Movies

Blogging from Cinequest: 3 Backyards

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This unbearably pretentious and self-indulgent wannabe art film is constructed around three completely unconnected plot threads.  In the best written and acted of the three, Edie Falco plays a woman excited about driving her new celebrity neighbor (Embeth Davidtz) to the ferry.  The celebrity is having a personal crisis and deigns not to share her innermost turmoil with the new acquaintance.  Because Falco’s character had fantasized about gaining a celebrity BFF, she is disappointed.   Unless petty disappointment counts as a major theme, this segment is pointless.

In the second thread, Elias Koteas plays a man unhappy at home whose business trip is aborted.  He wanders around waiting for the unexplained catharsis at the 87-minute mark of the movie.  Koteas proves once more that he can furrow his brow and mumble at the same time.

The third thread is about a little girl who plays with her mother’s precious new bracelet and loses it.  By this time, we almost expect the random appearances of a mystical unicorn, but we have to make do with a white poodle instead.  Plus there’s a masturbating dog killer.  In between the three plot threads, there are odd transitional shots of caterpillars and the like.

Somehow 3 Backyards won Eric Mendelsohn his second Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival.  I like to think that good directors tell stories and make them compelling, so I am baffled by this “achievement”.   I hated this movie – and it is still pissing me off.

Blogging from Cinequest: Small Town Murder Songs

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So there’s part of a good film in here somewhere.  Peter Stormare (the hulking brute in Fargo) plays the local cop in a rural Canadian community with German-speaking Mennonites.  The cop comes from the traditional Mennonites, but he is ostracized by them (including his father and brother) for a previous act of violence.  Now he has adopted a personal religiosity himself.  Then there is a murder, and the suspect is the new boyfriend of the cop’s ex (Jill Hennessy – very good here).  Stormare gives a fine performance as the cop.  So far so good.

But the movie drags.  It’s at only 75 minutes, but feels like two hours.    Indeed, there are some completely superfluous scenes with Stormare’s partner and the partner’s 12-year-old daughter.

One of the of the film’s potential assets is the unfamiliar setting.   But after some old Protestant hymns and some stark scenes of northern nothingness, the audience is jarred by very loud and distracting call-and-response music that is completely inappropriate to the time and place.  Disappointingly, the story relies on that hackneyed gimmick of using TV and radio newscasts to advance the plot.  Finally, writer-director Ed Gass-Donnelly climaxes the story with a Christ-like sacrifice that doesn’t fit this heretofore realistic movie.  Overall, not a success.

Blogging from Cinequest: Question in Details

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In this unassuming Hungarian film, a man and a woman recognize that their first date is a disaster and decide to keep talking as acquaintances – without the first date tension.  They go back to her apartment, and he meets her brother.  The three talk, bantering at first and then probing.  A previously unknown connection between them surfaces – and it’s a big one.  The audience cares about the characters (at least two of them) so much that it’s easy to forgive a highly unlikely coincidence in the plot.   It’s a satisfying little movie.

Blogging from Cinequest: Here’s the Kicker

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The biggest surprise at San Jose’s Cinequest film festival so far is the indie comedy Here’s the Kicker, written by its star, Ian Michaels.  The relationship of a prematurely retired football player and his girlfriend is being battered by their dead-end jobs in LA; (she is a make up artist – in porn films).  To save their relationship, he agrees to move back to her hometown in Texas where they can open a salon/saloon: a combo beauty parlor and sports bar.  Just as they are leaving on the road trip, he is offered his dream job as a football scout.  When is he going to get the nerve to tell her?  Along the way, they pick up his obnoxious former teammate and, most hilariously, his dad, who does NOT want to return to alcohol rehab.  Many guffaws ensue in this all too rare occurrence – a satisfying American film comedy.

It’s hard to write comedy.  Otherwise, we’d be seeing lots of good comedies.  So Ian Michaels deserves some recognition, and, above all, to get more screenplays greenlighted.

As the girlfriend, Sarah Smick succeeds in remaining sympathetic despite being continually aggrieved – no easy accomplishment.  Luce Rains is great as the drunk dad.

According to Ian Michaels at the screening, Director/Cinematographer/Editor Chris Harris made the key decision to cut some early scenes so the road trip could commence sooner. Obviously, that move worked.  Here’s the Kicker deserves a wide release.

Blogging from Cinequest: A Little Help

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A Little Help is a Jenna Fischer vehicle that illustrates the depth that Fischer can bring to even a shallow character.  In this dramedy, Fischer is suddenly widowed and must reassemble her life and support her quirky 12-year-old son despite the intrusions of her shrill, micro-controlling sister (Brooke Smith) and their chilly mother (Leslie Anne Warren).  Fischer’s biggest challenge is helping her son navigate social life at his new school, where he has told a preposterous lie on his first day.

Kim Coates steals every scene as a medical malpractice attorney.  Ron Liebman sparkles as the blowhard father.

Writer/Director Michael J. Weithorn made the very smart decision to hold Fischer’s character accountable for the bad choices she has made in her life.  If she were instead written as a completely innocent victim, the story would have lapsed into cliche.  Instead, it’s a pretty good movie and a fine showcase for Jenna Fischer.

Nora’s Will: A Suicide, a Rabbi and a Pizza

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In this wry Mexican dramedy, a long-troubled woman ends her life, and her ex-husband and adult son start uncovering some jarring family secrets.  The son is out-of-town, so the ex is stuck with resentfully planning the funeral with the interference of an obnoxious rabbi.  Did I mention that Nora’s Will is set among orthodox Jews in Mexico City – who knew?  The frustrated ex-husband finally offers a ham, bacon and sausage pizza to the orthodox rabbi during Passover, and somehow all the Jewish cemeteries in Mexico City become unavailable.  After many chuckles, there’s a sweet ending.

Kaboom: A trippy sex comedy

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Director Gregg Araki created the brilliant and searing Mysterious Skin, but here he’s just having fun.  In the first hour of Kaboom, I lost track of how many characters had sex with each other – it’s just about non-stop and guy-on-guy, girl-on-girl, guy-on-girl, guy-and-girl-on-guy, etc.  I would characterize the sex as casual, but that would make it seem that the characters were having even a modicum of difficulty in finding partners.  Anyway, the chaotic sexathon is fun and very funny.   The last twenty minutes takes the film into a campy version of a paranoid apocalypse film, before an abrupt (and I mean abrupt) ending.  Did I mention the bad guys in the animal masks? It’s fun and doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Cedar Rapids

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Cedar Rapids is surprisingly winning comedy about a guy (Ed Helm) whose life is so boring that an insurance agent conference in Cedar Rapids is a revelatory experience.   Helm plays a character whose sincerity and decency elevate his guileless cluelessness.  There are excellent supporting performances by Anne Heche, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and the irrepressible John C. Reilly.

This could have been a much courser and a lesser movie in the wrong hands.  It’s directed by Miguel Arteta, who also brought an appealing sense of humanity to the underrated The Good Girl and Youth in Revolt.

Set your TiVo for Carlos

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The Sundance Channel is broadcasting Olivier Assayas’ 5 1/2 hour miniseries Carlos again on February 23.  Don’t miss this miniseries on the 70s/80s terrorist Carlos the Jackal.

Carlos begins as a playboy who thinks it would be cool to fight for the Palestinians.  It turns out that he is way smarter and more nervy than the other dippy wannabe terrorists, so he rises to lead his own crew.  At first he prudently tries to remain clandestine, but he inadvertently gains some celebrity, and he LOVES IT.  After his first exposure in the media, he self-consciously dons a Che Guevara beret for his next adventure.  Soon he is a legend in his own mind.  Finally, he learns what happens when he becomes too hot for anyone to shield.

The action sweeps between atrocities in Paris and Vienna, a terrorist training camp in Aden, secret bases in Berlin and Budapest.  Along the way, we meet European goofball radical posers and smarmy Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan intelligence officers.  We see dynamite action scenes as Carlos must pull off escapes and attacks in compressed time.

Carlos is a  star making performance by the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez who plays Carlos and has to carry almost every scene.  Ramirez perfectly captures Carlos’ bravado, audacity, vanity, sexiness, delusion and dissolution.  Ramirez plays a few scenes in the nude, with Carlos at first admiring his own beefy body and later lolling about with a pot belly.

Carlos is a French film, but is mostly in English; there are subtitled scenes with French, Spanish and Arabic dialogue.

Carlos has also been released in a 2 hour 45 minute version on Pay Per View.  I strongly recommend the full length version on the Sundance Channel.

The Illusionist – wistful and charming

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Sylvain Chobert (The Triplets of Belleville) made this wistful animated charmer from a screenplay by the French master director Jacques Tati, who died in 1982.  The Illusionist tells the story of a small time magician whose act no longer appeals to a postwar audience.  As he prospects for an ever bleaker array of gigs, he drifts through show a biz detritus of seamy dressing rooms and broken talent.  He meets a girl, who attaches herself to him to escape her drab existence.  The magician selflessly works to help her blossom.  It’s an innocent and sweet tale made bitterweet by the harsh grimness of his situation.

I wasn’t a big fan of Triplets of Belleville, but here Chobert strikes every note perfectly.  It’s an essentially silent film that captures the tone of Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.  (Indeed, when the magician drops into a movie theater, it’s showing Tati’s masterpiece Mon Oncle.)   It’s a fine movie with a sweetness that is rare in modern cinema.