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.
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**/****
directed by Brad Bernstein
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.
Continue reading "TIFF '12: Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story " »
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**/****
directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
by Bill Chambers The 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.
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THE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels
AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani
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.
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***/****
directed by David O. Russell
by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There's a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010's The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he's now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.
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Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas
by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas's new film stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card, which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, "APRES MAI" ("After May"), with the mousy English translation, "Something in the Air." The French is the more precise, referring to the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while Thunderclap Newman's yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a roughly simpatico version of late-'60s American idealism falling into '70s cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas's personal attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn't significantly more illuminating about the period than something like Almost Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving together on one big bus, so to speak.
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****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.
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***½/****
written and directed by Jason Buxton
by Bill Chambers Jason Buxton's Blackbird is an important film but a primally engaging one that doesn't feel at all like medicine or, God forbid, an Afterschool Special. The destined-for-greatness Connor Jessup is Sean Randall, a broody but essentially sweet teen who lives with his divorced dad (Michael Buie) and loves from afar the popular Deanna (Alexia Fast). Sean's a modern-day Boo Radley, an artistically-inclined goth kid stranded in a passive-aggressive sports culture: His father operates the Zamboni at the local rink where Deanna's boyfriend--Cory (Craig Arnold), natch--practices hockey. Cory torments Sean at school, and a guidance counsellor suggests that rather than retaliate Sean vent his spleen on paper--which he does, via a hypothetical revenge scenario ("It's a story") he stupidly cross-posts to the Internet. The torch-wielding villagers show up at his subsequent court hearing like it's a town-hall meeting; in this post-Columbine world, he's never going to get a fair shake.
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**½/****
directed by Michael Winterbottom
by Angelo Muredda Michael Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004's dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom watched a dull relationship bloom and die over the course of nine dull concerts and miserable sex scenes, but the film can't help but be improved by the material this time.
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***½/****
directed by Noah Baumbach
by Angelo Muredda There's a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight
is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily
bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie's "Modern
Love." (In a daily
dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her "galumphing
radiance.") You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to
Michael Fassbender's miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song's
abrupt stop, from Leos Carax's Mauvais
sang--think of Gerwig as the
Ginger to Denis Lavant's Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest
expression of the film's ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through
traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.
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