In the years following 9/11 and the onset of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which segments of the American public boiled with tooth-for-tooth bloodthirst, an influx of films grappling with the destructive effects of vengeance hit theaters courtesy studios both indie and major: Spiderman 3 and Sweeney Todd, Shotgun Stories and Red, to name a few. Now Austria chimes in with Revanche (Revenge), a gorgeously photographed almost-thriller nominated this past year for Best Foreign Film. In it, Alex, a lovestruck brothel assistant (masterfully played by Johannes Krisch), robs a bank so he can start a new life with his prostitute girlfriend. (Financial desperation is another recently popular theme: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Cassandra's Dream, etc.)
Directed by: Armando Ianucci Written by: Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Ianucci & Tony Roche Full credits at IMDb
In the Loop, a manic and borderline screwball verbal satire, marries two comic styles from opposite ends of the pond: zany yet dry-witted English sitcom humor — a la Steve Coogan’s multiple Alan Patridge series, which director Iannucci helped write and produce — meshed with its goofier American counterpart. (Think the ensemble films of Christopher Guest.) For once, Britain and the U.S. sensibilities comedically complement one another: In the Loop is hilarious, peerlessly so among its contemporaries. And it isn’t funny for funny’s sake, either, like so many American film comedies; it uses its humor Colbertly, for the worthy cause of political lampooning.
Keep reading this 2009 Tribeca Film Festival dispatch at The L Magazine
The House of the Devil, a retro-minded horror flick, is all foreplay, an extended tease that tests the limits of audience patience before rushing through its hypergory climax. On the one hand, we should commend horror directors that choose not to revel too long in geysers of blood (for not "Eli Rothing"); on the other, build-up without satisfying denouement is exasperating. Grisly as his film may be at times, West seems uninterested in necessarily cathartic violence; over-concerned with establishing the proper atmosphere, he fails to strike the right balance between the horror film's dual demands: setup and, pardon me, execution.
Keep reading this 2009 Tribeca Film Festival dispatch at The L Magazine
The Eclipse would be a great horror movie, if it were a horror movie. Noted playwright and stage director (cf. The Seafarer) Conor McPherson’s ghost-obsessed film includes a few surprising and truly unnerving scenes in which our hero confronts a cadaverous black-eyed spectre and deals with assorted thuddings in a creaky old house. But, unfortunately, these moments are few and far between; the bulk of the film concerns needling domestic dramas about a struggling single father caught in a love triangle with a couple of lovelorn writers (an irritating Iben Hjejle and a marvelous Aidan Quinn).
Keep reading this dispatch from the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine
Directed by: Gregor Jordan Written by: Bret Easton Ellis & Nicholas Jarecki Full credits from IMDb
Based on a story collection by American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers, a tone-deaf moral parable about Reagan-era excess, follows seemingly infinite story strands packed with enough naked bodies to make the ‘60s look like the ‘50s. Set primarily in a Los Angeles with morals as gray as the smog, these low-stake narrative threads have very little to do with one another, except for a few contrived interconnections. (Some come together thematically in the end with the clumsiness of a Scrubs episode.) Ostensibly about self-destruction in a moral-deprived milieu—you can tell it’s the ‘80s because everybody’s got a Morrisey haircut and all the characters name-drop famous period-singers while wearing wayfarers—the movie comes across as self-righteous comic book tragedy. Some of the big stars here—Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke, Chris Isaak—perform credibly, but the rest of the cast, particularly Kim Basinger and the late Brad Renfro, is as laughably inept as the material. Each story adds up to nothing individually—less than zero, even—and The Informers is exactly the sum of its parts. It's easily on track to be dubbed the worst film of 2009. Grade: F
Directed by: Alastair Fothergill & Mark Linfield Written by: Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield & Leslie Megahey Full credits from IMDb
Hoping to cash in on the recent successes of high profile nature documentaries, the newly launched Disneynature releases the plainly titled Earth, a cutesy snapshot of exotic animals and far-flung places. Though it’s directed by the men behind the Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth—and liberally borrows from it—this movie has less in common with that spectacular series than with the cloying March of the Penguins. Regrettably lacking any of the philosophical inquiry of last year’s Oscar nominee Encounters at the End of the World, this film is cheaply predicated on exploiting the cuteness of animal babies. It’s like the best of Planet Earth, cynically repackaged for kids: it’s tweer, bloodless, and packed with groan-worthy jokes. James Earl Jones reads the silly script—“this creature is the very essence of wilderness”; “grass is the great unsung hero of our planet”—with risible gravitas. There are some neat moments—fast-motion flower blooming, a lion-elephant face-off—but it feels like this has all been done before. And better. Grade: C
Or, The Girl Who Ran Over Her Minutes, as epileptic Ivy (Zoe Kazan) spends half the film chatting on her cellphone. Some of those conversations are unsettlingly authentic, but — hark, young directors! — authenticity alone is not a virtue. This is the kids-in-Brooklyn-apartments movie run amok: shallow people stammer insufferably with little subtext, insight or significance, criminally underserving cinematographer Eric Lin’s gorgeous compositions. Gray’s wife, So Yong Kim, served as producer and assistant director; Exploding is In Between Days’ de-Koreaned doppelganger. Each was named for opposite faces of the same Cure 45; this is, conspicuously, the B-side.
Read dispatches from the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival at The L Magazine
Some unsettling borderline incest and pedophilia sequences appear in Fetishizing Zac, er, 17 Again, a middling comedy starring tenderfooted Tiger-Beater Zac Efron. In it, a deus ex machina (Brian Doyle Murray) uses nonsensical magic to restore teenagedom and Efronness to a whiny, 30-something pharmaceuticals peddler (Matthew Perry, in the laziest performance of the year), a past-his-prime wage slave with resentful children and an impending divorce. He uses his adolescence redux to infiltrate his family, in a deception-filled Doubtfire-ian scenario, in order to win back his wife (weird!) and help his children cope with the puberty years, during which his daughter falls for him (gross!).
While rejecting nostalgic regret and ambivalently embracing the imperfect present, the film crams in as many clichés (and product placements) as possible, including a dramatic courtroom speech, a rowdy high school party, and a Big Game triumph. 17 Again has few distinguishing characteristics or surprises, except perhaps a serviceable supporting turn from Thomas Lennon (Reno 911!), leaving us to await impatiently the inevitable finale. Director Steers is a long, commercialized way from his previous film, 2003’s unduly popular indie Igby Goes Down.
In 1974, choreographer Michael Bennett sat down with 24 dancers to talk about their lives, research that he and others would later transform into A Chorus Line. In 2006, that show returned to Broadway for a revival, which inspired this not-unlikable documentary: Every Little Step explores the musical song by song, character by character, illuminating its history while documenting the revival; it blends recordings of Bennett’s initial conversation with archival footage, interviews with the original cast, biographical sketches of the revival auditionees and footage of the audition process, to which the filmmakers were granted remarkable access.
The movie turns the tryouts into an American Idol of sorts, with judges, contestants and behind the scenes glimpses of both. It’s über-meta, following the audition process for a musical about the audition process, and the film hits on what the show did: the actor’s struggle, the lives of permanent audition. At turns, Every Little Step is compelling and dull, moving and irritating, funny and eye rolling—much like A Chorus Line itself, in a final meta stroke.
Mishmashing myriad influences — Cassavetes, Godard, Bujalski, Woody Allen, Astaire-Rogers — writer-director-editor-lyricist Chazelle fashions something new: the first Mumblecore Musical. It’s a black-and-white, naturalistic, 16mm exploration of young people and their romantic affairs that plays out on Boston streets and in apartments. But instead of awkwardly stammering their way around What They Mean, Guy (Jason Palmer) and Madeline (Desiree Garcia), respectively, play the trumpet and spontaneously slip into song. It’s affecting, endearing, and, even better, toe-tapping.
Tyson opens with a bird’s-eye shot of a boxing ring, suggesting that the film to follow might be a judgment of the titular mortal, through a lens godly. No such luck — not godly, just Tobackly. This straightforward, apotheosizing biodoc is too ensorcelled by its subject to take the cold, distanced or objective view. It plays out instead as one long fawning interview; writer-director Toback sets his camera in front of the scary, now-face-tattooed pugilist and lets him spill his compelling story as he sees it: the childhood bullying and heavyweight championships; the marriages and rape scandal; the Buster Douglas fight and, um, the Holyfield ear…incident.
Like the award-losing Benjamin Button, Is Anybody There? is an intermittently poignant movie obsessed with death. And, unlike that Pitt-lead dourfest, it’s intermittently funny, too! Set in an independently run nursing home, a ramshackley mom-and-pop start-up, the movie charts the budding friendship between a young boy (Son of Rambow’s Bill Milner, easily confused with Freddie Highmore), son of the caretakers, and a retired magician (Michael Caine), a new resident. That’s a dangerously contrived set-up treading in perilously manipulative waters, but the the strength of the leads manages to sustain a sweet tone while, most of the time, keeping clear of cloying.
The movie plays out as a study of two disagreeable and frequently unlikable characters—Grumpy Old (and Young) Men—that share a macabre preoccupation with mortality: gloomy gramps is in perpetual mourning for his dead wife; the kid obsesses over the paranormal, trying to record ghosts on tape. (“Why are you so bloody morbid?” the father asks his son. “’Cos I live here!” he answers.) The actors vivify each, particularly Caine, who adds complexity to a tired archetype, the old timer resentful to be placed in a care facility. Unshaven, uncombed and bloodshot, like an Irish sea-captain back from an Odyssean voyage, he seethes and snaps at the kind or aloof people around him. Caine humanizes the crusty fogey: cutting in one moment, he weeps in the next.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t live up to the performances. Director Crowley, who deftly staged The Pillowman on Broadway, directs Is Anybody There? like a theater man, even though his resume boasts more film credits (e.g. the well-received Boy A). Most glaringly, he has little faith in his images, drowning them in thick and nauseous musical syrup. Script problems drag him down, as well; he muddles through a misguided subplot about the nursing home proprietor—the boy’s father—lusting after the hired help, and the screenplay relies on unconvincingly quick changes of heart, as if a reel were missing.
Still, at the least, Is Anybody There? feels like a fresh take on the kooky old folk routine. Writer Harness grew up in a situation similar to that of our young protagonist, so he and Crowley imbue the movie with seemingly authentic details. For every contrived moment of quirkiness—the post-stroke geezer who can only mutter a single word—there’s a moment of genuine pathos, whether it’s Caine weeping in the mirror as he calls his departed beloved’s name, or an ancillary old woman sobbing in the corner of the frame. That it’s British doesn’t hurt—prick jokes told to priests replace rapping grannies—and it helps, too, that the film boasts a master thespian at the top of his game. If Caine were as sick as his character appears, this would be a worthy performance to go out on, regardless of the iffy material that it supports. Grade: B-
Sleep Dealer grapples with the Latino immigrant experience. Before you click away in been-there boredom, know that it does so by harnessing the batty tropes of science fiction: It sets its protagonist, an itinerant laborer, within a dystopian, technocratic, Philip K. Dickian near future in which a war over water rights, pitting freedom fighters against corporations and the governments that love them, has devastated the Mexican economy. The recent Sugar, which cloaks its immigrant story in the trappings of a neorealist baseball movie, might handle more effectively the bleak reality of the migrant workhorse. But Sleep Dealer is a hell of a lot more entertaining.
Alien Trespass, a bland, dippy and aggressively kitschy homage to the Hollywood space invasion picture, concerns a broad group of mid-century, small-town American archetypes: the sheriff, the waitress, the yokel, the drunk, the greaser, the high school student, his sweetheart, and, uh, the scientist—an astronomer (played wittily by Eric McCormack, Will & Grace’s eponymous Will). Soon into the picture, a crash-landed alien possesses the scientist’s body; together, he and the townsfolk battle, or at least get eaten by, a different outer space invader: an insatiable, rapidly multiplying creature (with camouflaging capabilities) that reduces humans and animals to steaming puddles of what looks a lot like shit and piss—the joke being, presumably, that ‘50s Americans, fed on thick steaks, tobacco and pie, trigger instant diarrhea in intergalactic beasts.
The monster also happens to look like a veiny, six-foot dildo. In a late scene, that resemblance briefly suggests something about ‘60s sex-craziness encroaching on the squeaky clean ‘50s, threatening women and children. (Don’t worry—they send that superphallus back to San Francisco, or whatever Sodom from which it came!) But the sexual allegory doesn’t carry through the film; it seems accidental. Directed by R.W. Goodwin, a producer (and writer-director) on The X-Files, Alien Trespass desperately, almost pitifully, wants to be cheap and cheesy ‘50s sci-fi camp. And, superficially, the pieces are all there: the conspicuously artificial sets, the ominous music and the exaggerated acting styles, as well as the props—tobacco pipes, tortoiseshell glasses, typewriters and separate beds—and the dialogue: “Cool it, Dickie, it’s his job to suck eggs.”
But where’s the substance? The classics that the filmmakers ape—such as It Came from Outer Space and The Day the Earth Stood Still—were deeply political films, cold war allegories that leaned both left and right. This film doesn’t lean at all; without any driving ideas, it’s all apolitical surfaces, a Technicolor photocopy pastiching pastiche. It fetishizes not the 1950’s but its empty pop culture signifiers. And as such, it doesn’t just signify nothing—it’s insignificant.
Directing duo Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden look like they’re on a quest to reinvent American subgenres. As well they should be: too many of this country’s movies, not least of all its indies, have languished too long under the insistent predictability of their narrative and character arcs. Every so often, they need a good shaking up. The directors’ mission began three years ago with Half Nelson, which, years before The Class hit these shores, made the student-teacher movie feel fresh, even stimulating. Rejecting the phony inspirationalism of exemplars like Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, it flipped the familiar formula: Ryan Gosling’s antiheroic, crack-addicted history teacher needed salvation as much as his inner-city students did; he leaned on them.
Fleck and Boden, who remain a team since they met and began dating as NYU film majors, now return with Sugar, a baseball movie that, like Half Nelson, bears only a cursory resemblance to its generic forebears.
Directed by: Majid Majidi Written by: Mehran Kashani & Majid Majidi Full credits from IMDb
Grade: 3/5
The Song of Sparrows, a serio-charming slice of Iranian neo-realism, shrouds grave matters like despondence and destitution in the trappings of a culture-contrast comedy. Concealing social criticism to curtail the censors is by now standard operating procedure in Iran. And so, for a while, the film plays its desperation for laughs. Karim (the hard-scrabble-faced Reza Najie) works at an ostrich farm, an inherently hilarious location thanks to the creatures’ rubber golf club neck-and-head combos. Director Majid Majidi exploits the setting for a few comic set pieces: a gaggle of workers scrambling after a runaway ostrich; Karim hunting that escapee in the desert, bent over, clad in a cape of ostrich feathers, brandishing an ersatz ostrich neck-head made of wood. But beneath the ostensibly laughable bubbles something more serious: Karim is poor, living in an impoverished (yet quasi-Edenic) village, and he has a wife and three children to support, one of whom is almost as deaf as a post and in need of a new hearing aid. A lost ostrich translates into a lost job, which he can’t afford. Soon, the shots of ostriches shed their risibility and assume a taunting and contemptible air.
In the years following 9/11 and the onset of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, during which segments of the American public boiled with tooth-for-tooth bloodthirst, an influx of films grappling with the destructive effects of vengeance hit theaters courtesy studios both indie and major: Spiderman 3 and Sweeney Todd, Shotgun Stories and Red, to name a few. Now Austria chimes in with Revanche (Revenge), a gorgeously photographed almost-thriller nominated this past year for Best Foreign Film. In it, Alex, a lovestruck brothel assistant (masterfully played by Johannes Krisch), robs a bank so he can start a new life with his prostitute girlfriend. (Financial desperation is another recently popular theme: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Cassandra's Dream, etc.)
