Film Freak Central

SDFF '13: Borgman

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam's Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli's "The Nightmare," tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft's lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary "Frankenstein" Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture's awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there's a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

A Perfect World (1993) - Blu-ray Disc

click any image to enlarge

****/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Kevin Costner, Clint Eastwood, Laura Dern, T.J. Lowther
screenplay by John Lee Hancock
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw Time and distance have conspired to replace Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with A Perfect World in my mind as his best film and one of the best movies of the '90s. The two occur within a year of each other and mark, with In the Line of Fire between them, a renaissance of the Eastwood brand that had taken a few licks of late with embarrassments like Pink Cadillac, The Rookie, City Heat, Heartbreak Ridge, and on and on. While I was growing up, Eastwood was a Dirty Harry joke and the guy who acted with Orangutans. The first time I saw him in anything was in Bronco Billy, which, frankly, isn't the first time you want to see anyone in anything. What Unforgiven did for me was inspire a curiosity about Sergio Leone and, with that, a new reason to respect Eastwood's legacy; my first time through A Perfect World disturbed my notion of who Kevin Costner was (baseball player/cowboy) at the height of his power and sway in Hollywood, and I was distracted. Every time I've revisited A Perfect World since (and I've been compelled to revisit it at least once every few years), as Costner's star has faded and Eastwood's elder statesmanhood behind the camera has somehow dwarfed his iconhood in front of it, I feel the melancholy nostalgia of the film more and more. It's an American masterpiece. I make that distinction because it's distinctly American; and I mean it when I say that it's as fine an essay of the dying of an age as anything in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

SDFF '13: I Used to Be Darker

***/****
directed by Matthew Porterfield

by Walter Chaw Matthew Porterfield's quiet and humane I Used to Be Darker provides an interesting contrast to Richard Linklater's talkier improvisations while covering the same interpersonal landscapes of how people speak to one another, react to one another, and interact physically within a space. One of the first images is of a little Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), taking a knife to a couple of paintings. It's a rejection of many things, as well as a declaration. I Used to Be Darker will privilege the cinematic (i.e., showcase the complexity and eloquence of communication through moving pictures), and Porterfield's DP on this production, Jeremy Saulnier, who's pulled off something like a masterpiece with his own Blue Ruin, is just the man to do it. Taryn, run away from the UK all the way to the U.S. to stay with her aunt and uncle, discovers that she's gone from perceived familial strife to tangible familial strife, as the pair is in the process of separating--leaving Taryn's cousin Abby (Hannah Gross) embittered and caught in the middle. More clues to Porterfield's intent come in the casting of musicians Ned Oldham and Kim Taylor as the aunt and uncle: non-actors (as is Porterfield's practice through three films), both, they inhabit their roles with the winsomeness, and indistinctness, of dedicated artists. It's not a far reach for them to access the despair that's essential, I think, to a certain kind of creation, and Porterfield allows them each a moment to express themselves in song: one in a basement before Oldham destroys his instrument, the other on stage and then over the closing-credits, with the coda being a sigh from Taylor and a little shake of her head. I Used to Be Darker isn't about anything more complicated than observing unhappiness and conflict; take it as the counterpoint to Felix Van Groeningen's Broken Circle Breakdown: the quiet between notes, a celebration if you can call something this downbeat celebratory, of what film should act like and look like when you leave it alone.

Nature Calls: FFC Interviews Denis Côté|Vic + Flo Saw a Bear (2013)

Not long into Denis Côté's equal parts unnerving and affecting Curling, we get a taste of what might charitably be called the social life of its cloistered central characters, stolid dad Jean-François (Emmanuel Bilodeau) and his taciturn daughter Julyvonne (Philomene Bilodeau): When Julyvonne does her chores, her father grants her a rare glimpse of the world beyond their home in the chilly Quebec countryside, courtesy of the living-room stereo. Father and daughter quietly tap their fingers and rock their knees to songs like Tiffany's improbably upbeat “I Think We're Alone Now”--pop hits from a bygone era that, for all the unschooled Julyvonne knows, could be the present. The irony of that reveal, which is perhaps unsurprising to anyone familiar with Côté's filmography, is that Jean-François and Julyvonne have their own, perfectly private lives outside this sheltered world, him through his work as a repairman whose job necessitates roaming into hotels and bowling alleys, her through a number of clandestine trips to the forest that put her in touch with a tiger and its possible prey.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

*½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Josh Hutcherson, Philip Seymour Hoffman
screenplay by Simon Beaufoy and Michael Arndt, based on the novel by Suzanne Collins
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw Portentous, eagerly-anticipated, ending on an abrupt cliffhanger aboard a spaceship... Yes I'm talking about The Matrix Reloaded--I mean, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (hereafter Catching Fire), which for all the conceptual visual improvements inherent in moving from The Hunger Games director Gary Ross to director Francis Lawrence for this instalment, still suffers from hilarible, unspeakable dialogue and a scenario seldom honoured by the execution. Those who haven't read the books (myself included), fair warning that you'll not be able to follow a moment of this one without revisiting the first film--again like The Matrix Reloaded. From what I could glean based on the fragments of The Hunger Games I haven't blocked out is that this girl, Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence, earnestly dreadful), has won a televised deathmatch sponsored by a monolithic government to keep control of twelve impoverished, racially- and class-coded districts. I get it, it's a metaphor and, um, a satire of some sort.

Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

*/****
starring Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Jared Leto, Denis O'Hare
screenplay by Craig Borten & Melisa Wallack
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Agreeable, well-meaning horseshit in the Lorenzo's Oil vein (but horseshittier), Jean-Marc Vallée's really bad Dallas Buyers Club is saved to some extent by a couple of fine, showy performances from a skeletal Matthew McConaughey and a skeletal Jared Leto in drag, but ultimately defeated by the standard straw-man activist biopic formula. Not to put too fine a point on it, it's this fall's Promised Land: another liberal movie that injures the credibility of the liberal platform by being so shrill and didactic as to play like melodrama of the worst kind--that is, the self-important kind. All of which is not to say that I didn't sort of enjoy it in the moment (it's fun to marvel at how close to death McConaughey looks, and how pretty Leto is), but to say that the act of writing about it means taking the time to think about it, and that Dallas Buyers Club doesn't suffer much thinking-about.

"Are Movies Breaking Bad?": See Walter Chaw in Person

Our own Walter Chaw will be speaking on a panel tomorrow (Sunday, November 17^th) at the Starz Denver Film Festival. From the Denver Film Society website:

Are Movies Breaking Bad?
Happening: Sunday, November 17, 12:15 PM
Duration: 120 Minutes
Venue: SDFF Sie FilmCenter

Lines along various parts of the entertainment/arts continuum seem to be blurring on a daily basis. Long gone are the days when watching a movie meant buying a ticket and sitting in a theater. But over the past decade or so, series—most aired on premium cable channels—have accomplished what many criticize the movies for not doing: focusing on characters, developing compelling stories, and dominating the national conversation. Long-form storytelling even has spread to services such as Netflix, which provide on-demand streaming as well as disc rentals. Panel moderator Robert Denerstein leads a discussion about whether the best of television now rivals and possibly surpasses movies in both relevance and artistry. Our panelists also will consider which form penetrates more deeply into the national consciousness. Put another way: Were you more likely to hear watercooler talk about such cable series as Breaking Bad, Homeland, and Game of Thrones than about Argo, last year's Oscar winner for best picture? Our panel will examine seismic shifts in the entertainment business, and chime in on whether movies are keeping pace. And, yes, we're talking content, not just delivery systems.

Panelists include: Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post Television Critic, Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post Film and Theatre Critic, Walter Chaw, Film Freak Central Film Critic

Short Term 12 (2013)

**/****
starring Brie Larson, John Gallagher Jr., Kaitlyn Dever, Rami Malek
written and directed by Destin Cretton

by Angelo Muredda Of all the specious arguments thrown around during awards season, the most enervating may be the contention, popular among early champions of films that are near-universally acclaimed on the festival circuit, that the first negative reactions to said films are simply backlash. Backlash, the logic goes, is a latecomer's insincere negative reaction to a title he or she did not have the opportunity to praise when it was still hip to do so--lateness presumably being the only reason a person might have problems with a critical darling. Let it be said, then, that while I could not shake my own feelings of belatedness while recently watching Destin Cretton's routine Short Term 12, which came out of festivals as diverse as SXSW and Locarno relatively unscathed, my response owes less to my unseasonable viewing conditions than to the film's own curious belatedness, its tendency to rehash old-fashioned 1950s moralism about family-planning and Dangerous Minds-derivative solemnity about underprivileged teens in a faux-authentic new package.

SDFF '13: The Fifth Season

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth's The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they're stunning at times, and it's easy to be mesmerized by them--by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other's faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick's movies do, certainly Bela Tarr's: it makes its form comment on its function.

Monsters University (2013) [Collector's Edition] - Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

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**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer's alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born.

Snuff (1976) - Blu-ray Disc

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*½/**** Image B+ Sound C+ Extras B+
starring Liliana Fernández Blanco, Ana Carro, Enrique Larratelli, Mirtha Massa
written and directed by Michael Findlay (with additional footage directed by Simon Nuchtern)

by Bryant Frazer For the majority of its running time, Snuff is pretty standard grindhouse fare. Shot on the cheap and loosely based on the Manson cult murders, which were still big news when the film was being shot in 1971, it's a potboiler about a serial-killing biker gang of women in thrall to a presumably charismatic, self-styled guru calling himself Satán. Shootings, stabbings, softcore groping, and general toplessness ensue. But it's not your ordinary South American Satanic nudie cult film à clef. Among dime-a-dozen exploitation films, Snuff is special.

SDFF '13: Blue Ruin

****/****
starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw Six years after his surprisingly poignant, unexpectedly deft, and, of course, funny debut Murder Party, multi-hyphenate Jeremy Saulnier (he writes, directs, and photographs his movies) returns with something very much like a genre masterpiece with Blue Ruin, the best Coen Bros. noir since they were making them. Grim in exactly the way that can be delightful, it's paced beautifully, written beautifully, and performed, that's right, beautifully. Saulnier's intelligent script is a model of restraint and a strong sense of humour. Macon Blair's reluctant avenging angel Dwight is someone I've never met before in a movie, and when Dwight seeks out old pal Ben (Devin Ratray) for help at some point, well, I'd never met him before, either. It's fair to say that nothing that happens in Blue Ruin happens the way I thought it would happen, if it happens at all. Note an early moment in the picture where Dwight sets up an ambush and doesn't pay it off, or that standard thing in movies now where the hero goes to a drugstore to pick up the supplies they need to perform self-surgery, which here ends with...that would be telling. All the requirements are there for a grand satire, it's true, yet Blue Ruin isn't that. Instead, it's a film that understands exactly what it is and what space it occupies, and at the end it's not merely an extraordinary character piece (Blair's turn would be star-making in a just universe), it's also a nimble thriller full of outrageous fortune and stunning reversals meted out perfectly between its breathless moments and the moments where it breathes.

SDFF '13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen's The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it's exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents--how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film's central event, then, isn't the child's fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise's (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier's band's songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once--even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

SDFF '13: Soft in the Head

**½/****
directed by Nathan Silver

by Walter Chaw Nathan Silver's second film in less than two years (he reports he now has four in the can) is the surprisingly affecting Soft in the Head, which works as a detailed study of lives of loud desperation. Natalia (Sheila Etxeberria) is a drunk, makes bad object choices, and is an all-around loser who also has the misfortune of being really pretty, making her the target of just about everyone she comes in contact with. Exteberria, the sister of an ex-roommate of Silver's, is a true find, as is Ed Ryan as kind, mild Maury, who walks the streets in search of lost souls to invite to bunk with him in his little apartment. Shades of Viridiana, and for all of Silver's protestations to the contrary, there's a certain formalism in his satire that gives an arc to what was, by his report, an almost-completely improvised, looser-than-loose adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot, with only the character of poor, saintly, benighted Prince Myshkin remaining somewhat intact in Maury. Soft in the Head is saved from pretension, though, by the complete naturalism of the performances. Exteberria astounds for her unself-consciousness as a character irredeemable, defined by her lack of impulse control and horrific decisions. A friend, Hannah (Melanie J. Scheiner), provides the film its foil while Hannah's autistic brother Nathan (Carl Kranz) has a pivotal moment where he speaks directly to Natalia's essential problem as an insufficient object of desire. The last moments between Natalia and Maury are touching, and the final scene, where I swear I see Maury moving his hand on her thigh, speaks to puzzles, deep, in how there may be no such thing as holy saints invested in pure altruism. The only thing worse than a world with Myshkins, after all, is a world without them.

SDFF '13: Go Down Death

½*/****
written and directed by Aaron Schimberg

by Walter Chaw Okay, I'm gonna take a stab at this one. Aaron Schimberg's aggressively pretentious Go Down Death is an attempt to speak to the idea that communal storytelling is the key way in which humans communicate culture. Ostensibly based on a lost folklorist's collected works, it acts like a Guy Maddin, looks like early Jim Jarmusch, and really doesn't work at all, because if the film is a variation on a theme, it's a riff that goes on way, way too long. I spent an evening once watching mushroom prints, stained directly onto film negative, by Stan Brakhage. The idea is interesting--a lot more interesting than the execution. It's more interesting that he thought of it and made it, in other words, than it is to endure it. I feel this way about most experimental cinema; I feel this way about experimental jazz, too. It's all perilously close to clever, highly-intellectualized masturbation. After a while, one begins to wonder if it's even still engaging to the person jerking off. Go Down Death does a nice job with its black-and-white, wilfully-grainy cinematography, which creates a convincing carnival/period feeling. Unfortunately, the dialogue is so impossible to deliver, and in the mouths of friends and family who need a lot more help than this. What remains is a film that can't quite get its fingers to close on valuable subtext or meaningful philosophy. Ending with an anachronistic jump to a neo-Pinter, kinda-Woody Allen modern-dinner-party epilogue that underscores the equation of cinema with the vessel of new tribal mythology, it's, you know...I get it, I get it, and I wish this were a short instead of a feature.

SDFF '13: Tricked

Steekspel
*/****
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Its title maybe referring to the audience, Paul Verhoeven's newest is a pain-in-the-ass gimmick piece done by a filmmaker I used to really admire and maybe don't so much anymore. The first third is dedicated to a built-in, manic "making-of" featurette that essays, in deadly, deadening detail, how Verhoeven posted four pages of a script online, then invited anybody with a laptop and a Starbucks to submit the next five pages, and the next, and so on and so forth, thus pushing Verhoeven out of his comfort zone and inspiring him to new heights as a filmmaker. As is always the case with Verhoeven, it's very likely that this whole project is some elaborate satire of exactly how stupid we are. His RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, Total Recall, and Showgirls have each enjoyed long, healthy second lives as critical darlings; in his way, he's the Douglas Sirk of the late-'80s/early-'90s: dismissed in the moment, but appreciated through the perspective afforded by time. I'm a fan. Enough so that I want to believe the prototypical mad-director persona Verhoeven inhabits in this thing is a piss on self-important meta stuff like The Five Obstructions. (Honestly, just the jaunty "fuck you" score suggests that Verhoeven is fully aware of the game he's playing here.) As for the short film that occupies the latter 50 minutes or so, it's a tale of corporate intrigue featuring unknown but game actors, playing out a sexual blackmail that feels more the lark for the context provided by the attendant documentary. Indeed, it's impossible to see the two halves as independent entities, however unintentionally, and as such, the product of the experiment lands as Verhoeven's most conventional film...ever. It's an example of the fallibility of giving people what they think they want and indulging what they think they understand. That doesn't make it better, though it does suddenly make it make sense.

Starz Denver Film Festival '13: All Together Now

**½/****
screenplay by Ryan Kasmiskie & Alexander Mirecki
directing Alexander Mirecki

by Walter Chaw Two scenes: one featuring a bonfire-illuminated kiss against a forest backdrop, the other a man standing on a platform in a clearing as a crowd fills in around him. Both are captured in glorious 16mm, shot through with grain and lit by natural light; both are suffused with a magical, twilit glow that only really happens in exactly this way when you use old, some would say obsolete, technology. These moments almost, by themselves, justify the existence Alexander Mirecki's All Together Now. At the least, there's nothing about the substance of the film that detracts from the beauty of Zoran Popovic's cinematography. Plotless, listless maybe, wobbling slightly from portentous to unassuming and slight, the picture is a half-fictionalized document of an all-night music festival that, in the tradition of Richard Linklater's earliest forays into proto-mumblecore (Harmony Korine's, too), doesn't have much on its mind and would even, given its lo-fi visual beauty, be better served as a silent. Still, it demonstrates just enough in terms of instinct to suggest that Mirecki has a future. Lou Taylor Pucci presents an affable semi-centre for the piece as the organizer of the concert and recipient of the aforementioned kiss, while bands like Manicorn, Pedestrian Deposit, Nice Face, and Night Control provide the right CBGB authenticity when we pull away from the overly-scripted (overly-slotted, truth be told) interactions of the audience.