Saturday, March 21, 2009

SXSW Day Seven: Humpday, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, The Way We Get By, and Exterminators

Once more, I'm finishing this up just before hitting the street to see my first movie of the day. Just one anecdote to mention; I only wound up seeing The Way We Get By because I cut something else too close; I wanted to see Made In China, but it started too soon after The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle. So add another one to the list of movies I missed at SXSW that I hope plays the IFFB (see also For the Love of Movies, The Last Beekeeper, Modern Love is Automatic, and, of course, Lesbian Vampire Killers).

Humpday

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

I haven't seen Lynn Shelton's first feature, but My Effortless Brilliance and Humpday form an interesting pattern, and not just in how both are kicked off by an old friend visiting unannounced. Unlike many female independent filmmakers who focus on making movies about women, Shelton opts to explore male relationships.

Here, the unexpected visitor is Andrew (Joshua Leonard), a globetrotting artist. It's two in the morning when he arrives at the Seattle home of Ben (Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), who are married and ready to start a family. Andrew soon meets up with a local artsy crowd, and Ben's intention to just stop by for an hour becomes a long drink-and-weed-fueled evening. One of the guests mentions and upcoming art-porn fest, and Andrew and Ben hatch the idea of shooting themselves having sex as an expression of their friendship. After they sober up... Well, offering each other the chance to back down triggers a thoroughly incongruous macho response.

There's a scene in the middle of the film that is so sitcom-like that the audience might almost expect to hear a laugh track. From the plot description, you can probably guess what it is. Answering audience questions after, the cast member and crew talked like good indie filmmakers about how they tried to avoid that impression, but in all honesty, I think the sitcom feel of that scene makes it, and maybe even the movie as a whole, work. Shelton has already set up a kind of out-there situation and then pushed it further when it might have been a whole lot more logical for the characters to back down. Inserting a moment that conventional makes it easier for the audience to buy into the story. Besides, things do become conventions because they work on some level, and that scene is darn funny.

Full review at EFC.

The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2009 at the Alamo Ritz #1 (SXSW Emerging Visions)

David Russo had a bunch of nifty ideas that he threw into The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, and they're the kind of ideas that work as part of this sort of strange stew movie - not big enough to serve as a story's foundation, but good for depicting a film's surreal world. The trick is to arrange and connect them into a movie rather than a movie-sized blob of wacky concepts, and I don't know that Russo does it.

Take the film's zippy opening credits, following a message in a bottle with a bunch of cool photography, editing, and effects work to a kind of funny punchline. It's nifty, and referred back to later, but the link feels obligatory, not strong. It could link to the way Dory (Marshall Allman) is looking for any kind of belief system for guidance, but it's in the wrong place for that. The film has a few clever fantastical bits, but what they build up to isn't as keen as the lead-up. Individual characters' stories fork off and reconnect later, but don't affect each other in the meantime.

The bits are nifty, though. We follow Dory, who joins a custodial service after screaming his way out of a data management company. There, he joins a staff run by transvestite Desert Storm vet Bergsman (Russell Hodgkinson) which also includes junkie lovers Methyl & Ethyl (Tygh Runyan and Tania Raymonde) and would-be artist O.C. (Vince Vieluf). O.C. has a crush on research company exec Tracy (Natasha Lyonne), who upon discovering that the janitors will eat any samples left lying around, uses them as guinea pigs for a cookie that warms itself upon contact with saliva - which also proves to be highly addictive and have certain bizarre side effects.

Full review at EFC.

The Way We Get By

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2009 at the Austin Convention Center (SXSW Documentary Feature Competition)

Film festivals overflow with movies like The Way We Get By, which are little documentaries about reasonably interesting people that have just enough of a spark of something unexpected or unusual that they grow to feature length when their natural size is that of a short. This one feels especially long, because there's only so many ways the Maine Troop Greeters can say they appreciate our soldiers' sacrifice.

ExTerminators

* * (out of four)
Seen 19 March 2009 at the Alamo Lamar #1 (SXSW Lone Star States)

Geez, all the effort I went through to see this one - I actually took the shuttle out to Lamar on Sunday, only to be told that it was sold out before I got off the bus - and it's pretty dull. The reason why is quickly apparent: As much as I like Heather Graham, she's a spectator despite being the main character here. Since we follow her, we don't get to enjoy the black comedy of her friends killing rotten guys, nor do we get to solve a mystery with her police detective boyfriend. If you're going to give us a movie about people doing bad things, you've got to really commit to the dark comedy, and ExTerminators keeps it at arms' length.

Friday, March 20, 2009

SXSW Day Six: Still Bill, Youssou N'dour: I Bring What I Love, The Eyes of Me, and The Slammin' Salmon

Not much time to write or anything particular to say, so Wednesday's movies:

Still Bill

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount (SXSW Special Screenings)

The recording studio that occupies a fair-sized chunk of Bill Withers's Los Angeles home in Still Bill is a tremendous tease. It's new-looking, with plenty of digital tools, which certainly suggests that the man behind "Lean on Me" and "Just the Two of Us" has written and recorded new music relatively recently, even though his last album came out in 1985.

Still Bill doesn't get into the specifics of the conflicts between Withers and Columbia Records back then; that information is out there for those who want to look. Instead, it gives us a look at Withers' life and personality to perhaps explain why he was able to just walk away from show business when many other men would fight the labels or do whatever was necessary to stay in the public eye. It's not so much that he's a man at peace with himself - indeed, he's wise enough to say, in a roundabout sort of way, that his calm demeanor owes as much to shyness as it does to contentment. He is fairly content; one of the aphorisms he offers to the camera and to his children is "on the way to wonderful, you'll pass through all right. Stop and take a look around, because you may be staying," and he does seem to be all right with all right.

Indeed, he seems to have come to that realization before he made it in show business. We learn about his childhood in Slab Fork, West Virginia, a played-out coal town, followed by stints in the Navy and working for various aerospace companies. not only is Bill a fine storyteller, but we go on trips with him, back to Slab Fork to visit a childhood friend and to reunions with Navy buddies and high-school classmates. A scene where Bill walks through a white graveyard to visit the overgrown patch where his father and other relations are buried says more about the segregation of his youth than words could; it's close to being randomly placed stones in the middle of the woods.

Full review at EFC.

Youssou Ndour: I Bring What I Love

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount (SXSW 24 Beats per Second)

Youssou Ndour is the biggest pop star in Africa; he is also a devout Sufi Muslim. Which, apparently, is fine as long as those two qualities don't intermingle as they did on his album Egypt, a disc full of devotional songs that was tremendously well-received internationally but led to criticism in his native Senegal. I Bring What I Love follows him as he tours Europe to packed audiences but fights censorship and derision at home.

It's a nice enough movie, although I found myself wanting a little more from the end: Senegal has no time for Egypt at all, and then, after Ndour wins the Grammy, everything is hunky-dory? There's something to be said about how it took outside validation for Senegal to accept the album, but this movie skips right past that potentially interesting idea.

The Eyes of Me

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2009 at the Alamo Lamar #1 (SXSW Lone Star States)

A good-intentioned documentary that will probably find its natural home on local public television sooner rather than later. This story about Austin's high school for the blind does do some neat things with animation to demonstrate how the visually impaired kids perceive the world (all four were sighted at one point).

The Slammin' Salmon

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 March 2009 at the Alamo Lamar #1 (SXSW Speical Screenings)

Hmm... Maybe I'm going to have to revisit Broken Lizard in the future. Most of the previews for their movies have done nothing for me, so I've skipped their releases, and to be perfectly honest, I wasn't terribly interested in this one.

The Slammin' Salmon takes a while for me to get into - aside from Michael Clarke Duncan, who is a blast from his first minute on the screen - but it's a little engine that could of comedy, plugging away constantly to make you laugh, and after a bit, the film's pace and sense of humor clicked with me, to the point where I was laughing pretty darn hard by the end.

Thursday, March 19, 2009

SXSW Day Four: Blood Trail, MINE, Best Worst Movie, The Two Bobs, and Observe and Report

So, I'm watching Best Worst Movie, remembering how the good folks at the Brattle have programmed Troll 2 once or twice but I have never been able to get to it, and Caitlin Crowley shows up on screen. She's one of the dozens of people in the Boston movie scene I have a thoroughly one-way fondness for, and anyone who is willing to profess their love of an apparently terrible movie in something that, like, hundreds of people may see is even cooler in my book.

Soon after that, the movie includes a montage of places where Troll 2 has played during its recent series of screenings. The Alamo Drafthouse shows up, of course, and the crowd in the Paramount goes nuts. The Brattle is a couple after that, and I raise my hands to applaud, realizing just after the last possible second that one guy applauding sounds just a bit more pathetic than zero guys applauding. Fortunately, I don't make much sound when clapping; not sure why.

Anyway, put that on a list of movies from SXSW I'd like to see playing IFFB - just so I can watch it again and see indifference to the Alamo and applause for the Brattle.

(Why yes, the "and I'm so glad to be showing this in Austin!" is getting on this tourist's nerves. Lack of sleep, I guess.)

Blood Trail

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2009 at the Alamo Ritz #2 (SXSW Special Screenings)

Robert King does not give the impression of a great war photographer when we first see him in Blood Trail. In 1990s Sarajevo, he's walking around a war zone like a naive kid; in 2007 Tennessee, we watch him stumble trying to set up a hunting blind. If the film ended there, one's mind would easily extrapolate the story of a man who had his sanity wrecked from witnessing horrors he wasn't ready to handle.

That's not this film's story, though King is changed by what he sees, as he must be. Instead, we watch him mature as both a journalist and as a man as he moves to Moscow, covers the wars in Chechnya, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq. Colleagues who treated him with derision when he started become close friends; a lifetime of binging between assignments settles down; and the means by which war photographers access the battlefield changes radically.

According to director Richard Parry, this film started out as a comedic short about a callow young American in way over his head, accumulating more depth as Parry (a fellow war journalist) crossed paths with King anew. Those roots occasionally show through, especially during the opening act in Bosnia. It's black comedy; there is, after all, a bit more of an edge to "ha ha ha, that fool's going to get himself killed!" when it's a real war zone with real bullets - but we soon see that a large part of success is surviving one's initial inexperience (true in all fields, if not always so literally so).

Full review at EFC.

MINE

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2009 at the Austin Convention Center (SXSW Documentary Feature Competition)

There are a lot of fiction films that don't set their main plot up as artfully as MINE does. After all, the title speaks pretty directly to what the movie is about, and yet director Geralyn Pezanoski is able to lull us into looking in a different direction, telling one interesting story that we forget is merely prelude to the main tale.

The opening tells us about how the evacuation of New Orleans, Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina frequently involved people leaving their four-legged family members behind for one reason or another. Fortunately, there are dedicated animal-rescue activists like Karen O'Toole and Jane Garrison, who mobilize almost immediately to rescue stranded pets (O'Toole comments that it's amazing that just by having "animal rescue" painted on the side of their vans, the army would let them into the flooded city when people trying to return to their homes were turned away). It's a gigantic logistical undertaking, not always happy - they come across people who treated their animals terribly, and one rescuer grimly notes that "cats don't bark". In order to make it work, the rescuers must often ship the animals they rescue to other shelters to make room for more incoming.

The trouble with that is, just as people weren't always able to take their pets with them as they escaped, they may not have known how to find them after returning home, or the various humane societies might have put them out for fostering/adoption relatively soon. Victor's bulldog Max is sent to Florida, where a woman adopts him and calls him Joey; Jesse's beloved JJ is sent to California; retired nurse Gloria's black lab Murphy becomes "Shadow" in California; 85-year-old Creole Malvin's poodle Bandit is sent to a shelter in Pittsburgh whose operator won't return any animals; Linda's German Shepherd Precious becomes Katia in Texas and she tries to sue for her return.

Full review at EFC.

Best Worst Movie

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

A pretty darn entertaining feature on Troll 2 fandom and its cast. It's hard not to love George Hardy, the Alabama dentist who played the lead in Troll 2 twenty years ago and retains a sense of humor about it to this day; he's among the most outgoing and genuinely nice guys you'll ever see. The movie itself is frequently hilarious without being mean-spiritd about what is, apparently, a really bad movie.

(No, I haven't seen it yet. I'm hoping the Brattle pairs it with this sometime in the next few months)

The 2 Bobs

* * * (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

Writer/Director Tim McCaniles described The 2 Bobs as his attempt to do a Kevin Smith movie, which is funny since Smith most recently released his attempt at a Judd Apatow movie. McCaniles makes a pretty entertaining one, though, a zany low-budget story packed full of nerd humor.

I think it will have legs even if you aren't a nerd, though - there are many different genuses of nerds, after all, with this movie's main source of gags being games and gamers, a group of which I am not a member. It's not quite so good/universal as Fanboys, but I liked how agreeably madcap it is.

Observe and Report

* * (out of four)
Seen 16 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

This one, not so much. It does have some huge, huge laughs, don't get me wrong, and is a nice demonstration that Seth Rogen has more than fat stoner roles in him, but those moments of explosive hilarity come in the middle of long patches of uncomfortable, and not necessarily the sort of uncomfortable that makes one more likely to laugh.

To be fair, though, it's probably the one nice character that messes the balance up. Collette Wolfe's Nell is really too likeable to be attracted to Rogen's goonish character; seeing the movie headed that way makes me cringe much more than a bunch of jerks being jerks to each other.

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

SXSW Day Five: Splinterheads, Four Boxes, The Promised Land, and Make Out With Violence

Hey, I'm on vacation. If I think it makes sense for me to post days out of order, I'll go right on and post them out of order!

Basically, Sunday wiped me out but good, leaving me with no time to post its stuff on Monday morning, but I had two reviews in my little notebook. I'll eventually get around to Tuesday, but for now, I'll just skip over it.

Today was an object lesson in both why it pays to get to the theater early, even if you have a badge, but also in how a good program can soften the blow. I was just after the cutoff for The Last Beekeeper, so I moved myself into the line for The Promised Land, since the other option at the Lamar, Eggshells, had this for a description in the program:
Eggshells, an American Freak Illumination Time & Space Fantasy of the exploding Austin inevitable. A crypto embryonic hyper-electric presence duels with itself as Vince Sobrosek goes to the bathroom yelling "listen to yellow dog, goddamn yellow dog!" while the uninvited dinner guests make love to the ghosts of Don Levy and Nic Roeg in a threesome with Carlos Casteneda in a bedroom that paints itself on its way to a wedding and your girlfriend and her lover dance out of the hemoglobin balloon forest as the writer-man takes an axe to the windshield and runs home naked to make love to the girl he loves for her breasts and they all grab seats under the transmogrifying hair dryers as Vince proclaims, "Ye shall know the truth and the truth will make you free." BYO

As much as Tobe Hooper has built (and squandered) a name in horror history... No. Just no.

I did like The Promised Land quite a bit, though, and Make Out with Violence even more so. Then I got shut out of The Horseman, and opted against The Haunting in Connecticut because, even though it's directed by the man who did the brilliant animated short "Ward 13", I looked at the line and felt like I'd be taking the place of people who really wanted to see it early. Plus, the idea of getting a decent night's sleep was starting to appeal.

(And then I wound up staying up because I have to give my roommate the new hotel key after he gets back from his midnight and party and whatever. Joke's on me!)

Splinterheads

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Emerging Visions)

Apparently "splinterheads" are a subset of what I've always thought of as "carnies", but that's apparently like calling a sailor, Marine, or airman a "soldier" - outsiders may think it's close enough, but in actuality it's not. Carnies work the rides, splinterheads the midway, and neither does much mixing with the townies.

Justin (Thomas Middleditch) is just about the towniest townie who ever towned. He lives with his mom Susan (Lea Thompson) and works mowing lawns with his best friend Wayne (Jason Rogel). Local cop Bruce (Christopher McDonald) is making Justin's life tough after Susan dumped him because of something Justin said, and he's got a perfect excuse when Justin drives away from a gas station after paying the girl running a game rather than the cashier. Just seens the girl, Galaxy (Rachael Taylor), working the dunk tank at the carnival which just came to town, which figures, doesn't it? So despite her attractiveness, he is somewhat less than pleased when their paths cross again the next morning.

Splinterheads could very easily have poured on the syrup with talk of destiny, fate, and stuff like that. Thankfully, it knows better than to act as if a comedy that goes for the rare triple meet-cute has any real mystery about how it's going to end. It's also not breaking any particular ground in having Galaxy not just be beautiful and outgoing, but have hobbies that are quirky but also show off just how cool she is, while Justin is a perpetually tongue-tied goofball. You can see the thuggish splinterhead boyfriend coming a mile away.

Full review at EFC.

Four Boxes

* ¼ (out of four)
Seen 17 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Emerging Visions)

If you hang on through the end of Four Boxes, everything will make sense. Yes, even the "nobody on earth actually talks like that" dialogue. That doesn't mean that you should hang on to the end, unfortunately, because not only doesn't explaining everything make it good, but there's a whole new bunch of dumb at the end.

Trevor (Justin Kirk) and Rob (Sam Rosen) have a small business where they purchase and resell the property of people who die without heirs. Their latest find is a bizarre mess, with boxes of junk, crime scene tape from where the deceased's wife hanged herself six months earlier. They find a sticky note near the computer for fourboxes.tv, which Rob says started out as a camgirl site, but the original girl moved out while leaving the cameras live. The new resident is creepy and sinister, and Trevor soon becomes obsessed with the site. As if that wasn't enough, Rob's fiancee Amber (Terryn Westbrook) soon joins them, and the fact that she used to be Trevor's girlfriend makes things uncomfortable.

Watching TV is not the most exciting thing to have your characters doing in a movie. Especially when the program in question is grainy webcam video, and the picture, when blown up to movie-screen size, becomes vague compression-artifcated blobs. Maybe seeing the movie on video rather than the big screen will help with that, but that still leaves the characters not doing much of anything for a good deal of the running time.

Full review at EFC.

The Promised Land

* * * (out of four)
Seen 17 March 2009 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (SXSW 24 Beats per Second)

The Promised Land may not be a great documentary if you already know something about the swamp pop of Southern Louisiana - it's a broad overview, although if there's any better way to introduce the living legends of a type of music than having them get together and form a supergroup, I can't think of one. The picture is sometimes hard to see, low-resolution and not well-lit.

The music is pretty darn great, though, a Cajun mix of old-school rock & roll, country, and dixie blues, a throwback to fifty years ago before all those influences went their separate ways. The Li'l Band of Gold performs throughout, and there's bits of a couple dozen songs packed into the film's 77 minutes, most of it as yet unreleased. That part is no disappointment at all.

Make-Out with Violence

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 17 March 2009 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar #1 (SXSW Emerging Visions)

Make-Out with Violence isn't quite so good as Let the Right One In, but that's the film it brings to my mind. Both take horror-movie tropes and twist them into service of a strange story of young love, and have a young boy at the center. Make-Out goes with zombies instead of vampires, and rather than a Swedish winter focuses on the summer after high school graduation in the American suburbs. The critical similarity is that both movies take a genre that is extremely played-out, tie it to a story where I believe in every one of the characters, and still leave me wondering what is going to happen next because it seems fresh and new.

That's fantastic, and the nifty soundtrack doesn't hurt a bit, either.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

SXSW Day Three: Letters to the President, Garbage Dreams, Sin Nombre, Women In Trouble, and Drag Me to Hell

This day started with me not being able to get to the Almo South Lamar in time to see ExTerminators at noon, and continued to nearly three in the morning before walking back to the hotel, so you'll forgive me if I fell a little behind. The time waiting for Letters to the President did give me a chance to write up a review of Objectified in my little festival notebook, so you can go read that.

I must confess, I'm not totally proud of my behavior vis-a-vis Drag Me to Hell. I sort of cut in line in front of a few hundred people when Jason Whyte stopped me while I was following it to the end, and then, when Sam Raimi came out to introduce it, I sent a text message to my brother who won't be able to see this for a couple of months so that he knew just where I was and what I was doing. Of course, since it was about 2am EDT for him, he probably just slept through it.

Letters to the President

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

Letters to the President is somewhat difficult to review as a film because it does its job so well. It is trying to give the audience a snapshot of the relationship Iran has with its populist president, and it does so with so little pretense that I'm initially more interested in the facts than the filmmaking.

Iran's current president is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he's the highest ranking elected official in the country, after Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He was born in a village of 2,000, though his father moved to Tehran where Ahmadinejad was a child. He would later become a university professor and the mayor of Tehran before being elected President in 2005. He is extremely popular with the people, both for his religious faith, his commitment to nuclear power, and his unusual accessibility. His proximity to people in public appearances would give the USA's Secret Service nightmares, and he encourages the people to write him with their problems.

The latter is the film's stated topic, and it's not hard to be impressed by the scale of the undertaking. Nine to ten million Iranians have written since his election, and an official tells us that 76% have received a response. Ahmadinejad can't do all that personally, of course, so we get looks at the bureaucracy put into place to handle it. The response is also not always positive, as a thoroughly frustrating interview between petitioner and official demonstrates.

Full review at EFC.

Garbage Dreams

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Documentary Competition)

Mai Iskander has made a fine documentary in Garbage Dreams, the type that is about people first, and does a fine job of being issue-oriented without hammering away at buzzwords like "globalization". For all that, I must admit that one of the most memorable things from the movie is a simple number: Eighty percent.

That is the amount of residential waste that the Zaballeens of Cairo are able to recycle. That's a fantastic number - most developed nations manage something in the twenties - and as might be expected, it comes through unconventional means: Though Cairo is a city of eighteen million, the largest in the Arab world or Africa, it had no official city-wide garbage collection program, instead relying on sixty thousand independent garbage collectors (the Zaballeens) who are paid a pittance for their services. Entire communities are built around garbage collection and recycling.

The largest is Mokattam, and Garbage Dreams focuses on three teenage boys and one young woman from the area: 17-year-old Adham collects garbage to support his family as the man of the house with his father in jail; 18-year-old Nabil has been working since the age of seven and has twin dreams of marrying and opening a can-recycling shop; and 16-year-old Osama is kind of a screw-up, unable to hold a job even though his father is pushing him to do something with his life other than root through other people's trash. Then there's Laila, a local social worker who tries to keep the people in her neighborhood healthy. She also finds herself fighting for the neighborhood's very survival when the city hires several European companies to handle trash collection.

Full review at EFC.

Sin Nombre

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

An impressive first feature, this is. Cary Fukunaga has made something that feels larger than its relatively short running time, depicting the difficult crossing across Mexico from Guatemala to the U.S., made more difficult by a gang member marked for death. Tense as can be, with moments of really shocking violence.

Women in Trouble

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 15 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

A thoroughly entertaining comedy, with ten women given a chance to do broad, crude comedy that somehow comes around to something vaguely heartfelt without it seeming too terribly ridiculous. Carla Gugino and Connie Britton get the meatiest roles and play well off each other, but the standout is probably Adrianne Palicki, who does great things with the dumb blonde role.

Director Sebastian Guiterrez said during the Q&A that the film was shot with a skeleton crew in something like twelve days, with the sequel (which focuses more squarely on Gugino's character) already finished with photography. I'll be looking forward to it next year; hopefully if it's nearly as much fun as this one.

Drag Me To Hell

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

Can you believe it's been over twenty years since Evil Dead 2? Considering how much of Sam Raimi's fame and career is built on that movie and its particular style, one would think he'd done more like it, but in fact he's ranged pretty far afield. Even Army of Darkness was something rather different, more PG-13-ish Ray Harryhausen tribute than combination of horror and slapstick comedy.

Drag Me to Hell, thankfully, is the Evil Dead 2-iest thing he's done in a long while, and a real blast to watch. He tosses Alison Lohman around like a ragdoll, heaping all the abuse that used to be handed out to Bruce Campbell. It's a fun combination of slapstick comedy and no-kidding-around horror, and it's a real treat to see Raimi back in this sandbox.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

SXSW Day Two: Sorry, Thanks, Bomber, Objectified, Moon, and Black

Yesterday didn't quite go as planned; I didn't make it to the Paramount in time for Sweethearts of the Rodeo and by the time Moon's Q&A was finished, I would have needed to move at light speed to make it to The Last Beekeeper. The day just got better as it went on, though, and I'm pretty sure I'll be recommending Moon to everybody until Sony Pictures Classics gives it a release.

Today's plan is in flux from the beginning: Ex-Terminators if I make the bus to the Lamar theater, St. Nick otherwise; Letters to the President, then probably The Overbrook Brothers (or maybe something else), Humpday (or Sin Nombre), Women in Trouble, and the work-in-progress print of Drag Me to Hell. But a whole bunch of that could change, I'm not really committed to much more than Drag Me to Hell, and that could easily fill up before I get there.

Sorry, Thanks

* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2009 at The Almao Drafthouse Ritz #1 (SXSW Emerging Visions)

The "mumblecore" generation is, perhaps, starting to get interesting. Digital video is both good and cheap enough that these movies no longer default to looking like a muddy mess. More importantly, the characters are starting to feel much more like interesting individuals, rather than generic artsy twentysomethings.

Take Max (Wiley Wiggins) and Kira (Kenya Miles). We meet them as they wake up after a one night stand. Max is kind of close to the stereotype, an artist frustrated by his job in a senator's San Francisco office. Kim is more outgoing and social, but she's just broken up with her boyfriend of seven years. They think it's a one-time thing, but it turns out that they move in the same circles - and it also turns out that Max has a girlfriend, Sara (Ia Hernandez).

Max gets most of the good lines, but it's Kira that turns out to be the interesting one. There's a surface-friendly sequence of her moving things out of her ex's apartment (we don't know what precipitated the break-up), and it's made clear that her new job as a copy editor is a step down from what she has been doing. We're watching someone scale back and otherwise rearrange her life, very deliberately, but without the usual rancor or grim determination that usually goes with such an activity. Miles navigates this nicely; she shows Kira's generally glass-half-full philosophy in a straightforward, unexaggerated manner. The cracks are also visible, whether they appear unbidden or in an oddly friendly act of romantic sabotage.

Continued at EFC.

Bomber

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2009 at The Almao Drafthouse Ritz #1 (SXSW Narrative Feature Competition)

Bomber, when you get right down to it, is the sort of movie where one can see very clearly that if the characters just did what any normal, sane person would do, things would go pretty smoothly. That they don't is okay for the first half or so, because the results are fast-paced and funny, but when the movie comes straight out and tells you what it's about, well, that's not so great, even if it is, ironically, perhaps more realistic.

Ross (Shane Taylor) gets up early, telling girlfriend Leslie (Sara Kessel) that he will be back later to help her with an event she's planning. He's promised he would see his parents Alistar (Benjamin Whitrow) and Valerie (Eileen Nicholas) off on a long-planned trip to Germany. His octogenarian father wrecks his car before even getting out of the garage (despite his meticulous preparation), though, and after the next cut we see Ross driving them through the Netherlands in his work van. Stuffy Alistar complains about Leslie's constant calls on the cell phone (and everything else), but the situation doesn't exactly improve when those calls come to an end.

The story hangs on a decision that doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense - would (a) Ross actually decide to drive them right then, or would they (b) wait a couple weeks until the car is repaired, or (c) take a train? Once they've decided on (a), would they perhaps be a little more accommodating of Ross, rather than insisting on taking B roads or stopping at several things Valerie wants to see? Naturally, if they did, there might not be a movie to be had, but that's okay - even as adults, we can find ourselves subject to our parents' whims, and parents will often have a hard time accepting that their kids know what they're doing. And the action of it is pretty amusing - Whitrow and Taylor are a well-drawn pair of opposites, the stiff-upper-lip member of the Greatest Generation and the touchy-feely modern man, and Ms. Nicholas is just well-meaning enough to annoy both of them in turn.

Continued at EFC.

Objectified

* * * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

Gary Hustwit is carving out a specific documentary niche for himself, talking about design and how it affects our lives. Objectified casts a much broader net than his first feature, Helvetica, and he mentioned during the Q&A that he's working on a third documentary on the subject.

Objectified is a fascinating one to watch; not to take anything away from Hustwit's various interview subjects, who all impart some new and intriguing bit of information, but through the beginning of the movie especially he'll hold his camera on common objects, finding a slightly different angle than the one we usually associate with them and inviting us to study them, making up our minds about what makes them good objects or bad objects, and why, before the various experts break it down. Which they do in clear, easily-understood ways, which is maybe to be expected from people dedicated to making things easy to use. A lot of people can't do this, though, which is why Objectified is an excellent example of an informative, intriguing documentary.

Full review at EFC.

Moon

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2009 at the Austin Paramount Theater (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

This is the movie at SXSW that was made just (or mostly) for me. I'm kind of amused that the host introduced it by saying it was a great science fiction movie because it relies more on great acting than special effects, since this movie is full of effects work, although not the kind that announces itself to you. It does have a pretty fantastic performance by Sam Rockwell at its center, and the story is one my hard-sf-loving self adores, even if they didn't have the budget to simulate lunar gravity very well.

I'm loath to say too much about the plot because most of the movie is dependent on a twist that happens fairly early on, but it's a pretty great acting showcase for Rockwell, who seldom shares the screen with other actors, but gets to do something a lot more exciting than just slowly go insane.

Black

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 14 March 2009 at the Alamo Drafthouse Lamar #6 (SXSW Presents Fantastic Fest at Midnight)

I wasn't quite so worn out during Black as I was for Ong Bak 2, although I will admit to being a little fuzzy at times. Not fuzzy enough to forget that Black is a whole ton of fun, a French action movie that starts as blaxploitation and then gets crazier from there, dumping a Parisian bank robber back in his native Senegal, and having him run afoul of mercenaries, rivals, arms dealers, undercover cops, wrestlers, witches, and then some really nutty stuff. It's not quite the tight, no moment wasted brand of action we've lately associated with France via Luc Besson's factory, but it is very well-done, especially once the Dakar heist goes down and the action basically doesn't stop until the movie ends. I look forward to seeing it again at Fantasia, just in case there's something I missed.

Saturday, March 14, 2009

SXSW Day One: Monsters from the Id and Ong Bak 2

Saw two movies yesterday; will see more today. The plan is Sweethearts of the Rodeo, Bomber, Objectified, Moon, The Last Beekeeper, and Black.

Monsters From The Id

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2009 at The Almao Drafthouse Lamar #3 (SXSW Spotlight Premieres)

1950s science fiction is known for being paranoid and downbeat, tinged with fear of atomic doom and the potential for infiltrators to be anywhere. Filmmaker Dave Gargani argues that this should not, necessarily, be the case, or at least not the whole story. As much as those themes are present, he argues, there is great optimism to be found in them.

He sets out to prove his point in Monsters From the Id, which takes is name from Forbidden Planet, one of the films offered up as evidence. Also featured are Invaders from Mars, War of the Worlds, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them!, and the "Tomorrowland" segments of the Disneyland television series. These films are discussed by five experts, Professors Leroy Dubeck and Patrick Luciano, Luciano's co-author Gary Coville, film critic Richard Scheib, and retired NASA engineer Homer Hickam. The film ends by pondering what changed between then and now and what that means for the future.

In general, the films roughly match with a theme - 20,000 Fathoms is used for atomic fears, Invaders from Mars and The Day the Earth Stood Still to show how children had a large role in these stories, War of the Worlds to demonstrate the level of trust accorded to scientists and the military at the time. It is, thankfully, not a rigid correspondence; movies will pop up in multiple segments to demonstrate that this is, in fact, a pattern, rather than Gargani trying to build a case via widely separated data points. The ideas involved aren't especially complicated, but the voiced articulate them fairly well, although they do have a habit of making the same points, rather than attacking the question from different directions.

Continued at EFC, with one other review.

Ong Bak 2

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 13 March 2009 at The Almao Drafthouse Lamar #1 (SXSW Presents Fantastic Fest)

I can't give this a full review, because it was roughly 12:30 by the time this movie started, which is 1:30am Eastern time, and I was already kind of worn out by a day of air travel followed by walking around Austin. So it's quite possible that the film is more than a complete mess broken up by some incredible fight scenes. The ones that serve as the film's finale are amazing, with Tony Jaa's Tien fighting off wave after wave of warriors, incorporating an elephant into the incredible stuntwork.

One thing the film is not, however, is a sequel to Ong Bak; it takes place in the 1400s, with the only connections I can see being Jaa starring and (perhaps) the same Buddha statue appearing in both films. I honestly can't say the plot for sure; something about Tien being captured as a kid and raised to be an invincible warrior by the man who murdered his family? Sure, it leads to some inventive beatdowns, but I found myself not really who was supposed to be Tien's enemies and allies.

Friday, March 13, 2009

This Week In Tickets: 9 March 2009 to 15 March 2009

This Week In Tickets: 9 March 2009 to 15 March 2009

I'm writing this at 30-odd thousand feet, on the first leg of my Boston-to-Austin trip to the South By Southwest Film Festival. I'm excited about it, though there are some things I would dearly love to see on the big screen in Boston while I'm away:

  • Sita Sings The Blues is playing at the Museum of Fine Arts from the 12th to 22nd. I was lucky enough to see it at the Brattle Eye-opener last week and absolutely loved it; I recommend it highly for everyone else.

  • Chocolate at the Brattle, late-night shows fro the 13th to 15th. It's actually already available on DVD and Blu-ray, but come on - we all know that wire-free ass-kicking is much more fun with a crowd.

  • The Last Command with the Alloy Orchestra at the Somerville Theater on the 15th. This one hurts; the annual Alloy show has been one of my favorite things to do and I liked The Last Command a lot when I saw it at the Brattle; a new print and score would have been a real treat.
  • The Boston Underground Film Festival, from the 19th to 26th at the Brattle and Kendall Square. Fortunately, I'll probably be able to catch most of what I want to, as the Festival proper is Thursday-Sunday, with the Kendall re-showing highlights from Monday-Thursday.
  • The Chlotrudis Awards at the Brattle on the 22nd. There's an outside chance I'll catch that, as it starts at 5pm and my plane gets in at 4:30pm (if the Brattle folks don't mind my suitcase full of dirty laundry sitting in their lobby)


  • So, if you're still in Boston, you've got plenty of options. Please, do some of them!

    This Week In Tickets!

    Yep, just one film so far this week, although I'll probably see another 8-10 by the time it's time to move on to the next page.


    The Secret of the Grain

    The Secret of the Grain

    There's a difference between "art-house" and "boutique" films. One of the people in the group I went with on Tuesday made a comment about knowing I would likely not be into this because of how little I liked A Christmas Tale, and this was another long French film. The thing is, I'm good with "boutique". I've got no problem with "long" or "French", individually or paired. I've got a problem with boring. I like to see people doing things, or at least saying interesting things. "Art-house", I guess, is beyond the need for such conventional narrative. And it drives me bonkers.

    La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain)

    * ½ (out of four)
    Seen 10 March 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)

    The Secret of the Grain is filled with things that make for great movies and great drama - opening a new restaurant, conflict between new and old families after divorce, being an ethnic minority, adultery, and cooking delicious food. Writer/director Abdel Kechiche, however, chooses approach these things obliquely, and to draw out what he does show in the most patience-trying way possible.

    We follow Slimane Beiji (Habib Boufares), a long-time dockworker in a port city in the south of France, and fidgety moviegoers should take it as an omen that we're introduced to him by way of his boss upbraiding him for taking three days to do a two-day job. His hours are cut and he leaves the yard, making stops to visit and deliver fresh fish to his ex-wife Souad (Bouraouïa Marzouk) and his daughter Karima (Farida Benkhetache), before coming home to girlfriend Latifa (Hatika Karaoui) and her daughter Rym (Hafsia Herzi). Laid off, he decides to open a floating seafood restaurant featuring Souad's fish couscous, though the help of Rym and his family only takes him so far when trying to navigate the bureaucracy and woo investors.

    Kechiche makes what are, if we choose to be kind, unconventional choices as to what to show and what not to show during the first hour-plus. For instance, we see Slimane and his boss discussing the severance package that he had been resisting, but the scene ends with him being told his hours are reduced; his actual losing of his job happens off-screen. We don't get a scene of him purchasing the boat, or deciding to open a restaurant. We don't get Slimane broaching the idea of the restaurant with Souad, or any confrontation between Slimane and Latifa over this idea. Much of this is supplied to us after the fact, by a chorus of Arab magicians sitting outside Latifa's restaurant. That's typical of what is shown through much of the movie, circular conversations that practically wear a rut in the ground by coming back to the same point over and over again. There's an extended Sunday dinner at Souad's which almost does this well, but like nearly every other scene in the movie, it goes on too long and repeats itself too often.

    Someone less story-oriented than I might think that Kechiche keeps most of the obvious plot-advancing events off-screen for aesthetic reasons, that they can be inferred and watching the characters react to them is a purer experience. It's possible. After a while, though, another theory started to come to mind: what if Kechiche discovered and built the movie around Habib Boufares only to find he couldn't act? That he has no other credits on IMDB isn't strong evidence for this theory (the further you get from Hollywood, the less complete it gets, and the ethnically North African/Arabic cast of an independent French film is a fair distance away), but it would explain the fact that, while Slimane is the film's central character, we never see him have a pivitol role in a scene. Boufares looks perfect for the role - every individual line on his face and hitch in his gait is as it should be - but the film certainly seems to be working around him.

    As theories go, it's probably crazy and almost certainly unkind, but it's where my mind went during two and a half hours of doing things off-screen and numbing repetition within scenes. It is, quite frankly, astonishing what a talent Kechiche has for wearing out a scene's welcome, especially in the last act. For just the second time, something has happened on-screen which holds out the possibility of causing other things to happen, but, of course, what the characters wind up doing is stalling in one location, and going through a series of incredibly drawn-out scenes in others. One is particularly painful, because it's a woman crying her heart out, but it goes on for so damn long that I went from feeling bad for her to feeling bad about wanting her to shut up. And it's just one of three prolonged time-killers Kechiche cuts between!

    The worst part is that for all the time burned, there are moments where The Secret of the Grain is cutting and potentially fascinating. Hafsia Herzi, for instance, never strikes a dull note when she's on-screen; she plays Rym as intelligent, passionate, and fiercely loyal to the man who is like a father to her. There's the flagrant way that the other local business owners make plans to sabotage Slimane while guests at his grand opening, and the way family differences explode into anger, especially among the women (Rym, her mother, and Slimane's daughters practically arch their backs like angry cats when confronted with each other). Even the scene with the crying woman starts out wonderfully raw before it pounds the audience into numbness.

    Indeed, it's tempting to give the film higher marks based upon the good moments, or even recommend it to those who prize unfiltered realism, right down to the monotony. I can't do it though, at least not now - the memory of banging the back of my head against the seat, desperate for the movie to end, or just get to the next scene, and seriously considering whether or not I would have walked out had I not been with a group is still too fresh.

    Also at EFC.

    Tuesday, March 10, 2009

    Phoebe in Wonderland

    This was on the schedule for last year's Independent Film Festival of Boston, and I'm not sure why I missed it. Something, I'm sure, to do with getting out of work on time and thinking, hey, a movie with this cast will play Boston eventually.

    (Son of a bitch - I missed this for Vexille? Ugh!)

    It's a pretty good movie, worth checking out if it hangs around another weekend.

    Phoebe in Wonderland

    * * * (out of four)
    Seen 8 March 2009 at AMC Harvard Square #4 (first-run)

    I really hope the Fanning kids are getting better advice and guidance than other people whose names come to mind at the mention of the phrase "child star". Not just because they're kids, and what sort of monster doesn't want the best for children, but for selfish reasons - I'd like to watch them work for a good long time. And as good an actress as Dakota Fanning has shown herself to be, younger sister Elle is making a name for herself beyond playing Dakota's character in flashbacks. Of course, even if everything else is ideal, one still has to hope that their talent doesn't come with strings attached, as it does for Elle's character in this film.

    Phoebe Lichten (Elle Fanning) is a bright and imaginative girl of nine. She loves Lewis Carroll, smiling when new drama teacher Miss Dodger (Patricia Clarkson) recites a bit of "Jabberwocky" that confuses her classmates. Phoebe she inherited from her mother Hilary (Felicity Huffman), who is trying to expand her graduate thesis on Alice in Wonderland into a book, although watching two kids like Phoebe and seven-year-old Olivia (Bailee Madison) takes all of her attention. When Principal Davis (Campbell Scott) calls Hilary and her husband Peter (Bill Pullman) in for a conference after Phoebe spits in another students face during a game of tag, Hilary initially dismisses it as no big deal - kids sometimes do stuff like that. It's not long, though, before it becomes clear that as brilliant as Phoebe is proving to be in rehearsals for Miss Dodger's production of Alice in Wonderland, she is having real problems elsewhere.

    Filmmaker Daniel Barnz cheats just a little bit in letting us see how good Elle Fanning's performance is, by giving Phoebe a sister who is, perhaps, an example of how gifted children can annoy moviegoers. Not that Bailee Madison is bad as Olivia, but she's the kind of little girl that claims to have "angst" at the age of seven and goes trick or treating as Karl Marx. Next to her, Phoebe doesn't seem like such a weird kid, which makes the encroaching mental illness all the more horrifying. There's a regular kid underneath Phoebe's tics and compulsions, and Fanning never gives the impression that there's anything fun about that sort of thing coming out. She's actually good enough that Barnz could have backed off a bit in the script; Phoebe explains what she's feeling several times, but it's something we can see as it comes over her.

    Felicity Huffman gets a pretty interesting character to play, as well. Hilary thinks of herself as a writer or academic rather than a stay-at-home mom, sometimes resenting that this may not actually represent the reality of the situation. Huffman manages to make Hilary both very warm and rather prickly; we see how she views any complaint about her kids as an attack on her, personally, but is not egotistical about it. The dilemma her character faces is that she's got very definite ideas about what is good for children, but Phoebe makes her ideals incomplete, though probably not wrong.

    Huffman and Fanning are wonderful enough that some of the other performances look less than impressive in comparison. The men in the film are somewhat rough, for instance: Bill Pullman is often forced into the devil's advocate role, not exactly giving a lot of individual personality to a character whose main job is to disagree with Hilary. Campbell Scott plays the worst elementary school principal ever, the type that always talks in the passive voice, avoids taking any sort of action or responsibility, and seems frightfully ill-prepared for dealing with something as unpredictable as a school full of 6-11-year-old children. Credit to Ian Colletti, though, as he makes Phoebe's best friend (a boy who collects Patriot Dolls, wants to play the Red Queen in the play, and has a headshot and resumé ready at his audition) someone we can take seriously, rather than a bizarre stereotype like the gay kid in School of Rock. Patricia Clarkson seems under-utilized, though, playing the weird, New Age-y theater teacher.

    It's easy to see what attracted them all to the screenplay, though - every one of these characters (well, aside from the principal) gets a big, meaty speech to call their own. They may be obvious summations of character or more eloquent than what even these very intelligent characters would say without a script, but they're good words given good readings. Pullman and Huffman articulate shame and uncertainty well, and the matter-of-fact way Fanning explains her illness to her classmates and answers their questions is both hopeful and tragic. Barnz's writing and direction has weaknesses - strawmen like Principal Davis, false dangers, and tendencies to wander or repeat himself - but he's got a couple of neat tricks up his sleeve, like getting us to like Phoebe, Hilary, and Miss Dodger for how they push against rigidity before making us wonder when it might become dangerous.

    Phoebe in Wonderland is a little rough at times, especially when it strays too far from Phoebe's specific illness and how it affects those around her. But it's got a pretty good handle on kids and perhaps an even better one on parents, especially when Elle Fanning or Felicity Huffman is on-screen.

    Also at EFC.

    Monday, March 09, 2009

    This Week In Tickets: 2 March 2009 to 8 March 2009

    I'm getting ready for my first trip out to the South by Southwest festival this Friday, so TWIT will be up Friday morning as there's no way I'm lugging my scanner to Texas or constructing pages while I'm out there. But for now...

    This Week In Tickets!

    You know, that's a pretty darn solid week. Two Lovers wasn't very good, but everything else had something to recommend it. My only real complaint was that the 104 bus took forever to arrive on the way back from the furniture store; one of those situations where if you knew two just weren't going to show up, you'd take the subway. But once it's late, it must be just around the corner, right?

    Also, I wish I'd been able to get to more of the "9 x Quine" series at the Harvard Film Archive, but Watchmen ate Saturday and I opted for Phoebe on Sunday. I'm definitely going to have to become a member of the HFA, since the price is pretty good (you save money if you go to three special events and eight films a year); I've been going there a lot more, lately.

    Pushover

    * * * (out of four)
    Seen 6 March 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (9 x Quine)

    I wrote a review of this three years ago. I liked it then and maybe don't like it quite as much now, but I'm still fond of it. Kim Novak is delicious in the role that introduced her, although Fred MacMurray's businesslike, barking fall from grace doesn't quite hold up as well. What I do still love is the meticulous way it sets up its action; not many movies these days would spell everything out with floorplans that the viewer is encouraged to memorize and follow along with for the rest of the movie. Nobody ever turns right when they should turn left; which is great attention to detail.

    Drive a Crooked Road

    * * ¼ (out of four)
    Seen 6 March 2009 at the Harvard Film Archive (9 x Quine)

    Eddie Shannon (Mickey Rooney) knows cars - how to fix them, build them, and drive them. Girls, that's another story - his short stature, nasty scar, and shy demeanor has served to keep him away. So the poor guy doesn't stand a chance when Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster) and her roughly eleven feet of legs comes into the garage where he works and asks for him by name...

    ... Actually, I just wanted to write that line about Ms. Foster's long, long legs. If I wind up writing a full review of this, it's going in there, and may work its way into another one. They certainly make an impression, although the rest of the movie isn't bad, exactly, just a little ham-handed. It's interesting for being a film noir with a script by Blake Edwards, who would become known for much lighter fare.

    I also think that this would be prime remake material - the plot, which involves a group of bank robbers recruiting Shannon because their bank robbery requires getting through a remarkably twisty road at an impossible rate of speed, is a good one. And the automotive action isn't bad for 1954, but a twenty-first century viewer can't help but wonder how much more they could have done even ten years later.

    Watchmen

    * * * (out of four)
    Seen 7 March 2009 at Jordan's Furniture Reading (first-run)

    What do you MEAN, no Star Trek trailer? Do I look like I care about Harry Potter?

    </NERD RAGE>

    And, you know, if nerd rage over the Watchmen movie ends there, they've done all right. I've got no complaints about the new ending, which is a logical enough way to do it, since it allows a time-consuming subplot to be excised and does wind up saying something interesting about Dr. Manhattan.

    As well as the movie does a lot of things, there are a couple of faults to it as an adaptation: The first is that it seems to miss one of Moore's points from the book, that there are no superheroes, just flawed and oftentimes perverse men and women. The one true superbeing becomes inhuman, and the closest thing to it comes awful close. Here, though, we see the characters engage in enhanced fisticuffs, destroying the rooms they fight in, rather than seeming terriby human and vulnerable as they do in the book. Excising certain scenes means we miss a big part of Rorschach's personality.

    The other thing is that, as much as Watchmen is deservedly called a graphic novel in terms of scope and structure, it's also a comic book. One thing I was struck by when reading it for the first time last fall is how much each issue is very self-contained. Watchmen #4, which tells Dr. Manhattan's story, is perhaps the best single issue of any comic ever written, and even as a chapter in a book, it's haunting and tragic and whole. In the film, there's no pause of any kind between it and what happens before and after, and while director Zack Snyder and screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse put it on-screen more or less unmolested, the sudden shift in narration and style makes it seem like an odd section of the movie, not the grand thing it was before.

    Of course, those are things coming from someone who is familiar with the book through recent experience. I'll be interested in hearing what my brother Matt thinks, as he intends to swipe my copy of the book after seeing the movie. It's still a good story told pretty well, and that's before getting to the soft spot I have for any movie that gives Matt Frewer a part well suited to him.
    Two LoversSerbisQuine X 2WatchmenSita Sings the BluesPhoebe In Wonderland

    Sunday, March 08, 2009

    Sita Sings the Blues

    I heard of Sita Sings the Blues around Christmas, from this entry in Roger Ebert's blog. (If you're not reading Ebert's journal, you really should). I was ecstatic to see that it would be playing the Museum of Fine Arts in March, only to be chagrined to realize that I would be out of town at SXSW for most of it. I was planning on bailing on work early on Thursday, taking the 2:30 bus from work to get to the 4:30pm showing.

    Happily, the Brattle showed it as part of its eye-opener program, in a beautiful 35mm print (you can buy one yourself at the website, if you've got a spare five grand lying around). Don't miss it.

    Sita Sings the Blues

    * * * * (out of four)
    Seen 8 March 2009 at Brattle Theater (Sunday Eye Opener)

    There's no such thing as bad publicity. Sita Sings the Blues is an extraordinary independent animated film, and while those are far from a dime a dozen, they have a tough time getting distribution and attention. Even with a glowing entry in Roger Ebert's blog, it might have disappeared. Some legal hassles over the publishing rights to eighty-year-old recordings got it a little extra visibility, and prompted filmmaker Nina Paley to forgo conventional distribution and instead make it freely available.

    The main story of the film is based on portions of the Sanskrit epic of The Ramayana, specifically the parts involving Sita (voice of Reena Shah), the wife of exiled prince Rama (voice of Debargo Sanyal). She is devoted to him, dutifully awaiting rescue when kidnapped by nine-headed Ravana (voice of Sanjiv Jhaveri). Things get cold after the rescue, though, with Rama growing distant, unable to trust that the twins Sita is carrying belong to him. In the present, a San Francisco animator (voice of Jhaveri) gets an offer to work for six months in India, but is cold to wife Nina (voice of Paley) when she comes to be with him, eventually sending her an email saying not to come back when she's on a trip to New York.

    This is not a definitive version of the Ramayana; a trio of shadow puppet narrators (voices of Aseem Chhabra, Bhavana Nagulapally, and Manish Acharya) argue boisterously while trying to recall the details, including Sita's proper name. It is, instead, Nina Paley extracting the elements of the mythology that speak to her, combining them with American blues to create something both fantastic and true, heartbreaking and tremendously entertaining. It is one of the smartest uses of mythology recently seen, removing the myth of Sita from the twin rigidities of scholarship and scripture. That the storytellers cannot agree on the details shows the power of mythology - the stories are larger than life, well-known but malleable.

    Paley's respectful of the myths, but her other source is just as interesting, if an unconventional match. The late Annette Hanshaw gets the "starring" credit, providing Sita's singing voice via recordings from 1927-1929. It's a great voice to (re-)discover; she could infuse those songs with great joy and sadness. Even songs that might be happy on the surface can become plaintive as she sings them. Despite the sorrow she can communicate, there's also a wonderfully youthful innocence in her voice, making her a perfect match for the unconditionally loving young Sita. That also comes through with the way she squeaks "that's all" at the end of songs, putting punctuation to the film's musical numbers.

    Those musical numbers not only have an unusual sound - much of the rest of the movie is scored with Indian synth-pop that might not be out of place in a Bollywood movie - but also a particular look. The musical numbers are slick, all round shapes pivoting off each other, looking like very good Flash animation with bright digital coloring. Sita herself is composed of perfect circles, from the palms of her hands to her breasts to her facial features; even her hair is overlapping circles. Paley uses three distinct art styles to tell Sita's story, with Sita having different character models in all of them: The circular model already mentioned, a traditional hand-drawn style as the story is told between musical numbers, and illustrations cut out of a book for the scenes with the narrators. On top of that, there's the jittery, cartoony style (with collage backgrounds) that Paley uses to draw her own experiences, and other styles used for specific scenes. It's a stylistic stew, and Paley only occasionally overlaps them, so we seldom think of the difference in style as we're watching the movie.

    For all the talk of ancient mythology, classic blues, and masterful animation, what makes Sita Sings the Blues a great movie is its light touch: Paley does not particularly play for the audience's sympathy in the autobiographical segments; she recognizes that her pining for Dave doesn't paint her in the best light, and doesn't wallow. It's more about having the audience see that even today, women are vulnerable to the same bad habits as in "A Long Time Ago, B.C."

    The movie is also very, very funny. The narrators argue, pointing out that a lot of trouble could have been averted had Sita taken her first chance to escape rather than dutifully waiting for Rama to rescue her. There are dancing monkeys, twenties blues set to cartoon mayhem, and funny antics with Nina's cat. There's also a hilarious three-minute intermission that breaks the fourth wall even more than the narration. 82-minute movies don't need an intermission, of course, but this one is packed with enough pure entertainment for a much longer movie, to go with its brains and beauty.

    It's a fantastic movie, held up from a conventional release by copyright laws (though the Hanshaw performances have entered the public domain, the publishing rights are not). At this writing, there are still 45-odd special bookings and festivals coming up, but Paley has also made the film available, free viewing/download, or purchase at her website (http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/) in a variety of formats (though donations are appreciated). There's nothing to lose by looking, and an amazing film to be found.

    Also at EFC.

    Friday, March 06, 2009

    Two Lovers

    One time, when being introduced to other people at a Chlotrudis outing, I was described as being a film critic at heart who works as a computer programmer to pay the bills. I didn't object, but I think that slights how truly left-brained I am: Would someone who was a film critic have decided to compare an indie romance drama to an insoluble problem of Newtonian physics?

    Two Lovers

    * * (out of four)
    Seen 3 March 2009 at Landmark Kendall Square #4 (first-run)

    Two Lovers is the sort of movie that can drive a single man batty. After all, the vast majority are not mentally ill mumblers who live with our parents, and yet it takes us a great deal of effort to find ourselves involved with even one girl who looks like Vinesssa Shaw or Gwyneth Paltrow. Two in the same day, more or less because of messing things up enough to have had to move back in with the 'rents? An insult to non-screw-ups everywhere!

    Granted, Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix) isn't entirely to blame; his engagement fell apart when he and his fiancée found out they both carried a recessive gene, and any children they had would be unlikely to live a year. He's getting better; his suicide attempt at the start of the movie isn't nearly as heartfelt as the one which landed him in a psychiatric hospital. Now, aging parents Reuben (Moni Moshonov) and Ruth (Isabella Rossellini) are planning to sell their dry-cleaning business to Michael Cohen (Bob Ari), as well as set him up with Cohen's daughter Sandra (Vinessa Shaw). Of course, before Leonard can meet Sandra, he runs into a new neighbor, Michelle Rausch (Gwyneth Paltrow), the beautiful but occasionally unstable mistress of Ronald Blatt (Elias Koteas).

    It's not even necessary to meet Sandra to see the roles that everyone is going to play: Michelle is the alluring choice filled with uncertainty; Sandra the traditional one who has just about zero wrong with her but does not particularly excite Leonard (a female Baxter, if you remember that movie). Leonard's parents are well-meaning but, like all Jewish movie parents, a little too involved. Blatt is the man who doesn't marry the girl whom the man doesn't marry. Leonard has a passion outside the dry-cleaning business to make him look like more than meets the eye, in this case photography.

    The three-body gravitational problem may remain intractable in real life, but in the movies, you can predict their paths of this group with uncanny precision. Maybe not from the very beginning, but what will happen in the next fifteen or twenty minutes is generally what a person would expect from having seen other movies and recognizing that Two Lovers is not a romantic comedy. Neither the Brighton Beach setting nor any of the characters are sufficiently unique to send the story in unexpected directions.

    Worse than that, they're not interesting enough to make watching them go through the motions particularly worthwhile. Leonard's story is sad, sure, but Phoenix plays him as a mere lump of wallowing misery, mumbling and self-effacing enough to keep the audience from having much connection with him at all. He's at least got a personality, though; Vinessa Shaw is given close to nothing to work with. We know that Sandra is attracted to Leonard from how she saw him in a good moment once, and that she's self-aware enough to recognize that she could choose from a large pool of men, because she tells us, but she's otherwise a blank. Shaw makes her pleasant enough, sympathetic as the only honest and forthright person in the triangle, and hints that she has a life exterior to the movie, which is probably all that can be expected of her. Michelle is less brainy than Paltrow's usual characters, but she's still predictably fragile. It's a well-honed performance, but one we've seen before.

    All three are fairly passive characters, and maybe that's the point: Like in the three-body gravitational problem, it may not be possible to calculate exactly how they'll attract each other and perturb their respective paths, but they're still affected by the rules of nature. The same circumstances will give the same results barring an outside force, and this movie's got no outside forces to supply. Director James Gray keeps things moving smoothly enough - the movie doesn't succumb to dead spots, and even the odd moment when Leonard is suddenly charming enough to give us some idea what Sandra would see in him doesn't seem completely out of place. He and co-writer do fall victim to thinking some of their details are more interesting than they actually are, especially by falling into the trap of substituting interest in opera and photography for personality.

    Of course, you could say the same about introducing physics into a simple movie review. That still doesn't change the fact that Two Lovers is a thoroughly Newtonian movie, following set, predictable paths, when it really could use an unpredictable quantum jolt.

    Also at EFC, along with one other review.

    Thursday, March 05, 2009

    Serbis

    Writing this review, I found myself wondering how the people who don't write reviews decide what they think about movies. That bit in the fourth paragraph isn't just me trying to give my writing some sort of flair or break up a bunch of analytical text with a personal touch; I honestly didn't get what the thrust of the movie was until halfway through the review.

    The answer, I guess, is that people don't, whether you want to take that to mean that most people don't really decide what they think about a movie beyond first impressions, or just don't think about them at all. There's noting wrong with that, but a movie like Serbis can't just be ingested and then not considered; do that and it's just an annoying art-house movie with more sex than usual and no real story to connect its random scenes. It grows in stature as one ponders.

    (Although, yeah, to a certain extent it is kind of an art-house movie with extra sex and minimal plot, but thinking about it made me realize that the various bits tie together much better than I initially thought.)

    Serbis (Service)

    * * * ½ (out of four)
    Seen 4 March 2009 at the Brattle Theater (Special Engagements)

    Serbis takes its name from the code word which the gay hustlers who populate the film's setting use to signify their availability. After watching it, I wonder why director Brillante Mendoza decided why he wanted this to be the word representing his film, especially when "Family" was sitting right there, admittedly obvious but also fitting and ironic. The "servicing" seems to mostly be going on at the periphery, and it makes me wonder whether I'm missing some greater metaphor.

    The setting is the Family Theater, aptly named in that it is owned, operated, and inhabited by three generations of the Pineda family; it's certainly not a place for the whole family, as it shows adult films and serves as a rendezvous and place of business for the local hustlers, prostitutes, and johns. Middle-aged Nayda (Jacklyn Jose) is handling most of the day-to-day operations, especially since her mother Flor (Gina Pareño) has recently been preoccupied by the legal proceedings against her husband (she's very worried that one son's testimony will allow him to go free). Nayda's husband Lando (Julio Diaz) mans the lunch counter between ferrying their son to and from school. Her cousin Alan (Coco Martin) paints murals and does odd jobs; in-law Ronald (Kristoffer King) handles projection. Every day is busy, but today is noteworthy; it's the day of the trial and also the day Alan's girlfriend Merly (Mercedes Cabral) shows up to put the extra pressure on him to share some information with Flor.

    Both the family Pineda and Family Theater are sprawling and somewhat run-down. Although Nayda is a rock at the center of the family, most of the rest show some sign of physical or mental infirmity: Alan has a revolting boil on his bottom, Ronald limps, Lando forgets things. And while the Family looks like it might have been an impressive place once - it has a balcony, and a large sign in good repair - there are tiles missing from the floor, though, and early on we see the men's room fill with filthy water as the floor drain gets plugged up. The Pinedas have more or less let the sex trade take over the theater, which is not only their place of business but their home, and though there's not much hand-wringing about it, there's obviously some concern about how the environment is affecting the two youngest members of the family.

    Ah, there it is; there's how the title reflects the heart of the film. Mendoza and writer Armando Lao do a good job of hiding it within a few lines of Flor's that don't overtly connect to everything else, but demonstrate just how warped priorities have become. I blame the sex for distracting me from this. Though IMDB shows the film as being R-rated, I'm surprised at that; the sex is quite explicit, and a throwaway line late in the movie makes the fairly innocent-seeming bit that opens the into something very uncomfortably voyeuristic. It's both more than I expected and more than I personally favor, and I'm not really sure it's the best way to tell the story, but it certainly does capture and focus the attention.

    The way Mendoza and cinematographer Odyssey Flores shoot the theater also gets some notice. Like the sex, I sometimes get the feeling that the filmmakers are doing attention-grabbing things to give the audience something to talk up. There are a pair of chases through the theater that are kind of showy, for instance. They do help give audience members who haven't thought much about what happens behind the scenes at the theater an impression of how the wide-open public spaces can give way to cramped, labyrinthine work spaces and corridors (including the inevitable need to go up and down stairs to move between two rooms on the same level). There's some fine handheld camera work, and while we see a great deal of decay and squalor, especially within the theater, the Angeles neighborhood outside does show sparks of vitality to hint that there is hope to be found. The camera often seems reluctant to leave the theater; early on it seems to wait on the porch as Flor goes off to court, and it twists around to look straight up at the theater's sign rather than pulling back across the street for a wide shot.

    As this sort of ensemble piece must, Serbis has a very nice cast, starting with the two women at the center. Jacklyn Jose and Gina Pareño play mother and daughter, but they are at the core two versions of the same character, at different points in their lives. Both Nadya and Flor are strong, uncompromising women, maybe beautiful in their youth but practical now, facing the life they find themselves in with resignation, anger, and desperation, depending on the circumstances. There's not a man in the movie quite so captivating as them; Coco Martin's Alan is interesting, but he's defined by his weakness, rather than his strength.

    By the end, we may not have gotten a complete story, but the cast and crew have come together to give us an intriguing day in the life of the Family Theater. Not always a pleasant one, but one with turning points and one which will probably linger in the mind.

    Also at EFC.

    Sunday, March 01, 2009

    This Week In Tickets: 23 February 2009 to 1 March 2009

    Below, one of the harshest indictments for the February dead zone that is February:

    This Week In Tickets!

    Folks reading this blog know that I like movies. I see a lot of them. So what does it mean when this page includes only four tickets to five movies (one of them not a real ticket, but just a placeholder to show I went to the Brattle's Sunday Eye Opener)? It means that either I'm really busy at work or there's nothing playing, and while I stayed late-ish to work a couple of times, I wasn't that busy.

    For crying out loud, I went to Echelon Conspiracy. That's not remarkable because I have much in the way of standards - the relatively common use of this blog's "crap" tag should indicate that - but because Echelon Conspiracy is actually playing on cinema screens. This is a direct-to-video quality movie at best, and yet not only was it playing in theaters, but there were a fair number of people watching it with me, despite the fact that there hasn't been, as far as I can tell, any posters, commercials, previews, or press of any kind for it before it showed up on Friday. People just wanted something new to see, and you can only watch the Oscar nominees and Taken so many times, so this and non-movies like the Jonas Brothers concert wind up on multiplex screens.

    Oddly, I'm not upset about this stuff getting a wide release while the likes of The Midnight Meat Train, Dance of the Dead, Fanboys, or any of dozens of other movies that I don't know about either get dumped straight to video or have to claw and scrape to get any release. I sort of think this like the tide going far out before a tsunami - Watchmen will get a metric ton of screens on Friday, and Echelon Conspiracy is just filling the gap before that. Still, this past week was a drag.

    Border Incident

    * * (out of four)
    Seen 24 February 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Remembering Ricardo Montalban)

    It's perhaps a little unfair that Ricardo Montalban, a fine, charming actor considered a sex symbol in his day, is remembered best for a couple of parts from his later years: Khan Noonian Singh and Mr. Roarke (as well as some car ads). He aged well, to be sure, but he also became a bit of a caricature of himself; he was something to behold in his younger days.

    Not that I'd particularly want him remembered for Border Incident, even though he is the best thing in it. It's a heavy-handed crime movie, complete with stenotarian lectures about how the border is policed and must be policed, the sort of thing that sounds like it was written by J. Edgar Hoover. Its characters are made of the finest cardboard, and its big action finale is about as unexciting as can be. It's the sort of movie that makes both criminals and police look less sophisticated than they possibly could be, and isn't nearly atmospheric or quick-witted enough to be good film noir.

    Mystery Street (aka Murder at Harvard)

    * * * (out of four)
    Seen 24 February 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Remembering Ricardo Montalban)

    Mystery Street does better by Montalban, casting him in the role of a Barnstable, MA, detective who receives assistance in solving a murder from a Harvard University forensic scientist. It's an enjoyable little mystery which would make for a decent episode of Bones or CSI these days, and has a great little moment toward the end where someone makes a remark about the detective's ethnicity (which had thus far gone uncommented upon) and Montalban's Peter Morales tosses it to the floor like he was doing verbal judo.

    And, it was fun for us locals to see Harvard Square (and other bits of Greater Boston) as it was roughly sixty years ago. One thing that amused me was that, while the Harvard campus looks much the same, a scene where a car drives up to park near the school gates passes by what is now the entrance to the T station, and the Out of Town News isn't there, although from the uproar when it looked as if it might close this year, you'd think the institution had been there forever!

    Echelon Conspiracy

    * ½ (out of four)
    Seen 28 February 2009 at AMC Boston Common #3 (first-run)

    Echelon Conspiracy is basically the same movie as Eagle Eye, only without the gigantic action sequences and charming lead actors that made the Shia LaBoeuf vehicle entertaining. It also manages to be even dumber than that other movie, which is pretty tough, as that was a pretty staggeringly silly movie, which got away with it because it never stopped long enough to allow the audience to think about what a house of cards it was. This one never gets up to speed.

    I strongly suspect that a lot of the money for this movie came from Russia, based on the effusive praise for Russian cryptography technology and the final scene which is jaw-droppingly hilarious if this film was primarily meant for an American audience. The real tragedy of this film is that director Greg Marcks doesn't let the absolutely insanely good vehicular stunt teams they have in Moscow go to town in the last act: There's a nice car chase, but if it's the same crew as was used in Junk or The Bourne Supremacy, they can do better, though maybe not on this budget.

    The Pink Panther 2

    * * ½ (out of four)
    Seen 28 February 2009 at AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run)

    Like it's predecessor, this movie isn't the abomination before good cinema that one could fear, owing in large part to the fact that when you cram Steve Martin, John Cleese, Alfred Molina, and Lily Tomlin into the same movie, comedy will happen if only by accident. Supplanting them with the likes of Jean Reno, Emily Mortimer, Aishwarya Rai, Jeremy Irons, Andy Garcia, and Johnny Hallyday isn't going to hurt things.

    That's the kind of sad in-between state it gets stuck in: It's not nearly as bad as the idea behind it, but it's not nearly as good as the amount of talent involved promises. Pretty much everyone involved is better than this, although it says something about Emily Mortimer that she can make me love a character in such a silly movie. Andy Garcia should also do this kind of broad comedy more often; he steals every scene he's in.

    The Toe Tactic

    * * ½ (out of four)
    Seen 1 March 2009 at the Brattle Theatre (Sunday Eye Opener)

    About fifteen or twenty minutes into this movie, I accepted that as much as I may support and appreciate risk taking in artistic endeavor, I really do appreciate it when people just tell me the story. There's a nice story in Emily Hubley's The Toe Tactic that often seems to have a hard time getting out because the animated chorus of card-playing dogs keeps interfering. What's interesting is that in the Q&A afterward, director Emily Hubley mentioned (admitted?) that the animated characters saw their roles increase as she worked on the script, in part because she is an animator from a family of animators (she's the daughter of John and Faith Hubley), and that's what she does.

    It's too bad, because there's a nice stretch in the middle where they pretty much keep out of it, and it becomes a real pleasure to watch Lily Rabe, Novella Nelson, Kevin Corrigan, Daniel London, Mary Kay Place, and the rest of the cast work. This is also the stretch where we get Jane Lynch as the emcee of a bar's open mic night, and though I suspect most people know this already, Jane Lynch is funny. She perks the movie right up, setting a bizarre tone that the animated bits, sadly, fail to deliver.
    Ricardo MontalbanEchelon ConspiracyThe Pink Panther 2The Toe Tactic