Last night I attended the opening night festivities and had a wonderful time. The opening night feature was Mike Mills' Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer (picture above). I had not been looking forward to seeing it, but now I adore it. It has a lovely combination of stylish, quirky dialogue, and a relaxed, sensual pace. It includes cancer and homosexuality as part of its plot, but the movie does not revolve around these issues; it concentrates on characters instead. It's something of an interior movie, very emotional more so than narratively logical, but it works, and it could be destined for the kind of success that The Kids Are All Right saw last year. I had seen it before at a press screening, and I was eager to see it again.
Also screening this week, we have Kelly Reichardt's Meek's Cutoff, a superior Western that may be my favorite festival film so far. It's both lyrical and realistic, reveling in details and balances, but with little regard for narrative structure, or for payoff. Michelle Williams stars as one of several travelers moving to California by wagon train in the 1840s; all of the traditional types -- including the heroic guide and the Indian scout -- are turned sideways. So far, it seems to be getting the appreciation it deserves, but it's going to be a hard sell for audiences that loved True Grit.
Miranda July returns to the festival for the first time since her much-loved Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) with her new film The Future. It's an equally quirky romance, equal parts comedy and drama and performance art. Sophie (July) and her boyfriend Jason (Hamish Linklater) agree to adopt a cat and they become overwhelmed with the long-term responsibility. So they decide to use their remaining weeks to just live life. Unfortunately, this leads Sophie into a sad, illicit fling with an older man (David Warshofsky). It's hardly realistic, however, and features a talking cat and a character stopping time and speaking with the moon. July seems to inspire both passionate followers and violent haters, but I fall somewhere in-between. I find her movies passively amusing, but not particularly deep or memorable.
The Troll Hunter, from Norway, is quite a bit like The Blair Witch Project crossed with Cloverfield; in other words, it's about a crew of young documentary filmmakers who venture into giant monster territory. They follow the title troll hunter whose job is to not only hunt and kill trolls, but also to keep their presence secret from the rest of humanity. It's fairly typical, but I liked it for the giant monster footage that rounds out the third act, and for the exhaustive details the movie conjures up to create a world of trolls. André Øvredal directs.
Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol's A Cat in Paris is an animated delight, a hand-drawn puff pastry that brings its title character into a web of deceit, revenge, robbery, and gangsters. It's a brief 74 minutes but moves well, and not at the breakneck pace of most of today's computer-animated movies. It uses physical locations well, including rooftops and hiding places, and it even manages some lovely quiet moments as well as some insanely funny ones.
Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is really so him. It makes perfect sense that if only one filmmaker in the world were to be asked to shoot inside a newly discovered cave containing 32,000 year-old drawings, it would be Herzog. He's the world's best explorer of the elusive relationship between man and nature, and his combination of reckless bravery and insatiable curiosity go hand in hand. This film is probably the first 3D movie, besides Coraline, that actually justifies its use of 3D. The historical importance of this find is beyond question, as is the existence of this film (so that the rest of the world can see for themselves). However, locked into such a rigid story, Herzog can't seem to go as far in his curious wanderings as he'd like. What he does find, though, is amazing; this film will make you ponder long into the night.
Miss Representation is directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who is the wife of Gavin Newsom, the ex-mayor of San Francisco and current Lieutenant Governor of California. (Gavin even appears in the movie.) But this is not a case of a politician's bored wife trying to assert her own identity. Miss Representation joins recent documentaries like Inside Job and the underrated I Am, which get to the core of what's wrong in America today. Newsom's film begins by talking about feminism, and how girls and young women have very little current information about to be a strong female, not judged by looks alone. But she digs deeper into issues like giant corporations running all of American media as a cold-blooded business, with absolutely no regard for content or quality. Media has a huge power over us, and we have the power not to let it do that. Interviewing many of today's strongest and most interesting women on camera, Miss Representation is exciting and empowering, yet simple and entertaining. It's a must-see.
The press materials for Jim Mickle's Stake Land reference author Richard Matheson, but only insofar as it includes a kind of cross between vampires and zombies, as Matheson employed for his great novel I Am Legend. Otherwise, Stake Land starts off as a kind of very serious, dreary version of Zombieland. A naive teen (Connor Paolo) joins up with a grizzled hardass called "Mister" (Nick Damici, who co-wrote the script), who teaches the youngster how to kill the ravenous beasties. They keep traveling north, hoping to run into some kind of haven, and pick up the usual batch of misfits (including Top Gun's Kelly McGillis) along the way. It's all fairly typical. What sets this movie apart, however, is the appearance of a bizarre religious cult that could be more dangerous than the monsters. If only it had gone farther....
As a genre film, Emily Lou's The Selling is a lot goofier and more fun. It begins with all the cliches of a typical haunted house movie, but refocuses it from the point of view of a hapless real estate agent named Richard Scarry (Gabriel Diani) who must try and unload the property. He bravely and hilariously puts up with the usual bleeding walls, locked doors, and other creepy activities while showing the house to potential buyers. Unfortunately, this haunting is not specifically attached to the house itself, and Richard finds himself in serious trouble. The film tends to run out of steam as the plot kicks in during the final third, but it's peppy and highly enjoyable for the majority of the time.
The festival is showing a brand-new print of what could be Federico Fellini's deepest work, La Dolce Vita (1960). Transitioning between early neo-realism and the phantasmagoria of his later films, this one tells the story of a tabloid reporter (Marcello Mastroianni), and his nocturnal wanderings around Rome. From one angle, his nightlife seems very sexy, especially his evening with a voluptuous movie star (Anita Ekberg), but from another, it seems lonely and empty. Fellini may have gone more autobiographical for his next film 8 1/2, but he was never more self-aware. (See my full review here.)
13 Assassins is the eighth movie I've seen by the prolific Japanese director Takashi Miike. Some years back, he was able to strike a good balance between the outrageous and the calculated, but now that balance seems to have been upset. His latest films just don't have the same energy; they don't know when to start or when to stop. This latest is basically a Dirty Dozen-style "assemble the team" film. The goal is a dangerous attack that will no doubt leave many team members dead. 13 Assassins takes a very long time to get started, and for a long while it doesn't even seem like it's going to have any action. Then we get to the climactic fight, in which the assassins attack an evil, sadistic warlord, and Miike heaps on shocking amounts of blood and gore, with hundreds of dead bodies. If the movie had been leaner and sillier, the climax would have worked, but it's too long and too serious, and the climax feels out of place.
Every year I complain about the Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film, but Incendies is a surprisingly good one. It's divided up into a modern-day mystery and a flashback to a time of unrest, and only the modern sequence works very well, but it works well enough to make up for the sludgy parts. In the present day, twins Jeanne (the lovely Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon (Maxim Gaudette) attend a reading of their mother's will. They are presented with some shocking news and a strange request. Jeanne is to locate and deliver an envelope to the brother she never knew she had, and Simon is to locate and deliver an envelope to the father he never knew he had. Often, and surprisingly, the unraveling of this mystery in the present day is far more powerful than the flashback images of the same events. (See my full review here.)
I have seen a lot of Iranian movies, and I have no idea how Maryam Keshavarz's Circumstance was ever financed, but I can guess that it was never shown to any Iranian officials for approval. It has some pretty radical images in it, adding up to a powerful experience. It centers on two beautiful young Iranian girls, Atafeh (Nikohl Boosheri), and Shireen (Sarah Kazemy); just the act of reveling in these women's beauty is revolutionary enough (their heads are shown uncovered), but the movie has the courage to make them lovers besides. Atafeh is the daughter of a powerful but liberal father and enjoys a certain amount of freedom. Unfortunately, her older brother Mehran (Reza Sixo Safai) returns home having become a radical fundamentalist, and proceeds to turn their lives upside down. Some non-traditional Iranian films have a tendency to overcook the drama, but Keshavarz keeps her images on a strong simmer, letting the powerful and pent-up emotions come through.
I'm not sure if there's a such thing as a Romanian New Wave, but we have seen five extraordinary pictures from there over the past five years. The new one is from director Cristi Puiu, his follow-up to The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Aurora is maddening, but also fascinating and dryly funny in the same way that Lazarescu was. Puiu himself stars as a normal-looking guy with an ex-wife and kids. He lives in a cluttered apartment, which is being redecorated. He spends a bit of time dealing with water leaking from an upstairs neighbor's bathroom. He runs errands, collecting bits and pieces of what will eventually make a gun. He shoots some people, and acts like a jerk for a while before things finish up with a whimper. The movie deliberately takes the crime genre and strips it down to a point that it loses all its romantic allure; it's a fascinating, mesmerizing commentary on our thirst for the sensational, but at the same time, why are we watching this, and why does it have to be 3 hours long?
Each year the festival has a live music event, and this year the English group Tindersticks turned up. For several years, the group has composed music for the films of Claire Denis, and this year they took the stage to play live music, accompanying clips from six Denis films: Nenette and Boni (1996), Trouble Every Day (2001), Friday Night (2002), The Intruder (2004), 35 Shots of Rum (2008), and White Material (2009). The songs ranged from sad and moody to cacophonous -- some of them contained lovely vocals -- and the clips seemed to focus mostly on sex and violence. 35 Shots of Rum came out the best, mainly because it had the most loving, meditative images. Overall, the show was mixed, but effective.
And, that, for me, I think, is the end of the festival for now. Hopefully this humble little guide will help point the way to some interesting films as they roll across the country in the months to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment