Fantasia 2022.06: Employee of the Month, "Hell Gig", Sissy, and We Might as Well Be Dead

Another day skipping out on one of the afternoon shows. Look, I am descended from New England Puritans, and while I am fairly open-minded and willing to see a lot of weird stuff and live and let live about the rest, I am just not going to go to one of three short packages labeled "Cavalcade of Perversions" when I could be sitting down for some decent fish and chips. It's just the way I'm wired.

Besides, you should always find a chance to sit down and eat in the middle of a marathon festival day if you can. Subsisting on popcorn and candy isn't good for you.

The day started with the encore show of Employee of the Month, whose director Véronique Jadin mentioned up front that she'd never really had this sort of corporate drone work, but that there was plenty of obvious idiotic sexism in the movie industry to draw on. This film at least rings frustratingly true on those points, which was a relief, because I often kind of worry about how much art and entertainment is created by people who have never been anything but artists and entertainers.

Here's Mitch with the makers of Sissy, Hannah Barlow (who also co-starred) and Jane Senses. It's an Australian film which they describe as being the overlap of their tastes, bloody and girly in equal measure. It's a clever little movie, and navigating those extreme as well as it does is no small feat, even if it's not exactly my thing.

Both heaped a ton of well-deserved praise on Aisha Dee, whom they'd originally wanted for a spring role but who convinced them that she knew Sissy and the particular panicky lack of confidence that manifests as carefully cultivated extroversion inside out.

Also, they've been on a hack of a festival tour with this, starting out in their home base in Sydney, then to Perth, Busan, and Montreal. Each leg of that is an order of magnitude larger than the last, so I presume they'll be at the moon next.

Last, but certainly not least, Natalia Sinelnikova of We Might as Well Be Dead, which had a lot of people murmuring about High-Rise and what a disappointment it was beforehand, but which turned out pretty dang good. It is, it turned out, a student film, leading my friend Kurt, seeing his last film of the festival for the year, to marvel at the sort of film education you can apparently get in Germany, as Luz from a few years back was a similar case of students cranking out a pretty darn good feature.

Sinelnikova was most excited to talk about her lead, Ioana Iacob; casting films has been as tricky as everything else over the past couple of years, so on the one hand it can be hard to keep things nailed down, while on the other you can sometimes get a hugely-respected actress to do your student film because a global pandemic shut down theater in Romania. Also, it was interesting to hear her talking about the language choices - most of it is in German, but Iacob's character is Polish and Jewish, so she's often speaking Polish or Yiddish as opposed to German when not talking with her daughter and other immigrant friends. It's an odd thing to watch when you're not that familiar with those languages - they seem just close enough that I could occasionally note that there had been a language switch, but probably didn't clock every one of them.

Random spoiler-y question I wish I'd asked during that session: Did she deliberately look for a girl who was taller than Iacob when casting Pola Geiger as Anna's daughter? Her appearance near the end of the movie delighted me and I'm not sure exactly why I liked that facet of it so much - because she'd been so afraid through the movie and emerged from her cocoon bigger and stronger-looking than expected? Like, even if she's not actually going to knock her bullies over, she's more than they expected and she'll be formidable if she ever returns? Dunno. Just one of those details that was unexpected but hit right.

Next up: Wednesday and the end of the first week, with Just Remembering, The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future, One and Four, Chun Tae-Il, and On the Line

L'employée du mois (Employee of the Month)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Hurrah for 78-minute black comedies! As much as releasing a feature that runs less than 90 minutes has often seemed taboo, there's a lot of room under that threshold for a movie to be just right. In this case, it's probably just the right length for an impressive amount of problems snowballing without the caricatures that fuel them to wear thin (or, perhaps, to not boil over with rage that they're not entirely caricatures).

Inès (Jasmina Douieb) has been the glue holding the office of Eco-Clean Pro together for a long time; her title is technically "legal expert" but she also functions as secretary, personal assistant, and is expected to make the coffee even though she doesn't touch the stuff, being the only woman in the office. Well, usually - Mélody (Laetitia Mampaka), daughter of a former colleague, is starting a one-month internship on the day that a visitor from the home office (Laurence Bibot) is making an annual presentation. It includes notes on pay gaps, but as long-time manager Patrick (Peter Van den Begin) puts it, that's more a goal for when they can afford it, despite salesman Nico (Alex Vizorek) and some of the other men in the office getting raises. A gruesome accident and an investigation by the financial police is all Inès and Mélody need - except that Inès may be even more frighteningly capable than even she knows.

Even at its fairly compact scale, many in the audience will find themselves waiting only semi-patiently for the first murder, even without knowing that it's quite that black a comedy - it is important, apparently, for everybody in the office to be kind of awful to Jasmina Douieb's Inès individually before the timid lady who keeps everything running from day to day gets to show how she handles herself in a crisis. At that point, though, we get to see something kind of wonderful in Douieb's performance, like she's figuring out that she can get away with doing something more broadly comic even as Inès is gaining confidence that she might be able to get away with covering up her boss's death and whatever else that follows in its wake. There's something similar going on with Laetitia Mampaka as the intern getting the full measure of how bad a first day on the job can be, although the filmmakers are smart in how they make it clear well beyond their different physiques that Melody isn't Inès minus twenty-odd years, but someone who has a different set of institutional biases to combat and different baseline expectations.

They do it in a pleasantly small-scale film, with the office feeling cramped in the way a real one can often be, rather than one that looks "tight, but not so you can't run a dolly through it". It means that there's got to be a weird efficiency to even the brutal bits of slapstick, like Rube Goldberg disasters compacted into one or two steps, or the phallic nature of a trophy pulling double duty. Every minor character is similarly a perfectly-captured bit of awfulness, with Peter Van den Begin's Patrick an especially great example - he's ridiculous and transparent but there's a scene or two where one can see a hint of the superficial appeal that initially put Inès under his thumb and kept her for something like 20 years.

There are times when it seems maybe a bit too efficient; there's room for some later shenanigans to play out funnier, or at least less directly. On the other hand, a movie like this can burn out quickly if they're not careful, and it's better off doing a quick hit and then letting the audience leave still laughing.

"Hell Gig"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

There's a really fun zippiness to "Hell Gig", with writer/director Ella Gale seeming to consciously strip away anything that's not going to lead to a joke within twenty seconds or so and letting stars Brooke Bundy and Jamie Loftus sort of riff their way through things, spilling what the audience needs to know while dealing with the supernatural trouble that has attached itself to one of them. It's fast and consciously banter-y, but not rushed.

Heck, even the rapid-fire jokes kind of feel explained within the short, with both women trying to make it as comedians and probably kind of quippier than the general population (it took me a bit to not associate "gig" with musicians, but it becomes clear quickly enough). Gale also gets what sort of vibe she's going for here and that the comedy is with the cast. A kind of goofy-looking monster is funny, but she mostly keeps it out of the center of action because otherwise camp could become the main joke.

Anyway, good stuff. Someone hire these folks for bigger things.

Sissy

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Every once in a while, I watch a movie like Sissy and wonder if I'm the reason why it doesn't click with me a bit better. It's well-made, creative, and I can certainly see what the filmmakers are getting at, mostly successfully. Am I just too old, male, and comfortable for it to speak to me? I don't know. I just find myself liking the film when I feel like I should love it.

It introduces the audience to Cecilia (Aisha Dee), an influencer who is doing pretty well for herself streaming tips about how to refocus when the world is too much, which often seems to be the case for her once the camera stops rolling. After posting her latest, she randomly runs into Emma (Hannah Barlow), her best friend as a child, who invites her to a night of karaoke with fiancée Fran (Lucy Barrett) and friends Tracey (Yerin Ha) and Jamie (Daniel Monks), and then to their shared bachelorette weekend. What Emma neglected to include was that this party would be at the home of Alex (Emily De Margheriti), who bullied "Sissy" when they were kids and is a big part of the reason Cecilia hasn't seen Emma since. It's not a pleasant experience for either from the get-go, and it's going to get worse.

This is a spectacularly bad idea on Emma's part that it maybe winds up undermining the movie a bit when the full extent of it is made plain (though it's pretty clear early on), in part because co-director Hannah Barlow plays the character as probably being smarter and more empathetic than that even if she is impulsive. There are other pieces of it that don't quite fit together - Cecilia is so reactive most of the time that the moments when she does plan ahead are jarring and almost feel out of character. It's also the second movie I saw at this festival where somebody does just a terrible job of making sure that their victim is dead.

That's all kind of nitpicky stuff if the movie is vibing with you, and though it doesn't quite do that for me, one can easily see all the situations where it would work. Barlow and co-director/co-writer Kane Senes build the whole film around intertwined earnestness and phoniness - not only is that the very foundation of Cecilia's online persona, but it's in the way many of the characters interact, heightened versions of their core selves so that Cecilia doesn't know what's fake about them and vice versa. There's an awful whimsy to the way a couple of kills are presented that's not out of place with the faux-glitter of others or how one scene is shot upside down mainly because it looks cool. The filmmakers and audience are going to struggle with the concept of "too far" as much as the characters.

And, above all, Aisha Dee is terrific as Cecilia - she's very much not well mentally but the fact that she's a bright and warm presence doesn't play as a façade, but like both halves are real, a duality that few performances capture as well as Dee manages. She's able to grab the audience early and mostly able to keep them past a point where a connection might snap, with Barlow & Senes knowing just which buttons to push to let her. She's counterbalanced extremely well by Emily De Margheriti, despite the latter entering relatively late - she's icy, mean, and angry from the start and never manages to grab the audience's sympathy even when it looks like she deserves some.

It is, I suspect, a tale of horror that will connect much better with folks closer to its characters than I am, which is absolutely fine. Sometimes a film can break through barriers and communicate something universal, and sometimes it's okay to be that specific if it works well enough for the intended audience.

Wir könnten genauso gut tot sein (We Might As Well Be Dead)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2022 in Auditorium des Diplõmés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Paranoia's a funny thing; give it even the slightest justification, and it grows out of control. The trick with a movie about it is that we often expect more from fictional characters and situations than we observe in real life, and doing something speculative can put fingers on the scales to an even greater and more obvious extent. That's what makes Natalia Sinelnikova's We Might As Well Be Dead so impressive - she does a nifty job of withholding some and giving even the most rational something to fear that the absurdity and tension of the situation are able to coexist.

As the film opens, a family is making their way for the woods to the St. Phobus tower, warily watching for any potential attackers. They're given a tour by Anna Wilczynska (Ioana Iacob), the head of security for the secure, apparently self-contained community, who is careful to tell them that she will not take their bribes but also won't let management know they were offered. The main portion of her job would seem to be smooth - the biggest complaint is from Gerti Posner (Jörg Schüttauf), whose dog hasn't returned after he let it out to run on the grounds, so it looks like there's a bigger parenting challenge, as daughter Iris (Pola Geiger) has shut herself in the bathroom and won't come out because she's afraid she's got the Evil Eye and that was responsible. Meanwhile, Gerti just won't let it go, and when Anna's investigation accidentally upsets another well-to-do family, things start to spiral.

The type of viewer that finds "plot holes" when a character doesn't do the reasonable thing they would have done in that situation may have a hard time with the back half of this one, because it sure seems like a lot of trouble could have been avoided by Anna just telling someone the embarrassing truth, but that's the beauty in the balanced-but-rickety situation Sinelnikova and co-writer Viktor Gallandi have built: The audience can clearly see Anna weighing how, as much as she is said to be trusted, she's also keenly aware that as an employee, she's not in the same social class as her neighbors and an immigrant to boot, so anything that makes her appear less that perfectly competent is threatening to her personally. The audience never learns how bad it is outside the grounds, really, other than how prospective clients appear to be screened for weapons rather than contagion, but it doesn't necessarily matter whether the residents are reasonable people afraid of real danger or paranoids jumping at shadows - the end result is still going to be the same unless Anna can manage the impossible task of reassuring them.

It's absurd, of course, and the filmmakers never lose track of what that means, both in terms of it frequently being funny and also leading to despair, but they manage the descent well, with inexorable progress, things that make one simultaneously laugh and shake one's head, and just enough time to consider what's going on before moving to the next stop. The team is also very specific about the world they're creating - it feels like an upscale complex that's maybe a bit understaffed, so it's not run-down but also not gleaming. It would be easy for this to tip into something that's mainly about the wealthy exploiting desperate immigrant slaves, and there's a sense that something like that may be what's next while lurking in this movie's corners, but it's not this movie's story.

Of course, Ioana Iacob could star in that one, but she aquits herself quite well here. Anna is good at her job because she is sensible and no-nonsense, but more empathetic than this job requires - you can see the woman who can't quite bring herself to drag Iris out of the bathroom for what may be weeks in how she discreetly refuses bribes, but you can see the half-second when she considers whether cutting some entitled rich jerk down to size. There's a neat group of supporting characters - Jörg Schüttauf in how he sours from a man who just wants his dog, Siir Eloglu as the building manager who seems quite nice until it's time to throw someone out, Mina Sadic as a fellow staffer who knows just how precarious her family's position is - and I find myself with a weird, special fondness for Pola Geiger, who spends most of the film capturing the film's central absurdity and desperation behind a locked door and is a surprise when she finally emerges.

It's an incredibly smart, confident movie under any circumstances - that it's a student film made during a pandemic makes Natalia Sinelnikova someone to watch even more closely.

This Week Month in Tickets: 2 March 2020 - 29 March 2020

It's been an unusual month, to say the least.









It starts normal enough, heading into the Somerville Theatre for Portrait of a Lady on Fire because I'd dilly-dallied a bit in seeing in and figured it might not be around when I got back (foreshadowing!). If you need another reminder of just how long March has been, this was also a day or two after star Adèle Haenel walked out of the Césars after seeing Polanski get an award.

The next day was the Massachusetts primary, and I voted early but didn't get the result I'd like, and then I spent the next couple days packing, getting laundry done, stocking up on comics and reading material before getting on the first of a couple planes and flying to New Zealand for vacation. Thing I didn't know when I got to the airport - you need a visa to travel to New Zealand from the United States, which the travel guide I bought a couple months earlier said was not the case! Fortunately, you can do this online more or less instantly, and then it's fly to LAX and then lose Friday while flying over the Pacific Ocean and across the international date line, to get to Auckland and learn how seriously they take biosecurity there. No outside food allowed in, and you'd better declare anything made of wood, because it might have insect eggs and island nations with fragile native life do not cotton to invasive species.



The only stop I really had the energy for that first day was the Maritime Museum, which includes (among many other nifty things) the "Black Magic", the boat with which the Kiwis won the America's Cup. I remember the Cup used to be kind of a big thing back in the 1980s - it would be reported on the national news, highlights would play after the late local news, people could name the captains, and so on. For yachting! Three or four channels on the TV, and they had room for yachting! I'd see America's Cup souvenir stores around the country a couple times on this trip, and I'm not sure whether it's weird that we ever cared about it or that we stopped or that other people didn't.



The big stop on Sunday was the Auckland War Memorial Museum, which I was delighted to see was not even primarily a military museum; apparently the veterans being honored for their service in World War I wanted something that did more than just elevate soldiering, so it became the site of the Auckland Museum, full of natural history and the like. It's also downright beautiful, located at the very center of one of Auckland's many extinct volcanoes with space around it that similar institutions don't have in other cities I've visited. It's near the really delightful Wintergarden and some really lovely parks as well.



Monday was the first of a couple day trips in a row, this one toward the south where the Hobbiton Movie Set can be found, and for as much as I joked with people about how I'm not a huge fan but knew that if I went to New Zealand without visiting this set I'd never hear the end of it, it's really a charming tourist attraction. It's a tour, so that people don't try to mess with things too much, but one that highlights just how much craft went into these movies and how fortunate Jackson was to find everything he needed in one place.



Next up was Te Puia, a site with a bunch of geysers and mudholes and other nifty geothermal things as well as a Maori cultural center that I unfortunately didn't get to see enough of because I spent so much time on the geology, and my heart genuinely sunk a bit when I realized, oh, there's just enough time to get back to the bus now. It's funny how quickly you can get used to the smell of sulphur.



Last stop of the day was the Waitomo Glowworm Caves, which don't allow photography inside because flashes and lights mess with the creatures in question, but it's a great set of caves (always look up) with an amazing finale as you pass through the crazy, semi-cannibalistic ecosystem in question.

Fun: One of the people on the tour was from Waltham, and came over on the same set of flights as I did. Small world, eh?



The next day was another tour, and not quite as much fun - it was longer on the bus, the driver wouldn't stop talking even when there was just more trees and I just wanted to read my book, and then when we got to the Bay of Islands, we were scheduled too tightly to look around much on our own, let alone get food not supplied by the tour company (which I never picked up, because I not going to go out of my way to grab a bag lunch with a chicken salad sandwich even if there's also a soda and a cookie in there). Also, the first stop for me, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, felt like the tour was pitched toward kids even though my 46-year-old self was the youngest person in the group, although that may just be how Maori speak, with heavy emphasis and storytelling flair. Taika Waititi is the only real exposure a lot of us have to the Maori outside of New Zealand, and you see a little bit of that in his work, but it's kind of filtered.

One thing I came out of this trip fascinated with is how the country's formative document - their Declaration of Independence or Magna Carta - is a treaty between the British and the native people. On the one hand, colonialism is kind of baked right into the country, but on the other, it certainly seems to put those native people in a much better position, even a couple hundred years later, than those in other countries.



Next up, a cruise around the Bay of Islands where I learned that you apparently get sunburned much worse in the Southern Hemisphere than you do north of the equator, particularly here, as there's some very thin ozone above Australia & New Zealand. Fun!

I didn't get many great pictures of the orcas we saw, but, still, we saw them breaching, and that's apparently rare enough that the crew of the boat who take this trip every day all came up on deck to take pictures and gawk, so that was cool.

(I was hungry enough when I got back to the hotel to hit both a steakhouse which is so no-nonsense that you basically point to a slice of meat and say "that, medium rare" and an ice cream place that is fantastically elaborate.)



I planned to take the ferry to one of the islands near Auckland with cool caves the next day, but they are very limited, so I wound up going to Devonport, which has a fair amount of cool things to see, like North Head, an extinct volcano on which defensive encampments were built, and while a lot of the tunnels were still closed off, it was still basically walking around a secret base inside a volcano, which can't help make you feel a little like James Bond



I flew to Wellington on Wednesday, and was kind of regretting that I only gave myself 24 hours there when I saw people surfing right next to the airport. It took a bit of doing to get to my AirBNB - sometimes you just can't data for your phone at first in a new city, so my plans to use public transportation were clobbered - and then heading to the downtown area was another adventure, as Google Maps said "walk this short distance and then take this bus for 45 minutes", not really indicating well that said short distance on the map was all uphill and all switchbacks, and then the bus route went through a lot of one-lane/two-way streets and hugged cliff faces and was, let us say, exciting.

At the end, though was Te Papa, the national museum, which included an exhibit on Gallipoli that featured some amazing work from the nearby WETA workshop and genuine World War I 3-D photography which is just, like, pandering to me directly.



After that, I decided to try out the cable car, because as in San Francisco and Hong Kong, when a city incorporates roller coasters into their public transit, you've got to try that out. Not nearly as hair-raising as the earlier bus ride by a long shot, and it was late enough in the day that the only things open at the top were a nice botanical garden, but it genuinely seems to be used as regular transit (unlike SF) and the light shows in the tunnels were cool.



Not many photos allowed inside the WETA cave, which is a fun visit though you're not going to see a lot of actual work going on, though there are some neat demonstrations. If you've got an AirBNB next to that spot, though, it's a good thing to visit in the before-eleven-AM hours before you have to leave your accomodations and head to the harbor so that you can take a ferry across the Cook Strait, mainly so that you can say you took the ferry across the Cook Strait.

It's not necessarily the best idea; I apparently took the less reliable one, so it got delayed by about an hour, and then instead of just giving you your luggage at the dock, you've got to get on shuttle buses to the line's office in Picton, but the transportation to Blenheim, the other large city in Marlborough, is back by where you disembarked, so you get back on the shuttle buses, by which time the last train has left and the app which seems to show a bus has actually sold you a ticket from Blenheim to Picton, and there really aren't any taxis around, so you wind up getting the customer service people at the other other ferry line to call you an accessibility shuttle… Basically, these two cities really have only two big attractions between them other than the wineries, and since the season for that is close to over, the infrastructure that supports tourists pretty much shuts down.



On the other hand, that one tourist attraction in Blenheim, the Omaka Aviation Heritage Center, is kind of awesome if you like old planes. See that ca. 1940 Boeing Stearman? I got to fly in that for ten minutes, and it was amazing. The braver folks (with a bit more money) could fly in a MiG that does aerobatics, which I heard as much as saw later in the day, and which might be quite a thing.

Fair warning, if you're doing this as close to the off-season as I was without cars - it was a pleasant 4.4km walk from my rental, which is not something I do every day, and there was precious little to do in town afterward. I wound up looking for the nearest movie theater and seeing Bloodshot there, both because it was getting "things are closed but it's not early enough to sleep" late and because I've been reading dispatches from home about people being told to stay home and theaters closing, so I figured, might as well!

Sunday is when things started to get kind of surreal - there weren't any direct flights from Marlborough to Christchurch, so I had to go to the Blenheim airport (where I just printed my boarding pass, dropped off my luggage, and was waved onto the tarmac like in pre-9/11 times), fly back to Wellington, wait to transfer, and then fly across the strait again and further south.



One of the neat things about Christchurch is that one of the most interesting attractions there is actually connected to the airport, the International Antarctic Center. That's where many scientists and service employees leave for McMurdo and other bases, and the place is fun - you can ride in the tractors they use there, look at rescued penguins, and experience a room that drops to freezing temperatures with eighteen-degree wind chill, which is apparently a novelty to Kiwi kids. I opted not to enter what is basically a "walk to the subway station" simulator.



The art installation above is not actually part of the "Quake City" museum, but it's a striking first glimpse for me of how the 2011 earthquake has left its mark on the city even almost ten years later. It's been rebuilt but you still see scars and public art reflecting it all over. It's a thing that makes visiting this city at this time a little more specific than the typical visit. Ten years ago, it was very different; ten years from now, there's a good chance that the quake will be less visible and the cathedral will be repaired. Hopefully not too much, though, because it's a very charming city.



I capped Monday off in the Canterbury Museum, which has moa skeletons and is generally a terrific picture of the area's history, from the modern to an area replicating a turn-of-the-20th-century street to Maori displays all the way back to mock-ups of what the giant penguins and parrots ("Squawkzilla!") who used to live there would have looked like. Seriously, I think a 1.5m parrot would have wrecked me.

It was a strange last couple days of vacation, though - I started to see signs that things were being called off locally as I arrived in Christchurch, the social-media postings and news from home got much more aligned in focusing on Covid-19 and self-isolation, and maybe crowds were becoming a bit more sparse even as the newspapers I saw in restaurants were just starting to mention cases showing up on the South Island. You start to wonder whether you're being irresponsible going out rather than just staying in your rental and wondering just what you'll do if you can't get home, because even though you feel fine and NZ is in much better shape than the USA is, there are not-bright people in important positions back home. By the time I got to the Christchurch airport on Tuesday morning, there are announcements of mandatory 14-day isolation for everyone entering the country.

Tuesday is a long day - I left the rental at 7:30am New Zealand time, flew to Auckland, then to LAX, where the immigration and transfer process is 75 minutes in sometimes very crowded conditions, then to Reagan/Washington, and then finally to Logan, with the airports becoming progressively more deserted and with many of the vendors and spots to eat shut down despite it being what are normally peak hours. There are a dozen or so people on a plane meant to carry 125, and the flight attendant mentions that they'll probably keep flying because of cargo contracts and mentions something that I'm going to have to write a heist script around. Eventually, after 30 hours, I get home at 10:30pm and it's still Tuesday. I haven't slept, deliberately, so I drop.

I'm mostly able to get up at the regular time on Wednesday, and though we're meant to work from home, I left all of my work stuff at the office. Quiet and not quiet enough. The theaters are closed, which is good, because I am weak and would have justified going to see Onward in 3D because, hey, nobody likes to sit up front with me anyway.

After that, there was a week of getting un-jet-lagged, getting caught up on Picard and the contents of my DVR, and so on, before the Coolidge started its virtual screening room, where over the next few days I'd catch Fantastic Fungi, The Whistlers, and Bacurau, the latter preceded by "The Haunted Swordsman", which would have been part of the Boston Underground Film Festival, except, well, cancelled.

More stuff coming on my Letterboxd page, although who knows when there will be more things taped to the scrapbook? The next few months are going to be weird.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 March 2020 in Somerville Theatre #3 (first-run, DCP)

I don't know that I really responded that much to the romance in this film, but I do remember the jolt toward the end when we see a man for the first time in a couple of hours and it feels like a trespass, a violation of the world that the women involved have built for themselves. There's a level on which the return of the Countess from her trip would trigger the same thing - Marianne, Heloise, and Sophie had seemingly lived without class barriers and hierarchy during their absence, and this would force them into rigid roles again - and it makes one wonder just how entwined the two are. The sadness to this picture is maybe not so much that the relationship must end, but that the world that allowed it to flourish must disappear as well.

Before that, though, it's beautiful, people circling each other warily but never uncertainly, with director Céline Sciamma and her crew staging each scene with beauty but not ostentatiously so. Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel are both genuinely terrific and they've got Luàna Bajrami and Valeria Golino to provide counters, grounded in their world in different ways.

It's not quite the sort of melodrama I'm completely able to get wrapped up in, but I suspect that anybody a single quantum more romantic than I will be all in.

The Whistlers

Back "at" the Virtual Coolidge Corner Theatre last night, planning for a double feature but not realizing that the second half would be fairly long. That will be tonight's entertainment, as it's scheduled to be around for longer than this one. It's worth noting that Magnolia is donating the entirety of your virtual ticket sale to the Coolidge (or, if you live in some other metropolitan area, the local independent cinema of your choice), so that's a pretty good way to help keep them going while getting an hour and a half of decent entertainment.

I must admit, the way I thought about the movie and wrote the review shifted more than a little bit when I decided to go and see what else I'd written about the director's previous films, particularly his previous film about cops and crime and surveillance, and saw that star Vlad Ivanov was also in Police, Adjective - and suddenly his supervisor's reference to his being "the boss" back when something else happened in another city clicked into place. It's not a perfect connection - Sabin Tambrea would in that case be playing a character played by someone else in the previous movie, and it's a bit odd that the lead characters in both movies are both named "Cristi", although Ivanov's character was apparently only given a surname in Police, Adjective (which is mentioned here). That the two are potentially in the same continuity isn't actually important, in that I got through it without confusion despite there being no references, and may just be a fun easter egg for those who saw the two ten years apart to pick up on.

Still, I can't exactly un-see the connection now that I've seen it, and now I am tempted to go back and re-watch to see just to what extent it makes sense as this movie's backstory, and whether or not it should color how I view this one - did it enhance what disappointment I felt compared to the clever bits I like, make me wish that things that had been alluded to was given more time, or anything else?

Well, it's not like we don't have time.

La Gomera (The Whistlers)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 28 March 2020 in Jay's Living Room (Coolidge Corner Theatre Virtual Screening Room, Vimeo)

For all that some rightly complain about filmmakers being pigeonholed, there are times when filmmakers seem to do it to themselves. Take The Whistlers, which has a clever premise for a heist, a nice cast, and an intriguingly twisted network of surveillance and corruption - and a writer/director in Corneliu Porumboiu who seemingly can't be satisfied to just make an entertaining genre movie. He acknowledges their appeal, references them, and otherwise sets up bits of meta-commentary, but doesn't capture the actual excitement of such movies.

Which is odd, because while Porumboiu's previous films have fit comfortably into art-house niches - they are restrained and often built around people talking dispassionately, somewhere between arch and dry - they have seldom been dull. His work has always had a sly wit and a way of circling around the point he was looking to make like a tiger ready to pounce before methodically disassembling their prey. The Whistlers occasionally drops hints that it's a sequel to one of those movies - Police, Adjective is referenced in a couple of oblique ways - although it's more something to investigate afterward than necessary prerequisite.

This one opens with Inspector Cristi Anghelache (Vlad Ivanov) arriving at La Gomera in the Canary Islands, there to meet Gilda (Catrinel Marlon) and learn the local "whistling language", which will play a part in Gilda's scheme to break her partner Zsolt (Sabin Tambrea) out of prison. She warns Cristi that what went on back in Bucharest was just her playing for the surveillance cameras. And there were plenty there, as Cristi did his best to work both sides while investigating how Zsolt was apparently using his mattress factory to launder drug money - though who isn't, as Zsolt was caught in part by lead detective Magda (Rodica Lazar) encouraging Cristi and partner Alin (George Pistereanu) to plant evidence.

Full review on EFilmCritic

The Treasure

I think this is the first time I've been back to the Belmont Studio since they were closed down for a few months last year, and I sort of wonder if during that time they removed the nicer seats and put them in West Newton, leaving the ones without cupholders here. I distinctly remember there being cupholders, because I used one to hold my burrito the last time. But now, now cupholders, and the affiliated burrito place next door is no more. Bummer, because it's a tiny lobby with limited concession options, and I was hungry.

I was out there for Belmont World Film, which is a neat little even that was kind of homeless last year. It was pretty crowded for that lobby, with a lot of local Romanians coming out for the film.

I get more impatient than I should at these sorts of screenings, where the post-film Q&A/discussion becomes a lot of rambling statements, but I'm trying to appreciate that more, hoping to be less impatient because it's not helping me with the topic at hand (the movie) and more interested in learning about other cultures in general. Not exactly succeeding (and it gets tougher when the person talking has missed something basic and there's a half hour between buses if I don't catch the next), but it's probably worth trying to get to one or two more of these this year.

(And I appear to have written this review just as the film comes off Amazon streaming. I am just generally behind this year.)

Comoara (The Treasure)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 27 March 2016 at the Belmont Studio Cinema (Belmont World Film Series, digital)

Even the titles of Corneliu Porumboiu's best-known recent films - 12:08 Easy of Bucharest and Police, Adjective - are focused on a sort of precision that can sometimes be maddening and The Treasure, ("Comoara" in the original Romanian) certainly starts out that way, hitting the audience right off the bat with a pair of the sort of conversations about minutiae that just don't happen outside of art-house films. It does eventually loosen up into a deadpan comedy, but that humor might not be enough for some considering the painstaking steps Porumboiu takes to get there.

The film centers on Costi Toma (Toma Cuzin), who is getting by a bit better than many in Bucharest, but still doesn't have enough money to float his neighbor Adrian Negoescu (Adrian Purcarescu) the loan he asks for. Not at first, at least; when Negoescu finally explains that his great-grandfather buried valuables on the family estate before it was sized by the communists (with the land only returned to the descendants relatively recently), Costi grows interested and scrapes enough together to hire a guy with access to a metal detector. Once he has stated along the path, the operation becomes more questionable - the government tends to seize anything with historical and cultural significance (interpreted broadly), and the details of Negoescu's story seem to become a little less favorable with each telling.

Costi is detail-oriented and basically honest, which would seem to be about half-useful in terms of this particular scheme. It also gives the film a dry sort of start as he initiates protracted discussions with both his son Alin (Nicodim Toma) and Negoescu about things that seem extremely extraneous. That Toma Cuzin and Porumboiu opt to underplay the character initially seems like a curious choice - there are beats that, if emphasized, could give Costi a stronger personality or make what's slow going more dramatic - but it pays off later on when the audience is able to get a fuller picture: We see a man who is curious but not obsessive, on the lookout for opportunity but not necessarily greedy, and mostly level-headed and conciliatory. That kind of man is not usually an exciting character, and though it describes most in the audience, viewers don't necessarily identify with him because they tend to grab on to something that sticks out. Still, by the time the film is over, an affection has likely developed for this man; Cuzin and Porumboiu have quietly brought his virtues to the fore, even if they are sometimes well-disguised.

Full review on EFC.

Beyond the Hills

Plenty more I'd like to say about this one, but it ends in Boston (well, Cambridge) today and I need some sleep before work. I do strongly recommend it, though - it covers some fairly familiar ground with what I think is unusual grace, far mroe than I could manage when talking about its subjects (religion, sexuality, mental illness), and leaves an impressive amount for the audience to at least feel like they're figuring out themselves.

One thing I will mention is that I did look original author Tatiana Niculescu Bran up on Wikipedia, and it was interesting from the descriptions of her "non-fiction novels" to see how much Mungiu left out, but sort of didn't. It looks like the end of his movie shifts the ambiguity around a little:

SPOILERS!

In the description of the books, who is ultimately responsible for Alina's death appears to be vague, with the hospital staff taking potentially dishonest steps to absolve themselves of the blame, causing the priest and nuns to be imprisoned for murder; the film appears to place the blame much more squarely on the exorcism but leaves the ultimate fate of the clergy up in the air, the implication being that the church is too much a part of society for them to completely take the fall.

!SRELIOPS

At any rate, it's worth checking out, even if it is a bit of a long one.

Dupa dealuri (Beyond the Hills)

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 9 April 2013 in Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run, 2K DCP)

Beyond the Hills is a slow builder, with writer/director Christian Mungiu's point almost never in doubt. He knows, though, that you don't change someone's beliefs with one bold demonstration, especially if it's built on a premise that the audience doesn't necessarily believe, so he spends his time nudging, not seeming to do anything big, until finally stepping back, having attacked points that are often far from subtle obliquely but still creating something engrossing.

Things start quietly, with Alina (Christina Flutur) returning to her home village in Romania after having lived in Germany after aging out of an orphanage. She's met by her best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), who stayed behind to enter a convent. Though Alina protected Voichita when they were children, she is the one who seems fragile now, begging her friend to return abroad with her. Voichita would like to help Alina, but she has found a home in the monastery, and the priest in charge (Valeriu Andriuta) demands her commitment to God be total.

There's a wonderful shot early on in this movie where Alina and Voichita walk away from the town toward the convent which, despite taking them up a mountain, feels like sailing away from a shoreline - the clumped-together buildings a land mass with a very definitive border. The landscape becomes important again toward the end, as mounting snow makes the environment more perilous, despite there not being talk of a storm. I wonder if this is fortuitous or deliberate - the film was shot in sequence, so the filmmakers may have just taken the weather they got and made it work - but it's impressive how Mungiu works these perhaps less-obvious characteristics of the setting more than well-worn ones. He could have had the nuns using horses or donkeys to travel to and from the town to mark their home as a place stuck in the past, for instance.

Full review on eFilmCritic.

Sense of Place: Tales from the Golden Age, Small Town Murder Songs, and Sedona

There's a good entry to be written about the three very specific places where these films take place, but it's been the better part of a month since I saw some of them and would like to get to plowing through a few other things. So let's pretend I did before I start binging on TWIT stuff, okay?

Amintiri din epoca de aur (Tales from the Golden Age)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 December 2011 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement)

When Cristian Mungiu last took audiences to Romania before the fall of communism, he gave us the tense, oppressive 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days; it seldom referenced the Ceaușescu regime directly, but still managed to perfectly evoke what a terrifying prospect having the government poking into every aspect of one's life must be. A single challenge can, perhaps, be met with pluck and determination, but Tales from the Golden Age suggests, in witty fashion, that getting through it on a daily basis requires a healthy sense of the absurd, and retells (with the help of several other Romanian directors) six urban legends that, back in the day, were only whispered.

In the first, "The Legend of the Official Visit", a small village spends days preparing for a motorcade with an important Party official to pass through town, changing plans based on what they hear from previous stops and the whims of a pair of advance scouts. It's a fun little character piece, with Alexandru Potocean making a fine straight man as Gheorghita, the mayor's aide tasked with actually pulling everything together. By the time this section reaches its conclusion, it has jumped onto a metaphor that doesn't quite match its story, but still delivers a fitting punchline before the screen of text explaining how legend has the story ending.

That's somewhat the pattern with the next segment, "The Legend of the Party Photographer", in which the nervous title character (Avram Birau) and his assistant (Paul Dunca) are charged with snapping a picture of Ceaușescu meeting with a French diplomat - and perhaps more importantly, retouching it so that it sends the proper message to the workers who will be seeing it in the paper. Of all the segments, it's perhaps the easiest for outsiders to digest - it attacks an easy target, and does so like a well-oiled machine, with an especially good contrast between its two leads, who (along with Mungiu) don't just make them stock characters, but inject a serious darkness into their contrasting personalities. I suspect the reasons for that contrast are what help "Party Photographer" resonate later; of all the stories, it probably maps to other times and places best.

Full review at EFC.

Small Town Murder Songs

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 5 December 2011 at the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché)

A body is found at the beginning of Small Town Murder Songs, but the identity of the dead girl isn't that important. This, after all, is the sort of movie that is less about the victim or perpetrator of a crime than the man notionally charged with solving it. Peter Stormare can handle that sort of focus, but it might perhaps have been nice for there to be a little more to the film.

Stormare plays Walter, the Mennonites chief of police in an Ontario farming town. A girl's body has been found up by the lake, and there are few enough leads that Walter starts to focus on Steve (Eric McIntyre), a shady character he saw in the area the night of the murder. But is this because Steve is a genuinely viable suspect, or because he's shacked up with Walter's ex Rita (Jill Hennessy)? Walter may be a pious man now, but his anger has certainly gotten the better of him in the past.

Though it's an invstigation that moves things forward; Small Town Murder Songs isn't really a mystery; it moves in a pretty straight line and there aren't nearly enough suspects or twists to make it a game worth playing along with. Instead, the investigation is an engine that pushes Walter to the next place we need to see him, with scattered flashbacks and asides doing more to explain the path that led him to this particular point in his life rather than the crime he's trying to figure out. Those are only doled out in piecemeal fashion, of course; writer-director Ed Gass-Donnelly probably figures that too many specific, clear bits of cause-and-effect would make Walter seem less human and more like just a purpose-built character.

Full review at EFC.

Sedona

* ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 December 2011 at the Brattle Theatre (CineCaché)

Since it has already screened, the description for Sedona is no longer on the Brattle Theatre's website for reference, but it included the words "quirky", "spiritual", "magical", and "miracles". Well, at least three of the four. Now, there's nothing wrong with any of those, but line enough of them up - and use them as selling points, as opposed to things for the audience to discover - and there's a good chance that the movie is trying way too hard.

Sedona, Arizona, certainly is a pretty town, set amid some awe-inspiring scenery, which is why Scott (Seth Peterson), his partner Eddie (Matthew J. Williamson), and sons Denny (Trevor Sterling Stovall) and Jeremy (Rand Schwenke) are there on vacation, even if Scott is the sort who tends to bring his work and Blackberry along with him. Tammy (Frances Fisher), on the other hand, aims to just pass through on her way to an important sales presentation in Phoenix. However, when Denny wanders away from his family and Tammy gets involved in a truly bizarre automobile accident, they wind up dealing with more of the town and its residents than they'd planned.

Sedona is the sort of movie that is built on coincidence that occasionally works as serendipity, which is okay to a certain extent. The trouble is, writer/director/producer/editor Tommy Stovall seems to think that it rises to the level of destiny or magic, something that happens because Sedona is so very special, and that's not something it earns by a long shot. The natives talk a lot about "the vortexes" in a way that makes one wonder if they know the meaning of the word.as well as a fair amount of other mystical mumbo-jumbo that maybe resonates with the residents but ends up just piling contrivance on top of bad decision. Oh, Stovall and his movie have a sense of humor about it at times - some of the goofier residents come in for a ribbing - but lots of characters, like the astrologist/pedicurist played by Beth Grant, are apparently meant to be taken seriously.

Full review at EFC.

This Week In Tickets: 25 January 2010 to 31 January 2010

Unreal. I go pretty much all last year without losing a ticket stub, and this year I've lost two in the first month. I'm guessing that this one either wound up tossed in the trash with the little slip the concession stand at AMC Boston Common gives you so that you can claim your mozzarella sticks when they come out of the kitchen, or somehow slipped out when Matt and I went to the Elephant & Castle for lunch. There was a lot of paper moving around there.

I managed to keep a lid on a minor horrified reaction when I gave Matt the Red Sox tickets I got him and his finacée for Christmas, because he placed them in his wallet and folded them. They're going to be in rough shape three months ago, when the time comes to actually use them.



(It's a little amusing that the piece of paper that tells you how many MovieWatcher points you have - 393, a neat trick considering you get two per movie - has an exhortation to join MovieWatcher. Since that's the one I got when watching Edge of Darkness, it can sub for its ticket stub.)

Mostly empty space, since the Friday night Mystery Team with filmmakers in attendance was sold out by the time I got there, and the Chlotrudis Society nomination meeting ran long enough for me to miss Saturday's. It was fun, although I'll have to get there earlier next time, as when there are only a few seats left to choose from, the already-high probability of being caught in the middle of a conversation about cats climbs frighteningly close to certainty. Here's the results; sometime later this week I'll post my thoughts on them compared to the Oscar list.

One thing I'm a little disappointed that I missed was the AfterDark horror fest; unfortunately, it's just too difficult to get out to Revere for movies that, at least in recent years, have been far under the radar. The year it was at Fresh Pond, I actually went to Fresh Pond for quite a bit of it, but I'm kind of surprised that they can't get it booked someplace closer to Boston proper than Revere. Does it really draw such a small crowd that the Somerville, Arlington Capitol, Fresh Pond, Harvard Square Cinema, and the Coolidge all figure they're better off not giving it a screen? If so, I'd be surprised if they had any sort of theatrical release before the DVD release next year.

Edge of Darkness

* * * (out of four)
Seen 31 January 2010 at AMC Boston Common #10 (first-run)

Based upon the previews to this, I wondered a couple of things: Did Mel Gibson listen to anything but Kennedy speeches while working on his Boston accent? If so, bad choice, because I don't believe that anyone outside that family actually speaks that way. Also, how much Ray Winstone are we going to see, because he looked aces in the previews.

I suspect that there was more of Winstone's character in the original BBC miniseries, and not just because six hours of time lets you see more of everybody. At times we seem to be a bit too aware of the streamlining; it's the sort of movie where they'll show the villains discussing something and then cut to Gibson's Thomas Craven knowing it. It's not that he couldn't; it's just that you can see the filmmakers trying to save a little time.

It's a good role for Mel Gibson, who has been laying low for a while; he plays this sort of tough guy well. For much of the movie, I was thinking that it was too bad he hasn't played Mike Hammer (yet), as the plot of the movie reminded me of Kiss Me Deadly: Detective who tends to work as a blunt object winding up way over his head, dealing with conspiracies and nasty nuclear material. It works in large part because Gibson does great hard-boiled; give him a line filled with pulp and he will sell the heck out of it. And while I imagine that you could cut Winstone's character, I'm glad they didn't, because the scenes of them together are gold; two different varieties of tough guy who understand and respect each other, and thus aren't trying to outdo one another.

Police, Adjective

At one point, I wasn't sure I was going to get to this. I missed the Chlotrudis screening earlier in the week (I just can't do Monday movies, it seems), and the snow came down like crazy on the bus ride from Waltham to Cambridge; crazy wind and the amount of white stuff just jumped. Must have been a passing squall, though. This, naturally, comes just a couple days after the temperature climbed high enough to melt what snow was left on the ground. New England weather.

I don't have much to say about this that isn't in the review, other than mentioning that the similarity between this film's last act and that of the director's previous work, 12:08 East of Bucharest, didn't really occur to me until I did a quick scan of eFilmCritic to see if I'd reviewed that one. It really is kind of striking, now that I think of it. I may keep it in my pocket as ammunition for tomorrow's Chlotrudis nomination meeting for when people make the inevitable drive-by comments on Avatar (and I know they'll be coming; even otherwise classy, intelligent people can't resist trying to imply that they're better than the rabble by making snarky comments about something popular). See, this art-house guy is kind of a one-trick pony too; you just happen to like that trick.

Speaking of which, I should go fill out my nomination form. Sadly, I don't think Police, Adjective pushes me quite to the 110-eligible-movie level, so I'll only get 21 nominations per category rather than 22. I will attempt to use them for good.

Including nominating Sam Rockwell for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in one of my favorite movies of the year - because I can and he deserves it!

Politist, adj. (Police, Adjective)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 28 January 2010 at Landmark Kendall Square #5 (first-run)

The title of Police, Adjective comes from a scene almost at the end of the movie, and based upon the definitions read out in that scene, it's interesting that the film was not named "Police, Noun" or "Police, Verb", at least if one is into self-referentiality. The first description of the world "police" as an adjective refers to a type of movie, and while this one technically fits the category, it tends to focus on different aspects of police-work than the typical procedural.

Cristi (Dragos Bucur) is a young detective in a smallish Romanian city. He is currently assigned to tail Victor (Radu Costin), a high-school student whose smokes a bit of hash with a couple of friends, one of whom - Alex (Alexandru Sabadac) - has ratted him out to the police, saying Victor's brother supplies him. Cristi has been following Victor for a week, and though he figures that they technically have enough to bust the kid for distribution, he doesn't want to move in with a sting just yet: It doesn't net him the brother they figure is the real dealer, there's something off about why Alex would squeal, and, besides, why bother when no other country in Europe prosecutes for this anyway?

While most procedurals involve surveillance and stake-outs to some extent, they tend to focus on the moment when something is about to happen, or play up the stultifying boredom of it by showing time passing. Writer/director Corneliu Porumboiu takes a different tack here, giving us many scenes of Cristi taking up a spot in the background while the teenagers do their thing, then wordlessly following as he trails them. Proumboiu and cinematographer Marius Panduru frame things carefully, almost exquisitely, to keep the tail on one side of the screen while the person being followed is at the other edge. We pick out tradecraft without being told - how Cristi tries to keep another person between himself and his target, or how to allay suspicion when a third party starts noticing that he's hanging around. It's an intriguing combination of interesting and tedious, and even though the we aren't given the message directly, we start to notice how just how much time and resources are being spent on this one kid.

Despite the precision present in how Porumboiu presents his police-work, in many ways it is the other half of the title that he is truly concerned with. Not adjectives specifically, but language. The above-mentioned scene between Cristi and his boss (Vlad Ivanov) is, in some ways, the culmination of others where characters ask each other to speak plainly, or Cristi and his wife Anca (Irina Saulescu) debating the meaning to a song's lyrics. There's another scene between them where she points out that out that the grammar in his report is out of date, that what had been two words was now supposed to be one, according to the Romanian Academy. So when all is said and done, we've got the curious idea that laws are made out of language, but language itself can change for political reasons.

That's something to chew on, although even without the way the dialogue occasionally goes into oddly formal territory, it's interesting to watch these debates play out on the face of Bucur's Cristi. Bucur doesn't feel the need to do much to ingratiate Cristi with the audience, allowing the character to come off as fussy or demanding. There's the constant implication that Cristi is smart, but in a bit over his head, and even if the audience doesn't always quite warm to the man, we can find ourselves empathizing with him about his questions, even as we sometimes have trouble deciding whether they are emotional or intellectual. He's given good characters to play against, too - Irina Saulescu manages both intellectualism and warmth as Cristi's wife, while Ion Stoica is a simple presence as the fellow officer he shares an office with. And while I believe that Ivanov only has that one scene, it's a big, meaty one that he absolutely dominates.

I notice, upon re-reading what I wrote about 12:08 East of Bucharest, Porumboiu's previous film, that it too was built around one big scene, staged in a fairly similar way: What amounts to a long-held shot of three men involved in a relatively formal discussion. It's a format that works for him, apparently, although I think it works better here because the scenes leading up to it are much more focused - there can be no doubt that this is Cristi's story - and it leads directly to a conclusion. Indeed, what could be a stiff, purely intellectual story winds up somewhat fascinating by how well Porumboiu and Bucur put us in Cristi's shoes.

It still winds up being rather on the formal side; those looking for a conventional crime movie will likely be disappointed. It offers plenty of food for thought for those with a fair amount of patience, though, whether it be ethical or intellectual.

Also at EFC

Lightning round: February 2008

Stuff has started falling out the back of my brain, so it's time to do some capsules and then see which ones expand themselves into full reviews. President's Day weekend was kind of a cruncher - something like 11 films at the sci-fi marathon, the Academy Award shorts, and three other features. My brain just can't store that many details about that many movies.

Evil Dead 2

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 1 February 2008 in Jay's Living Room (Blu-ray Disc)

At last count, I think I've purchased something like four copies of this movie - one on VHS, two on DVD, and this one on Blu-ray Disc. I knew from reading reviews of the disc that it probably doesn't look as great as it could, so there's a good chance that copy #5 could be in the future when Anchor Bay inevitably issues another edition. It doesn't look bad - far from it! - but the quality of the transfer is a bit wonky. There are some sections which look too bright, with the result that it looks more like a set than a real place. Not that I'll likely go back to the DVD very often, but it's a tad disappointing.

I'll probably watch it again sometime in the next few months because watching it again reminded me that this is a really weird movie. Army of Darkness, the musical, the comics that have played up the comedy, and the whole Monty Python-ish cult that has sprung up around this movie makes one tend to think of it as funny, but the first half hour to forty-five minutes plays the absurdity as much as a descent into madness as slapstick, especially considering how it is, for the most part, just Bruce Campbell in the cabin. The parallel universe version of this film is Ash as a murderous, hallucinating madman, and you wouldn't have to change the first half of the movie very much at all to get it.

The rest of the movie is more straight-ahead, and it's amazing to see how good Sam Raimi was at action and comedy, and how to mix the two without either of them suffering, so early in his career. It really is amazing how many different styles and approaches Raimi used in this movie, and it's the mark of a fine, under-appreciated director that he fuses them into his own style rather than making it feel like a jumbled mess.

Let's Get Lost

* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2008 at the Brattle Theatre (Special Engagement)

I suspect a biopic with Nick Nolte playing Chet Baker would be a huge hit in Europe. This documentary does a lot of the basics - the humble beginnings, the testimonials from fellow musicians, the stories of drug abuse and infidelity. What makes it unusual, I think, is the way it so baldly portrays the tremendous, sometimes humiliating loyalty that genius inspires in people.

Because there's no redemptive portion here. Baker's death came soon after Let's Get Lost was shot, but more than that, there's a gut punch about a half an hour or so into the film, when a former mistress talks for a while about Chet, clearly still very fond of him, and then finishes it off by flatly saying what a selfish bastard he is. Then there's the ex-wife, a former English beauty queen, living in Baker's native Oklahoma with their kids, blithely acting like Baker will be back someday.

Then there's Baker himself, his face and body imploded from years of indulgence and self-destruction. He still has admirers and talent, but there's not much else of him left. Even the music chosen to score the film is lonely, as he switches between trumpet and raspy vocals.

And yet, the women in his life still pine for him, despite everything.

Night Moves

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2008 at the Harvard Film Archive (Arthur Penn in person)

I first heard of Night Moves in GAMES magazine, which used it to introduce a chess puzzle similar to the game that Gene Hackman's Harry Moseby studies at various points in the film. He's looking at it as being about missed opportunities and not being able to see what's in front of one's own face as his marriage falls apart and the full facts of the case he's working on are often just out of reach.

Night Moves is a nifty little crime story with a few extra things going on. Part of what's really neat about it is the way it shifts back and forth between detection and drama. We follow a trail with Moseby as he tracks down a missing girl, but then we watch them for a bit as the crime story simmers in the background before it bursts back into the foreground. During the discussion, director Arthur Penn mentioned how proud he was of the finale, which eschews exposition for showing the audience the answers visually, and it is a very welcome change.

The movie also has a fantastic cast - Gene Hackman had a number of great roles during the seventies, and this is right up there. Jennifer Warren is similarly terrific as the mystery woman he meets while looking for a missing girl. We also get early roles from Melanie Griffith and James Woods, which is extra fun, in part because of how James Woods has always been James Woods; even back in his mid-twenties, he had the sort of scuzzy, sarcastic persona figured out.

Mickey One

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 2 February 2008 at the Harvard Film Archive (Arthur Penn in person)

Mickey One was the second part of the Archive's Arthur Penn double feature, and it was... different. Warren Beatty plays a Detroit comedian who runs afoul of the mob, escapes to Chicago, but finds himself unable to resist getting back on stage, even though that leads to fears of the Detroit mob finding him again...

It's an interesting movie, sort of avant-garde, and Beatty and Alexandra Stewart are both pretty good in it. It does get kind of jumpy in the second half, blurring the line between what's actually happening and Mickey's fears, and the illogic of Mickey's dilemma is hard to escape. Beautiful black and white cinematography, though.

Also on the program: A short film from the 1972 Olympics ("The Hightest", part of Visions of Eight) about pole-vaulting. You never know, until you've seen it in slow motion, just how specific and non-transferable to anything else pole-vaulting skills are.

The Pursuit of Happyness

* * * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2008 in Jay's Living Room (rental Blu-ray Disc)

If Will Smith ever runs for President, I'll probably vote for him. I don't think he has yet taken on a project he couldn't handle - even his bad movies are generally bad in spite of him, rather than because of him - even when people are underestimating him. It's a quality that serves him well in Pursuit of Happyness as he drops his cool and cocky personas to play a father trying to hold it together for his son without much in the way of resources. The film wears its aspirations to inspiration on its sleeve, but Smith's a guy with the knack for making the audience believe in him, so it's pretty easy to believe in what we're seeing.

27 Dresses

* * (out of four)
Seen 3 February 2008 at Regal Fenway #13 (first-run)

... or "what I hadn't seen the night of the Super Bowl".

I like Katherine Heigl. She's built herself a solid on-screen persona; ever since Roswell she's been playing smart, excessively organized young women who are still fun to be around, and her role in 27 Dresses fits that to a tee. It's got a clever hook for a story, decent-enough actors in the supporting roles, and a fun opening sequence.

What it doesn't have, sadly, is much in the way of jokes. It's not a heavy movie, by any means, but that's not really enough to qualify as a really good romantic comedy; such a movie should probably make me laugh a lot more often than it did. And I'm not trying to pull "it's called romantic comedy" the way others pull "it's called science fiction"; having the characters make us laugh would make us root for them to end up together more.

Brothers Sklandowsky (aka A Trick of the Light)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 6 February 2008 at the Harvard Film Archive (VES free screenings)

This one was a feature presentation to go with a bunch of early silents, all of them screened on DVD, which was kind of disappointing. You'd think the HFA would have a copy of something like "Une Voyage dans la Lune", at the very least, but apparently those don't get broken out for what are basically classroom screenings to which the general public is invited.

I did rather love Wim Wenders's story of a German clan who built a motion picture camera at around the same time Edison and the Lumiere did. He and his students take plenty of liberties with the story at times, and note that they've done so, but this is really a joyous little film - the silent film pastiche is a great deal of fun, and the interview with the nonagenarian daughter of one of the brothers is one of those awe-inspiring bits where you realize just how much happened in the course of the twentieth century, over the course of just one human life. There's a kind of melancholy to it, too, as one realizes how the stories she tells will just become facts and history after she passes, rather than an experience that shaped a person and that she cherishes.

Romantico

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 10 February 2008 in Jay's Living Room (rental DVD/Chlotrudis "Buried Treasure" nominee)

More buried than treasure, I think. It's not a bad movie by any means, and it's one where I hope i'm not falling into the common documentary trap of judging a film by the importance of its subject matter rather than its own merit when I dismiss it. It is, after all, a very small film, focusing mainly on one mariachi playing for tips in San Francisco. And it does a nice enough job of that, giving voice to him and his partner in music, teaching us things we may not have known.

It doesn't take it to that next level, though, where we the audience get emotionally invested in their lives. Things that are good and bad for them are interesting, but there's never the reaction that something is particularly unjust or fortunate or surprising. Things are just how they are.

Of course, I may not have given it the fairest shake; I watched it kind of late on a Sunday evening and felt myself drifting off at times. It was also pretty clearly shot on either video or lesser film stock, and one of my first clear indications that while my Toshiba HD-A1 can make a good looking DVD look pretty decent on my HDTV, it won't do much to help a bad-looking one, and might even aggravate the situation.

Body Heat

* * * (out of four)
Seen 11 February 2008 at the Coolidge Corner #1 (Science on Screen)

Let met tell you, there's nothing that sets the stage for an erotic thriller quite like a lecture on ferret sexuality. I kid, a little; the lecture that accompanied the film as part of the Coolidge's Science on Screen series was interesting in its own right and didn't have me looking at what was going on too clinically.

The movie itself is a pretty good one; it's good old-fashioned noir set in the sweltering Florida sun. Kathleen Turner reeks of sex as the femme fatale whose body temperature runs a degree or two hotter than normal, while William Hurt hits all the right notes as the guy whose weak moral compass is completely thrown off by her. The folks in the supporting roles (notably Richard Crenna and a pre-CheersTed Danson) are also good. The plot is the sort where the audience knows what will and must happen, but the exact details are a fun surprise and likely still trashy fun even after the first viewing.

The Spiderwick Chronicles

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 February 2008 at AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)

The purpose behind this one was simple - it was the movie that I knew Paramount was attaching a trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to; I'd later get lucky and see it again with Jumper and Definitely Maybe, but I wanted to be sure.

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon, especially if you've got a kid in tow. It was a little disconcerting for me to see Freddie Highmore speaking with an American accent, but that's my problem more than the film's. The story is the usual for a kids' fantasy: Kid from broken home discovers a hidden world where he gets to be strong and important, and he ultimately gets to show his family that he's not just a crazy troublemaker. The filmmakers do it well, and they've got some better-than-expected talent tagging along in the persons of David Strathairn and Nick Nolte. Some of the fantasy settings are unexpectedly beautiful, while others are enjoyable cartoony. I have to admit, I was happily taken aback to how Seth Rogen's hobgoblin fit into the final sequence.

Good fun. And Indiana Jones is back, too.

2007 Oscar-Animated Shorts

Seen 16 February 2008 in the Coolidge Corner Theatre Screening Room (special engagement)

On the one hand, I kind of miss when the Coolidge's "We've Got Oscar's Shorts!" program was a big, special deal; on the other, it's cool more people are getting the opportunity to see these. What I really miss are the nominated documentary feature screenings that don't seem to be happening anywhere in Boston any more.

The individual shorts:

"My Love (Moya Lyubov)" - A very pretty painted piece from Russia. It's kind of long and full of people thinking of doing things rather than actually acting for an animated piece, but very nice to look at.

"Même les Pigeons vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)" - I'm pretty sure I saw this somewhere else last year, but it's one I like: A CGI short that looks like stop-motion about a con man selling an old man a tip to heaven.

"I Met the Walrus" - Cute; it's at fun idea to illustrate a rambling conversation with John Lennon this way, and although the visuals are sometimes a little on-the-nose, it's a nicely active piece that doesn't wear out its welcome.

"Madame Tutli-Putli" - One of my favorites among the bunch, a dialogue-free horror piece that has a woman confronting various freaky occurances on a train. The stop-motion animation is quite nice, and the atmosphere of lurking nastiness out to get our heroine doesn't prevent some nicely comic bits.

"Peter & The Wolf" - A deserving winner, packed with drama, comedy, and thrills, along with some terrific animation and music. It's also the rare film where another animal surpasses the duck in terms of being the charmer (I loved the blue jay).

The Draughtsman's Contract

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2008 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagement)

I might be tempted to bump this one up to three stars on a second viewing; I generally liked what I was seeing and Peter Greenaway has an absurdist sense of humor that can be a lot of fun. It was kind of a log day, though, and my mind was kind of wandering toward the end, and I really had no idea what was going on as it finished. That's probably more on me than the film.

A Zed and Two Noughts

* * (out of four)
Seen 23 February 2008 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagement)

But don't give that rating too much credence; I was tired by the time this started, and Greenaway demands alertness. That said, I don't think this would be my thing even under the best of circumstances. As a friend put it the other day, there's "quirky", and there's "random", and this thing is definitely random. It didn't even wind up being fun random for me, just unpleasant for the most part.


Whew. That just leaves a backlog of six plus a post for the marathon. Eminently doable, I think.