Film Freak Central

Far from the Madding Cloud: An Interview with Iuli Gerbase

I first caught Iuli Gerbase's fantastic debut The Pink Cloud as part of last year's virtual Sundance and came away from it feeling like I'd seen perhaps the definitive film of the pandemic. But it wasn't a pandemic movie, per se. It was written in 2017 and shot in 2019, meaning its story of two people negotiating isolation is engaged in unpacking a different kind of virulence. The script was completed post-Trump but pre-Bolsonaro, so this Brazilian film isn't even exactly a political metaphor, although it could certainly be read that way. While it's good, publicity-wise, for The Pink Cloud to seem a work of prescience, it's bad in that the picture's prescience detracts from the thorniness of its broader sociological themes. Given time, its embedded subtext concerning a patriarchal system reinforcing traditional gender roles should emerge as the novelty of it as the world's grimmest Magic 8-ball recedes.

Sundance '21: We're All Going to the World's Fair

***/****
starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw We spend our teen years--and, if we're not careful, our entire lives--imagining ourselves a player in a grand, romantic storyline where everything that happens has meaning, every misdeed receives justice, and every moment of grace is returned in kind. We need to feel like there's more to this than just chaos and meaningless suffering. Most of all, we need to believe that we have some control over how things turn out on both a personal level and a cosmic one, too. The alternative, after all, tends to be despair. I suspect the reason Boomers are the majority demographic in the Q-nonsense is their fear of a world in which they suddenly understand nothing requires some sort of recourse, no matter how tortured.

Sundance '21: Strawberry Mansion

****/****
starring Penny Fuller, Kentucker Audley, Grace Glowicki, Reed Birney
written and directed by Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley

by Walter Chaw Strawberry Mansion is very much like a live-action "Adventure Time", perhaps doomed, like Pendleton Ward's existentialist/surrealist masterpiece, to a long road to appreciation as something emotionally incisive rather than something especially but merely unconventional. Of all the antecedents it boasts (add eXistenZ, Alphaville, Tom Schiller's Nothing Lasts Forever, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Douglas Adams's work, and, um, Laura to the mix), however, Strawberry Mansion finally reminds me most of the Oliver Stone-produced miniseries "Wild Palms" in both its literal execution and the low thrum of underlying paranoia about the commodification of dream sleep. The danger is great that a stew as heady as this will be ponderous at best, indecipherable at worst, but it's delivered with a confident, even light touch by co-writers/co-directors Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney. As odd as it seems on the surface, the picture, again like "Adventure Time", has easy-to-argue themes and is guided by what feels like real, cathartic pathos. Strawberry Mansion's aggressive artifice actually enhances its emotional authenticity. I love this film.

Sundance '21: Violation

****/****
starring Madeleine Sims-Fewer, Anna Maguire, Jesse LaVercombe, Obi Abili
written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer & Dusty Mancinelli

by Walter Chaw Just the image of a man, naked, fighting for his life against a clothed assailant after a sexually-compromised engagement feels by itself something like rebellion. Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer's Violation isn't the first in the struggle, but it's a powerful addition to a fulsome rape-revenge subgenre that, with classics like Abel Ferrara's Ms. 45, Lars Von Trier's Dogville, and Meir Zarchi's I Spit on Your Grave leading a to-this-point male-dominated field, has always had something on its mind about the way women are brutalized in a society that sees them mainly as appendages for male desire. What I like best about Violation, though, isn't its similarities to modern examples, but rather its relationship (not unlike Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring) to ancient examples such as Medea and Atreus. Indeed, the film lands somewhere between the two: the House of Atreus cursed because of a rape and playing out through the rendering and surreptitious cannibalism that Violation makes distaff through Medea's vengeful filicide (at least in the Euripedes telling). Violation is ancient Greek, too, in the pulling of atrocity into the immediate comparison to not the indifference of the natural world, but the transformative viciousness that animates it. Things are always in a state of violent flux; it's nature's lone promise. And this cosmological tendency towards equilibrium is only achieved through the passing through of distant polarities. The road to "fine" leads through bliss and blood.

Sundance '21: Cryptozoo

*/****
written and directed by Dash Shaw

by Walter Chaw I rail a lot about how animation is a genre in the United States instead of a medium, how the Japanese have it all figured out and we Americans are at least a generation behind. Now here's graphic novelist turned animator Dash Shaw, following up his better--or at least more focused--My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea with the oddly blissed-out eco-adventure flick Cryptozoo. What's clear is that this, more than his previous stuff, is an attempt to ape Japanese director Ujicha's hand-drawn nightmare/cutout style from stuff like the indelible The Burning Buddha Man and Violence Voyager. What Shaw hasn't successfully ported over is Ujicha's kineticism--that sense of propulsive, compulsive, nightmarish energy that confers upon his films a weird, repulsive energy. Watching Ujicha's films is like accidentally touching a sea cucumber. I reached into an opaque bag of Wonder Bread that I found in a cabin once and drew back, in revulsion, a hand covered in bright green slime. That's Ujicha. Cryptozoo is a movie that feels like it was based on one of the breathless stories Juliet and Pauline would have made up over a lazy summer's day in Heavenly Creatures. Just a long string of terribly important things tied together by "and then and then and this and also this" narrative exposition.

Sundance '21: Knocking

Knackningar
**½/****
starring Cecilia Milocco, Krister Kern, Albin Grenholm, Ville Virtanen
written by Emma Broström
directed by Frida Kempff

by Walter Chaw Frida Kempff's Knocking reminds me a great deal of Matthew Chapman's underseen Heart of Midnight, in that both are about troubled young women recovering from some recent trauma, given autonomy over themselves and their environment and then mistrusted when things, perhaps insidiously, start to go pear-shaped. Where they diverge, however, is that Chapman's film is deliciously sleazy--the peril therein largely housed in the tension between sexual repression and expression and the lengths to which a male-dominated society is interested in manipulating women. It's no accident an inciting moment in Heart of Midnight involves an apple dropped from a peephole bored through the heroine's ceiling. In Knocking, the tension is whether Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is hearing ghostly knocking coming from her ceiling--maybe in Morse code, maybe not--or imagining it. That's it. Unless the knocking is attached to some tangible anchor, it can exist only as a metaphor for Molly's flashed-back-to but oblique trauma, for her sexual identity as gay (though no one seems interested in her one way or another), or for a more general sense of societal systems designed around not believing women. All are important in a social sense and tedious in a metaphorical sense. If the message is women get shafted, well, this is true and terrible. But if that's all you have to say about it, there's nothing left to consider in the subtext.

Sundance '21: The Pink Cloud

A Nuvem Rosa
***½/****
starring Renata de Lélis, Eduardo Mendonça, Helena Becker, Girley Paes
written and directed by Iuli Gerbase

by Walter Chaw Iuli Gerbase's stunning feature debut The Pink Cloud owes a great deal to the insular psychodramas of J.G. Ballard, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a more specific High Rise in which the fall of society is focused through the decay of a relationship forged in quarantine. It works best as allegory, allying itself with something like Lorcan Finnegan's recent and similarly-pre-pandemic Vivarium, using science-fiction as a launch point to test the tensile strength of the tenterhooks tethering us to one another. The details of the corruption matter less than how we change when our environment changes--or, more specifically, how we fail to.

Sundance '21 - An Introduction

by Walter Chaw I think there are so many film festivals now that it's never not festival season. As a consequence, no one festival is more important than any other festival. They're each a different tentacle of the distribution/exhibition octopus, an appendage of chthonic horror. If any distributor happens to show some apparent innovation, call it a novel mutation: temporary and vestigial on the body impolitic. Celebrate A24 and NEON, in other words--but I have an idea that everyone is connected to the same profit motive. Meanwhile, the festival clockwork churns on unimpeded.

Sundance '20: Luxor

***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes, Sherine Reda
written and directed by Zeina Durra

by Walter Chaw In Zeina Durra's Luxor, Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a British surgeon in Luxor, Egypt on a short leave between horrific assignments first in devastated Syria, then in Yemen. She's shell-shocked, it's clear. She spends her days wandering through the ancient city and allows herself one night to be picked up in her hotel's bar by an unctuous Yank throwing his money around. She lies in her hotel room for hours, trying to nap, and when she does sleep, she wakes to find herself another day closer to some sort of hell. Durra captures her listlessness as a feeling ineffable of being lost but never lost enough. Hana sits by herself at the far left end of a park bench, arms folded across her chest and a baseball cap pulled down low over her stunned expression. She visits a pyramid one day, just another tourist, and overhears a tour guide giving the yokels a taste of the gravid mysticism they're paying for. It all lands as empty for Hana. Hana, who doesn't have anything left inside after all this time bearing witness to the absence of God.

Sundance '20: Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness

*/****
starring Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee
written and directed by Massoud Bakhshi

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes into Massoud Bakhshi's shrill Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (hereafter Yalda), I put my hands over my ears to blunt the constant keening. It's also the point where I started wondering what this film was on about. There's something brilliant and fascinating at the core of Yalda--a movie about an Iranian variety/game show in which the fate of someone sentenced to death hangs on the forgiveness of one of the people they've wronged--that makes its hamfistedness a real pity. Gathered are what we might call the plaintiff and the defendant to sit in an "Ellen"-style talk-show nook to tell their stories and air their grievances and then let the audience deliver a verdict via text message, whether or not a blood-money bounty will be paid to the aggrieved should they decide to exercise some grace. That's horrible. It's not more horrible than the U.S. justice system, which offers no such opportunity of recourse for the accused (heaven forbid a Christian nation ever exercise forgiveness and actually value life), but it's horrible just the same.

Sundance '20: This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection

***/****
starring Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makheta, Makhaola Ndebele, Tseko Monaheng
written and directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

by Walter Chaw In Lesothan hyphenate Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's debut film This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (hereafter Burial/Resurrection), the fate of a village, soon to be drowned as a casualty of a government dam project, weighs heavily on elderly widow Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo). Mantoa's striking visage suggests an octogenarian Beckett photographed by Jane Bown, perhaps, the lines on her face describing a road map of the places she's been. Her sorrows include a lost husband, child, and brother--to a mining accident, illness, and misadventure, respectively. The one thing tethering her to the ground is the village's cemetery, where all her hopes are interred. The film's introduction, a slow crawl through what vibes as a jazz club as an old man (Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha) sits playing his Sotho lesiba (which makes music that sounds a little like a dirty-water trombone) in counterpoint to his slam poetry-like incantatory recitation of the movie's themes, the whole of it working like nothing more than a grand invocation to the muse. Burial/Resurrection is film as epic poem, and it has moments of truly staggering power. Power it only really loses when it cuts too quickly, cleanly, back to the narrative of the film itself. What would it have been like had it leaned harder into being a stream of images?

Sundance '20: The Evening Hour

***/****
starring Philip Ettinger, Stacy Martin, Cosmo Jarvis, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Elizabeth Palmore, based on the novel by Carter Sickels
directed by Braden King

by Walter Chaw Everybody likes Cole (Philip Ettinger, the suicidal environmentalist from First Reformed), and for good reason. Cole is young, handsome, pleasingly brawny, appears to genuinely enjoy his job at the old-folks home, and takes care of his grandmother (Tess Harper) and demented-and-fading-fast grandfather (Frank Hoyt Taylor). As it happens, his grandfather looks a little bit like my late father-in-law, who was taken by dementia a couple of years ago at the beginning of one of the more bleak periods of my life. The way Cole reacts when he learns that plans are being made to move his grandfather into more structured care feels familiar and true. When Braden King's The Evening Hour is best, it's for how lived-in everything feels. Elizabeth Palmore's screenplay, an adaptation of a novel by Carter Sickels, sounds good and right in the mouths of these actors. I do wish it had eschewed its criminal subplot in favour of more, well, flavour, but even in its MacGuffin, find embedded modern bogeys like financial desperation, the opioid epidemic, and a broken healthcare state. Weighty stuff, and The Evening Hour handles it with agility and charm.

Sundance '20: Beast Beast

*½/****
starring Shirley Chen, Will Madden, Jose Angeles, Courtney Dietz
written and directed by Danny Madden

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Slacking around in the common area shared by Elephant, Madeline's Madeline, and Skate Kitchen, Danny Madden's message-heavy melodrama Beast Beast would've been better served just being about the difficulties of adolescence without wading into the gun debate. Once this pretty decent hangout flick tries to gain some gravitas, it invites close scrutiny of the ways it's going about it. One side will start looking for reasons to discredit it, while the other will be burdened by this uneasy recognition that sometimes, undisciplined good intentions make the struggle harder. There's a fine line between a cogent argument, after all, and The Life of David Gale, and Beast Beast is further evidence that liberals tend to be their own worst enemy. It's too bad.

Sundance '20: La Leyenda Negra

*/****

starring Monica Betancourt, Kailei Lopez, Irlanda Moreno, Justin Avila
written and directed by Patricia Vidal Delgado

by Walter Chaw Shot in black-and-white, Patricia Vidal Delgado's La Leyenda Negra is filled with good intentions. It's the story of El Salvadoran Aleteia (Monica Betancourt), a high-school senior studying with a "Temporary Protected Status" that's about to be rescinded under Trump's xenophobic, white-nationalist administration. She has a scholarship to UCLA, the film is quick to remind, but she still has to make it through graduation. Easier said than done when her school's curriculum seems set on teaching antiquated attitudes towards imperialism and the genuine evil of nations that have devastated whole populations in the name of Manifest Destiny. There's a classroom scene where Aleteia corrects her white teacher's pronunciation of her name before laying into her for perpetuating the party line. Aleteia is meanwhile developing a crush on Rosarito (Kailei Lopez--a budding star, perhaps), a shy girl in the sway of a monstrous bully, Monica (Irlanda Moreno), who does not approve of potentially losing an acolyte to the interloper.

Sundance '20: Summer White

Blanco de Verano
**½/****
starring Adrián Rossi, Sophie Alexander-Katz, Fabián Corres
written by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson & Raúl Sebastián Quintanilla
directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson

by Walter Chaw Aspiring for something like The 400 Blows with a young protagonist who looks and acts like 15-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud, Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson's directorial debut Summer White seeks to explain the pain and occasional outbursts of a young man coming of age without the means to express himself. The film's style lies somewhere at the intersection of early Harmony Korine and Ken Loach: it's aggressively not-showy--so devoted to its austerity and so accomplished in achieving it, in fact, that its aesthetic humility becomes a kind of distraction. It looks beautiful. Maybe too beautiful. It looks like an Y Tu Mamá También while acting like a Ratcatcher or a Kes, and reconciling that dissonance begins to feel difficult. In the end, what disappoints most about Summer White is that I started to question whether the film wanted to be something for its own sake or if it was just something done by someone who'd seen a few Linda Manz movies and thought she was really great. I mean, she is, of course. Linda Manz is awesome.

Sundance '20: High Tide

***½/****
starring Gloria Carrá, Jorge Sesán, Cristian Salguero, Mariana Chaud
written and directed by Verónica Chen

by Walter Chaw Verónica Chen's astonishing High Tide threatens for a while to be the distaff version of Alain Guiraudie's Stranger by the Lake before it takes something like a turn into the basement of some dark, dismal, class-based noir. It opens with rich, anxious Laura (Gloria Carrá) dancing in front of an uncurtained, wall-length window, seemingly aware of the three workmen watching in her yard as the sun goes down and they break for the day. The foreman, Weisman (Jorge Sesán), stays behind to a couple of sly, knowing looks, and engages in a rough seduction that finds Laura at turns the aggressor and the aggrieved. She doesn't like the rough talk. She thinks Weisman's a bit of a pig but softens when he apologizes and calls her "ma'am." It's a clue--though it's not obvious what kind of clue until later. The next morning, she sends him away and, while shopping, gossips to a friend about the size of Weisman's dick and his "animalistic" stamina. It's the set-up for something James M. Cain might have written, but it's told from the point of view of the fatale.

Sundance '20: Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on 'The Exorcist'

**/****
directed by Alexandre O. Philippe

by Walter Chaw There's a moment in Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on 'The Exorcist' (hereafter Leap of Faith), the latest feature from cinephile documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe (78/52), where Friedkin talks about a shot he framed so that Max Von Sydow is in the foreground of the Tomb of Nebuchadnezzar. It's followed fast by Friedkin talking about how he didn't intend anything in The Exorcist. In other words, he says he didn't impose meaning and then immediately offers exceptions. He brings up instinctual filmmaking after speaking to how carefully he developed the script to be a series of slow revelations and portents. Friedkin is, in short, a mass of contradictions. But rather than look on it as disingenuousness or confusion, I sense that he doesn't really know why The Exorcist works the way it does, but it got under his skin and into his bed in the same way it has for audiences these past 47 years. We do our best to dance about architecture, but in the end, architecture can only be enhanced by the dance, not defined by it.

Sundance '20: Once Upon a Time in Venezuala

*/****
directed by Anabel Rodríguez Ríos

by Walter Chaw My favourite part of Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's pretty documentary Once Upon a Time in Venezuela isn't the mad woman who has a shrine to Hugo Chavez and forces people to touch a giant, door-sized poster of him before entering her room, nor is it the two old men who cry while talking about the way things used to be in their little floating/stilts-bound town of Congo Mirador before playing pointed tunes on an old rat-box guitar. No, my favourite part of Once Upon a Time in Venezuela is how it's loosely structured around a doomed election that has no real bearing on this tiny place's inevitable disintegration. There's a lot to pull from this idea that the works of Man are but a speck of dust and all that--a mote in God's design, right? Some of the locals, especially one garish busybody, are also displeased with the quality of education their children are receiving while the world falls apart around them. It's fun to watch people without a future try to plan for the future. And then you realize the film is talking about us.

Sundance '20: And Then We Danced

***/****
starring Levan Gelbakhiani, Bachi Valishvili, Ana Javakhishvili, Kakha Gogidze
written and directed by Levan Akin

by Walter Chaw I don't know that Levan Akin's beautifully-shot, sensitively-performed And Then We Danced does anything especially novel, but it lands everything it attempts. That's an apt metaphor, I think, for a film about an elite Georgian dance troupe that ends with an audition where our hero, Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), Curt Schilling-bloody-socks his way through a gutsy routine. It plays out a lot like the audition in Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria reboot in all its physicality and injury fear/revulsion, just as the rest of it plays out like Guadagnino's Call Me By Your Name in the broad strokes of its gay coming-of-age melodrama. And Then We Danced is derivative, sure, but at least it's derivative of the right films.

Sundance '20: Amulet

***/****
starring Carla Juri, Alec Secareanu, Angeliki Papoulia, Imelda Staunton
written and directed by Romola Garai

by Walter Chaw Romola Garai makes her directorial debut with the gnarly, self-described "feminist" horror film Amulet, which doesn't tread much new ground until, suddenly, it does. It's a lovely debut, smart and fruitfully repugnant--an able showcase for Garai as a filmmaker possessed of a nice sense of pacing and a good, gothic eye for object placement and gore. One scene, taking place in the musty attic of a crumbling old house, made me feel exactly the way I felt the first time I saw Clive Barker's Hellraiser, back when I was a teenager and easier to freak out. Something about unnatural births, and all that, and unexpected apertures opening with unexpected wetness, carried off with this impeccable feeling for archetypally disturbing ideas. Telling more would be telling, but from that point on--about two-thirds of the way in--Amulet not only had my attention, it also had my respect.

Sundance '20: La Llorona

***½/****
starring María Mercedes Coroy, Margarita Kénefic, Sabrina De La Hoz, Julio Diaz
written by Jayro Bustamante & Lisandro Sánchez
directed by Jayro Bustamante

by Walter Chaw In a film comprising indelible compositions, one in particular stands out in Jayro Bustamante's doom-laden La Llorona. It's not a supernatural tableau, although the film is thick with them, nor is it one from a devastating war-crimes trial where an old Guatemalan general, Enrique Monteverde (Julio Diaz), stands accused of unspeakable atrocities visited upon Mayan women during a horrific, early-'80s pogrom against them. No, the moment that lingers for me is a brief one where a new maid in the General's household, Alma (María Mercedes Coroy), kneels beside a giant backyard pool and fishes protest flyers out of the water as a frog swims laconically past. The sequence itself captures the mild surreality of a picture set against a sociopolitical reckoning with an ugly period in Guatemala's history. The General and his family rattle around in a mansion, surrounded by tokens of their affluence. Our first night with them, long-suffering wife Carmen (Margarita Kénefic) is mistaken for a ghost and shot at by the great man, and their daughter Natalia (Sabrina De La Hoz), a doctor only now coming to learn of the crimes of which her father's accused, also discovers that his facilities are, perhaps greatly, diminished.

Sundance '20: Be Water

*/****
directed by Bao Nguyen

by Walter Chaw Bao Nguyen's Bruce Lee documentary Be Water is a moving hagiography of a legend immortalized by his sudden death at the beginning of his career. He reminds of James Dean in that respect, captured in amber as this eternally young punk icon for the disenfranchised, the alienated, the frustrated. He was a point of pride for Asian-Americans and became a peculiar rallying point for African-Americans, too. The pressure for me to write favourably about this film is crippling and depressing. It occurred to me not to review it at all. Bruce Lee's legacy is complicated. He was someone I lionized when I was a kid. Slight, wiry, he looked like me when I was little. That he could become something so huge in my imagination was to me extraordinary. If he, with his heavy accent and ferociously Chinese demeanour, could refuse to assimilate and yet rise, maybe this country meant what it said. You know what, though? It doesn't mean what it says.

Sundance '20: Aggie

**/****
directed by Catherine Gund

by Walter Chaw Agnes Gund is a fantastic person, a philanthropist art collector who sits as President Emirita for the Museum of Modern Art. She champions artists while they're living, visits them in their studios to better understand the hands that move the creations, and recently sold a famous Roy Lichtenstein original ("Masterpiece") for an ungodly sum of $162 million, which she used to create a foundation called "Art for Justice" dedicated to penal reform, with the ultimate aim of eradicating mass incarceration. She's been called the "last good rich person" by the NEW YORK TIMES and it's hard to argue, though the bar is admittedly low. The temptation is to launch into a long screed on the moral abomination of allowing such a thing as a billionaire to exist in the first place, just one of the many digressions that daughter Catherine's able, functional documentary Aggie inspires. There are moments in this film where Gund, now in her eighties, needs to be cajoled into speaking (they're played off as more of her humility), intercut with archival footage of a younger Gund demonstrating a more able public persona. She's slowed down considerably, and I wondered a time or two if she has someone to manage her estate. I worry about her, but the film does not.

Sundance '20: Black Bear

**/****
starring Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon, Paola Lázaro
written and directed by Lawrence Michael Levine

by Walter Chaw Hyphenate Lawrence Michael Levine (Uncle Kent 2) ventures into Darren Aronofsky territory with his insular, solipsistic Black Bear--the kind of movie that actually deploys "solipsistic" as a word to develop its two female leads: one uses it, the other pretends not to know what it means. It's a game that sophisticates play with one another, I guess, and Black Bear, split into two loosely-related halves, is also a game sophisticates are playing with one another, or at least with themselves. In the first segment, co-producer Aubrey Plaza is Allison, a movie director renting a room in a cabin in the woods from a bickering couple, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). Blair is pregnant, Gabe is insufferable, and the two of them spend a lot of time arguing about whether or not women had it better in the 17^th century, when they were the property of men. (It's one of those arguments Jordan Peterson makes because Jordan Peterson is an incredible asshole.) So they fight, and Allison is caught in the middle. They also bicker about whether or not Blair should be drinking wine while she's pregnant, and then Blair goes completely apeshit and says that Allison's pussy probably smells like "spider shit." It might be an improvisation, which is really something if it is--and really something if it isn't.

Sundance '20: The Painter and the Thief

****/****
directed by Benjamin Ree

by Walter Chaw Shot over the course of three years, Benjamin Ree's documentary The Painter and the Thief details the relationship that blooms between artist Barbora Kysilkova and a man, Karl-Bertil Nordland, who stole two of her paintings from a gallery. That's it. You should see this movie and then come back here because I want to talk about it with someone--but you should see it first. Okay. You back?

Sundance '11: If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front

**/****
directed by Marshall Curry

by Alex Jackson I have officially reached the point in my life where when I see a cop beating up on a hippie, I identify with the cop. There's a shot in Marshall Curry's If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front in which the police spray two ELF members directly in the eyes with mace during a peaceful sit-in. Some audience members behind me interjected, I think by pure reflex, "That's not fair!" But I found myself feeling considerably less enraged. Yes, these protesters were being entirely non-violent, but what alternatives have they left the police? The cops are there to break up the protest and allow loggers to cut down trees. If the loggers can't do their job, it means the police haven't done theirs. And if these people can't do their jobs, then that means they can't make their mortgage payment or feed their kids. With all that at stake, conceding to the protesters isn't exactly a viable option. If a Tree Falls doesn't really rise above the level of a generic direct-to-HBO/PBS/Netflix Instant issue documentary; I was never fully sold on the validity of the ELF's cause. The Earth Liberation Front appears to be predicated on the notion that our forests should be protected simply because they're aesthetically pleasing, or because they've been on the planet for hundreds of years. Logic like that is shaky at best. The bulk of the film deals with ELF member Daniel McGowan, who was charged and eventually convicted of helping set fire to Superior Lumber Company and Jefferson Poplar Farms in 2001. After 9/11, his case fell under a new "terrorist enhancement," which would mean a harsher sentence. I get the feeling that nobody involved in the Earth Liberation Front sees the liberation of the Earth as a cause worth going to federal prison for. These acts of arson are depicted as the dumb actions of a dumb kid several years ago and not the work of a real "terrorist." It all strikes me as incredibly disingenuous: if Curry isn't going to romanticize McGowan as a martyr for his movement, it seems to me he should be more proactive in exposing the underlying naiveté of his cause.

Sundance '11: Salvation Boulevard

*½/****
starring Pierce Brosnan, Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, Greg Kinnear
screenplay by Doug Max Stone & George Ratliff, based on the novel by Larry Beinhart
directed by George Ratliff

by Alex Jackson What a waste. The cast assembled for George Ratliff's Salvation Boulevard is one for the ages. You have Pierce Bronson as super-evangelist Reverend Dan Day, Jennifer Connelly as infatuated housewife Gwen Vandeveer, Ciarán Hinds as Gwen's hard-ass Naval vet father Billy, and Ed Harris as pompous, bearded intellectual Dr. Paul Blaycock. These are traditionally serious dramatic actors in roles that lend themselves to caricature, yet they invest these characters with history and a point-of-view, providing substantive depth to the most basic of outlines. There's a real sense of professional pride to the performances here; Bronson, Connelly, Hinds, and Harris love these people and believe in them. Instead of coasting their way to their next paycheck, they're fucking earning it by doing some real fucking acting. But it's all for naught, as these great actors are completely squandered by a writer-director who doesn't care nearly as much about his chosen craft. (I'm reminded a bit of Matt Zoller Seitz's brilliant review of Sphere.) I'm obliged to report that not every performance in this film is created equal. Greg Kinnear stars as Carl, an "ex-Dead Head"/current member of Day's flock who's married to Gwen. Kinnear is not in the same league as the other four I mentioned. The only time he ever impressed me was in Paul Schrader's Auto Focus, and, of course, that's because the part was tailor-made for his shallow amiability. It's not that he's bad in Salvation Boulevard, he just reliably does whatever it is that Greg Kinnear does. Marisa Tomei, on the other hand, is very bad indeed as stoner security guard Honey Foster, who knew Carl back on the "Dead Head" circuit. Tomei goes for the cheap and easy laughs, but even then I don't blame her as much as I do a screenplay that hasn't given her the luxury of one dimension to play. Tomei doesn't do the work that Ratliff couldn't be bothered with, but she at least has enough courage to make a total fool of herself. What is there to say about the picture itself? It's Satire with a capital S, taking on that easiest of pickings: Christian fundamentalism. I won't bore you with plot details or analysis. Suffice it to say that believers will feel insulted, non-believers will feel coddled, and neither will feel particularly challenged to consider the other's perspective.

Sundance '11: Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

*½/****
directed by Jon Foy

by Alex Jackson I'll admit that I can't readily imagine anybody ever making a better film on the subject of the Toynbee Tile phenomenon than Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles. The problem isn't that it's done poorly--it's that anybody thought it should have been done at all. Filmmakers Justin Duerr, Jon Foy, Colin Smith, and Steve Weinik worked on this project for five years, but I don't really understand why. Were they actually hoping to solve the mystery? And if they solved it, well, what then? Insofar as the Toynbee Tiles hold any interest for us at all, it's as a non sequitur, and what's the point of making sense of a non sequitur? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose? As explained by WIKIPEDIA, the Toynbee Tiles are a series of messages embedded in asphalt across approximately two dozen American cities and four South American capitals. The message on each tile is essentially always the same: "TONYBEE IDEA/IN MOVIE 2001/RESSURECT DEAD/ON PLANET JUPITER." Sometimes "movie" is substituted with "Kubrick's" and oftentimes this main inscription is supplemented with paranoid asides about Jews, journalists, and the Mafia. Toynbee Tile enthusiasts believe that the "Toynbee idea" refers to a passage in historian Arnold Toynbee's Experiences that describes the possibility of the deceased coming back to physiological life rather than being resurrected in an immaterial supernatural dimension. Apparently, the tiler believes that Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is suggesting this rebirth will occur on the planet Jupiter. Duerr, a Philadelphia-area artist and musician who first became interested in the tiles in the mid-nineties, spearheads the investigation into their origin. It's an obsession over an obsession. What kind of person would make these tiles and what kind of person would be interested in the person who made these tiles? When ironic detachment is held onto long enough, it ceases to be ironic but doesn't exactly become sincere, either. Anybody who devotes five years of his life to a film about the Toynbee Tiles hasn't just wasted it--he's affirmatively stated that the deeper questions of human existence are no more material than a perverse preoccupation with kitsch. This is a profoundly obnoxious film.

Sundance '11: Benavides Born

All She Can
**/****
starring Corina Calderon, Jeremy Ray Valdez, Joseph Julian Soria, Julia Vera
screenplay by Daniel Meisel & Amy Wendel
directed by Amy Wendel

by Alex Jackson Amy Wendel's Benavides Born is throwing me for a loop, and I'm getting a little frustrated about it. I understand that this film isn't trying to be Step Up 4 or the female weightlifter version of Rudy--but it's not really giving us a viable alternative to that kind of programming, either. On a very basic level, I don't know what this movie's about. The small town of Benavides, Texas has only three industries: fast food, an oil rig, and the military; high-school senior Luz Garcia (Corina Calderon) is disenchanted with all three. Outside of school and her customer-service job at Whataburger, she devotes her life to competitive weightlifting. What's driving me nuts is that Garcia doesn't lift weights because she's seeking relief from her humdrum working-class existence and that's the only time she feels truly alive, as in Saturday Night Fever. No, Garcia doesn't even like lifting weights. She's only doing it because she's aiming to get a college scholarship and leave Benavides without incurring any student debt. What does she want to study? What does she want to be? If weightlifting isn't her dream, then what exactly is? Co-writer/director Wendel never gets around to asking these questions. She admires Garcia for her pragmatism and perseverance but is sheepish about the way her college goals are born almost exclusively out of a desire to distance herself from her working-class Mexican-American family. This culminates in an awkward plot development late in the film where Garcia helps a family of illegal aliens into San Antonio and then drives to confront the Admissions Dean at the University of Austin. Does this mean she's saying goodbye to her Mexican self? Coming to terms with it? It feels like superficial action cooked up by a filmmaker who's let political correctness sterilize all the tension organic to the material. The result is a piddling, rambling film that broaches social issues more than it explores them.

Sundance '11: Crime After Crime

***/****
documentary; directed by Yoav Potash

by Alex Jackson From 1983 to 2009, Deborah Peagler was incarcerated at the Central California Women's Facility for the murder of her boyfriend, Oliver Wilson. Wilson battered Peagler, forced her into prostitution, and molested her daughter from a previous relationship, but because he took out an insurance policy before his death naming Peagler as a beneficiary, and because the actual murder was carried out by two Crips she went to for protection, the district attorney at the time presented this as a hired killing. All evidence of abuse at the hands of Wilson was suppressed. In 2002, encouraged by a new California law giving battered women a second chance for a hearing if the original court did not consider evidence relating to the abuse, land-use lawyers Nadia Costa and Joshua Safran took Peagler's case pro bono and spent the next seven years fighting for her release. Crime After Crime rather preciously argues that battered women who kill their abusers are victims, too. I mean, no shit, right? The case of Deborah Peagler is a pretty easy one to get indignant about. Accordingly, Crime After Crime is neither incredibly intelligent nor particularly challenging. It is, however, wonderfully entertaining. Director Yoav Potash was there from the very beginning, and the intimacy he developed with his three subjects during that time lends the picture genuine warmth that cuts through the sermonizing. And I like how Wilson kind of fades from memory as the film progresses. This is not at all a depressing documentary and only superficially an angry one. Twenty-six years is a long time (Peagler ends up spending more of her life in prison than she did as a free woman)--much too long to stay angry or resentful and much too long to go without establishing some sort of personal identity and purpose. While incarcerated, Peagler directed the prison gospel choir and earned two associate's degrees. Potash additionally includes the testimony of a former drug addict who credits Peagler with helping her to earn her bachelor's degree. The last thing you could feel while watching Crime After Crime is pity for a wasted life.

Sundance '11: The Woods

*/****
starring Justin Phillips, Toby David, Nicola Persky, Brian Woods
written and directed by Matthew Lessner

by Alex Jackson A bunch of twentysomething idealists go out into the woods to get away from civilization, lugging plasma-screen displays and a refrigerator full of Capri Suns along with them. That's basically the one joke of Matthew Lessner's The Woods. It's a pretty good joke. The image of these pseudo-hippies playing "Wii Sports" in the middle of a forest is evocative in a way that cannot be readily communicated with words. Wyatt Garfield's cinematography effectively parodies the look of a Land's End or L.L. Bean catalogue, demonstrating how anti-consumerist sentimentality has essentially become another product to be consumed. Consumerism is part of our national identity; even in rejecting it, we are viewing ourselves in consumerist terms. The folly of these faux-naturalists isn't just in their hypocrisy, it's in their belief that they could exorcise the influence videogames and social media have had on their lives. Alas, aside from that one good joke and Garfield's aesthetic prowess, there's really not much to differentiate The Woods from that shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark those kids from Mississippi made in the '80s. It's a textbook example of a film that was probably a lot of fun to make but isn't much fun to watch. Although Lessner seems to have encouraged his cast to improvise and come up with new variations on his central theme, he himself never builds upon it, and the movie meanders in a lateral direction. We quickly grasp everything The Woods has to say, at which point all there is to do is wait for it to end. It appears that everyone was so engrossed with the filmmaking process they forgot to actually make a film.

Sundance '11: Incendies

****/****
starring Lubna Azabal, Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette, Rémy Girard
screenplay by Denis Villeneuve, in collaboration with Valérie Beaugrand-Champagne
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Alex Jackson There are two incredible images in Denis Villeneuve's Incendies. The first of these is during a preamble to the main story. A small Arabic boy is having his head shaved. We push in on his face as he stares contemptuously at us. Everything childlike has been gutted out of him and he's been filled back up with rage. I can't recall the last time I saw the aftermath of child abuse concentrated so concisely and with so much potency. This shot feels vaguely invasive, as though we're seeing a part of him we weren't meant to see. The second incredible image is of childbirth. The mother is Palestinian and her lover, the father of her baby, was just recently murdered by her brothers as part of an honour killing. Her grandmother is keeping her protected until she has the child. This baby looks like an actual newborn: wrinkled, veiny, bloody, covered with waxy vernix. The infant embodies all those romantic hopes for a better future, but there's a bodily horror to it, too. By having this child and bringing it to term, the mother has essentially assured her own demise, or at least the complete rejection of the only family she knows. I don't see ambiguity like that very often. It's thrilling. While I'm not convinced that Incendies would work without these two images, with them Villeneuve proves ready and willing to reward our emotional investment. I'm a little disappointed that Incendies was Canada's official submission for the Best Foreign Film Academy Award this year and is now one of the five final nominees, as this indicates that backlash--particularly, I fear, towards the picture's unabashedly sentimental climax--is just around the corner. This is, quite simply, one of the best films of this year or last.

Sundance '11: Uncle Kent

**/****
starring Kent Osborne, Jennifer Prediger, Josephine Decker, Joe Swanberg, Kev
screenplay by Joe Swanberg & Kent Osborne
directed by Joe Swanberg

by Alex Jackson Despite having recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, children's-show cartoonist Kent Osborne is no closer to leaving young adulthood behind. Never married and not a father, he finds himself too embarrassed to date anyone. Every single woman his age feels her biological clock ticking and asks, on the first date, whether he's ready to have children. With no greater purpose outside of his work, Osborne wastes his days smoking pot, frequenting Chatroulette, and trolling craigslist. You would think that Joe Swanberg's Uncle Kent was made as a reaction to Greenberg (particularly as that film stars Swanberg expatriate Greta Gerwig, of Hannah Takes the Stairs fame), but I can find nothing within the picture that would support this conclusion. Uncle Kent has a lot less bite than Greenberg; Osborne's callow self-absorption is considerably more benign. There are none of Greenberg's petulant tantrums or scenes that remotely correlate with his semi-predatory seduction of the family employee Gerwig plays. I sort of doubt that Uncle Kent is any more truthful than Greenberg, though it's certainly a lot less interesting. As in Hannah Takes the Stairs, these characters have a tendency to talk around things, coding every communication with irony and a gracious unwillingness to offend or concretely state any affirmation of feeling or value. They rarely let themselves get angry or sad, as they wouldn't want you to think that you're the cause. The most they'll show is frustration or discontent. This is probably why the film's sex and nudity fail to truly shock, much less titillate. Nudity is paradoxically used as a means for the characters (and, I think, the actors) to avoid exposing themselves. If somebody pulls his dick out in front of you or demonstrates how he masturbates, you'll mistakenly believe that he's being frank and be reluctant to probe deeper. This is all very novel (or at least it was three years ago; I admit to kind of avoiding these Mumblecore movies), and it successfully rationalizes Swanberg's lo-fi minimalism. But inert characters make for an inert filmgoing experience--and after Uncle Kent, I was still hungry to watch a real movie.

Sundance '11: I Saw the Devil

Ang-ma-reul bo-at-da
***½/****
starring Lee Byung-hun, Choi Min-sik, Jeon Gook-hwan, Jeon Ho-jin
screenplay by Park Hoon-jung
directed by Kim Ji-woon

by Alex Jackson The rape scenes in Kim Ji-woon's I Saw the Devil are the most blatantly eroticized and sadistic I've seen since Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days, but they're countered by the hilariously gory revenge scenes against the rapist (Choi Min-sik) by his victim's boyfriend (Lee Byung-hun). The film isn't trying to rationalize the rape with the revenge or the revenge with the rape. Rather, it regards women and the men who rape them as equally undeserving of our sympathy. One is tortured for thrills, the other tortured for laughs. There doesn't appear to be any kind of coherent moral perspective here, it's just Kim pushing our buttons and taking whatever strong reaction he can get. What makes I Saw the Devil so very good is that he pushes them exceptionally well. I kind of agree with Bret Easton Ellis, who said, "If you come at movies with your own sense of morality and not your own sense of aesthetics, I think you're screwed. I think that's not a way to look at movies." I suppose you could dismiss I Saw the Devil as superficial or even immoral, but that seems to minimize how viscerally stimulating it all is. There's the shocking first attack, a tour-de-force multiple stabbing in a taxicab, witty homages to Blue Velvet, Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and Se7en, and the strangely poignant image of the rapist-killer playing guitar over the body of his latest conquest. If the film has anything substantive to say about vengeance, it might actually be saying it through its length. After two-and-a-half hours of revenge and counter-revenge, we're just plain exhausted. More than the idea that the boyfriend has essentially changed roles with his girlfriend's rapist, or that he's doing this more for himself than for her, what ultimately comes across is that neither the rapist nor the boyfriend will ever stop on his own accord. It's perfectly noble to ensure that evildoing is ultimately punished, but you reach a point where you simply have to let it go and get on with your life.

Sundance '11: The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975

****/****
directed by Göran Hugo Olsson

by Alex Jackson Goran Hugo Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 begins with a disclaimer explaining that this film is not intended to categorically define the Black Power movement, but merely to represent a few Swedish filmmakers' impressions of it. This seemingly innocuous statement raises more questions than it answers. Why would Swedes want to tell this story in the first place? Do they have the right to tell this story? And what's the point of looking at the Black Power movement of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies in 2011? It seems the moment you make a film about the Black Power movement, it becomes a commodity to be consumed, at least in part, by a white audience. I believe that whites are attracted to stories of the black experience and to the icon of the black militant for a number of reasons, perhaps least among them liberal guilt. On an individual level, the white may feel disenfranchised and see the black militant as a kind of romantic ideal. Or maybe he believes himself to be relatively lacking in cultural identity and looks upon the strongly defined culture and identity of African-Americans to satisfy this need. The Black Power Mixtape is a compilation of direct documentary footage shot by Swedish journalists in the United States from 1967 to 1975. Olsson has mildly contextualized what we're seeing via several contemporary audio interviews with major figures like Angela Davis and Melvin Van Peebles, and he scores it to songs by The Jackson Five and The Roots; the film is a coherent and edifying history of the Black Power movement tightly wound into an efficient 96 minutes. But in unabashedly indulging our taste for nostalgia, and in preying on the fundamental emptiness of the "white experience," it's also a rollicking entertainment. (The spell is broken, briefly but provocatively, by a lingering shot of a heroin-addicted infant.) By consciously underlining the fact that he and his fellow countrymen are essentially outsiders interpreting this material, Olsson introduces a tension between the revolution-as-revolution and the revolution-as-pop. The film exists as one, the other, and everything in-between.

Sundance '11: Hobo with a Shotgun

**½/****
starring Rutger Hauer, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworth
screenplay by John Davies
directed by Jason Eisener

by Alex Jackson Director Jason Eisener and screenwriter John Davies must have been left in the care of a particularly negligent babysitter throughout the 1980s. Their Hobo with a Shotgun, an adaptation of a fake trailer the two made for Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse contest back in 2007 (it won, and was subsequently attached to Canadian prints of the film), not only cites Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Robocop, and probably Cobra among its myriad references but also pays what I think is an incontrovertible homage to Tinto Brass's infamous 1980 debacle Caligula. The villain's preferred method of public execution greatly resembles Caligula's "lawnmower" and he has no shortage of naked bimbos to shower in the blood or join in on the torture. Hobo with a Shotgun is essentially in the Troma tradition--there's a rather studious contempt towards anything resembling introspection or sincerity, much less good taste, and there's a very deliberate amateurishness at work here. Perhaps nothing demonstrates this more than the garishly oversaturated cinematography; Hobo with a Shotgun isn't upstaged by its look, though it is defined by it. This isn't a real movie so much as the kind of X-rated cartoon that pedophiles keep in the basement for the purpose of grooming young boys. Similarly attention-grabbing are the villain's two sons, Tom Cruise parodies who sport Ray Bans, drive a DeLorean, and whoop and holler like they're in The Color of Money. They mutilate homeless men for sport, placate the townspeople with Tony Montana-sized mounds of cocaine, and recite dialogue like, "The only thing I'm going to let slide is my dick in your pussy." Somehow, the joke of this '80s rich-kid douchebaggery never grows stale.

Sundance '10: Skateland

***/****
starring Shiloh Fernandez, Ashley Greene, Heath Freeman, Taylor Handley
written and directed by Anthony Burns

by Alex Jackson Anthony Burns's Skateland honours the hoary conventions of the "summer-after-high-school" genre (notice I'm not even bothering to explain what the movie's about), plays everything by the book, and never takes you too far out of your comfort zone. I think the film's power lies in Burns's willingness to allow for a cliché or a saccharine moment so long as it is truthful. Skateland closes with the hero kissing the girl to the accompaniment of Modern English's ubiquitous "I Melt With You," and I felt as though I was seeing this ending for the very first time. Burns makes the smart move of establishing them as best friends at the beginning of the film and then having them transition into lovers. Because there has already been a great deal of intimacy between the two, their kiss stems organically from the material and the emotions it provokes are genuine. More inexplicable are the subtle nuances (in the performances? The writing? The direction?) that manage to depict teenage horniness without ever lapsing into sexism or misogyny. Perhaps it could be attributed to the fact that the guys here are as gorgeous as the girls, essentially levelling the playing field. (I'll admit to feeling somewhat alienated by all these beautiful people, but I adapted fairly easily.) Extra points for the scene where the hero finally assaults the archetypical bully and the results are not cathartic, but frankly a little scary. The violence is crudely explosive, and while the film minimizes the consequences of this attack, it does nothing to excuse or justify it. Although Skateland doesn't re-invent the genre, it does it well and believes in the material. And wouldn't you know? That's all the re-invention we really need.

Sundance '10: Boy

**/****
starring Taika Waititi, James Rolleston, Te Aho Eketone-Whitu
written and directed by Taika Waititi

by Alex Jackson Taika Waititi's Boy has one thing to say and spends 87 minutes saying it. Its message is basically that best friends are poor substitutes for fathers. Eleven-year-old New Zealander Boy (James Rolleston) idealizes his absentee dad Alamein (writer-director Waititi), who has spent the past seven years in prison for robbery. Returning home to dig up the loot he buried before getting caught, Alamein casually re-establishes a relationship with Boy by feeding him beer and initiating him into the world of "men." In exchange, Boy helps him look for his money and gives him marijuana stolen from a classmate's illegal farm. There's admittedly something very slippery about Boy. It's cute and quirky and even fun. Waititi is too adventurous a filmmaker to make a boring movie. Among the many tricks and gimmicks he employs, I particularly liked a sequence where Alamein paints with light to entertain his son. But gradually, without any change to the tone of the film or the nature of the character (he never becomes abusive or cruel towards Boy), we go from seeing Alamein's immaturity as charmingly anarchic to seeing it as repulsively irresponsible. Boy never really proselytizes, but it doesn't develop or deepen, either. Waititi's strategy is to give us so much of the comically buffoonish man-child Alamein that we grow to kind of hate him. This is problematic for a number of reasons. First and foremost, perhaps, is that it renders Boy too superficial to be a satisfying filmgoing experience. Secondly, it overly minimizes the horror of adult irresponsibility. There's a shot late in the film where Boy sips on a beer and smokes a reefer, yet the movie effectively denies that Boy is being corrupted and losing his innocence in this moment by suggesting he's only copying his father, whose lifestyle he will ultimately find wanting. Finally, while I admire that Boy is attempting to dismantle the "cult of childhood" genre by taking it to its logical end, I think Waititi underestimates the awesome power of pop culture. Boy's hero is "Thriller"-era Michael Jackson and he often fantasizes his father dancing like him--but Waititi fails to adequately evoke the irony of Boy idolizing a man with such a public Peter Pan complex. In the end, Boy doesn't challenge our love of pop culture so much as simply pander to it.

Sundance '10: Me Too

Yo, también
***/****
starring Lola Dueñas, Pablo Pineda, Antonio Naharro, Isabel García Lorca
written and directed by Álvaro Pastor & Antonio Naharro

by Alex Jackson Daniel (Pablo Pineda) is a 34-year-old man with Down Syndrome who has recently graduated from college and gotten a job as a social worker connecting persons with disabilities with home- and community-based services. (I served my internship at a state-run agency like this.) There he meets and grows infatuated with the blonde, slightly older, sexually provocative Laura (Lola Dueñas), who does not have Down Syndrome. They find themselves developing a strong friendship, with Daniel trying to push it towards something more and Laura wading very cautiously, worried about exploiting him. I'll grant you: Me Too is kind of a Down Syndrome version of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I didn't realize how bizarre that sounds until I typed it, which should indicate that the film serves some kind of legitimate, socially-redemptive purpose. The college-educated Daniel is an outlier, made as unthreatening as possible, and we're ambivalent as to whether or not he should be aspiring to join the ranks of "normal" people instead of just accepting himself for who he is. But to its credit, Me Too neither ignores nor dodges any of these complaints--though it's very gentle in the way it triggers and then assuages our liberal guilt. Following a point-of-view close-up of Laura's cleavage, I became terrified that Daniel was going to assault her. Of course he doesn't. The filmmakers seem to be telling me I was wrong for feeling that way, to relax and not get too embarrassed about it. Daniel treats people's assumptions about him with great patience and humour; he appears to believe that we all mean well. Complicating things wonderfully, the film sources Laura's promiscuity to childhood sexual abuse by her father. Her attraction to Daniel is then explained by the fact that she doesn't think of him sexually. Not only that, she has an additional vested interest in not sexually exploiting him. But as Laura's abuse has rendered her, in a very real and unironic way, possibly more retarded than Daniel, the line between who is exploiting whom becomes significantly blurred. Would he be attracted to her were she not excessively sexualized as a result of her past? Remembering that something like ninety percent of pregnancies with the diagnosis of Down Syndrome are terminated, I'll admit that my eyes watered a little when Daniel details that he's come as far as he has because his mother read and talked to him as a child and essentially treated him as a normal, perfectly intelligent person capable of understanding her. The simple, effortlessly humanist message of Me Too is that nurture matters more than nature. And nurture is something we can actually do something about.

Sundance '10: I Am Love

***½/****
starring Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Pippo Delbono, Alba Rohrwacher
written and directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Alex Jackson What to make of the ending to Luca Guadagnino's I Am Love? It's not that it's inexplicable, exactly. I believe I understood what "happened" perfectly well. The issue, really, is with John Adams's score. It builds and builds and grows louder and louder until we half believe that wealthy Milan housewife Emma Recchi (Tilda Swinton) will be dragged down to Hell by a gypsy curse. The audience I saw it with struggled to stifle giggles. They were emotionally manipulated to have a strong visceral response, but nothing within the film warranted it. It was an orgasm by prostate massage--pure meaningless reflex. What can you do but giggle? For years, Emma's existence has consisted of a quiet but comfortable series of rituals. Confronted with the knowledge that her daughter Elisabetta (Alba Rohrwacher) has fallen in love with another woman while away at college and is now a moderately radicalized lesbian, she realizes how empty her life has become. Her son, Eduardo Jr. (Gabriele Ferzetti), is having a similar crisis. He's being groomed to take over the family business, but he'd rather open a restaurant with his chef friend, Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini). When Emma tries one of Antonio's creations, she finds herself sensually overwhelmed. The two begin an intense love affair, culminating in perhaps one of the most pretentious sex scenes ever committed to film. Early reviews of I Am Love place it in the tradition of Douglas Sirk. I see it as more Luis Buñuel masquerading as Ingmar Bergman. That's similar to Sirk, I suppose, but quite a bit more savage. It suggests tragedy elevated beyond melodrama into the realm of absurdist surrealism. I Am Love is filled with lingering shots of furniture, artwork, and food preparation. Guadagnino is establishing a world where our emotional connection to objects is more powerful than our connection to each other--and there's a thin line between that and the French landmark porn in Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty. Guadagnino keeps pushing us and pushing us until our identification with the Recchis completely runs out. These people are Martians. The trap they're in isn't tragic, it's ridiculous. Just as ridiculous, perhaps, is their hopelessly bourgeois escape from it: college lesbianism; the restaurant business; and sexual escapades with the working class. By the time Adams's score peaks, we can no longer pretend this is a serious film. Our alienation from the material has come to a head.

Sundance '10: Winter's Bone

**/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt
screenplay by Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini
directed by Debra Granik

by Alex Jackson Those who loved Courtney Hunt's Frozen River are welcome to a second helping with Winter's Bone. I fear it might signal the start of a new genre: grass-and-granola cinema nobly detailing the plight of the working poor crossed with pulpy film noir. (Granola noir, perhaps?) The problem with these movies is that grass-and-granola and film noir just do not mix. The "plight of the working poor" is grossly oversimplified when narratively expressed in noir terms. The gangsters in Winter's Bone are meth dealers, but that's details--what really matters is that they're gangsters. Meth is reduced to a plot device, which does a great disservice to those whose families have actually been affected by the drug. And the "grass-and-granola" aesthetic grounds film noir in reality, neutralizing the dream-like abstraction endemic to the genre. Winter's Bone simply doesn't work in pop-movie terms. But it's not only that: combining "grass-and-granola" with film noir confuses the sociology of gender and class stratification with existential fatalism. Rhee Jessup (Jennifer Lawrence), the seventeen-year-old protagonist of Winter's Bone, is cast in the familiar role of Mom Who Will Do Anything For Her Children. With her own mother becoming increasingly senile and her father in prison for cooking meth, Rhee is forced to raise her younger brother and sister on her own. When Rhee discovers that her father has put up their house for bail money and skipped town, she risks her life by investigating his disappearance. Rhee is crudely idealized as a woman tough enough to go toe-to-toe with dangerous, wife-beating meth dealers and come out unscathed. While she's not a passive character, that isn't to say she has free agency. Rhee is forced to make these decisions out of love for her family and a desire to ensure they don't wind up homeless. Her actions are dictated by external forces. All Rhee wants to do is raise her kids. She has no sexual desire that we can ascertain, nor does she have any real drive to move up the social ladder. This is not film noir. In film noir, people are motivated by sex or greed and fate finds a way to fuck them over in the end. They can't change the outcome, but the genre is based on the notion that people have choices and are nonetheless too weak and fragile to make the right ones. Grass-and-granola is idealistic; film noir is cynical. They don't go together because they represent two fundamentally opposed worldviews.

Sundance '10: Smash His Camera

**/****
directed by Leon Gast

by Alex Jackson Leon Gast's Smash His Camera isn't much more than bubble gum: it's kind of sweet for a while and gives you something to chew on, but it has no nutritional value. A hagiography of paparazzo Ron Galella, the film is so deliriously meta in conception that it feels like some kind of joke at our expense. We're told by one of Galella's critics that his photographs are interesting simply because he photographs interesting people--we look at them for the subject, not for the artistry. That's all quite true, and perhaps even so obvious it could have gone without saying. But what does this mean when the subject of the Galella treatment is Galella himself? Gast is starfucking a starfucker. The film's saying that if you love celebrities enough, you will become a celebrity yourself and be subject to that same adoration. No surprise, then, that Galella was Andy Warhol's favourite photographer. I'm more alarmed by Roger Ebert's blog entry on this documentary. Ebert writes that he responds to Galella's "life force" and passion for his work and ends the entry by reminiscing about the era Galella inhabited and the stars they mutually worshipped. He drank the Kool-Aid, in other words. Ebert isn't showing the slightest shred of critical skepticism, though of course that's only part of the problem. The bigger issue is that he seems to identify with Galella and sees his particular strain of movie-love as something worth celebrating. Smash His Camera is easy to like, but I worry that liking it robs the cinema of the potential for being great art. When critics embrace a movie like Smash His Camera, they facilitate the shift from film criticism to entertainment reporting. They suggest that everything is pop and sensationalism and that nothing ever has any deeper meaning. Galella's pet subject was Jackie Onassis. He photographed her for years, even after she got a restraining order against him. Galella explains that he didn't have a girlfriend at the time and so Jackie became his girlfriend. No doubt this is an extremely revealing statement, yet Gast never follows it into darker territory. In establishing that he does very much the same thing as Galella, he's not going to paint Galella's obsessions as dysfunctional and risk indicting himself or his audience. Better to hide in a thick head of frothy inconsequence, I suppose.

Sundance '10: One Too Many Mornings

**½/****
starring Stephen Hale, Anthony Deptula, Tina Kapousis, Jonathan Shockley
screenplay by Anthony Deptula, Michael Mohan, Stephen Hale
directed by Michael Mohan

by Alex Jackson One Too Many Mornings is yet another semi-autobiographical romantic dramedy about two twentysomething males refusing to enter the adult world. It sounds a lot like the below-reviewed Bass Ackwards and Obselidia, but this one was made completely out-of-pocket and shot on the weekends over the course of two years. Considering the ultra-low budget, I'll admit there's a temptation to lower my standards. The filmmaking itself is stylish and inventive while essentially staying organic to the material--there's a fine action sequence involving an angry drunk, while the use of canted angles to convey a character's hangover works nicely, however elementary. I also liked a montage of light switches being turned off that's repeated a few times throughout the film and becomes something of a motif. (It's a successfully cinematic expression of tedium.) Director Michael Mohan is not content to just point-and-shoot, and on the other end of the spectrum, he's not going to play around with the medium unless it serves the characters or the story. One Too Many Mornings is not as bad as the Butler Brothers' 2000 atrocity Alive and Lubricated. It's not even in the same ballpark. Alive and Lubricated was made by amateurs; One Too Many Mornings was made by actual filmmakers. I guess it's pretty good for what it is, though it's still not good enough. Like a lot of these movies, the acting is broad and exaggerated in a way that keeps the performers from exposing too much of themselves. Similarly, the comic elements aren't sourced to a singular, overarching worldview, but are there so the proceedings don't get too serious and brooding. The saving grace of Clerks is that it has an authentic New Jersey flavour; I don't know or remember where One Too Many Mornings takes place--it seems that it could be anywhere. Similarly, the saving grace of Quentin Tarantino's unfinished My Best Friend's Birthday is that it's infused with Tarantino's voice and personality. There's nothing terribly unique or distinctive about One Too Many Mornings.

Sundance '10: Memories of Overdevelopment

Memorias del desarrollo
**½/****
starring Ron Blair, Eileen Alana, Susana Pérez, Lester Martínez
screenplay by Miguel Coyula, based on the novel by Edmundo Desnoes
directed by Miguel Coyula

by Alex Jackson Asked by a student why he left Cuba despite supporting and believing in his country's socialist principles, Latin-American studies professor Sergio responds that not being able to write what he wanted to write was simply unbearable. Now that he's in the United States, he's free to say whatever he wants--and nobody cares. It's a relatively minor moment in an aggressively polemic film, but it's an extremely important one just the same. Throughout Memories of Overdevelopment, Sergio makes photo collages out of pornography and religious iconography. This is the ultimate art-world cliché, though I think the movie recognizes it as such. It's saying that obscenity and sacrilege have become so commonplace that they no longer have any currency. While in Cuba, Sergio wrote that Americans have Superman and Cubans have Che. He meant that their hero is flesh-and-blood while ours is a cartoon character, but his editor tells him that the analogy could easily be misconstrued (i.e., dangerous). There's virtually nothing "dangerous" Sergio could say in the U.S. and this frustrates him to no end. He takes it to mean that we have no ideals or values worth protecting. Writer-director Miguel Coyula initially appears to be an aggressively shitty filmmaker, indulging in a lot of goofy rotoscoping and cut-out animation, particularly early on in the film. Compounding the amateurish feeling of the entire production, he shoots on cruddy digital video. The film also goes on far too long. It feels repetitive and self-indulgent, to put it mildly. It's one of those movies you can guarantee people will walk out of, even when they've paid fifteen dollars for a ticket. But as Memories of Overdevelopment is an externalization of Sergio's subjective state, where all communication has been rendered empty noise and even anti-consumerism has become a product to be consumed, this shittiness seems entirely justified. A well-made, conventionally attractive film would not capture this mindset nearly as successfully. That isn't to say I don't kind of hate Memories of Overdevelopment. Late in the picture, Sergio bemoans religion, politics, and consumerism as his three greatest enemies. But if you don't have religion, you don't have politics, and you don't have consumerism. You don't really have much of anything; what's the use of disillusionment if it never leads to anything better? All this drifting around is depressing and nihilistic. Sergio's rut is certainly an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Sundance '10: Bass Ackwards

**½/****
starring Linas Phillips, Davie-Blue, Jim Fletcher, Paul Lazar
written and directed by Linas Phillips

by Alex Jackson It took me a while to have any reaction whatsoever to Linas Phillips' Bass Ackwards. I guess I ultimately settled on mild affection, but this is not a film that's going to divide people. Phillips plays a Seattle-area wedding videographer named, yes, Linas. He's living with a young married couple and having an affair with the wife thereof (Davie-Blue). She's not willing to develop the relationship any farther and her husband kicks Linas out of their house. With no home and no girl, Linas picks up a '76 Volkswagen bus and decides to drive to the east coast to stay with his parents. Yeah, so it's a road-trip movie. Phillips is essentially playing himself and the film seems to be based on personal experience. Accordingly, as a writer, director, and actor, he is generously self-effacing and willing to look foolish--but he's never particularly critical of the Linas "character." Until the movie was over, I was only about seventy-five percent sure that Linas was having an affair. (The other twenty-five percent of me believed that his girlfriend and the wife were actually two different people who happened to look alike.) Even though I don't think this is an "emotional affair," nobody ever has sex. They just talk to one another with a familiarity more suited to lovers than to friends; the entire thing is left for us to infer. It seems that anything more explicit would render Linas unsympathetic--a loser-loser instead of a lovable one--and Phillips couldn't stand us seeing his alter ego that way. He appears to have had a rather conventional "quirky" road comedy in mind when conceptualizing Bass Ackwards and maybe the film would have turned out that way had he never met cinematographer Sean Porter. Imagine Little Miss Sunshine directed by Terrence Malick and you might get some idea of what you're in for. Porter's photography is incredible on an aesthetic level, and it's genuinely shocking to learn that the finished film (after post-production) cost a mere $90,000. Bass Ackwards would no doubt be worse without him. But I found all that beauty problematically tasteful, especially when combined with Phillips' softball treatment of "Linas." How about this? Anybody who hates Bass Ackwards is doing so for reasons unrelated to the quality of the movie itself; anybody who loves it has given up on asking for films that demand anything of them.

Sundance '10: Obselidia

**/****
starring Michael Piccirilli, Gaynor Howe, Frank Hoyt Taylor, Chris Byrne
written and directed by Diane Bell

by Alex Jackson Mark (Michael Blackman Beck) is working on an encyclopedia of obsolete things. He writes on a typewriter, wears a fedora, and films interviews for his book with an outdated camcorder. One of the things he considers obsolete is love. This belief is tested when he meets Sophie (Gaynor Howe), a projectionist of silent movies who nonetheless loves life too much to be stuck in the past. Diane Bell's Obselidia is gorgeous to look at and very well-acted. If the description I just gave made it sound like something you might want to see, then you will probably enjoy it. Still, I found the film to be transparently manipulative. It seems we're meant to envy Mark's cocoon-like isolation while feeling inspired by how Sophie breaks him out of it. Realizing there is only so much tension that can develop between Mark and Sophie, Bell artificially shoehorns in a road trip to provide the film some kind of narrative drive. It's an acknowledgment on her part that she's reluctant to give either character any depth and thus risk neutralizing the quirky romantic escapism Obselidia has been consciously cultivating. There came a point where I wondered to myself if Mark has an entry for minstrel shows in his encyclopedia, which got me thinking how much better a film is Ghost World. Ghost World empathizes with its characters, but it also keeps pushing until the romance of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl or the sadsack loser whose life she redeems loses its sheen; it has too much respect for the complexity of identity formation and romantic relationships to give us the easy pay-offs of Obselidia. In addition to all that, Obselidia annoyingly panders to an arthouse audience. Sophie bemoans that her boyfriend thinks Star Wars is the greatest movie ever made when he refuses to even watch Au hasard Balthazar because it's in black-and-white with subtitles. What's the use of preferring Au hasard Balthazar if you think Obselidia is worthwhile filmmaking?

Sundance '10: 7 Days

Les 7 jours du talion
**/****
starring Rémy Girard, Claude Legault, Fanny Mallette, Martin Dubreuil
screenplay by Patrick Senecal
directed by Daniel Grou

by Alex Jackson Perhaps one of the more overtly sadomasochistic entries in the torture-porn genre, French-Canadian Daniel Grou's 7 Days seems to be seething at the bit to get to the good stuff. When Jasmine (Rose-Marie Coallier), the eight-year-old daughter of surgeon Bruno Hamell (Claude Legault), is raped and murdered, he decides to kidnap, torture, and kill the man responsible and then turn himself in. Hamell catches the killer, a day labourer named Anthony Lemaire (Martin Dubreuil) who has been implicated through DNA evidence, ties him up, and strips off his clothes. Lemaire then spends the rest of the film completely naked. I hope it's not a function of a prudish American upbringing, but whenever this guy was on screen my eyes were immediately drawn to his exposed penis. Allegedly, the suspense is in whether or not the police will find and stop Hamell; in practice, the suspense is in when exactly Hamell will castrate Lemaire. Hamell smashes Lemaire's knee with a sledgehammer and we just think to ourselves, Well, thank God it was only his knee. 7 Days isn't about the horror of losing a daughter--it's about the horror of getting hit in the balls. I don't think Grou is a deliberate provocateur, per se. This is an utterly bleak and humourless movie, lacking the sensationalism and showmanship of Takashi Miike, Gaspar Noé, Eli Roth, or even Lars von Trier. Grou actually seems serious about this subject matter. But to quote Pauline Kael, that this film has impact doesn't make it art. Because we only see her body after the fact, Jasmine's rape and murder don't have the proportional weight of the resulting torture. It becomes an excuse to make a movie about a naked man being tortured. I also found the relationship between Hamell and Jasmine to be overly idyllic. I sense that anybody who would want to get revenge like this, who would have it in them to do these things to another human being, would already have a rather strained relationship with the person he's avenging. This isn't about Jasmine, it's all about Hamell, and we should get more of a sense of this egotism in his family life before the murder. 7 Days doesn't have a lot of insight into human behaviour, much less the ethics of vengeance or the emotional experience of mourning.

Sundance '10: Double Take

***/****
starring Ron Burrage, Mark Perry
written and directed by Johan Grimonprez

by Alex Jackson Johan Gimonprez's Double Take imagines an instance where Alfred Hitchcock is interrupted from filming 1963's The Birds to talk to his "double." This doppelgänger is from 1980--the year, you may remember (or reasonably guess), that Hitchcock died--and not his "double" at all, but rather his wraith, a vision of himself on the eve of his death. Hitchcock asks him who wins the Cold War and the wraith dismisses the question as unimportant. He wants to talk about how television is destroying cinema. The bulk of Double Take is a montage of archival footage--host segments from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and television broadcasts of Hitchcock's films, commercial spots for Folger's Instant Coffee that border on misogynistic, and news coverage of the 1959 Nixon/Khrushchev "kitchen debate," the infamous 1960 Nixon/Kennedy debate, the space race, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. The film calls to mind Jayne Loader and Kevin & Pierce Rafferty's 1982 curiosity The Atomic Cafe, in which the threat of nuclear holocaust is documented entirely through archival footage with no contextualizing narration or interviews. Gimonprez's digs at Richard Nixon (he match-cuts his twitchy eyes with those of a space monkey) and his facile but extremely powerful juxtaposition of The Supremes singing "Baby Love" and "Where Did Our Love Go" with footage of nuclear explosions and the escalating tensions between Cuba and the United States, to take the two most obvious examples, would have had more resonance 25 or 30 years ago, when condescension to the late-'50s/early-'60s was more fashionable and we were still under the immediate threat of nuclear annihilation. In 2010, Gimonprez's boogeyman isn't nuclear war, but television. He's suggesting that television makes everything it shows equally significant, until finally none of it matters. The Cold War is as pop as an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. But once we establish that, the film becomes somewhat self-cannibalizing. By putting criticism of television in the mouth of Hitchcock and the defense of it in the mouth of Nixon, and by holding Kennedy up as a manifestation of its denigrating effects (he seems more like a hologram than like a man), the film itself becomes subject to its own critique. If television has made it so that nothing is important, then that means Double Take itself is not important. I came out of Double Take feeling refreshed, as though I had just woken up from a beautiful dream, but something tells me I might have been even happier seeing three back-to-back episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", complete with vintage commercials.

Sundance '09: Earth Days

***/****
directed by Robert Stone

by Alex Jackson I'm not quite sure how I feel about the environmental movement--the subject of Robert Stone's documentary Earth Days. There are two inarguable, somewhat contradictory truths at work here: mankind has been destroying and continues to destroy the planet he is inhabiting; and various doomsday scenarios predicted by the environmental and population-control movements have not come to pass. Stone shows us environmental leaders from three decades ago predicting that the sky will fall in 30 years. I sort of wish he had found room for a clip from Richard Fleischer's great 1973 film Soylent Green, which posits a future where strawberry jam is sold on the black market and food shortages are great enough that corporations start selling people in cracker form. It was a dystopia that never saw the light of day. Stone includes archival footage from the 1950s of men spraying pesticides on kids swimming in a community pool and it gets a huge laugh from the audience. We wonder how Americans could have been so naïve. But with its roots in the '60s counterculture, the environmental movement has its own kind of naivety; as Andrew Stanton's WALL·E demonstrated with its mock corporate-logo stinger, anti-consumerism is itself a product to be consumed. The attitudes of the 1960s are every bit as campy, every bit as surrounded by quotation marks, as those of the 1950s.  As a teenager, I found myself strongly siding with the population-control movement. Seeing how more people were being born than dying, I was convinced that human beings would eventually outstrip their resources. The large Mormon families whose offspring I went to school with struck me as morally bankrupt.  I've since chilled out. Stone interviews a woman who, upon graduating from college, announced that she was never going to have a child. I find it incredible that she is willing to sacrifice the joy of becoming a mother not because she personally doesn't identify motherhood as joyful, but because she doesn't want to contribute to overpopulation. Subjugating one's individualism in the name of the Greater Good to this degree registers as a little insane. It's true that we are all citizens of planet Earth and it's true that we should be conscientious of the cumulative impact of our individual actions, yet living exclusively on a global scale really isn't any way to live at all.

Sundance '09: Moon

****/****
starring Sam Rockwell
screenplay by Nathan Parker
directed by Duncan Jones

by Alex Jackson Lunar miner Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is nearing the end of a three-year contract with Lunar Industries when an accident lands him in his spaceship's sickbay. Upon regaining consciousness, he meets a facsimile of himself and begins to suspect that his employer and his robot companion Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey) have been keeping something from him. While Moon has some kind of basic dramatic conflict and is centred around an actual story instead of impressive visuals (though Sam Rockwell playing table tennis with himself is a hella neat trick), its vision of the future is surprisingly utopian. Bell is mining helium energy from the moon's surface and this efficient, clean-burning fuel has solved a great deal of Earth's energy problems. Once the truth of Lunar Industries' deception is finally revealed, we implicitly understand that Bell is necessary collateral damage sacrificed for the greater good. The most provocative thing about Moon is that it doesn't bother indulging in sanctimonious outrage or in typecasting Lunar Industries as a monolithic villain. Bell never launches into a moralistic tirade condemning them and they never launch into a diabolical tirade defending themselves. The film in general is a strangely comforting experience. Rockwell may be the most amiable actor working today while Spacey, perfectly cast as the voice of Gerty, slyly sends up both himself and sci-fi movie computer voices. (Perhaps in order to make Gerty's presence genuinely calming and reassuring, the filmmakers had to acknowledge, on some level, the calm and reassuring computer voice as a genre cliché.) If the film is completely unthreatening stylistically, the questions at the heart of the material are not. Like this year's Boy Interrupted, coincidentally enough, Moon forces us to confront the natural ramifications of seeing Man as a biological rather than spiritual entity. When we learn the perfectly logical reason why Bell can see himself, it just fucks with our minds even more. Identity is not something that should be explained scientifically. The film's future epitomizes how science and reason can make our lives better, not only through technological improvements but through a move towards utilitarian ethics as well. And yet, by design, there is something terrifying about it.