Portland International Film Festival 2007

One of the many benefits of living in Portland, Oregon is that every February the Northwest Film Center puts together a terrific film festival. My entries from last year's can be found on pages 36-39 of the "What was the Last Movie You saw in the Theaters?" thread.

This year's PIFF had over one hundred and fifteen features and shorts screened over seventeen days from Feb. 9th to Feb. 25th. Last year I was able to get to thirty-four features and eighteen of the short films. Unfortunately this year I was monstrously busy with work and unable to go as much as I wanted. There were a couple nights in there I didn't go at all. Yet I still managed to see twenty-one movies (though sadly none of the shorts programs). I'm still monstrously busy, but I'm going to give at least a brief impression of each that I saw.



Das Leben der Anderen - The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany)

This was the opening night of the Festival, and it was also the best film I saw. Set in 1984 East Berlin, this look at a stoic and efficient Stasi officer who doesn't question The State or his role and methods in it but slowly and shockingly awakens to feel love, art and oppression through the latest subjects he is following was brilliantly done. It's Kafka and Orwell via Coppola's The Conversation, and though a fictional story that you may have to take a few leaps of faith with it is perfectly rooted in the details of the GDR of that time period and benefits from three great performances by Martina Gedeck and Sebastian Koch as the artists/lovers and Ulrich Mühe as the Stasi man on the other end of the listening devices. I like what it has to say about art, about basic freedoms, about the pettiness of bureaucracy, about the power of and limits of love and how sometimes in a corrupt and evil system even trying to do right only ends up in pain and tragedy. I found it literate, smart and compelling, and for a first feature from writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck it's an amazingly polished and accomplished work. Definitely one of the very best movies I've seen in the past year or so.

As you'll recall, a few days ago The Lives of Others won the Best Foreign Language Oscar. Ever since I walked out of the theater I was hoping it would upset the favored Pan's Labyrinth. I liked that movie a lot, but I loved this one and was hoping against hope it would pull out the victory. It was my happiest surprise of the night! Those who watched the telecast will remember how good Florian's English was during his acceptance speech. We in the audience of the Film Festival were also amazed by it. I did get to shake his hand after the screening on the way to the opening night party, and I told him it was a beautiful film and wished him luck at the Oscars. I'm very happy that I didn't jinx him.

GRADE: A



Gwoemul - The Host (Joon-ho Bong, South Korea)
Very entertaining flick that's sort of a South Korean take on Godzilla with a bit of Shaun of the Dead and Dr. Strangelove thrown into the mix as well. The film opens with a U.S. Officer (Scott Wilson) at a Seoul Army Base carelessly ordering his Korean subordinate to dump large quantities of toxic formaldehyde down the sink, which will flow into the Han River. Years later the story picks up at a small foodstand along the river where a family makes their business selling fried squid and candy to tourists and others. Unfortunately for them those chemicals have resulted in a hummer of a mutated beastie, a gigantic two-legged fish thingie that likes to eat people. It bursts out of the water and starts chowing down, including on the pre-teen little girl of the Park's, the family that owns the foodstand. They are devestated, but when they learn that she wasn't eaten outright but swallowed and then regurgitated into its nest somewhere in the sewer system, the entire family springs into action to rescue her. They are her Grandfather, her dimwitted if devoted father, his unemployed brother and their championship-level archer of a sister. The tone is cut with some great dark humor, and while never the focus there's some pointed satire throughout as well. The CGI effects on the monster are pretty damn good, and there is some good gore as well. Lots of fun.

GRADE: B



Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence, Australia)
I am a big fan of Ray Lawrence's Lantana (2001), which was labeled "Altmanesque" because it had more than three main characters and the plot was centered around one tragic event. While the Altman tag was correct in a general sense, it didn't really fit the tone and style of Lantana, which I thought was its own thing and wonderful. So I was looking forward to Lawrence's follow-up, Jindabyne, which is adapted from a Raymond Carver story "So Much Water So Close To Home". This time he seemed to be inviting the Altman comparison as Bob had adapted this piece as well as one of the storylines in Short Cuts (1993) - if you're familiar with that one it's the fishing trip that Fred Ward's character goes on. But Altman had successfully changed Carver's setting from the Pacific Northwest to southern California, so why not Australia?

Unlike Carver or Altman, Jindabyne starts out with how the body got there. A young woman is driving by herself across the beautiful emptiness of New South Wales, Australia. An older man in a truck watches her, then forces her off the road. We find a short time later that he has murdered her and put her in a remote section of a mountain river. Now we're introduced to the Kanes. Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) is a former rally car driver turned gas station owner and mechanic in a sleepy town. With his wife Claire (Laura Linney) and young son they seem like a perfect family. But there is a tension beneath the surface between husband and wife. The highlight of Stewart's year is when he closes up shop and he and three buddies trek to a special secluded spot in the mountains for a weekend of fishing. For Stewart it seems to be the closest thing to spirituality he has. They drive most of the day and hike the rest of it to their sportsman's oasis. When they get there Stewart spots the naked and bruised body of the young girl floating in the water. The men are horrified and curious, and they decide since it's almost dark they'll wait until the next day to go back and report it. But the next day comes, Stewart wakes up early and begins his communing with nature and they decide instead to tether her to shore with fishing line and stay to have their weekend as planned, intending to call the police when they 're done. This decision will cause problems for all the men, and especially the Kane family. The girl was of Aboriginal descent, and the community as well as the authorities have to wonder if the fact that she was female and of dark skin didn't contribute to the decision to fish over her dead body instead of reporting it as soon as possible.

Gabriel Byrne is good and rarely gets roles of substance anymore, so it's great to see him work here. And Laura Linney continues to show she's one of the best and most interesting actresses around. Sadly the movie doesn't really work. The serial killer aspect is tacked on and never really examined, and the racial elements seem a bit forced too much of the time. Where it works best is as a character piece in the subplot of the incident from the past with Laura Linney's character that has caused so much tension in their marriage, and that is something I would have liked to see the whole movie about rather than all the rest of it. After the brilliance of Lantana, this was definitely a let-down.

GRADE: C


More reviews coming....

__________________
"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

Indigènes - Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, Algeria/France)

A well-meaning piece dramatizing the sacrifices made by Algerians during WWII, the movie is never as interesting as its subject and is too mired in genre clichés. More than a decade before the start of the Algerian War of Independence, France recruited its citizens to help liberate them from the Nazis. Of course all of the issues that led to the revolution were very much in play at the time, but France was happy to take those men it gave little rights or respect to and use them as cannon fodder. The men who actually served in these units were there for a variety of reasons, from genuine if misplaced patriotism and a hope that such service would change how France thought of them to men who had no other way out of poverty and everything in between. The film focuses on a platoon of Algerians who represent all of this, including Jamel Debbouze (Amélie) and Samy Naceri (Taxi). They start out as a ragtag bunch as they train in Northern Africa, and we follow them as they battle in Italy and eventually into France. The battle sequences are well choreographed if nothing new, but taking the oppressed Algerians fighting for people who don't like them element out of it this is a standard War movie. When the Algerian plight is examined, it's in a pretty two-dimensional way. The story of pre-revolutionary Algerians enlisted by their Colonial occupier into the war is an interesting chapter of history, but find a good book on the subject and rent Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece The Battle of Algiers.

GRADE: C



A Fost sau n-a Fost? - 12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania)

Sixteen years after Ceauşescu and the Communists were deposed in Romania, a television host (Teodor Corban) wants to air a live broadcast remembering the fateful day. He asks two of the men who were there in Bucharest's Main Square as part of the chaotic groundswell that led to the fall of Communism in the country to be his on-air guests and lend their perspectives. The men are Piscoci (Mircea Andreescu), a retired Santa Claus with nothing better to do and Manescu (Ion Sapdaru), a university professor who spends most of his time drinking and borrowing money. Leading up to the television program there are some nice slice-of-life moments in modern Romania, cut with a dark but playful sense of humor. When the show finally airs and people start calling in with their own versions of the day and bringing into question whether or not Piscoci and Manescu were even there, it becomes a sort of satire about collective memory, history and the lingering effect of Communism. It's a mildly amusing piece, though not as funny or as pointed as I kept hoping it would become.

GRADE: B-



Fido (Andrew Currie, Canada)

Set in an alternate history 1950s, the premise of Fido is simple: radiation from outer space caused the dead to rise as flesh-eating zombies, and after a great war between humans and the undead the remaining zombies (and any new ones that crop up) are kept as pets and servants, a sort of status symbol for the rich. The movie tells of the Robinson family who finally gets their zombie, and how it effects them. Dylan Baker (Happiness) is the father who has been reluctant to bring a zombie into his home thanks to a childhood trauma, Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) is his wife who has always wanted one if only to keep up with the neighbors and K'Sun Ray is their pre-teen son Timmy who quickly bonds with the creature he names Fido (played by the great Billy Connolly). There are some good laughs in the movie, especially from the faux newsreels and educational films that give the zombie backstory and from Henry Czerny (Mission: Impossible) and Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother , Where Art Thou?). Czerny plays a new neighbor of the Robinsons, who has an important position at the company that created the collar that subdues the zombie lust for flesh. He's hysterical playing deadpan as the typical '50s TV sitcom dad in sweaters with a ubiquitous pipe who will also take a zombie's head off as calmly as if he were playing the back nine. Nelson also lives in the neighborhood and is a former scientist from the company who spends his days and nights happily humping a young, pretty zombie he keeps for himself. One day Fido's collar malfunctions, but Timmy finds the zombie has genuine affection for him and won't attack him or his family no matter what. He also falls in love with Mom, and she with Fido.

There's some very good stuff in Fido, but frankly it's not enough to sustain a feature. Were this an eight-minute segment of a "Simpsons" Treehouse of Horror Halloween episode, it'd be great. At 90-minutes it's a bit thin. It's also odd that they cast Connolly, who's brilliance on screen and off is his quick-wit and verbal agility, as a character who can't speak. He's fine as Fido, but he's simply not the kind of physical comedian who might have given the part an extra dimension. Anyway, it's definitely worth a rental down the line, but it isn't in the same class as something like Shaun of the Dead.

GRADE: C+

Away from Her (Sarah Polley, Canada)

Good drama about Alzheimer's anchored by a knock-out performance by the great Julie Christie. Grant (Gordon Pinsent) and Fiona (Christie) are an old married couple living in a cabin in Ontario. Everything would be great, except for the fact that Fiona is showing signs of Alzheimer's. After a close call they come to the reluctant decision that she should be institutionalized. They find a place that's nice enough, where the ground floor treats the patients mostly like a retirement community. Fiona, sensing how debilitating her disease is becoming, is actually the more willing to go the institutional route. Grant doesn't want to give up his wife, even knowing keeping an eye on her at home by himself has become impossible. This is made all the tougher by the policy that loved ones are not to visit or even communicate with the new patients at all for the first month of their stay. They say this is the best way for somebody suffering from dementia to adapt to such a surrounding. Grant eventually agrees to this, but when he returns at the end of the month he's crushed to find Fiona barely recognizes him. What's worse she and another patient (Michael Murphy) seem to have bonded to one another and she cares for him as if he were her husband, not Grant.

The look at Alzheimer's, the importance of memory in identity and the need to let go even when it's the last thing you want to do is all very well done. Pinsent and Christie are both amazing, especially Julie in her best role in decades. At sixty-five she's still strikingly beautiful and such a great actress when given the chance to work. A subplot between Pinsent and Olympia Dukakis, who plays Michael Murphy's wife, is a little clunky and not as subtle and truthful as the body of the film, but overall this was a treat. A movie like this will never get the kind of attention it needs to propel Christie into an Oscar nomination, but she certainly deserves one. This is the first feature as director from Sarah Polley, who since her days as a child actress in Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen has become one of Canada's shining stars.

GRADE: B+



Sommer '04 (Stefan Krohmer, Germany)

Odd piece about a family on holday that becomes a sort of coming-of-age for the 40-year-old mother, and not the teenagers. Mirjim (The Lives of Others' Martina Gedeck), André (Peter Davor) and their son Nils are vacationing at the shore in northern Germany. The boy's girlfriend Livia (Svea Lohde) is also staying with the family. But she has befriended a much older man, Bill (Robert Seeliger), a handsome rogue who likes sports cars and yachts. Livia is only fourteen and clearly experimenting with her budding sexuality. Mirjim realizes she has to make sure Bill isn't helping conduct that research. But what starts out as a contentious relationship between Mirjim and Bill soon becomes an affair. How she will deal with this attraction and keeping it from hurting her family or Livia is the crux of the drama, and in the last act there's a sort of Hitchcockian element more reminiscent of a Patricia Highsmith novel. There's a twist of a CODA that is surprisingly effective and Martina Gedeck is sexy as Hell, but Summer '04 never quite comes together as a great film and too much is underdeveloped (particularly Mirjim's relationships with André and Nils). I have to admit it has stayed with me more than I thought it might when I walked out of the theater, but it lacked one more element to tie it all together.

GRADE: B-



Italianetz - The Italian (Andrei Kravchuk, Russia)

Drama about a cute orphan that lacks the faith in the audience or skill in filmmaking to be anything other than a manipulative weeper. Vanya (Kolya Spiridonov) is a young boy living at a run-down orphanage in the middle of Russia's snowy plains. Turns out he's one of the lucky ones as the agency that runs the dilapidated warehouse of neglect shops the kiddies around the world on the internet. A rich and fairly young Italian couple has their eye on Vanya, and after a visit arrangements are made. Soon he'll be far from the cold and poverty he's known his whole young life and be with family that longs to take care of him. That should be the happy part of the story, but when Vanya learns about a former friend's mother finally coming to look for him, he becomes obsessed with the idea of finding out if his own mother is alive, and if so make sure she doesn't now want him. The witch of a woman who runs the agency (Mariya Kuznetsova) is outraged because she's already counting on the large sum of money the Italians are going to pay for the adoption - money that will of course go into her pocket and not back into the orphanage. With the help of some of the older kids who run a sort of underground criminal empire on the streets, Vanya gets his hands on his file and has a place to start looking for Mommy. He runs away, hoping for a happy ending. The greedy monster of a woman and her henchman pursue him. Had this been a subtle character piece that examined the horrible conditions and treatment of the disenfranchised in modern Russia, it might have been noteworthy. Instead we get a cartoony Miss Hannigan-like villain (I did keep expecting the kids in rags to break into a Russian version of "It's a Hard Knock Life"), with plot machinations and an over reliance on an intrusive score that are laughable in spots. The real shame is that somehow in the middle of all that overwrought melodrama the director elicited a remarkable and naturalistic performance from Spiridonov that François Truffaut would have been proud of. Too bad the rest of the flick is such a throwaway.

GRADE: C-



Z odzysku - Retrieval (Slawomir Fabicki, Poland)

In this sort of a low-rent Polish version of Mean Streets we follow a nineteen-year-old named Wojtek (Antoni Pawlicki). He bounces from crap job to crap job in a gray metropolis and makes the most money at night as a boxer in shady illegal bouts. He's trying his best to support his girlfriend Katia (Natalya Vdovina) and her pre-teen son. Wojtek's Grandfather (Jerzy Trela) wants to keep him on the straight and narrow and thinks he should keep an honest, simple job in the country rather than mess around with the dangers and temptations of the streets. But Wojtek is headstrong and determined to make it on his own. After one of his boxing matches a local hood, Badylarz (Marek Bielecki), is impressed enough with his toughness and common sense to hire him on as muscle, mostly doing debt collection. This brings him more money than he's ever known, but also puts him squarely on a path to danger and a life he may not be able to free himself from. The performances are uniformly good and the look at the back alleys and tenements of a small modern Polish city are interesting. It's got a nice texture to it, but you kind of know very early on where Wojtek's moral delimma is going to end up. But even free of surprises it's a good journey there and back again.

GRADE: B-



Still more reviews coming...

Wang-ui Namja - The King & the Clown (Jun-ik Lee, South Korea)

Set during the Chosun Dynasty of the 16th Century, it's an odd piece. Two street performers, Jang Sang (Woo-seong Kam) and Gong-gil (Jun-gi Lee), are arrested for their skit that mocks the ruling King (Jin-yeong Jeong). The offense is punishable by death, and their only hope for a pardon is to make the King himself laugh. They and their troupe of minstrels and acrobats are brought to the palace. Jang Sang decides if he's going to die, it may as well be doing something he loves, and to the King's face he makes fun of him. To the entire Court's surprise, the King not only laughs but joins in the mocking. This makes the other Lords uneasy to say the least, but the troupe is officially celebrated. It turns out the King has become instantly infatuated with Gong-gil, who plays a woman in most of the skits but is a man. In addition to this budding romance, the King also starts using the troupe to ferret out other Lords and subjects he does not like by having them publicly mocked, and if they object (which most do) having them stripped of their titles, banished or killed. The King has gone mad with his own power, and the crux of the story becomes can the troupe extricate themselves from him before all Hell breaks loose? The King & the Clown has some good sequences and moments, but I kept feeling like it was just missing and there was an awkwardness to the pacing that consistently took me out of the story.

GRADE: C+



37 Uses for a Dead Sheep (Ben Hopkins, United Kingdom)

British documentary about the Pamir Kirghiz, a semi-nomadic tribe from Central Asia, their history of displacement and ultimately how their culture is dying out. The Kirghiz lived peacefully in the mountains of the north easternmost corner of what is today known as Afghanistan. Even after the British Colonies to the south and the Soviet Communists to the north started marking their territory, their land was part of the neutral Wakhan Corridor, also known as "the Roof of the World", and as part of the Silk Road there was always trading to be done. But in the first half of the 20th Century when the Communists started getting too close for comfort, they moved east into the mountains of China. This turned out to be bad timing as not long after they arrived China had its Communist Revolution, and the Kirghiz moved back again. When Russia invaded Afghanistan in 1979, once again they were displaced and became one of the first groups of refugees in Pakistan. They petitioned the international community for a place they could make their new home. For a short while it looked like the U.S. was going to move them all to Alaska, but ultimately the Kirghiz chose to take Turkey up on their offer, as it was a primarily Muslim country with similar enough terrain for sheep. Today they are still in Eastern Turkey, though the younger generation has become modernized and choose to live in major urban areas like Istanbul. Documentarian Ben Hopkins does a good job at relaying all the history and major ups and downs of the tribe, and even has them stage some of their seminal triumphs and tragedies. The only flaw with the piece is that for some reason Hopkins feels compelled to insert himself in the proceedings too often, and there are extraneous bits about the actual filmmaking process which would have been better suited for supplemental features on a DVD release down the line. But it's definitely an interesting story, and there is plenty of interview footage with the Kirghiz themselves.

GRADE: B-



Il Vento fa il Suo Giro - The Wind Blows Round (Giorgio Diritti, Italy)

This is the only movie I saw this year that I just plain didn't like. Set in modern day in a small town in the Italian Alps, it's the story of a shepherd who moves into the tight-knit community. The shepherd, Philippe (Thierry Toscan), is French and has a wife and two young children. The town is so high in the mountains that there is basically a one-month tourist season in the middle of the summer, so the rest of the year the town is sparsely inhabited (as many of the home owners live down the mountain except for that one month themselves) and very quiet. Philippe is a bit unconventional, especially to the older conservative residents, because he is direct, energetic and determined. He makes a gourmet cheese from the goat milk, and the mayor and a couple of the younger residents welcome him as it'll be something new and perhaps their little town will even become famous for its cheese and be a tourist destination year-round? Everything seems to be going well at first, but eventually the townies start to turn on Philippe and his family. They don't really have a good reason, but all of the sudden he's unwelcome. This degenerates until some of the residents are sabotaging his business, spitting at his wife and even kill some of his goats and implicate him in a crime he did not commit. This could have been a light quirky comedy, or it even had the potential to be a little darker than that. Instead it moves toward a finale that is ugly and petty, with no real purpose. The purpose, such as it is, is finally revealed after they drive Philippe and his family from town when an old man returns and tells of how the town banded together in WWII to help each other out, no matter what, just because it was the right thing to do. The point is that this town once represented the best of human nature, and now it represents the worst. Well bravo. I rather liked Toscan who plays Philippe, and he has a Gérard Depardieu-like presence. Alessandra Agosti, who plays Philippe's wife, is stunning. Of course the cinematography and the mountain setting are beautiful. But the turn in the movie where the townies become pathologically cruel for the sake of being cruel is unbelievable and annoying.

GRADE: D

Where's Molly? (Jeff Daly, U.S.A.)

In 1957 when Jeff Daley was six-years-old, his little sister, Molly was suddenly gone from the house one day, never to return. Whenever he asked his mother where she was, he was told to forget about her, punished and ordered to stop asking. Eventually after years of not getting any information, he did forget, or at least put it in the back recesses of his mind. What happened is she was sent to an institution because she was mentally retarded. Up into the 1960s this was very common practice in the U.S., and something that doctors and courts urged families to do. It was said this was the best thing for them, and that they required too much constant supervision to keep at home. There was also a powerful social stigma attached to having a retarded child. So Molly, like tens of thousands of children, was sent away. Many years later when Jeff met an old girlfriend at his twentieth High School Reunion, she asked "How's your sister, how's Molly?" and all those buried questions resurfaced. He eventually married that sweetheart, and they began asking his now elderly parents about Molly again. Mom still refused to discuss it, so Jeff didn't have any idea where she was or if Molly was even still alive. After his mother died and then his father months later, Jeff stumbled across old records hidden away in his father's things. It gave him enough information to start looking for his sister. There were all kinds of legal gymnastics he had to go through in order to find her, but after forty-seven years he was reunited with Molly. The movie recounts all of this as well as the deplorable warehousing conditions of the institution Molly and many others were sent to (it closed in the 1980s) and Daley's battle to have the State (in this case, Oregon) change the strict privacy laws in order to give adult siblings easier ways of reconnecting. It's a very moving and ultimately triumphant story. Many other States have adopted or are looking to adopt the same legislation, "Molly's Law", that passed here in Oregon. Lots of interesting turns along the way, including the odd cosmic coincidence that Jeff's sister-in-law also happened to marry a man who's little brother was sent away under similar circumstances in the 1950s - what are the odds? And that Jeff's Dad went to visit her regularly for a while until the institution asked him to stop (as Molly was difficult to control after he left) so he continued to visit her secretly dressed as a clown. An important and touching subject, well relayed in the movie. Their website is http://www.wheresmolly.net.

GRADE: B+



L'Ivresse du Pouvoir - A Comedy of Power (Claude Chabrol, France)

Chabrol teams with Huppert for the seventh time in the story of corporate greed and shady corruption. The always fascinating Isabelle Huppert plays magistrate known and feared for her no-nonsense approach and high conviction rate. Her latest case is a State-contracted company who's president (François Berléand) has been using its funds for expensive treats for himself and his mistress and anything else he desires. The case winds up being complicated by the fact that lots of people want to keep this corrupt system going, including some who have powerful influence inside the government itself. But Huppert's character keeps doing her job, no matter the obstacles, including threats on her life. Her work ethic and the tangential dangers of the job has effects on her personal life, too, as her husband (Robin Renucci) feels more and more distance between them. Both plots eventually converge, and it's all done in the typically restrained Chabrol style. There wasn't enough meat on this one for me, and though I'd watch Ms. Huppert on screen in anything, the examination of the character was too distracted by the plot machinations, yet at the same time the plot never really became all that revelatory or compelling. Not one of the very best Chabrol/Huppert combos.

GRADE: B-



El Violin (Francisco Vargas Quevedo, Mexico)

Set in the 1970s in the rural Guerrero region of Mexico, it's a little parable about honor and sacrifice. When the army takes over a small village to root out any rebels, one of the displaced, an old man named Don Plutarco (Don Angel Tavira) becomes the only one who can get back into the village for the ammunition the rebels need to fight back. A crate of ammo is buried in one of his fields just outside the village, but they are forbidden from farming. But Plutarco plays the violin, and the Capitán (Dagoberto Gama) delights in hearing it played and talking to the grizzled old farmer. After playing for him becomes a daily ritual, Plutarco is allowed to tend to his fields a bit - and thus get the bullets, which he sneaks in his violin case. The texture of the film is very dark, not just because it's shot in black & white, and there is no Magical Realism or happy ending that can save anyone...except maybe in the young boy who learns to play the violin and can sing songs of what happened. Very simple, surprisingly brutal in spots, and doesn't graft on any impossibilities for the sake of narrative ease.

GRADE: B-

Trade (Marco Kreuzpaintner, U.S.A.)

The "trade" of the title is the sex trade, specifically young girls and boys who are kidnapped and sold via underground international networks to sleezebags. The film starts with Veronica (Alicja Bachleda-Curus) a teenage Polish girl who arrives in Mexico thinking she's about to get her big break and start a modeling career. After her abduction at the airport we meet Adriana (Paulina Gaitan), a pre-teen Mexican girl who is snatched from the street. Adriana's brother Jorge (Cesar Ramos), only a teenager himself, desperately tries to find her. He manages to track her north to Juarez, but loses her before she is smuggled across the American border. He does happen upon an American named Ray (Kevin Kline), who also seems interested in the network of sin. Eventually Ray and Jorge will team up in an effort to save Adriana before she is sold. The ugliness of it all definitely comes across, and while no nudity is shown (especially of the younger children) some of the rapes and brutality that are portrayed are pretty unsettling. You never feel like you're watching a snuff film or anything, but it's effectively nasty and it definitely treads the line of exploitation itself. Kline is very good, playing a low-key yet determined and invested character and the script happily gives him motivations that aren't as simplistic as you might suspect going in. Ramos is very good as well as the rebellious young Mexican who only wants his sister back. The most compelling performances in the film are definitely Bachleda-Curus and Gaitan as the kidnapped girls who bond during the ordeal. Unfortunately the movie's conclusion is far too simple and "Hollywood", and it relies on one of the evil scumbags to have a tremendous change of heart at exactly the right moment, which doesn't feel even a little bit possible. There's also a totally unnecessary CODA that is supposed to feel triumphant but is only one ending too many and yet more too-neatly-wrapped garbage. It does have thriller trappings to it, but it's much more akin to Paul Schrader's Hardcore (1979) than the pulpy Joel Schumacher crapfest 8mm (1999). It's a shame that the last act of the picture is so damn trite and convoluted, but even before that I can't say it's any eye-opening dramatic document about the 21st Century slave trade, though it does have some good performances. All in all a more serious attempt should have been made, if at all.

GRADE: C



Red Road (Andrea Arnold, Scotland)

Very effective tone poem about loss, grief, rage and forgiveness. Jackie (Kate Dickey) works monitoring the CCTV cameras that keep an eye on the public spaces of Glasgow. She's supposed to be watching for crimes and anything the police can assist, but mostly she watches the people. Sometimes she even seeks them out when she's off duty, to see what their lives look like up close and in 3-D. One night while watching the screens she thinks she's spotted somebody from her past, somebody she thought was in jail. Her obsession with this man (Tony Curran) and her fragile and scarred psyche will lead her to confront a demon she never thought she'd have to, or even have the opportunity, at one point doing something very extreme in a sort of vengeance. But things look different up close, and people, even those we have pegged as monsters, are never quite what they seem. I won't give away who the man is or what event has linked them as it is purposefully revealed in the film quite late, but the two central performances are great and while the narrative takes some leaps of faith it rings very true emotionally and has some surprising twists that have more to do with character than the plot. As an indictment of and a celebration of humanity, I found it very effective. It has an eerie, unsettling feel like a nightmare, and this heavy style will likely turn some off. I loved it and found it really added to the experience of how damaged these characters were.

One side-note: the print that I saw had English subtitles, presumably so we silly Yanks could understand that thick Scottish accent. This really pissed me off and I spent the entire movie with my hand held in front of me to try and crop them out. It was annoying and condescending to use subtitles for a film that is in English, fer cripe's sake. In Scotland are movies like Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector subtitled so you guys can read over the dialect? OK, I hope that Larry the Cable Guy didn't play in Scotland, but you know what I mean.

GRADE: A-



Starter for 10 (Tom Vaughan, United Kingdom)

Charming if light and predictable coming-of-age dramadey that aspires to be smart and quirky like Bill Forsyth's work but is ultimately a little too tidy and sitcomy to move to that next level. James McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland) stars as Brian Jackson, a clever young man from a humble upbringing who thirsts for knowledge. Not that he's an expert in anything, but he knows a little bit about a lot of things, as the saying goes. His enthusiasm and unconventional personality get him into a decent university, where his goal is becoming part of the school team that competes on the televised trivia challenge that he's loved since watching it as a small boy with his father. As the impossibly pretty girl who he becomes infatuated with tells him, "You're a general knowledge god!", and soon he's the star of the team. But that pretty girl, Alice (Alice Eve) will become a distraction from not only the TV quiz show but his school studies and his life in general, in the way only a first love can. There's also another classmate who he fancies a bit (Rebecca Hall), and thus is set in motion the old story of the person you want versus the person that's clearly best for you and how long it takes you to learn the difference. McAvoy is very appealing on screen, Hall and Eve are attractive, and the movie has plenty of honest laughs. But there's really nothing you probably haven't seen in a dozen or two other movies. Overall it's an amusing little diversion, but not especially memorable and certainly nothing new or ambitious. Gregory's Girl (1981) and Rushmore (1998) it ain't. But still, while I would have liked to see something with darker edges and a plot with some fresh wrinkles, it's hard to dislike Starter for 10.

GRADE: B


Still more to come...

Above and beyond, Holds. Above and beyond. Already one of the best threads MoFo has ever seen. You're getting rep for every single post in here.

I've been thinking about trying to get an intern with the NW Film Center as an exhibition intern for the PIFF.

Awesome review Holden.

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Great reviews Holden.... thanks for sharing. I'm particularly interested in seeing 'Where's Molly'.....

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Top notch reviews. I didn't even know such a festival took place in Portland.

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"No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul." ~ Ingmar Bergman

Haha...how so?

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http://www.last.fm/user/diezelpower/

Because it's reporting on a film festival that, presumably, wouldn't be otherwise reported on here. And it contains a number of insightful reviews on less-than-completely-accessible films, too.

Plus, they're formatted all nice and whatnot.

I see. And what use will you get out of it?

Well, reading other people's thoughts on film is always interesting when properly articulated, and it may cause me to seek out one or more of the films in question. That said, whether or not I, personally, get anything out of it is kind of beside the point, as I expect someone here will.

This site exists so that people can read and write about film, so I think that introducing people to a festival they haven't heard of, and in turn films they haven't heard of, is worth praising.

I hope you don't mind me asking, but is there some specific point or rationale behind these questions?

I just thought the comment was sorta funny. It's a good thread no doubt, and I appreciate the work Holden does for this site, but by your rationale, OG's or my review thread (not to blow my own trumpet or anything) could have been declared one of the best threads Mofo has ever seen because they too deal mostly with foreign (a.k.a.:non-English-speaking-so-they-must-be-obscure) films. Your enthusiasm would be wonderful if it was equally distributed towards people that aren't named Holden but do similar work in trying to bring attention to such films, and even more so if you actually bother to check out at least the films he praises, which I have a sneaky suspicion you won't. Hence the rather sarcastic response from me.

Equally distributed? I rewrote parts of the forumdisplay.php file so threads like yours and OG's can sit atop the forum in their own special section, and I periodically check to make sure that (with some exceptions) the most cared for, active review threads are stuck in lieu of the others. That took a helluva lot more time and effort than writing Holden a thank-you post.

And yes, threads like yours and Peter's are among the best on the site. I singled Holden's out because in part because it's coming in bunches, but moreso because it details a particular festival. That makes it, if nothing else, a bit unique compared to other review threads.

The thread has value independent of what I personally get out of it, as we've already established, and I don't pretend to understand why you occasionally find random statements suspicious.

If you wish to continue this odd little tiff, I suggest we do it somewhere else, so as not to clutter up Holden's thread any further.

Or to sum up....


"Mom always liked you best!"

At least it was only subtitled...I had to stop watching a copy of Mad Max that I rented the other week because it was dubbed into American accents.

This kind of thing will eventually stop people with different accents speaking the same language from understanding each other at all. What next...dialect novels like Trainspotting translated into standard English?

I appreciate what you do as an admin, but my comment was directed to Chris the user and movie fan. You'll understand why I'm a little bitter when you make comments like that, yet probably never bother to check out any film that for example I write about (I'm fairly sure you don't even read those reviews. As crappy as they may be, you'll find a lot of recommendations for incredible non-American films.)


I never implied it doesn't have value, but I still find your comment to be a tad over the top and slightly insulting. My suspicion that you won't actually get any use from this thread, nor most people here is because I think in the two years I've been here, I only recall you commenting on one particular "foreign" film, the recent "Pan's Labyrinth", and only because it got a lot of attention and a mainstream release in the U.S..[shrugs]

Let's be real here and say that Holden's reviews are the most read and respected not only because he's uber smart and eloquent, but because he mostly writes about mainstream films. This festival is anything but, I've personally seen a few films he mentions, I dare say most Mofo's never will. Including those that commented in this thread. It's an old peeve of mine...

adidass:
Could I just say that as a new user to this forum I'm not judging this thread by my personal feelings to the poster, and I think it's a great thread. I hadn't heard of a few of these films or the PIFF for that matter, and the many reviews here are presented and written in a way in which is very useful to me. I don't think you should take Yoda's praise as an insult to you.