Bodyguards and Assassins

In 1901, the first political assassination was carried out in Hong Kong in order to subdue stirrings of democracy. By 1908 the waves needed only a shore to break upon; Sun Yat-Sen would provide the direction needed. He was an important figure in the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty to bring the nation into the years of the republic. There were many attempts on his life, so this provides the backdrop for action scenes whereby hundreds of Chinese extras get booted in their shit. Bodyguards and Assassins is an emotionally and kinetically overblown epic that delivers a flying tiger claw to subtlety. Whether it is factually accurate is as reasonable as the question of whether Chinese street fighters are indeed capable of flight. It is a well done action film that sets up a complicated story with numerous characters that are developed enough for you to care about them so it really matters to you when they are stabbed for the eightieth time in the groin.

Sun Yat-Sen (Sun Wen in the film) departs for Hong Kong to discuss the plans for revolution and set in motion the political figures that will organize a public and military uprising. The Qing Dynasty retaliates by targeting Sun via the Empress Dowager Cixi, who sends an army of assassins that appears to be large enough in size to sink the entire city under their weight. A revolutionary arrives ahead of time to prepare for Sun’s arrival, meet with a businessman (Li Yutang) who provides monetary support for the revolution, and run the newspaper that presses for rebellion. When the entire unit of bodyguards detailed to protect Sun Yat-Sen is murdered, Li Yutang steps forward to find a new contingent of bodyguards. Every opportunity to heighten the dramatic decibels is taken; Li’s son is chosen as a decoy, leading to many tearful partings; a beggar is given a chance to redeem himself; a corrupt cop is able to redeem himself in the eyes of his family; the daughter of one of the murdered bodyguards joins the unit to fight for revenge. The film takes its time setting the pieces upon the board, making clear that this is a desperate battle against unreasonable odds, the stakes being the future of the nation. The goal is to protect Sun Yat-Sen on his relatively short trip from the dock to two locations and then departure, the entire route an agonizingly exposed trap.

The details of the plan do not matter, because when the revolutionary arrives, the action involves a chaotic mess of superhuman feats to kill what appears to be the entire population of Beijing. The action scenes are involving, and there are some wicked stunts and jaw-shattering blows that are all like OOH. You don’t even care much when characters do the gravity-defying stunt work that is a legal requirement in all Chinese martial arts films since Crouching Tiger. The action scenes are equalled in bombast by the death scenes with lots of slow motion and tearful regrets. It is all very silly, and entertaining, and there are worse ways to spend a few hours of your time.

If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle

Silviu has fifteen days left in a juvenile detention facility in Romania. His crime is never explained, but his motive is made clear in that the only person with whom he lowers his guard is his little brother. His life has meaning only if he can protect him as a father figure, and no sacrifice is beyond consideration. Social workers cannot really reach him, as a straight life is no different than an imprisoned one, as long as his only goal in life is met. His final days are thrown into disarray when his mother sees him for the first time in years to say she is going to take his little brother away with her. This is a deeply involving drama about the choices that are made by people with very few options. Once a person has a criminal record in Romania, their alternatives shrink considerably. Sometimes opportunities must be forced into existence.

His hope for a straightforward life is mirrored by the social worker, Ana, who catches his eye. That most mundane of social exchanges, the cup of coffee, is as distant to him as a dive in an ocean trench. Even normal decisions become impossible, as he cannot shield his brother from his mother’s unwise compulsions. She detests loneliness, and so had children. When dumped by men, she took the children and traipsed around the city. We all know parents like this, and how they ruin the lives of their unfortunate offspring by rendering them as baggage, an audience to pitiful desperation. Silviu’s hand is eventually forced, and he must find a way through, even though there is no way.

George Pistereanu was a smart choice for the lead actor; his face is not emotive in the least, which makes sense for a prison film where walls must be maintained. He does have the appearance of a young kid who is more than capable of eviscerating someone who stands in his way. The character is capable of great violence in service of a tender act; in this, the right notes are hit every time. If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle is a quiet and brooding work that creates a suffocating environment where one must sacrifice all for a breath.

Colors of the Mountain

In a part of the world that regards football as akin to a religion, a child loses his brand new ball as it bounces into a minefield. The temptation to go get it anyway is overwhelming, despite what happened to that pig last week. This small issue becomes symbolic of the loss of innocence and the denial of a childhood in a part of the world torn by internecine conflict. In Columbia, the rural population is squeezed between anti-government rebels who demand attendance for all men at meetings and then active participation in whatever ineffective plans they have, and the military who sweep through the community seizing anyone who went to those meetings or know anyone who did. The lush and green countryside is drained of men, and then entire families who flee the insane and identical choice offered by the warring sides: join us or die. Manuel is a young boy who has a passion for footy, attends school, takes care of his chores, essentially average for a kid in a remote area. The flat place where they play has an adjacent area that has been mined in the past, apparently because it was used to land helicopters. When the ball is kicked out of reach, it parallels the life that will soon be out of reach for all of them.

Manuel has a teacher who is fresh from the city, and is dangerously naive about how precarious it can be for anyone who does not keep their head in the trench. She slowly loses her idealism as name after name is crossed out of her roll call, as they are ‘gone’. Even an act as well-intentioned as painting a mural (over pro-rebel graffiti) on the school wall puts her life in danger. Life is cheap here in ways no child should endure, and the point is made with surprising subtlety. One of Manuel’s friends is an albino, and there are quietly spoken rumors that albinos tend to have shorter lives. It is simply understood who will be sent into the minefield to retrieve the ball. Eventually the conflict razes their area until nothing of value is left – but the ball will be had one way or another. Perhaps the act of reclaiming such a prize is akin to taking one’s childhood by any means possible. This is a bleak but thoughtful consideration of the difficulty of rural life, where every inch of the Earth will become a war zone. The only differing aspects are the players – the fight will be the same no matter where you are.

The Robber

Johann Kastenberger was a bank robber and long-distance runner in Austria; a novel was written about the man who had these synergistic hobbies, and this was developed into the German-language film The Robber. There are many potential methods to adapting this work about a man for whom the adrenaline rush was his reason to be; strangely enough director Benjamin Hiesenberg decided upon a static character study. This was not necessarily a mistake in itself, except that the character of The Robber has no character whatsoever. Whether this is due to the internal performance by Andreas Lust or the lack of any direction by the script, there is nothing there to understand, no insights to consider, and no person to care about. He is a driven man in jail, is released, trains for a marathon, and robs banks. He doesn’t care about the money, stuffed into trash bags as an incidental finding. He does care about the rush, whether it comes from decimating his race competitors or thefting a load of cash does not matter. So what? This theme has been explored before, and there are no new ideas here. What is left is a sociopath who genuinely impugns any human connections, kills his parole officer for annoying him after a race, and is on the run from the police. There is no reason to sympathize with this asshole, so we do not care if he escapes, is caught, is killed, or is raped by bears. He has a girlfriend who expresses love for him though he is incapable of any emotion beyond bland contempt. So we have a main character we hate, his girlfriend who says ‘I love you’ even though we have no idea why she loves this asshole, and a massive manhunt that we watch eagerly only in hope that he is caught, beaten, and burned alive. I hate wasting time in the theatre. Boring, predictable, pointless. Next time, make a character study about someone who has a personality.

Medal of Honor

Nothing seems to go well in Romania. When an elderly pensioner is informed by the veteran’s administration that he is to receive a medal of honor for bravery during the Second World War and will be decorated by the president, he manages to ensure that this goes to shit. The film traffics in the cynical and dry Romanian sense of humor, in that no matter what happens, it will be amusing in how it gets worse. Ion (Victor Rebengiuc) pursues this with the veterans from his past and with the labyrinthine bureaucracy, in search of what he could possibly have accomplished worthy of honor. He did nothing in the war worth remembering, apart from remaining alive. It provides a distraction from his dull life. His wife barely speaks to him, due to a long past betrayal about which he remains obstinately ignorant. He has not heard from his son in years since they had a falling out. Ion is mindlessly patriotic, and unjustifiably arrogant; the medal only feeds this inflated sense of self worth.

Still, he is broke and a pawn shop would pay nothing for this worthless hunk of metal. When he confronts another recipient of this honor, they spurn it as they would a rabid pedophile dog. After a time, however, it becomes a talisman, a source of pride for a man closer to the end than the beginning with nothing to show for his efforts. So when the government moves to strip him of his medal, it has become the only proof that his life has not been a complete waste of time.

Medal of Honor is not overtly funny as much as it is amusing in its sense of the absurd. The hoops required to address any issue are a running gag, the bureaucratic drones who busily do nothing become a source of irritation that becomes funny in itself, and the lead has a total inability to be as important as he pretends. The screenplay finds humor in the dull daily rhythms of life, and the stoic interplay between Ion and his wife touches a nerve. They have been married for thirty years, and there is nothing further to say; even without the bad blood, it bodes poorly for married couples in general that are unable to hide in routine. The heart of the film lies in Ion’s increasingly ridiculous attempts to be every bit as great as the medal would indicate, in his eyes if not anyone else’s. He is struggling to become a person of consequence in the eyes of his family – and he must be deceptive as he is nothing in his own. Fun fact: the former president of Romania, Ion Iliescu, makes a cameo as himself.

Also reviewed for the Wisconsin Film Festival: The Red Chapel, Carancho, Le Amiche, Troll Hunter, Viva Riva!, and Mozart’s Sister.

A film that involves a series of brutal deaths including a guy in a wheelchair by way of a laugh is not exactly taking a middle road. I had to admire writer Mark Doherty’s desire to broaden the appeal of his opus to fuck-all of an audience, except those who want their comedies to be funny. The set up is fussy but efficient, establishing a pair of barely working writers in a crumbling flat who then host an increasing body count present due to circumstances beyond their control. The dialogue is sharp, the reliable Dylan Moran delivers his usual frustrated misanthrope (don’t you dare change) with panache, and events are kept just this side of ridiculous to avoid losing a hysterical audience. The gimmick is that the flat mates are struggling to produce a script despite a lack of any decent ideas for a murder mystery. Trouble is, the good ideas have been taken, and the chaff that is left results in plots that are wildly implausible. For example, one accident is possible. Two is unlikely and indicates foul play. Three or four, and suddenly our protagonists find they are in the middle of a wildly implausible Film With – well, you get the idea. Thankfully, Ian Fitzgibbon’s bold first feature film never attempts to be clever to the point of cute with the meta joke. It wins us over the old-fashioned way – by being really fucking funny.

Dylan Moran plays Pierce, and in a stretch is an alcoholic asshole who has nearly one good script in progress. Mark (who you may have guessed is the screenwriter) is losing his girlfriend, and will be evicted shortly by his cock of a landlord. Mark looks after his paraplegic brother whilst forlornly contemplating suicide. There is no way out for these miserable failures except an unlikely success for their script. And so their fortunes change for the worse. A Film With Me In It uses the structure of a broad comedy to explore the absurd narratives required for fiction, particularly when truly new or clever ideas are difficult to come by. Pierce describes his current abortive project as Fargo and Dog Day Afternoon with a bit of The Conversation, which gives you an idea of just how far along he is. When a terrible accident occurs in their apartment, followed by more of them, they are unable to write their way out of that. After all, who would believe them? Searching for a solution only leads to further disaster, until there is simply no way for them to ever be seen alive again.

The twists and details are almost Byzantine in their knotting, which makes this rewatchable like crazy, but by far the greatest asset are the actors who sell this admittedly far-fetched bullshit like it was purloined fact. The humor is wonderfully dry and the lines fly by thick and fast – Pierce fretting that geeks would obsess about an inaccuracy in the story or the halting explanation provided to a passing police officer demand repeat viewings alone. This is a cinematically literate film, and it avoids being too pushy with references, all while having Neil Jordan play a director in the film (bonus points). This was fucking well done, and if you are appalled at the subject matter, then you may lovingly tongue my asshole.

A Film With Me In It screened with the Wisconsin Film Festival, and will be released in the United States in… oh right, this shit is never released here because nobody goes to see good films. Enjoy your Sandra Bullock films, you maggots.

Cell 211 is a film of extraordinary gravity that blasts through the expected prison film clichés and into something else entirely. It moves briskly, develops characters with precision and efficiency, and drags you with all speed into a finale that gleefully courts disaster. This film comfortably inhabits a place where a lonely human being plunged into impossible circumstances is free to find his own way, even if his cause is truly lost. This is not one of those narratives crafted from a position of safety, where the protagonist is veiled in a rarefied light and all the right people pull through while inconvenient aspects of a complicated situation never enter into the story. The story of Cell 211 progresses in as sloppy a fashion as imaginable, just as a prison riot should. The setup is simple: a prison guard is to start at a high security facility the following day and is taking a tour; he is knocked unconscious by a bit of plaster from the ceiling and a riot breaks out during the confusion, and he is abandoned by the other guards who run for their lives as the inmates overwhelm the block. And so Juan Oliver must think fast, pass for a prisoner, and survive the day.

A lesser film would have a protagonist who is too clever by half and capable of busting heads with unexplained martial art prowess. But this is no simple action flick – the guy is just a guy, not terribly smart or strong, but he has that survival instinct, and the insane courage that comes from having no other choice but to go straight through the gauntlet. He joins the inmates as the riot is in full swing, knowing that the slightest mistake will end with his gutted body. The riot’s leaders are from the DSS program, prisoners marked for special surveillance, prisoners who spend nearly their entire time behind bars in solitary, tenderized by frequent beatings. This riot, as with all others, is to negotiate for better conditions. The government will pretend to give a shit, then ignore the demands as they always have. This time, however, the prisoners have four hostages who the government does care about – terrorists from the Basque separatist group ETA. They do not wish to make waves by allowing these men to be harmed, and so the SWAT teams are at the ready to keep them alive at all costs. Juan Oliver, on the other hand, is a civilian, and can go fuck himself. It gets worse, but I think you get the gist – this is no ordinary prison film, and it gets complicated fast. The rioting prisoners are under the command of Malamadre, a Ruthless motherfucker if ever there was one, while the police cannot even contain protesters or family members of prisoners outside the prison.

The acting is solid throughout, and the characters are finely shaded even when larger than life. Juan has a cruel arc to take, and he conveys this with a the unpolished presence of an everyman. Malamadre lives up to his name. The rest of the crew are fucking perfect, right down to the violent prison chief who portrays the 80s action icons like the whiny little entitled bitches that they are – more on this in a moment. Above them all, the director projects a moody gloom over the proceedings, making a living and breathing character of the crumbling prison, emblematic of the justice system. Its beating heart is Cell 211 itself. The first prisoner onscreen carefully crafts a razor out of a cigarette filter, slashing his wrists for reasons that become clearer with time; the prison itself is a disease, and it eats away at every person within; and so it metastasizes to the rest of the population.

Prison films, due to their inherently limited settings, must adhere to certain tropes, and Cell 211 checks a few familiar boxes, but it also goes for the vitals of an action film mainstay – namely, the conservative sacred cow of delicious revenge. This brings us back to the skull-cracking prison warden, who believes in spilling blood to make a point. Justice is often portrayed as a matter of personal revenge, since an impartial and faceless system could never provide an equal hand. To put it more bluntly, the government is infiltrated by liberal faggots, all of whom are just itching to free violent criminals for any technicality so as to allow mass rape and murder of innocent bystanders with no lines of dialogue. Any thinking person understands that lone gunmen dispensing justice makes for great entertainment but poor public policy. Still, a large number of people worldwide actually believe in justice via an iron fist. The prison warden is quick to action, but only makes the situation worse. A basic flaw to our favorite 80s action icons is that they are all correct without fail; in reality situations like this explode in ways that cannot be anticipated, hence the advantages of a dispassionate system that is fair even when such a thing is distasteful. Cell 211, takes takes a long, hot piss on the entire idea of worship of authority figures.

This is not a political screed, however. Cell 211 is pure entertainment, and exploits the emotions of the audience by the oldest method available – characters that are well-developed and relatable. There is a point to the story, and clearly Daniel Monzon has an axe to grind against the criminal justice system of Spain, but this is to the benefit of a fine story. If this were entirely fictional, it would be rather easy to forget once catharsis has been achieved. There is no true end to Cell 211, and what happens here will continue until justice systems live up to their billing and dispense with revenge.

Cell 211 screened at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

Cristi is a cop in Romania who has been charged with shadowing a 16 year old kid and building  a case for his arrest for smoking and dealing weed. Unlike in the rest of Europe, herb is  illegal here, and cannot be openly smoked. The cops were placed on the tail of this teenager  by the teenager’s friend, who may be more interested in the kid’s girlfriend than in deterring outlawed vices. This all sounds like rather pedestrian and dour subject matter for a police  thriller, and so it unfolds as such before your very eyes, in long takes that give the  impression of an investigation in real time. This is the police procedural to end all; this is what police officers do every day, and it appears tedious beyond belief as the viewer is  dragged from one moment devoid of portent to the next. The subject of the  film is boring, literally nothing happens of note, and yet Police, Adjective is exhilarating to watch if you enjoy films that actually try new things with the medium. Just as Gerry was a daring exercise in the beauty of a void (of action, content, and character development), Police,  Adjective is undeniably something special. It manages to create an unadorned space in which real people commit to real-appearing actions, and in the quiet your mind is allowed to wander into more philosophical directions. When the actors do things that are dull and illogical, you are compelled to wonder why.

Cristi proceeds from one scene to the next with his head down, as if weathering a never-ending wind that emanates from his superiors. He does not believe in his assignment, as arresting  this embryo with a toke in hand will land the kid in a Romanian prison for 8 years or more, which will ruin his life. And even though the kid is smoking, is he really dealing?  Technically, maybe, if someone else shares it. Cristi is aware of the liberal laws elsewhere,  and feels the law may change in Romania, so there is no point in going after this case. In particular, the informant attracts more suspicion than the current suspect, and has a clear ulterior motive. This setup calls into question the entire point of law enforcement, which appears for all the world to primarily require looking busy. More to the point, it is about  adhering to technical rules that are inapplicable to questions of civic duty or morality. To wit, perhaps the greatest quality of a policeman is his ability to avoid enforcing the law.

The filmmaker has described this work as a ‘police thriller’, one of many examples of dry wit. Police work is procedure-based, but is anything but thrilling, and consists primarily of writing reports. There is no gun. When the cop returns to his apartment, he is not ambushed by an assailant. There is no stupid police chief, no major clues or big breaks, no conspiracy to  follow. Throughout there is a strong subtext of the importance of language, with extraordinarily careful use of terminology; it is as though every character is afraid of  falling off the earth if they stumble in their endless dialectic battle. And such precise use of dialogue and scene leaves carefully defined edges where you can consider where, or whether, conscience should begin. The characters in Police, Adjective are Romanian, and they must adhere tightly to the laws of the land, as well as language. This is made clear in a truly  astounding scene that stretches for 15 minutes where three men argue over dictionary  definitions. How director Corneliu Porumboiu managed to make this not only interesting, but hilarious is beyond me. But we are swept along by long and pointless scenes where Cristi follows a group of kids, goes home, writes reports with passages like “For three hours, nothing happened”.  He hangs out by a coffee shop and explains his presence to the owner by claiming to be from public works and watching a hole in the ground to make sure nobody falls  in; this is accepted without question, and is one of many subtle ways one is introduced to  post-Ceausescu Romania.

The central theme is whether it is possible to follow the rules while doing the right thing,  and obviously this is impossible. There must be an interpretation, else a descent into madness  is inevitable. But our cop is interpreting the law, and in itself this is seen as an evil. His captain patiently, and reasonably, argues that such interpretation removes the law from the realm of impartial fairness and into individual bigotry. This occurs not by logic, but by scrupulous analysis of dictionary definitions of such words as ‘police officer’ and ‘law’. And so follows a long conversation wherein it is made clear that one can be absolutely correct and dead wrong simultaneously. Somewhere along the line, some become so mired in rules that they lose sight of their purpose in society; a cognitive dissonance overwhelms even the most intelligent people. This devotion to  following rules to the letter seems a part of the identity of Romania, and contributes more than a little uncertainty as to the nation’s future. After the brutal regime of Ceausescu, during which at least 2 million people were killed, Romania was in economic dire straits; more recently it has gone through a resurgence with significant improvements in living conditions. Still, significant problems remain in the vast empty spaces between the crumbling gray buildings that filled the eye during the running time of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days; an uneasiness with evading strict rules and returning to the recent mire may drive this sentiment. Police, Adjective, as with the rest of the sublime cinema that has come from Romania in recent years, is a particular product of its home country, but expresses ideas that are universal to our world.

Police, Adjective was screened at the Wisconsin Film Festival.

Shirley Adams

There are some events in life that are truly impossible to understand unless they happen to you. Nothing can prepare you for coping with such situations, and empathy is forever out of reach. Shirley Adams is a single mother living in Cape Town, and her son was left as a quadriplegic (with some arm use) after being shot in the spine by thugs. The event is not portrayed, nor any reason given for the event, and rightly so since such things are meaningless for those left to pick up the pieces. Her husband left, and it is suggested that an inability to deal with his son was the reason. While avoiding melodrama, Shirley Adams gets across just how thankless a task it is to care for someone who is left a shell of his former self. The son is unable to provide even minimal self-care due to being physically shattered, and emotionally he is a husk, as he is well aware of the empty life left ahead of him. This is better than just about any film I have ever seen about the complexities of the aftermath of tragedy. It is messy, incomplete, and fraught with abrupt shifts in tone, just as it should be.

Shirley’s son attempts suicide by pill ingestion, which is extraordinarily difficult to do when you cannot use your hands. Shirley cannot understand how this feels, nor the drive for suicide; she does not pretend to. She just keeps working, and doing her best to take care of him. We are taken through the daily routines, cooking, cleaning, dealing with money and medication shortages due to being unable to work steadily, bathing him. Daily work, with no end in sight, no crying, no emotion if at all possible. The question of why this happened, and why her son was shot never comes up, though it is made clear the question circulates through her mind every moment of every day. There is a wonderful sequence where the boys who perpetrated the crime are caught, and it is made clear just how hollow any sense of victory is after the tragedy has already taken place. The mother and the son no longer have any reason to care about this, and the absurdity of daily life is written on their faces. A social worker drops by to work with her son, and her naivete is as plain and awkward as a newborn impala. She may want to find a way to help, but can never be savvy to whether that help is wanted or needed. Her ability to wake him out of his funk has an unexpected result, but then, one can never predict the effect people can have on one another.

Shirley Adams is filmed with a claustrophobic eye, often choking the viewer – this is not a comfortable film to watch as it often hits rather close to home. The technique is often jarring, and pitch-perfect. Oliver Hermanus filmed this for SABC television, but it comes off as feature film quality. The central performance by Denise Newman is bold and unflinching, and one can hope she finds equally challenging roles in the future. The resolution is as random (yet strangely expected) as anything else in the film, just as the tragedies and triumphs of life are often random and not interested in whatever plans you have previously made. Life goes on. Or not. What Shirley Adams conveys with astute observations is the relative lack of meaning in our direction; there is only the drive to survive, which not everyone has. Even more crucially, one cannot comprehend what it is like to live with disability. Those who are cut down are locked in their perspective, and those who remain whole are in theirs.

Thorn In The Heart

Michel Gondry is one of the more exciting directors today, crafting some of the more revolutionary (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) or at least clever (Science of Sleep) films that consider what it means to be human, which is an elusive and complicated subject to say the least. It is surprising, then, that his new film is such a meandering slog. The subject of this documentary is Gondry’s aunt, who taught classes at various levels in the south of France… and that is about it. She tells stories, expresses regret about one of her sons who has been a ‘thorn in her heart’, and we revisit some of the places she lived in her youth in this traipse down memory lane. The question of why this demanded an actual film is left unanswered, except that Gondry has the resources to make a movie. It really is little beyond an assemblage of home movies with a few interesting scenes thrown in with no overall vision. There is one such scene where the ruins of a former school are resuscitated for one night as they show a film for the locals who have gathered in what is now a forest clearing. Probably the most inessential film of the year apart from Nightmare on Elm Street.

Point Traverse
It is convention in cinema that the protagonist is someone special (otherwise, why tell a story about them?), destined for greatness. A chosen one on the hero’s journey, or perhaps an ordinary individual who must triumph over incredible odds. This artifice bleeds off the screen and into popular culture and the life of the viewer as one identifies with those onscreen. I like to think this plays a part in the entitled psychology of this generation. It is deeply satisfying to see this convention left for dead in Point Traverse, one of the best features of the year so far. An ordinary story is told with solid craft by Albert Shin in a confident feature debut. The background subtext, as persistent as the fluorescent overhead lighting in a fast food restaurant, is the uncomfortably bleak but practical question “What if I was not destined for greatness… or anything at all?” Fortunately this existential trip without specific direction has more than its share of interesting stops, all relating to the central theme.

The opening shots are drenched in the realism of drudgery; Adwin works in a small town burger place, generally by himself, and seems content with this responsibility and the steady paychecks spent on his solitary apartment. Cael is a drifter, hitching rides and going from one random place to crash after another, stealing when possible to stay alive. Cael went to school with Adwin; presumably neither saw a reason to go past high school. In short, one is tethered to a stable job and an adequate life, the other is in dire poverty but is completely free. The characters are neither eloquent or particularly self-aware, and the film is devoid of expository dialogue, requiring you to read between the lines to understand who these people are and how we relate to them. Our plot, what little there is, sets in motion when Cael drops in on Adwin to hang out for a while before moving on to the next town. Nothing is revealed apart from their circumstances, and Adwin and Cael drink the night away. There is no overt reflection on this night, at least not immediately. The only progression in the story is that of character development, which is largely wordless.

Adwin and Cael are on two opposite sides of a looking glass, and they wonder, with remarkably internal performances, what lies on the other side. For Cael, freedom is his prison, and the source of his crushing poverty. He gets a job, and a girlfriend, but his habits make it impossible to keep one, then the other. And he moves on as always. Adwin glares balefully at the tools of his trade and begins to wonder what else there is in life. He hires a girl and cultivates a relationship, but being a pathologically lonely social retard, this does not go the way he plans. All he has is the dead-eyed endurance that allows him to do well in his job. In one exemplary scene, he is sawing chicken carcasses, and the scene stretches… a little too long. Similar to how a word hanging in the air long enough becomes awkward, he considers his situation and the silence magnifies his absurd existence. Such nothingness itself can organically grow tension, much as Jean-Pierre Melville would as he advised his cinematographer “Kiddo, let’s stretch this one out a bit.” Both Adwin and Cael tread water in their isolation, but this isolation has emotional investment. There is a murder, but it has no import or relevance to the story; at least, no more than the trees the people trudge through, the lakes they overlook, the mountains that stare down upon them. Such things will stand long after our minimal existences cease, and function as signposts for those who walk by.

So much of Point Traverse is a blank slate (filled with symbolism and beautifully shot moments, of course) that one is free to project and consider their own lives in a similar context. In a way, your enjoyment may depend on what you bring to the theatre, and whether you are in the mood for something entertaining in its own right, but with room to stretch out and get philosophical.

Izulu Lami (My Secret Sky)

Films taking place in the most impoverished parts of the world begin their lives at high risk of devolving into tragedy porn, and it takes a sure hand to steer the ship into such troubled waters without losing an audience. There is nothing worse than feeling manipulated, even if the goals of the manipulator are noble. Izulu Lami, a remarkable new film from South Africa, avoids sentiment and hokey cliche in favor of a narrative designed to bring its audience to understand the life of an orphan in one of the most harsh places in the world to be one. Shot on location in KwaZulu-Natal, a boy and girl watch their mother die, ostensibly of HIV/AIDS, and their world falls apart quickly. All they have left in the world is a woven mat their mother completed just before her death, and it comes to embody their hopes for the near future. This is nowhere near as precious as it sounds – Izulu Lami is a surprisingly cynical and knowing film.

There are an estimated 11 million children orphaned in sub-Saharan Africa, and HIV is only one of the causes (about 70% in this part of the world). Rural areas are unusually affected due to a relative lack of preventive education and support services. When parents die, the only common solution is for distant relatives to adopt them, and so they do for the benefit check. Often they are exploited in ways physical or sexual that the community tends to ignore. Izulu Lami nails this sense of the world crumbling beneath the feet of the two children as their aunt sells off everything of value before leaving forever. Funerals happen in every community, no matter how small, every single weekend, and this sort of thing is common enough to be accepted. They are left with a bare house of no value – but the older girl has managed to hide the potentially valuable mat. The village prays to the ancestors and ancients to protect these children as the myth of universal African generosity is skewered mercilessly. It is satisfying to see these cliches burned at the stake – Africans are no more or less greedy than anyone else, and this intensifies if the dead relative had the AIDS curse. The children are more than poor – they are untouchable.

Left with few options, they decide to flee for the city – that other cliched source of hope and boundless optimism. There is a white priest there who had purchased a mat from their mother in the past, and perhaps he would favor them this time. They do not have a name, only a photo and maybe an address. But Durban is a five hour drive from their remote village, and these children are wandering on foot. The journey is a difficult one, made all the worse by their discovery that kindness is hard to come by. Eventually they reach the sprawling urban center of Durban, only to find that religious figures are of no help to anonymous street kids like them. The only assistance they can find is of the accidental kind, as a glue-sniffing street kid, played with considerable charisma and presence by Tshepang Mohlomi, lends a hand while figuring out how to wring some money from these farm children. Sobahle Mkhabase turns in a complicated performance as the young girl who must obtain some street smarts in a hurry or the city will swallow them whole.

In the end, the mat along with any other potential source of hope turns out as false as the supposed cohesion of their home village. Izulu Lami takes a fascinating and circuitous route in showing that true hope only comes from within; any external source is worthless. In a quiet scene with considerable emotional punch, the children set aflame not only a source of such false hope, but a symbol their ancestors, their religion and everything that failed to provide even minimal solace. It is only too common that children orphaned by AIDS in Africa must fend for themselves. For these two children, there is no way out, but there may be a way through. Izulu Lami is at turns funny and heartbreaking, but above all else it is grounded in reality.

The Exploding Girl

The movement of aggressively quirky, ironically detached cinema has given way to more dreary mumblecore dramas with pretensions of neorealism, which in a way is like meningitis becoming a persistent vegetative state; less of an emergency during which you shit yourself, more of a languid bore that is easily forgotten. In that vein, let us explore, and then promptly ignore The Exploding Girl. This is a tale of love lost and then sort of found again, which is something you have experienced unless you have been aborted in the first trimester.

The Girl in question has a boyfriend, Greg, who moves across the country, and the two have a long distance relationship. As so often happens, one (in this case Greg) loses interest and finds someone else. Meanwhile, a guy from her college moves in with her and her mom (since his parents sublet his room) and the two begin to gel in the way people do when not afflicted by agoraphobia. This is nothing you have not seen before, and is crushingly straightforward without the benefit of an incompetent director to bring something interestingly ludicrous to the table. This whole thing is so much more inconsequential on the big screen than in real life.

I wish I had more to say on the matter, but there just isn’t much here. An element of drama is attempted as the girl has a seizure disorder which manifests itself when she drinks too much after being dumped. This gimmick adds nothing of value other than unnecessary metaphor. Meanwhile, I managed to compose an elaborate grocery list and read The Onion twice. So, at least you can get something useful done if you wish to see The Exploding Something Something.

Mid-August Lunch

Ferragosto is the harvest festival, traditionally at the end of summer, reduced from one solid month of faffing about in Roman times to a single day of celebration in the present. With that setting, Gianni is about to host his own small, but significant festival in his flat. Gianni takes care of his 93-year-old mother, and lost his regular job, making it impossible to pay rent. Fortunately, his landlord has a solution: watch his mother so he can get away for the weekend. As it happens, additional professionals drop off their elderly family members to cancel out unpaid debts, and our hero is running a miniature assisted living facility. This lighthearted and gentle farce is a considerable change of pace for the director of Gomorrah, to put it mildly. It does not have a larger point to make, apart from noting that a lust for life can last well into the twilight years, barring onset of dementia. These ladies are very much alive, ready for one glass of wine after another, dancing, and enjoying the fine cuisine that our long-suffering host can provide. Initially this is a burden for him, as these women are quite the handful. One in particular is all about the bar scene, nipping out to troll for ass and then drunkenly trying to seduce Gianni. This is not a ham-handed commentary about neglect of senior citizens, it is just a slice of life plugged into a cooking-heavy film where everyone has a glass of vino in hand at all times.

Mid-August Lunch is brisk, and almost slight enough to blow away with the breeze. One grounding aspect is Gianni’s push well past middle age. He seems to understand just where he is headed, and can only hope to appreciate the time he has left as much as his charges do. This effortlessly charming film is funny, and emotionally involving without a hint of manipulation, never for a moment overstaying its welcome.

Sweetgrass

Touted as a beautifully shot look at the life of sheep farmers in Montana, Sweetgrass had considerable potential as a meditative look at an extraordinarily lonely job. On these terms, Sweetgrass works reasonably well, though it is so distanced from its subject that one is left with a sort of ‘huh’ feeling at the end. The landscape photographs well, and the director manages to capture not only the beauty, but the unforgiving roughness of the terrain. Odd scenes such as the opening shot of a sheep staring gormlessly into the camera evokes a mood rather than offering illumination into how such a life is lived. The ranch hands take their sheep on epic strolls across the mountains to graze on public lands (until 2003 this was the case), a massive effort with shorn wool as the fruit of their labor.

It captures the absurdities inherent in the life of a cowboy in the modern age; open grazing is coming to an abrupt end as factory farms produce nearly all of our food supply. Sheep no longer scrabble along ridges for sweet grass – they are jammed into massive warehouses and fed chemical mixtures with antibiotics. The men working this herd do not appear to enjoy their jobs, or at least that is the impression given by one hand who is raving about the motherfucking terrain, the cocksucking sheep, and his son of a bitching knee. He needs to walk on it considering his dog is too exhausted to even stand, and his horse is approaching lame status thanks to the fucking piece of shit mountain. Times change, and Sweetgrass considers the end of this way of life.

Check back for longer individual reviews of the following films from Wisconsin Film Festival: The Law, Cell 211, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, A Film With Me In It, and Police, Adjective.

The Telluride Film Festival is a cruel mistress, never more so than in a year that promised the usual also-rans and refuse from Venice and Toronto. Telluride prides itself on the world premieres that later achieve respectability and industry buzz (Juno and Slumdog Millionaire being most prominent), but more than ever, it’s just as content to slide through the uneventful and pretend you’re lucky to be paying for the privilege. I was not in a good mood as I drove into the always breathtaking little mountain town (this is my eighth festival, and the scenery never gets old), largely because the general state of cinema has pushed me to stay away from the theater more than ever. 2009 has been legitimately lethargic and mediocre, but I’ve become so jaded that my usual excitement about the exclusivity of an elite weekend turned to rage before I saddled up for my first queue.

Once again, limited funds ensured that, as an Acme pass holder, I would have to remain joined at the hip with the Chuck Jones Theater in Mountain Village (the best seats in town, but so detached from the action that it may as well be located in Denver), a reality that further limits my scheduling. As expected, the shows I wanted to see were either at ungodly hours (The White Ribbon, all 144 minutes of it, starts at 10:30pm?), or conflicted with other venues. And the TBA’s, usually a quirky element of the festival that allows for unpredictability and excitement, pissed me off to no end, as I couldn’t pull the trigger on Sunday without knowing what would play on Monday. And so on and so forth.

I know: Shut the fuck up, you bastard. You’re in Telluride, inhaling free beef jerky, breathing clean mountain air, and watching some of the best sunsets on the planet. But hey, I’m the kind of guy who still rails against nature for the brevity of the male orgasm, so there’s no pleasing me. Nevertheless, I offer no apologies for (along with my wife) being the most negative person in any given line. While everyone else gushed, swooned, and beamed, I harshed a hundred buzzes without pause. Telluride continually brings out my dark, unpleasant, inner contrarian, and it has become almost instinctual to piss on the festival parade. Still, how often can one endure unblinking love for the average and the merely decent? Telluride has a knack for bringing out the kind of filmgoers who put the last movie they saw at the top of their list of all-time favorites, and like flies to shit, we always seem to find the aging couple who hate “disturbing” and “depressing” as much as they love formulaic and phony.

More than ever, 2009’s edition has proven that my sedentary lifestyle is not all conducive to the frenetic pace of a festival. Unless the film plays at high fucking noon, I seem to stagger from screenings exhausted and bereft, uncertain whether I genuinely dislike the movie or simply remember little else but an initial frown. For now, I’ll assume my fatigue is indifference and a failure to meet my blue-ribbon standards, but there’s a cliché-in-waiting that just might apply: I’m too old for this shit. Then again, no fewer than three films featured central characters betrayed by lovers who harbored secret families (it’s the new pedophilia), and there are always those confounding short films to deal with. But for every Nic Cage railing at a Labor Day picnic about his “overacting,” there is a coveted sneak preview slot being taken by some Herzog rubbish that bored me to tears with a mere three sentence description. And how, in the same weekend, could I miss a gimme Oscar trivia question and miss running into Helen Mirren by mere seconds? Now she’ll never know how I really feel about her. And now, the films — some good, some bad, most down that damnable middle of the road.

Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans

Leave it to the irredeemably insane Werner Herzog to submit the most curiously delightful head-scratcher of the festival; a film so appallingly ridiculous on its face that it should come as no surprise that it survives its journey from madness to sublime entertainment fully intact. A crime drama with precious little of either, this in-name-only remake dispenses with the Catholic guilt of its predecessor and instead, embraces the reliably unhinged Nicolas Cage (proving that true genius lies in casting) as a figure of guiltless criminality. As Mr. Cage stated in the film’s post-screening Q&A, Herzog approached this glorious wreck not as a study in sin and redemption, but rather the “glory of evil,” where a man can — and perhaps, should — use his position of authority to satisfy the darker urges we all share. Cage also informed the crowd that, during a mid-shoot wrap party, Herzog insisted that he would never again make another movie unless “his iguanas” could remain on screen for a full five minutes, rather than the cutting room floor. Iguanas, you ask? Though best discovered on your own terms and in your own way, rest assured that said creatures not only get their very own lyrical interlude, but are closely photographed by Herzog himself, who can now lay claim to being the first filmmaker on record to score a POV shot from a lizard. There’s also an alligator, as if there were any doubt.

If it matters, and I can assure you that it does not, the plot (like a bad episode of Kojak with a bit of German engineering) involves brutal drug killings in the Crescent City, as well as a beleaguered police force that appears all-too-willing to take matters into its own hands. Xzibit is the kingpin in question, and he’s just the man you’d want to gun down an entire household in defense of his turf. He kills, but always with a smile. Cage, channeling Richard III by way of Richard Nixon, mumbles, limps, garbles, and twitches his way through a performance that is technically a character, though its claws simply reattach to a body of work that has yet to inhabit a universe with a molecule of subtlety or shading. Eyebrows fully arched and sweat dripping in epileptic frenzy, Cage’s bad cop interrogates, accuses, probes, bribes, and threatens, all in the ragged pursuit of the next high which, thankfully, is never more than fifteen seconds away. Cage smokes crack, snorts coke, dabbles in heroin, and pops any number of pills, though he’s so damned inviting that it’s less a cautionary tale than a masterpiece of comic invention. He even commands a top football recruit to shave a few points for a crucial bet. Not surprisingly, Cage’s mad stomp through this dirty, crime-ridden shithole leads him to a retirement home where, in the pursuit of a justice that long ago left the bayou, he deprives an uncooperative geezer of her oxygen in order to secure information. Needless to say, he’s also pointing a loaded gun at her caretaker’s head. Though both survive, he leaves the pair with hateful words so damned agreeable, they just might become a national motto.

Cage’s growling, and the nearly unbroken fit of hilarity that ensues, is matched scene-for-scene by Eva Mendes as a whore/girlfriend, Brad Dourif as a sleazy bookmaker, Val Kilmer as a puffy, amoral cop, and Jennifer Coolidge playing, well, the umpteenth ditzy scumbag in a career where sobriety and sanity long ago ceased being viable options. And make sure you stay tuned for a final act of such preposterous good fortune that it becomes impossible not to conclude that Herzog wants evil itself to triumph, or at least have bad behavior avoid the lash of moral judgment. Simply put, for all of his evidence tampering, theft, denial of civil rights, cruelty, and unlovable depravity, Cage’s bad lieutenant is a man of action; a force of the very nature Herzog worships with muscular abandon. All the better to be promoted for it. And when he stands tall, a captain in full measure, we remember that last, fatal bust where it all came together. “Shoot him again,” Cage instructs the drug lord regarding a slimy rival. “His soul is still dancing.” And just like that, as the bloody corpse receives yet another bullet, the departed one’s spirit rises forth, kicks into gear, and yes, dances before us. Breakdances, to be exact. And yet we never question the logic. Crap has rarely been so operatic.

Fish Tank

Andrea Arnold is a director at the top of her game. After the magnificent short film Wasp, which was soon followed by the gritty, uncompromising Red Road, she can now be compared to the best of Mike Leigh without apology or risk of overstatement. She’s the go-to filmmaker for the hopelessness of Britain’s still defiantly rigid class system; where a life in the projects guarantees little save the pain and misfortune similarly visited upon mom, dad, grandma, and every generation within earshot. Without sentimentality, false hope, or condescension, Arnold conveys a sense of doom without ever overplaying her hand. These are human beings, yes, and victims to a small degree, but whenever a moment of sympathy creeps in, a profound lack of common sense or poor life choice swings the pendulum back to disgust. Acutely observational in tone, the small community we witness is loud, nasty, and overcrowded, made worse by the vulgarity of the abbreviated educations on display.

Though largely plot-free, Fish Tank is, above all, the coming-of-age tale of 15-year-old Mia, though unlike nearly every effort in this overstuffed genre, no life lessons are learned, and what hope we find comes in the form of a failed audition for a strip club. Mia dreams of dancing her way out of her dreary existence, and though she has drive and desire, she lacks any visible talent. Much screen time is devoted to her routines, the painfully earnest exercises of youthful abandon, yet they are utterly dreadful from top to toe. Throughout this movie, I quietly cheered this brave directorial decision, as we’re usually expected to believe that our ghettos exist solely to hide reservoirs of untapped potential; unkempt saints denied their just due by the brutal indignities of short-sighted, bigoted gatekeepers. Mia, no plucky heroine, is a feisty, surly, foul-mouthed little bitch, and she’ll end up just like her bleached tramp of a mother, whatever her efforts.

Sure, there is young love, lust, and pained jealousy, but all evolve from the wellspring of authenticity, not detached idealism. Mia and her sister, for example, are about as close to real siblings we’re likely to see on film, and there isn’t a false note to be found in their caustic co-dependency. A new school beckons, but the film tempers its temporary optimism with a closing scene of quiet, depressing power. As the mother sadly gyrates to a driving beat while settling in for yet another booze-soaked, work-free day, both daughters join in her dance. What appears to be an atypical escape from failure and hardship is instead the ultimate representation of how generational pathology is passed along like a virus. I’ve always believed that the boy of ten is the man of forty, and here is no more striking example. These are fiercely unreflective people, “working” class in name only, who will die largely unchanged. And yet they keep trying; carving out small moments of fleeting pleasure that dissipate the precise moment they are acknowledged. It’s life as lived, without the Hollywood gloss.

Life During Wartime

Sadly, Todd Solondz has reached the end of the line. He’s out of gas, out of ideas, and so beyond even the minimal effort to surprise us that he’s revisiting old characters for no discernable reason save pure laziness. Using familiar names from both Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, Solondz forgot to bring along the originality and sense of daring that so defined those previous efforts. Now, older and not at all wiser, he is a man cursing the darkness of his own creative bankruptcy. All told, Life During Wartime is a dull, pointless exercise in unmotivated action; where characters walk and talk not according to anything resembling reality, but rather the tired drive to shock the senses in a world that has moved beyond such puerile predictabilities. Far from a gifted voice of the cinema, Solondz now appears to be content as a fringe carnival barker; an irrelevant “auteur” masturbating to the sound of his own anonymity. His swift decline, via this atrocious spray of mist, was surely one of the most depressing realizations of an already dreary festival.

The pedophile dad from Happiness returns as a different actor (they’re all played by new faces, actually), only this time he hasn’t a thing to occupy his time. Even a hotel bar seduction with Charlotte Rampling, surely a scenario that oozes with dark comic possibility, is horribly wasted and awkwardly staged. The scene almost plays like lost footage from another movie. His ex-wife, Trish (Alison Janney), is trying to move on, but Solondz has found the least interesting manner possible of doing so. And Joy, the sad sack sister, is back and as pathetic as before, but now she’s resorting to imaginary conversations with a dead boyfriend, endless scenes that are overlong even when measured in mere seconds. Jokes are strained, story turns fall flat, and all that’s left is the arrogant assumption that we should care because we’ve heard these names before under far better circumstances. Though topical satire withers on the vine with cruel rapidity, such pointed commentary still would have been better than this toothless chamber of horrors that all but ignores the genuine madness happening right outside its cloistered walls.

A Prophet

After all these years, it’s good to see that penitentiaries remain dank laboratories of rape-fueled showers, random throat-slashings, and cigarette-heavy bribery for small favors. Pity, though, that the lesbian guards have the gone the way of the daring, midnight escapes via the laundry carts. All of these sigh-filled familiarities clog the arteries of A Prophet, a film that damn near stole away this past year’s Palme d’Or, despite often playing like a bad marriage between Midnight Express, American Me, The Shawshank Redemption, and any number of movies featuring Paul Muni. Though well-crafted and superbly acted, the film’s criminal over-length (150 minutes that passed like hours), combined with the moth-eaten story of a young innocent who learns the jailhouse ropes from a ruthless mentor, sentences the enterprise to the cure-for-insomnia bin. Stupidly, I endured this ass-numbing exercise first thing in the morning, which means my boredom was exceeded only by the drool that rolled in thick waves from my gaping maw. I’m not saying that the world didn’t need another reminder that prison is quite possibly the most dangerous place on planet earth, but surely the silver screen could have pounded home the same trite message in a quick flurry of images over a coffee break, rather than a large chunk of my very busy day. I had no idea the program’s description of “Kafkaesque” also applied to the audience.

Inside this particular French prison, there are the Corsicans, an aging, though still-powerful gang that clings to old traditions, such as tapping new recruits to gut stool pigeons like they’re being prepped for Thursday’s meatloaf. Malik, the wide-eyed innocent in question (so innocent that he’s received a lengthy prison sentence for, I’m assuming, failing to bring in his overdue library books), complies with this violent request, though only after much soul-searching. Unfortunately, it’s also a murder that saddles the poor boy with the victim’s yammering ghost for the better part of the picture. Competing with the Corsicans for control are the Arab gangs, equally ruthless upstarts who appear to have forgotten the chain of command that exists in such subcultures. It is here, with the inclusion of the Muslim population, where the film generates some much-needed heat, as Malik’s meteoric rise appears to mirror France’s own struggle with non-assimilating immigrants. Malik’s eventual triumph (and release) may in fact signal the director’s shrugging sense of resignation, but it could just as easily be a warning for a fractured nation on the edge of disaster. Regardless of the larger implications, there’s little here I haven’t seen before.

An Education

Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly ruined the world in any number of ways, the most obvious being her malodorous life lessons for budding young women everywhere; primarily, that one can sip champagne, visit Paris, and navel gaze as a matter of course, rather than as temporary breaks in the tedium of living. There’s nothing that a good hat or fashionable pair of sunglasses can’t cure, and for Jenny (Carey Mulligan), they are both worth the trade for a top education at Oxford. Jenny is almost obscenely bright and clever for her age (I doubt America has ever had such girls about), and though it is 1961, she’ll be damned if antiquated ways are going to hold her back from a rich, fulfilling, independent life. She’s a top student, loves the written word, and has enough pluck for a dozen heroines; she’s more Portrait of the Idealist as a Young Woman than your average teenager. The world is for the taking, and ideas, purity, romance, and love are, expectedly, all that matter. Needless to say, she’s also an obnoxious little sot, and once she meets a much older, more sophisticated man, she’s more than willing to get married and become what she presumably hates.

Of course, the man (Peter Sarsgaard) is nothing like her father, which means he earns his bread through theft and chicanery instead of hard work, which can be more than justified by being in direct contrast to bourgeois boredom. As a couple, they travel, eat like kings, and exchange witty banter in hip jazz clubs, though it’s only a matter of time before the other shoe drops and Jenny is made the fool. She deserves the comeuppance, of course, and I cheered her cruel dismissal as she attempted to crawl back into the good graces of those she so casually cast aside during her wild ride of good fortune. Unfortunately, the movie (based on one of those ubiquitous memoirs that may or may not contain an ounce of truth) rewards her in the end for her foul deeds, when we all know that such women usually live out the nightmare of their own creation, regretting their naiveté until the grave beckons. In the end, I never believed Jenny’s affectations were anything other than a means by which to set herself apart from her parents; mere pretensions to garner the attention she so desperately craved. Like so many smart girls, she’s all-too-willing to put away her books for the first gent to take her dancing.

Make Way for Tomorrow

It seems fitting that the best film playing in Telluride over the Labor Day weekend would be from 1937, rather than the gray, depressing present. Even better, it’s currently unavailable on home video in any format, making the screening an exclusive, must-see event. Adding to the charm is the fact that the film is from Alexander Payne’s private stash; a surprisingly undamaged print he acquired from eBay for the princely sum of six dollars. That aside, the movie just happens to be an unsung classic, the sort of film that can hold court with the best of Ozu in terms of emotional heft and depth of humanity. Appropriately, this film inspired nothing less than Tokyo Story, and it does not suffer for the comparison. Orson Welles once said of Make Way for Tomorrow that “it would make a stone cry,” and the results demonstrate his lack of exaggeration. It’s about acceptance and loss, aging and death, but at its core, it begs for living life beyond one’s role as a parent. Though likely unintended, this is the best argument yet for staying the hell away from cribs and diapers and taking a vacation instead. At the very least, don’t wait fifty years to revisit old memories.

Leo McCarey’s direction is as surefooted as ever, and the performances — especially those of the unwanted, burdensome parents (played flawlessly by Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) — are surprisingly nuanced for the time, and the authenticity is secured right down to the final scene, which avoids the expected turn for the better. In fact, the final images at the train station are shattering, if only because they so violate the norms of American cinema, then and now. Movies are usually about hope and opportunity, or the next best thing around the corner, so imagine the shock at finding one over 70 years old that provides no comfort, and offers no quarter. Yes, the children are nasty and selfish, but what they decide is far from unreasonable. Life should go on, and each generation must surely pass the torch. And of course, the parents are irritating and frustrating, but do they not deserve honesty and respect, or at least a quiet, dignified end for lives well-lived? Thankfully, the film never offers answers or asks for clear lines between heroes and villains, nor does it wallow in cheap sentiment. There is humor and charm to spare, and a warmth not from decency winning out over evil, but that of a job well done.

London River

No film about terrorism in the modern age has any right to succeed, if only because the political undertones are bound to be oversimplified and shouted at the top of their lungs. Thankfully, we have London River, a quiet, understated film that avoids politics altogether and instead focuses on loss at the personal level. If I were to tell you that the two characters at the center of the movie were a vaguely bigoted widow from Guernsey (Brenda Blethyn), and a solemn, rail-thin African Muslim from Paris (Sotigui Kouyate), you could practically submit your own appalled objection. Do they break down racial and ethnic barriers and share a hug for all mankind? Do they screech and pontificate and see the error of their ways? Not really is the best I can offer, but rest assured that sentiment remains far in the distance this time around, and though these two parents, both of whom are searching for their missing children in the wake of the July 2005 London bombings, do approach a tentative, uncertain bond, they are more opportunists in need of temporary crutches for their grief.

More than a story of tragedy and desperation, however, is the fact that in their own way, both the mother and the father in turn have never really known their children. The realization that each will never see their kids again is painful in any context, but more so because no opportunities will ever again exist for bridging the divide. Sure, it seems cutesy and convenient that the two kids were involved with each other, killed on the same bus because they were taking a trip to France, but from scattered clues, it seems quite possible that the privileged white girl was having that obligatory affair with a minority group to, in whatever manner left to her, strike back at her mother. Even the girl’s flirtation with Arabic lessons and the like demonstrates that irritating youthful indulgence with the Other that is bound to fade with adult responsibility and the crush of the real world. Mom may one day come to see that herself, once the shock of loss yields to numbing routine. Still, any film that tackles something so topical without speechifying must receive something slightly more than a muted endorsement.

Vincere

Here, at last, is the story of Ida Dalser, a young Italian woman who claimed to have had Mussolini’s son before his ignoble rise to power, only to be declared insane, sent to a mental hospital, and thrown in a pauper’s grave upon expiration. I say “at last” in jest, of course, because there’s no way in hell this is coming to a theater near you, though such news is, as you would expect, not even remotely tragic. Even if true, I’m not sure we can blame Il Duce for denying the marriage and birth, largely because running a chaotic empire in the midst of depression and war seems a tad more important than the self-involved ravings of a woman scorned. Think about it: a man like Mussolini obviously has the drive and ambition of a hundred men, and with that comes an unquenchable passion. I hate to tell you, lady, but Benito likely has dozens of children cluttering up Italy, and I’m not sure it’s in the nation’s interest to have them all move into the presidential palace. You were once a great love, but he’s, like, dictator now, so admit your lies and put the brutal nuns of institutional life behind you.

Despite some truly gorgeous cinematography and gripping sequences, the whole adds up to very little, as Mussolini disappears completely after an hour, so that the woman’s tale can receive full focus. We see Il Duce through newsreels and the like, which is unfortunate, as it’s his story that holds all the interest. His rise to power, as expected, is oversimplified to the point of high comedy, as one day he’s standing naked on a hotel balcony as the dark streets fill with noise, while the next he’s in the charge of the whole damn enterprise. Bizarre on-screen words and an overbearing musical score don’t help, and the story seems to turn on granting this woman a sympathy she may not have earned. Were mental institutions a means by which to control outspoken, independent women? Most assuredly, but they also housed the genuinely insane, and Ida just might have been yet another starstruck groupie who attached herself to a rising star because her own was fading in the mist. In any case, a long and routine effort that may occupy an evening, but won’t register beyond its one and only viewing.

The White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s film was the most anticipated of the festival, which only goes to show that outsized expectations are the greatest curse to befall a moviegoer. While a good film overall, and one that features a host of spectacular scenes, it fell short of the anticipated masterpiece, so the tears I cry are for the failure of initial impression. I fully expect to revisit the movie, if only to flesh out a more considered opinion, but at first blush, the lush black and white cinematography and somber tone, while creepily effective, supported a meandering pace that often frustrated, rather than yielding to rapture. Haneke respects the audience enough to avoid capital letters and bold underlines, but the crippling over length and shifting perspectives helped maintain an unfortunate level of detachment. Dry and muted are usually preferred, but they can become dull if one isn’t careful. That said, it’s always appreciated to have a movie about Germany before the Nazis, and even in advance of World War I, if only to remind viewers that savagery was not always expressed, and once needed a suitable environment in which to grow.

Perhaps Haneke’s conceit — that the Germany of 1913 can be mined for “signs” of impending doom — is best enjoyed at the theoretical level, and that as discussed in story form, the results could only hope to be mixed. After all, a weak screenplay would be far too obvious with the horrors to come, forcing slow-witted viewers to point out the heavy-handed imagery. So, thankfully, there are no Hitler stand-ins, nor are there metaphorical gas chambers, and the lurking anti-Semitism is even pushed aside for more subtle investigations of rural German culture. The farming village in question is quiet and seemingly gentle, but bizarre acts of violence suddenly break out without explanation, forcing villagers to confront their own natures. Only they do little self-examination, and the crimes go wonderfully unsolved. Are these acts of cruelty from without? Within? Perhaps supernatural? Though the children — the generation that would sweep the Nazi regime to power with little objection — are the likely culprit, it’s best that we learn very little regarding victims and perpetrators.

The “white ribbon” of the title refers to a reminder a moderately cruel father (and pastor) ties to the arms of his children concerning their responsibilities as “the innocent.” Behavior, then, follows not as an instinctive drive for goodness, but rather an arbitrary symbol of the punishment to follow if certain rules and regulations are violated. Haneke is surely not suggesting that the German children who were treated poorly readily embraced global war and the Holocaust as natural responses to punishment, so I must conclude that he is instead suggesting that in the absence of genuine, unprompted morality, murder and totalitarianism will follow. But as this is hardly unique to the soil of pre-war Germany, it seems a rather dubious conclusion. Perhaps it’s best to approach The White Ribbon as a cautionary tale; not necessarily that there are handy road maps for evil, but rather that the more bucolic the setting, the more seemingly tranquil the populace, the more receptive such minds are for the ever-feeding forces of self-destruction.

Up in the Air

There’s a certain satisfaction that comes from being the first audience on the entire planet to see a movie, but it inevitably means far less when we’re talking about a Jason Reitman production. After all, this is the same man who set Juno loose upon an unsuspecting world, though my negative review appears to be one of only a handful to be found. Telluride’s faithful are especially enamored with it, and if any one statement dominated the endless queues of the weekend’s events, it was, “I liked it, but it was no Juno.” You are correct, madam or sir, and that’s about the best bit of news concerning this decidedly commercial enterprise. Up in the Air is, at bottom, a creature of mainstream moviemaking, and while limiting in terms of payoff, I’m here to say that it’s not all bad. In fact, I pretty much enjoyed the thing, much to my surprise. Of course, as I expected to loathe its very existence, modest entertainment was more than I had any right to expect. George Clooney tones down the smugness for once, and is all the better for it, and the story, while too redemptive by half, manages to traffic in adult situations and topical relevance with precious little by way of, well, preciousness. Reitman would do right to stay away from Diablo Cody from here on out.

Clooney portrays Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchet man of more recent vintage; the anti-headhunter who visits downsizing companies across the country to lay off the unsuspecting with what he believes is tact and sympathy. Essentially, he stands in for gutless managers and CEOs who can’t do their own dirty work. The visits are scripted down to the letter, and are so sterile (they involve handbooks on coping with the post-layoff depression, for god’s sake) that they practically run themselves. But Clooney is proud of his work, as he provides a human face to a very inhuman moment in the lives of so many. Along with that central thrust are two side stories: Clooney’s relentless pursuit of his ten-millionth frequent flier mile, and the introduction of a corporate upstart who threatens to take the business into a new age of “video conferencing,” which pretty much entails eliminating all the travel to fire people via the internet. With that, the story is off and running, though it won’t be inviting comparisons with Bergman anytime soon.

We also know that Clooney’s “go it alone” philosophy will be challenged by a fellow traveler who becomes more than a port in the storm, and that her “real life” will present new obstacles, etc. Also, no prizes for guessing that his motivational speeches, used primarily to supplement his income (as well as provide an excuse to keep him on the road even more), will be thrown into disarray by this unexpected attachment, and if you were to assume that a third-act seminar will be interrupted by the standard “moment of clarity” (which by necessity must include leaving the podium and making a mad dash to the airport), you would not be going out too far on the proverbial limb. Again, all pretty much by the book. But it’s well-made, engaging, and for once, despite some definite compromises, the lead character stays nestled in his self-imposed cocoon during the closing credits. Sure, he craves connection, but he’s not really cut out for the daily grind of holding down the homefront. A small victory, perhaps, but enough to warrant a recommendation.

A moderate sized but respectable film festival, the WFF has grown each year to its current crop of 198 films from local and international filmmakers. The crowd is cosmopolitan, and you will as likely share your theatre row with suits as bums, with people on one hand arriving from a wine tasting party while the next cinephile will be spilling liquor from his brown bag all over his beard before passing out on your lap. Above all the people are almost disconcertingly friendly, and you will have your ears chatted off by what amounts to a mobile city made of amateur critics. At least there is little apathy, as people really put some effort into this increasingly popular event – this year attendance reached 32,000, and nearly every showing was close to sold out. There are some significant gripes, namely that the feather in the festival cap this year was the world premiere of 500 Days of Summer, described as an “avalanche of whimsy” and starring Zooey Deschanel. The audience award went to Being Bucky, the inspiring story of what it is like to be the Wisconsin Badger mascot, and how it, and I quote, “changes you forever”. So yeah, there is a lot to be desired. Still, the selection was wide, and was filled with a fuckton of foreign language films that would never make it this far from either coast otherwise. Also reviewed from the festival were Goodbye Solo, Tokyo Sonata, and the fiery, fucked-up Food, Inc.

24 City

Massive munitions plant 420 is being demolished to make room for the luxury apartment complex of 24 City, to the detriment of the thousands of Chinese workers who were displaced to work on the original project. 24 City is an attempt to weave documentary and narrative styles in order to tell this story, using some of the individuals from plant 420 and actors telling their stories. Though the mutation from communism to capitalism can make for an engaging story, this is such a dull and lifeless film that I cannot believe there was a director on set during the entire enterprise. Use of fact and fiction can be a dangerous mélange, as a potentially tragic or moving tale can be easily jettisoned by the viewer if shenanigans are called.

In 24 City, just such a moment happens when one woman tearfully recalls being forced to leave one of her daughters behind when a day of work finished and the entire work force was to board a ferry and depart; the following scene has Joan Chen discussing her days working in the factory, and that she was called ‘Flower Girl’ for her striking resemblance to Joan Chen. Oh how very very and too too. Even if the majority of the stories were not meandering, tangential, and deadly dull, I have a severe allergy to this sort of bullshit.

To say the pace is glacial is an insult to glaciers, which in comparison tear across the landscape like majestic wildebeest. Which are running from cheetahs. That are on fire. There is a poem written by an author from plant 420 that goes thusly:

“If the aeronautics factory is like a huge eyeball, then the labor is its pupil.”

Either this is from an actual poet, which is pathetic, or was carefully written expressly for this feature, which is hilarious. What a worthless experience, ameliorated only by a 15 minute nap and the sight of at least thirty people walking out mid-film. Shortlist it for whatever ‘worst of the year’ list you have in progress.

Beaches of Agnes

The French New Wave directors created a wildly diverse body of work, but they had in common a fierce intellect and a desire to reinvent cinema as consummate artists and auteurs. Of these, Agnes Varda was probably the least predictable and most esoteric, creating works as disparate as Vagabond, Cleo from 5 to 7, and The Gleaners and I. As a relentlessly fascinating figure, she makes an equally fascinating subject for a documentary, in the autobiographical Beaches of Agnes. Though she would loathe the comparison, I found myself thinking of the insufferably obnoxious pixie known as Miranda July. As Agnes Varda creates various forms of art including beautifully composed photography (she originally trained as a photographer), mirror arrangements on the beach, and a thoughtful shed made of clipped celluloid from a unremembered cinematic flop, I thought to myself, “This is what artists are capable of when there is a true vision at work.” As opposed to the forced whimsy shit slurry that was Me and You and Everyone We Know. Watching that film, painful though it was, was useful for witnessing how attempting art without having any sort of talent can go horribly wrong.

Varda is first seen walking along the beach, aged 80 going on 25, narrating “If we opened me up, there would be beaches”, as she carefully arranges mirrors on the edge of the surf, creating images whereby the ocean approaches from many different directions. Somehow, this is all you really need to know about her as a visionary director as well as a prescient human being. You can intuit the rest. She had no formal training in filmmaking, noting “I thought if I added sound to photographs, that would be cinema.” And so she just made it up as she went.

This film strains the definition of documentary, as facts and emotions blur past the camera – Varda is no stranger to artifice, and uses it joyfully as another actress plays her, speaking to the camera. A close friend refused to appear in this film, and so she uses a cardboard cat, his voice altered to hilarious effect. She shows her work space, in an alley between the houses owned by her and Jacques Demy, demonstrating with a prop car how many times she must back up and go forward to pull into her garage. Frequently she walks backwards, as do other actors, signifying reflection without nostalgia. Sets depicting times past are recreated in the most artificial fashion possible, including a flasher who prowled near her school (sporting a foot long pink dildo under his coat). She is a compulsive artist that lacks pretension, creating a giant fabric whale with a colorful tea room in the belly, or opening a photographic exposition of potatoes and advertising the showing by traipsing down the sidewalk in a potato outfit. At no time does she appear to be concerned about whether she is being, like, totally deep. She just expresses in ways that feel right and unforced. The film as a result is not only effortlessly charming, but genuinely funny.

She reviews some of her films, including La Pointe Courte, her first film, and arguably the antecedent salvo of the New Wave. Combining two unrelated narratives, she used the people who lived in the neighborhood as actors. In Beaches of Agnes, she returns to the quay where much of the filming occurred, and those actors were still there, carrying out their daily rhythms. Much of the film is absorbed in these rhythms, and this energetic director appears to have both hands firmly on the pulse. Study at the Louvre, running away to Marseille to mend fishing nets and figure out what life is all about. Varda finds work touching up paintings, though she prefers them in disrepair, referring to the ‘tyranny of the sharp image’. Meeting Jacques Demy just before they embark on a career of filmmaking, and trying to understand the love of her life. Photographic journeys to China and Cuba, including a brilliant image where she has captured Fidel Castro in front of a religious statue: “A tall utopist with stone wings.”

The film is a free flowing essay about the life of Agnes Varda, a poem without rhyme or meter, nor underlying purpose, other than an expression of life. At least the way she sees life. As she gets older, she expresses the regret that memory begins to fade, and our recollections fall to dust as do our bodies. “Our memory ultimately fails. But it is still ours, and nobody knows us.” She recalls shooting a documentary about Demy, as he lay dying, collecting his thoughts and memories. Varda is always collecting, with the admission that she cannot understand the people in her life, but true understanding is overrated.

And so she walks backwards towards the waves on the beach, looking back upon a life resplendent with friends, family, and artistic accomplishments that have a great deal to say about life and humanity, and the difficult terms by which we understand them. In a way, walking backward is the only sensible way to view one’s life, as anything forward is but a blind step into the darkness. Looking back is all we really have, our own experiences in this limited time on earth. “While I live… I remember.”

Betrayal

A film 23 years in the making, Betrayal is an exhaustive, yet cold and distant, documentary about one family’s struggles from war-torn Laos to a crack house in New York City. The patriarch is trained with the Royal Laotian Guards as a ground coordinator for airborne assaults, and fought on behalf of the King, who was allied with the United States during the Vietnam War. Though they fought bravely in what was essentially an undeclared war, the United States disavowed any involvement when they withdrew their military support from Vietnam and paramilitary support from Laos and Cambodia. As expected, the Pathet Lao began arresting members of the Royal Lao Army and interning them into ‘reeducation camps’, while steadily harassing and occasionally executing their family members in the new Lao Peoples Democratic Republic. They accused the soldiers of fighting with colonialists, and since the French set up the Royal Lao Army in the first place, they do have a point. Still, they really never knew what hit them, and saw the American withdrawal as a betrayal, and this would be the first of many.

The family is left with little choice but escape, as they were regarded with suspicion by their neighbors, contempt by the government, and as target practice by the People’s Army. They escape in the night via Thailand into refugee camps, and from there make their way to the United States, and to the quaint hamlet of the south Bronx. The family goes from constant harassment by armed soldiers to constant harassment by armed gangs and drug dealers. Their cultural isolation compounds their fears, and the family falls to pieces as traditions give way to integration in the worst possible way. Namely, the children of the family find gangs or drugs and become lost in the urban jungle. In this way, the family betrays itself and its history. There are other betrayals, one notably by a family member who loses his way.

The storytelling and cinematography is dry and matter-of-fact, and you may find the film interesting in how a family fundamentally changes over time and in response to tragedy. The mother’s attempts and ultimate failure to keep her family intact as they survive in a hostile environment are moving, and their final move to rediscover their roots says a great deal about the potential advantages that tradition and culture can offer. Their story is not necessarily a unique one, as there have been numerous tales of immigrants who disembarked to find a war waiting for them in the streets of America. Still, it is engaging enough to watch a family do their best under difficult circumstances without really knowing if there was any point to sticking together, or what future there was to struggle for.

Jerichow

Film noir remains a strangely bottomless well, perhaps due to the universality of its themes of weakness and temptation, and the inevitable similarity between the doomed protagonists and the viewer. Since its glorious birth with the likes of Double Indemnity, the same story has been told time and again, and that story just does not tire. In Jerichow, the story has been set in rural Germany, with Thomas, a dangerous and broke ex-military man, Ali, a fat and wealthy Turkish kiosk owner, and his wife Laura. Laura was a waitress with thousands in debt and a prison history until Ali rescued her and made her a kept woman. He drinks too much, is deeply jealous, and almost hopes his wife is cheating on him so as to justify his occasional beatings. Thomas is a thug whose stoic appearance belies a central weakness that feeds into his simplistic sense of justice. The couple hires him as a driver after Ali is caught driving drunk, and he becomes a trusted friend, if indeed trust exists in such films. Ali is a tool, but he is no villain, being the only person capable of a steady income and willing to help others if they require it. He does exact a price, but mostly due to his inability to understand any relationship that does not involve money. For example, after spying on his wife, he ambushes her and accuses her of cheating on him; he does not understand her secretiveness until she reveals that she has been stealing from him in order to pay her debts. Unlike her inexplicable sexuality, this he understands.

Thomas is a fairly simple and straightforward character, and so the viewer can project themselves into his shoes with ease. Laura is more of a cipher, a fountain of knowing looks and nuanced gesture. She tells Thomas of her money issues, how trapped she is in this marriage of convenience and the impossibility of divorce given her prenup. Nina Hoss plays Laura as a bit sharper than her appearance, as if she knows just how much information Thomas needs to make a rash decision.

Thomas provides Laura with a way out of this situation, and so the story evolves its flawed protagonist and femme fatale, the plot having been in motion without self-awareness. The acting is solid, and the story is engaging; above all noir is a study in human behavior, and in this respect Jerichow excels.

Of Time and the City

Essentially a retrospective using voice over narration and old footage from a bygone era, Terence Davies’ feature considers his home town of Liverpool and the joy of bleak nostalgia. Quoting poetry and displaying sardonic wit, the town of his youth was a source of strength and confusion as he grappled with the muddled teachings of the church and his own homosexuality. Liverpool arose as a manufacturing giant, the narrator’s Ozymandias, before the nation was plunged into poverty by the strain of the Second World War.

The time line is fractured, and historical fact has little value here. This is an emotional recollection, and the tone is bittersweet as the footage displays vast arrays of abandoned apartment blocks and signs of deep urban decay. Though this sounds absorbing, at 85 minutes the film drags and wears out its welcome after its thousandth tangentially-related quote. Normally I give this sort of thing the benefit of the doubt, as natives of Liverpool will be more likely to resonate with this subject. After a while, however, Davies takes up some navel-gazing as he wonders “Where is the Liverpool I knew and loved?” Well, considering that the empty shacks made excellent crack houses, I would imagine that urban renewal was an alluring item on the menu. Change is not an absolute good, as nothing complex can be. Stasis, however, is an absolute evil, as nothing contributes more to irreparable destruction than decay.

Revanche

Crime dramas tend to romanticize life in the underground by depicting danger as thrilling and individuals as fast living and sexy rather than run down and burned out. Despite immaculate camerawork, the Vienna of Revanche is revealed as a chaotic machine that grinds down its inhabitants, none more so than the workers in a brothel. Tamara is a Ukrainian immigrant who gets by however she can, which usually involves being on her knees. Her boyfriend is Alex, a none-too-clever hired meathead who works at the brothel, and he offers to rescue her and go on the run for a better life. A bank robbery is planned and poorly executed, and disaster befalls a character as the film threatens to become a revenge thriller. This all sounds familiar, but the story is pumping with a new life, as if director Gotz Spielmann believed he invented the concept of revenge. From the loud and dangerous city, Revanche moves to the deceptively quiet countryside where Alex finds himself surrounded by people who – in his mind – destroyed his life. That the spare soundtrack is filled with aching quiet only drives the wonder of just what will explode next.

There is no point in revealing further plot details since any description will sound fairly derivative and dull. There is only blind hatred and the desire for reprisal that becomes sidetracked into uncharted territory. In the meantime, Alex chops wood in seething fashion, each pound of the axe striking an ominous chord.

If you are looking for a ‘point’, then this film is bound to disappoint you. This is one to become lost within, perhaps considering the course of events as a morality tale where concepts as fragile as human morality and dignity are loose objects quickly thrown from a vehicle lurching perilously off course. It is quite well done, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, though I am unable to describe why. Those are the films that stay with you – those that evade an easy characterization.

Silent Light

One of the most beautiful opening shots I have ever seen occurs in Silent Light; clouds and stars, slowly, almost subliminally yielding to a otherworldly sunrise. This sets the meditative quality of this quiet and introspective film. This is the first, and likely the last film to capture the Mennonite community of rural Mexico in the obscure language of Plautdietsch. This wholly novel subject grabbed me, and the hypnotic style kept me riveted; the film unspools carefully, taking its time, while wasting no time. Despite these strengths, all does not go well in the telling, and I was left with the question of whether the journey was worth the effort.

The story focuses on a family, and more precisely upon a love triangle. Johan loves his wife Esther, but is uncontrollably drawn to Marianne; in his mind, his marriage was a mistake, as he feels that he belongs with Marianne. The austere ambiance unconsciously allows us to feel how one can come to this conclusion without considering the pitfalls of declaring one’s love for a mistress. Insane though it is, Johan only considers what feels correct, though he does not understand what to do with his wife. A friend advises him, “A brave man makes his destiny with what he’s got”, implying that fate is an illusion, as is the love that burns brightly one moment, only to wink out in the next. These people are deeply religious, and so Johan feels that this obsessive love for Marianne is God’s work – why should he argue? His father gives sober advice, noting that he was in his son’s shoes once, and he found that position worthy of both envy and scorn. Envy for the newness of another love, and the potential and danger inherent in an affair; scorn for that same danger and understanding that newness fades quickly to be replaced by comfortable contempt. He knew the excitement was in him only, and so he remained with his wife. “If you do not act quickly, you will lose them both.” Indeed.

After a time, it becomes clear that Johan is a dreamer, and has very little consideration for anyone who isn’t Johan. He confesses to Esther that he sleeps with Marianne, then continues to see her, justifying it as the will of God. The kids become an annoyance for him, even as Esther demands that the kids accompany him to his trips to see his mistress. The heart wants what it wants, but that is when the head is supposed to exact some control. Johan fails to decide, with disastrous consequences for his family. There is no reason to be surprised that such a quiet individual could be such a narcissist, but anyone who believes that God talks to them personally will probably end up one eventually.

Love triangles are most often told as a love denied, and a desire kept secret. There is good reason for this, as such feelings are most often infatuation, and such emotions pass quickly enough that the practical roadblocks to outright overtures render them prohibitive. Silent Light interestingly bypasses such pragmatism as Johan has already informed his wife that he is stabbing a little something on the side, and that he is very much in love with that something. It is not made clear why this Mennonite community was chosen for a story that could occur anywhere, and filmed in an ancient language. Perhaps the devout nature of these people makes such open and impractical honesty possible. It is an interesting exploration of what happens in such a love triangle when each point is aware of the others.

The film takes a nosedive in the final act with a twist that at first holds Johan accountable for his imprudent failure to take a stand, then appears to exonerate everyone involved. It is difficult to elaborate without giving away the ending, so I will: Esther dies of a heart attack, or rather a broken heart. Whether by God’s will or Johan’s stupidity, she cannot take this farce any further and dies in the rain. Johan is preparing to bury his wife, still one of the loves of his life, when Marianne shows up to the funeral. While she holds Esther’s hand, Esther awakens, and thanks Marianne for her kindness. Now this may be a meditation on destiny, or the moment where the two loves of Johan’s life become one, there are other possible interpretations. I like to think that Johan is dreaming of Esther’s resurrection so he evades culpability, or dreaming that Esther forgave his idiocy. The quiet pallor upon the proceedings was dashed in any case, and the tragic outcome of Johan’s inadequacy at creating his own destiny morphed into his destiny being handed to him. If that was the point, then the conclusion is a mess, and betrays the spartan style of the film. I suspect there was a desire to have a happy ending, as otherwise the somber tone would become overwhelming. If that is the case, then so be it – allow the film to breathe its own life, rather then injecting artifice where it does not belong. Ah, it was a truly breathtaking opening shot, though.

2008 Denver International Film Festival

After watching the infuriating Witch Hunt, my immediate attention turned to finding someone to blame. Perhaps kill. Bakersfield, California, circa 1984, was the ultimate hellhole (more so than usual). During a frenzied few months, otherwise exemplary citizens were plucked from their homes, accused of child molestation, put on trial, and, based on the coerced testimony of impressionable children, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Hundreds of counts, hundreds of years, and no chance for parole. It shouldn’t surprise a soul that to a man (and woman), they were all innocent, set free only after years of hard work by humanitarian groups and yes, documentary filmmakers. The film takes us to the beginning, when a custody battle produced the first accusation, which, like wildfire, spread quickly, choked the life from a town, and set neighbor against neighbor. The charges were beyond the pale – ritualized torture, vicious beatings, repeated rape – yet all of it was based on the stuttering, half-hearted words of a few kids. No medical evidence, no adult corroboration, and no documentation. Even the child pornography charges stuck, despite not a single picture being placed into evidence. Prosecutors found nothing. But kids don’t lie, now do they?

The most obvious villain in all this is the Kern County District Attorney, one Edward R. Jagels. Remember that name, because the cocksucker is still in office, re-elected repeatedly by a community that doesn’t seem to mind incompetence and corruption. First put into power on a typical Reagan era platform of “no nonsense” law enforcement, the end result was exactly as one would expect: round ‘em up justice that concerned itself with numbers and headlines, not actual guilt or innocence. Add to that the decade’s fanaticism regarding child abuse, which stemmed from actual cases, yes, but also a right-wing need to punish working women. One need only survey the damage to child care centers throughout the country (and in California, most appallingly) to see this proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. Women were leaving the home to earn a living, much to the dismay of Lord Ron and his ovary-hating minions, and the very places where they dropped their brood needed to become dens of iniquity in order to shame mothers everywhere back to their proper roles. Why else attack day care? And why the fuck does Satan seem to be lurking in the background during all this?

It was never enough to accuse these people of raping children; there had be animal sacrifices, bloodletting, and orgasmic cries to demonic forces to make the story complete. Again, maybe DA Jagels looked too deeply into an AC/DC record, or ministers spent too much time at the right hand of government, but these hellish connections seemed to spring from the wild blue yonder. Once again (there’s a theme here), no evidence was ever found, but the belief was enough, and no one with children appeared to be safe. And god forbid you had a backyard pool, or a basement, or were seen talking to youngsters in the street. It was mass madness, and the do-gooders did everything to make Jagels’ job that much easier. Yes, I’m speaking of the social workers. Perhaps the world’s worst slice of humanity, these poorly trained, idealistic authoritarians-in-waiting created fictions to feed to children and communities alike. And if you refused to admit being fucked by Mr. Smith down the street, you were in denial and in need of treatment. The denial, in fact, was the surest sign that you had been fucked. And like all social workers, they harmed the innocent and looked away from real wrongdoing. That their trade springs from sociology is no surprise. If only their damage was limited to the university.

We hear many horrifying stories — Scott Kniffen (12 years served), Jeff Modahl (15 years served), John Stoll (20 years served), Marcella Pitts (6 years served) – all of which made me want to gouge out my own eyes in frustration. The trials were preposterous on their face, and should scare the hell out of anyone who thinks the state actually has to prove its case to send you away. At bottom, though, this is a testament to the evils of romanticizing childhood. By failing to recognize that kids are capable of deceit, adult lives were ruined forever. By all accounts, these kids simply caved to authority figures in order to get some ice cream, but never again should we assume that the mouths of babes are sacred. More than that, any case that relies on witnesses alone should not produce a conviction. Didn’t someone, somewhere wonder why little Tommy’s ass was in tip-top shape, even after being repeatedly sodomized by mask-wearing adults?  Where were the bruises? The welts? The sure-fire trauma that would result from having hot wax dripped on your hairless genitalia? Despite the eventual release of these folks, a sadness still remains. How long until it happens again? It’s not an “if”, but a steadfast, depressing “when”.

2008 Denver International Film Festival

A man’s true character is revealed not by how he makes a living, his outward appearance, or even the company he keeps, but rather the nature of his obsessions. The origins of these fanatical pursuits and preoccupations are often shrouded in mystery, and the diversity of passionate interest as widespread as the shock we feel whenever we encounter unparalleled devotion. Some we understand (and expect) — sports, gambling, religion — and each in its own way has been sanctioned by the dominant culture. One may step over the line again and again, but no one’s ever really going to punish the man who lives his life for a decidedly mainstream desire. Friends and comrades are always around the corner. But what of the truly bizarre? The abnormal or the fringe? And what if the obsession itself becomes indistinguishable from the man? For Dallas and Wayne, two aging maniacs from Portsmouth, Ohio, one of those increasingly familiar Midwestern towns without any visible means of support, days and nights begin and end in search of the elusive Bigfoot, the ape-like creature that has haunted the imaginations of hill folk for generations. To call these men true believers is an understatement, and yet again, the documentary form has highlighted the infectious insanity of the American way. We’re fucked, but we’re fun.

Jay Delaney’s Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie is the aptly named study of the pair, for at no time does the film become a tired cultural analysis of the Bigfoot phenomenon. No scholars are consulted, no historians remain at the ready, and no unseen narrator provides an unsolicited take on the truth or fiction of the Sasquatch myth. Thankfully, this is simply an unvarnished look at two American originals and the pursuit that defines their lives. It’s enough that it’s real to them. Sentiment aside, though, there are laughs to be had, and yes, most are at their expense. And why not? Dallas, for one, a toothless old coot suffering from emphysema, says, without a trace of sarcasm, “I’ve had four different doctors tell me I have sheep DNA.” He’s even more serious about his spiritual “gifts,” which amount to shouting-in-tongues to attract the creatures, as well as unproven healing powers. “Feel better?”, he asks Wayne after a particularly intense round of mumbo-jumbo. That Wayne answers in the negative means little; Dallas is a god among men, or at least the men he chooses to surround himself with. One is his son, a seemingly level-headed young man who accompanies pops to a Bigfoot convention, which is nothing more than a packed-to-the-gills cabin containing more diabetics per square inch than any place not Mississippi. It stands to reason that sonny boy believes the Yeti race has acquired powers of levitation.

The film, far too short for the riches it unearths (just over an hour), contains a controversy of sorts; one that threatens to tear apart the friendship Wayne and Dallas share. You see, Wayne is a comically stupid man (he blasts Republicans, only to follow with how much he hates liberals), though one saved by a self-esteem so poor that he admits repeatedly that he’s a complete failure. Wayne cries, mumbles, threatens suicide, and speaks to a series of half-starts and dead-ends so pathetic as to achieve a reluctant grandeur. Wayne done fucked up on a radio program one day, and his contradictory, confused statements caused Dallas’ Bigfoot website to be classified as a fraud. I know, it was before and will always remain such, but no one had said so out loud, and now the magic was gone. Wayne got all twisted around about a picture he took that appeared to reveal the woodland beast at last, though close scrutiny seems to show a drunk wearing a flannel shirt. It’s far too blurry to tell, but for Wayne, it had been the equivalent of holding the keys to the kingdom. He had respect, a devoted partner, and, from his perspective, a fawning (and paying) public but a short ride away. And in an instant, he threw it all to the dogs. Needless to say, Wayne beats himself up over the humiliating interview, which leads to a painful phone call with Dallas to set things right. It’s touching in its own trashy, ridiculous way, and striking proof that even the most brain-fried among us need a shoulder to lean on. And something to believe in.

Again, this isn’t necessarily an insight into a subculture, and there are far more questions asked than answers given. For Dallas, Bigfoot clearly has some sort of Jesus allure, and its discovery, in his mind, would change the world. It’s an adventure to benefit mankind. Wayne just wants a little recognition and, of course, the money a “hot” picture would provide, though he’s not about to fake anything for the reward. No, these men take hundreds of photos and shoot thousands of hours of video because they are convinced that every smudge and shadow brings them one step closer to solving the mystery of the ages. Alas, one of Dallas’ fellow travelers dies along the way (though we never meet the man), and though remembering the beloved Fred turns Dallas into a teary mess, I laughed my ass off (and couldn’t stop for a good five minutes) when I learned that ol’ Fred had a heart attack and fell off a cliff. I couldn’t shake the image of a leathery Appalachian, overloaded with cameras, walking sticks, binoculars, and bags of trail mix, at last glimpsing the fruits of his labor, only to clutch his chest and tumble down a mountain right before snapping the money shot. But at least Fred died with a dream, as will Dallas when at last his lungs give out. And I have no doubt that when the end comes, he’ll be squeezing that plaque bestowed upon him by his fellow trackers, perhaps the lone reminder that his life was not in vain. I, for one, am not about to argue. 

2008 Denver International Film Festival

There’s a myth afoot, origins unknown, that life is worth living. It’s a powerful elixir, needless to say, and continues to hold great power despite almost hourly confirmation of having long ago been debunked. Evidence is plentiful, though one could just as easily submit the documentary Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father and be done with it. All told, it’s one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen, and while I tend to shrug at most displays of pain and sorrow, this one had me shrinking in my seat. There have been greater tragedies, of course, than the events that unfold during these 95 minutes, and if we’re talking sheer numbers, this one doesn’t even get an invitation to the party, let alone a seat at the table. And yet, Dear Zachary’s tidal wave of despair had me flipping up the collar of my coat, stuffing my hands deep into my pockets, and shuffling out into that appallingly unjust night as if having been repeatedly kicked in the stomach. I hated you, I hated myself, and I hated the whole rotten enterprise that gives rise to such events. If this shit is even possible, I wondered, what conceivable reason do I have to get up in the morning? My god, what a horrible, horrible story.

Filmmaker Kurt Kuenne first set out to celebrate the life of his murdered friend, one Andrew Bagby; a pudgy, genial sort who seemed to have it all except for the ability to pick sane girlfriends. Working through medical school and eventually settling in Pennsylvania, he is haunted by Shirley Turner, a woman more than a decade his senior, and one capable of more evil than he ever could have known. She is flighty, obsessive, manipulative, a full-blown narcissist, and, quite predictably, a killer-in-waiting. One day, Andrew breaks off the relationship at last, and sends her on a plane back to Iowa. Rather than accept that love fades, Shirley drives non-stop back to Pennsylvania to plead her case. Her “case”, such as it is, involves luring him to a park and pumping five bullets into his head, back, and buttocks. Casually, and not missing a beat, she drives back to her home and leaves a loving voice mail on Andrew’s phone, primarily to establish her whereabouts. Needless to say, she forgets that along the way, cell phone towers have been tracking her dozens of frantic calls throughout several states, establishing firmly that she was in fact in the Keystone state during the time of the murder. Oh yeah, and her gun is a perfect match. Not that it will matter.

The events of Andrew’s murder, as well as the portrait of Shirley’s unquestionable madness, make for a crackling good story, and have us watching helplessly when the inevitable finally arrives. Throughout this first act, we watch friends and colleagues alike speak to Andrew’s generosity, humor, and imagination (the director is a childhood friend who made home movies with Andrew), and we also meet David and Kathleen Bagby, Andrew’s distraught and unimaginably strong parents. At first blush, it all sounds pretty standard: naïve young man falls for a psychopath, ends us dead, and the killer is brought to justice. Only there is no justice. Nothing of the kind. This too may seem ordinary, but the manner by which it is set aflame and used to mock grieving loved ones has to be seen to be believed. From bail to extradition to Canadian officials with heads firmly up asses (Shirley flees to New Brunswick to avoid capture), the entire process is laughable on its face, and surely one of the most infuriating rides ever captured by a documentary. To complicate matters, Turner announces that she is pregnant with Andrew’s child (the Zachary of the title). And so begins the second, most sinister act.

From this point forward, I will let the story wash over you as it will, and for once in my life, I will not play the spoiler. The events to come are shocking, though not entirely unexpected. If we take stock of this woman, we get a sense of her depravity, though I doubt we want to admit how bad it will get. The best documentaries are always those that start at one place, take a turn, and become about something else altogether, and Dear Zachary is no exception. There’s almost too much to deal with, as it calls into question every facet of a social fabric that seems to go out of its way to inspire people to vigilantism. I sure as hell understand it better than I ever have before. Andrew’s parents do as well, and to push genuinely sweet people to such considerations proves that we’re all but a slight nudge away from cracking beyond repair. So yes, it’s a legal drama of sorts, and a moving story of familial bonds, but it also considers the very nature of love itself, and why so many of us are so damn bad at it. One of the film’s unexplored elements – only hinted at by a few interview subjects – is how a smart, successful, socially popular man became so deeply involved with a woman by all accounts his polar opposite. And why are we so forgiving of glaring signs of instability, even when we know what’s just over the horizon?

It’s all that and more, and easily one of the year’s most unexpected treasures. I was taken to the very depths, and never once regretted the ride. As it all comes together, it forces the most disturbing question of all – in the absence of a god, or any “divine” punishment, how does one deal with an unrequited lust for revenge? If the very person responsible for all of your pain and anguish is no longer available, at whom (or what) does one direct the rage? And how in the fuck do some people keep going? Liquor? Denial? Jesus? What this movie proves to me at long last is that I am a fundamentally weak person, and am ill-equipped to handle anything even one-tenth as dire as this. And sure, I’d like to think that I’d bomb courthouses, or assassinate judges, or slash throats with abandon, but more honest impulses paint a picture of the solitary mourner, weeping quietly behind a locked door. And while Dear Zachary is a howl of pain in the face of a world where human happiness is the last thing ever really considered, it also nails shut that last, most terrifying coffin: we are truly powerless, and life unfolds as it must. We stand by afflicted, our screams fading fast in a sea of indifference.