Second Week of the Boston Film Festival, Part II:
The Boys From County Clare -
¾
The Boys From County Clare is kind of a topsy-turvy movie, with the familiar character actors in the lead and the good-looking romantic pairing in supporting roles. If Miramax picks up the rights, you can almost guarantee a cover that focuses on Andrea Corr and Shaun Evans with Bernard Hill and Colm Meaney nowhere in sight.
Hill and Meaney play brothers, John Joe and Jim, who learned to play the fiddle at their father's knee and now, forty years later, have only their passion for traditional Irish Ceili music in common. John Joe (Hill) is a lifelong bachelor, still working their father's old farm in County Clare; his band has won the top prize at Ireland's largest folk festival two years running. He and Jim (Meaney) haven't talked for twenty-four years, during which time Jim has married five times while becoming a millionaire builder in Liverpool, but now he's put together a ceili band of his own and aims to win the trophy himself. John Joe's band includes Anne, a supremely talented (and beautiful) fiddler played by musician Andrea Corr; Jim's includes Teddy, a shy fellow played by newcomer Shaun Evans.
Anne's mother Maisie (Charlotte Bradley) is also in John Joe's band, and this fact should allow even folks who have never seen a movie before to figure out how this one goes; the family feud isn't just about who has possession of their father's fiddle. The conclusion, especially, is telegraphed early and often. Still, the screenplay works around its difficulty in deciding just what it wants to be (I nearly shamed myself by using the sniglet "dramedy" to describe this movie, but that's a rant for another day), and director John Irvin keeps the melodrama around Anne and Maisie seldom clashes jarringly with the occasionally-cartoonish parts of the brothers' musical rivalry and Jim's band of oddballs.
I should probably say something about the music, but beyond knowing that Andrea Corr does this stuff for a living (as part of The Corrs), I know pretty much nothing about Irish music. In particular, all the ceili numbers sounded alike to me, although there's enough dialogue about the finer details and scenes the focus on performance almost exclusively to suggest that writer Nicholas Adams knows his stuff. Of course, John Joe and Jim might have been selecting identical songs as a way to show that they're still connected no matter how much they don't get along.
The cast is good, individually, and plays well off each other, although I question casting Hill and Meaney as brothers. They really don't look a bit alike, their accents don't match, and the apparent age difference between the characters in the "present" (circa 1968) belies how close in age they are in the flashback to 1926 that opens the movie. Hill gets the more reserved, affable part, while Meaney's blustering, obnoxious Jim is more likely to stick in the audience's memory (he gets the last word, with gusto). Corr and Evans likably play likable young people; Evans gets and "Introducing" credit while Ms. Corr gets billed before the title along with Meaney & Hill, so I gather someone sees them as being movie stars, though it's tough to tell from these supporting roles.
The Boys From County Clare is a good little movie. I went because I couldn't remember ever seeing Colm Meaney in a lead role before (though he's probably had more character roles than all the other supporting actors on every
Star Trek series combined) and found myself at least enjoying the funny bits, even if two vomit-related gags is at least one too many. The serious bits are a bit iffier, especially around the Anne/Teddy/Maisie resolution, but not enough to seriously detract from the film.
Kontroll -
½
My first impression of
Kontroll was that it was the work of a sort of Hungarian Danny Boyle, although the specific movie it reminds me of most is Doug Liman's
Go. That's pretty good company to be in; Nimród Antal's movie is a fast-paced, occasionally dark comedy with a driving soundtrack, populated by young characters living on the fringes.
The film centers around a group of ticket inspectors in the Budapast subway; apparently, instead of having turnstiles, passengers just walk right in, and it's up to the inspectors to make sure that the people on the train have actually paid. It is not, as one may imagine, a job which confers much respect or pay, and attracts the peculiar.
The group that the audience follows is nominally led by "The Professor", a sad-faced middle-aged man resigned to this as his lot in life; it also includes Tibi the new guy, Lescó the narcoleptic, Muki the belligerant guy, and Bulscú (Sándor Csányi). Bulscú never actually leaves the Metro, sleeping in the stations during his off-hours and making friends with one of the drivers, Béla.
As humdrum as the inspectors' jobs sound, it's frequently peculiar or downright surreal. There's a stupid workplace rivalry with one Gonzó (who is favored by the bosses) and his group that leads to a potentially fatal rail running race. There are weird customers, such as the one who brings his unmuzzled dog on the train, or the pimp and his "clients" who tries to pay via barter. One passenger who captivates Bulscú is a pretty girl (Eszter Balla) riding the subway dressed in a big teddy-bear costume. There's a vandal called "Bootsie" whose ass, the team feels, desperately needs kicking. On a more disturbing note, the number of suicides committed by people jumping into that path of an oncoming train is on the rise, and the audience can see that they're not suicides at all.
Kontroll has a lot of balls in the air, but Antal has the knack for moving quickly and for prioritizing. It's clear early on that the movie is Bulscú's story, and while the other characters are entertaining and undoubtably have stories of their own, the movie never becomes an ensemble piece. There's only one or two scenes that seem to go on too long, and not by much, and the director knows that a little obvious foreshadowing can go a long way. There are also a few exciting (and funny) chase scenes, full of pushing and shoving in crowded tunnels. When violence happens, it happens with shocking suddenness.
Full disclosure - I didn't immediately "get" one of the more surreal sequences; one of the disadvantages of the festival experience is that by the fourth movie of the day, your mind might not be totally sharp, especially if you're shuttling between two theaters and subsisting on a popcorn diet. I get pretty literal-minded at that point, although the metaphor of the tunnel to the hidden part of the subway system (Bulscú's entire world) should be fairly obvious to most.
Hungary doesn't seem to produce a lot of movies, or at least not a lot that make it to the United States, and don't know what sort of thriving film industry the country has. I'm guessing a somewhat conservative one from the disclaimer at the front, making sure we understand that
Kontroll doesn't accurately reflect the employees of the Budapest Metro but that they chose to allow filming anyway to support the filmmaker's art (which struck me as simultaneously progressive and quaint). So a film like
Kontroll is a pleasant surprise, filled with actors free of baggage from previous roles and feeling rather polished despite its grimy setting.
Duane Incarnate -
¼
As I started watching Hal Salwen's
Duane Incarnate, I got a little worried. The narrated montage that opens the movie seemed rather mean-spirited, as narrator Gwen (Caroleen Feeney) described her three best friends, Fran (Kristen Johnston), Connie (Cynthia Watros), and Wanda (Crystal Bock). Gwen, Fran, and Connie are all beautiful, successful women with great boyfriends, while Wanda... Well, she falls short in every category. Fortunately, while the movie is mean-spirited, it sets its targets on the right people.
Because, see, the pretty girls can't cope when Wanda gets a new boyfriend, Duane (Peter Hermann), who is apparently everything a girl could want. He's handsome, sensitive, incredibly intelligent, gregarious, a good dancer, has a great job, and is skilled and considerate in bed. He can, it seems, do a lot better than Wanda, and he makes the other girls' boyfriends look bad.
Understand - even as the audience feels vaguely disgusted by how Gwen and company patronize Wanda, they understand it. Wanda is plain-looking, out of work, and even if she is smart, she doesn't articulate herself well; she also has a sort of annoying voice. There is a sort of cruelty to her relationship with the others, as if they keep her around in order to feel better about themselves, while she puts up with their patronizing comments and actions because, hey, at least she's hanging with the cool crowd. Very high school, when you think about it.
Of course, I might also sort of looking down at these characters because we don't really get to see grown women as comic leads that often and aren't used to it.
Mean Girls and the slapstick comedies on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel show teenage girls acting silly, but once they're old enough to vote, it seems women in comedies are either objects of men's desires, the sane wife/girlfriend who reels the stupid man in, or a comic character with little screen time.
Duane Incarnate is somewhat unusual in that it gives the women almost all of the jokes.
The movie's world reminded me a bit of
Just A Kiss, in that it seemed to recognizably be our world, although the characters sort of push the envelope of believable behavior. The characters are aware of that, though, as they see the events of the story as an anomoly, nay, a danger to an orderly and comprehensible universe. Writer/director Salwen is good at convincing the audience to go along with it, though, especially with the introduction of Sheena (Amber Cather), a potential rival to Wanda who seems as unlikely a creation as Duane himself.
The movie's most recognizable cast members, Johnston and Watros, have a sitcom background, while most of the rest are (I assume) New York stage actors. Given the off-kilter style of the movie, though, this acting style actually works better than I think the usual (for film) naturalistic approach; it heightens the unreality of the situation. The movie looks good, and appears to use the independent "we'll use what locations we can get" situation to its advantage ("a bowling alley will let us shoot there if we thank them in the credits? Well, heck, this is an opportunity to show that Wanda's not good at anything").
Duane Incarnate is a quirky, off-kilter thing. I like this brand of comedy when it's done well, which isn't that often: It's hard to create a sort of exaggerated environment without going too far and leaving the audience without context. This movie is occasionally shaky, but mostly manages the trick.
