Category: Film Page 50 of 101

AFI Fest 2011: Day Four (Monday)

On November 30, 2011

Hoping to plow through the rest of these recaps so I can get to my month recap post relatively on time. Monday was kind of a disappointing day at the festival for me, as I didn’t really care for either of the features. However, there was enough goodness during the shorts program that it saved the day a bit for me. Still, ending the day with a 158-minute Russian film I nearly hated was pretty much of a downer. That’s what you get with festivals, though, gotta take the bad with the good.

Shorts Program 3

I usually try to make it to one shorts program per festival; this time I made it to three of them! And I’m really glad I did – they don’t get as much press, but short films are often the hidden gems at festivals, and it’s too bad there’s not a more visible/mainstream venue for them. This program had eight live-action shorts running around 10-20 minutes each, pretty much all of them extremely high production quality.

Juan and La Borrega – A crime drama short from Mexico, with a heavy strong-arming his way into a uniform wholesalers before they open and terrorizing the meek clerk. Really good acting, but a touch on the melodramatic side. Reaction: LIKED.
All in All – Not totally sure what to make of this one; set at a Christian summer camp, it was getting laughs from the audience purely through the characters talking about their commitment to God and such. I’m not sure what the filmmakers intended; if it was satire (as the audience was largely taking it), it was a little too straight. If sincere, the actors weren’t quite good enough to pull it off. Reaction: DIDN’T LIKE
Clear Blue – A teen starts his first day lifeguarding the early shift at a nearly deserted pool, except for the older woman who seems to have impossible breathing control and dislikes contact with other people. The two of them form a strange friendship, as the woman reveals she’s not quite what she seems. A bit of a slow burn, but gorgeous cinematography and a very sweet story. Reaction: REALLY LIKED.
Blink – This one had some stylistic over-the-topness that wasn’t really necessary, making the beginning a little offputting, but the underlying story is pretty interesting – a guy experiences weird glitches, then discovers that his girlfriend is literally editing their life in a film editing room hidden off their bedroom, cutting out all the bad parts. But who is she to decide what the bad parts are, or that they should be removed? Interesting ideas, and only a little over-indulgent. Reaction: LIKED.
Pale Flowers in Time – The most overtly experimental of the pieces, a sort of horror riff on the idea that red-eye in photographs is actually a demon in the person. Some of it is downright terrifying, both in the way music and editing juxtaposes things together, and notably in a scene with Chloe Sevigny and a little boy trying to make faces to scare each other, helped out with a little excellent makeup and CGI work. Reaction: LOVED.
Ex-Sex – Very Silver Lake hipster-esque film, all pastel-colors and indie pop music as a former couple gets back together for a one-night stand. Some sweet moments, and really good chemistry between the actors, but not really enough back story to their relationship to make it fully worthwhile. Still, some decent promise here, and I’ll check out the feature the director’s working on (okay, partially because the feature will star Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie). Reaction: LIKED.
Another Bullet Dodged – Another hipster-esque film, but not nearly as sweet. This time, a man picks up a girl who may or may not be his girlfriend, and eventually you find out they’re headed to an abortion clinic. Not a storyline I’m a fan of anyway, but the guy’s such a dick (intentionally, I think – we’re not supposed to like him) that I found it pretty hard to sit through. Reaction: DIDN’T LIKE
The Voyagers – Back to more experimental with this one, as a narrator talks about the Voyager missions, including a capsule of earth things sent into the far reaches of space, and then connects those musings to love, and how risking everything on love is kind of like sending a Voyager capsule into space on the possibility that someone, somewhere, someday will find it. It’s a heady piece, made up of found footage and animation, but it all came together with the narration much better than my description would indicate. Reaction: REALLY LIKED.

Coriolanus

This adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays boasts a strong cast including Ralph Fiennes (who also makes his directing debut), Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain, and James Nesbit. But there’s a reason that Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays. It’s frankly not that interesting, even transposing its story of a military hero double-crossed and banished into a modern setting. The acting veers from classical overblown Shakespearean antics to more minimalist approaches, giving the film a very uneven feel – only Redgrave and Cox seem to know how to navigate switching between these two as the material calls for it. Chastain is really underused. There are some great moments, particularly Redgrave’s tour-de-force scenes as Coriolanus’ mother, but the whole thing is unwieldy and uneven. Reaction: MEH. Full review on Row Three.
2011 UK. Director: Ralph Fiennes. Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave, Brian Cox, Jessica Chastain.

Target

I so wanted this to be good – a Russian sci-fi film about a group of people who seek out this target-shaped area in Thailand with a well at the center of it that supposedly grants eternal youth. Seems like a good deal, but all is bound to go wrong. That much I figured, but it goes wrong in really offputting, cruel, and pointless ways. By the end of its two and a half hour runtime, I didn’t care about any of the characters and just wanted it to end. There are some great visuals spread throughout, and it’s shot and acted quite well, but it’s just…punishing to watch. Reaction: DISLIKED.
2011 Russia. Director: Alexander Zeldovich. Starring: Vitaly Kishchenko, Danila Kozlovskiy, Nina Loshchinina.

AFI Film Festival: Day Three (Sunday)

By Jandy

On November 25, 2011

In Film

I am determined to get all these AFI films capsuled up, even if we are getting further and further away from the festival itself. Sunday would’ve been another five-film day like Saturday, except that I knew the Melancholia screening was going to be packed and decided to get in line super-early instead of seeing something in the slot just before it. That turned out to be the right decision, since being at the front of the pass-holder’s line only got us seats way over on the side. They turned away a whole bunch of people from that screening. But it was worth it. Great film, definitely one to see whether you’re a fan of von Trier or not, really.

The Dish and the Spoon

Greta Gerwig is an indie goddess for a reason, and this little film proves why. Taking a simple story of a woman angry at her husband’s infidelity and throwing in some adventures with a young unmoored British man, Gerwig finds a character arc and runs with it, alternating funny, awkward, raw, and quirky as needed. The film is something of a collaboration between director, writer, and stars, and though things like this can get loose and uncontrolled very quickly, that doesn’t happen here, and the film remains charming and cohesive. Reaction: LIKED. Full review on Row Three.
2011 USA. Director: Alison Bagnall. Starring: Greta Gerwig, Olly Alexander.

Cafe de Flore

Parallel stories seemingly connected only by the importance of the title song in each take place in 1969 Paris and present-day Montreal. In 1969, a mother devotes herself to her Downs Syndrome son, their close bond threatened only when the boy becomes attached to a Downs girl he meets a school. In present-day, a DJ leaves his wife of many years for a young beauty. Both stories are concerned with multiple loves, lost love, new love, and letting go, and they may be connected even closer than that. This film will sneak up on you with how good it is, rising to an amazingly edited and scored crescendo. There currently isn’t US distribution for it that I’m aware of, and that’s a crying shame. This is one of the best films of the year. Reaction: LOVED.
2011 Canada. Director: Jean-Marc Vallée. Starring: Vanessa Paradis, Kevin Parent, HÃ©lÃ¨ne Florent, Evelyne Brochu.

Melancholia

It stands to reason that Lars von Trier would be a stellar director for a film with the end of the world as a metaphor for depression. It isn’t a particularly subtle film, but it’s nonetheless a perfect depiction of “melancholia” in both metaphorical and literal terms, as Kirsten Dunst gives an incredible performance as a woman struggling with depression, seemingly the only person who truly understands the import of the planet hurtling toward earth (dubbed “Melancholia”). Her sister, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, tries to help her through the depression, but when it becomes clear that Melancholia is not going to miss Earth as predicted, she falls apart – the shifting roles of the two sisters brings a dynamism to a film that can get downright stately (in a good way). No one but von Trier could make this film, but it is probably his most accessible in years. Reaction: LOVED.
2011 Denmark. Director: Lars von Trier. Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Alexander Skarsgaard, Stellan Skarsgaard, Charlotte Rampling.

Headhunters

A downright fun thriller with a heavy dose of dark comedy, as a mousy headhunter who uses his contacts as a way to find potential targets for his side business as an art thief ends up embroiled in a scheme way over his head and has to overcome his many character weaknesses just to survive. The plotting is intricate, but rarely confusing, and the cast (including Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, best known in the US for his villainous Jaime Lannister on Game of Thrones) carries off all manner of ridiculous situations with believable aplomb. Reaction: LOVED.
2011 Norway. Director: Morten Tyldum. Starring: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Aksel Hennie, Julie R. Ã˜lgaard, SynnÃ¸ve Macody Lund.

Review: Tomboy

By Jandy

On November 18, 2011

In Film, Reviews

[Rating:3.5/5]

[Tomboy opens in limited release in the US this week, so I’m reposting and expanding my LAFF review; x-posted from Row Three]

Moving into a new neighborhood means new kids to play with, and a chance for ten-year-old tomboy Laure (already androgynous with cropped hair, tank top, and shorts) to pretend to be a boy with her new friends. Introducing herself as Mikael, she passes quite well, playing sports with the boys and hanging out with new friend Lisa in a perhaps more than friendly way. At home she continues to be Laure, and her parents have no idea that she’s lying about her gender elsewhere – though they do perhaps have something of an inkling that she is not particularly comfortable identifying as a girl.

Ten seems fairly young to experience gender identity issues as strongly as this, but writer/director Céline Sciamma wisely keeps the film focused on identity rather than sexuality. Yet this also introduces a certain ambiguity that may or may not be a good thing – when I initially saw the film in June at the LA Film Festival, I left the film confused as to whether Laure really did identify as a boy, or whether she simply wanted to do “boy” things and wear “boy” clothes. In other words, is she really just the tomboy of the title living in a society that for some reason restricts girls from doing boy things while still identifying as girls, or does it go deeper than that? I’m more inclined now to see that ambiguity as a plus than a minus, but it’s still definitely there for me. Others are seeing the film as a fully LGBT film (in fact, it played in an LGBT sidebar at LAFF), but I don’t think it’s necessarily that simple.

As the summer goes on and school looms on the horizon, Laure resorts to increasingly elaborate attempts to keep her secret, but eventually it comes out, and the pain of both returning to her female gender and having to tell her friends (and their families) that she lied to them is almost palpable. It’s a great central performance from Zoé Héran, who gets across both the joy in the early scenes of small things like being able to take off her shirt to play football and the humiliation of having her secret revealed in subtle and believable ways. It’s a very still performance a lot of the time, but she breaks out when she needs to for emotional impact. Even better, though, is Malonn Lévana as her little sister Jeanne. In between cavorting outside with Lisa and the boys, Laure stays home and takes care of Jeanne, drawing and playing with her without pretense. Jeanne is a live-wire, all smiles and giggles where Laure is very quiet and solemn. She steals nearly every scene she’s in, and the film (which sometimes threatens to lose itself in its own stillness) comes alive whenever she’s on screen. She figures out Laure’s secret before long, but keeps it, somehow intuiting even at her young age how important this is to Laure.

The very end adds to the ambiguity, suggesting that Laure actually has a long way to go before she figures out her own identity, but that’s okay. It holds forgiveness and tentative friendship, the rebuilding of bonds that could well have been severed completely. The film stays fairly aloof from its own gender politics, something that frustrated me a little on initial watch but that I think is ultimately a strength – a willingless to simply observe Laure without making overt statements of its own. At the same time, it also seems like it’s trying to be a little more profound than it actually is – gorgeous cinematography make it quite watchable despite the slow pacing, but also lend it a veneer of depth that the film doesn’t entirely earn.

Writer/Director: CÃ©line Sciamma.
Producer: Bénédicte Couvreur.
Starring: ZoÃ© HÃ©ran, Malonn Levana, Jeanne Disson, Sophie Cattani.
Country: France
Running Time: 82 min.

AFI Festival 2011: Day Two (Saturday)

By Jandy

On November 15, 2011

In Film

Getting a little hopelessly behind on these (hopelessly because the fest has now been over for several days), but I’m going to go ahead and do them in order as planned anyway. Saturday was the fullest day of movies, with five features all in a row starting just after noon. Had some close connections to make (including running down the street from the Chinese to the Egyptian in about two minutes flat), but I made it to everything, just barely. And what’s a fest without a few close calls, eh?

Snowtown

[Rating:4/5]

Everything I’ve heard from Australian bloggers and other festival-goers indicated that this film was a) really well-done and b) really hard to watch. That’s not far off, although I didn’t find it as difficult to watch as I thought I might. It’s based on the real-life John Bunting, Australia’s most notorious serial killer, but it’s far from a standard biopic. It filters its portrait through the character of Jamie, a teenage boy growing up in a single-parent, low income home. We spend a good bit of time with Jamie and his family before John shows up, suddenly Jamie’s mom’s new love interest. John is charismatic and heroic to Jamie and his younger brothers, someone who protects them from the pedophile next door but slowly brainwashes Jamie into his bigoted and violent worldview – but what at first seems to be just extreme vigilante justice against actual bad people soon turns into more and more self-serving kills. Some of these are very hard to watch, and I admit to closing my eyes a few times, but even more disturbing is how John brings Jamie into his group, and how he treats his “friends” at any provocation. It’s an extremely effective approach to Bunting, but probably not something I’d want to watch again.
2011 Australia. Director: Justin Kurzel. Starring: Lucas Pittaway, Bob Adriaens and Louise Harris.

Le cercle rouge

[Rating:5/5]

My one repertory screening of the festival, thanks to Pedro Almodóvar programming a Jean-Pierre Melville film I’ve wanted to see for quite a while. And it was totally worth giving up a new movie to be able to see this one for the first time in a theatre with a full, appreciative audience. It’s a crime story, like most of Melville’s films, an intricately plotted combination of criminals on the run, police on the chase, the mob on the make, and a well-planned jewelry heist. All these elements get their due, with great characters in every part. It’s not quite fair to give a 40-year-old film my “best of fest” vote, but it was unquestionably my favorite. Full review on Row Three.
1970 France. Director: Jean-Pierre Melville. Starring: Alain Delon, Bourvil and Gian Maria Volonté.

Pina

[Rating:3.5/5]

After thinking that Werner Herzog’s The Cave of Forgotten Dreams was the best use of 3D I’d seen so far, I figured I’d give Herzog’s countryman Wim Wenders a chance to challenge with his dance documentary/tribute to groundbreaking choreographer Pina Bausch, who died while working a film with Wenders. He abandoned the film upon her death, until her dance company convinced him to complete it as a tribute to her. The film itself is lovely, a collection of dance performances, some on stage, others in various urban and rural laces throughout Germany, intercut with brief interview excerpts from members of the company about Pina and her approach to dance. The 3D, though…something may be wrong with me, but I find it impossible to focus on movement in 3D, and dance is a LOT of movement. The still parts look pretty cool in 3D (including, surprisingly, the interview segments, which are done as a shot of the dancer not talking with their quotes given in voiceover – more effective than you might think), but as soon as the dancers move with any speed, it’s just a blur and trying to focus on it gave me a massive headache. I think I would prefer to watch this in 2D. Full review on Row Three.
2011 Germany. Director: Wim Wenders. Starring: Ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch.

BonsÃ¡i

[Rating:3.5/5]

An opening voiceover tells us that all we need to know about this story is that at the end, Emilia is dead, and Julio is not dead. “All the rest is fiction.” I love when stories play with storytelling itself, and that’s what this film does, giving us a multi-layered look at a relationship that may be real, or may be partly real, and certainly is partly fiction. Julio is a wanna-be writer who tries to get a job typing up the latest work of a famous novelist. When he fails to get the job, he tells his girlfriend about it anyway and starts making up the story based on the brief logline the novelist gave him, tying it back to a relationship he had nine years earlier with a girl in college. At some points he seems to be telling their story exactly, but other times it’s clear that filtered through both memory and fiction, it’s vastly different than what actually happened, if indeed, anything actually happened at all. The story owes a lot to Proust, whose opening lines in Remembrance of Things Past get repeated a few times (Julio and Emilia also met over them both pretending to have read Proust) – I won’t repeat them all here, but they have to do with the main character falling asleep reading and in a half-wakeful state imagining himself to have become part of the book he was reading. That’s very much what’s going on here, and I loved it. The love story (or stories, both the remembered one with Emilia and the current one with his girlfriend) is sweet and genuine, and though the film as a whole is pretty slight, it’s very enjoyable and made me want to read Proust myself. So there’s that.
2011 Chile. Director: Cristián Jiménez. Starring: Gabriela Arancibia, Cristóbal Briceño and Julio Carrasco.

Kill List

[Rating:4/5]

Main character Jay has been out of work for eight months, a situation that he seems okay with, but his wife Shel most certainly is not. At first, it’s not clear what he does for work, but as the film wears on and a former colleague approaches him with a potential job, it becomes clear that he’s a hit man. As they take on the job, which consists of a list of people to be killed, the situations get weirder and weirder until the film takes a turn that switches it from slow burn to high-octane in almost a split second. That turn may not work for everybody, but it worked like gangbusters for me. Even the earlier kills have a bit of the old ultraviolence to them, and the twist at the end is horrible, but not necessarily unearned. At least, not in terms of the emotional and adrenal impact. I’m not sure the whole trajectory of the story makes logical sense in any way whatsoever, but by the time Jay and his cohort are being chased around in a set of dark, dank tunnels, it doesn’t really matter anymore. Terror takes over, and I have to say, this is one of the most terrifying films I’ve seen lately, even with a whole month of horror films just behind me in October. I loved it.
2011 UK. Director: Ben Wheatley. Starring: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Harry Simpson.

AFI Festival: Day One (Friday)

By Jandy

On November 7, 2011

In Film

A few capsule reviews from the first day at the AFI Film Festival. Saw a couple of great things, a couple of not-great things, managed to eat dinner in the middle of it all, and made it through the midnight movie no worse for wear. So great to be festivalling again. So great.

Extraterrestrial

I’m a big fan of Nacho Vigalondo’s time travel film Timecrimes, so when I saw his new alien invasion film was coming to AFI Fest, it was an immediate must on my schedule. I’m not as big on alien invasion films as I am on time travel films, but that’s okay, because this is far from your typical alien invasion film, focusing on a quartet of characters left behind the evacuation when an alien ship appears. Their biggest fears, though, are the secrets they’re keeping from each other and the theories they hatch about each other. Great script and performances to match from the young cast make this a hugely fun time from start to finish. Full review on Row Three. Reaction: LOVED

This is Not a Film

This is not a film because Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been placed under house arrest and banned from filmmaking for 20 years by the Iranian government, because his films are seen as subversive and politically dangerous. This is not a film also because what he’s doing instead of making a film is having a friend record him telling his next screenplay, and a description of a screenplay is not a film. But this is a very real, very heartbreaking, very frustrating, and surprisingly very funny documentary about a man denied the ability to do what he does. It’s fantastic, and the knowledge that Panahi’s appeal was denied in the middle of October only makes it more poignant. Full review on Row Three.Reaction: LOVED

Faust

I quite liked Alexander Sukorov’s one-shot odyssey through Russian history in Russian Ark, but this film is nothing like that. It does have the framework of the Faust story, but a whole lot of the film is taken up by angsty philosophy (“where does the soul reside”) that might’ve intrigued me a little more if I knew more German and Russian philosophy, and a bunch of random running around as the devil and Faust hang out, crash parties full of women, wander through a city and the woods, etc. There’s some pretty cool imagery here and there, and after Faust actually signs his soul away, the rest of the film is good. But everything up to that (which is a LONG TIME) is really dull. Really. Reaction: MEH

Beyond the Black Rainbow

I had no expectations at all of this, other than a recommendation from one friend who likes weird genre stuff and random Internet reviews that hated it. The trailer’s pretty trippy, so I was expecting that. Turns out there is a sci-fi story of sorts involving a happiness clinic, a girl held there against her will, a creepy psychologist-type guy, a bunch of androids or something, and…other stuff. The best part is the almost fully abstract flashback that sort of (but not really) explains the girl’s background; the parts that try to be story-led are just kind of off putting. Reaction: MEH