2004 Foreign, Alternative and Independent Films - Page 2  

Jason, I wanted to thank you for your review of Bon Voyage. I have a pass to see it this Thursday and wasn't sure if I was going to go. Your review convinced me to use the pass.

I appreciate all the reviews in this thread (and the forum). I see a lot of movies but have no writing skills to really be able to talk about them. I love reading about them though.

While I'm here I would like to recommend I'm Not Scared. We saw it at a special screening a couple of weeks ago with the director in attendance. It's a little gem. I'd suggest going in knowing as little about the plot as possible, so you can discover along with the central character what's happening. I knew the plot (I read the IMDB comments) and it didn't diminish my pleasure, but I think it would have been even better if I'd gone in cold.

How the heck do you get from Love Actually to Intermission? Sure, both have large casts and various plot threads that intersect, but there has to be a more logical comparison. Magnolia, perhaps, or some Robert Altman film or other? Or Pulp Fiction, perhaps. None of them are particularly close comparisons, but they're at least tonally closer than Love Actually.

Jason, your review makes me wish I'd seen Bon Voyage in LA instead of Eternal Sunshine. I might have seen it just on principle if I'd read the poster close enough to see that it had Isabelle Adjani. But I was with my wife who has an aversion to subtitles so it was out of the question anyway. Hopefully it will show up in Atlanta soon.

I've still only managed to see 2 2004 films so I've had nothing to post about here yet.

Touching The Void - (out of four)

This is a movie about crazy people. The type of people who see a cliff face no-one has ever climbed, so high that the air thins and the temperature drops well below zero - let's make this very clear, these are not the environments in which human beings have evolved to thrive - and say, golly, this looks like fun. To compound this, the two young English mountain climbers in this movie then decide to climb this mountain in the Andes as they would an Alp, in one push, rather than in stages that allow for resupply. This, it strikes me, is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and if something goes wrong, well, you've kind of got it coming.

Now, there wouldn't be a movie if something didn't go wrong. Indeed, what happens as they descend the mountain is the very reason the phrase "things went horribly wrong" exists. And then, things got worse.

The outcome of this adventure is never seriously in doubt. Climbers Joe Simpson and Simon Yates are both interviewed in the talking-head segments, so they obviously survive their ordeals - although without full body shots, it's still quite possible that they were maimed, somehow; I half expected the movie to end with a pull-back revealing amputated limbs (this doesn't happen). The purpose of this movie is not to keep the audience in suspense; it is to make it very clear to each and every member of the audience that we aren't nearly as tough as these guys. That, in similar situations, we would give up, fail, act indecisively, or otherwise behave in a manner that would conclude with our frozen corpses not being found for decades. Happily, Joe and Simon don't rub our faces in it. They are very matter of fact in their recollections. It's not just that they're telling the story nearly twenty years after it happened in a very English, self-effacing manner. Throughout the movie, terms like "bravery" and "courage" are never used. Words like "stubborn" are used instead, and not as euphamisms. They're very pragmatic: If you find yourself grievously injured halfway up a mountain with no rope, food, or water, getting to the bottom isn't brave; it's just something very difficult that you have to do.

Between the talking-heads sequences are re-enactments, which are well-done and nicely photographed. Unlike an IMAX film, these scenes aren't primarily meant to inspire awe in the terrible beauty of the mountains. There is that, especially when we're looking at the inside of a crevasse, but most of it is straightforward illustration of what Joe and Simon are telling us. It's the little "how we do it" details that would be tedious to explain but simple to show.

Indeed, this is a very humanistic movie. Director Kevin Macdonald doesn't personify nature as others might, portraying it as a force actively seeking to kill people stupid enough to defy it. It's just nature and doesn't feel a thing. Similarly, it's a nice change of pace to have Joe talk about how it did didn't occur to him to pray during his ordeal, and that he didn't believe in an afterlife. He got through it not because he had faith God would provide the means, but because he was a tough, resourceful human being who wanted to keep living.

Red Trousers: The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen -

Even those who are not fans of martial arts movies would probably acknowledge that there's an interesting movie to be made from the stories of the Hong Kong stuntment, or the Chinese opera training that produced many of them and gives this film its name (and may already have been, since Painted Faces seems to have generally good reviews). Many of these stuntmen (and actors, and directors) have been trained since they were very small children, did highly dangerous work for very little pay, and do it in part because the brutal authenticity is part of what set Hong Kong's action movies apart from their more expensive, slicker American counterparts. Unfortunately, Robin Shou is not the man to do make this movie.

Shou is indentified as an "Actor/Director" when he appears, but that is something of a cheat, since this is his directorial debut, if you don't count the movie's film-within-the-film, "Lost Time" (we'll get to that later). He's really got no sense of how to put a movie together to form a cohesive narrative, is not a very good interviewer, and as part of the industry he's documenting, he can't look at it objectively or clearly. It's almost as if he decided, halfway through making "Lost Time", that his action movie wasn't nearly as interesting as the people working on it and turned the cameras in the other direction. But, in doing so, he didn't want to alienate any of the people he was working with and had to try and produce a feature documentary on the budget for a DVD extra.

Consider, for instance, Ridley Tsui, the movie's stunt director. The impression is occasionally given that Mr. Tsui is a harsh taskmaster, abrasive, and possessed of other traits that do not endear one's boss to a person. He is apparently good at what he does, but there's the sense that the respectful way in which the stuntpeople talk about him are not, shall we say, representative of their entire opinion. To be fair, this may not be Shou's falt; the American-educated director does try to elicit a stronger opinion, but he seems to be up against a strong cultural imperative to not cause one's superiors to lose face.

There is also the matter of the Hong Kong film industry as a whole. In interview footage, director/actor/stuntman Sammo Hung (a personal favorite of mine) off-handedly mentions that the HK film industry is in a bad place, and that it was once the best in Asia and one of the best in the world. Similarly, students at a performaing arts school in the end speak worriedly about their futures. It seems like an obvious angle for a documentary on Hong Kong stuntment to take - that between runaway production, the return to Chinese rule, and many of HK's top action filmmakers going to America, there is less work for these people. But this is avoided.

Similarly, the name "Red Trousers" comes from the traditional dress of students at the Peking Opera School, which produced such action stars as Jackie Chan, Yeun Biao, Sammo Hung, and Tony Leung. But that tradition, which goes back to the eighteenth century, is given short shrift, with only Sammo appearing in interview footage and some archive footage (including one shot of an astoundingly slim young Sammo). It reappears toward the end in one of the movie's best sequences, where we see young kids training in martial arts at a newer academy - featuring, I imagine, much less corporal punishment - and some of their teenaged students talk about their hopes. A really good movie might have closed on that, showing it as a continuing tradition, though one that's in danger.

Unfortunately, Red Trousers still has more "Lost Time" to subject us to. This movie-in-a-movie, intended as a way to show us these stuntmen in action, is awful. The acting is terrible, and as a director, Shou tends toward the Hollywood method, showing us a lot of close-ups of fists colliding that we'd know were doubled even if we hadn't seen, for example, that his leading lady looks nothing like her stuntwoman. These segments go on far too long, showing us a lot of Robin Shou but also taking up valuable time that could be spent on learning about the Hong Kong stuntmen - which is what we paid for.

It's so disappointing; it's not like the intercut movie is a bad idea (Standing In The Shadows Of Motown used it to brilliant effect); but the execution is so bad that I can't bring myself to recommend Red Trousers.

Good Bye Lenin! - ½

Change happens fast. Fortunately, the average human being can handle rapid change, especially when it offers more choices and opportunities. We resist, but we rise above it.

Good Bye Lenin! confronts its characters with both the biggest changes to happen in recent memory - the collapse of the communist dictatorships - and a character uniquely unable to cope with change. Christiane Kerne (Kathrin Sass) has devoted the last ten years of her life to socialism, ever since her husband escaped to the West without her and their children. When she has a heart attack, she lapses into a coma that lasts eight months - during which time communism falls, her children find new jobs as salespeople for such quintessentially capitalist institutions as Burger King and satellite TV, and the country she's been so devoted to is rushing headlong to erase itself from existence. Fearing that the shock to her system may be fatal, her son Alex (Daniel Brühl) opts to make her room a safe haven - the last place the DDR still exists.

There are many things to like about Good Bye Lenin!, particularly its characters. They're distinct, mean well, and are believable as family. There's a history to Alex's interactions with his mother and his sister Ariane (Marla Simon); shared histories, long-standing arguments, and love inform the scenes they have together. Ms. Sass and writer/director Wolfgang Becker strike a very good balance in creating Christiane; it would be very easy to make her appear a complete fool, but she's not stupid - she recognizes that her country isn't perfect and strives to make it better. The people Alex drags in to maintain the charade are fun, too - everyone in this movie means well, and the side stories like Alex falling in love with a pretty nurse, or the (newly-unified) German soccer team competing in the World Cup driving satellite dish sales. And the story is fun, in a goofily improbable manner. It's the kind of thing that could happen, perhaps, but it's only in the movies that people are resourceful or creative enough to put forth the effort.

The really nifty thing that Good Bye Lenin! does, though, is to capture a moment in history not from the perspective of the people who made it happen, but those who lived through it. They suffer on the one hand and blossom on the other, come face to face with things they thought they would never have to think about, and they go about their own lives both oblivious to and profoundly affected by these major events. Those of us who haven't had our world change practically overnight may have a hard time grasping the enormity of such an event, but this movie does a good job of illustrating it, while being sweet and funny at the same time.

Country of My Skull - ¼

Country of My Skull means well. Oh, boy, does it mean well. Director John Boorman clearly admires and is fascinated by the South African Truth And Reconciliation Commission, a traveling tribunal set up after the end of apartheid with the purpose of eliciting the whole truth by offering amnesty to those who will admit it and whose crimes were politically motivated; it operated during 1995 and 1996. It's a fascinating concept which itself contains many heartbreaking stories; a documentary that covers the same subject, Long Night's Journey Into Day, was nominated for an Oscar three years ago, and is excellent.

This feature, however, is less impressive. Based upon a semi-autobiographical novel by Antjie Krog, it follows two writers assigned to cover the hearings. Langston Whitfield (Samuel L. Jackson) is an American working for The Washington Post who initially feels that if he wanted to write about white cops killing black people, he could do that from home; Anna Malan (Juliette Binoche) is an Afrikaaner poet doing commentary for South African and American radio. Anna's assistant Dumi (Menzi Ngubane), being a gregarious sort, soon makes friends with Whitfield, but the two journalists initially dislike each other.

Here's the thing - without Langston and Anna, you may as well just be making a documentary. The idea behind the two characters is sound and rather clever - Langston calls himself "African-American" but learns about actual African culture from a white woman, and Anna needs the foreigner's perspective to see how she and her family are complicit in apartheid, even though she personally has always found it abhorrent. Focusing on them, however, deflects attention from the truly unique and fascinating work of the commission. Additionally, their scenes often seem prepackaged and overly familiar, perfect examples of what people mean when they use "Hollywood" as a pejorative. Their growing closeness and the stress of bearing witness to so much horror leads in an inevitable direction, and it's no surprise when it means the characters have to deal with the Commission's ideals of truth and forgiveness on a personal level. None of this is close to as unique or fascinating as the film's background.

Also not helping are the mostly flat performances; few of the supporting characters and family members are more than placeholders. Jackson and Binoche are a bit better than adequate, and while Menzi Ngubane shows real charisma, the best performance comes from Boorman regular Brendan Gleeson. As De Jager, a fictionalized version of one of the old regime's most infamous war criminals being interviewed by Jackson's character, Gleeson has the most force of personality, and becomes the most interesting character in the movie: Is he a sociopath who found a place he could thrive, or a patriot who became too willing to do wrong to defend his way of life? And does it matter? That, as my friend Laurel pointed out, is a question we should all be concerned about, given the current political climate. Another thing that's somewhat glossed over is that after the hearings, the black and white members of the press go to a bar and hang out together, and the one who (initially) seems the most uncomfortable is the American; Dumi also seems to harbor no ill will toward the various white Afrikaaners. Is this meant to imply that the reconciliation process is working, or that these characters are just more cosmopolitan than the rest of the country? There is remarkably little tension visible outside Anna's family for a country whose way of life has just been turned upside down

It's too bad these questions aren't given more prominence; they might have made Country of My Skull a much better movie than it was. During the Q&A after the preview screening, Boorman described the movie as still being "amenable to change", and the preview audience did hammer him on the relationship between Anna and Langston (well, they hammered him in a mostly polite, respectful manner). I don't know how much change is possible, though; though it isn't scheduled to open in the US until this September, IMDB has it opening in Ireland next month.

Azumi -

Say what you will about the rest of the movie, but Aya Ueto's blood-spattered face is a work of art.

The title character's face gets hit with speckles of blood a lot, always covering the same half, with her hair falling into place to cast a shadow. Visually, it's a pretty clear trick - Azumi is half beautiful, innocent young girl, half cold-blooded killer. Director Ryuhei Kitamura gets a lot of milage from this image, using it for sadness, rage, and Azumi being just the most efficient teenage assassin you're ever going to find.

This movie doesn't get made in the US; the body count is too high, and the subject matter - kids raised to kill without question or compassion - would have people writing letters and threatening boycotts by the time it was announced (heck, the popularity of the manga it's based upon would have caused a furor). The violence is completely over-the-top, almost all of it is either directed against kids or committed by them, and the film's moral compass is not steady, to say the least. Gessai, the master assassin who has trained Azumi and her nine male compatriots for the past decade, has them reduce their numbers to five to find out who the best is and who is the most willing to follow orders. Later, as they come upon a village being ransacked by bandits, he holds them back, saying that their work (assassinating ambitious shoguns) is too important for defending innocent people to interfere.

And yet, the kids are likable. They are, after all, kids - though they've been trained to kill, it's like other kids are trained to play sports or do their schoolwork. When they get their first glimpse of the outside world, they get excited watching troupe of traveling acrobats. One develops a crush on the pretty Yae (Aya Okamoto), who will become Azumi's friend after she is separated from the rest of the group. Azumi will be tempted to join her and lead a normal life, but it's not to be - knowing himself a target, one of the three Shoguns the children have been dispatched to kill has unleashed not only an army of bandits, samurai, and ronin, but also freed a flamboyant, vicious serial killer. Bijomaru (Jô Odagiri) is so skilled at death that he has never had his sword in a defensive position.

Azumi is based upon a manga, and still retains a lot of that sensibility. Anime and manga are the source from which The Matrix drew much of its visual inspiration, and Kitamura stays true to the source medium (I've not read the comics). Azumi moves impossibly fast, as does Bijomaru, and when they collide amid a battle that consumes an entire town, it's one of the most energetic action sequences you'll ever see. There are impossible shots in it; one of the most astounding has the camera making a vertical circuit around Azumi and Bijomaru, and I've got no idea how they managed it, even with CGI-assistance.

Ryuhei Kitamura has improved since Versus, his last film to show up here in Boston. In particular, this movie is paced better, perhaps because others wrote the script, and even though Azumi is actually somewhat longer, it flies by. And though this is one of the most action-stuffed movie's you'll see, it never becomes overwhelming. Seeing this, I am completely stoked about Kitamura being the guy to direct the next (and final, for now) installment in the Godzilla franchise.

Azumi isn't for everyone. It features kids slicing people up and getting sliced back, and is peppered with vicious bits of black humor. Saying it's one of the best teenaged-assassin movies you'll ever see is something of a backhanded compliment, but it is - the director makes an impressive leap forward, Aya Ueto is charismatic as the title character, and Jô Odagiri gives one of the best scenery-chewing raving lunatic performances in recent memory. Recommended for those who aren't repulsed by the concept.

Okay, more from the second annual Independent Film Festival of Boston. They actually divide nicely into categories.

First up: Documentaries

Double Dare -

Jeannie Epper and Zoe Bell are cool chicks. Sure, I figure anyone willing to throw themselves off a building for my entertainment is probably pretty cool, but for Jeannie and Zoe, we've got it on tape.

Jeannie and Zoe were the primary stunt doubles for Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman and Lucy Lawless on Xena respectively. While the actresses were the pop culture representatives of female empowerment for their respective generations, it's Jeannie and Zoe who took the punches, flew through the air, and otherwise shouldered the risk of injury to make the action sequences work. While the roles they're best known for (if that's the right term) have a similar place in the public consciousness, the women themselves are an interesting contrast.

Jeannie's an old pro. Her family has been in the stunt business for about as long as there's been one - her father, brother, and daughter are only a partial list - and she's very well respected within the community. As the movie opens, though, she seems a little frustrated. She's cold-calling around town, reminding producers and stunt co-ordinators that she's out there. One of the themes that develops as the movie goes on is that not only is it hard for a sixty-year-old grandmother to find work doing high-falls and other risky tasks, but she feels that producers are reluctant to hire a woman as a stunt co-ordinator. She contemplates having some cosmetic surgery done, as stuntwomen often have to double for actresses younger than themselves, and whose costumes don't have the room for padding that then mens' do. And to top it off, her daughter is in the hospital after a stunt went wrong with a neck injury, so she's also watching the grandkids.

On the other side of the world, Zoe is facing unemployment for the first time, with Xena due to wrap production. The thought of going back to being a waitress doesn't appeal to the physical, energetic girl, but there isn't a whole lot of stunt work to be had in New Zealand's small film industry. Zoe realizes she'll probably need to go overseas to continue her career, despite not being anxious to leave her tight-knit family.

Director Amanda Micheli doesn't focus much on the how of stuntwork - we see scenes being shot, but mostly to show that even though Zoe may come off as somewhat impulsive and wild, she is methodical and disciplined when the cameras roll. There's also the obligatory "these people are nuts" shots, such as giving us Zoe's perspective when she first tries jumping onto an air bag from thirty-five feet in the air.

Micheli isn't looking to stir up controversy with this film; she likes her subjects too much. But, gee, how do you not like these ladies? They themselves bond pretty quickly; in the latter half of the movie, when Zoe comes to America to find work, she winds up in Jeannie's spare bedroom. That very week, Jeannie's getting her an audition for Quentin Tarantino, who is looking for a stunt double for some movie with Uma Thurman he's shooting in Beijing. Jeannie's donated a kidney to an actor friend, and if she's bitter about her lack of work, she still perseveres.

It's a truism that in Hollywood, getting work is more difficult than the work itself. You wouldn't think this would be true when the work is getting kicked in the stomach or falling off a building, but there's a group of people who line up to do it. Most of them seem to be pretty good folks, deserving of more recognition, which at least a couple get from this documentary.

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Word Wars: Tiles and Tribulations on the Scrabble Circuit - ¼

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of the documentary as a genre, rather than a form. Most documentaries we see are serious examinations of an issue or a person; even Michael Moore's satires are issue-oriented, about something important. Word Wars will have none of that; though it's told by filming actual events, it is a comedy, and an unabashed one.

Directors Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo follow four top Scrabble players for nine months leading up to the 2002 National Scrabble Championship. Chaikin has participated in this "sport", so he knows the kind of idiosyncratic folks he'll find there. They are characters who, if they showed up in a conventional screenplay, might be considered too broad. Joe Edley, the defending champion, spouts various zen-like mantras and warms up for his matches with tai chi; "GI Joel" Sherman (the GI stands for gastro-intenstinal) is such a mass of nerves that he sucks down Maalox to quiet his stomach as if it were a milkshake. Matt Graham and Marlon Hill are also both crazy in their own ways - Matt's shelf of "smart drugs" is frightening, and he doesn't seem to have any clue how bizarre he acts; Marlon is, however, ready and willing to tell him in between rants of his own on how the fact that he speaks English is an affront to his identity as a black man. These folks apparently all show up in Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak, and are fiercely entertaining here. As the director said in the Q&A afterward, only Edley is really functional enough to hold down a job and support a family, but even that is with the National Scrabble Association.

You can laugh at these guys, though, without feeling too bad about it. They're relatively self-aware, acknowledging that there are likely many people who contribute a lot more to society than they do. And their obsessiveness and peculiarity appears to help them in their chosen field of endeavor. There are also cuts to other people on the periphery, including a gang of Scrabble hustlers in New York City's Washington Park, along with discussion of the game's history and rules.

This movie was made for one of the Discovery Channel stations, and it looks and feels like cable TV - except, of course, for the swearing. It's something of a cliché that the black guy drops the f-bombs, but I think it'll be even funnier when bleeped, just to further contrast Marlon with the professorial type many would expect to be a top Scrabble player. (As an aside, Anthony Anderson's people should be trying to get him to play this character in a Scrabble-related comedy; it would be brilliant) Indeed, as Marlon points out, knowing what words mean in Scrabble is pretty useless; another player mentions that top Scrabble players tend to be math whizzes more than people who are good with the English language.

Documentary comedies are rare birds. You get the occasional Michael Moore-type movie, but those are often so much Moore organizing something that they may as well be scripted. It's a risky business to just turn the cameras on and hope you'll have a funny movie by the end, so few people try it. Word Wars is a rare treat, worth catching if it plays a theater near you (here in the Boston area, it's scheduled for a June run at the Coolidge) or when the (sanitized) version appears on Discovery Times in late June.

More from the IFFB - Amnesia "thrillers"

Nightingale in a Music Box - ¾

So, here's a nifty idea - a woman is found in a top-secret portion of a biotech company working on memory suppression technology, her mind a blank, and a top-secret formula in her hand. She's no spy - she's a mother of two who works as a realtor, with no skills to get past tight security. To try and figure out what happened, a woman who used to work in the intelligence community deprogramming brainwashees and now works for the UN agency overseeing this biotech company's operation is brought in.

It's a promising science fiction concept. Unfortunately, Nightingale in a Music Box is crushed under its low budget and a script that is both painfully talky and guilty of dancing around something really obvious. Taking the last first, it seems to take Edwina Burke (Kelley Hazen) an eternity to connect the work done by the company that the woman's husband works for to her memory loss. Sure, Robin (Catherine O'Connor) shows every sign of psychological conditioning, but even if that's what seems logical, everyone in the audience knows that the formula Robin was apparently stealing could have been for anything. We know that the MacGuffin being memory erasure is important, so we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And the getting there... Ugh. The cast isn't bad, and Ms. Hazen manages the pages upon pages of technobabble she's given to spout well, but that's part of the problem. The entire movie is too clinical. Maybe writer/director/editor Hurt McDermott has studied brainwashing and deprogramming to the extent where he knows much more than the average screenwriter knows about their subject and is determined to get it right. Maybe it's just a case of a writer (and a first-time filmmaker at that) falling in love with his script and not bearing to cut anything at any junction. Whatever the reason, this movie is excrutiating to watch. It's clinical, for lack of a better word; Burke is so even-toned and professional throughout that it saps any energy or interest out of the initially fascinating concept. And the budget is so low that all the filmmaker has to work with is the same few people talking on the same few locations. So we don't actually see Robin captured, and there's very little to break up an endless stream of psychobabble. Makes for a long 96 minutes of movie.

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Blind Horizon - ¼

There was a point, about ten years ago, when it seemed like Val Kilmer was going to be a huge movie star. He was coming off The Doors and Tombstone, and had Batman Forever and Heat coming up. He's made about the same combination of good, bad, and interesting movies since then as most other actors, but it's a mystery to me why his career slowly sank until his movies are going direct to video or otherwise unnoticed. The same could be said about his co-star, Neve Campbell, although she never quite seemed to be quite the A-list draw Kilmer was. On the other side, Amy Smart has appeared in a few movies people have seen, and folks have liked her enough, but no-one yet trusts her with a lead role in, as they used to say, a major motion picture.

Blind Horizon is the kind of movie actors at those stages of their careers make hoping for the best. It's a paycheck; the movie itself is dark and mysterious enough to play film festivals but mainstream enough that it might be able to pop up in theaters during an otherwise slow week. When push comes to shove, it's neither clever nor grandiose enough to be much bigger than direct to video. In a few months people will see it next to where Lord Of The Rings: Return of the King would be and say, huh, I've liked Val Kilmer and since what I really want to see is out, this doesn't look too bad. It will rent but not sell, but maybe it will lead to something better.

It's an okay movie, not cheap-looking but maybe a little ham-fisted in the directing department with an unfocused screenplay. A pair of kids find a man with a bullet wound in the desert outside a small town in New Mexico; the smell of a nurse's cigarette apparently causes this man (Kilmer) to awake from his coma with amnesia but occasional flashes of memory. He becomes certain that he knew something about a plot to kill the President in this small town, which is absurd because as the Sheriff (Sam Shepard) says, it's little more than a wide spot in the road. Soon, a woman claiming to be his finacée (Campbell) appears and says his name is Frank Kavanaugh and he works for the IRS in Chicago. The sheriff smells something fishy, but can't quite figure out what.

Part of the problem is that there's no background on any of the characters. Some, like the sheriff and the nurse (Smart) are probably what they appear to be, but many of the rest are overly mysterious. Neve Campbell's character, for instance, isn't an interesting enough personality for us to wonder about her motivations, and a mysterious figure played by Faye Dunaway's intentions never become clear. There's also a subplot regarding the upcoming sheriff's election that never goes anywhere. The assassination plot is a silly Rube Goldberg thing that is relentlessly foreshadowed but which never really seems to work from either a practical or motivational stance. Performances are good, based on how little there is to work with. There is a good "middle-of-nowhere" feeling to the setting, although it seems that nobody ever knows as much as they should, given the circumstances.

Blind Horizon is basically competent, and doesn't feel like a waste of time. Send it back in time five years, when Kilmer and Campbell were bigger names, and it gets a theatrical release and probably does respectable mid-level business. Now, though, with their star power dimmed, there's not much reason to notice it.

...And "Maybe I'm Just Too American":

Moonlight - ½

Every once in a while, I see a movie - often involving kids - and I have to wonder, who in the heck is the audience for this? The uncomfortable realization then comes that, since I'm sitting in the audience with a ticket for which I had handed over money a couple hours previously, it must be me. And think, just a couple days before I was wondering if I was some sort of perv for wanting to see Mean Girls or Ella Enchanted.

It starts out well enough. A boy from some unnamed foreign country (he may be Middle Eastern, or South American, or something else) gets off a bus stop. He is being used as a mule by drug dealers, who hand him a roll of toilet paper and wait for their shipment. A noise in the woods spooks them, though, and the boy is shot as he's trying to run. Meanwhile, a very serious-looking young girl named Claire experiences her first period while practicing the piano in her big, beautiful, sterile house. Ashamed, she runs off to the garden shed, where she finds the boy.

The sensible thing, of course, would be to scream, run back to the house, tell her foster father that there's a boy in the shed and he's bleeding. Then, the boy would get medical attention, they (rather than Claire) would find the tiny bags of cocaine in his stool (among the first on a long list of scenes we really didn't need to see), the police would be called, and things would perhaps not end happily, but there would be a sort of logic to the procedings. Instead, of course, Claire opts to bandage the boy up herself, admittedly showing great resourcefulness, but apparently never realizing that she's in over her head, even though they don't have any languages in common.

On the subject of language - this film is mainly in English, even though it was filmed in Luxembourg and the Netherlands, with a young Danish lead in Laurien Van den Broeck. Why? I guess English-language films sell better internationally than those in French, German, or Danish. I can't think of any other reason. It's not important, though I did spend an inordinate amount of time trying to place Claire's accent.

Not that I think it will sell much anyway - I don't think there's much of an audience for a movie that is so mean-spirited toward kids. Not that Claire's an especially nice girl - she is, in her way, as distant and aloof as her parents - but she's smart and relatively capable if not necessarily possessed of good sense. She was abandoned as a baby and her adopted parents' lack of attention has made her self-sufficient but unable to trust, we initially get why she wants to handle everything on her own. Miss Van den Broeck gives an exceptional performance, really, considering how little dialog she has and that it's not in her native language.

But how much are we as an audience supposed to take without there being some sort of point to it? Movies like Thirteen and Lilja 4-Ever at least seem to have something they want to say; Moonlight just piles violence and suffering one on top of the other without serving some larger goal. Why do we see the boy bite a chunk out of a man's ear without any reaction or reason? Is there any point to the drug use? And I normally don't like to mention what happens in a film's last act, but what is gained by showing Claire (who must be all of twelve if she's just had her first period) nearly raped, then having sex with the boy? Topless? And then the nihilistic scene after that? What am I supposed to feel except for dirty?

I wonder how these movies are made, especially in Europe, where it seems there are dozens of production companies and creditors in the opening credits of every film. I'm stunned by that many people and groups wanting to be a part of something as exploitive and nasty as this.

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Luck - ¾ ( Canadian)

Two thoughts occurred to me about this movie as I watched it:

1. I'll bet it's much more popular in Canada than here in the US. Native Canadians will probably latch on to the movie's environment as soon as the Canada-versus-the-Soviet-Union hockey series that serves as the movie's backdrop is mentioned; as an American I had no idea what they were talking about. The movie is proudly Canadian, "ehs" and all, and makes no concessions toward being accessible to its neighbor to the south. That's not a bad thing; it knows and serves its audience. The rest of us are probably missing some amount of historical context, though - if these hockey games in 1972 basically shut down the country with interest, then every Canadian in the audience knows how this backdrop is going to play out, which must add irony and tragedy to every statement where the characters assume that the Russians are going to win. If you don't know that background, as I didn't, you're likely missing half the movie.

2. Gambling as a metaphor for not being timid in one's life really needs to die. I think writer/director Peter Wellington gets this, because he shows gambling as ultimately self-destructive, but he also keys the film's finale on a wildly unlikely bit of chance. I suppose there's meaning, that even when we don't actively gamble, much of our life is still random events. But it's a little pathetic when, toward the end, Luke Kirby's Shane gives us a big of gambling-inspired philosophy well past the point when he really should know better.

There are a number of funny scenes - a lot of Shane's narration is fun to listen to (calling out a Gamblers Anonymous group, saying they don't have a problem with gambling, but with losing), and there's a frenzied, caper-comedy air toward the middle when Shane and his friends attempt to start their own bookmaking operation. But the film is also uncomfortably split in two ways - the first half is Shane retelling it to the GA meeting, while the second half is him narrating it for someone else. There's also a best-friend-he's-actually-in-love-with-who-just-broke-up-with-her-boyfriend, Margaret (Sarah Polley), but her presence and absence is arbitrary. Some of the best material relates to her, but she's got little to do with the middle of the movie. Was Ms. Polley only available for part of the movie's shooting schedule, requiring a write-around? Or was a girl necessary to make Shane's life seem less empty, even though actually having her around might be too stabilizing? Her complete disappearance at the end made it feel like a scene was left out.

Or is the whole thing just too Canadian for me? I'm not sure, although on balance more made me laugh than left me cold.

Another simular movie that I just read about is called Km. 0. I have never seen it but a few of my friends said it was quite good.

The Saddest Music in the World - ½

Guy Maddin is one peculiar fellow, and bless him for it. At first glance, his latest film may seem almost mainstream - it's got actors whose names you might recognize (Isabella Rossellini, Mark McKinney), it's being distributed to non-repatory theaters by IFC films, runs 99 minutes and has something resembling a linear plot - but once it starts, the audience is quickly disabused of that notion. It's immediately subjected to grainy black-and-white film stock, opening credits that could have come from the 1930s, and striking design work and twisted comedy that is pure Maddin.

It's better than much of his previous feature work, at least as much of it as I've seen, in part because Maddin has help. He and frequent collaborator George Toles worked with a script from novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, and the end result is a Guy Maddin film that has memorable dialogue to go with its memorable visuals, and doesn't become a self-indulgent mess. There's a story holding this lunacy together, and characters that arouse some genuine interest.

Lady Port-Huntley (Rossellini) is a Winnipeg beer-baronness who lost her legs years ago in a tragic accident, and has decided to promote her beer with a contest to find out which country produces the world's saddest music. A local man who has pined for her for a long time will represent Canada, while his son Chester (McKinney), for whom Lady Port-Huntley spurned him, represents America, along with his girlfriend Narcissa, an amnesiac nymphomaniac who claims to be given messages by her tapeworm. Chester's brother Roderick (Ross McMillan) returns home from Europe to represent Serbia, heartsick over the years-ago death of his son and disappearance of his wife. Various other nations send representatives, eager to win the top prize of "twenty-five thousand Depression-era dollars".

There's a wickedness to Maddin's comedy, whether it's transforming Roderick's sorrowful lament into a peppy, upbeat musical number, the deadpan radio commentary on the various musicians, the shots at America (both in terms of how an American number should be large and vulgar and how Chester merrily co-opts the entrants from other countries into becoming part of his show), and the gruesome circumstances under which Lady PH lost her legs (and I'd just told a friend how I think I may have outgrown finding dismemberment funny). Just because this film is made to look 70 years old doesn't mean the filmmakers are trying to make a movie for their grandparents. It's an irreverent comedy which packs its jokes in tight, and is not terribly worried about good taste.

To say, honestly, that this is likely the funniest Canadian black-and-white musical black period romantic comedy likely to grace screens this year is both a recommendation and a warning; it's got a place of honor on my list of films that I love but which I might regret recommending to friends who tend to appreciate the familiar more than the outré in their entertainment. I'll do it anyway, though, becaue you can lose a lot of the adjectives between "funniest" and "comedy" before that sentence comes close to being inaccurate.

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Anyone else hitting the indie houses & festivals?

Also, reviews of shorts from IFF Boston are in the blog.

The Crimson Rivers 2: Angels of the Apocalypse sees release in Canada on May 7th. I just wonder if CR2 will only get a DVD release down in the US.

I'm Not Scared (Io Non Ho Paura) - ¾

To a child, life in the south of Italy in 1978 appears idyllic. As the movie opens, Michele is running through a field with his friends and little sister, not a care in the world. Yeah, she breaks her glasses, but little sisters do things like that, which is why you have to watch out for them. But even in that first scene, we get a hint of what to come, as we get a glimpse at the nastiness in one of the kids, and the willingness the others have to work with him to humiliate another (this one an overweight girl). Michele stands up to deflect their cruelty from her, but almost too late. As they leave the abandoned house where they were playing, Michele's sister Maria realizes she's lost her glasses. When going back to find them, he finds a hole; looking into that hole, he sees a foot sticking out from under a towel, not moving.

So begins a great little story of how a boy realizes that even the people close to him whom he loves and respects - and who genuinely love him in return - can be capable of doing terrible things. But when you're ten years old, and the people in question are your family and their friends, how can you be sure that it's evil? There are lots of things that parents don't talk about, after all, and this just may be one of them.

The movie does an excellent job of giving a kids'-eye view of the whole situation. Newcomer Giuseppe Cristiano does a fine job making Michele seem intelligent and troubled by what he has seen, aware that something is strange but unable to question what he knows right away. The film is, from what I gather, a faithful adaptation of a first-person novel, so Cristiano must appear in every scene, and the adult interactions are what he sees and overhears, so we need to see them as a ten-year-old would, rather than as an adult member of the audience. Director Gabriele Salvatores manages this nicely, especially in one scene where the town's adults are all in conference, leaving the kids confused and mainly concerned about when they will have their supper.

The most prominent adult roles are given to Dino Abbrescia and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón as Pino and Anna, Michele's parents. In many ways, it is as confusing to the audience as it is to the characters how they can be involved; even though they may seem to worry a little much, they are good parents. We do get an occasional glimpse that this life may not be as charmed as it seems to the children, but it seems nearly as incongruous to us as it does to Michele.

Part of the reason for that is that this movie is gorgeous. Even though Michele's town is a little poor and run-down, the exteriors are filled with warm colors and pleasant imagery. It makes the ugly elements stand out, though even those scenes are well-composed and eye-catching.

There's been some controversy over Miramax marketing this as a thriller rather than a coming-of-age drama. I can see where this aggravation is coming from; even without Miramax's history being peppered with abuses visited upon foreign films, this is clearly not a nail-biter for most of its run-time, but is more introspective. Still, it does fit into both genres, and an intelligent thriller with a ten-year-old as its protagonist is a rarer specimen than a "growing up twenty years ago in a poor region" story. So while the advertising may be deceptive, it's not a lie, and if it gets people to see this movie, good for it.

Games People Play: New York - ¼

Sometime, in the not-too-distant future, Games People Play will be mentioned in Congressional hearings about obscenity in movies, the reality TV phenomenon, and the basic decadence of the entertainment industry. It is one of the most gleefully exploitive movies I can recall seeing, and one of the most shamelessly manipulative. It is also, in some ways, fiendishly clever about making the audience members confront their individual attitudes toward this exploitation and manipulation. It can be viewed as either a sharp satire of unscripted television shows or the most cynical, vulgar example of them that one can imagine (until the sequel, Games People Play: Hollywood, is rolled out later this year).

One of its best qualities is that you're never quite sure how serious writer/director James Ronald Whitney is about this. He starts off addressing the audience to say that this is a pilot for a new primem time game show, in which actors compete in a variety of tasks over a seventy-two hour period in competition for a $10,000 prize. I'm not sure which networks he would be sending this pilot too - the options seem pretty much limited to Showtime and the Playboy Channel. Maybe pay per view. Because, as we quickly learn as he and two "judges" audition actors to participate in this game, we quickly learn what his ad in the trade about looking for "mentally and physically uninhibited" actors meant - the audition scene calls for nudity and simulated sex right off the bat. I want to show this audition sequence to my theater major brother as a look into the future - competition in the acting profession is fierce. However, I'm pretty sure our parents would be very, very upset at me for this.

Once three actors (Joshua Coleman, David Maynard, Scott Ryan) and three actresses (Dani Marco, Sarah Smith, Elisha Imani Wilson) are chosen, they're given a series of tasks to perform which will involve them interacting with the citizens of New York. Some are wickedly funny, some are mostly benign, and some are disturbing. The director takes care to note that everyone who participates signs a release form (indeed, a urine sample collected in the mens' first challenge doesn't count unless accompanied by a release), showing that it's not just the actors who are willing to embarrass themselves, but several "man on the street" types.

Meanwhile, the judges meet with the contestants. These judges, Dr. Gilda Carle and Jim Caruso, both have websites that don't appear to be clever movie publicity. As they talk, the contestants let out shocking secrets, but our cynicism has been primed - these are actors, after all, who have already shown themselves willing to do a heck of a lot more than most in the audience would for a chance at $10K. How much of what they're saying is genuine and how much is BS?

The games themselves are strongly on the exploitive side. That urine gag? Probably the most benign. Most of the others involve not only the contestants getting naked, but convincing strangers off the street to get naked, often in an unquestionably sexual context. The movie isn't sexist about it; you're going to see just as much penis as you will breast.

The inevitable "reality show twist" at the end is clever, I'll give it that - it allows the audience to feel relief, then wonder if they should, then question the whole thing. It's wonderfully ambiguous. Maybe a little too ambiguous, perhaps - I wasn't clear what role the judges played in this twist, which frustrated me. It could have ramped the viciousness of the satire up a notch, or it might have just made everything more staged.

Also, some of the inner "game" elements were underdeveloped. While the graphics and presentation had an authentic cheesy-cable-show quality to them, the "Naked Trio" event wasn't nearly as amusing as the time spent on it. Which is too bad, because it's one of the few times we got to see the contestants work with each other. Also, if this is supposed to be a pilot for a real show, a little more attention should have been paid to the aspect of keeping score and judging performances. The lack of focus on the competition sort of gave the lie to the "this just may be real" conceit. Oh, and the music was truly, utterly awful - going well beyond a parody of what a show on a low budget would use into just being intrusively bad.

This movie will cause some to react strongly, especially those who don't see the satire as amusing. I'm in the category that thinks this could have been brilliant with a little more refinement; hopefully Games People Play: Hollywood will be a slightly more polished work (its poster indicates a somewhat different focus).

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Anyone... anyone... (I saw you saying you'd seen The Saddest Music in the World on the film list thread, Brook!)

I agree 100% with Jason in his marvelous post re: Bon Voyage in page 1. Great reviews of a captivating film! Films like Bon Voyage are one of the reasons why I go to movies.

What other fair way is there to watch a movie, though? Maybe I was lucky in that I saw it at a preview screening and didn't really have many expectations other than being fairly sure Virginie Leyoden would be pretty. I'd only read a couple reviews so I wasn't sure what to expect.

It's just an odd turn of phrase, though - it implies that you didn't enjoy Bon Voyage, but for some reason other than what it is.

Well, I'd rather France (and every country) put out a broad range of films. There's room for a very pretty trifle like Bon Voyage next to the new Ossayas film, and I'm really irritated that Miramax is just sitting on the two Astérix movies.

I'm more on Edwin's side of the fence. I thought it was a likeable movie. I enjoyed the characters and some nice barbs at the upper class and French politicians, but I failed to see it as some kind of great farce/comedy like most of the reviews describe it as.

Edwin, fear not for France, it can also produce Twentynine Palms, bleak and spare with little substance. Of course the most interesting pictures, like the new Rohmer and Godard's, won't get distribution here.

Coffee and Cigarettes - ½

Jim Jarmusch has been making these little films since 1987 - black and white, featuring a couple people in a café, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and talking. These folks are celebrities, most playing a somewhat caricatured version of themselves. Somewhere inside each of the eleven segments, someone will mention that coffee and cigarettes isn't much of a lunch. It has the potential to get repetitive, and some quite frankly aren't terribly entertaining. They are, however, more than balanced by the ones which are hilarious.

The funniest are, by and large, the ones with a sort of tension to them, where people are meeting for the first time and one is clearly more impressed with the other than vice versa. After a forced conversation between Steven Wright and Roberto Begigni (whose two styles don't match well at all) and a downright peculiar bit where Joie and Cinqué Lee have Steve Buscemi as a waiter, we get the first bit that is pure gold: Iggy Pop meeting up with Tom Waits, with Waits being subtly hostile to Iggy. A similar tactic is used later on, in the segment entitled "Cousins?", with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan meeting, with Molina being a big fan of Coogan's work and Coogan being "aware" of Molina's. It's a refined bit of conversational combat.

A number of the segments are just odd, some working much better than others. "Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil", for instance, features Jack & Meg White of The White Stripes talking while Jack's Tesla coil sits off to the side in a little red wagon. It's probably the most outright peculiar segment, although most have a sort of unpredictability to them. The characters share names with the actors, and mostly seem like their public personae, but have just enough eccentricity that it's seldom clear where the individual quirks stop and the acting begins. Especially with the ones who may not be familiar - this is Renée French's only credit, so how much of the femme fatale type she plays is a character and how much is Jarmusch wanting to capture someone he knows. That's part of the appeal, too - in a segment where Cate Blanchett plays herself and a cousin with a striking resemblence (but a wholly different personality), we wonder which character more aptly represents the real Cate.

Writer/director Jim Jarmusch stumbles, on occasion, though he's got talented performers to smooth it over. The portion with Wu-Tang Clan's GZA and RZA awkwardly references the other segments, but has Bill Murray, who can do deadpan eccentric better than anyone. There is a fair amount of repetition here (it's hard not to be aware of him re-using the overhead shot, for instance), but the film manages to be original and unpredictable through most of its runtime, and delivers some very big laughs.

I know, I know Jason. I just can't seem to get motivated to write real reviews these days. I've seen Saddest Music, Bon Voyage, Spring, Summer, The Return, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, several of which haven't been reviewed here, but I'm a blank right now. I'm even a few reviews behind in the S&S thread. Hopefully the muse will strike sometime soon. (and not the crappy Albert Brooks version)

Love Me If You Dare (Jeux d'Enfants) - ¼

Kids can be cruel, especially when the world has been cruel to them. Julien Janvier is watching his mother die and his father grow angry at the world as a result; Sophia Kowalsky is taunted cruelly for being poor and a child of Polish parents who don't even speak French. They soon make their life an endless string of dares, mostly harmless though infuriating to their families. They draw strength from this, but by the time Sophie (played as an adult by Marion Cotillard) realizes she wants more from Julien (Guillaume Canet) than friendship, they don't know how to do anything but challenge each other.

Love Me If You Dare is often unpleasant to watch. At first, it looks like it's going to be a story about two kids obviously in love who can't get out of their own way. That would be a less daring movie, but perhaps a more entertaining one. When the characters, who last talked when they were eighteen, meet again at age 25, the movie becomes problematic. What had before been a playful, if a bit edgy, relationship takes a sharp turn into cruelty. One could even, perhaps, describe it as sadistic. It doesn't seem like there's any reason for this escalation, and I found myself quickly losing sympathy for the characters.

This movie has a great deal of visual flair, making good use of digital effects and dream sequences. There's also one outright heartbreaking scene early on, as 8-year-old Julien, visiting his mother in the hospital, is angry that Sophie has come to see him; in a moment that foreshadows their teen years, she sadly realizes she is "only good for playing". But after that, it seems to have sections missing - the relationship between Julien and his father seems to become uglier than what we see in the movie would merit, and we only get glimpses of Sophie's life. There isn't enough information about either direction the movie could go - Julien's life isn't fleshed out enough for it to be about him, but Sophie is given rather short shrift for a movie about their relationship. And then it seems like quite a leap to get from the climax to the ending.

Or endings, plural. There are two, that run parallel, as if the director shot one light and one dark but couldn't decide which he preferred. One is pretty clearly the "primary" ending, but even that one is somewhat different in tone than the way it's established in the beginning, before the rest of the movie is told in flashback. That inconsistency is maddening; it doesn't work in terms of making the relationship seem complicated, but just arbitrary.

Hmmm, thanks Jason, I've been somewhat intrigued by the film since I've seen the trailer about 10 times. Seems like they show it before everything I've seen lately. Sounds like I'll just wait and rent it.