked it, and the Q&A illustrated a few reasons why: Though I don't remember any talk of it being improvised, it was constructed out of anecdotes and, basically, what can we do with these folks and this location in a few weeks? That's not often a winning formula unless someone does something downright brilliant, and nothing had that spark here. He also talked about how the tendency toward extreme close-ups was a matter of "when the shot is bad, pull the camera in", and that can't be a good reflection on the film.
On the other hand, several people in the audience told Shaw that he did a very good job capturing a person with Asperger's Syndrome, which is good to hear; that's a thing that can easily be done poorly. Shaw was one of the liveliest parts of the Q&A, talking not just about how he had a relative to base the performance on, but how he was originally going to just be running sound, and wound up playing Mutty when someone else dropped out.
Whose Streets?
* * * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Starting as it does in the immediate aftermath of the Mike Brown shooting, Whose Streets? cannot help but be chaotic as it chronicles the immediate aftermath and the emergence of a local civil rights movement (or the rekindling of such) over the ensuing months. As such, many will find it unsatisfying; it answers few questions definitively and provides little resolution. But, perhaps, that's also what makes the movie successful; the chaos and confusion is honest.
Though it took a long time to sort out the Brown shooting (to the extent that it has been done), the aftermath played out on nearly every screen in America, but, for many, it was just the broad strokes, large anonymous masses clashing, with some anonymous member of the groups standing out when they did something particularly noteworthy in one direction or another. For their film, Sabaah Folayan and co-director Damon Davis embed themselves at the local level, looking at the activism of Ferguson, Missouri natives such as single mother Brittany Ferrell and one-man "CopWatch" David Whitt.
Folayan, Davis, and cinematographer Lucas Alvarado-Farrar were either on the scene quickly or local, because they seem to embed themselves into the nascent Black Lives Matter movement and the protesters fast enough to get the story from the start. By doing so, they get a particularly focused, close-up view that not only spends much of its time focusing on the way Ferrell and Whitt integrate their activism into their everyday lives, but often makes a point of showing how sometimes the broader movement can be seen as a nuisance by the locals, with Whitt in particular bristling at how it seems people from outside of Ferguson move to the center of the line when he's been the one documenting law enforcement's excesses for some time. At times, this winds up being a film about how, despite having a clear end goal, civil rights movements can have a lot of what is, ironically, called Brownian Motion in the sciences, with more chaotic activity in the middle of what should be a simple stream. Many locals worried about what lots of outsiders will stir up in their neighborhood or - especially in the case of the younger people - bristling at older figures expecting them to act as cogs in their long-term plan.
Full review on EFC.
Tormenting the Hen
* * (out of four)
Seen 28 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
I did not enjoy Tormenting the Hen when it initially seemed to just be an attempted work of discomfort, and I found myself liking it less when it seemed to end by delegitimizing that discomfort, even if I did grudgingly respect the way it did so. The film's unusual rhythms and often-confrontational nature may score points with those who count being non-mainstream as a virtue in and of itself, but something can be both peculiar and tedious, something that is too often the case here.
It starts in New York City but soon moves to Long Island, where would-be patron of the arts Sarah (Josephine Decker) has invited Claire (Dameka Hayes) to be the playwright-in-residence at the local theater. While she attempts to get actors Joel (Brian Harlan Brooks) and Adam (Dave Malinsky) on the same page as her, her fiancee Monica (Carolina Monnerat) is back at the rented guest house, unable to fully enjoy studying the trees in the nearby woods because Mutty (Matthew Shaw), the groundskeeper for the property that his family owns, quickly goes from being a bit odd to being downright intrusive, and Claire doesn't quite see how it's actually starting to scare Monica.
Filmmaker Theodore Collatos has some potentially interesting places to go here, especially when his imagination is leading him to genuinely odd places. Mutty tells Monica early on that the guest house used to be a chicken coop, and that results in her and the audience occasionally jumping to thinking opening doors and strange noises may be ghost chickens, a delightfully original and absurd cause of unease. The theater stuff may be a little inside-baseball at times, but the way it presents everybody involved as kind of puffed-up and self-important though still not egomaniacal monsters. There is a nice balance of obviously imposing and absurd about the way Mutty intrudes upon the guests' desire for a little peace and quiet.
Full review on EFC.
Thursday, May 18, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.02: Furusato and The Crest
I don't set out to curate days at film festivals; it's just that this sort of thing can happen when you're there on a pass and not building around certain films: The thing that strikes your fancy for the 7pm film also strikes your fancy at nine, and you wind up seeing two movies about people returning to an evacuated ancestral land.
This pairing probably makes The Crest look a little more lackluster than it actually is, especially when you get to the Q&A and one of the subjects is talking about how he goes back to Ireland every year since this first visit, because it really does exert a magnetic pull. I mean, I don't doubt that he feels that way, but a week-long summer vacation a boat-ride away from the actual island one's great-grand-parents emigrated from is something a bit different from the people of Minamisoma, who in many cases are returning to homes that their family has occupied for centuries despite the fact that the radiation sickness could very well kill them in ten years.
Speaking of, say hi to Furusato director Thorsten Trimpop in the center, flanked by Tess from the festival and Megan O'Grady, who I believe is from a Cambridge-based organization that supports documentary film (please correct me). Trimpop gave us plenty of tales of how this was, as he shot it, very close to being a one-person operation at times, with him actually heading to Japan even before funding was secured, and often carrying his own camera and holding his own boom mike. Docs are often made on tight budgets, but that's impressive even by those standards. It gave him a lot of room to improvise, though - he talked about how he met one of his first subjects just walking around and seeing somebody carrying music equipment around on the street.
It was a drawn-out, often odd shoot; he mentioned that they shot over several years, which created challenges when it came time to edit - put the film together chronologically, and you're rushing through seasons, both creating a certain unsteadiness and causing subjects to drop in and out; edit it to look more like a single year or so, and you're losing a dimension. They opted for the former, for the most part. Also kind of weird was the official representative of the energy company that operated the Fukashima plant; it seems that they made a token request, not expecting anyone to get back because the company has generally not commented, and then this guy shows up in Boston saying he can talk and film for a couple of days. Cut him out, and the filmmakers would be accused of ignoring part of the story, but that perspective is really not part of the movie. They kind of decided to make his scenes informative but kind of surreal, especially since his presentation and ideas were a bit along those lines anyway.
And here are the folks from The Crest: Cinematographer Georgia Pantazopoulos, director Mark Christopher, and subject Dennis "DK" Kane. Ironically, DK is the cousin who lives in California; his cousin Andrew, from Cape Cod, didn't make it. He was actually in Ireland, appearing with an exhibition of his art at the Blasket Center shown in the film.
Covino talked a bit about how, as with his previous film A Band Called DEATH, this one kind of happened organically - he found the subjects, saw that something interesting was on the cusp of happening, and following. This time, the story didn't develop as well, even though DK talked about how Covino was trying to direct it into being a more narratively-focused movie
Anyway, lots of friends and family of the cast and crew here for this one, which always makes the disgruntled feeling with a disappointing movie feel a little worse. I don't begrudge anyone liking it, and I could see why they did, but I also couldn't help but notice where it was leaning on that pre-existing affection for the subject matter.
Furusato (2016)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
According to the director's introduction for Furusato - a low-key documentary about the people still living in a city near the Fukushima Daichi reactor - most people simply translate the title as "hometown", but a more poetic reading is "the first and last landscapes one sees". That's something to keep in mind while watching the film, which is far from rabble-rousing or blame-seeking, but instead something of a chronicle of stubbornness and inertia, as people try to continue their lives despite what they face.
The hometown examined is Minamisoma, located at such a distance from the reactor that the border between officially inhabitable and evacuated runs through the center of the city. As the film opens, evacuated families are returning - some just to quickly recover their possessions, others to work their family farm, others because their home is a shrine, and maybe they would have resettled if that were not the case. As volunteers attempt to meticulously remove and test the black dust that has blown into the area, the town struggles to return to normal, even as many have seen the writing on the wall and left.
Director Thorsten Trimpop does not spend a lot of time with experts; the fellow from the power company tends to talk in banal generalities and it slowly becomes clear that Kenji, the man with a hazmat suit doing much of the testing and cleaning is not doing so in any sort of official capacity. Instead, he mostly follows a group of ordinary people, though he varies his approach: The woman who returned because her home is a shrine spends most of her time on-screen talking directly to the camera, with frustration and fatalism coming to the fore much more quickly than might be expected, while Miwa, a woman in her twenties, occasionally makes an aside as she and her father go about the work of trying to work a poisoned farm. The film is affecting, at times because it can be stoic as opposed to overtly passionate, zeroing in on this interesting group and letting them just be rather than spending a lot of time filling the gaps of their stories.
Full review on EFC.
The Crest
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Surfing footage and shots of the Irish countryside are things that seldom fail to impress on screen, and The Crest doesn't really let down when that's what the camera is pointed at. Knowing that they were going to be starting from there, the makers of the movie must have felt that they were in good shape early on, but documentaries are risky endeavors by their nature. Eventually, the interesting idea and nice-looking footage need an actual movie to form around them, and this one maybe doesn't come up with enough material.
It has a neat hook: Two Americans living on opposite sides of the country - Cape Cod surfer Andrew Jacob and Dennis "DK" Kane, who builds custom boards in San DIego - are both descendants of Pádraig Ó Catháin, aka "An RÃ", who was King of Ireland's Blasket Islands around the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The cousins have never met, but after learning about each other they decide to take part in a family reunion and journey to their ancestral home to surf the waves near the now-abandoned islands off the coast of Dingle. Should be fun!
And it is, sure, but there just doesn't wind up being a feature-length movie there. Andrew and DK are nice guys, folks most people would enjoy hanging around with, and perhaps too loose and too similar to each other to have especially interesting points of view on what they're learning. They're pleasant and friendly but we seldom see them doing much more than passively observing each other and Ireland, and there's not the sort of on-screen chemistry that makes a great movie. They're good dudes but not great characters, and when the surfing tale director Mark Christopher Covino hangs the film on doesn't amount to much, there's not any sort of a backup plan.
Full review on EFC.
This pairing probably makes The Crest look a little more lackluster than it actually is, especially when you get to the Q&A and one of the subjects is talking about how he goes back to Ireland every year since this first visit, because it really does exert a magnetic pull. I mean, I don't doubt that he feels that way, but a week-long summer vacation a boat-ride away from the actual island one's great-grand-parents emigrated from is something a bit different from the people of Minamisoma, who in many cases are returning to homes that their family has occupied for centuries despite the fact that the radiation sickness could very well kill them in ten years.
Speaking of, say hi to Furusato director Thorsten Trimpop in the center, flanked by Tess from the festival and Megan O'Grady, who I believe is from a Cambridge-based organization that supports documentary film (please correct me). Trimpop gave us plenty of tales of how this was, as he shot it, very close to being a one-person operation at times, with him actually heading to Japan even before funding was secured, and often carrying his own camera and holding his own boom mike. Docs are often made on tight budgets, but that's impressive even by those standards. It gave him a lot of room to improvise, though - he talked about how he met one of his first subjects just walking around and seeing somebody carrying music equipment around on the street.
It was a drawn-out, often odd shoot; he mentioned that they shot over several years, which created challenges when it came time to edit - put the film together chronologically, and you're rushing through seasons, both creating a certain unsteadiness and causing subjects to drop in and out; edit it to look more like a single year or so, and you're losing a dimension. They opted for the former, for the most part. Also kind of weird was the official representative of the energy company that operated the Fukashima plant; it seems that they made a token request, not expecting anyone to get back because the company has generally not commented, and then this guy shows up in Boston saying he can talk and film for a couple of days. Cut him out, and the filmmakers would be accused of ignoring part of the story, but that perspective is really not part of the movie. They kind of decided to make his scenes informative but kind of surreal, especially since his presentation and ideas were a bit along those lines anyway.
And here are the folks from The Crest: Cinematographer Georgia Pantazopoulos, director Mark Christopher, and subject Dennis "DK" Kane. Ironically, DK is the cousin who lives in California; his cousin Andrew, from Cape Cod, didn't make it. He was actually in Ireland, appearing with an exhibition of his art at the Blasket Center shown in the film.
Covino talked a bit about how, as with his previous film A Band Called DEATH, this one kind of happened organically - he found the subjects, saw that something interesting was on the cusp of happening, and following. This time, the story didn't develop as well, even though DK talked about how Covino was trying to direct it into being a more narratively-focused movie
Anyway, lots of friends and family of the cast and crew here for this one, which always makes the disgruntled feeling with a disappointing movie feel a little worse. I don't begrudge anyone liking it, and I could see why they did, but I also couldn't help but notice where it was leaning on that pre-existing affection for the subject matter.
Furusato (2016)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #2 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
According to the director's introduction for Furusato - a low-key documentary about the people still living in a city near the Fukushima Daichi reactor - most people simply translate the title as "hometown", but a more poetic reading is "the first and last landscapes one sees". That's something to keep in mind while watching the film, which is far from rabble-rousing or blame-seeking, but instead something of a chronicle of stubbornness and inertia, as people try to continue their lives despite what they face.
The hometown examined is Minamisoma, located at such a distance from the reactor that the border between officially inhabitable and evacuated runs through the center of the city. As the film opens, evacuated families are returning - some just to quickly recover their possessions, others to work their family farm, others because their home is a shrine, and maybe they would have resettled if that were not the case. As volunteers attempt to meticulously remove and test the black dust that has blown into the area, the town struggles to return to normal, even as many have seen the writing on the wall and left.
Director Thorsten Trimpop does not spend a lot of time with experts; the fellow from the power company tends to talk in banal generalities and it slowly becomes clear that Kenji, the man with a hazmat suit doing much of the testing and cleaning is not doing so in any sort of official capacity. Instead, he mostly follows a group of ordinary people, though he varies his approach: The woman who returned because her home is a shrine spends most of her time on-screen talking directly to the camera, with frustration and fatalism coming to the fore much more quickly than might be expected, while Miwa, a woman in her twenties, occasionally makes an aside as she and her father go about the work of trying to work a poisoned farm. The film is affecting, at times because it can be stoic as opposed to overtly passionate, zeroing in on this interesting group and letting them just be rather than spending a lot of time filling the gaps of their stories.
Full review on EFC.
The Crest
* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 27 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #5 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Surfing footage and shots of the Irish countryside are things that seldom fail to impress on screen, and The Crest doesn't really let down when that's what the camera is pointed at. Knowing that they were going to be starting from there, the makers of the movie must have felt that they were in good shape early on, but documentaries are risky endeavors by their nature. Eventually, the interesting idea and nice-looking footage need an actual movie to form around them, and this one maybe doesn't come up with enough material.
It has a neat hook: Two Americans living on opposite sides of the country - Cape Cod surfer Andrew Jacob and Dennis "DK" Kane, who builds custom boards in San DIego - are both descendants of Pádraig Ó Catháin, aka "An RÃ", who was King of Ireland's Blasket Islands around the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The cousins have never met, but after learning about each other they decide to take part in a family reunion and journey to their ancestral home to surf the waves near the now-abandoned islands off the coast of Dingle. Should be fun!
And it is, sure, but there just doesn't wind up being a feature-length movie there. Andrew and DK are nice guys, folks most people would enjoy hanging around with, and perhaps too loose and too similar to each other to have especially interesting points of view on what they're learning. They're pleasant and friendly but we seldom see them doing much more than passively observing each other and Ireland, and there's not the sort of on-screen chemistry that makes a great movie. They're good dudes but not great characters, and when the surfing tale director Mark Christopher Covino hangs the film on doesn't amount to much, there's not any sort of a backup plan.
Full review on EFC.
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Independent Film Festival Boston 2017.01: Stumped
Another IFFBoston already completely in the books, and I'm just starting to get the reviews posted, because this ain't my job, evident from the member pass I purchased my own self rather than the press pass I've had in previous years. This puts me three festivals behind right now, although BUFF just has a few shorts as stragglers and the sci-fi fest isn't much of a priority.
After fifteen years, a lot of opening night is familiar. Get off the T, pick the pass up, back in a different line to hang out with friends I don't see that often before getting in, finding the area I usually grab in Somerville Theatre #1 is taken and so wind up at the far right, which is going to make the "horrible photography" tag even more appropriate. I mean, just look at that picture to the right of Jon Bernhardt; it just doesn't do him justice. But, I think we can agree, this is the proper attire for theremin players, right? Much like tuxedos are de rigeur for the symphony, this is how one must dress to play an instrument that involves moving your hands through magnetic fields.
Eventually, Brian got up on stage, thanked the volunteers and the sponsors (fun fact: I still have only the vaguest idea what a Talamas is), and then we were off to the races. It was kind of odd when Stumped was announced as the opening-night film, mostly because it seems like it's been around for a while; I'm pretty sure a short or work-in-progress version has appeared in Emerson's Bright Lights series a couple of times. It's not something I've seen, but something I could have.
It wound up being a pretty good movie, with an impressive group of guests:
Left to right, we have director Robin Berghaus, subject Will Lautzenheiser, his partner Angel Gonzalez, and comedic collaborator Steve Delfino.
In a lot of ways, the Q&A followed the arc of the film - very funny and irreverent at times, but also with an overpowering sense of gratitude toward Will's donor that could have seemed like too much if it weren't obviously sincere. Indeed, I think one of the more intriguingly telling moments of the session was Will saying that he wasn't planning on doing more comedy around his new situation and challenges because he had a hard time coming up with gags that didn't have the potential to come across as disrespectful either to his donor or the entire transplant process.
Stumped (2017)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 26 April 2017 in Somerville Theatre #1 (Independent Film Festival Boston, DCP)
Unlike a lot of documentaries that necessarily change during the making, Stumped handles the fact that its subject's life doesn't stand still worth aplomb. Though it would have likely been a nifty documentary if its subject - a young filmmaker who needed all four extremities amputated after a horrifying infection - had just used stand-up comedy as a way to cope with the new challenges he faced, the fact that he was able to have a dual arm transplant during filming adds new, intriguing material.
Indeed, I believe that a short version with just the first half of the story had been making the rounds for a few years, and I suspect that it's uplifting enough on its own, despite how the opening, where Will Lautzenheiser feels a pain two days into his job teaching film at Montana State University and, by the time he gets to the emergency room, this group A staph infection has snowballed into toxic shock, necessitating the amputation. It's hard to see anything coming after that as a best-case scenario, but it's arguable that this is what happens: He commits to full-time rehab, learns to accomplish what he can with limited capacity and prosthetic limbs, and eventually takes to the stage at a Boston improv club with jokes nobody else could get away with making. That positive attitude is part of the reason that the doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital find him to be an excellent candidate for a transplant, as the rehab for that is tremendously intense.
Stick with the first half of the story, and you've got a fairly strong documentary. It's based around a very personable guy with a likable support network, and both Will and filmmaker Robin Berghaus have a good idea of what's entertainingly self-deprecating without being disrespectful of the greater community dealing with that sort of disability, getting genuine laughs rather than ones given begrudgingly because He's So Brave. There are moments of calculated unease, from photos of how quickly and thoroughly the infection destroyed healthy tissue to the understandable discomfort that co-exists with his twin brother's support, but also a willingness to show how WIll managed both simple and complex things that carefully stokes and satisfies the audience's curiosity (and I daresay his handwriting is better than mine). Overall, there's a fine balance between demonstrations of what his rehab and day-to-day is like and the more personal, less technical material.
Full review on EFC.
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