Here’s the premise of Songs She Wrote About People She Knows – a dissatisfied but very contained woman adopts the therapeutic device of SINGING her true feelings. So she expresses her resentments by leaving excoriating singing voicemails. When she melodically rips her ubercaffeinated boss, there is an unintended consequence. Her harangue sparks both his personal interest in her (unwelcome) and a sudden decision to swing his life 180 degrees. He gloms on to her as he seeks to his artistic dream. It becomes an odd couple movie, where he spends the rest of the movie annoying her (and, believe me, this is not very entertaining).
In the lighthearted Italian Wax: We Are the X, a notoriously shady producer sends two guy filmmakers to Monaco to scout locations for a commercial and meet a gal French casting director. They are all hired because they work cheap. What follows is a little whodunit, a little relationship drama, a little comedy and, as one might expect, a ménage à troisillustrating the open-mindedness of French women (in the movies, anyway).
The best five minutes of the movie is right at the beginning, when the producer demonstrates his mastery of getting someone else to pick up a tab.
There is a superfluous but welcome cameo by 70-year-old Rutger Hauer (it’s been over thirty years since Nighthawks and Blade Runner!). And there’s a Gen X hook, an attempt to make Wax: We Are themore than it is, which is basically an entertaining piece of Euro-fluff.
In the Mexican drama The Life After, two brothers are raised by a very unreliable single mom. When she disappears and leaves them on their own, they go on a road trip where the emotional damage she has wreaked on them is exposed. It’s well-acted and well-photographed, but grim and slow-paced. Ultimately, I’m just not convinced that this story needed to be told.
29-year-old slacker Aron (Áron Ferenczik) is coming off a bad break-up – so bad that his girlfriend took all of her stuff out of their apartment and even removed her hair from the bathroom drain. Stunned, Aron spends the rest of the Hungarian comedy For Some Inexplicable Reason staggering around Budapest trying to escape a profound personal confusion. In the opening sequence, Aron feigns dropping dead in a variety of Budapest locations amidst unconcerned passersby. That (along with the hair removed from the drain – what a great gag) sets the mood of this witty and good-hearted comedy.
We meet Aron’s buddies, who are all farther along in their careers, but only marginally more mature. His well-intentioned parents are not helping his mental health. There is the specter of his ex Ezter, hopefully to be replaced by one of the young women who wander into his crosshairs.
Writer-director Gábor Reisz delivers some highly original moments, including Aron being followed by an increasing lineup of Ezters. There’s a priceless kitchen table argument between Aron’s parents shot-from-high. There is Aron’s totally unexpected reaction to a sexual opportunity. And, is you see For Some Inexplicable Reason, DO NOT MISS the closing credits – well worth it!
These inventive fragments are all reminiscent of the 2013 Cinequest gem Oh Boy, which later secured a US theatrical release as A Coffee In Berlin. For Some Inexplicable Reason isn’t quite as unified a work as Oh Boy, but it’s entertaining throughout and the best parts are really clever.
For Some Inexplicable Reason plays again February 27 at Camera 12 and on March 7 at the California Theatre.
In the bawdy Norwegian comedy Chasing Berlusconi, a beleaguered harness racing driver gets into trouble with menacing (and very, very funny) Finnish loan sharks, which precipitates a farce involving two shady dim bulbs and a pair of even dumber cops. Oh, and then there’s the driver’s nyphomaniacal wife. Did I mention the racetrack owner with a piercing, sudden cackle and a predilection for toupees and cowboy hats? (The movie’s title comes from a racehorse named for the Italian scoundrel/politician.)
This all makes for very good lowbrow comedy. And lowbrow it is, featuring jokes based on impotence, penis length, horse poop and the like. Chasing Berlusconi also features very clever references to Columbo, The Wire and Fifty Shades of Grey. The characters of the racetrack owner and the lead loan shark are especially funny.
I loved filmmaker Ole Endresen’s hilarious King Curling at the 2012 Cinequest. That story had a very original hook – to win a curling tournament, the protagonist needs to stop taking his meds, and then tries not to slip into psychosis. Chasing Berlusconi isn’t the comic masterpiece of King Curling, but it’s worth some guffaws.
Chasing Berlusconi plays again at Cinequest March 1 at the California Theatre and March 3 at Camera 12.
Another struggling Hollywood artist is the heart of Booze Boys and Brownies, and this, time, she bursts into song. She’s an actress unlucky in both love and career, and she navigates through both with her BFF and her once and future boyfriends. Not one of the songs is a show-stopper. None of the characters is especially winning. Pass.
The winning Nerd Olympics documentary Sweden’s Coolest National Teambrings us into a world that I didn’t know existed – international competition in memory sport. That subject is the first factor that elevates Sweden’s Coolest National Team above the familiar arc of the sports movie. We see people who can remember the exact order of a shuffled deck of cards, seemingly endless strings of binary numbers, even entire dictionaries. (The current world record for memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards is 21.19 seconds.) It is a jaw-dropping exhibition.
We meet the sport’s founder and several world champs, and we do end up at the World Memory Championship. Along the way, we see the universal aspects of competition – the pressure to perform, the rookie’s overconfidence, comeuppance for both the brash rookie and the complacent old champ. One competitor’s sister phones their parents to report “he got crushed”.
But what makes Sweden’s Coolest National Team so engaging is that its subjects are so fascinating. As one might expect, the competitors don’t seem particularly athletic and many are downright geeky. Several of the past world and Swedish champions are remarkably devoted to the sport and amazingly generous in helping younger memory sportsmen. Then there is the smug yuppie who dresses like he is giving a TED Talk and seeks to mold the sport into something that he can monetize.
And it has plenty of slyly funny moments – just as our yuppie complains about a former champ making the sport look like it’s just for oddballs, the old geek wanders through a competition with an alarming case of Plumber’s Butt.
The film’s epilogue notes that one of the subjects won the World Championship in 2013. He repeated his win in 2014.
Sweden’s Coolest National Team, which flies past the audience in a just-right 58 minutes, will have its North American premiere at Cinequest on February 25 and play again on February 27 and March 1, all at Camera 12.
The ever-absorbing The Center explores how someone of sound mind and normal disposition can be completely enveloped by a cult. The Center is writer-director Charlie Griak’s first feature, and it’s a very impressive debut.
We meet Ryan (Matt Cici), a talented guy with low self-esteem. He is highly functional and ultra-responsible, but it seems like nobody is in his corner. The first six minutes of this screenplay paint a detailed portrait of a guy who is crapped upon more than Job. No one encourages Ryan to do anything for himself, and he ends each night alone, with a beer and late-night TV. Then someone else shows personal interest in the hang-dog Matt, and he gradually slides into what at first seems the appreciation of his potential, but which is revealed to be a web of exploitation.
The audience recognizes some red flags before Ryan does, but every step in this story is credible – and there isn’t a cliché in sight. The keys to The Center’s success are the crafting of the Ryan character and the believability of the story. Ryan’s journey is compressed into a taut and compelling 72 minutes.
Matt Cici, who is in virtually every shot, is perfect as Ryan – a guy with plenty to offer, but whose lack of self-confidence sets him up for exploitation by everyone else. The acting is strong throughout The Center. Ramon Pabon is especially memorable as a twitchy loser who has been sucked into the cult. With piercing eyes, Judd Einan nails the role of the uberconfident, emotionally bullying cult founder. Annie Einan is excellent as Ryan’s world-weary sister, so burdened by their mother’s care that she can’t be there for Ryan until she spots the crisis in his life.
This spring, HBO will premiere documentarian Alex Gibney’s (Taxi to the Dark Side, We Steal Secrets, Client 9, Casino Jack and the United States of Money) expose of Scientology – Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. Going Clear will be a big deal, and will beg the question, “How can smart, able people fall into this stuff?”. The Center should become the perfect narrative fiction companion to Going Clear.
One more thing – The Center was shot in St. Paul, Minnesota, a city that I’m not used to seeing in a movie. The Center’s sense of place (a place fresh and unfamiliar to many of us, anyway) adds to its appeal.
With The Center, Charlie Griak has shown himself to be a very promising filmmaking talent and has left a serious professional calling card. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Cinequest will host the world premiere of The Center on February 27, and it will play again on March 1 and March 3, all in Camera 12.
In documentarian Julie Sokolow’s suprisingly moving Aspie Seeks Love, we meet a geeky guy named David Matthews, and we can immediately tell that he has really bad social skills. He’s initially off-putting – he has a robotic speaking voice, he’s bringing up the wrong conversational subjects and any woman he meets can safely be predicted to run, run, run away. Then we learn that David (now age 47) was diagnosed with Asberger’s at 41. (Aspie is a self-descriptive term used by some folks with Asperger’s syndrome.)
David is determined to overcome his Asberger’s and find love. We follow David with his support group, his therapist and even along on some dates. We’re with him when he’s hanging around a pool table with three Aspie buddies; they’re talking about how difficult it is to navigate courtship rituals when you don’t have the ability to pick up cues – for example, whether a woman is ENCOURAGING or DISCOURAGING an escalation in physical contact. I really felt for these guys – non-verbal communication while dating can be hard enough to decipher without the handicap of an autism spectrum disorder. It’s heartbreaking that David spent 41 years (before his diagnosis) with people thinking that he was just a weirdo.
Small talk is a challenge, too. David says, “I’m a vegan”, which draws some interest. But he doesn’t understand why you shouldn’t follow that up with “It makes my body smell clean”.
Despite his disorder, David is really smart, artistic, and enjoys an ever present sarcastic sense of humor. I’m no softy, but I found myself really rooting for this guy. Okay – so he’s socially awkward, but he’s employed and stable, lives in his own house, is about to become a published author, is impeccably clean, doesn’t smoke drink or do drugs, has no criminal record – he must be right for SOME WOMAN out there. I live in Silicon Valley among engineers and David really isn’t THAT socially inept by comparison.
Possibly because David doesn’t really GET awkwardness, writer-director Julie Sokolow is able to follow him into situations that normal folks might find intrusive. Sokolow also edits, and the editing choices are just about perfect. Aspie Seeks Love is a gem.
Cinequest hosts the world premiere of Aspie Seeks Love on February 27, and it plays again on March 1 and March 4, all at Camera 12.
In the documentary Meet the Hitlers, we are introduced to those few people who choose NOT to change their birth name of “Hitler”. And it’s a varied bunch. We meet a delightfully confident Missouri teen girl, a workaday Ecuadorian whose parents didn’t know who Hitler was and an affable Utah oldster who might be the most jovial fellow ever to brighten up a chain restaurant. And there’s an Austrian odd duck burdened with enough personal baggage that he surely didn’t need this name. Do they see the name as a curse, and how has it affected them? It’s a theoretical question to us in the audience, but it’s compelling to see the real world responses of the film’s subjects.
And then there’s a mystery about three Americans who HAVE changed the name – because they are the last living relatives of Adolph Hitler. We follow the journalist who has been tracking them down for over a decade. (Documentarian Matt Ogens makes a great editorial choice as to whether to reveal their current names.)
Finally, there’s the disturbing saga of a New Jersey neo-Nazi who is NOT named Adolph Hitler but WANTS to be. Of course, anybody can choose to adorn themselves with a Hitler mustache and swastika tattoos and spew hatespeech, but his choices are affecting not just himself, but his children.
Some of these threads are light-hearted and some are very dark. Meet the Hitlers works so well because Ogens weaves them together so seamlessly. It’s a very successful documentary.
You can see Meet the Hitlers at Cinequest on March 1, 2 and 7 at Camera 12.
