I happened to see Mid August Lunch today too after it being on my Lovefilm list. Very gentle, and a little poignant at times too given the obvious loneliness of the other old ladies. Nicely observed film.
Cinco Días sin Nora - Nora's Will Mariana Chenillo, Mexico
Understated and well told story of a family gathering for a strange Passover Dinner. Set in current day Mexico, it opens with a woman alone in an apartment preparing food and arranging her home for guests. She is Nora (Silvia Mariscal), and when her ex-husband José (Fernando Luján), who lives in the apartment building across the street, gets a delivery of food for Nora because there is no answer at her home, eventually he goes over to investigate...only to find Nora dead in her bed. She has committed suicide but left copious notes and instructions behind. As José contacts their adult son, who is on vacation in America with his family, her doctor, the Rabbi and on and on, he becomes more and more resentful of the situation she has neatly planned. Between her son not being immediately available, the observance of Passover and the Sabbath, it will be five days before Nora can be buried, leaving her body in the bedroom. The carefully orchestrated gathering leads to decades old secrets and resentments coming to the surface, and José, who is not religious at all himself and certainly can't be bothered to respect the Jewish traditions, manages to alienate just about everybody. But the situation forces José and everybody else to find a solution.
There is some nice, gentle humor throughout, the seventy-one-year-old Luján is very good balancing the comedy and drama, and it builds to a well-earned and tender finale that is not forced or saccharine.
GRADE: B
Passenger Side Matt Bissonnette, Canada/USA
Loosely inspired by the Wilco song of the same name, Passenger Side is a modest character-based road movie set in and around Los Angeles. Adam Scott (Art School Confidential, "Party Down") stars as Michael, a thirty-something writer who has had one novel published and is struggling through his second. It's his birthday and his mother calls, but mostly just to guilt him into seeing his brother that day. We learn that his brother, Tobey (Joel Bissonnette), has had his share of problems, mostly stemming from a past of drug abuse. As a result, the brothers haven't even spoken in months, even though they both live in L.A. But he begrudgingly decides to see him, and when he picks him up Tobey claims he needs to be chauffeured around, initially he says for a job interview. Michael doesn't believe him, but he agrees anyway. As they begin to make more and more stops in seedier and seedier parts of town, Michael is sure this is drug related, but Tobey eventually confesses that he's searching for his ex-girlfriend who he has seen in a recent dream and is now sure she is his destiny. So off they go, trying to track her down.
Along the way they meets some random people who wind up sharing their ride for a time, including a transvestite, a drunken girl, and a young man who has accidentally severed a couple fingers while cutting down a tree. But mostly Michael and Tobey talk. It's much more like My Dinner with Andre than Easy Rider, and their banter and relationship is the true spine of the movie. There are a few big laughs with a decent emotional payoff, and if it weren't for the presence of a couple established professionals in Adam Scott and Robin Tunney it would fit into the so-called Mumblecore slice of indie fare. Not overly ambitious, but well-observed and I enjoyed riding around with these guys for a day.
GRADE: B
Waking Sleeping Beauty Don Hahn, USA
This one is extremely entertaining, a behind-the-scenes look at the critical point in Disney's history when the animation division went from rock bottom to unparalleled success from the years of roughly 1984 to 1994. Told by Don Hahn, a longtime animator and producer at Disney, using retrospective interview clips and home movies shot by the animators plus some current day reflections to tell this amazing Hollywood tale. By the late 1970s Disney's animation output, the brand identity of the empire, was in sorry shape. Even before Walt's death in 1966, animation had become less and less of a priority for the company, which was focused on their amusement parks and merchandising. After a downward slope in quality from the '60s onward, titles like The Aristocats, Robin Hood and The Rescuers, they were dealt a near deathblow when Don Bluth, who was being groomed to take over the operations, abruptly quit the company and took half of the younger animators with him to create his own studio, which would eventually lead to direct competition with movies such as The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail and The Land Before Time. There were still some of the animators ftom the classic '50s era who were in their sixties, but the kids who hadn't left with Bluth hadn't had their chance to show their stuff yet.
The Fox and the Hound, released in 1981, was massively over-budget and a couple years behind schedule when it finally made it to the screen to lukewarm reviews and tiny box office. Then there was a big shakeup at Disney in 1984, with Roy, Walt's nephew, stepping off of the board and making way for former Warner Bros. exec Frank Wells and Paramount chairman Michael Eisner to be installed as COO and CEO of Disney. They were big Hollywood guns, and they changed the company immediately. Their renewed focus on non-animated features paid off in a huge way under the new Touchstone banner from Splash onward, but they were smart enough to know that animation had to continue and thrive, even though it was at a low point. Eisner brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg to oversee feature animation, although he had absolutely zero background in it.
The animation hit its true low-point with The Black Cauldron in 1985. Years overdue it was a critical and financial disaster, getting beat by the frippin' Care Bears Movie at the box office. But that got rid of the stale old projects, and the young guys were finally allowed to start showing their stuff. Their next two features, The Great Mouse Detective and Oliver & Company, were improvements and put them back in the right direction, but when the big project Who Framed Roger Rabbit was made in London without anybody from the animation department being involved, they knew they were still in the doghouse. But it was a bit of a blessing, as the international talent that was drawn to Spielberg and Roger Rabbit were folded back into the L.A. team, which brought new energy and skills. Their next project, a return to the fairy tales that made the studio famous, was The Little Mermaid. It was a huge hit, winning Oscars and raking in millions. It also started a run of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King that were successes like the industry had never seen. An investment they made in technology during this time also led directly to the explosion of PIXAR and the next wave of unprecedented success.
In chronicling all of those ins and outs and ups and downs, the movie also gives the backstage view of the conflicting personalities at Disney, especially Katzenberg, Eisner and Roy Disney. During that decade it did turn the animation department around, but it didn't last forever with the various egos and personalities too much to coexist indefinitely, and after Frank Wells tragically died in a helicopter crash the buffer between the other three men was gone and led to Katzenberg leaving the company after The Lion King. Don Hahn and the other hundreds of people involved in Disney animation, had a special perspective on it all, and it is relayed very well without becoming gossipy or cheap in Waking Sleeping Beauty. Hahn loved his job and the people he worked with, and above all that passion and artistry behind these megahits is what comes through again and again. For anybody who is even remotely interested in Disney or Hollywood or the business of show, it is absolutely fascinating and a must-see.
GRADE: A
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"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra
De Brief voor de Koning - Letter for the King
Pieter Verhoeff, The Netherlands
Old fashioned adventure tale told pretty well, would have loved it when I was eleven. Set in Medieval day minus any supernatural elements or sorcery, we follow a young Knight-in-training, Tiuri (Yannick van de Velde), only sixteen-years-old but on the eve of being promoted from his father's shield bearer to an actual junior Knight. The final task requires that Tiuri and the other hopefuls spend all night locked in a chapel. They are not to talk, other than prayer, not to sleep, and definitely not to leave. In the middle of the night there is a great pounding on the door and pleas for help. The other young men ignore it, but Tiuri cannot. He knows it may be either a test or even if it is real may well ruin his chances at Knighthood, but he cannot ignore the cries. Out in the dark is a wounded man. He gives Tiuri a letter, says it is for the King of the next land only, and cannot be given to anybody else or unsealed. The Knight that was carrying it is wounded in the woods nearby and Tiuri rushes to him for further instructions. The Knight, a stranger in Tiuri's land, gives him a ring to show to a hermit and reinforces that NOBODY else may read the letter other than the King. With that the Knight dies, so Tiuri mounts his trusty steed and rushes off into the wilderness.
Along the way the inexperienced Tiuri will meet monks, bandits, Knights, and others as he tries to make his way through one kingdom, over the mountains, and into another before the evildoers who killed the Knight and Squire who originally had the task of delivering the letter try their best to find and kill him, too. Lots of great photography, especially in the woods and mountains of Europe. The story is about as basic as can be, though in a refreshing and unpretentious way. The main flaw I would say is that the action scenes, specifically the sword-fighting, does leave something to be desired: it is stagecraft 101 High School time. But otherwise, an adventure like they seldom make anymore, minus all the bells and whistles and high concept twists of say The Lightning Thief or the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake...but with thrice the charm.
GRADE: B-
Alle Anderen - Everyone Else
Maren Ade, Germany
This was the first stinker I saw at the Festival this year. Four years ago at PIFF I saw this director's previous effort, Der Wald vor lauter Bäumen, her debut, which I rather liked (review HERE). As such I was looking forward to this one: what a disappointment. It is about the relationship between two lovers, Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger), on vacation in the Mediterranean. It is a vacation home of Chris' parents, though as the movie opens his sister and her young daughter are about to go, leaving Chris and Gitti alone. For a couple they have different personalities. He is an architect, though the kind who will stubbornly pass up jobs if they will not let him have his way creatively, and he is very conservative in manner. She works for some record label back home, and deals with marketing, with a very outgoing manner. She speaks no Italian, so that makes them captives of the house, more or less,and for a while that seems fine. But when they are around other people, including an old architect friend and his sophisticated girlfriend ( Hans-Jochen Wagner and Nicole Marischka) all of the sudden Gitti doesn't seem to be good enough or "normal" enough for Chris, who becomes more than a bit of a bastard.
Then you spend an excruciating holiday with these people as the passive-aggressively (and every once in a while just plain aggressively) talk and mostly don't talk to each other. Unfortunately the movie has nothing new to say about the nature of intimate relationships, and what it does say is simultaneously plodding and annoying. Then to add insult to boredom it has an artsy non-ending ending. Waste of time, although there is one steamy sex scene toward the end. But hey, just Google some porn and skip this one.
Based on the real-life story of a card-carrying Nazi who managed to save a couple hundred thousand lives during the Japanese massacre of Nanking. John Rabe (Ulrich Tukur) was a German businessman who had lived in China for over twenty-five years, working for the Siemens Company building a phone company and power plant. He was more than a bit imperialistic in his attitude toward his almost entirely Chinese staff and employees, but while condescending toward them he did at least see them as human beings. Just before Rabe and his wife were to return to Germany for good in December of 1937, the Japanese attacked Nanking. On the first night of bombing he displayed a large Nazi flag, which stopped his plant's destruction. Japan and Hitler's Germany were already allies, so his cache as a card-carrying Nazi got him and those he protected some small measure of mercy. Having been in China since 1910 or so Rabe was not a fanatical Nazi, really loyal to the State in name only and, as the movie tells it anyway, blissfully unaware of the radical and dangerous aspects of Hitler. But his Nazi branding was enough to be able to open a dialogue with the Japanese diplomats and eventually the military itself as the city was sieged. A contingent of Europeans, including an American doctor (Steve Buscemi), the French headmistress of a girl's school (Anne Consigny) and a young German diplomat (Daniel Brühl) who had already fled the Japanese attack of Shanghai, all banded together to create a "safety zone" in the center of the city, a humanitarian area where refugees would be given sanctuary, medical attention and food while the attack raged around them.
The safety zone was far from perfect, and the Japanese soldiers consistently ignored the borders and rules of the area when they felt like it, but overall because of Rabe and the others it managed to save the lives of around 200,000 Chinese. It is a fascinating and seldom-mentioned chapter of history, and while the film John Rabe slips into melodramatics and TV movie-of-the-week histrionics too often, the power of the underlying story (as tweaked as it may be for dramatic license) is enough to carry the narrative over its rougher and cheesier lapses. I'd rather see a good documentary or read a book about this subject, but for what it is, I suppose it works OK, especially with the good core of actors doing their best.
GRADE: C
The Shock Doctrine
Whitecross & Winterbottom, UK
Cliff Notes version of Naomi Klein's best-selling book of the same name where she deconstructs the failures and dangers of what she defines as "disaster capitalism". Inspired by the theories of the anti-Keynesian Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, it basically contends that the most radical of free marketeers may use disasters, natural, military or otherwise, to quickly deregulate and privatize societies. Using several examples, the most convincing and clear being the first, Pinochet's Chile of the 1970s, the film chiefly intercuts a talk Klein gave at The University of Chicago with newsreel footage to illustrate her central arguments. Whether you think Naomi is a genius or a crank or somewhere in between, the documentary is concise and cogent and gives a jumping-off point for further discussion, thinking and study to see if the shock doctrine holds any water.
GRADE: B
Moomin and Midsummer Madness
Maria Lindberg, Finland
Starting way back in the 1940s, Finnish cartoonist and author Tove Jansson created a world of Moomintrolls in a series of books and comic strips. They are a standard part of pop culture in Finland, and beyond the original texts the creatures have inspired TV shows, cartoons, movies and even a theme park! I did not read the books as a child, so I have no natural reservoir of nostalgia or affinity for the characters, but this newest film adaptation just plain didn't work for me. This past year Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr. Fox was noted for it's retro stop-motion style and Coraline was an example of the artform at its highest level, but this Moomin & Midsummer Madness is retro in a bad, bad way. It does truly look like it was made in about 1964 in maybe the Soviet Union, but the biggest problem I had in relating to the characters on the screen is that their mouths don't move and their facial expressions rarely change at all, making for a monotone and flat bunch of odd little critters to try and follow through their so-called adventures. I don't know how closely this plot of an erupting volcano and resulting flood displacing the Moomins is to any of the books, but the movie is all incident and no plot, and that coupled with characters who have little to zero demonstrable personality makes for a snore of a flick, from ages five to five-hundred.
There was a Japanese-Dutch series of the Moomins that made it to the UK and both freaked and intrigued... pretty good production values (the moomins even got mouths) and strange Finnish sensibilities...
Cleverly constructed genre piece about a small-time smuggler forced to do one more job. Baltasar Kormákur stars as Kristófer, recently released from jail having gotten caught trying to smuggle many gallons of illegal alcohol into Iceland. He is working as a nightshift security guard, barely making ends meet for not only himself but his wife and two kids. A buddy of his, Steingrímur (Ingvar Eggert Sigurđsson, Jar City), who was also involved in the smuggling business and who Kristófer essentially took the fall for, wants to help out, but he's resistant to charity. He's trying his best to go straight, but since a nephew has gotten himself in trouble with some thugs for ditching a load of drugs on a recent run, he agrees to do one last job to square the debt and get his family a financial foothold. He manages to wrangle a job back on the same ship where he was arrested last time, even though the conservative Captain of the freighter is constantly suspicious of him and watches his every move above and below decks.
What follows is a thriller that is part caper movie and part con game, all with a dash of humor. Baltasar Kormákur (101 Reykjavík) is terrific in the lead, kind of an Icelandic Colin Farrell, and while genre aficionados won't be terribly surprised by the several twists and double crosses, it is done very well and definitely has the audience rooting for Kristófer to figure out all the angles and play them before he himself is played. After seeing this fun flick I can't say I'm at all surprised to find that an American remake is already in the works, to be produced by and starring Mark Wahlberg. Before the inevitably lesser reworking makes its way to the cineplex, track down the original.
GRADE: B+
Panique au Village - A Town Called Panic Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar, Belgium
Unlike the newest Moomin movie, this one is inspired, chaotic GENIUS! Following the misadventures of a Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a small house together, A Town Called Panic is relentlessly bizarre, beautifully anarchic, and incessantly hysterical. While the same criticism I just leveled at Moomin could be said here, that it is all action and no plot with characters who don't have a very wide range of physical expression, it hardly matters, because the difference here is in execution, tone and that these funky little guys do indeed have personalities, such as they are, despite their physical limitations. Done in stop-motion animation with what appear to be common children's toys of an era or two gone by, the audacity of the insanity on display is pure bliss. I laughed like an idiot all the way through, and in the second half when it kept getting more and more absurd and surreal, the movie kept getting more and more delightful and deliriously comical. This one is a must-see. Truly.
Now I'm only about six days behind in my reviews. I will catch up by this Monday. The last full day of screenings is today (four more on the scheduled for me), and then I'll have one final flick Sunday. So about sixteen or so more reviews to go, but they're a comin'.
Good conman drama, where the web of deceit he's woven may be even too much for him to escape. Gábor (Ervin Nagy) and Tibi (Zsolt Trill) are a two-man team of duplicity. They get jobs working as night-shift janitors in various office buildings, and after going through the garbage at each desk build profiles of the workers until they target lonely women who Gábor then romances with the knowledge they've already gained in their late-night reconnaissance. Gábor is tall, good looking, and charming, but most importantly he can become whatever he senses the woman desires. After a couple months of romance he proposes to the marks, they open up joint accounts, he and Tibi quickly empty them, then they move to the next city and the next office building. They usually spend about a thousand dollars all in on each scam but net in the neighborhood of nine or ten.
It is a system they have down with minimal risk. But that is put in danger when Gábor has a new wrinkle to the idea: he sees a TV program where a prominent psychologist is being interviewed and mentions that he records all of his sessions. So it is there they become janitors, and begin copying discs of female patients revealing their most intimate secrets and desires. Tibi thinks he's spotted an easy mark, but Gábor has his eye on a dancer, Hanna (Gabriella Hámori). She is a prima ballerina, but coming off of a leg injury with her career in peril. She is much younger and much prettier and more sophisticated than the sad sacks Gábor usually gets to fall in love with him, but since she has a millionaire father Tibi reluctantly agrees to make her the next target.
Of course Gábor quickly starts falling for Hanna, and soon instead of simply deceiving her in order to win her affection he is in the middle of several false identities, including trying to coerce a surgeon (János Kulka) to accept Hanna as a patient, pretending to be the long-lost cousin of a local soap opera star (Sándor Csányi), and each of these lies stars bleeding dangerously into the other. It builds to a well-earned conclusion, and Ervin Nagy has a nice screen presence watching him go from cool deceiver to lovesick fool to being caught in his own traps.
GRADE: B-
陽陽 - Yang Yang Yu-Chieh Cheng, Taiwan
Small character piece about a young girl coming-of-age that is just about completely undone by its distracting directorial touches. Sandrine Pinna stars in the title role, a teenager who is constantly reminded that she is different. She is of a mixed heritage, her father, who she's never known, being French. Her mother has remarried, and it would seem to be perfect for Yang Yang because the man is her track coach and his daughter from a previous marriage is her best friend, Xiao Ru (Her Sy Huoy). Friend-turned-stepsister might have been ideal, except that Xiao Ru's boyfriend, Shawn (Bryant Chang), has eyes for the more exotic Yang Yang, and it is a desire he is finding more and more difficult to keep secret. Yang Yang also has interest from Ming Ren (Huang Chien Wei), an older young man who has already finished with school and is a photographer/agent and thinks he can make the mixed-race beauty a star.
There are betrayals and disappointments, and Yang Yang learns some tough emotional lessons along the way. Sandrine Pinna is gorgeous and quite good, playing a character who constantly masks her public insecurities and insults with a false face of cheerful bravado, but is a shaking mess in private. I like the charcater very much and was willing to go on a journey with her, but director Yu-Chieh Cheng his cinematographer Jake Pollock have made the movie damn near unwatchable. I have no natural aversion to hand-held and intentionally shaky camerawork, as long as it serves a purpose and is done well. But the camera constantly shakes as if in a massive earthquake, and not only that but over 50% of the movie feels like it is in too much of a close-up and on the subject's back shoulder, plus on top of all that it is rarely in focus. From an artistic point-of-view I can understand the impulse to make the visual presentation somewhat mirror the character's uneasiness and insecurity, but it's taken to such an extreme and applied so completely that it never makes a point and quickly moves from distracting to annoying. Pinna is fantastic, the character is interesting, and the flick is a visual mess.
GRADE: D+
Mal día para Pescar - Bad Day to Go Fishing Álvaro Brechner, Uruguay
The film opens with an ambulance rushing to an arena and a man so completely bandaged and seriously injured, a negative prognosis that seems this patient will surely die. Because of the bandages we dont know who that man is, but whoever it is has suffered a beating most severe. From there the narrative backs up a couple weeks and we meet the likely victims. First there is an impresario named Orsini (Gary Piquer), a slick and smooth-talking figure who bills himself as a Prince and travels from town to town setting up fights for Jacob van Oppen. Jacob (Jouko Ahola), as Orsini deftly promotes, is a former world champion wrestler from Germany, a mountain of a man so fearsome and skilled that he will put up a thousand dollars against any man from your village even lasting three minutes in the ring with him. Orsini and van Oppen arrive in a town, scout out the local talent, promote the contest for a week or so, then charge admission to watch the champion grapple. They then take their gate and move to the next sleepy locale, starting all over again.
Jacob does appear to be the real deal, but he has aged since his glory days, and now he's a depressed alcoholic sideshow who, while still stronger than most humans, is not the world-class specimen he once was. To take any risk out of the deal, Orsini even pays the local fighters to throw the match, so it secretly becomes an exhibition only. That, however, is not happening in Santa Maria. It's a small dusty town like all of the others, but the man Orsini chooses for the fight winds up drunk and in jail after blowing his advance. That leaves Adrianna (Antonella Costa), a local young woman, to approach with a proposition. She is pregnant and her fiancé, a local shop-owner, is twenty-three and a gigantic mountain of a man, the kind of monster Jacob van Oppen must have been in his prime. Orsini tries everything he can to weasel out of it, but he's backed into the bout. Will the old pro or the young bull be the victor, or is it the impresario that is going to wind up in the hospital?
Gary Piquer is fantastic headlining this movie that is sort of The Wrestler meets Diggstown down in South America. A low-key character piece, it has a nice undercurrent of dark comedy and a dash of satire as the con game becomes a true fight to the death.
The world does not know much about this Film Festival. They know OSCAR , KAN Film festival very much. Your post made me interested about this film festival. Now i will try to get the update about the festival.
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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Dr. Albert Barnes was a self-made millionaire, and he also had an amazing eye for art. Years before the major Museums of the world starting buying up the works of Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir and others, Barnes knew they would be some of the defining painters of the century and he both befriended the artists and started acquiring some of their most important and seminal works. He is a native of Philadelphia, PA but despised the social elites of the city, so when he designed and built a museum to showcase his unique and important collection he settled in the suburbs of nearby Marion, Pennsylvania, in a residential neighborhood. Unlike most major museums, Barnes also had a different way he envisioned the actual display of the art should be done. He died in 1951, and though he had no biological heirs he left behind a Foundation and what he thought was an iron-clad will outlining very specific parameters for his beloved collection, including that it never be moved from Marion and that it never be loaned to other museums or sold.
As the documentary The Art of the Steal outlines, there were powerful forces in Pennsylvania that more-or-less conspired to get control of the Barnes Collection, filled with so many masterpieces (including a Matisse painted specifically for the gallery in Marion) that it may truly be priceless, with dozens of the hundreds of canvases that would fetch in excess of a billion dollars each on the market. The film certainly has its agenda going in, but I'd say they absolutely back up their position. The bigwigs, moneymen and politicians who have wrestled control of the art and will move it to a brand new museum in downtown Philadelphia in 2012 are definitely cast as villains. But given the expressed wishes of Albert Barnes and his personal and well-known reasons, I'd say it's difficult not to agree with the film's perspective. All of the double crosses and intrigue is presented almost as a whodunit?, and it also raises questions about the very nature of art and who should have access to it. It's a good watch.
GRADE: B+
誰も守ってくれない - Nobody to Watch Over Me Ryôichi Kimizuka, Japan
Apparently in the culture of Japan the family of somebody who commits a horrible crime are nearly as culpable as the perpetrator. Not legally responsible, but in the court of public opinion. This is the starting point for Nobody to Watch Over Me. After a young man is arrested for the savage murder of two school-aged girls in his neighborhood, the media immediately descends on the home. In the midst of the chaos the Police also envelop the family, and an older detective (Kôichi Satô) is assigned to the fifteen-year-old younger sister (Mirai Shida) of the suspect. While trying to find out if she has any helpful testimony about the day of the murder they must protect her from the relentless Paparazzi as well as an online community looking to out the family members and divulge their personal information and locations.
That the family would feel intense shame in such cases I understand. It is of course antithetical to the Western model where unless there were factors like abuse or foreknowledge of a crime the family of a monster is not held responsible in any way, but I get that in Japan specifically there is a cultural current that in some cases would even lead to family members committing suicide. And yes, I get that the Paparazzi in Japan is as intense as anywhere else in the world. But as a narrative I NEVER ever bought the over-the-top goings on in this movie. The press is SO immoral, the Police are SO monstrously unfeeling, the online justice seekers are SO arch that it comes off like a sloppy cartoon. Fairly early on in this movie the fifteen-year-old sister who never did anything is being targeted for death simply because her brother is apparently guilty of a horrible crime. That I just never bought. At all. I don't doubt the underlying sentiment is real and I am allowing for cultural differences, but as a movie this is amateurish junk. Given this basic subject matter I think a subtle character piece with the detective and sister could be made, and the same material could even be fodder for a fun thriller, but as is Nobody to Watch Over Me is neither.
GRADE: D
Down Terrace Ben Wheatley, UK
This is an odd hybrid that pretty radically changes tone midway through, but it somehow pulls it off and the result is a unique flick. It stars with Rob Hill and his real-life father Robert as Karl and Bill, just being released from jail. They return to their modest working class home where Maggie (Julia Deakin) is waiting for them, cooking. They are joined by several men, and they mostly sit around the living room and drink, and smoke and insult each other. Without giving the explicit details, we learn that they both served four months for something to do with drugs, and they all certainly enjoy their pot. It seems like this is going to be sort of a Ken Loachy sitcom, if you can imagine such a thing, with a bunch of Cockney slackers of a couple generations bullsh!tting with each other. The presence of Deakin as well as Michael Smiley who were both part of "Spaced" and Rob Hill who has been involved with the TV shows "The Wrong Door" and "Modern Toss" seem to underscore this and have you set-up for a comedy. As such it works, with a couple really big laughs as we start to know these characters, not just the ex-Hippie parents and their underachieving son who still lives at home but the various other losers who they are associated with.
Somewhere about forty-five minutes in you begin to sense that their criminal empire is more than just a stash for personal recreation, and when they decide which of the hangers-on is probably the one who ratted them out to the authorities they decide to get Medieval on his ass. This leads to one killing and then another and then another until the Shakespearean final act. This change from a low-key talky comedy to a low-key bloody crime film really shouldn't work, but it does. This isn't like a Tarantino rip-off with stylized violence and black comedy, this truly starts out as one kind of movie then reveals itself to be another. Don't think Guy Ritchie flick, but sort of characters from Withnail & I who find themselves in the plot of The Long Good Friday. It's not as much of a genre picture as something like In Bruges, but gets there in a sneaky way. On one viewing I can't deconstruct why this amalgam works so well, but it does.
Writer/director Andrea Arnold won an Oscar for her short film "Wasp" (2004), about a young mother in Dartford, Kent, with questionable parenting skills who tries to go on one date with an old flame in a local bar. The almost unbearable tension leading up to relief in the form of a perfectly-delivered punch-line was very effective. Her feature debut, Red Road (2006), was not only one of the best films I saw that year but one of my favorites in the entire decade. It was dark and disturbing, cleverly constructed, and had a lead character I simply hadn't seen before. Just when I thought I knew where the narrative was going, Arnold subverted the expectation, but not just for the sake of doing so, it fit her overall story wonderfully. As far as milieu and social class, you could say she is of the Ken Loach social-realist school, except that Red Road was more poetic and strange with a tone that was distinctly her.
Because of all that plus its notices at Cannes and awards at BAFTA and elsewhere, I was really looking forward to her follow-up, Fish Tank. Perhaps I had unrealistic expectations, but while a solid effort, for my taste this is half a step backward. Here we have a coming-of-age tale centered on Mia (Katie Jarvis), a fifteen-year-old living in an Essex housing project with her Mother (Rebecca Griffiths) and younger Sister (Kierston Wareing). Mia is rebellious, probably a tic more than most, and has gotten into so much trouble at school that she is in danger of having the social worker visit for further options. She likes to dance to hip hop music in her small room, but her other outlets for her frustration and boredom are far less constructive. Into her life appears Connor (Michael Fassbender), a new man in her Mom's romantic life. Judging by his manner, speech and clothes he's a slightly higher social class than Mia's family, with a job as a manager at a warehouse. Through the relationship with this older man, Mia begins to have a level of self-confidence she's never enjoyed and can even start to imagine realizing some of her dreams beyond getting through the current day.
From there you can likely predict where the relationship and her life lessons are heading. And that's the biggest problem with Fish Tank. It is well made and Katie Jarvis, who had never acted professionally before this movie, is good and Fassbender is very strong. Michael Fassbender's career has really exploded in the past couple years, with the amazing performance as the hunger-striking prisoner Bobby Sands at the center of Steve McQueen's Hunger (2008), then as the covert British soldier who makes one costly dialectic slip-up in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Fish Tank continues his meteoric rise, with a character who is both charming and contemptible. But overall Fish Tank is too familiar, too pat, even with the good performances, minus the kind of weird poetry and constant guessing in Red Road, and winds up as sort of Ken Loach-lite. Other than being less in direct comparison to her first film, Fish Tank also suffers in that it was released the same year as Lone Scherfig's An Education, which despite being about a different social class in a different era hits many of the same narrative notes...and that one is a better film.
Not a bad movie, at all, but I hope Andrea Arnold gets back to more of what I loved in Red Road. That her next scheduled project is yet another remake of Wuthering Heights is not especially heartening, though her voice coupled with that Gothic costume pic may yield something interesting?
GRADE: B-
Palata N°6 - Ward No. 6 Gornovsky & Shakhnazarov, Russia
Loosely based on an 1892 short story by Anton Chekhov, this one is about the head doctor of an insane asylum who, through lengthy philosophical conversations with one of the inmates, begins to think of the man as a wayward prophet until the doctor himself becomes an almost silent patient in the asylum. Set in modern day Russia, it begins with visualizing the history of the religious sanctuary that eventually became the insane asylum before we meet a few of the patients in direct-to-the-camera interviews. Then we discover the story of Doctor Ragin (Vladimir Ilyin) and his former charge Gromov (Aleksei Vertkov). On the basic age-old level of how we define sanity and how one proves in such a setting that they are 'normal', it's only mildly engaging and has been done better in other projects. As for the update of Chekhov, as I interpret it his story was about intellectual excuses for societal inaction, but I don't get any of that here or how it translates specifically to 21st Century Russia. Ilyin and Vertkov are both fine, but the most interesting aspect are the interviews and interactions with the real patients of the asylum. I'd have loved to see a documentary about their plight and thoughts, but the narrative grafted around them didn't do a whole lot for me.
GRADE: C+
Nothing Personal Urszula Antoniak, Ireland/Netherlands
Cinematic tone poem that is a sort of an emotional Last Tango in Paris set against a magnificent countryside of Ireland's west central coastline. In the opening scene a young woman (Lotte Verbeek) in Amsterdam is getting rid of nearly all her possessions, including a wedding ring that she discards. With almost no dialogue and no explanation of her past, not even her name, we next find this woman hitchhiking around Ireland by herself, with only a pack and small tent, apparently without a penny. Eventually she wanders upon a small house on what is almost an island off the coast. After snooping around when the lone resident has left on his small boat, she later makes some kind of contact with the man (Stephen Rea). He tries to give her a bit of natural charity, and she shoots back attitude, which he returns in kind. After a bit of a stand-off he offers her shelter and food in exchange for working his garden and taking care of household tasks. She agrees, but only on the strict caveat that neither one of them share any personal information, not even their names, and certainly nothing of their pasts, and that she can leave at any moment she chooses. He reluctantly agrees, and so an odd relationship slowly builds.
Hauntingly beautiful photography by Daniël Bouquet (coupled with Verbeek's features it constantly put me in mind of Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings), a paradoxically warm yet Gothic tone by writer/director Antoniak in her feature debut, along with the very strong work by the old pro Rea and stunning newcomer Verbeek make for an engrossing film. Can't wait to see this one again.
Completely agree with you on your Fish Tank assessment. I may be getting a little perspective (finally) on films after all. Definitely am going to be tracking down Red Road as soon as I can though, thanks for that.
Thanks again for posting these. A lot of really great looking flicks here.
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