Film Freak Central

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.

BHFF '18: Knife + Heart

Un couteau dans le coeur
***½/****
starring Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet
screenplay by Yann Gonzalez, Cristiano Mangione
directed by Yann Gonzalez

by Walter Chaw Yann Gonzalez's Knife + Heart is a smart film by a smart filmmaker. It's a movie-lover's fugue, a tribute to the heyday of gay porn and the grindhouse theatres that showed it, a salute to editors, a shrine to multi-cultural myths about birds. It's a deep well with obvious pleasures, a film with a recognizable structure complete with solution that still manages to avoid the standard exposition and perfunctory resolution. The spiritual brother to Brian De Palma's Body Double (exploitative and sleazy and also commentary on exploitation and sleaze), it's a movie about looking that has as its central image a blind grackle--an extinct variety of the common pest that used to bring folks back from the dead by burning off the ever-after as it flew too close to the sun. Its central couple is gay-porn director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) and her editor and former lover Lois (Kate Moran), who churn out the sort of softcore masterpieces of art-film erotica favoured once upon a time by your Kenneth Angers, your Paul Morrisseys and Radley Metzgers. All of her work is autobiographical in some way. There's no line separating Anne's reality, nor her dreamlife, from the mindscreen of her movies.

Fantasia Festival '18: Blue My Mind

**/****
written and directed by Lisa Brühlmann

by Bill Chambers 15-year-old Mia (Luna Wedler) is struggling to fit in at a new school, feeling suffocated at home, and hormonal in the usual ways--physically lashing out at her mother (Regula Grauwiller), smoking, flirting on the Internet with men who should know better. She manages to break the ice with the cool kids by seconding their idea to take the school field trip to Switzerland's version of Coney Island, and earns the respect of pack leader Gianna (Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen) with a thrill-seeking attitude that in fact portends a self-destructive streak. Mia's body is changing; it starts with her toes growing together and a sudden appetite for the tropical fish in her mother's tank. Whether to feel desirable or because she senses that time is running out, she becomes promiscuous, but when she finally meets up with her Humbert Humbert (Nicola Perot) he shows a paternal concern about the mottling on her legs that sends her fleeing, while a subsequent "bounce" (the movie's--and, presumably, Swiss German millenials'--slang for sex) with a popular boy (David Oberholzer) leaves her unsatisfied. Though Blue My Mind is bound to alarm parents of modern teenagers, like David Cronenberg's gruesome remake of The Fly it's less a horror movie than it is a drama about prematurely waking up to one's mortality--although the bittersweet finish is more hopeful and casts an even wider metaphorical net. (I suspect the picture will resonate with trans viewers, or at least that it aims to.) Wedler and Holthuizen mature convincingly on screen together, their lovely chemistry filling out and filling in a relationship that is all too typical of director Lisa Brühlmann's sketchy screenplay. There are ambiguities, for instance, concerning Mia's provenance and how much her mom and dad know, but when her parents discreetly depart from the narrative, despite the unlikelihood that they'd abandon a daughter so clearly in the throes of a depressive episode (this part seems like it was concocted by an actual bitter teenager), it reduces those unanswered questions to so much pointless teasing. Perhaps, like its obvious inspiration The Metamorphosis, Blue My Mind was only meant to be a short story, and ironically endured growing pains of its own. Brühlmann has enough stunning images in her, including an especially striking one of a flooded apartment, that it's a shame she defaults to a muted, pseudodocumentary European aesthetic, which exposes some feeble writing to the harsh light of interrogation instead of safely locating the film in the realm of dream logic. Fantasia Fest 2018 - Programme: Camera Lucida

Hot Docs '16: Sonita

***½/****
directed by Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami

Hot Docs, the Canadian International Documentary Festival, runs April 28-May 8, 2016 at Toronto's Bloor Cinema. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Bill Chambers By coincidence or zeitgeist design, Sonita is my third consecutive Hot Doc about the disenfranchised's quest for "personhood." Here it's the titular Sonita Alizadeh, an Afghan teenager who fled the Taliban and, as the film begins, is living in a fleapit in Tehran with her sister and young niece; an unseen brother apparently resides nearby, close enough to duck in and trash her belongings while she's out. Sonita's nightmare family expects a lot from her--when they're evicted, her hookah-smoking sister barks, "Go find us a new home! Now!"--and that includes that she will one day soon return to Afghanistan to be sold into marriage. She has dreams of becoming a recording artist, though, and a wilfulness that director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami tries desperately to cultivate without violating the documentarian's Prime Directive of impartial observation. When Sonita's mother extorts Maghami for $2000 to buy her subject six more months in Tehran, Sonita and Maghami get busy and make a video for Sonita's prosaic but politically-charged rap song "Brides for Sale," which goes viral and attracts the attention of a nonprofit that wants to fly Sonita to America, birthplace of her beloved Michael Jackson. (In a memorable sidebar, she's baffled by an Iranian map of the world that colour codes the U.S. as a desert--propaganda at its most diabolical.) Because I didn't follow Alizadeh's story as it happened live, the final third of Sonita played for me like a heist movie, with Sonita tiptoeing back into Afghanistan to retrieve her passport while keeping her final destination on the down-low. But there's a sadness gnawing away at the suspense: Sonita's mother is determined to find a man who will pay nine grand for her so that one of her sons can afford his own $9000 wife (she's the kind of older person who enforces the awful traditions to which she was subjected out of spite), and in Iran Sonita's social circle is drying up because nobody wants to be seen fraternizing with an outlaw (given that women there are technically not permitted to sing)--institutionalized misogyny has left her without a sanctuary. Sonita's victories are by no means Pyrrhic, yet the lonesome final shot shows that freedom and isolation are sometimes uncannily similar.

TIFF '15: Black; We Monsters; Keeper

BLACK
*/****
directed by Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah

Wir Monster, a.k.a. Cold Days
**/****
directed by Sebastian Ko

KEEPER (pictured)
***/****
directed by Guillaume Senez

by Bill Chambers My random sampling of #TIFF15's Discovery programme yielded a loose trilogy of bildungsromane. The most 'problematic' of these, as the kids say, is Black, a West Side Story redux set on the surprisingly mean streets of Brussels, where rival gangs of Moroccan and (I think) Congolese immigrants antagonize the locals and each other. Marwan (charming Aboubakr Bensaihi) and Mavela (gorgeous Martha Canga Antonio) meet-cute in police custody. He's Moroccan, she hangs with "the Black Bronx," whose name very purposely evokes American ghettos for that soupçon of danger. When he hits on her, she asks him how he'd feel if his sister brought a black man home; Marwan admits there's a double standard, then reassuringly points out they're both African. Within days they're a couple on the DL, whispering dreams of an honest future together. Alas, Mavela becomes inextricably tethered to the Black Bronx when she baits a female member of Marwan's posse to their clubhouse to be gangraped, then endures the same torment herself after they find out about her affair with Marwan. Note that the first rape happens offscreen while Mavela's does not, and though I don't condone any rape scene, there is something ultra-nauseating about graphically violating the Maria/Juliet figure, like when Edith Bunker endured a rape attempt: It breaks some socio-artistic contract we have with our most wholesome archetypes. It didn't make me hate her attackers so much as it made me hate the filmmakers.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010) + Secretariat (2010) - Blu-ray Discs + Conviction (2010)

YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
**/**** Image A Sound B
starring Antonio Banderas, Josh Brolin, Anthony Hopkins, Gemma Jones
written and directed by Woody Allen

SECRETARIAT
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Diane Lane, John Malkovich, Dylan Walsh, Scott Glenn
screenplay by Mike Rich, suggested by the book Secretariat: The Making of a Champion by William Nack
directed by Randall Wallace

CONVICTION
**/****
starring Hilary Swank, Sam Rockwell, Minnie Driver, Juliette Lewis
screenplay by Pamela Gray
directed by Tony Goldwyn

by Ian Pugh You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger represents the apotheosis of what shall now be called the New Woody Allen Average--those perfectly competent nothing movies that never rate more than two, two-and-a-half stars. I say that without a hint of sarcasm, and I say that as someone who considers Allen's work a primary influence--and as the guy who regularly defends Scoop. But I have to be honest: the New Woody Allen Average has become so predictably mediocre that I just can't take it anymore. The director's latest surrogate is another novelist, Roy (Josh Brolin), who's struggling to complete his latest book. It's putting a strain on his marriage to Sally (Naomi Watts), so he looks into the window of his pretty next-door neighbour (Freida Pinto) for romantic respite. Sally, an art curator, feels the same pressure, and casually drifts closer to her boss, Greg (Antonio Banderas). Sally's father Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) has left his wife for a prostitute (Lucy Punch), while his ex, Helena (Gemma Jones), retreats to spirituality, consulting a medium to find out where she stands in the great cosmic plan. It's a matter of "what you want" versus "what you take" in a race to see which floundering/philandering idiot can make the most tragic mistakes in the span of 90 minutes. Is it any different from Vicky Cristina Barcelona? When you break it down to its most basic components...no, not really.

Dispatch from the 2010 WWSFF: Midnight Mania - Freaky

Click here to visit the Worldwide Short Film Festival's official website.

 

by Bill Chambers It's tempting to say that pop already ate itself, leaving a vast wasteland of remakes and reboots that can't possibly be fertile enough to cultivate imaginations; I sometimes lie awake worrying that one day all we'll be left with is the vultures and their Jane Austen mashups, their homemade Lord of the Rings prequels and Sweded Rambo movies. Should such a Doomsday scenario come to pass, let's hope it occasionally yields something as whimsical and obviously heartfelt as France's The Little Dragon (Le petit dragon) (animated; d. Bruno Collet; 8 mins.; ***/****), in which a magical force brings a Bruce Lee action figure to life, seemingly with the legend's identity, if not his soul, intact, as it is his impulse upon encountering a Chuck Norris cut-out to kick it down. (He also recognizes his name and image on other collectibles.) Decked out in his yellow Game of Death jumpsuit, he navigates a maze of cobweb-strewn movie memorabilia that appears to be some Harry Knowles type's bedroom; in a moment of quintessentially French cinephilia, Bruce, having been passed the torch (the Statue of Liberty torch from a Planet of the Apes model kit, that is), stumbles on a makeshift crypt lined with dolls of Rita Hayworth, Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Louise Brooks, Robert Mitchum, and, erm, Robert Taylor. The stop-motion animation is charming--this scrappy little guy may actually be the ne plus ultra of Lee imitators, who are of course legion--and the tone is deceptively irreverent. This is fan art, executed with gusto--but does it have a function? Collet could be the next Nick Park--but is he hurting for inspiration?

W. (2008) + Trouble the Water (2008)

W.
**½/****
starring Josh Brolin, James Cromwell, Elizabeth Banks, Ellen Burstyn
screenplay by Stanley Weiser
directed by Oliver Stone

TROUBLE THE WATER
**½/****
directed by Carl Deal & Tia Lessin

by Walter Chaw John Powers once called Nixon-era Oliver Stone our most Nixonian director: smart, driven, divisive, unlikeable. So the neatest trick of Stone's latest biopic, W., is to make George W. Bush--arguably the most reviled, detached, ideologically arrogant president since James Buchanan--a figure of genuine pathos. Never mind that this incurious, adolescent, fundamentalist fanatic is our proverbial Nero, fiddling while every foundational tenet of Lincoln's party is fed to anti-intellectualism and evangelical Christianity. George Orwell said something once about how the end of democracy is heralded by millionaires leading dishwashers; what's unexpected for me is the extent to which the Republican party in the new millennium has not only convinced the blue-collar to vote against its own self-interests by waging class warfare against liberals, but also begun to turn against the intellectuals in its own party. "Georgetown cocktail party" conservatives are now painted with the same broad brushstroke as "Latte-sipping" lefties--and this idea of abandoning the middle class takes on the onus of not just money and privilege, but education and eloquence as well. The logical end-point of wanting a President as ill-read, venal, and feckless as your alcoholic born-again Uncle Festus is a figure like Governor Sarah Palin, whose chief qualification appears to be her ability to blend into your local chapter of Oprah's Fan Club without a ripple. Hate, division, ugly innuendo, and racism: sowing fear and reaping the political benefits until the house falls down.

The Recruit (2003) - DVD|Blu-ray Disc

*½/****
DVD - Image A Sound A Extras B-
BD - Image B Sound A Extras B-
starring Al Pacino, Colin Farrell, Bridget Moynahan, Gabriel Macht
screenplay by Roger Towne and Kurt Wimmer and Mitch Glazer
directed by Roger Donaldson

by Walter Chaw Aussie director Roger Donaldson's No Way Out is one of the better Cold War paranoia films: sexy, tricky, and packed with the sort of performances (from Kevin Costner, Sean Young, Gene Hackman, and Will Patton) that spin gold from proverbial straw. Donaldson's The Recruit is another derivative post-Cold War knockoff: boring, predictable, and laden with the sort of hackneyed turns that are not only immanently forgettable, but also doomed to eventually be left off the resumé during those Academy clip retrospectives. What a difference sixteen years makes.

Man on Fire (2004) - Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A+ Sound A+
starring Denzel Washington, Dakota Fanning, Marc Anthony, Radha Mitchell
screenplay by Brian Helgeland, based on the novel by A.J. Quinnell
directed by Tony Scott

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. What used to be the province of the Times Square grindhouse and drive-in movie theatres is now star-vehicle blockbuster fodder, making the revenge sub-genre's subversive qualities and carefully-cultivated atmosphere of frustrated rage suddenly a reflection of the demons plaguing mainstream culture. Though certainly more substantive than the hit-and-run remake of Walking Tall, Tony Scott's Man on Fire falls far below the redemptive qualities of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, offering the world the logical end result of a nation operating under the twin godheads of fear and Old Testament vengeance: a slickefied, iconographic, racist, sexist, huckster version of the grimy, low rent, pleasantly exploitative The Punisher.

Sundance '06: Into Great Silence

Die Große Stille
****/****
directed by Philip Gröning

by Alex Jackson I actually saw director Philip Gröning's previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L'Amour, l'argent, l'amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable--it's the sort of "bad" movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning's Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don't know if I'm complimenting the Emperor on his new clothes or not, all I know is that I watch them and something...just...clicks. Into Great Silence is a documentary filmed inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery in France's Carthusian Order. Gröning passively and reverently observes the monks going through their daily routine, making little comment or inquiry as to the who, what, or why of it. Title cards containing relevant Bible verses--printed in French and translated into German, which is then translated into English--surface throughout the 164-minute running time. Gröning continuously returns to a sequence where the monks stare uncomfortably into the camera for some period of time. He repeats the image of a red light burning in otherwise utter darkness and the image of an airplane flying over the monastery. The film is repetitive and there's a question as to whether or not the repetition represents discipline or if it merely represents repetition. When we see the monks looking into the camera, it's astounding how homely and imperfect they are: one eye always looks smaller, bigger, lazier, or more out of place than the other. The monks have allowed some technology into their lives, and the visual presence of electric razors, microphones, and even laptop computers clashes uncomfortably with the medievalism of their garb and housing. They're mostly silent throughout the film, but once we hear them talk, we're struck by the lack of profundity in their statements. They chat about washbasins while out in the garden one summer, and near the end of the film an aged monk gives a hollow, greeting-card version of the meaning of Christianity. Are these men fools, or does their life of asceticism serve a purpose? Is there spiritual sustenance to be found in Gröning's film or is it a crock of shit? Providing no hints, Gröning approaches this material with 110% conviction, refusing to condescend to the material or artificially inflate it with false artistry. What you see is what you get.

The Constant Gardener (2005)

**/****
starring Ralph Fiennes, Rachel Weisz, Danny Huston, Bill Nighy
screenplay by Jeffrey Caine, based on the novel by John Le Carré
directed by Fernando Meirelles

by Walter Chaw An interesting companion piece to both Philip Noyce's The Quiet American and Andrew Niccol's upcoming Lord of War, non-antipodean Fernando Meirelles's follow-up to City of God, the John Le Carré adaptation The Constant Gardener, is beautifully shot in the murky style of David Fincher or high-fashion photography. Not a bad thing--indeed, The Constant Gardener is one of the most technically proficient pictures of the year--but not a great thing, either, when talking about children killing children in Brazil's favelas or, as is the case here, a British diplomat confronting his culture's pathological politeness in the plague-fields of Kenya. What recommends The Constant Gardener is the uniform tonal perfection of the performances, and even if the film itself seems to glamorize (and condescend to) the plight of starving and exploited African nations, it at least demonstrates, along with its cinematic brethren (add The Interpreter and Stephen Gaghan's forthcoming Syriana to that list), cinema's willingness to take a more global stance. A paternalistic one, for the most part, but a global one just the same.

The Chorus (2004)

Les choristes
½*/****
starring Gérard Jugnot, François Berléand, Kad Merad, Jean-Paul Bonnaire
screenplay by Philippe Lopes-Curval, Christophe Barratier
directed by Christophe Barratier

by Walter Chaw The one good thing about Christophe Barratier's unbelievably inane, saccharine, and derivative The Chorus (Les Choristes) is that it offers the much put-upon American public a little comfort in the knowledge that the French mainstream (which made this film its top-grossing title of last year) has just as unquenchable a sweet tooth for pap. Useless to discuss at length, The Chorus is essentially another in a line of literally dozens of films in which an inspirational teacher changes the lives of a group of troubled/lower-class/underestimated children through will, kindness, and a rogue spark of crinkly-eyed genius that irks to no end the evil dean/headmaster/school board/community. It's not as bad as Filipino contribution Little Voices, nor is it as good as, say, Goodbye Mr. Chips--locating it somewhere in the neighbourhood of a disaster like Mr. Holland's Opus or the endlessly weird Wes Craven (!) picture Music of the Heart. Taken on its own merits, pretending that you've never seen Dead Poets Society, Stand and Deliver, The Blackboard Jungle, Conrack, Mona Lisa Smile, Dangerous Minds, Renaissance Man, Coach Carter, and so on and so on, The Chorus is still unspeakably maudlin and presented in so straightforward a fashion that if you did the right thing and asked for your money back after five minutes, you could reasonably fake having seen it to a circle of friends, who will admire your stamina in having sat through the whole benighted thing.

Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) + Elektra (2005)

ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13
***/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Laurence Fishburne, John Leguizamo, Maria Bello
screenplay by James DeMonaco, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter
directed by Jean-François Richet

ELEKTRA
½*/****
starring Jennifer Garner, Goran Visnjic, Will Yun Lee, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
screenplay by Zak Penn and Stuart Zicherman & Raven Metzner
directed by Rob Bowman

by Walter Chaw Being under siege and obsessive-compulsive disorder have together wrought a weird parallel generation in the remake Assault on Precinct 13 and sequel/comic book adaptation Elektra. In each is not only a woman who uses numbers obsessively in stressful situations, but also some sort of predicament where a gang of bad guys traps a band of good guys only to be given the business end of heroic pluck. Both are unusually ugly films with a higher-than-expected body count, and, to various degrees of success, both traffic in a paranoid marshalling of forces that comes with a fear of invasion from without. When you're panicked, drawing those you trust closer to the vest since the rest of the universe has murder in mind is the sanest recourse--even when you're aware that you're addicted, mad, or otherwise in desperate need of therapy. Early in 2005, trends are pointing to a year in which we champion isolationism, fear the marauding Hun, and start wondering if there's a blue-stater playing sheep in the quilting cotillion. Unless, that is, the blue-stater is you, and the constant threat of lynching or crucifixion has caused you to lose your mind.

Once Upon a Time: FFC Interviews Marc Forster

November 14, 2004|Looking more than a little like Michael Stipe, German-born, Switzerland-raised director Marc Forster speaks with a soft Swiss accent, supplementing his thoughts with delicate hand gestures and a nervous self-deprecation. He seems almost too fragile for the world, and in fact admits that he retreats into fantasy, the womb of fable, when he can. His instinct to fashion metaphor out of life's cruelties drew his debut and sophomore features--the festival darling Everything Put Together (about the loss of a child) and arthouse smash Monster's Ball (which won an Oscar for Halle Berry while making of race and class a fairy tale of the reconstruction), respectively--their fair share of criticism. A gauzy look at the South, Monster's Ball, for instance, reminded me of Faulkner but many others of Jim Crow. Taking the harsher edges of life and rounding them into allegory rubs me, where Forster's first two films are concerned, the right way. I can't say the same for his latest, Finding Neverland.

TIFF '03: Vodka Lemon

***/****
starring Lala Sarkissian, Romen Avinian, Ivan Franek, Armen Marouthian
screenplay by Hiner Saleem, Lei Dinety, Pauline Gouzenne
directed by Hiner Saleem

by Bill Chambers Discombobulating and deadly dull for its initial half-hour, Hiner Saleem's Vodka Lemon coalesces before it's too late into something by no means ineffectual. The first in an accumulation of vignettes finds an old man being schlepped in his bed through the Armenian tundra to a funeral site, where he promptly removes his dentures to pipe a dirge for the other mourners. The picture continues to lightly tread such surreal ground until the whimsical closing shot, in which music also acts as a kind of catharsis; Saleem stocks as much of his faith in minimalism as he does absurdity, though, the hush merger proposing at the best of times--during the nonverbal love story between two transient peddlers that commandeers the narrative, for instance--Sunrise for a new era. With a title like Vodka Lemon and wintry bleakness as far as the eye can see, one could easily misinterpret this as a Mosfilm production, but the film, despite the economic hardships it itemizes, is more Beckett than Chekov, the title referring to the beverage served at a lemonade stand in the middle of nowhere, the characters carrying portable chairs with them on their regular snowbound treks not, it would seem, for the small luxury of idleness, but rather should an impromptu bottomless debate arise. Vodka Lemon is a self-confident work that disarms existential misery with humour without trivializing a soul--there's actually an abundance of joy to savour here, even if it takes a microscope. *** (out of four) | Programme: Contemporary World Cinema

TIFF '03: The Five Obstructions

De Fem Benspænd
***½/****
a film by Jørgen Leth & Lars von Trier

by Bill Chambers Jørgen Leth struck a self-described "Faustian" deal with half-insane auteur Lars von Trier to remake his own experimental short film The Perfect Human five times according to "ruinous" changes mandated by von Trier. But the mouse repeatedly outwitted the cat with an incapacity for anything but quality product: The first four of the titular "obstructions" are up there with, well, early Leth, and the venture teaches von Trier--who thrives on unforeseen obstacles and how they lead to personal dissatisfaction with his work--that you can't make crap on purpose. In the film's best sequence (though it doesn't involve the best obstruction, a version set in Cuba with shots that last twelve frames apiece), Leth and von Trier express their mutual loathing for cartoons, prompting the latter to send Leth to the Austin-based workshop of Waking Life co-director Bob Sabiston, where the pair concoct an animated rendition of The Perfect Human that only bears out Leth's artistic integrity. (No matter the medium, a true filmmaker won't begrudge his or her vision so long as reputations are at stake.) It'd be imprudent to spoil the nature of the fifth and final obstruction, but suffice it to say the final minutes of this fascinating, if specialized pseudo-documentary are as unexpectedly affecting as most von Trier productions, even if they confirm one's preconceived notion that von Trier is a terribly malicious softie. Programme: Real to Reel

Winged Migration (2001)

**/****
directed by Jacques Perrin

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The birds are coming, my friends, and you best take shelter before they bore you into a stupor. Not even Hitchcock himself made avian life seem as pervasive a threat as Jacques Perrin does in Winged Migration--though instead of being an active physical menace, it simply has the power to take your money and drive you to sleep or insanity. Alas, despite some super cinematography and generally good intentions, this record of birds sitting around and taking off gets very old very fast, for want of anything beyond an exclamation of, "Look at the pretty birdie!" There is, of course, an audience (nature enthusiasts without an intellectual bent, for starters, as well as those who would mistake impersonal, "professional" photography for art) that will not only gobble every shallow morsel of this film, but also think it a cultural advance.

Psst!: FFC Interviews Christian Frei

September 30, 2002|While flipping through a magazine on a flight to Chicago in April 1997, Swiss director Christian Frei became acquainted with the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey, one of the most decorated artists in his field and the subject of Frei's remarkable documentary War Photographer, which debuts this week in Denver at the Argus Human Rights Festival. A fascinating, almost Lacanian separation of observer and observed indicates the piece, a film shot with a specially designed camera-mounted camera that provides an intimate point of view of the photographer at work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Frei this morning on the telephone to Switzerland as the director, fresh from a trip to Kabul researching his newest project, The Giant Buddhas, spends the next week and a half in his homeland.

Mostly Martha (2002)

Bella Martha
**½/****
starring Martina Gedeck, Maxime Foerste, Sergio Castellitto, August Zirner
written and directed by Sandra Nettelbeck

by Walter Chaw A Bavarian Big Night, Sandra Nettelbeck's Mostly Martha joins a romantic-comedy premise with a lost-child scenario, setting it all to a leisurely pace and framing it with an eye for the handsome. Its sightlines as crisp and clean as the dishes chef Martha creates in her immaculate kitchen, the picture is as relaxed a viewing experience as any this year--a dish without many exotic ingredients (like a good Salmon dish, the film tells us), but just enough substance to forgive the froth.

Secret Ballot (2001)

Raye makhfi
***½/****
starring Nassim Abdi, Cyrus Abidi, Youssef Habashi, Farrokh Shojaii
written and directed by Babak Payami

by Walter Chaw It begins and ends with waiting, while the middle of Babak Payami's Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi) is invested in the Theatre of the Absurd--this is Samuel Beckett, in other words, applied to the Iranian voting process, as an unnamed election agent (Nassim Abdi) travels to a remote Persian island on a quest to gather votes from citizens who may not know that it's election time, are probably unfamiliar with the candidates, and almost certainly aren't affected by the outcome anyway. If anything, Payami's picture confirms that things are the same all over.

Film Freak Central Does Hot Docs 2002 Canadian International Documentary Festival - April 27

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover

TREMBLING BEFORE G-D (2001)
****/****
directed by Sandi Simcha Dubowski

One doesn't normally expect a film about religion and homosexuality to come down affirming both, but that's exactly what's happened in this elegant and powerful documentary about gays and Orthodox Judaism. Trembling Before G-d shows how, against tremendous resistance and incomprehension by the religious community, gay Jews insist on staying with God and try all manner of counter-measures to make their families and community understand their plight. One man confronts the rabbi who sent him into aversion therapy years ago, demanding a better answer; two women serve as a support centre for Hasidic lesbians; and many fight an uphill battle in re-connecting with the families that rejected them.

The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)

**/****
starring Guy Pearce, Jim Caviezel, JB Blanc, Henry Cavill
screenplay by Jay Wolpert, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas
directed by Kevin Reynolds

by Walter Chaw Preserving the main events of the bombastic blunderbuss novel on which it is based, Kevin Reynolds's adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père's The Count of Monte Cristo also jettisons what meagre subtlety there was in the source material. The film, an attractive swashbuckling spectacle, is pleasantly campy for its first hour and a plodding endurance test for its final eighty minutes, an initially agreeable, if ridiculous, escapist (literally) flick that bloats to the dimensions of standard Hollywood offal.

Bread and Tulips (2000)

Pane e tulipani
**/****
starring Felice Andreasi, Vitalba Andrea, Tatiana Lepore, Ludovico Paladin
screenplay by Silvio Soldini & Doriana Leondeff
directed by Silvio Soldini

by Walter Chaw There are great chunks missing from Bread and Tulips, story transitions that appear inconsequential until one finds them neglected. An action is announced and several scenes later we are left to presume that the action has been performed; an event occurs and several scenes later we give up waiting for the reaction. Nowhere is that discrepancy more jarring than at the conclusion, when our heroine is spirited away from her family and loved ones and deposited in the middle of a different movie. There is a considerable problem with a film that insists on holding your hand through score or ham-handed direction; on the flipside, there is a considerable problem with one that discards basic narrative cohesion in favour of a calculated whimsy. A film like Bread and Tulips.