by
Angelo Muredda Midway through When I
Walk, Jason DaSilva's seven-year record of his experience
since an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 25, the filmmaker
wonders what his future will be, his life an ever-moving series of
targets since illness and disability became a part of it. It's to
DaSilva's great credit that that curiosity about what will become of
him is developed in more than prurient ways with an unexpected but
welcome detour into what it means to struggle through the normal
checkpoints of a committed relationship--babies and all--when one also
has a degenerative illness with an uncertain endgame. That isn't to say
we should celebrate the film simply for being something other than a
depressive's video diary of his body gone awry, but that DaSilva's hook
is honestly come by and cannily placed. What's more, it pays off to the
extent that DaSilva is a mordantly funny subject, candid about his
bodily quirks, his vanities, and his anxieties.
by
Angelo Muredda "Don't you think we're already fucked
anyway?" a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks
an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest,
Michael Marczak's gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature
documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn
collective-cum-NGO. It's a decent question, but you don't get the sense
that the sweet young Berliners to whom it's directed have much of a
clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which
Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to
turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely
nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes
they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio
track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired
backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide
for the group's journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals
who want to preserve the Amazon.
***½/**** directed
by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman
by
Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle
thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an
interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman's powerful Remote
Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days' worth of
travel away--23 more than if he'd been on the moon, as an astronaut
once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into
a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for
greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme
conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of
human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of
professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman's film,
which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded
in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of
Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up
days in advance for a fighting shot at care.
Iron
Man Three
*½/**** starring
Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley screenplay
by Drew Pearce & Shane Black directed
by Shane Black
by
Walter Chaw I laughed once during Shane Black's Iron
Man 3--an unfortunate milestone for me and Black's
films, which I
have found, without exception, pretty amusing. That one moment is a
reference serial post-modernist and industrialist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.)
makes to
Michael Crichton's 1973 cult fantasia Westworld.
The Tony Stark character is not just the cocksure pop-cultural embodiment of Roland Barthes's work on semiotics and myth: he'd be Barthes's greatest subject for analysis--the object that presumes a pop-cultural universal constant. The place where Black works, in other words, is that place where everyone's seen and read and heard everything they "should have" seen and read and heard. When Stark drops the Westworld bomb, then, we understand the implication that Stark is observing an evil henchman to not only appear to be robotic and indestructible, but maybe sexy and Yul Brynner-esque as well--maybe a female fantasy, maybe a "stupid sexy Flanders" homosexual fantasy. Certainly there's a recognition that dropping a reference like this is pleasurable in a way that structuralism would appreciate, but only for the nerd bourgeoisie. It's a moment meant to create a sense of exclusionary cloister in the midst of one of the most widely-dissembled entertainments in human history, and I liked that.
by
Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver
could well be the start of John Kastner's NCR: Not
Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese's paranoiac dream
closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as
either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner's film
opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means--for
everyone from victim to convict to society at large--to reintegrate
into Canadian culture a violent criminal who's been found not culpable
for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean
Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall
man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite
their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors'
assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim's family is
understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so
are we.
by
Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song
called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by
local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend.
It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus,
where the man insists--likely just to himself--that he won't go through
it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If
nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting
Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and
hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot--defined by a
vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons--is pretty standard
stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric
profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an
unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch
Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of
Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation
of signs and wonders.
**½/**** directed
by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin
by
Angelo Muredda Civil disobedience is about as uncinematic
as political protests get, so credit Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin
for making Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer a more or
less compelling paean to the troupe's fortitude against Russian
orthodoxy. The film chronicles the ongoing legal battle that ensued
from the feminist collective's 15-second guerrilla performance of a
song called "God Shit" at the altar of St. Christ Church in Moscow. The
impromptu number, captured in fuzzy cellphone video that's the
most stirring footage in the movie by a mile, got masked performers
Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Mariya Alyokhina a
3-year sentence at a penal colony for simultaneously dumping on the
Orthodox Church and Putin. That such a minor demonstration could
inspire such a heavy-handed state response is just one of the hooks the
filmmakers exploit to strong effect in their look at how deeply
religious values are embedded in Putin's Russia, which turns relatively
minor acts of punk rebellion into the most vital expressions of
political dissent.
by
Angelo Muredda Who would have expected both Bill and Ted
to become a pair of slick documentarians about media revolutions? Just
last year there was the Keanu Reeves-produced Side by Side,
and now, Alex Winter's Downloaded, an engaging if
overly twee sort-of prequel to The Social Network
about the formation and early death of Napster. Downloaded
moves at a good clip, establishing early on both the company's
miraculous birth over a bunch of IRC chats between nerdy cofounders
Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker (interviewed in a ridiculous penthouse
suite that Facebook built) and the larger systemic changes in
information-management that produced their baby, the first major
decentralized file-sharing system. Winter gets utopian about the spirit
of exchange that ensued when campus-dwellers started trading
their Nirvana
concerts and Sugar Ray
singles in the late-Nineties, but you can forgive him for getting
misty-eyed: It's easy in retrospect to forget just how easy
and inevitable library consolidation through downloading became when
Napster took off.
*/**** directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews
by Angelo Muredda Whatever goodwill James Franco built up with his mesmerizing turn in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is bulldozed by Interior. Leather Bar., his second infuriating Hot Docs appearance in as many years. Ostensibly a recreation of a lost 8-minute sequence from William Friedkin's Cruising that was to show Al Pacino's undercover detective intimately crowdsourcing a gay S&M bar for a serial killer, this is nothing short of an incompetent lecture on queer theory and the importance of being a heterosexual ally to the community from a vain graduate student and, even worse, a tourist.
by Angelo Muredda "I call myself a filmmaker," Shawney Cohen muses off the top of his debut feature The Manor, "but I've actually been a strip-club manager for longer." Family inheritances have long proven fertile ground for emerging documentarians, like Sarah Polley with Stories We Tell just last year. Still, Cohen has a distinctive enough angle here, given the unusual visual dynamics of his family (dad's overweight, mom has an eating disorder) and its business, the titular Guelph club that Cohen's father has been running for over 30 years.
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