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The Parson’s Widow

Andrew Schenker — Fri, 16 May 2008 16:09:07 GMT

The satisfactions of early Dreyer are available to the viewer in a somewhat limited quantity. Those looking for embryonic signs of the director’s signature style, augmented by the occasionally spectacular sequence will find what they’re looking for; those expecting fully formed masterpieces or even any kind of consistently sustained brilliance, alas, will not. Still, if there’s one early work that satisfies most completely on its own terms, it’s probably the filmmaker’s 1920 feature The Parson’s Widow and that’s largely because it’s played pretty much as comedy.

Unbreakable

Leo Goldsmith — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:59:44 GMT

In retrospect, it’s not hard to see why everyone found Shyamalan’s (essentially) sophomore effort — all waterlogged dreariness and millennial malaise — so disappointing. It’s slow and a little sappy, with Samuel L. Jackson’s trademark intensity and Bruce Willis doing his best “blue steel.” It also lacks the pyrotechnics, however subdued, of Shyamalan’s previous film, preferring marital strife and father-son time to the expected “Biff”s and “Ka-Pow”s of a superhero movie.

But from this vantage point, after the dozen or so comic book movies that have since followed (and Heroes, which I’ve never watched), not to mention the subsequently diminishing returns of Shyamalan’s career, Unbreakable seems a far more plausible movie now than it did eight years ago. The idea of the film — that Willis’s David Dunn is an unbreakable superhero, but never realized it — is drawn out with uncommon subtlety by Shyamalan, and the film is shot with his particular grey, Philadelphian beauty. Some scenes fall a little flat, but others — the astonishing trainwreck and its aftermath, a weirdly touching weightlifting scene — keep the film quietly suspenseful, right up to its climactic/anti-climactic action sequence.

Shyamalan’s effort — and it’s no easy one — is to credibly weave comic books into a Hollywood-realist melodrama, a task which other, more recent comic book movies (Batman Begins flaps to mind) take up and drop without much consistency. Shyamalan at least holds to his intentions, and the result is that the film usually functions better in its family drama mode than its superhero movie mode. But as his films are always about the different narratives that compete for control over the characters’ and the audience’s minds, this push-and-pull of genres actually works in the film’s favor. And the acting follows suit: Robin Wright (erstwhile) Penn is characteristically serious and great, Jackson is cartoonish and effortlessly watchable, and Willis (whose performance is — no kidding — among his best) is a mix of both. Even if Shyamalan all but blows it with the final scene — not so much because of the “surprise” ending (which is quite clever, but not that surprising), but because of Sam Jackson’s outfit and the useless titlecards — I, for one, mostly buy it. Whatever its faults, it’s nonetheless undeserving of its status as a film maudit.

Nerdcore Rising

Victoria Large — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:13:03 GMT

IFFB coverage – Other nerdcore artists appear along with MC Frontalot, and there is discussion of the obvious differences and ironic similarities between nerdcore and, say, gangsta rap, as well as the potentially problematic issue of a white musician co-opting a traditionally black musical style and giving it a comic twist, but these are brief interludes in a fairly short feature, and there are stones that go noticeably unturned.

Iron Man

Evan Kindley — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:36:07 GMT

Maybe it’s because they were working with a second-tier superhero, but Marvel’s certainly taken some interesting risks with this movie, starting with hiring director Jon Favreau, best known for snappy dialogue comedies. Iron Man is remarkable in that it pushes the superhero-movie genre in two seemingly incompatible directions: toward contemporary political allegory on the one hand and mid-90s indie nonchalance on the other. This should result in a pretty schizophrenic movie, but Favreau’s film brilliantly avoids generic dissonance by achieving in cinema what it fantasizes about in the political realm: namely, violence with heart, or weaponization with a human face. The plot turns on Tony Stark, a leading military arms supplier, having a crisis of conscience and deciding he’s been complicit in terror and murder, all of which is somehow resolved by his invention of suits that can fly and shoot missiles. (“How about a pilot without the plane?” is the way he puts it.) The theme is the image of America abroad, whether we’re to be regarded as peacekeepers or “merchants of death,” even whether one necessarily entails the other.

Lest this political subtext get too depressing, though, Favreau slathers on the charm, with Robert Downey Jr. undercutting every possible moment of solemnity and Gwyneth Paltrow somehow managing to make a character named “Pepper Potts” relatively believable. Thus we get a film which is about 40% snappy dialogue-comedy, 60% CGI robots and explosions, with each pleasure balancing out and guaranteeing the other: we don’t feel so irresponsible enjoying the carnage knowing that it’s being supervised by a morally conscious and moreover unpretentious US citizen, one who can distinguish terrorists from civilians and kill only the latter at the touch of a button. Stark, in other words, is the kind of arms manufacturer you’d like to have a beer with, and the archetype Downey inaugurates here — the witty, socially responsible, cheeseburger-loving engineering genius — is as good a summation of how Americans now wish to think of themselves as we’re likely to get this decade.

The Beaver Trilogy

Katherine Follett — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:41:23 GMT

IFFB coverage – In my mind, the Beaver Kid is and does one thing, and in the filmmaker’s mind, he is and does something entirely different. Both Harris and I have evidence for our interpretations. Both of us might be wrong. Either way, The Beaver Trilogy accomplishes something astonishing. It documents the gap between an event and its interpretation, between an action and our memory of it, between the world and our perceptions.

The Beaver Trilogy

Rumsey Taylor — Tue, 13 May 2008 02:37:48 GMT

IFFB coverage – What we’re observing in the initial scene of the Beaver Trilogy is real, but it is also a performance. And it’s one, the film will subsequently prove, so wholly unique, so unadulterated and unrehearsed that it amounts to one of those moments for which cinema exists, a performance expressed outwardly toward an audience and yet one created in respect to the presence of a camera.

Romeo, Juliet and Darkness

Ian Johnston — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:17:32 GMT

Jirí Weiss’ own family background obviously comes into play with this wartime setting he returned to repeatedly in his films—he was born into a German-speaking Jewish family. But although Romeo, Juliet and Darkness deals with the Holocaust, it’s never made the centrepiece of the story; instead, it’s shifted to the background in the same way that Hanka herself is kept at the periphery, an almost exotic figure that is kept at a distance, one that is in a sense outside the world of the film.

At the Death House Door

Victoria Large — Thu, 08 May 2008 15:28:49 GMT

IFFB coverage – There’s a small moment late in the film when Rohto confesses to Pickett that she’s angry about what happened to her brother. Pickett urges her to “stay that way,” and that may be Gilbert and James’ hope for their audiences as well. Pickett, Rohto, and of many of the others interviewed frequently contemplate their own accountability for the death of De Luna and others. It may be this element of the film that sobers even the staunchest supporter of capital punishment.

Big Man Japan

Rumsey Taylor — Wed, 07 May 2008 16:53:53 GMT

IFFB coverage – You would never know it from talking to him, but Masaru is actually a superhero, and he comes from a family of superheroes deemed “Dai Nipponjin”, or “Big Man Japan.” They’re capable, via moderated electrocution, of growing to enormous size and contending with a variety of other super-sized personalities that invade Japan, each of whom is more a nuisance than threat.

The Linguists

Katherine Follett — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:31:41 GMT

IFFB coverage – The Linguists could have been a better, more powerful documentary if it had chronicled the ways and lives of some of the people Harrison and Anderson were trying to record, instead of just Harrison and Anderson’s adventures as they tried to record them. These people are some of the most rare, unusual, and endangered people on the planet. Harrison and Anderson are pretty much regular American white guys. I know which I’ve seen before.

Transsiberian

Rumsey Taylor — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:47:46 GMT

IFFB coverage – Transsiberian makes suspenseful and sometimes violent gestures, but it’s all decoration. There’s a young, charismatic Eurasian couple – a catalyst for the American woman’s unethical whims – who forward mystery mysteriously. There’s the picturesque Russian setting that looks more like a template for a postcard than it does the imprisoning, foreign setting from which the American characters are to question their ability to exit.

Second Skin

Katherine Follett — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:54:46 GMT

IFFB coverage – The back-and-forth juxtapositions of “MMOs: Good or Evil?” seemed a bit heavy-handed and clumsily constructed at times. And the film’s desire to have it both ways, to both empathize with and mock its subjects, left me feeling that the filmmaker’s intentions were a bit exploitive. But in an odd twist, it was the subjects of the documentary themselves who managed to subvert this tone.

Flight of the Red Balloon

Adam Balz — Tue, 06 May 2008 16:37:27 GMT

Had the opening scene—of the titular red balloon following Simon through the streets of Paris—been the entire film, all 117 minutes, I probably would have left the theatre a little teary-eyed. The magic in film that evokes the innocence and wonderment of childhood is very rare today—perhaps the rarest of cinematic species. Studios try to replicate that feeling—mass-produce it with characters they think we’ll love—but never succeed, because it never feels like anything other than desperation. For money, for notoriety, for awards, for the number-one spot on the Box Office Top 10. I clearly remember watching The Wizard of Oz as a child and being enamored by every aspect, a feeling I later felt when I watched other films like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Disney’s The Sword in the Stone. The Flight of the Red Balloon, while not perfect—and after those opening seven or eight minutes, nothing director Hou Hsiao-hsien could do would ever be—revived, at least for a while, those feelings of astonishment I very rarely feel for movies today. (Feelings, I should note, I had felt only days before, when Suzie Templeton’s Peter and the Wolf was broadcast on PBS.)

I realize my thoughts on Hou’s film are bumbling and overly sentimental, and I’ve spent the last month trying to write something better—more broad, more analytical. But I couldn’t, probably because my friends and I watched this film in a theatre that is slowly but visibly showing its age: Chipped walls, scuffed and soiled floors, broken chairs, a stage curtain held together by duct tape. Never a more apt metaphor for the sad state of magical films.

Meadowlark

Katherine Follett — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:52:17 GMT

IFFB coverage – This could have made three separate films, and I would argue that one of the incidents makes up the bulk of both the running time and the power of Meadowlark. But even if the three events could have been weighted differently, the result is still a moving personal story that manages to transcend simple self-examination and become about larger issues that touch everyone’s lives.

Intimidad

Victoria Large — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:38:46 GMT

IFFB coverage – The film follows a family through reunions and separations, small triumphs and not-so-small setbacks. This narrative is focused and very personal (the title appropriately translates to “Intimacy”). Yet while it may appear to eschew global-scale muck racking in favor of a simpler tale, the piece pointedly retains its social conscience

Raw Force

David Carter — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:23:42 GMT

An encyclopedia of exploitation clichés that manages to remain coherent enough to be one of the most insanely entertaining films I’ve ever seen. The Burbank Karate Club takes a booze-cruise to Warrior’s Island, a place where the dead martial artists allegedly rise from their graves to do the bidding of the island’s cannibalistic monks. Attempting to stop their arrival is Hitler look-alike Thomas Speer, who is afraid that his nude-girls-for-jade exchange program with the monks will be upset if outsiders are allowed on the island.

Raw Force has a frenetic pace, hitting its exploitive marks with unbelievable frequency. There are no lulls in the steady stream of kung-fu, nudity, and zombies. Fans of cine-excess should find a copy as soon as possible. Look for Camille Keaton in a rare post-I Spit on Your Grave role as a drunk girl in a bathroom.

Savage Man, Savage Beast

David Carter — Sun, 04 May 2008 21:19:04 GMT

Savage Man, Savage Beast could alternately be viewed as the zenith and nadir of the Mondo cycle. Climati was Jacopetti & Prosperi’s cinematographer and the photography and use of montage on display here perhaps eclipses that of their works. A greater emphasis is given to placing the events of the film within a context, and the film more wholly espouses a critique of “modern” society than its predecessors. Though similar in style, Savage Man, Savage Beast has little in common with the lighthearted travelogue of curiosities that typified Mondo Cane I & II. The film’s sole concern is death; animal deaths primarily, but human death is used to extend the metaphor on occasion. It is for this reason that SMSB’s influence is possibly even more important Mondo Cane’s. This film is the bridge between Mondo and shockumentary—Faces of Death and the like that replaced Mondo in the late-seventies. Post-hardcore pornography, death was the only taboo on which Mondo and exploitation held a monopoly and Savage Man, Savage Beast is the first step towards the macabre monomania of later entries.

Savage Man, Savage Beast’s influence stretches beyond the Mondo/shock genre. Two “authentic” sequences in the film are key influences on Cannibal Holocaust’s film-within-a-film technique. Each is depicted as separate from the main film itself, with intertitles informing the audience of their origins and authenticity. The mauling of a tourist by a lion is captured both by his own camera and those by of onlookers. The sequence is by all accounts false, yet the amateurish quality, the “factual” context given by the narrator, and the point-of-view footage all make it difficult to readily dismiss upon a first viewing and it is still believed to be real by some. It would reappear in several films, either reimagined with different animals (Faces of Death) or as the same footage (Traces of Death). The alleged victim Pit Dernitz even has his own IMDB.com listing. Less convincing—but more important to Deodato’s film—is a later segment showing the murder, scalping, and castration of indigenous people by mercenaries from the “civilized world.” This portion was visually and thematically incorporated whole-cloth into a host of Italian cannibal cinema as it used in this context to establish the savagery of the modern man against nature and his fellow man.

It should be noted that print of the film on the Fortune 5 DVD excises the castration scene, stopping as the Indio’s legs are spread apart by the mercenaries. Uncut, that scene reveals its falsity soon after and this truncated print actually makes the segment seem more real; allowing the viewer to imagine an outcome rather than sit through Climati & Morra’s ludicrously excessive conclusion.

Mister Lonely

Rumsey Taylor and Katherine Follett — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:21:04 GMT

IFFB coverage – A director like Korine moving toward more traditional narratives is like a beloved cult musician bringing song structure and melodies to what was formerly noise. To purists and lovers of abstraction, challenge, and all things fringe, it may feel like a loss of authenticity. But to the larger mainstream audience, it simply makes art more accessible, and possibly widens the range of what’s considered mainstream.

Safari

Katherine Follett — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:24:20 GMT

IFFB: This film could be called moving still-lifes, or non-human dance. Small animals (insects, amphibians, reptiles) are shot in plant-filled but artificially lit setups that allow the camera to pick up stunning color, texture, movement, and expressiveness. A lovely film that combines the best features of video art and nature films.

Doxology

Katherine Follett — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:23:04 GMT

IFFB: Not so much a short film as a series of vignettes advertising the director’s talents as an animator, and he has many. The animation could be described as full-size stop-motion: instead of using clay, he uses human actors. There are one-man tennis games, dances with sedans, and Shiva’s morning hygiene. Give this guy a story and the results could be great.