In the sex comedy Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends, several twenty-somethings start hooking up with each other in random combinations, even though some are in relationships. The sexual entanglements predictably lead to both comic situations and hurt feelings.
Happily, sometimes there is Truth in Advertising, and there is a lots of Effing in Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends. There’s so much sex that, although it has a real plot and much better acting, it wouldn’t be totally out-of-place on late night Showtime.
The cast is young, appealing and able, and Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends works as a trifle (and there’s nothing wrong with that). Its world premiere was at Cinequest.
The contemporary and topical comedy Search Enginestakes on our obsession with We see an extended family Thanksgiving – and everyone is bowing into that screen-gazing posture. All the characters are preoccupied by their smart phones as they text, video, read recipes and blog away. Suddenly, something blocks their coverage, and we see what happens when all the screens go dark.
Search Engines has a promising cast (Daphne Zuniga, Joely Fisher, Natasha Gregson Wagner and even Connie Stevens!), and they all perform well. The strongest part of Search Engines is its topicality, but as mildly amusing as it is, it just ain’t a knee slapper.
Here’s an interview with the Lori Stoll, writer-director of Heaven’s Floor.
[NOTE: THIS INTERVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS]
The Movie Gourmet: The protagonist Julia is so restless, and the restlessness seems to drive her impulsiveness. Is she just naturally restless, or is there some deficit in her satisfaction that is filled by Malaya?
Lori Stoll: Both really. Her experience with Malaya forced her to grow up. When she says she just wants to be good, she sincerely means it, even when being good required her to take responsibility for her actions and take other people into consideration. Julia’s natural state is one of restlessness, always looking for an escape – a character flaw that clearly gets her in a heap of trouble.
Having said that, Julia sees the best of herself in Malaya, but she doesn’t realize it until Malaya rejects her and is about to leave. At that point Julia also realizes that her actions created unintended consequences. Julia chooses to take responsibility for her wanderlust, terminating her gallivanting around the globe. When she promises her son she is grounded she means it.
TMG: Do you think that Julia, once more satisfied, is still impulsive?
Lori Stoll: Julia grew up through the experience of blowing up her life- perhaps she would like to continue to act on her impulsivity, but has learned to consider the who she is hurting by her decisions. However Julia’s restlessness did create her family.
TMG: So the movie starts with “Based on a true story” and ends with stills of the real Malaya and the obligatory “Any resemblance to real persons” disclaimer. How much of this story really happened this way? The arctic rescue for example?
Lori Stoll: The arctic rescue happened. The emergency shelter happened. Actually most of what was filmed in the arctic really happened and it was much more treacherous in reality, which we were unable to capture on film. For example, the rescue took place in a blizzard, and we had to slide down a frozen waterfall in the middle of the night. When we finally made it to the lodge in Pang, I was as banged up as Julia is in the film. I did lose my film on the ice and I was stuck in Pang for 10 days. I gave Malaya and her friends my candy bars and my sled. And she did ask me if she could tell her friends that I was her mother. Both Malaya’s mother and grandmother died. I did go back up for the funeral, and I did bring her back to LA with me. US Immigration did inform us that for Malaya to stay in Los Angeles she had to be legally adopted, and she was given a visa good for a one month stay in the US.
TMG: Movies are not often kind to characters who resist someone’s “following their heart”, no matter how impractical or whatever the consequences to others. Yet your depiction of the husband Ed is very sympathetic, as someone reacting with understandable resistance to impulsive, unilateral and life-changing commitments. Will you share any of the real back story on that relationship?
Lori Stoll: It’s funny, I see Ed as you do, he’s married to this crazy woman, he really loves her, and his biggest fault is being overwhelmingly practical. It’s complicated – he loves her, he wants her to be happy, he tries to understand her.
Julia feels held down by Ed, and forced into a conventional relationship. She resents his practically. If you are asking about my husband and our real backstory, clearly spontaneously adopting an almost teenage child from another culture created a lot of conflict. Having said that, I’m happy to share with you that today my husband and I are together, Malaya is 27 and the executive producer of Heaven’s Floor, and our son Zach is 20 and a sophomore at the University of Chicago.
TMG: The Arctic scenes are really impressive. How did your background in photography inform the film’s cinematography for the Arctic scenes? You are a first time director, and I see that your first time DP for the Canadian locations is a veteran camera operator. How “hands on” were you in the cinematography?
Lori Stoll: Regarding the cinematography, I was very hands on. I’ve been a photographer for 30 years, and I’m most comfortable working in a visual medium. Having said that, both George Billinger (Arctic DP) and Danny Moder (LA DP) are both so talented. For a first time director, I truly had the A team for my crew.
Heaven’s Floor’s World Premiere is tonight at Cinequest with more screenings on March 6 and 11.
The title character in the Peruvian psychological drama Magallanes is a loser, but is he a lovable loser? Played by Damián Alcázar, Magallanes bounces around from odd job to odd job. He can’t break even driving a borrowed outlaw taxi around the squalid streets of Lima, he lives in a basement hovel and he has one friend. Magallanes glimpses a person from his past, and it rocks him into a series of life-changing events.
Magallanes starts out as a caper movie. But we learn that his one friendship is from his military service in a death squad unit, dispatched to repress the indigenous population with the harshest methods. What this unit did years ago has scarred all the characters (except two snarky cops), and Magallanes is revealed to be a study of PTSD.
What is driving Magallanes’ behavior in this story? We find that we is trying to right a past wrong. But what? And by whom? The revelation in Magallanes is that some wrongs cannot be righted.
Magallanes is a showcase for Mexican actor Alcázar, whom U.S. art house audiences saw in John Sayles’ Men with Guns and as the lead in Herod’s Law. Alcázar makes Magallanes so sympathetic that the movie’s climax is jarring and emotionally powerful.
I saw Magallanes at Cinequest, where it plays again on March 10 and 12.
Here’s what you want in a disaster movie: 1) a really impressive disaster and 2) lots of suspense about which of the main characters will survive. The Norwegian The Wave successfully delivers on both counts.
As a non-Norwegian, I didn’t know that, every few decades, an unstable mountainside somewhere in Norway breaks loose, plunging hundreds of tons of rock into a fjord; this triggers a tsunami, which rages down the fjord, destroying everything and every one that doesn’t reach high ground. Norwegian geologists are even perched above these fjords to trigger early warning systems. A siren goes off, and everyone downstream has TEN MINUTES to climb to safety. As disasters go, this is pretty novel – not your ordinary earthquake, fire, flood, shipwreck and not even your ordinary tsunami (Hereafter, The Impossible). In The Wave, the tidal wave itself is pretty impressive, and the special effects are believable.
But the best part about The Wave is the tension produced by, not one, but TWO ticking clock scenarios. The filmmakers build the tension as we wonder just when the upcoming disaster is going to hit and whether the characters will have time to escape. And then, there’s an excruciating race-against-time to save family members from a hopeless situation.
The main characters are sympathetic, the acting is very good and the dialogue is very witty for the genre. Ane Dahl Torp plays the mom, and her character’s off-the-charts take charge heroism and resilience is a big part of the fun. I’m not a real fan of disaster movies, but I still stayed with The Wave for its entire length.
I saw The Wave at Cinequest, where it gripped and exhausted the audience (in a good way). It will be released theatrically in the Bay Area on March 11.
Ah, those nutty Czechs. Here, we think we’re watching a political spoof. Then, a third of the way in, Lost in Munich becomes a mockumentary on the “making of” the movie we thought we were watching. The joke is on us and on the incompetent and unlucky fillmmaker characters and on the Czechs themselves.
There’s a particular dry deadpan in some Czech cinema, and the best example may be a Cinequest film from two years ago, Polski Film. The Czechs are happy to make fun of themselves and their European neighbors (in this case the French). The movie-within-a-movie centers on Czech hard feelings from French Prime Minister Edoaurd Daladier selling out the Czechs in the 1938 Munich Agreement with Hitler. A dim French diplomat tries to smooth things over by bringing Daladier’s 80-year-old pet parrot, but the parrot turns out to be counterproductively politically incorrect, the parrot is parrotnapped, and the comic absurdity of Lost in Munich goes on from there.
Lost in Munich is pretty successful when it mocks the making of a snake-bitten movie where everything that CAN go wrong…You’ll probably like this movie if you have a taste for absurdist cinema. Lost in Munich plays Cinequest again on March 11 and 12.
The Canadian psychological thriller Lost Solacetakes a highly original premise and turns it into a pedal-to-the-metal thriller. It’s an astonishingly successful debut for director and co-writer Chris Scheuerman.
Co-writer Andrew Jenkins stars as the psychopath Spence, whose life is devoted to exploiting women, stealing their stuff and emotionally devastating them to boot. Spence is remarkably skilled and seems unstoppable until he unwisely ingests a recreational drug – he starts suffering hallucinatory episodes that are intensely emotional. Here’s the brilliantly original core of Lost Solace – having the occasional fit of feelings and empathy really gets in the way of being a coolly cruel psychopath.
Spence targets the emotionally fragile rich girl Azaria (Melissa Roxburgh). Melissa is burdened both by the care for her violently psychotic brother Jory (Charlie Kerr) and by years of verbal evisceration by her prick of a father, Chuck (Michael Kopsa). Able to peg Spence as a scumbag, Jory offers Spence a share of his inheritance to kill Chuck. It’s a plan hatched by a psychotic – what could possibly go wrong? Add an ambitious physician (Leah Gibson) who is eager to cash in on a cure for psychopathy, and we’re off to the races.
Scheuerman is an economical story-teller who lets the audience connect the dots. Spence doesn’t even speak until well into the movie. But Scheuerman spins a great tale, and as he reveals his characters, we see that Chuck may be every bit as fiendish as Spence and that Betty the doctor, may be just as greedy. There’s plenty that can unravel Spence’s Perfect Crime, and that’s what keeps us on the edges of our seats.
Andrew Jenkins is completely believable as both the supremely confident Spence and, later, as the Spence determined to steel his way through his unexpected confusion. The rest of the cast is exceptional, too, especially Kopsa and Gibson.
So far my personal favorite at Cinequest 2016, Lost Solace will have its World Premiere on Friday, March 4, and screen again on March 6 and 10.
Restlessness, thy name is Woman. The absorbing and character-driven autobiographical drama Heaven’s Floor begins with photographer Julia (Clea Duvall) finishing a shoot, but then being reluctant to go home. Now Julia has built herself a comfortable West LA life – career, marriage, kid, friends, house. What is she missing?
Julia feeds her wanderlust by impulsively joining an arctic adventure led by Jack, a charming reprobate. This isn’t fair to Julia’s husband Ed, but he dutifully covers for her on the home front. The trip to the Canadian Arctic becomes more nightmare than adventure, and Julia is marooned in a small Inuit village where she meets an orphaned girl. Both Julia’s compassion and her impulsivity kick into high gear, and we are off on a journey that will indelibly change several lives.
Note that Heaven’s Floor is autobiographical. Indeed, what seem like the most improbable and extreme plot points in Heaven’s Floor really happened to writer-director Lori Stoll. Stoll’s real life background as a photographer also informed the film’s cinematography – and the scenes in the Arctic are particularly impressive.
There’s plenty of exciting, true life adventure in Heaven’s Floor. But, at its core, it is an evocatively crafted character study of Julia – her restlessness, impulsivity, compassion and emotional needs. Heaven’s Floor takes on a quest that may – or may not – satisfy those needs and complete the already complicated Julia.
Although it’s anything but a showy role, the part of Julia’s husband Ed is also remarkably written. Movies are not often kind to characters who resist someone’s “following their heart”, no matter how impractical or whatever the consequences to others. Yet Stoll’s depiction of the husband Ed is very sympathetic, as someone reacting with understandable resistance to impulsive, unilateral and life-changing commitments.
Clea DuVall has a knack for making small parts in good movies (21 Grams, Zodiac, Argo) memorable. Here, she gets her chance at a leading role and her Julia keeps us on the edge of our seats; we care about her, but have no idea what she’s going to jump into next. Toby Huss is very, very good as Julie’s loving but aggrieved husband Ed. Veteran Irish actor Timothy V. Murphy sparkles as the huckster adventurer Jack who could sell the proverbial ice to Eskimos.
Heaven’s Floor is one of the 129 Cinequest films directed by a woman. Heaven’s Floor’s World Premiere is at 6:45 PM on Friday, March 4 at Cinequest with more screenings on March 6 and 11.
Coming on Friday: an interview with Heaven’s Floor writer/director Lori Stoll.
The most masterful filmmaking achievement at Cinequest 2016 might just be the Chilean drama The Memory of Water by Matias Bize. The Memory of Water is an exploration of grief, its process and its impact. After all, the individuals who make up couples grieve in different ways and at different paces.
We meet a couple (Benjamin Vicuña and Elena Anaya) who has recently experienced a tragedy. He is undertaking an everyday task. She is (literally) revisiting the tragedy. Director Bize brilliantly takes us to the wall in the home where parents record the height of their growing kid – the camera scans up the marks for 2, 2/12, 3, 3 1/2 and then stops after 4. We understand.
The husband is extremely sensitive and tries his best to comfort her. It’s not enough. She tells him that he needs to cry just once. The movie is his journey to being able to cry that one time.
We see him at work, faced with something that reminds him of the tragedy, She is a medical translator and, in the most heartrending scene, must maintain her poise to get through a task that no one should be asked to perform. There’s an explosive sex scene, beautifully shot in red light, that’s all about the release of passion in an encounter that is itself passionless and meaningless.
And we see water. Water that evokes tragic memory. And water in a different form that brings joyful memory. And, finally, water in a scene of closure.
The Memory of Water explores the same ground as Rabbit Hole, the excellent Nicole Kidman/Aaron Eckhardt film based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play. But The Memory of Water is better cinema.
The 35-year-old Bize (The Life of Fish) is a major filmmaking talent. The Memory of Water is a Must See at this year’s Cinequest and screens on March 2, 10 and 12.
The documentary The Promised Band is about a group of Israeli and Palestinian women seeking to fight through the cultural, legal, political, military and security barriers between them (by forming a girl band). It effectively brings the audience into the Israel-Palestine border situation and the isolating effects on both Israelis and Palestinians.
Israel’s solution to the security situation has created a world in which Israelis and Palestinians do not interact and get to know each other personally. The American filmmaker Jen Heck has friends on both sides, and sought to connect them personally – which is not easy. In fact, it is illegal and dangerous for Israelis to visit parts of the West Bank that are designated as Area A (under complete Palestinian control). And it’s downright impossible for Palestinian residents of Area A to enter Israel. The women decide to form a band, with the hope that a performance in Israel can legally justify a visit by the Palestinian women.
Is this extremely naive? Indeed, Heck herself and one of her Israeli friends seem pretty clueless about the risks…at first. But other Israeli women had been in Palestine while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, and the Palestinian women live with the harsh realities every day.
The most compelling subject of the documentary is the main Palestinian character, the charismatic Lina. Lina is a rock star, and a little imbalance is created when she is matched with the other subjects of the documentary. Lina is clearly repressed by both Israeli occupation and her own conservative culture, but she doesn’t grouse about the latter to her Israeli friends.
The Promised Band is a successful exploration of the effects of mutual isolation, as well as a wistful personal study of the women (and a man) who come and go from the band. Along the way, it provides a very explicit snapshot of the barriers to travel and social integration. The Promised Band is one of the 129 woman-directed films at this year’s Cinequest.
The Promised Band’s World premiere will be on March 4 at Cinequest, with additional screenings on March 6 and 12.
