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.
*/**** 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 When Michael Haneke's Amour met its first wave
of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all
but the film's place within the German-Austrian taskmaster's oeuvre. Although
some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in
crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his
austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by
external invaders--in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time
of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping
score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is
probably somewhere between those poles. It's no surprise that the key
players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke's
pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent--sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful
piano teachers. But it's difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often
associate with Haneke's Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who--far more than the chameleonic
Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators--recall a
bygone era of French cinema.
by Bill Chambers Sanity and fatigue are ineluctable corrupting influences on an aging filmmaker, but it brings me great pleasure and no small relief to be able to report that while Mother of Tears: The Third Mother--Dario Argento's long-gestating conclusion to his "Three Sisters" trilogy--is neither as artful as Suspiria nor as dreamlike as Inferno, it nevertheless surpasses expectations fostered by Argento's recent work to emerge as his best movie in decades. Fitting that Argento should choose to tell the Rome-set story of Mater Lacrimarum last, marking this as a homecoming in more ways than one.
by Bill Chambers The problem with 2005's Land of the Dead is that it could've been made by virtually anybody at virtually any time. While I imagine that George A. Romero, stalwart hippie that he is, has an anticapitalist streak a mile wide, that picture's "eat the rich" trajectory ultimately felt like a rather flimsy pretext for Romero to resume chronicling social change through the prism of his precious undead. Given that the "Dead" films have typically had long incubation periods, it's surprising to see Romero return to the well so soon, but then it was probably best to hit the reset button post-haste. George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead does just that in more ways than one: Here, Romero disentangles himself from the cul-de-sac of a zombie-human détente by starting from scratch in the present tense, making this the Casino Royale of the series.
by Bill Chambers At the outset, it worried me that The Hole (no relation to any of the films bearing that title in the past), the great Joe Dante's return to the big screen, has little to no marquee value. Silly, I know: It's not like Gremlins' Zach Galligan was or is a household name--and besides, this is one of Dante's kid-oriented pictures, which are never star-driven. Still, to go from "and Steve Martin" to "and Teri Polo" in six short years is pretty humbling; Dante long ago paid his dues in B-movies and, however happy he might be to get away from studio interference/oppression, I'm sad to see him back there--not just because he hardly deserves such a Wellesian fate, but also because he's a director whose imagination grew in proportion to his funding, and he seems no longer inspired but instead stupefied by a shoestring budget. At least where his feature work is concerned.
by Bill Chambers There's something a little ghoulish about
still reviewing TIFF movies at this late date, I know, but I wanted to briefly touch on
a few of this year's selections I never got around to reviewing in full, before they became indistinguishable dots in the rearview.
by Angelo Muredda "If you want to give them an identity,
children should be traumatized," illustrator Tomi Ungerer says in Far Out Isn't Far Enough,
speaking about his life as much as his career obsession with drawing the
macabre. Brad Bernstein's feature debut has the benefit of an articulate
subject with a captivating life story, from his confused wartime upbringing in
Strasbourg--"the sphincter of France," as he calls it--to his early
American days as a freelancer, to his later erotic drawings (of "bondage
and so on," he explains) and role as a sort of artist-in-residence for the
civil rights movement. What it lacks is assurance, frequently getting in the
way of its powerful material with hammy stylistic flourishes and a treacly
score better suited to a Disney-channel docudrama.
**/**** directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
by Bill ChambersThe Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for
Kristen Wiig's first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids--though for the sake of managing expectations, it's probably better to
think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert
Pulcini's follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child
playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy's
desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an
aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a
last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos).
The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who's in every goddamn movie like this) who
finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her
mandatory psych stay at home--specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic
City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives
with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom's weird boyfriend (Matt
Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene's old
room.
by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about
criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him
to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he
writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his
columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into
camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee
Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of
Daniels's shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter's
writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter's 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less
bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed
shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or
character dynamics.
Recent Comments