Elena is didactic filmmaking and in interviews, director Andrei Zvyagintsev hasn't been shy in explicitly stating his fundamental criticism of the contemporary Russian underclass. "This is how they will behave," he noted in an interview conducted at the film's Cannes premiere. "At one point we considered calling the film The Invasion of the Barbarians." "They" are the title character's (Nadezhda Markina) son Sergei (Aleksey Rozin) and his family, notably grandson Sasha (Igor Orgutsov), whose grades are so bad he'll end up serving mandatory army time unless the right college officials are bribed. Former nurse Elena wants far wealthier second husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) to provide the money, but he refuses on angry principle, insisting military discipline is just the right education for a directionless young man.

The harshest dialogue's always closest to the director's unambiguous public statements. Vladimir's daughter Katya (Elena Lyadova) is a disappointment ("a goddamned hedonist," father grumbles), but he's still planning to leave her the bulk of his money. Her brusque, cynical affection cheers him up. "We're all bad seeds," she declares in deadpan resignation, declining Vladimir's suggestion to try maternity as a cure for disaffection. "What's irresponsible is producing children you know will be sick or doomed, because their parents are sick or doomed." (This echoes Zvyaginstev's own viewpoint exactly: "It's also a myth that procreation at any cost is a necessity.")

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A cut from her verdict on contemporary Russian society's moral decay to Elena's infant grandson on a bed is repeated even more pointedly towards the end. When the camerawork turns unexpectedly handheld and frenzied to keep up with an eruption of youth gang violence, this cut again connects the innocent of today with the disaffectedly loutish street soldier of tomorrow.

Where Zvyaginstsev's first two films The Return and The Banishment emphasized the natural world (and the director's oft-noted reverence for Tarkovsky), here he leaves it after an opening shot fixed on a tree branch as morning sunlight rises. Dimly heard sirens and car alarms are fainter still inside. Vladimir's wealth lacks ostentation: his bare apartment contains high-end consumer goods, but its primary purpose is to dampen the outside world. His only out-of-apartment trek is a Mercedes drive to the gym, but Elena takes the train to visit her family at Moscow's Soviet-bloc(k)-tower fringes. The transit noise inescapably rises above the Philip Glass score, as hawkers offer adult magazine for the purchase of unashamed passengers. Charged with heightened, aggressively surround-sounded ambience, the bright-lit settings bristle with ominous undercurrents that finally come to the foreground.

Class differences aside, Elena and Vladimir share a mutually misplaced belief in the sanctity of family bonds, placing those ties above all other social and legal obligations if need be. The steps Elena takes to secure her loved ones' survival are spoiler territory, but they lead her to an act of violence for the purpose materially enriching her feckless family and keeping them close at hand. As they gather around a big-screen TV at the end, there's no sense that their new circumstances will set the stage for Elena's loved ones to put down their Playstation controls and get a job. (TV, unsurprisingly, is another thing Zvyagintsev hates: it's "a deformed mirror, that man chooses for himself because he doesn't want to deal with his own personality.") Elena's acts echo the darkest received narrative of Russia's post-USSR trajectory: that power and capital passed from one small group of hands to another (often the same), frequently through violent acts. The film declines to explicitly state how Vladimir made his fortune.

This is the most decorous of recent Russian films depicting violence (unreported to the police, who either actively ignore or perpetrate the incidents) as an unavoidable, commonplace factor of Russian life. These scorched-earth state-of-the-nation dispatches link stratified but equally morally bankrupt social tiers of corrupt national life. In Alexei Balabanov's Cargo 200, a roadside breakdown places a Communist Party functionary's relatively well-off young daughter in the hands of an older, murderous regional police captain in '80s Russia, while his 2010 A Stoker depicted mid-90s Russia as a place where oligarchs casually order contract hits, with the bodies driven in broad daylight to large industrial furnaces for destruction After an upper-class social worker is raped in Angelina Nikonova's Twilight Portrait, she takes tracking down one of the officers as a chance to put her ineffectual office work into practice by infiltrating his apartment and trying to reform him personally. And in Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, a truck driver's detour to the countryside leaves him stranded and transformed into a mute murderous hulk.

Killings and class frictions are relentless, intertwined constants in all these films. Glazed windows block out the outside world in Vladimir's, while Sergey's apartment is depicted in striking long shot as one of dozens, one of many public tragedies on casual display. Austerely condemnatory, Zvyagintsev's argument is convincingly apocalyptic (its original incarnation was as an English-language end-of-days drama), hypnotically rendered in slow zooms and tensely prolonged shots, making for the most visceral of jeremiads.

[Elena is now playing at Film Forum in NYC. For tickets and info, visit the website.]

]]> 8252@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

Elena is didactic filmmaking and in interviews, director Andrei Zvyagintsev hasn't been shy in explicitly stating his fundamental criticism of the contemporary Russian underclass. "This is how they will behave," he noted in an interview conducted at the film's Cannes premiere. "At one point we considered calling the film The Invasion of the Barbarians." "They" are the title character's (Nadezhda Markina) son Sergei (Aleksey Rozin) and his family, notably grandson Sasha (Igor Orgutsov), whose grades are so bad he'll end up serving mandatory army time unless the right college officials are bribed. Former nurse Elena wants far wealthier second husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) to provide the money, but he refuses on angry principle, insisting military discipline is just the right education for a directionless young man.

The harshest dialogue's always closest to the director's unambiguous public statements. Vladimir's daughter Katya (Elena Lyadova) is a disappointment ("a goddamned hedonist," father grumbles), but he's still planning to leave her the bulk of his money. Her brusque, cynical affection cheers him up. "We're all bad seeds," she declares in deadpan resignation, declining Vladimir's suggestion to try maternity as a cure for disaffection. "What's irresponsible is producing children you know will be sick or doomed, because their parents are sick or doomed." (This echoes Zvyaginstev's own viewpoint exactly: "It's also a myth that procreation at any cost is a necessity.")

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Elena...

]]> Film of the Week 2012-05-16T14:01:11-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008251.html by Steve Dollar

Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, whose career as a filmmaker has yielded such dark and excoriating satirical fare as Shakes the Clown and World's Greatest Dad, has been making the festival rounds for months with his latest comedy, God Bless America. The film, newly released, is the director's answer to Natural Born Killers and Network. Joel Murray (Goldthwait's co-star in One Crazy Summer) is Frank, a middle-aged corporate cubicle denizen abandoned by his wife and daughter and left to stew in his bachelor apartment, festering in anger, frustration and failure. One day, his fantasies of violent revenge on a reality show world spill over when he loses his job and is diagnosed with a brain tumor. With nothing left to lose, Frank goes on a rampage—and he reluctantly takes on a co-pilot in death-dealing, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a teenaged sympathizer who hates the world perhaps even more zealously than he does.

I caught up with Goldthwait during the South by Southwest film festival in March, where he was premiering the film with its stars. During a chat in the lounge of the Driskill Hotel, the trio talked about their favorite reality TV shows, the death of common decency and Diablo Cody (don't ask, just see the movie).

]]> GREENCINE DAILY: Before we get started, I wanted to tell you that I'm a huge fan of World's Greatest Dad. Although I was late in getting to it, it seems to have a life of its own.

BOBCAT: World's Greatest Dad didn't have people come to the theater, but that's been the MO with the movies I make. Being fortunate to have movies at film festivals, it's a little like those rich guys who play fantasy baseball. I get these few weeks of sold out crowds, and then the harsh reality hen the movie opens and there's no one in the theater. It doesn't bother me. The idea that's there's going to be a print of the movie is big, big stuff.

Do you think it's because they're too dark?

BOBCAT: I don't know why people don't go to my movies, but I don't take it too personally. I sound like Dirk Diggler, I'm gonna keep rockin' and rollin'... I'm going to keep making the movies. I'm just trying to live in a creative life.

Was making movies what you always wanted to do?

BOBCAT: Yeah. It took me this long in life to go, "Oh, this is really what I'm happiest doing." It's more rewarding than stand-up, it's more rewarding than all the other things I did. I have a whole new appreciation for actors. It's really hard. I think these guys did an amazing job. And I now realize that I'm a really bad actor.

What's he like as a director?

JOEL: He's pretty cool. He's very comforting and calm. He's not a yeller, unlike her. I was up against the fact that, in my head, this was a part he had toyed with playing himself. I kind of thought, [mimics Goldthwait] "H-h-h-ow would Bob say that?" But he wasn't demonstrative in any way.

TARA: And funny. This is my first film and I've been spoiled. He creates such an awesome, equal welcoming environment on set, and I know that's not going to be the case for 90 percent of the movies I do.

BOBCAT: This was a violent movie about kindness. Now while we're making this movie, if I'm a douchebag then I'm a huge hypocrite. because the whole movie is anti-douchebag. I remember once talking to a Teamster who worked with Bob Fosse on Star 80. They said, "Oh, we had so many laughs!" And I was like, "Wh-a-a-a-t?" That always stuck with me. It should be fun. Life's too short. He said every Friday night, Fosse through a huge party. "Alright, let's get done with the rape. Let's work on the party!" Do you feel there was a pivotal moment when American culture went down the tubes?

BOBCAT: I don't know if there was a tipping point for me. I'm not that angry I don't think, but I am upset and frustrated with the way things are right now. I don't know if it's a question of maturity you start thinking things seem worse, or if they really have gotten worse. I wasn't around during the '20s. But it really does seem right now we reward the dumbest, the shallowest, the meanest and the loudest.

Also with the rise of reality TV, there's less work for writers.

JOEL: These people, they're scabs. They're stealing jobs they shouldn't have. They're under-qualified people taking jobs away from writers and actors. You wouldn't have a plumber in your house who's cheaper than a real plumber but doesn't know how to do it.

A reality plumber.

JOEL: I just think it's an outrage. When I catch my wife watching The Real Housewives of Hoboken, I tell her, "Turn it off! They're taking food out of our mouths!" It's her guilty pleasure. I hate it.

BOBCAT: I do small things. If I click on a news story and I see that it's TMZ, I won't go over there. I don't want to be one more hit for that kind of nastiness.

I always thought like the O.J. Simpson trial was the beginning.

JOEL: But the O.J. trial also gave us 14 CSIs and NCISes, because everybody in America wanted to know how ot get away with killing their wife or spouse, so it also made work for actors.

BOBCAT: What is this DNA?

JOEL: There's 15 shows on now about how to get away with murder.

BOBCAT: The thing about murder always is that it's complete storytelling. People meet, something goes wrong, someone gets killed, someone gets away with it or they get caught. I watch a lot of true crime, and crime reenactment, and 48 Hours. When Joel's character falls asleep, watching the Charles Whitman story, that is me. I put on true crime and I sleep like a baby. There's a show called Snapped. It should be called Bitch Got a Gun.

This is a real show?

TARA: Oh yeah. It's women in relationships who kill their husbands. That's the whole show. I think it's on Oxygen.

BOBCAT: People think this is a parody. I'm not parodying anything. These are shows that I have seen. People say it's a little dated, it's because I'm not watching this stuff anymore.

JOEL: Some of the people who have see the trailer have said aren't you worried about copycat murders. Look at the news! You can't even copy half the murders that are going on. These murders are sensible, compared to taking your two sons, filling the house with gas and when the social worker drops them off blowing up the house.

BOBCAT: If we want to start banning violent works of fiction, I'm all for it but you better start with the Bible. Cut-your-baby-in-half King Solomon was the inspiration for the baby getting shot at the beginning of the movie.

I'm curious about the blowback from the kind of people you literally target in the movie. Has there been a lot?

BOBCAT: Before the movie came out there was a nice positive story done in the LA Times about it. I went on some conservative websites and they were very upset with me already. They hadn't seen the movie. They didn't know what it was about. It's a movie about kindness. People go, aren't you afraid of people watching the movie and being influenced by it. No. I hope people watch the movie. I hope people stop being douche-y. It's funny when I ego surf. White supremacists are mad. It's funny how he doesn't kill anybody of color! You're watching the trailer man. We shoot and kill the whole Reading Rainbow and some point or another. It's just people who are douchebags. Sometimes people bring up this movie Falling Down. That movie is about a guy who really wants to go to his daughter's birthday party. And then foreigners get in his way. Gangsters get in his way. That's not this movie.

Diablo Cody gets singled out for a special moment in your script, although she never makes the character's hit list. Have you heard from her?

BOBCAT: She wrote a blog that she was very saddened by me.

I thought she had a sense of humor?

BOBCAT: The point of that scene was, my daughter's really funny and when she says things that are funny people go, "You're like Juno." And she's like "Dad, I want to stab them in the throat when they say that." So Frank needs to say the line, "I only wanna kill people who deserve to die." Roxy needs to give examples of people who don't deserve to die. Obviously, I don't really think Diablo Cody deserves to die. At one point someone suggested I take it out, so I added another page about why Diablo Cody sucks. [laughs]. So you know, whatever, maybe her and I will eventually bro down.

JOEL: Young Adult's pretty good.

BOBCAT: As I was ego-surfing I saw one review of Young Adult and it said "This would have been a much better movie if it had been made by Bobcat Goldthwait." Poor Diablo Cody! But it was funny in this blog she wrote, she was like, "Please let me evolve. Juno was my grovel-ly voice." I was like, what are you nuts? Don't evolve. You're a successful writer who won an Oscar. What do you want to become? A Martian? A moon maiden? Lighten up, lady! That was a weird thing. I haven't been concerned with evolving. I'm not worried about people's perceptions of me. If you only know me from Police Academy or my early stand up, I don't have a problem with that. I've been making these movies because I love making them.

]]> 8251@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

Comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, whose career as a filmmaker has yielded such dark and excoriating satirical fare as Shakes the Clown and World's Greatest Dad, has been making the festival rounds for months with his latest comedy, God Bless America. The film, newly released, is the director's answer to Natural Born Killers and Network. Joel Murray (Goldthwait's co-star in One Crazy Summer) is Frank, a middle-aged corporate cubicle denizen abandoned by his wife and daughter and left to stew in his bachelor apartment, festering in anger, frustration and failure. One day, his fantasies of violent revenge on a reality show world spill over when he loses his job and is diagnosed with a brain tumor. With nothing left to lose, Frank goes on a rampage—and he reluctantly takes on a co-pilot in death-dealing, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), a teenaged sympathizer who hates the world perhaps even more zealously than he does.

I caught up with Goldthwait during the South by Southwest film festival in March, where he was premiering the film with its stars. During a chat in the lounge of the Driskill Hotel, the trio talked about their favorite reality TV shows, the death of common decency and Diablo Cody (don't ask, just see the movie).

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Bobcat Goldthwait, Joel Murray, Tara Lynne Barr...

]]> Interviews 2012-05-15T09:54:31-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008249.html by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's fish-out-of-water vampire comedy Dark Shadows.]

Pair a flagging comedian with a floundering horror director and what you get is Vampire in Brooklyn, a marriage made in horror-comedy hell courtesy of Eddie Murphy and Wes Craven. The mid-90s-isms of this wretched collaboration are plentiful—cue Salt-n-Pepa's "Whatta Man" to underline Murphy's alpha-male sexiness?— and yet they're the least of this film's problems, so misbegotten and poorly executed is its every element. Working from a story co-conceived by Murphy and a script co-written by Murphy's yet-to-be-Chappelle's-Show-famous brother Charlie, Craven's pre-Scream debacle gets clunky wit' it from the get-go. Before we've even seen him, Maximillian (Murphy) narrates the set-up: with all his brethren dead, Max has left his Bermuda Triangle island home to find and marry the last of his line, who happens to be living (unaware of her vampiric nature) in Brooklyn. Given Craven's Haiti voodoo-themed The Serpent and the Rainbow, Max's nationality suggests that the filmmaker has a particular conception of the Caribbean as a hotbed of exotic evil. Those nonsensical notions, though, are overshadowed by the more basic absence of craft on display, as evidenced by an intro scene in which, after Max's ship crashes into a dock, John Witherspoon's hands-flailing caretaker investigates the vessel and finds a murdered crew in one amusement park ride-style close-up after another.

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Max makes his initial appearance on a wave of smoke-machine fog in a dark alley, where he rescues Julius (Kadeem Hardison) from Italian mobsters—ripping out Mitch Pileggi's heart and then quipping "Put a little heart into it!"—so he can make him his ghoul minion, replete with putrefying skin and falling-off body parts. "I am Maximillian. A connoisseur of death, you might say," coos Murphy's specter, but with his long flowing locks, well-manicured goatee, and dark black overcoat, he seems less a descendent of Nosferatu (board-stiff rising from the ground or not) than a vain '90s R&B singer dressed up for Halloween. When Julius tells a hungry Max that he can get some KFC and Max instead flicks flesh out of his teeth and retorts "I already had Italian," the mixture of racial stereotyping and one-liner cheesiness is almost too much to bear. Any such offensiveness, however, is still more interesting than Max's ensuing search, which is conveniently aided by the fact that his target, Rita (Angela Bassett), is a cop who just happens to be investigating the very ship murders Max perpetrated. Rita's mom went crazy in an asylum for seeing the same visions that now terrify Rita but—as when she dreams of discovering herself crucified in a doorway, leading to her waking up screaming and flailing about—are hopelessly laughable.

Bassett may be a more elegant and forceful screen presence than the rest of her mugging co-stars, but she does her best to match their overacting throughout Vampire in Brooklyn, her performance comprised mainly of hysterical freaking out and badass tough-girl strutting. Alas, no subtlety would have salvaged this material, as Max's pursuit of Rita involves one groan-worthy set piece after another, many scored to the sounds of Hardison's awful comedic-relief cackling and, in two cases, centered on Murphy's fondness for prosthetics-enabled impersonations. To get to Rita, Max shape-shifts into, respectively, a bellowing preacher and an Italian gunmen, both of them even broader caricatures than the one Zakes Mokae (a holdover from The Serpent and the Rainbow) plays as Dr. Zeko, the Caribbean-expat vampire expert whose insights eventually help Rita's dull-as-dirt partner-cum-love-interest Detective Justice (Allen Payne) thwart Max's plan. Murphy's role-playing shenanigans are a dreary example of look-at-me narcissism, and they further strand the proceedings between scary and funny—a netherworld that becomes more unpleasant as the story barrels toward its conclusion, and wisecracking banter sits more and more uncomfortably next to monstrous-faced bellowing and neck-biting.

Ultimately more disastrous than tonal inconsistency is simply Vampire in Brooklyn's cluelessness about how it wants us to feel about Max, who for the first two-thirds of the film is presented as a likeably dapper anti-hero for whom we're supposed to root, and then—once he's on the verge of securing Rita's affections—is suddenly positioned as a villain whose downfall we should crave. This muddled POV means that one never cares about these characters' fates at any point along their respective journeys. Then again, Craven's direction is so hambone silly that taking any of this seriously is nigh impossible. Despite his illustrious reputation, Craven proves downright incompetent when it comes to atmosphere, employing thunder and lightening, violent wind, and bright misty light with ridiculous frequency. His touch is heavy and exaggerated, which means it perfectly matches Max's double entendres to Rita like "I would love to have you for dinner," and his responding to Rita rejecting his proposition of eternal life with the scene-closing zinger, "Women." In his holy man guise, Max may preach "Evil is good!" but it's a sentiment refuted at every turn by Vampire in Brooklyn's insufferable cartoon spookiness. ]]> 8249@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's fish-out-of-water vampire comedy Dark Shadows.]

Pair a flagging comedian with a floundering horror director and what you get is Vampire in Brooklyn, a marriage made in horror-comedy hell courtesy of Eddie Murphy and Wes Craven. The mid-90s-isms of this wretched collaboration are plentiful—cue Salt-n-Pepa's "Whatta Man" to underline Murphy's alpha-male sexiness?— and yet they're the least of this film's problems, so misbegotten and poorly executed is its every element. Working from a story co-conceived by Murphy and a script co-written by Murphy's yet-to-be-Chappelle's-Show-famous brother Charlie, Craven's pre-Scream debacle gets clunky wit' it from the get-go. Before we've even seen him, Maximillian (Murphy) narrates the set-up: with all his brethren dead, Max has left his Bermuda Triangle island home to find and marry the last of his line, who happens to be living (unaware of her vampiric nature) in Brooklyn. Given Craven's Haiti voodoo-themed The Serpent and the Rainbow, Max's nationality suggests that the filmmaker has a particular conception of the Caribbean as a hotbed of exotic evil. Those nonsensical notions, though, are overshadowed by the more basic absence of craft on display, as evidenced by an intro scene in which, after Max's ship crashes into a dock, John Witherspoon's hands-flailing caretaker investigates the vessel and finds a murdered crew in one amusement park ride-style close-up after another.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Vampire in Brooklyn (1995)...

]]> Retro Active 2012-05-11T17:11:17-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008248.html by Vadim Rizov

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's last film to receive American distribution, 2008's Still Walking, ended with a long shot of trains passing, "a moment whose metaphoric intent is clear," wrote Trevor Johnston. "Those trains have people on them with the same problems as the rest of us." Japanese National Railways' high-speed bullet trains serve a more optimistic function in I Wish, as well as providing some of its financing. Shane Meadows made use of Eurostar's funding for the delightful Somers Town, and Kore-eda is similarly adept in making sure he isn't compromised by his financiers.

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In Kore-eda's best known film, After Life, the newly dead have seven days to choose their favorite memory, which is filmed so that they can spend eternity with these moments. Inevitably, everyone ends up choosing ah-that-was-the-moment-of-my-life scenes of passing incidental pleasures: a sunny trolley ride, a quiet afternoon sitting on a park bench. By emphasizing the effort of recreating such a moment in long near-documentary sequences of the difficulty of film production, Kore-eda turned the process into something to be savored in and of itself, rather than hectoring us. Not so much in Still Walking, whose very title invites people to jump up and down with joy at not being paralyzed, and which came dangerously close to that-floating-plastic-bag-sure-is-beautiful smugness. Here, despite a sticky-sweet score from the band Quruli, Kore-eda lets moments unfold without forcing a message on each one.

Older sibling Koichi (Koki Maeda) lives with mom in Kagoshima, cleaning the volcanic ash from nearby mount Sakurajima that settles daily in his room before going to school. Younger Ryonuosuke (Oshiro Maeda) lives with dad in Fukuoka, high-fiving his way through the morning playground, belting out "OHAYO" ("good morning") like a miniature Japanese Seann William Scott. Their visible maturity levels are deceptive: Koichi's the one harboring unrealistic plots of bringing their divorced parents back together, while Ryonusuke revels in his new home.

Koichi and Ryonosuke take after their custodial parents: Koichi's a worrier, Ryonosuke a feckless wastrel in embryo (so says mom). Koichi's fixation on making sure he's raised by a nuclear family denies the obvious reality that his parents' antithetical goals and levels of responsibility were a very good reason for splitting up. In Ryonosuke's flashbacks, his parents are always at alarming dinnertime odds, and he vows to never put up with that again. But Koichi is determined to force reconciliation. After hearing that the first two passing trains on the new line will make wishes come true for anyone who sees this moment, he plans an expedition to be there.

When the brotherly road trip finds a last-second spot to witness the locomotive miracle, Koichi's suddenly overtaken with flashbacks to "small moments" from the last two hours: a teacher's grip upon his shoulders, a student making a baseball diamond in the dust with his feet. This montage condenses After Life's message into a brisk 30 seconds, the only bold gesture in an otherwise tempered, gentle work that's content to bask in the presence of its uniformly endearing characters. Amiable father Kenji (Jo Odagiri) is given the task of delivering Kore-eda's thesis by way of a self-defense: "There's room in the world for waste. Imagine if everything had meaning. You'd choke." I Wish practices what it preaches.

]]> 8248@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda's last film to receive American distribution, 2008's Still Walking, ended with a long shot of trains passing, "a moment whose metaphoric intent is clear," wrote Trevor Johnston. "Those trains have people on them with the same problems as the rest of us." Japanese National Railways' high-speed bullet trains serve a more optimistic function in I Wish, as well as providing some of its financing. Shane Meadows made use of Eurostar's funding for the delightful Somers Town, and Kore-eda is similarly adept in making sure he isn't compromised by his financiers.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: I Wish...

]]> Film of the Week 2012-05-09T11:17:54-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008247.html by Steve Dollar

Somewhere around 1 a.m. at the Lithuanian Hall in Baltimore, it hit me. Why shouldn't this be the place to have a passionate, detailed conversation about independent filmmaking? Film festivals take pride in the range of experiences they can offer guests and patrons, but nothing I've experienced quite compares with this backdrop: a packed, sweaty dance floor hopping with enthusiastic groovers, while a DJ plays deep soul classics and Charm City icon John Waters sits in a corner having an intimate chat with a fan. Behind the rectangular bar, burly old guys from the Old Country gruffly dispense $2 bottles of Utenos and Svyturys. I bump into an old friend I haven't seen in 20 years, and he immediately introduces me to an unalloyed artifact of the city. I don't understand too much of what he's trying to tell me, but from his T-shirt I know his name. The garment bears a likeness of his pixelated gaze and wild shocks of white hair framing a bald dome, and underneath his face the legend: Rezzy Ray Has a Posse.

We didn't talk for long, Rezzy Ray and I, as I had another posse to engage. In an adjacent room was a convergence of American filmmakers, brought to town for the Maryland Film Festival, which has evolved into an important annual summit meeting. The festival's particular focus is on the ever-emerging microbudget movement and smart, risky, handmade cinema, the kind that has to work hard to assert itself in a world where distributors often want everything and offer next to nothing.

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"It's like summer camp for filmmakers," noted Kris Swanberg, whose second feature Empire Builder premiered at the festival, during one of several panels devoted to relevant themes. With a lineup that included Craig Zobel (Compliance), Amy Seimetz (Sun Don't Shine), Kate Lyn Sheil (Sun Don't Shine, Empire Builder, The Comedy, V/H/S), Rick Alverson (The Comedy), David Lowery (apparently everything, but here notably as the cinematographer of Empire Builder and Reconvergence), Sophia Takal (Supporting Characters, The International Sign for Choking, V/H/S), Bill and Turner Ross (Tchoupitoulas), Rachel Grady (Detropia), Jonathan Lisecki (Gayby), Jodi Wille and Maria Demopoulous (The Source), Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky (Francine, The Patron Saints), Joe Swanberg (V/H/S), and even Bobcat Goldthwait (God Bless America) genially popping up everywhere, among many others, it was a rich mix of talent that also wasn't limited to one creative circle.

Between the panels, the parties and a freewheeling daylong conference that brought filmmakers together with programmers, critics and at least one distributor (and remarkably left no scars), the festival becomes what South by Southwest or Sundance might be for many if they weren't too busy pushing their own film or chasing deadlines to chill out and get real, and amazingly enough finally watch each others' films.

Fostering that communal vibe at a festival that isn't about making deals or working the press is the genius concept here. On the one hand, Maryland is a kind of aggregator event that cherry picks the best or most apt titles that already have played Sundance or SXSW (or even the New York Film Festival, where foreign-language auteur events like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Turin Horse made their U.S. premieres last fall), but in many cases have yet to reach festival screens in New York. On the other, that all but guarantees a satisfyingly strong schedule. It's more or less what Brooklyn's BAMcinematek will do in a few weeks when it launches the 2012 BAMcinemaFest, an event whose curatorial tastes argue for the vibrancy of so much work that exists under the radar of mass media/multiplex consumption—but gives audiences a truthful account of what's happening in America right now. But BAM programs its festival over a dozen days. Maryland serves up a strong, fast dose of cinema, packed into four nights of screenings that stretch over a weekend, with almost everything centered around the historic Charles Theater and an adjacent parking lot transformed into a tented HQ/lounge/bar zone. The design makes everything easy.

Though it's mostly not a "breaking news" festival like SXSW or Sundance, it was fascinating to re-watch films and reassess how they felt outside of the bubble of those omni-fests. For instance, the multi-director omnibus V/H/S, once you know what's going to happen in each episode, plays even more strongly as a comedy. Even if, objectively, it's far from perfect, the film delivers genuine excitement: laughs, subtle or extreme, peppered with scares that finally escalate into seat-bouncing freakouts. Underneath the decayed texture of the found footage concept, there's some fascinating crosstalk between the different writer-director teams whose casts usually are engaged in some kind of male-female power game. Compliance, as elsewhere, generated a lot of debate. The heard-on-the-street reactions to Zobel's chilling "based on a true story" drama of a sexual assault on a fast food employee incited by a prank call reminded me of Le Tigre's "What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?": Misogynist! Genius!

The "girls vs. boys" themes abided in debuts like Swanberg's Empire Builder, in which Sheil plays a frustrated Chicago housewife (married to Swanberg's real-life filmmaker husband Joe) whose one-week escape to a Montana cabin with baby (Jude Swanberg, in his first role) on board. Once there, in a grandly minimalist terrain lensed by David Lowery, she begins to experience a renewed sense of herself—a room of one's own, really—but soon falls in with the handyman (Bill Ross), and almost wordlessly finds herself back where she started. The improvised drama makes much of landscape and expression without much dialogue, to an end that felt head-clearing and meditative, leading up to a sudden, literally hysterical ending that then shuts down the movie cold. Zach Weintraub's The International Sign for Choking is similarly stripped down, with a character (Weintraub's Josh) at his own summit of discontent, uncertain how to move forward. Shot in Buenos Aires by the talented and often experimental cinematographer Nandan Rao (Green), the film might have taken place anywhere: Much of the action is shot in a bedroom against a brightly colored backdrop of floral wallpaper. Rao's knack for abstraction and playful use of focus seems to reflect Josh's own state of mind. He's a stranger in Argentina, stuck on a documentary commission and unable to break out of his shell, when he meets-cute with Takal's Anna (they discover each other playing knock-knock on either side of a wall in a rooming house). A fixation leads to unexpected stalker behavior involving Anna's dates, and the story carefully builds suspense of a highly existential sort.

What happens next to these films this small and personal is hard to say, but the Maryland Film Festival exists to keep showing them, and generating conversation about them that won't be over anytime soon.

]]> 8247@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

Somewhere around 1 a.m. at the Lithuanian Hall in Baltimore, it hit me. Why shouldn't this be the place to have a passionate, detailed conversation about independent filmmaking? Film festivals take pride in the range of experiences they can offer guests and patrons, but nothing I've experienced quite compares with this backdrop: a packed, sweaty dance floor hopping with enthusiastic groovers, while a DJ plays deep soul classics and Charm City icon John Waters sits in a corner having an intimate chat with a fan. Behind the rectangular bar, burly old guys from the Old Country gruffly dispense $2 bottles of Utenos and Svyturys. I bump into an old friend I haven't seen in 20 years, and he immediately introduces me to an unalloyed artifact of the city. I don't understand too much of what he's trying to tell me, but from his T-shirt I know his name. The garment bears a likeness of his pixelated gaze and wild shocks of white hair framing a bald dome, and underneath his face the legend: Rezzy Ray Has a Posse.

We didn't talk for long, Rezzy Ray and I, as I had another posse to engage. In an adjacent room was a convergence of American filmmakers, brought to town for the Maryland Film Festival, which has evolved into an important annual summit meeting. The festival's particular focus is on the ever-emerging microbudget movement and smart, risky, handmade cinema, the kind that has to work hard to assert itself in a world where distributors often want everything and offer next to nothing.

Continued reading MARYLAND 2012: Critic's Notebook...

]]> Festival Review 2012-05-07T09:25:13-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008246.html by Vadim Rizov

[Presented by Milestone Films, The Connection opens today at NYC's IFC Center in a new 35mm restoration.]

Though credulous French viewers allegedly mistook it for vérité footage at Cannes, Shirley Clarke's 1962 drama The Connection is unmistakably a filmed play. A camera swoop through a ratty New York apartment halts for a sweaty, self-and-everyone-loathing monologue from waspy addict Leach (Warren Finnerty), fuming about his "so-called friends" and their junkie worthlessness. Far from naturalism, this is Eugene O'Neill territory, with a drug connection subbing for the long-awaited iceman in a purgatorial living room. Leach finds his place under a big sign posted above the bathroom for maximum dark comic value ("Heaven or hell...which will you choose?"), holding forth with barroom intensity and pointlessness about the speed of light and the body's transparency.

Clarke meticulously records Finnerty's theatrical version of verisimilitude. More of-the-time hamminess comes from Solly (Jerome Raphael), a middle-aged intellectual with a penchant for philosophizing at the slightest provocation. Leach's problem is his sexual incompatibility with every woman on the planet ("a queer without being a queer," one of the addicts sneers), while Solly's seen gazing at male nudes. Their sexual marginalization isn't necessarily related to their drug habit.

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The Connection can be profitably viewed as an even-handed dual record of contemporary off-Broadway theater and bop only incidentally interested in heroin use. Many of the musicians weren't actually users, but saxophonist Jackie McLean taught them how to credibly mimic nodding in and out. When the connection finally shows up, Freddie Redd's ensemble doesn't stop their song: each monologue-averse quartet member drops out to shoot up, taking just long enough for another player to solo. After all four have had their fix, they all play a full-band reprisal, having never once lost control over song structure.

The Living Theater's original production had actors insulting patrons in the lobby during intermission, and young Martin Sheen (in his first stage role) interrupted the second act from the audience. More playfully, the adaptation subs out the on-stage director and producer and offers up a sacrificial lamb in the form of blustering documentarian Jim Dunn (William Redfield). "I know something about Eisenstein and Flaherty" he says in a badly misguided attempt to lend authority to his desire to capture unvarnished reality (both filmmakers noted for high artifice and overt authorial flourishes). Mostly unseen, cameraman J.J. Burden (Roscoe Lee Browne) observes with grim amusement his boss' attempts to ingratiate himself by stuttering how much he digs these cats rather than taking the obvious option of just shutting up and watching.

Dunn and Burden have two cameras, the film ostensibly cutting between their viewpoints. The cinematography is mostly omniscient, executed by offscreen hands when everyone but J.J. is clearly too incapacitated to shoot. Instead of trying to develop two separate visual viewpoints, Clarke goes for vigorous movement that never duplicates an earlier move. "What do you want to hear?" a junkie fumes in schematic, audience-indicting protest. "That we're a petty, self-annihilating microcosm?" The play's guilty as charged, miles away from the urban rot of 1971's twin heroin landmarks, Panic in Needle Park (Manhattan) and Dusty and Sweets McGee (Los Angeles), similar open-air juxtapositions of actors and the real-life destitute. Less interested than those films in capturing unquestionably authentic locations, The Connection's vigorous record of a thorny production seemingly urges audiences to actively criticize and nitpick at the onscreen drama's credibility.

]]> 8246@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

[Presented by Milestone Films, The Connection opens today at NYC's IFC Center in a new 35mm restoration.]

Though credulous French viewers allegedly mistook it for vérité footage at Cannes, Shirley Clarke's 1962 drama The Connection is unmistakably a filmed play. A camera swoop through a ratty New York apartment halts for a sweaty, self-and-everyone-loathing monologue from waspy addict Leach (Warren Finnerty), fuming about his "so-called friends" and their junkie worthlessness. Far from naturalism, this is Eugene O'Neill territory, with a drug connection subbing for the long-awaited iceman in a purgatorial living room. Leach finds his place under a big sign posted above the bathroom for maximum dark comic value ("Heaven or hell...which will you choose?"), holding forth with barroom intensity and pointlessness about the speed of light and the body's transparency.

Clarke meticulously records Finnerty's theatrical version of verisimilitude. More of-the-time hamminess comes from Solly (Jerome Raphael), a middle-aged intellectual with a penchant for philosophizing at the slightest provocation. Leach's problem is his sexual incompatibility with every woman on the planet ("a queer without being a queer," one of the addicts sneers), while Solly's seen gazing at male nudes. Their sexual marginalization isn't necessarily related to their drug habit.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: The Connection (1962)...

]]> Film of the Week 2012-05-04T09:31:19-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008245.html by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Marvel's superhero-team extravaganza The Avengers.]

Released before 2002's Spider-Man and the ensuing (and still-ongoing) onslaught of CG superhero spectacles, The Specials is something like Watchmen-lite, with its deconstruction performed not with an incisive scalpel but a feathery sarcastic touch. Unlike screenwriter James Gunn's more recent Super—which bluntly delved into the psychosexual madness underlying masked avengers' vigilantism—his prior likeminded effort is a humorously cheeky affair, focusing on a mundane day in the life of The Specials, the "sixth or seventh greatest superhero team in the world." That ragtag group of do-gooders is led by The Strobe (Thomas Haden Church), a pompous blowhard whose arrogance—epitomized by his fondness for recounting to team members his origin story, in which he likens himself to God—is laced with a melancholy born from the realization that he's woefully low on the superhero ladder. His problems are compounded by the contempt showered on him by wife Ms. Indestructible (Paget Brewster), who's secretly sleeping with smug Weevil (Rob Lowe), as well as by a bunch of paranormal misfits that include, among others, blue-skinned sexual degenerate Amok (Jamie Kennedy), dim-witted strongman U.S. Bill (Mike Schwartz), ill-tempered ghoul-summoning Death Girl (Judy Greer), and shrinking Minute Man (Gunn), whose name is constantly mispronounced "Minuteman" ("Do I look like a soldier from the Revolutionary War?").

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Dysfunction is the Specials' specialty, though that seems poised to change with the forthcoming unveiling of their action figures (an honor akin to the Oscars). Still, even that momentous event is downplayed by Gunn's tale as merely another facet of the daily drudgery faced by superheroes, who operate out of an office fielding requests from weirdoes (Ms. Invincible explains to a caller that they don't have archival nude photos of past members), and spend most of their time having pity parties about lack of recognition (Weevil says that being a Special is akin to being "the last sailor in line behind the whore"). Gunn shrewdly casts superheroism as a vocation driven by marketing concerns: Minute Man worries his costume is too "gay," and a rival outfit recruits Weevil because his blue outfit fills a need for their upcoming Beanie Baby dolls. Those concerns, however, never supersede Gunn's characterizations of his protagonists as goofy, socially screwy outcasts searching for acceptance and community. That portrait is aided by Real World-style confessional interviews in which the Specials' latent anger, misery, emotional retardation and bizarreness comes to the fore, never funnier than when Minute Man crazily opines (after failing to woo new recruit Nightbird (Jordan Ladd), "The great thing about not getting the person that you love is that you can still think about that person and masturbate, which is essentially the same thing."

The fact that it preceded the last decade's superhero blockbuster trend likely contributed to The Specials' under-the-radar fate, though equally culpable for a lack of recognition is Craig Mazin's direction, which is so flat, ungainly and all-around uninspired that the film resembles a second-rate sitcom. Mazin never met a medium-shot he didn't want to light in dull hues and frame in the gawkiest way imaginable, and the effect is that the aesthetics—while mirroring the material's depiction of the Specials' routine busywork and bickering—work at odds with the zippiness of Gunn's script. That's most notable during a paparazzi-flashbulbed blow-up between Strobe and Ms. Indestructible about her infidelity, with Mazin barely able to even shoot a single punch to the face without employing graceless edits, and then ending the scene with time-lapse dissolves that have all the panache of an amateurish wedding video. That form-content dissonance drains The Specials of considerable electricity, although not enough to sabotage its funniest sequence, in which the Specials' toys wind up looking nothing like the members, with Minute Man turned into an African-American, Death Girl reimagined as a meat thermometer-wielding evil clown, and genius Mr. Smart (Jim Zulevich) given a Richard Dawson head.

Gunn doesn't do much with his initial new-recruit-joins-the-team narrative strand, but the shagginess of the action proper is befitting a story about personal and professional disappointment, insecurity and ennui. Scant drama emerges from Weevil and Death Girl contemplating offers to join other crews, Amok thinking about returning to his youthful villainous ways (which involved trying to give the world scabies), and Strobe's petulant attempt to disband the Specials. Regardless, Gunn's writing, rooted in a deep familiarity of superhero lore that never leads to allusion-overload, has a crackling energy that's enlivening. The Specials is one-note, and yet that one-note is a strong one that reaps consistent laughs, as with U.S. Bill, a dumb-guy-says-dumb-things caricature whose non-sequitur idiocy is nonetheless hilarious, be it his opining about cocktail punch "Some things have flavors that taste good on your tongue, dontcha think?" or crazily cackling at a shadow on the wall behind his mother's head that makes it look like she's wearing a hat. Most amazing about Gunn's deconstructionist work, however, is that via the profane Amok—a desperate misfit with borderline rape-fantasy sexual hang-ups—he manages the superhuman feat of making Jamie Kennedy mildly amusing.

]]> 8245@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by Marvel's superhero-team extravaganza The Avengers.]

Released before 2002's Spider-Man and the ensuing (and still-ongoing) onslaught of CG superhero spectacles, The Specials is something like Watchmen-lite, with its deconstruction performed not with an incisive scalpel but a feathery sarcastic touch. Unlike screenwriter James Gunn's more recent Super—which bluntly delved into the psychosexual madness underlying masked avengers' vigilantism—his prior likeminded effort is a humorously cheeky affair, focusing on a mundane day in the life of The Specials, the "sixth or seventh greatest superhero team in the world." That ragtag group of do-gooders is led by The Strobe (Thomas Haden Church), a pompous blowhard whose arrogance—epitomized by his fondness for recounting to team members his origin story, in which he likens himself to God—is laced with a melancholy born from the realization that he's woefully low on the superhero ladder. His problems are compounded by the contempt showered on him by wife Ms. Indestructible (Paget Brewster), who's secretly sleeping with smug Weevil (Rob Lowe), as well as by a bunch of paranormal misfits that include, among others, blue-skinned sexual degenerate Amok (Jamie Kennedy), dim-witted strongman U.S. Bill (Mike Schwartz), ill-tempered ghoul-summoning Death Girl (Judy Greer), and shrinking Minute Man (Gunn), whose name is constantly mispronounced "Minuteman" ("Do I look like a soldier from the Revolutionary War?").

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: The Specials (2000)...

]]> Retro Active 2012-05-03T14:05:14-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008244.html by Craig Phillips

[The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 3.]

The distinctly deadpan feature debut of Lebanese filmmaker Rania Attieh and her American co-director Daniel Garcia, OK, Enough, Goodbye is a warm but not overly sentimental, low-key character comedy. Like the Middle Eastern answer to Azazel Jacobs' Momma's Man, the film concerns a 40-year-old schlub (Daniel Arzrouni) who still lives at home in Tripoli—a seaport city with a rich history dating back to the 14th century, which has since fallen on hard economic times.

The locale has an air of sadness about it; not just war-torn malaise but a feeling for things lost between generations, palpably seeping into this household as a mother regrets that her son is such a loser. She speaks of wedding ceremonies and gowns she used to make, while her sociophobic son can't get a date with anyone other than a prostitute. The unnamed protagonist works in a bakery and doesn't otherwise get out much. When his mother takes off unexpectedly, leaving him on his own, the story becomes about one man's searching—first for his ma, then for himself. It's hard to blame anyone's downbeat demeanor in a decaying, depressing environment, but this sourpuss only becomes more irritable after he's "abandoned." To the directors' credit, the film doesn't deride him but also isn't afraid to mine his neuroses for comedy.

]]> OK, Enough, Goodbye has an immediate, realistic feel that subtly grounds the humor. The energy level threatens to flag at times, but Arzrouni proves to be a compelling presence. He hires a poor Ethiopian maid to clean house, except she's really there to keep him company; of course, she doesn't speak a lick of Arabic and doesn't understand his rants. The unlikely pair, along with the neighbor boy briefly form an oddball family unit, at least until our momma's man finds himself a more fitting companion. And, OK, that's enough, goodbye.

After a foray into Hollywood as an actor (Munich, Haywire) and director (Babylon A.D., Gothika) following the critical success of La Haine, Mathieu Kassovitz returns to France as the director of Rebellion, a provocative and highly effective thriller that trades on his dual history as provocative auteur and flashy studio hack. The film is based on a bloody 1988 incident that occurred in the French territory of New Caledonia; more specifically, Ouvéa Island, a deceptively beautiful tropical landscape that offers such Apocalypse Now-like imagery as helicopters against an orange Pacific sky.

Kassovitz also stars as Captain Legorjus of the Gendarmerie (military police), a skilled negotiator who is called in when indigenous Kanak separatists attack and take French soldiers hostage in an uprising. Legorjus is almost too compassionate for the job, butting heads with the more truculent soldiers who think of the natives as savages. While it's filmed from a French viewpoint, one gets a sense through the captain's open-mindedness that things are more turbulent than his countrymen pretend.

Well-paced and commendably tense, Rebellion unfolds as a commando flick with a ticking clock (there are only 10 days to find and negotiate with the hostage takers) but manages to navigate the political complexities—and absurdities—of the situation. A French general tries to take advantage of the event's unexpected "gift" by making a name for himself as a war hero; similarly, career-minded politicians are more concerned with elections than humanity, and a pompous French colonial minister rejects proposals while eating his luxurious breakfast. "Words always take longer than weapons," the negotiator reminds the minister, but words ultimately end up as deadly as harsh truths are revealed in what it means to be a "good soldier." The separatists aren't especially interested in talking; the rebel leader tells Legorjus that without the nickel in the mountains, the French wouldn't know they exist.

Rebellion runs a bit longer than necessary, but it's easy to appreciate Kassovitz's patience in letting details gradually unfold. Working with cinematographer Marc Koninckx, the film stunningly captures the exotic landscape—not just the jungle canopy but the rocky, volcanic terrain; an otherworldly maze of caves, craters, hiding places. While it's not peak-era Costa-Gavras, it's still mighty compelling material—and if you're not riveted by the tragic finale, tell it to the French government.

Manuel von Stürler's beautifully conceived Winter Nomads follows a shepherd and his young female apprentice as they trek across a snowy Switzerland. The journey is called "transhumance," a centuries-old and increasingly rare method of feeding sheep naturally in grassy areas. Von Stürler confidently shoots in a vérité style: there is no narration to explain who these shepherds are, their personalities and backstories trickling out along the journey, with only the occasional mingling of Olivia Pedroli's gentle guitar score to remind us there's a director behind it all.

It's hardly a Disney movie, but the exquisite milieu, adorable canines, comical sheep and donkeys make for a family-suitable nature travelogue. The narrative tension comes from man's relationship to beasts, or a man and his naïve, stubborn apprentice as she learns the surprisingly complicated ropes. They sometimes rely on the kindness of strangers (one nearly resident gifts them slices of leftover pizza), though not everyone is so neighborly about their route, and not all lambs are lucky enough to simply be used for sweaters.

Though reminiscent of the recent, Montana-set documentary Sweetgrass—also a vérité portrait of shepherds—von Stürler's film is more satisfying. One especially sweet scene features master and pupil celebrating Christmas, eating cake at their sodden camp as distant church bells ring out midnight mass. Winter Nomads is meditative, but never dull.

]]> 8244@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Craig Phillips

[The 55th San Francisco International Film Festival continues through May 3.]

The distinctly deadpan feature debut of Lebanese filmmaker Rania Attieh and her American co-director Daniel Garcia, OK, Enough, Goodbye is a warm but not overly sentimental, low-key character comedy. Like the Middle Eastern answer to Azazel Jacobs' Momma's Man, the film concerns a 40-year-old schlub (Daniel Arzrouni) who still lives at home in Tripoli—a seaport city with a rich history dating back to the 14th century, which has since fallen on hard economic times.

The locale has an air of sadness about it; not just war-torn malaise but a feeling for things lost between generations, palpably seeping into this household as a mother regrets that her son is such a loser. She speaks of wedding ceremonies and gowns she used to make, while her sociophobic son can't get a date with anyone other than a prostitute. The unnamed protagonist works in a bakery and doesn't otherwise get out much. When his mother takes off unexpectedly, leaving him on his own, the story becomes about one man's searching—first for his ma, then for himself. It's hard to blame anyone's downbeat demeanor in a decaying, depressing environment, but this sourpuss only becomes more irritable after he's "abandoned." To the directors' credit, the film doesn't deride him but also isn't afraid to mine his neuroses for comedy.

Continued reading SFIFF 2012: Critic's Notebook...

]]> Festival Review 2012-05-01T12:20:17-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008242.html by Steve Dollar

I don't care what you say; the cinema is richer because Harmony Korine exists within it. Hopes for The Fourth Dimension were calibrated, nonetheless. The only advance word on the new film, a three-director omnibus with vaguely Dogme '95 overtones, was that it starred Val Kilmer "as Val Kilmer," playing a motivational speaker, who rides a kid-sized bicycle and dazzles the faithful at Southern indoor skate arenas. I had penciled it in as part of the Tribeca Film Festival's freakshow trilogy, which included the stunt-casted Elmore Leonard caper Freaky Deaky (Andy Dick and Crispin Glover as playboy brothers) and Francophrenia (James Franco as "James Franco," playing a soap-opera character named Franco). It's much better than that.

Kilmer's episode, "The Lotus Community Workshop," opens the show, lensed by Korine in an extreme panoramic aspect ratio that seemed to highlight the flotsam-jetsam aspects of the director's beloved underclass milieu. Kilmer, who these days might be called "Fat Val Kilmer," rallies an adoring circle of devotees with a nearly incoherent rush of free-association and ecstatic positivity ("Cotton candy!" "Velvet Killed Elvis!" "Vibe jack!"), each phrase peppered with kooky sound effects supplied by the roller rink's DJs.

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The banter is so bizarre, and Kilmer so committed, that you can pretty much sit there hypnotized, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Only it doesn't. The story cuts back and forth with the rest of Kilmer's evening. He meets his girlfriend (Rachel Korine, in wigger hair braids) and they rent a video game called "Kill Freak," encountering a pair of shirtless, older men on the way home—an occasion for Kilmer to share more of his philosophy. Interstitial title sequences fill in some blanks: Each episode is meant to follow a set of rules ("The hero must tell bad jokes... but they're good"), organized either to foster absurdity or thematic flow. Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko takes the second slot, telling the story of Grigory Mikhailovich (Igor Sergeev) and his mission: to travel through time using his invention, the "Chronoscope." The action unfolds in one of those quintessentially desolate Soviet apartment buildings, a 4th dimension all its own, a quality further emphasized by the actor's resemblance to a Tarkovsky character. In the end, Mikhailovich succeeds in his quest, but his jerry-rigged video screen only reveals things at obscure angles. His chronoscope is a bust. But in his failure, he finally melts enough to connect with a sexy neighbor (Darya Ekamasova) and together they fulfill one of Korine's mandates: they dance.

At the end of the third segment, a viewer in the row behind me complained, "Just what we need, a Polish hipster apocalypse." Truth! The closing "Fawns," from Polish director Jan Kwiecinski, is the best of the trio. A quartet of young punks, with an apparent thing for communal phlebotomy, wander a depopulated town raiding fridges and randomly trash humping, the camera peeping from many odd perspectives. Soon enough, it's revealed that some kind of natural disaster is on the horizon, and these overgrown children—three boys and a girl—continue to play until it's almost too late, a sense of dread gradually draining their ebullience as one of them goes missing and their afternoon takes a couple of unexpected twists leading to a climactic revelation. Kwiecinski's eye is improvisatory and alive with color, and shares a sense of the mordant magic in everyday life that most of us might associate with Kieslowski, and throughout this anthology is illuminated in balloon hues (Cotton candy!).

BEST COEN BROTHERS KNOCK-OFF: The Norwegian Jackpot (Arme Riddere). The next hot literary-to-screen phenomenon about to break out of Scandinavia is crime novelist Jo Nesbø (who also penned the novel adapted for the current, and highly recommended, Headhunters). He came up with the story behind this raucous (and absurdly violent) caper about four losers—employees at an artificial Christmas tree factory—who miraculously win a bundle of kroner betting in a soccer pool. That's the worst kind of luck for Oscar Svendson (Kyrre Hellum), who has to explain to the cops why he's the quartet's only survivor after he crawls alive out of a strip-club massacre. The flashback-driven plot is frantic and ridiculous, littered with corpses hidden in tanning beds, splattered brains and an unusually handy pig farm.

BEST SUPPORTING GIRAFFE: Postcards from the Zoo (Kebun Binatang). The director's name is Edwin. Just Edwin. And he's equally concise about matters of dialogue and plot. This charming and hypnotic Indonesian film was one of the more visionary and unique Tribeca selections. It's a ‪ curious consideration of Jakarta's nearly 150-year-old Ragunan Zoo. Though it stars only a few of its 270 species of most endangered animals, many of them are human: in this fictional scenario, the zoo also hosts a colorful community of the homeless, who have turned the property into their own imaginary theme park, conducting tours and entertaining the visitors. Lana (Ladya Cheryl), a child of the zoo, grows up and has to leave this improvised Eden for the urban jungle—assisted by a cowboy-magician whose purposes remain vague. Blatantly obvious statements about natural beauty and the loss of innocence come into play, although given the film's‬ ‪ spare, almost wordless construction, it's hard to say if they are meant to be statements at all. Lana's ‬ beatific aura abides, lending the film a grace that rises above the elliptical narrative.‬

‪BEST BIRTHDAY PARTY MELTDOWN: The American Caroline and Jackie had this prize locked until Certain People came along. The Swedish ensemble comedy, set on the island that Ingmar Bergman called home, is a deconstruction of pretentious, entitled bohemians who visit an elysian country estate to celebrate the birthday of the lissome Katinka (Mia Mountain). But there's an insane amount of tension about to crack the self-satisfied facade, which is doomed the second the host's prodigal (and drunk and freeloading) twin brother shows up. He's brought along a firecracker named Linda (Yohanna Idha), a playful sexpot whose combination of sexual charisma and lack of sophistication makes her a catalyst that exposes everyone's lies and desires. Levan Akin's direction of a colorful cast emphasizes pregnant pauses and dart-like glances, leaving an ample amount of breathing room—space that the audience can color in with its own interpretations of characters who are all an awful lot like certain people we know.‬

THE ‪DUDS: Elles, As Luck Would Have It, Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal.‬

]]> 8242@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

I don't care what you say; the cinema is richer because Harmony Korine exists within it. Hopes for The Fourth Dimension were calibrated, nonetheless. The only advance word on the new film, a three-director omnibus with vaguely Dogme '95 overtones, was that it starred Val Kilmer "as Val Kilmer," playing a motivational speaker, who rides a kid-sized bicycle and dazzles the faithful at Southern indoor skate arenas. I had penciled it in as part of the Tribeca Film Festival's freakshow trilogy, which included the stunt-casted Elmore Leonard caper Freaky Deaky (Andy Dick and Crispin Glover as playboy brothers) and Francophrenia (James Franco as "James Franco," playing a soap-opera character named Franco). It's much better than that.

Kilmer's episode, "The Lotus Community Workshop," opens the show, lensed by Korine in an extreme panoramic aspect ratio that seemed to highlight the flotsam-jetsam aspects of the director's beloved underclass milieu. Kilmer, who these days might be called "Fat Val Kilmer," rallies an adoring circle of devotees with a nearly incoherent rush of free-association and ecstatic positivity ("Cotton candy!" "Velvet Killed Elvis!" "Vibe jack!"), each phrase peppered with kooky sound effects supplied by the roller rink's DJs.

Continued reading TRIBECA 2012: Critic's Notebook #2...

]]> Festival Review 2012-04-29T14:01:52-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008241.html by Nick Schager

[This week's pick is inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe-themed horror-mystery The Raven.]

Not to be nitpicky, but it would have benefited Web of the Spider if it had something—anything—to do with a spider. Or, for that matter, a spider's web. It's likely that director Antonio Margheriti intended his title to refer to the sinister trap set in his story by a castle proprietor for an American journalist, but that's hardly a reasonable reason for bestowing this 1971 film with its chosen moniker, especially given that it's a remake of Margheriti's own aptly-dubbed (and superior) 1964 Castle of Blood. Nonetheless, this Italian horror throwaway's problems aren't relegated to name alone, as the saga of a haunted abode and its spooky inhabitants is defined by lame-brained incompetence, a fate made all the more frustrating by the fact that it has the inspired idea to cast the incomparable Klaus Kinski as Edgar Allan Poe. Kinski opens the film flailing about a tomb with a torch in hand, lurching and spinning about with frantic, sweaty drunkenness, and smashing open a coffin before bellowing a hilarious "Noooooo!" Cut to a pub, where Kinski's Poe is regaling the patrons with one of his macabre tales, though what he truly proves interested in is Yankee reporter Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), whose disbelief in the supernatural—spurred by Poe claiming his stories are all reality-based—is soon challenged by Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman).

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Blackwood owns a nearby castle that he claims is haunted, and bets Alan ten pounds that he can't survive a night alone in the place. Alan gladly accepts this offer, yet it's completely baffling why Blackwood suggests it in the first place, since it happens to be the one night of the year when the castle's ghouls materialize and attempt to continue their evil existences by feeding off of human blood. In other words, Blackwood gives his demonic houseguests an opportunity (through Alan) to prolong their afterlives—something he shouldn't want to do—over a ten-pound wager, a deal that makes as much sense as director Margheriti's relentless close-ups, which are so numerous that they thrust the material into a realm of numbing ugliness. That Margheriti also shakes his camera about while focusing on his players' eyes, necks, and foreheads makes Web of the Spider even goofier. Still, it's the action proper that's the real problem, because there's no real action to speak of, given the film's fondness for sequences in which Alan wanders about the musty castle bumping into things, hearing strange noises, and then delivering one laughably extreme overreaction after another.

After much roaming around, playing a piano, and staring at some portraits, Alan discovers that one of the wall's paintings is in fact alive—and not just alive, but a buxom hottie to boot. Elisabeth Blackwood (Michèle Mercier) seduces Alan in the blink of an eye, and after a quick drink of whiskey (Elisabeth: "I hope you like it." Alan: "Yes, I do. It's excellent") and subsequent sex, they fall madly in love, despite the intrusions of Elisabeth's nemesis, equally buxom beauty Julia (Karin Field). Alas, Alan and Elisabeth's amour is complicated by the fact that she's dead—a situation made more perplexing to Alan once Elisabeth disappears and Dr. Carmus (Peter Carsten) appears to explain (via a decapitated snake experiment) that, when people are killed in a moment of intense emotion, their survival-instinct-spirit lives on. Or something to that effect. Trying to make heads or tails of Web of the Spider is pointless, since there's no rhyme or reason to its plotting or transitions, especially once the story segues into its torturous A Christmas Carol-style middle section in which Dr. Carmus shows Alan how each of the castle's undead residents perished.

Those fatalities are uniformly mundane, and preceded by all sorts of romantic entanglements that make no difference to the ultimate fate of Alan, who watches these scenarios with a look of astounded horror unwarranted by the nonsense on display. It's eventually suggested—by a few random neck bites—that the castle's ghouls are actually vampires, a notion furthered by their final cries to a cornered Alan that "Blood is life!" Alan gets out of this predicament and tries to drag Elisabeth into the daylight, leading to Margheriti's sole beautiful image, of Elisabeth twirling in slow-motion and vanishing before she hits the ground. As befitting such a disastrous endeavor, however, that sight is immediately followed by the film's most inane moment, in which Alan responds to Elisabeth's disappearance by clumsily stumbling into branches and around grave markers before collapsing on the ground in slow motion that highlights his raging eyes and screaming mouth. After a twist of fate thwarts Alan's attempt at escape, Poe arrives on the scene and laments that no one will believe this story to be true—the one moment in Web of the Spider that's utterly convincing.

]]> 8241@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Nick Schager

[This week's pick is inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe-themed horror-mystery The Raven.]

Not to be nitpicky, but it would have benefited Web of the Spider if it had something—anything—to do with a spider. Or, for that matter, a spider's web. It's likely that director Antonio Margheriti intended his title to refer to the sinister trap set in his story by a castle proprietor for an American journalist, but that's hardly a reasonable reason for bestowing this 1971 film with its chosen moniker, especially given that it's a remake of Margheriti's own aptly-dubbed (and superior) 1964 Castle of Blood. Nonetheless, this Italian horror throwaway's problems aren't relegated to name alone, as the saga of a haunted abode and its spooky inhabitants is defined by lame-brained incompetence, a fate made all the more frustrating by the fact that it has the inspired idea to cast the incomparable Klaus Kinski as Edgar Allan Poe. Kinski opens the film flailing about a tomb with a torch in hand, lurching and spinning about with frantic, sweaty drunkenness, and smashing open a coffin before bellowing a hilarious "Noooooo!" Cut to a pub, where Kinski's Poe is regaling the patrons with one of his macabre tales, though what he truly proves interested in is Yankee reporter Alan Foster (Anthony Franciosa), whose disbelief in the supernatural—spurred by Poe claiming his stories are all reality-based—is soon challenged by Lord Blackwood (Enrico Osterman).

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Web of the Spider (1971)...

]]> Retro Active 2012-04-26T14:39:10-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008240.html by Vadim Rizov

A minor Richard Linklater film is better than no Linklater at all. Bernie reteams Austin, Texas' finest with Jack Black eight years after their major-studio breakthrough School of Rock. Linklater's talent for normalizing potentially over-the-top material is very well-suited for mainstream fare; the key shot of School of Rock comes when Black yields to the kids in his class—all bugging him to perform for them—and launches into impassioned song. A hack would've cut constantly between Black's mugging and the students' goggle-eyed reactions, but Linklater reduces this scene to one simple shot. Black sings as the camera slowly tracks back down the classroom aisle, recording his performance without cueing the audience how to respond.

Rock was a hit, but Linklater's 2006 Hollywood follow-up, a remake of The Bad News Bears, was a bust. Since then, financing for the kind of modest films the director specializes in has dried up, and Linklater's talked with wistful frustration in interviews about leaving Texas for a second European career. His first narrative feature since 2008's Me and Orson Welles, Bernie reconstructs the true story of Bernie Tiede (played here by Black), a Carthage, Texas (population: 6,700) funeral home employee with a reputation for exceptional kindness. One widow who benefited from his attention was Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), who'd alienated everyone in Carthage, TX with rudeness and stinginess. After her husband died, Bernie gave her his coat at the funeral and showed up a few days later to check how she was doing. He became her nearly-live-in companion, until her demands became too much and he killed her.

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The story is juicy, but the film proves lethargic when focusing on Bernie and Marjorie's ill-fated relationship. Black and MacLaine are aces together, but when Bernie begins to show remorse (tears, sad music), the emotional impact simply isn't there. The framing device is what holds the story together, as local gossips weigh in via staged talking heads. Even if the title cards are a little too cute ("What you're fixin' to see is a true story"), said interview footage is so utterly convincing that it's hard to believe it isn't documentary footage. It's a peanut gallery of actual actors, albeit many of them in-the-know Texas residents providing character testimony for the accused by noting "he could remember your son was at Texas and your daughter was at A&M."

These kinds of trivialities loom large in small-town life. Sarah Palin did everyone a favor when she proclaimed there to be a "Real America," giving a label to semi-rural communities in which the ultimate proof of moral fiber is politeness to one's neighbors. The dark joke of the film is that Carthage rallied behind Tiede, even though his guilt was unquestionable, simply because Nugent was a notoriously unkind lady. Bernie is both a love letter to and repudiation of the kind of city that's colorful but reprehensibly judgmental in equal measure.

The dramatic segments are comparatively bloodless alongside all the idiomatic chatter. Bridging the two modes is Matthew McConaughey as district attorney Danny Buck Davidson, the only character who's both an interviewee and a narrative player. He nearly destroys everything by appearing to be mugging his way through an entirely different movie, possibly one directed by Christopher Guest. (For sheer authenticity, he's shamed by his real-life mother Kay as one of Carthage's cattier, cougar-like residents.)

Linklater has tidied up the quotes from the copious documentation on the case, including the Texas Monthly article by co-writer Skip Hollingsworth that served as the film's basis, in which one of Carthage's old biddies is cited as asking her delivery man (in 1998!), "Shall I introduce you as Negro, black or colored?" Many locals regarded Tiede as having atoned for his homosexuality by virtue of good community deeds. "That dog don't hunt," one notes during the film, while another says (straight out of Hollingsworth's article) that he was "light in the loafers." For whatever reason—and you could guess—the Carthage police department deemed it a necessary part of their investigation to find tapes of Tiede having sex with other men (although at least some of these tapes were German porn he financed, a detail left out of the film). At one point, Bernie nearly confesses his crime during lunch, asking a woman if it's possible for someone who's seemingly good to be a completely different person from how they're perceived. She instantly assures him no one cares what goes on in his bedroom—but, of course, all of Carthage actually does.

At least two of Nugent's relatives have recently written articles recalling exactly how nasty Nugent was. With his typical aversion towards strong villains, Linklater leaves out some of the more pungent details, but otherwise hews remarkably close to recorded dialogue and events. This must be one of the most faithful true-crime movies ever made, putting the lie to the director's bullet-point sales description of this being an "east Texas Fargo." Verisimilitude, in and of itself, isn't necessarily laudable, but as an exercise in seeing how close imaginative reconstruction can be to journalism, Bernie's ambitions are surprisingly as big as Tiede's personality.

]]> 8240@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

A minor Richard Linklater film is better than no Linklater at all. Bernie reteams Austin, Texas' finest with Jack Black eight years after their major-studio breakthrough School of Rock. Linklater's talent for normalizing potentially over-the-top material is very well-suited for mainstream fare; the key shot of School of Rock comes when Black yields to the kids in his class—all bugging him to perform for them—and launches into impassioned song. A hack would've cut constantly between Black's mugging and the students' goggle-eyed reactions, but Linklater reduces this scene to one simple shot. Black sings as the camera slowly tracks back down the classroom aisle, recording his performance without cueing the audience how to respond.

Rock was a hit, but Linklater's 2006 Hollywood follow-up, a remake of The Bad News Bears, was a bust. Since then, financing for the kind of modest films the director specializes in has dried up, and Linklater's talked with wistful frustration in interviews about leaving Texas for a second European career. His first narrative feature since 2008's Me and Orson Welles, Bernie reconstructs the true story of Bernie Tiede (played here by Black), a Carthage, Texas (population: 6,700) funeral home employee with a reputation for exceptional kindness. One widow who benefited from his attention was Marjorie Nugent (Shirley MacLaine), who'd alienated everyone in Carthage, TX with rudeness and stinginess. After her husband died, Bernie gave her his coat at the funeral and showed up a few days later to check how she was doing. He became her nearly-live-in companion, until her demands became too much and he killed her.

Continued reading FILM OF THE WEEK: Bernie...

]]> Film of the Week 2012-04-24T10:41:00-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008239.html by Steve Dollar

The end of the world was just the beginning of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Serious consideration of apocalyptic themes have permeated all kinds of recent cinema, perhaps gearing up in a timely fashion for the Mayan Shakedown forecast for 2012, so it was no surprise to note the opening weekend's selection of First Winter—which considers the events that immediately follow An Event. What surprised, however, was the film. It's a low-budget ensemble drama made by a group of young Williamsburg denizens—yoga hipsters, if you will—whose retreat at a remote farm upstate suddenly feels a whole lot more isolated when the power dies and a transistor radio picks up disturbing, cryptic static out of New York City.

Echoes of 9/11 can't entirely be ignored, which makes this a resonant selection for Tribeca, a festival that came into existence because Robert De Niro's neighborhood became the site of its own apocalypse. But if anything, this strikingly accomplished debut by writer-director Ben Dickinson represents something of a reboot for the fest, which opened its 11th annual edition last Wednesday. A new team of programming honchos, including Geoff Gilmore (a former longtime chief at Sundance) and Frederic Boyer (formerly in charge of the Director's Fortnight at Cannes), appears to have made an impact. One promising development, in particular, has been an embrace of "no-budge"—the kind of post-mumblecore projects that Sundance and South by Southwest take pride in discovering.

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As such, First Winter looks exemplary, in specific ways, of how that scene (or whatever you want to call it) is shifting. Though still grounded in the intimate and volatile dynamics of relationships in a small, incestuous circle of friends, the plot's sexual and psychological games—It's a polyamorous bunch whose vegan-ish ethics have nothing to do with carnal knowledge—are framed against a minimalist tableau, with sparse dialogue and an immersion with the natural landscape. The immediate absurdity of the shorthand premise (just what we need, another piece of entertainment detailing the privileged pretensions of Brooklyn's most over-mediated demographic) gives way into a complicated character study and a not-necessarily unfunny social critique. The beardos don't even know how to properly shoot a rifle. The tilt into genre is key, raising life or death stakes that add ballast to the narrative, and marks an ongoing trend that extends from creepy plasma-splashed "mumblegore" of the omnibus V/H/S to lyrical romantic noir of Amy Seimetz's Sun Don't Shine. Like the latter film, First Winter features Kate Lyn Sheil (in a smaller, but no less vocal, performance) and beautiful Super 16mm cinematography. It also aspires to something visionary, evolving over the course of 91 minutes into a Tarkovsky-themed meditation whose ambiguities linger.

The festival, which runs through April 29, has more to offer on its indie slate. SXSW everyman Alex Karpovsky makes his Tribeca debut with a shocking turn in Rubberneck. The tightly wound suspense tale of a workplace obsession gone wrong finds the former stand-up comic playing a Boston research scientist whose emotional well-being has been stunted by a family secret. Because of his endless string of performances in indie comedies, I naively assumed that Karpovsky wrote and directed Rubberneck as some sort of deeply twisted humor of excruciation. And I can tell you, that attitude made the first half of the film amazingly weird to watch. Once the plot pivots, though, there will be no confusion. (And for those who prefer the "early, funny" Karpovsky, there's Supporting Characters, a soft-hearted bromantic roundelay about indie film editors and their female troubles).

And, of course, there is indie film that comes with no mumblecore attached. Visually polished (if emotionally raw), Adam Christian Clark's Caroline and Jackie takes a dysfunctional sibling premise and flips the script a couple of times, using that old standby—the dinner party—as the stage for a long, long night of crazy. The ensemble piece about twisted sisters (one twisting, the other the twistee), familial bonds that abide no matter how frayed they appear, and the often transparent cruelty lurking behind good intentions could be thought of as a crisp, latter-day riff on Persona, set amid a self-satisfied Los Feliz tableau. Marguerite Moreau (Caroline) and Bitsy Tulloch (Jackie) play their yin/yang roles with a gleaming intensity as the story veers increasingly stranger and darker, a suspense flick lurking in the shadows of an ensemble comedy.

]]> 8239@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

The end of the world was just the beginning of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. Serious consideration of apocalyptic themes have permeated all kinds of recent cinema, perhaps gearing up in a timely fashion for the Mayan Shakedown forecast for 2012, so it was no surprise to note the opening weekend's selection of First Winter—which considers the events that immediately follow An Event. What surprised, however, was the film. It's a low-budget ensemble drama made by a group of young Williamsburg denizens—yoga hipsters, if you will—whose retreat at a remote farm upstate suddenly feels a whole lot more isolated when the power dies and a transistor radio picks up disturbing, cryptic static out of New York City.

Echoes of 9/11 can't entirely be ignored, which makes this a resonant selection for Tribeca, a festival that came into existence because Robert De Niro's neighborhood became the site of its own apocalypse. But if anything, this strikingly accomplished debut by writer-director Ben Dickinson represents something of a reboot for the fest, which opened its 11th annual edition last Wednesday. A new team of programming honchos, including Geoff Gilmore (a former longtime chief at Sundance) and Frederic Boyer (formerly in charge of the Director's Fortnight at Cannes), appears to have made an impact. One promising development, in particular, has been an embrace of "no-budge"—the kind of post-mumblecore projects that Sundance and South by Southwest take pride in discovering.

Continued reading TRIBECA 2012: Critic's Notebook #1...

]]> Festival Review 2012-04-22T19:10:26-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008238.html by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the female boarding-school chiller The Moth Diaries.]

Dario Argento's fascination with sight takes sexually anxious form in Phenomena, the Italian giallo maestro's surreal 1985 saga of boarding school maturation. That carnal awakening isn't overt in Argento's film, which is nominally about a serial killer stalking young females in a remote Swiss village, a spree that coincides with the arrival of Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), the daughter of a famous hunky movie star, at the imposing Richard Wagner Academy for Girls. On her maiden drive from the airport, Jennifer protects a bee from being swatted by hysterical Frau Brückner (Argento regular Daria Nicolodi), an act that's soon explained by the fact that Jennifer shares a telepathic bond with insects, thus making her a prime candidate to befriend local entomologist Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance). McGregor is fascinated by Jennifer's relationship with bugs, which—as when she causes one to emit its mating call out of season—boasts a quasi-sexual nature that's further heightened by Jennifer's use of this human-insect connection to help find the area's psycho. Jennifer comes into direct contact with that lunatic during a bout of sleepwalking (a habit attributed by school staffers to "schizophrenia") that leads her to a ledge where, in a moment of shocking brutality, she witnesses a young girl stabbed through the mouth with a blade.

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That weapon's phallic nature speaks to Phenomena's underlying portrait of youthful sex as potentially dangerous, a notion first suggested in the sterling opening sequence, in which a young Danish tourist (Argento's real-life daughter Fiore) is abandoned by her classmates and adult chaperones and, venturing into the woods, stumbles upon a house where a faceless maniac breaks free from chained captivity, strangles her, stabs her with a protruding knife (more phallic imagery), and then decapitates her and tosses her head into a raging waterfall. Sexualized violence against young women who've been deserted by men is a constant in Argento's film, be it Jennifer's roommate Sophie (Federica Mastroianni), who's been given baby food to eat by her absentee parents and is felled by the fiend after her paramour ditches her post-make-out, or Jennifer herself, incapable of reaching her father or his agent by phone and hunted by a killer while she attempts to understand her sensual rapport with buzzing flies and slithering maggots. Argento subtly enhances these undercurrents through camerawork that plunges into darkness and pans through spaces with sinister voluptuousness, creating a mood of dreamy menace that's rooted in the notion that female puberty is a process that one must experience alone, and that's fraught with lethal peril.

Argento's fondness for heavy metal, here highlighted by cuts from Iron Maiden, Motörhead, and The Goblins, further pushes the material into sex-and-death-fantasy territory, as well as gives it a persistent groove of electric malevolence. Argento regularly toys with expectations, beginning with the scene immediately following his intro murder that finds Professor McGregor admonishing his pet chimpanzee Inga—who's initially spied trying to get back inside their house—for playing with a knife, thereby suggesting that the chimp is the villain in question. It's one of Phenomena's many red herrings, as Argento's tale doggedly posits non-human creatures as forces of good and, more mysteriously, as in tune with pubescent children's development into adults. That association isn't clearly spelled out by the film but, rather, suggested in beguilingly oblique ways, and is given a bizarre semi-spiritual element by a haunting sequence in which Jennifer, mocked by her ice-queen headmistress and then taunted by bitchy classmates for her alleged link with insects, tells her tormentors "I love you all" with turn-the-other-cheek benevolence as swarms of flies amass outside nearby windows.

Last act revelations about the serial killer's identity layer the action with pseudo-Freudian shadings that further complicate the overarching stew of parent-child sexual tensions. However, it's via a hideously deformed little boy who covers mirrors in order to not see his hideous reflection that Phenomena fully taps into Argento's fascination with the vital act of seeing (and not seeing). That familiar preoccupation is also conveyed through the director's trademark employment of POV shots, not just for his murderer but for both Jennifer and her insect pals, whose perspective is visualized through split-screen imagery. While the director isn't able to meld his story's various elements into a completely lucid whole, that disarray contributes to the ominous sense of a world slightly unmoored from reason and sanity. It's an atmosphere that carries the film over its rougher spots, and culminates in a magnificently deranged climactic battle between Jennifer and a mommy dearest (with adult men relegated to powerless witnesses) involving a vat of human sludge and skeletons, a boat skirmish between a mutated tyke-monster and angry flies, a fiery lake baptism that finds Jennifer emerging from the water in a white gown, and a final showdown which argues that, even more than ladybugs or larvae, a preyed-upon girl's best friend is, ultimately, a chimpanzee with a straight razor.

]]> 8238@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Nick Schager

[This week's "Retro Active" pick is inspired by the female boarding-school chiller The Moth Diaries.]

Dario Argento's fascination with sight takes sexually anxious form in Phenomena, the Italian giallo maestro's surreal 1985 saga of boarding school maturation. That carnal awakening isn't overt in Argento's film, which is nominally about a serial killer stalking young females in a remote Swiss village, a spree that coincides with the arrival of Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), the daughter of a famous hunky movie star, at the imposing Richard Wagner Academy for Girls. On her maiden drive from the airport, Jennifer protects a bee from being swatted by hysterical Frau Brückner (Argento regular Daria Nicolodi), an act that's soon explained by the fact that Jennifer shares a telepathic bond with insects, thus making her a prime candidate to befriend local entomologist Professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasance). McGregor is fascinated by Jennifer's relationship with bugs, which—as when she causes one to emit its mating call out of season—boasts a quasi-sexual nature that's further heightened by Jennifer's use of this human-insect connection to help find the area's psycho. Jennifer comes into direct contact with that lunatic during a bout of sleepwalking (a habit attributed by school staffers to "schizophrenia") that leads her to a ledge where, in a moment of shocking brutality, she witnesses a young girl stabbed through the mouth with a blade.

Continued reading RETRO ACTIVE: Phenomena (1985)...

]]> Retro Active 2012-04-20T08:56:46-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008237.html by Vadim Rizov

2005's A Tale of Cinema inaugurated the second phase of Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's career (Hong 2.0), introducing basic components returned to and toyed with in every subsequent film: drunken directors who swear to change their lives before lapsing a scene later, women alternately being idealized/treated badly but granted final telling-off authority, events repeating themselves with no explanation, goofily inelegant zoom shots. Oki's Movie (screening in NYC through April 22nd) is an excellent introduction for novices, distilling and compacting the familiar elements of Hong's last seven years into 80 minutes, his shortest-ever feature by eight minutes.

The first of four parts is a short film by Jingu (Lee Sunkyun)—still a college student, but already filming predictive nightmares of his onscreen alter-ego being accosted at a post-screening Q&A by the angry friend of a woman he callously broke up with. The last segment is directed by his crush/fellow student Oki (Jung Yumi). Jingu longs for Oki—at inebriated length, with melodramatic, near Wayne's World "I'm not worthy" outbursts—but never realizes he's involved in a love triangle with his rival film professor/mentor Professor Song (Moon Sungkeun).

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Oki's Movie is relatively elegiac compared to the broad, buoyant near-farce of Hong's previous three films Night and Day, Like You Know It All and Hahaha—all taking place in spring or summer to Oki's Movie's winter. In her titular film within this film, Oki breaks two mountain hiking escapades—with Song on Dec. 31st, and with Jingu on New Year's—into lists of what both men remarked on or ignored, if they went to the bathroom, what they ate. Her willingness to recount events head-on (in a way neither man can) is bracing as Hong literally directs, as he never has before, from a woman's perspective.

In Hong's The Day He Arrives (opening this Friday in NYC), it's still winter in Seoul, but this time in black-and-white, low contrast and joylessly washed-out. Inactive director Seong-jun (Yu Jun-Sang) has come from the countryside to spend a few days in his former home base. He has modest plans designed to keep him out of trouble ("go sightseeing and buy some books"), but predictably a solitary meal in a restaurant turns into a drinking session with friendly film students. ("No one should drink alone.")

The group recognize Seong-jun, who doesn't want to talk about his professional career and reasons for inactivity, then invites them to join him at an awesome, undisclosed place a taxi ride away. When they get out at a fruit stand, Seong-jun stumblingly lights up; like dwarf acolytes, the students do the same in unison. "Stop copying me!" Seong-jun screams and runs away, giving himself too much credit: his followers are the same type of repetitively self-abusing drunk male, who don't need to study him to resemble him.

Recently, Hong has taken considerable care to frequently include the outdoor world and natural light, even within interior scenes, placing diners and drinkers near windows with a good view. In The Day He Arrives, every bar Seong-jun visits is framed (in tight close-ups) without any windows, shutting out sunshine's warmth. His daily street run-ins with an actress he hasn't seen in a while are refreshingly devoid of embarrassing, ill-timed sexual propositions—a Hong trademark. Seong-jun departs after both of this film's hook-ups, commanding both women to forget him, keep diaries and never text him, even on his birthday, for both their good. "I'm going to keep an eye on you," a flirtatious woman he doesn't hook up with says. "I'm going to watch how you change."

This remark seemingly triggers a slow but crippling realization: Seong-jun can't come into the city without every female encounter turning into another opportunity for sexual self-laceration. The unremarked-upon fact that every day he and his friends go the same places, in the same order, without remarking upon any similarities assumes a sinister, purgatorial aspect. In Oki's Movie, Jingu berates a woman who photographs him passed out on a bench. When Seong-jun is stopped by a woman's shy look, he grumblingly consents to pose. The last shot is a slow zoom in on Seong-jun's face, stuck in sheer spontaneous terror.

The color-drained interior chill of The Day He Arrives may mark a cautionary-tale conclusion to Hong 2.0, whose next film Another Country—with Isabelle Huppert, his first Western star, in three separate roles—may mark yet another leap. This may be the bleak end of a cycle, about a filmmaker abruptly plunging from vivid-anecdote terrain into the self-aware hell of a waking nightmare.

]]> 8237@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

2005's A Tale of Cinema inaugurated the second phase of Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo's career (Hong 2.0), introducing basic components returned to and toyed with in every subsequent film: drunken directors who swear to change their lives before lapsing a scene later, women alternately being idealized/treated badly but granted final telling-off authority, events repeating themselves with no explanation, goofily inelegant zoom shots. Oki's Movie (screening in NYC through April 22nd) is an excellent introduction for novices, distilling and compacting the familiar elements of Hong's last seven years into 80 minutes, his shortest-ever feature by eight minutes.

The first of four parts is a short film by Jingu (Lee Sunkyun)—still a college student, but already filming predictive nightmares of his onscreen alter-ego being accosted at a post-screening Q&A by the angry friend of a woman he callously broke up with. The last segment is directed by his crush/fellow student Oki (Jung Yumi). Jingu longs for Oki—at inebriated length, with melodramatic, near Wayne's World "I'm not worthy" outbursts—but never realizes he's involved in a love triangle with his rival film professor/mentor Professor Song (Moon Sungkeun).

Continued reading Hong Sang Two...

]]> Film of the Week 2012-04-17T14:23:04-08:00 http://daily.greencine.com/archives/008236.html by Steve Dollar

I remember the first time I visited the Mars Bar. It was 1997, and a friend dragged me there very late one night. It was the kind of East Village dive, just a block off the Bowery, that seemed like a hallucination: dank, dark, walls covered in graffiti and gonzo artwork, lots of cheap canned beer, a jukebox stuffed with Stooges, Motorhead and local scum-rock acts, and a clientele from... Mars. There were only three people in the place, besides us and the bartender, a young woman who looked exactly like the kind of neighborhood siren who you saw, naked, in an R. Kern photo collection: a dwarf, a blind man and a Native American. Was this a Tom Waits song? Somehow two of them got into a fight. And then someone was forcibly locked into the bathroom. More drinks were served, and eventually everyone was back at the bar, a thick haze of cigarette smoke (ah, the '90s!) the ideal ambience for the murder beat lurching out of the juke's tinny speakers.

"You've been in that bathroom?" Jonas Mekas asked me after I told him the story, in a tone one might use when debriefing a refugee from the abyss.

Now 89, the New York filmmaker and archivist speaks from experience. Mekas has spent a third of his life drinking at the Mars Bar. The dive at the corner of Second Avenue and First Street opened in the early 1980s, when Mekas was busy renovating the future site of his Anthology Film Archives, a block away.

"We came into existence together, so it was friendship," he said, chatting over Lithuanian beer and vodka shots at the Anyway Cafe, one of several East Village bars he frequents more often since Mars Bar closed last June (and was subsequently demolished). The demise of the bar, a refuge for the neighborhood's old-school bohemians, artists and rogues, prompted the filmmaker to edit more than 15 years of casual video footage into My Mars Bar Movie, which runs this weekend at Anthology.

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You polish off a lot of tequila shots in My Mars Bar Movie. It almost looks like a daily ritual. Was it?

It became traditional that when any of the visitors [to Anthology] left, a traditional drink was tequila. It became the tequila bar, because there was always somebody coming and leaving.

It's not like anyone was probably looking for the comprehensive Mars Bar documentary, but it's worth noting that this is, like so many of your films, a scrapbook of your own peculiar experiences. "My" Mars Bar.

It's not a documentary. It's like a diary. It doesn't try to cover all aspects of it. I have my camera and I always film, or rather tape. So it's very personal.

I noticed that there are lot of daytime scenes.

Ten years ago they decided to quit [replacing burned-out lights]. There was practically no light. You couldn't film anything [at night]. There was no other bar like that. Other bars try to bring themselves up to date, become a bit cleaner. They didn't care. I'm for a little bit of dirt. Every city needs some messy dirty place where you can go and lose yourself and leave some of your dirt there. Paris has. Hamburg has. New York does not have it anymore. This area had Mars Bar. Now it's gone. Now New York is cleaner but not for the better.

I visited the bar on a few unforgettable occasions myself. It was like a time machine, fueled by rotgut whiskey.

When I moved into Manhattan from Williamsburg in 1953 to Orchard Street, and had an apartment for $14.95 a month, I walked along the Bowery toward the Village and there were many, many bars a little bit like the Mars Bar. Lionel Rogosin made a documentary called On the Bowery, but he chose a little bit cleaner bar. I don't know where else you can find anything like that.

What did you like best about Mars Bar?

You felt very free. The drinks were cheap in price and very often cheap in quality. But you didn't care. It was very open. You always saw the same people, very devoted to the place. From South America, this guy Hamlet, who was always there. It made you feel a little bit like home. There was something like a family feeling.

How many filmmakers did you take there over the years?

Many. Many. Some are not known. Some are like Bela Tarr. Jim Jarmusch. One of the stills we sent to the press was me and Zoë Lund, of the Bad Lieutenant, and of course Abel Ferrara.

What did Bela Tarr make of it?

Usually, everybody found it a little bit exotic and not like anything else. Everybody liked it for that reason. It was still before gentrification, before civilization took over. Something left over from some dream of the past. Now something essential is gone. It's the end of an era. The customers are desperate where to go next.

Places like this often become romanticized. Anyone who drank there knew that It also could be scary.

Yes. There were fights, and stealing. You had to be very careful. But I have not seen any really bad fights there. Some arguments. Some voices. As I said, I have not spent so many late nights there.

Did anyone care that you were shooting them?

No. No one. We knew everybody. Even when that guys jumps on the bar and takes his pants down, he didn't care. He knew I was there with a camera.

Did you have any favorites?

In the early days there was this guy who did not talk. He cleaned the place. He was one of the characters. Everybody liked him and he was always there. But he couldn't talk. He was mute. But he could sort of sing. But I could not find the footage when we sang duets. There may be another edition.

]]> 8236@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

I remember the first time I visited the Mars Bar. It was 1997, and a friend dragged me there very late one night. It was the kind of East Village dive, just a block off the Bowery, that seemed like a hallucination: dank, dark, walls covered in graffiti and gonzo artwork, lots of cheap canned beer, a jukebox stuffed with Stooges, Motorhead and local scum-rock acts, and a clientele from... Mars. There were only three people in the place, besides us and the bartender, a young woman who looked exactly like the kind of neighborhood siren who you saw, naked, in an R. Kern photo collection: a dwarf, a blind man and a Native American. Was this a Tom Waits song? Somehow two of them got into a fight. And then someone was forcibly locked into the bathroom. More drinks were served, and eventually everyone was back at the bar, a thick haze of cigarette smoke (ah, the '90s!) the ideal ambience for the murder beat lurching out of the juke's tinny speakers.

"You've been in that bathroom?" Jonas Mekas asked me after I told him the story, in a tone one might use when debriefing a refugee from the abyss.

Now 89, the New York filmmaker and archivist speaks from experience. Mekas has spent a third of his life drinking at the Mars Bar. The dive at the corner of Second Avenue and First Street opened in the early 1980s, when Mekas was busy renovating the future site of his Anthology Film Archives, a block away.

"We came into existence together, so it was friendship," he said, chatting over Lithuanian beer and vodka shots at the Anyway Cafe, one of several East Village bars he frequents more often since Mars Bar closed last June (and was subsequently demolished). The demise of the bar, a refuge for the neighborhood's old-school bohemians, artists and rogues, prompted the filmmaker to edit more than 15 years of casual video footage into My Mars Bar Movie, which runs this weekend at Anthology.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Jonas Mekas...

]]> Interviews 2012-04-14T16:37:23-08:00