Foundas & Taylor on Film

Another New York-only (for now) film retrospective that will, with any luck, eventually make its way West centers around the volatile, Texas-born character actor Rip Torn and, in particular, the rarely screened independent and underground cinematic experiments (including two films directed by Norman Mailer and one co-directed by Jean-Luc Godard) to which Torn devoted himself between 1967's Beach Red and 1973's Payday.

In previewing the series for this week's Village Voice, I wrote that Torn "has repeatedly gravitated, as if by some Pavlovian reflex, to the margins and uncertain frontiers of independent moviemaking and to filmmakers intent on setting the barn ablaze with the horses still inside. Notwithstanding the hard-working character actor's inability to turn down a job, 'normal' has rarely seemed to hold much interest for him." To read more, go here. ]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/03/let_it_rip.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/03/let_it_rip.php Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:38:33 -0800 Reflections on a Darkened Screen

Somewhere, Guy Debord is smiling -- or at least nodding in approval. Although it's been nearly 15 years since the French author, filmmaker and all-purpose radical put a gun to his heart and ended his life at the age of 62, his anarchistic spirit was alive and well this past weekend at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Walter Reade Theater, where a screening of Debord's 1952 film Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Howls For Sade) came as close to inciting a riot as any movie I have ever seen play out before an audience. Admittedly, this may not have been such a surprise, given that Debord's 75-minute debut film -- which, to the best of my knowledge, has never before been commercially exhibited in the U.S. -- consists almost exclusively of a black screen and silent soundtrack.

Periodically, that silence is interrupted by flashes of a white screen accompanied by a cacophony of voices (belonging to Debord and fellow members of his "Letterist International" collective) spouting uncited literary quotations and snippets of dissociated conversations. "Love is only possible in a pre-revolutionary period," says one, while another reads a news item about the suicide of a child radio actress. Someone, presumably Debord himself, rattles off a "crib sheet for the history of cinema" that naturally includes his own birth (among such other milestones as Chaplin's City Lights and Méliès' A Trip to the Moon) and ends with Hurlements itself. Gradually, the dark, silent passages grow longer and the bright, sonic ones less frequent, until the film ends on something like 20 minutes of uninterrupted blankness.

Given those variables, it's little wonder that Hurlements has enjoyed something of a clandestine existence since its initial public screenings. Even Greil Marcus, who wrote at length about Debord and the Letterists in his essential Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, had to settle for "seeing Hurlements on the page," in the form of Debord's published screenplay and various other written accounts. Per Marcus, when the film was first screened, at the Musée de l'Homme in June of 1952, the projection was stopped after 20 minutes, with several LI members resigning in disgust over the film's very existence. Eight years later, when Hurlements was booked by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, it created more outrage, with viewers leaving one showing pleading with those lined up for a later one to go home and save themselves the agony -- which, of course, only made the second group even more eager to see the film.

Something not dissimilar transpired Sunday at the Walter Reade, where Hurlements capped a day-long marathon of Debord films organized by the editors of Film Comment magazine and presented, per the wishes of Debord's estate, in reverse chronological order. About 20 minutes into the screening, two people seated close to the screen started to audibly chatter (about what I'm not sure) during one of the film's silent passages. This prompted a patron seated near the back to loudly reprimand the talkers for disrespecting Debord's film. The talkers responded in kind by uttering a profane imperative and insisting that the blank screen wasn't really part of the movie. This was followed by another 30 minutes or so of relative quiet (during which several viewers filed into the lobby to report a projection problem), before more voices -- speaking in a fascinating babel of American, British, Indian and South African accents -- made themselves heard. "We could try holding our breath to see who lasts the longest," said one. "The whole point of this movie is to provoke discussion," reasoned another, in response to a second attempt to restore calm and order. Then, during the sustained final stretch of darkness, a voice from the middle of the theater endeavored to lead the audience in a group sing-a-long to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," followed by the 1915 union anthem "Solidarity Forever" (at which point the staunchly anti-union Debord may have gone from nodding in agreement to roiling in his grave).

Now, generally speaking, I am of the opinion that cinemas are holy sites far more deserving of our reverence than most churches, and that the films shown there should by approached with a worshipful silence. When a news item appeared late last year about an incident at a Philadelphia multiplex in which one man shot another in the arm for talking during a screening of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, my sympathies were squarely with the alleged assailant -- no matter that Benjamin Button is a film for which I personally feel no great enthusiasm. But if ever there was a movie that invited a violent (and vocal) reaction, it's Hurlements, and the fact that it is still able to engender one more than a half-century after it was made, when we are now more than ever prisoners of what Debord termed "the spectacle" -- a post-capitalist society in which representations have entirely supplanted reality -- is no mean feat. Quite frankly, I can't recall the last time I felt so enlivened in a cinema.

In all fairness, it may be asking too much to expect an audience to give Hurlements due consideration without at least some grounding in Debord's theories, which is why the Film Society's counter-clockwise homage seemed to make perfect sense. The afternoon began with an encore screening of Debord's final film, In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (1978), which received its own belated American premiere as a special screening during last fall's New York Film Festival, where it was followed by a panel discussion featuring Debord scholars and acolytes including Marcus and the French filmmakers Olivier Assayas and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Arguably Debord's most forcefully articulated, personal statement, In girum (whose palindromic Latin title translates as "We turn in the night, consumed by fire") begins with the static image of a cinema audience suspended in a state of artificial bliss, while Debord's spoken narration tells us, "I will make no concessions to the public in this film." What follows is a succession of of original and repurposed images -- Paris street scenes and cavalry raids from old Hollywood movies figure prominently -- as Debord mounts his own full-frontal attack on "a totally commodified society" and everything therein. "From the very beginning, I have devoted myself to overthrowing this society," Debord states, and so profoundly does In girum believe in the possibilities of revolution (even as it mourns a post-'68 Paris whose revolutionary embers had apparently burned out) that it seems to me impossible not to get caught up in its idealistic furor.

After two viewings, I can say that I find In girum among the most beautiful of all films, even if most audiences -- then and now -- may be ill-equipped to fathom its beauty. Put another way, Debord is not for those who blindly subscribe to what they have been taught in schools or by their parents; who happily swallow, like patients in an asylum, the mass-produced lies proffered by most Hollywood movies and the largely counterfeit art that gets classified as "art cinema"; or who measure their own self-worth by any yardstick of "acceptable society" (personal wealth, family, career advancement, etc.). For Debord, the only life truly worth living was one lived in a constant state of opposition -- opposition to the status quo and the anti-status quo alike (since rebellion itself was in constant danger of being commodified), to capitalism and to the perversion of Marxism that masqueraded as Communism, and to the various misreadings of Guy Debord's own work. Fittingly, in addition to Debord's 1973 film adaptation of his famous 1967 text, The Society of the Spectacle, the Film Society program also included his 1975 short Refutation of All the Judgments, Pro or Con, Thus Far Rendered on the Film "The Society of the Spectacle", in which Debord systematically debunks all the major reviews of his film in the French press, reserving his greatest contempt for the favorable ones.

Which brings me back to that blank screen -- Debord's earliest celluloid provocation and one of his most intriguing. Presented with it, most audiences will instinctively bolt for the exit, incensed at having wasted their "valuable" time when there are so many "better" and "more important" things they could be doing. But those who stay to ponder Debord's non-images may find themselves afflicted by the dawning revelation that this apparent emptiness is no more meaningless than most of the ephemera of our lives inside the spectacle (or, as some latter-day Debord disciples would term it, The Matrix) -- the null objects to which we ascribe significance, the choices we sheepishly believe are ours to make, and the conformity we do not question, or question only in the most conformist of ways. And that is the moment when Debord will have begun to have his desired effect. Now that these films have surfaced in New York, will anyone in Los Angeles (or any other American city) dare to show them, or to see them? Discuss -- as loudly as you desire -- amongst yourselves.]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/03/reflections_on_a_darkened_scre.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/03/reflections_on_a_darkened_scre.php Uncategorized Mon, 02 Mar 2009 09:47:52 -0800 How Do You Say "Oscar Scandal" in Hebrew?

Much as I am loathe to give any further wind to the orgy of self congratulations and poor taste that was this year's Academy Awards, given that it has been something of an ongoing discussion on this blog I do feel obliged to offer a few words to the outcome of the Best Foreign Language Film contest. That much-maligned category, which has undergone nearly as many cosmetic makeovers in recent years as the previous Best Actress winners seen on the Kodak Theatre stage last night, drew a fair amount of unwanted attention earlier this season when, despite all the reforms spearheaded by current Foreign Language nominating committee chair Mark Johnson, Matteo Garrone's widely acclaimed mafia drama Gomorrah failed to secure a nomination despite being Italy's official submission for the award.

Still, many (including Johnson) argued that the eventual five nominees were nothing to scoff at, since they managed to include French director Laurent Cantet's The Class (winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival), Austrian director Götz Spielmann's superb revenge drama Revanche (an audience favorite at least year's Telluride and Toronto festivals) and Israeli director Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, a film that rivaled Gomorrah in terms of its torrential acclaim from critics and audiences alike from Cannes up through its commercial release in U.S. cinemas last December. Given that Folman's film was also in the running for, but failed to secure, a nomination in the Academy's Best Animated Feature category, it had generally been considered the favorite to win in the Foreign Language category. But alas, when the envelope was opened, the Oscar instead went to Japanese director Yojiro Takita's relentlessly medicore tearjerker Departures, about an unemployed cellist who takes a job as an "encoffinment" specialist, preparing dead bodies for cremation. (As if that weren't enough, Waltz with Bashir was also omitted from the Oscar telecast's montage of animated features from 2008, having evidently been deemed a less significant achievement than Space Chimps and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.)

Admittedly, the win for Departures wasn't a total surprise. While it may be one of the lesser-known of the nomainetd films (by virtue of the fact that it played relatively minor film festivals and has yet to be commercially released in the U.S.), voters in the Foreign Language category are obliged to see all five nominated films, thereby placing the contenders on a somewhat level playing field. And when I found myself at a dinner last week with several knowledgable parties (including a longtime foreign-language film publicist and the head of a European country's national film commission), it was generally agreed that if there was a surprise winner, it was going to be the Japanese film. Beyond that, there is the simple fact that, along with Germany's The Baader Meinhof Complex, Departures was easily the most conventional, Hollywood-style movie of the five Foreign Language nominees -- the one with "universal" (read: one-dimensional) characters, a direly familiar fish-out-of-water scenario and an incessantly sentimental musical score applied like a thick shellac.

Meanwhile, I'm sure various conspiracy theories will emerge in the next few days as to exactly how and why Waltz with Bashir got screwed. Speaking to an audience at last year's New York Film Festival, Folman himself pointed out that his film, which examines the controversial role played by Israeli soldiers in the massacre of Palestinians during the 1982 occupation of Southern Lebanon, had been criticized by some extreme leftists in Israel for not being self-critical enough. But I doubt that Academy members objected to the movie on similarly political grounds.

Rather, it seems more likely that Folman's film was simply too innovative for the Academy's notoriously calcified tastes. Certainly, by Academy standards, it was one of the more radical works ever to be nominated in the Foreign Language category -- a fragmented memory film in which truth and illusion collide on a tide of uncertain recollection. There are multiple narrators, dreams masquerading as reality (and vice-versa), and so many genres exploded moment by moment that it becomes imossible to squeeze the film into an easily definable box. And while Waltz builds to a conclusion that many (including this critic) counted among the most emotionally devastating in movies last year, it is a moment that is earned by the film rather than cheaply calculated, and which raises more questions than it answers. That's something that many viewers of Folman's film have found thrilling to behold, but which may well have inspired paroxysms of rage in Academy voters who stand by the belief that a movie should have a clear beginning, middle and end and send people out of the theater feeling better about "humanity."

Even the somewhat more conventional The Class may have suffered for similar reasons, since despite the familiar trappings of its inspirational-schoolteacher scenario, it was that rare such film about a teacher who tries, but in many cases fails, to make a difference, and who is as complex and flawed a character as any of his troubled students. Like Waltz, Cantet's film also liberally mixed documentary and narrative techniques, using a real teacher and real students in a fictionalized scenario based on real events -- too much, perhaps, for Academy voters to wrap their heads around (much in the way that, for decades, documentary films featuring extensive use of dramatic re-enactments were considered anathema to the Academy's documentary nominating committee). Or it could simply be that the Academy felt the nomination was honor enough for films starring non-professional talent made well outside of their own countries' "studio systems." Such films do little to stroke the egos of actors (the Academy's largest voting branch) who seem to relish sitting in the Kodak auditorium while being reminded how fabulous they are. It's hard to imagine a Hollywood remake of Waltz with Bashir or The Class that would have roles in it for many of last night's nominees, but an American Departures starring Sean Penn as the cellist/undertaker and Kate Winslet as his clueless wife...well, that may already be in the works.
]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/how_do_you_say_oscar_scandal_i_2.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/how_do_you_say_oscar_scandal_i_2.php Uncategorized Mon, 23 Feb 2009 04:40:45 -0800 Rated "G" For Globalization

As earlier noted, the 2009 Berlin Film Festival opened with a Hollywood movie (The International), directed by Germany's own Tom Tykwer and filmed in a half-dozen countries around the world, then continued with a French movie (In the Electric Mist) made in the U.S.A. with dialogue spoken in regional Louisiana dialects that begged the need for subtitles. In addition, this year's official Berlinale competition has included Storm, German director Hans-Christian Schmidt's docudrama about the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Netherlands, featuring a cast of Brits, Romanians and New Zealanders speaking a mix of English, Bosnian and Serbian; and Mammoth, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's stab at a Babel-style cross-cultural jigsaw, set between New York, Thailand and the Philippines. Still to come is The Dust of Time, the latest from master Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, here reportedly working in English, Russian, German and Greek, with Willem Dafoe in the lead.

Meanwhile, for the last two weeks, the North American box office has been dominated by Taken, a French movie made in France with an English-speaking, Irish-born star (Liam Neeson) that had already been released in most of the rest of the world before it ever crossed the Atlantic. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Films made by actors and directors working outside of their national borders and mother tongues are, of course, as old as the cinema itself, with Hollywood having first been colonized by emigré filmmakers (Capra, Griffith, Wilder) who went on to make some of the most iconic American films. Likewise, there is the equally longstanding tradition of American and British movies set in foreign cultures, but starring predominately Yank and Anglo actors speaking anachronistically in English (for recent examples, see Valkyrie, with its cast of British-accented Germans, and The Reader, with its cast of faintly German-accented Brits). And whether now or then, American moviegoers have paid such nuances little mind -- in large measure because most Americans, whether at home or traveling abroad, assume that everything from restaurant menus to movie dialogue ought to be in English. I mean, if we're going to complain about the lack of German accents in Valkyrie, why not mention that, by rights, everyone in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner ought to be speaking Hungarian?

What's different about the crop of English-language international productions at this year's Berlinale is that they largely take matters of language and nationality as their very subjects. They could, one British colleague has joked, be rated "G" for globalization. Or, better yet, "P" for pedantic. That's certainly the case with Storm, which much like The International seems hellbent on finding a multinational bogeyman to finger for all of the world's injustices. In Tykwer's film, it's the global banking industry; in Schmidt's, it's the UN, which pays predictable lip service to the idea of bringing justice to bear on fugitive war criminals from the Bosnian conflict, provided it doesn't take too long or -- God forbid -- impede the breakaway Balkans' efforts towards EU membership. "Do you watch those kind of movies, where the good always wins in the end?" asks the potential star witness (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days star Anamaria Marinca) to the idealistic Hague prosecutor (Kerry Fox) who's urging her to testify against a former Yugoslav Army commander. From there, Storm becomes exactly one of those movies, complete with a grandstanding finale in which our two crusading heroines create massive disorder in the court and, by doing so, tip the scales of justice back into balance.

Still, far better Schmidt's Erin Brockovich of the Balkans than Moodysson's Mammoth, whose two-ton pretension is heralded by its own title, a reference to a $3000 pen whose clear barrel contains pieces of mammoth ivory -- this, in the movie's view, being the ultimate symbol of imperialist decadence. That pen is used by an arrested-adolescent video game designer (Gael Garcia Bernal) to sign the lucrative contract that will allow him to keep up the mortgage on the chic SoHo loft occupied by him, his ER doctor wife (Michelle Williams) and their young daughter. Williams, fresh from Wendy and Lucy -- one of the only recent films with something meaningful to say about America's haves and have-nots -- here has little wiggle room as a contemptible bourgeois who berates her live-in Filipina nanny for teaching the young'un Tagalog, unaware that, half a world away, the nanny's own son is about to stick his toe in the water of Manilla's underage sex trade. Let it be said that Moodysson, best known in the States for his 2002 human trafficking drama Lilya 4-Ever, has not yet run out of ways to humiliate his leading ladies.

Relievedly, given its own confluence of First World and Third, black skin and white, Islam and Christianity, London River (which could be rated "T" for terrorism) almost always places its characters ahead of its polemics, making for a small but heartfelt drama about an African man (the excellent Malian actor Sotigui Kouyate) and a British woman (Brenda Blethyn) who meet while searching for their missing children in the aftermath of the 2005 London subway and bus bombings. Directed by the French-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb, who previously made the Oscar-nominated Indigènes, London River sometimes plays things a bit too broadly in the culture-clash and racial-profiling departments, but still manages to render a nicely understated snapshot of multi-ethnic life in the global city, without a non-linear narrative or top-heavy title metaphor in sight.

Ironically, London River, which is mostly in French, seems a lot likelier to make its way to international art-house audiences than either Storm or Mammoth, which are mostly in English. The instructive difference is that, where Bouchareb's film feels personal and human-scale, the others seem anonymous and monolithic -- movies more concerned with saving the world than telling stories, hammered into existence by international sales companies and co-production boards rather than by artists with singular visions. ]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/rated_g_for_globalization.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/rated_g_for_globalization.php 2009 Berlin Film Festival Fri, 13 Feb 2009 03:29:58 -0800 Mist Opportunity

Not many films in the 60 years since Robert Flaherty's immortal Louisiana Story have evoked the atmosphere of the Bayou State as strongly as Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist, a movie that doesn't seem to have been filmed so much as distilled, on a creaking porch beset by mosquitos and summer heat, with the rumble of a gathering storm in the distance. Adapted from the novel by James Lee Burke, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's popular detective character, Dave Robichaux, here investigating the murder of one Cherry LeBlanc, a "fatally beautiful" 19-year-old prostitute whose mutilated corpse washes up on shore in the film's opening scene. Not long after that, another body -- this one belonging to a lynched black man dead and gone some 40 years -- surfaces deep in the swamp, loosed by Hurricane Katrina's churning tide.

Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier, combining two of the veteran French filmmaker's great passions: the American South (previously explored in his 1985 documentary, Mississippi Blues) and American pulp fiction (the basis for 1981's Oscar-nominated Coup de torchon, which transposed Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French colonial Africa). But it's been a long road to Berlin for In the Electric Mist, which was shot on location in 2007 only to become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film's American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).

When the dust finally settled, two different versions of the movie emerged -- an "international" cut prepared by Tavernier, which screened here in Berlin and will be released in most countries around the world, and an "American" cut supervised by Fitzgerald that runs 15 minutes shorter and will go directly to DVD in the U.S. next month. In comparing the two edits, Variety critic Leslie Felperin deemed the American version "brisker but less-coherent" with "tacky summing up and [an] oo!-spooky last shot mini twist that makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie."

Having seen only Tavernier's version, I can say that it's unfortunate American audiences may never get a chance to experience this superior detective yarn on the big screen, in the form its director intended. Unfortunate, but by no means surprising. Indeed, where the default Hollywood position would have been to strip-mine Burke's source material for its narrative chassis while junking all its atmospheric touches, tertiary supporting characters and curlicue digressions, Tavernier (working from a script credited to the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) does exactly the opposite. Much like Burke himself on the page, he plays up the bass line at the expense of the melody, showing markedly less interest in the identity of the killer(s) than in a long and winding history of Southern injustice that stretches from Jim Crow to George W. Bush. Long ago, Robichaux says in the lyrical voice-over that opens the film, people placed heavy stones on the graves of the dead so as to weigh down the souls of the departed. But in Burke and Tavernier's world, every time a storm blows through, those stones become displaced, and restless spirits take to wandering the bayou.

This is the Burke adaptation fans of the author deserved, but were sorely denied by the 1996 film version of another Robichaux novel, Heaven's Prisoners, with an altogether unconvincing Alec Baldwin in the lead. Jones, by contrast, slips effortlessly into the character's skin -- a bit too effortlessly, some might argue, given the actor's history of playing no-nonsense lawmen. But pay close attention to the jittery impatience in Dave Robichaux's voice, his clumsiness of gesture, the faint uncertainty in his recovering alcoholic's eyes, and you will see a character many jurisdictions removed from The Fugitive's cocksure Marshal Samuel Gerard and No Country For Old Men's wizened and weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

If In the Electric Mist is finally less than completely satisfying as a murder mystery, as a piece of cultural anthropology it is never less than deeply absorbing. History and myth freely intermingle with the present, particularly in the case of what may be the movie's cleverest conceit -- a Civil War-era film within the film, starring a hell-raising Hollywood actor (a highly amusing Peter Sarsgaard) and a cast of hundreds, although the Confederate General (Levon Helm) Robichaux keeps encountering in the nighttime fog seems more than a mere costumed extra.

Elsewhere, Tavernier's movie runs thick with gut-bucket jazz and blues, regional accents so foreign that the film's Berlin press screenings carried English subtitles, and local fat cats with names like "Babyfeet" Balboni (wonderfully oily John Goodman) and "Twinky" Lemoyne (Ned Beatty) who add to the Chinatown-like air of pervasive corruption. One murder blends into another, and the only meaningful punishment is meted out not by the hands of the law, but by those of father time. Ultimately, "whodunit?" seems a question as unanswerable as a Zen koan -- except, perhaps, in the producer's cut. ]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/mist_opportunity.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/mist_opportunity.php 2009 Berlin Film Festival Thu, 12 Feb 2009 03:14:37 -0800 Run Naomi Run

For the next 10 days, I'll be posting regularly from the Berlin International Film Festival (a.k.a. the Berlinale), generally considered to be the second largest festival in Europe (after Cannes) and, at 59, one of the oldest. This year, the Berlinale's international competition will feature the world premieres of new films by Stephen Frears (Cheri), Chen Kaige (Forever Enthralled), Sally Potter (Rage) whose 2004 film, Yes, sparked a memorable dialogue in these pages, and French director Bertrand Tavernier, whose 1995 teen crime drama, L'Appat, won Berlin's top prize, the Golden Bear, and who returns this year with an English-language adaptation of detective novelist James Lee Burke's In the Electric Mist, filmed on location in Louisiana with Tommy Lee Jones in the lead. Those films and 13 others will be judged by a jury headed by Tilda Swinton that also includes Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet, Swedish author Henning Mankell and American "slow food" doyen Alice Waters.

At 82, the Polish master Andrzej Wajda (Sweet Rush) may be the oldest director in competition, but he's young enough to be the son of Portugal's unstoppable Manoel De Oliveira, whose latest feature, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, screens in the non-competitive Berlinale Speical sidebar, which also includes Bellamy, the latest from French suspense maestro Claude Chabrol (a mere 78, and with nearly that many films under his belt). Meanwhile, in the Forum -- a home for more independent and experimental works roughly equivalent to Cannes' breakaway Directors Fortnight section -- one can find everything from Beeswax, the third feature by Funny Ha Ha director Andrew Bujalski, the latest architectural essay film by Heinz Emigholz and Love Exposure, a four-hour Japanese film about an adolescent sexual voyeur who falls in love with the man-hating step-daughter of his priest father's lover. (The Forum program intriguingly states that the film "composes the extremes of human behavior into an ecstatic passion choreographed to religious music, the Bolero, the funeral march and the Japanese band Yura Yura Teikoku's J-Pop music.") As a fan of long-form films, I welcome that challenge, but take due pause at the prospect of German director Ludwig Schönherr's New York. Ein visuelles Arbeitstagebuch, a Super 8 "visual diary" of New York City that reportedly takes more than four days to view in its entirety.

Like last month's Sundance Film Festival, which saw even its biggest buzz usurped by the U.S. Presidential Inauguration, the 2009 Berlinale coincides with its own bit of national history: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, although it will not be officially marked until November, is the subject of various year-long commemorations throughout Germany, including a special Berlinale sidebar, "After Winter Comes Spring - Films Presaging the Fall of the Wall," comprised of 13 features and several shorts produced in the GDR and other countries of the former Communist East.

Meanwhile, the curtain rose on the Berlinale Thursday evening with an opening-night film inspired by more recent current events. Loosely based on the 1990s scandals surrounding the Pakistani-run Bank of Credit and Commerce International, The International is, true to its title, a globe-hopping conspiracy thriller directed by a German (Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer), produced with American studio money, and starring two foreign-born actors (Clive Owen and Naomi Watts) who are now as Hollywood as they come. So, for that matter, is the movie.

Since I'll be writing about The International at length for next week's editions of the Weekly and The Village Voice, when the film opens in worldwide commercial release, I won't belabor the matter now, except to say that this poor man's Parallax View, about a sinister Luxembourg bank that runs a brisk sideline in third-world revolutions and black-market arms sales, can't hold a candle to the geopolitical nail-biters presently unfolding in the pages of your morning newspaper. Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention the elaborate shootout that occurs in, of all places, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, which should appease anyone who has ever wondered what a Michael Bay gallery installation might look like and provides The International with a working metaphor for its own shotgun wedding of grindhouse inclinations and art-house ambitions. ]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/run_naomi_run.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/02/run_naomi_run.php 2009 Berlin Film Festival Fri, 06 Feb 2009 17:01:43 -0800 John Updike at the Movies

Hollywood and John Updike, who died today at the age of 76, never made for the easiest of bedfellows. In 1970, the underrated director Jack Smight took an admirable stab at filming Rabbit, Run, the first in Updike's tetralogy of novels about the disaffected former high-school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. But the flm was taken away from Smight by writer-producer Howard B. Kreitsek, recut, shelved by the studio (Warner Bros.) after unsuccessful test screenings, and ultimately dismissed by Updike himself in a 1973 New York Times interview.

Seventeen years later, Mad Max director Grorge Miller's film version of Updike's The Witches of Eastwick, starring Cher, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Jack Nicholson, was a hit, spawning a stage musical and two unsold TV pilots in its wake. But it also took drastic liberties with Updike's 1984 novel and was described publicly by Miller as the worst creative experience of his career. "[It] "had a beautiful cast but intruded on the world of the witches. It became Nicholson's movie and dissolved into special effects," Updike told USA Today last fall, upon the publication of the book's sequel.

Indeed, the best and most faithful film adaptation of Updike came on the small screen, in the form of Fielder Cook's superb Too Far to Go (1979), which used Updike's series of short stories about Richard and Joan Maple (played by Michael Moriarty and Blythe Danner) as the basis for a devastating portrait of modern marriage from "I do" to "I'm leaving you." So impressed was Francis Coppola with the film that he decided to give it a theatrical release via his Zoetrope Studios in 1982. After a long period of unavailability, Too Far to Go has recently been issued on DVD. I urge you to see it.

Meanwhile, our own Chuck Wilson, writing at his Flickers blog, recalls a lovely passage about moviegoing from Updike's century-spanning 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lillies, the first part of which concerns one Clarence Wilmot, a New Jersey Presbyterian minister who loses his faith and becomes an encyclopedia salesman -- as well as a fanatical movie buff.

Updike writes:

During the summer Clarence took his own defeat indoors, deserting the sunny harsh streets of door-to-door rejection for the shadowy interiors of those moving-picture houses that, like museums of tawdry curiosities, opened their doors during the day....When Clarence had paid his nickel -- one of the brand-new Indian-head nickels, with a buffalo hulking on the reverse side -- and settled into his hard chair in the dark, carefully placing his leather salesman's case upright between his ankles, it was as if his eyes drank a flickering liquor. The passionate, comical, swift-moving action on the screen, speckled with bright scratches, entered him like an essential food which he had been hitherto denied.

For more, click here.

]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/john_updike_at_the_movies.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/john_updike_at_the_movies.php Uncategorized Tue, 27 Jan 2009 13:31:29 -0800 Coming to Amreeka

If the U.S. dramatic competition at Sundance this year failed to yield one truly great film, it did offer up a lovely surprise in writer-director Cherien Dabis' Amreeka, which follows a Palestinian single mother and her son as they emigrate from the West Bank town of Ramallah to the flatlands of the American Midwest.

In its basic outline, the movie sounds like a collection of hoary coming-to-America clichés: Upon arriving in suburban Illinois, Muna (the excellent Nisreen Faour) and 16-year-old Fadi (Melka Muallem) move in with Muna's sister, Raghda (The Visitor co-star Hiam Abbas), who herself dreams of returning to her homeland. Raghda's husband, a doctor, has seen one white patient after another take their business elsewhere following 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. And as Muna searches for a job and Fadi enrolls in a public high school, they too encounter the face of anti-Muslim discrimination at every turn. That Muna and Fadi aren't Muslims hardly matters. All that matters is that they look the part.

Like The Visitor, to which it will surely be compared, Dabis' film aspires to show the plight of Arab people living in the U.S. in the Homeland Security era. Only, unlike that film, Amreeka tells its story from the inside-out, without want or need of a white protagonist to serve as the audience's surrogate, and with real three-dimensional characters instead of blunt ideological instruments masquerading as human beings. Although Dabis (who is Palestinian herself) isn't entirely immune from painting in broad strokes -- once again, a white character's first encounter with falafel is deployed as a symbol of East-West bonding -- the details in the film feel lived-in and sincere. Systematically, one form of humiliation is traded for another: no longer subjected to daily searches by West Bank checkpoint guards, Muna instead finds herself flipping burgers at White Castle, while Fadi's classmates accuse him of plotting to blow up the school.

At the heart of Amreeka beats an irresolvable conundrum: that a nation founded by immigrants can be so narrow-mindedly conformist. Yet, given every opportunity for self-pitying ACLU hand-wringing, Dabis keeps the film's tone buoyant and light, making a fine comedy of deception out of Muna's efforts to convince her family she actually works in a bank, and laying the groundwork for a gentle, not-quite romance between Muna and the Jewish principal of Fadi's school. When most filmmakers want to say something important about cultural conflicts, they labor to bring tears to our eyes. Dabis, by contrast, makes us laugh at ourselves and, in turn, each other.

Amreeka was the best of several films at Sundance this year concerned with living in (or getting to) the U.S. as seen through foreigners' eyes, a couple of which seem poised for prizes at the festival's closing-night awards ceremony, which begins in an hour from now. One of those contenders is Student Academy Award winner Cary Joji Fukunaga's Sin Nombre, which won over audiences (and a lot of critics) with its violent story of a teenage Honduran girl and a Mexican teen gangbanger on the run who end up on the same perilous train journey to the U.S.-Mexico border. When they say "From the producers of The Motorcycle Diaries," they're not kidding: another lushly produced, impersonally directed piece of Central/South American slum porn, Sin Nombre hitches stylized suffering on to a direly predictable street-thug scenario (two friends, torn between their loyalty to the gang and to each other) while awating the inevitable plaudits of festival juries, American art-house moviegoers and Oscar voters. (No surprise: this is one of the only competition entries to arrive at Sundance with a distributor already in place.) Fukunaga's film is slightly less exploitative, and therefore marginally preferable, to Fernando Meirelles' rancid City of God -- but not by very much.
]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/coming_to_amreeka.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/coming_to_amreeka.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:35:01 -0800 Crude Realities

One of Anna Wintour's most significant (and profitable) contributions to Vogue, we learn in The September Issue, has been her decision to put movie stars -- rather than fashion models -- on the magazine's cover. That gives The September Issue an unintended but hardly insignificant point of connection with director Joe Berlinger's Crude, a remarkable documentary about the decade-and-a-half-long, multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit filed by indigenous Ecuadorian villagers against the Chevron oil company alleging toxic pollution of the local soil and water supply. At one point in Berlinger's film, longtime Amazon Rainforest advocate (and wife of Sting) Trudie Styler develops an interest in the case, and her involvement leads directly to a flurry of increased U.S. media attention (including a Vanity Fair profile of charismatic Ecuadorian prosecutor Pablo Fajardo). Whatever one thinks about the vacuity of celebrity culture, these two films convincingly argue that celebrities can and do make things happen, whether sustaining a magazine's viability or drawing attention to corporate America's latest atrocity. Certainly, in an age when shirtless pictures of Barack Obama are as much in demand by the tabloids as paparazzi snaps of Britney Spears, resistance is futile.

Styler's involvement in the Chevron case is one of the few bright spots in Crude, which otherwise unfolds as an infuriating litany of South American exploitation, back-room glad-handing and bureaucratic dead ends. For nearly 30 years, beginning in the mid-1960s, the former Texaco oil company (acquired by Chevron in 2001) drilled for oil in the Euacdorian Amazon, in and around the ancestral homeland of the native Cofán Indian community. In 1992, Texaco's government-granted concession ended and the company ceded control of its drilling sites to the state-owned Petroecaudor, after allegedly embarking on a government-mandated $40 million "environmental remediation" project. And yet, today the soil and waters of the area still run black with oil, the Cofán are dying of cancer at an alarming rate, and the blame for this enviro-disaster is being passed between Chevron and Petroecuador faster than a Bobby Hull slapshot.

No stranger to gnarly courtroom thickets, Berlinger, together with his longtime filmmaking partner Bruce Sinofsky, previously directed the Sundance Audience Award winner Brother's Keeper (which centered around a fratricide trial in the small, dairy-farming community of Munnsville, New York) and the two Paradise Lost documentaries (about the ongoing travails of three Arkansas teenagers convicted, on questionable evidence, of murdering three eight-year-old boys). In the gripping, intrinsically cinematic Crude, he does an equally superb job of taking us through the twists and turns of a legal battle nearly as long as the Amazon itself, and with no discernible end in sight. As usual, Berlinger presents both sides of the case as fairly and non-judgmentally as possible, never inserting himself into the narrative and turning the audience, in effect, into the jury. Chevron even sends its in-house environmental scientist out to speak to the filmmaker in a defensive interview that plays like an extended Tilda Swinton outtake from Michael Clayton. Talk about your ice queens: next to this woman, Ana Wintour seems a positive ray of sunshine.

If Crude is the most urgent film I've seen at Sundance this year, Boy Interrupted is unquestionably the most harrowing. Directed by Dana Heinz Perry and photographed by her husband, Hart Perry, this documentary isn't torn from the headlines, but rather the bloodline. In 2005, the Perrys' 15-year-old son, Evan, committed suicide by jumping from the bedroom window of their New York City apartment -- something the bipolar teen had talked about doing since as early as age five. That event created an odd symmetry with the death, 30 years earlier, of Hart Perry's own younger brother, who asphyxiated himself with car exhaust at 21. Boy Interrupted tries to make sense of these two senseless acts by reconstructing them, through home movies and interviews with surviving friends and family, in frequently agonizing detail.

Nothing is private here, obsessive self-documentation the order of the day. "Filmmaking has been the family business for almost twenty years now," Dana Perry notes in a statement included in the movie's press kit, but it's actually even longer if you count the interview footage (included here) Hart Perry shot of his own parents in the immediate aftermath of his brother's death. Three decades later we see the Perry matriarch again, now suffering from dementia and a fair amount of willful amnesia, once more asked to replay painful memories before the camera's unforgiving gaze. The result is a deeply absorbing, undeniably creepy hybrid of catharsis and emotional exhibitionism -- a movie that twists your guts into a gordian knot, then sends you out of the theater wondering if there are limits to those things that should be filmed and publicly shown. Boy Interrupted is hard to reckon with, but even harder to shake off. If Capturing the Friedmans had been directed by the Friedmans themselves, it might have looked something like this.
]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/crude_realities.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/crude_realities.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Thu, 22 Jan 2009 18:45:00 -0800 Shalom Documentaries!

"The dirty little secret about Sundance is that the best films every year are the documentaries," says Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth director David Guggenheim in one of the trailers for this year's Sundance Film Festival. Actually, it's more of an openly acknowledged fact that Sundance's documentary selection is reliably stronger than its narrative one. And so, having made it through 14 of the 16 films in this year's U.S. Dramatic Competition (I'll see the remaining two -- Adam and Amreeka -- today), I shifted gears yesterday and hunkered down for a full schedule of docs at Sundance's newest screening venue: Temple Har Shalom or, as it's known until Sunday, the Temple Theatre.

First on my itinerary was The September Issue, which arrived in Park City hyped as a nonfiction riposte to The Devil Wears Prada, which it both is and isn't. Although director R.J. Cutler (A Perfect Candidate) was allowed unprecedented access behind the scenes at Vogue during the planning and production of its massive September 2007 issue (at the time, the largest single issue of a monthly magazine ever published), anyone who comes to The September Issue expecting a warts-and-all portrayal of Vogue editor-in chief Anna Wintour is likely to find the 90-minute film something of a let-down. That's not to say that Cutler lobs softballs at the fashion world's perpetually sunglass-ed high priestess, but rather that his primary interest is the nuts-and-bolts running of a magazine, from the concept stages to the moment the latest issue hits the newsstands. Of course, since this is a movie about Vogue and not, say, Field and Stream, the attendant glamour level is high, from the vertigo-inducing haute couture to the parade of strapping models and actresses who grace the magazine's coveted spreads.

In addition to following the Devil herself as she meets privately with top name designers (Oscar de la Renta, Jean-Paul Gaultier, et al.), scours the runways of the world's fashion weeks and passes final judgment on what does and doesn't end up in print, The September Issue devotes nearly equal attention to Vogue's flamboyant editor-at-large, André Leon Talley, and its legendary creative director, Grace Coddington. And it's Coddington, a Welsh-born former model whose hugely ambitious narrative photo shoots have become a Vogue hallmark during her 30-plus years with the magazine, who threatens to steal the movie right out from under her more famous co-star. A force of calm at the center of Vogue's sometimes tempestuous storm, Coddington is, by Wintour's own admission, "a genius," and you don't have to know much about fashion (or even take it that seriously) to recognize the vivid, cinematic atmosphere and compositional elegance of Coddington's work with some of fashion's leading photographers.

Wintour, meanwhile, remains as coolly inscrutable to us as she does to many of the people she works with on a daily basis. And why not? It's to Cutler's credit that he neither plays into the stereotype of Wintour as an unfeeling ice queen nor goes out of his way to warm her up. (He also doesn't pry very deeply into her personal life.) Instead, he portrays the world's foremost fashion tastemaker as a serious businesswoman who has managed to not only keep Vogue at the center of the zeitgeist for the past two decades, but to enlarge the magazine's success at a time when most other printed media is going the way of the dodo. For this alone, she commands our respect.
]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/shalom_documentaries.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/shalom_documentaries.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:00:37 -0800 Pushed to the Brink

By the mid-point of Sundance 2008, the standout film of the dramatic competition was Lance Hammer's Ballast, which mined unexpected poetry from the story of a poverty-line black family making ends meet in the Mississippi Delta. This year, it's a film that casts an equally penetrating gaze on the trials and tribulations of disenfranchised blacks in the urban jungle of pre-gentrification Harlem, circa 1987. Adapted from the first novel by the Nuyorican poetess known as Sapphire, Push: Based on the novel by Sapphire immerses us detail by agonizing detail in the life of a morbidly obese 16-year-old, Clareece "Precious" Jones (newcomer Gabourey Sidibe), whose welfare mother (Mo'Nique) beats her with a frying pan, who is repeatedly raped at the hands of her father (resulting in one Down Syndrome baby and, early in the film, a second pregnancy), and whose only escape from her bleak existence are the vivid daydreams in which she imagines herself a ghetto-fabulous fashion model or pop star.

Directed by Lee Daniels, who established himself as a producer (with Monster's Ball and The Woodsman) before making his directorial debut with the risible 2005 mother-and-son assassin romp Shadowboxer, Push isn't half the piece of controlled, confident craftsmanship that Ballast was, but it may be that Daniels' crude, wildly undisciplined, anything-goes directorial style is exactly what the movie calls for. Hothouse melodrama one moment, pungent social realism the next, with dashes of slapstick farce (be they intentional or not) in between, Push takes the better part of an hour to settle on something resembling a consistent tone, yet even when the movie is at its most schizoid, you can't take your eyes off of it.

Not one for subtlety, Daniels puts black female lives destroyed by abuse and defeatism on the screen with a brute-force intensity and lack of sentimentality (The Color Purple this certainly isn't). He also gathers a collection of startlingly effective performances from such unlikely players as Mo'Nique (whose monster mom is anything but a one-note villain), Mariah Carey (deglamorized as an empathetic social worker) and the magnanimous Sidibe, who carries this exhausting and strangely exhilarating film on her mighty shoulders. Push is far from perfect, but there isn't much I've seen at Sundance this year that I wouldn't trade for the sight of a hard-won smile finally making its way across Precious Jones' stoic, beautiful, wounded face. ]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/pushed_to_the_brink.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/pushed_to_the_brink.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Tue, 20 Jan 2009 12:45:10 -0800 Susan Sarandon Help Line

Will someone please stop Susan Sarandon from playing grief-stricken mothers before this once-great actress becomes a one-trick caricature of her former self? Having fretted over a son feared missing in Desert Storm in Safe Passage, mourned the death of her son's fiancée in Moonlight Mile and most recently grieved for a son killed upon returning from Iraq in In the Valley of Elah, Sarandon makes it a four-peat with director Shana Feste's dubiously titled Sundance competition entry The Greatest, in which her 18-year-old son dies (by his own stupid fault) in a car crash and his surviving girlfriend (newcomer Carey Mulligan) subsequently announces that she's pregnant. Seemingly included by the festival only because of its shameless plagiarism of Sundance founder Robert Redford's Ordinary People, The Greatest is a mourning-family turkey with all the trimmings: a father (Pierce Brosnan) who can't bring himself to grieve; a mother who refuses to alter so much as one dust mite in the dead boy's room; a recovering-addict brother (Johnny Simmons) forever in the shadow of his golden-boy sibling; and an incessant love-songs-with-Delilah soundtrack meant to wring tears from even the stoniest of viewers. No movie at Sundance this year has depressed me more -- not because of the story it tells, but because of the creative bankruptcy it embodies.
]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/susan_sarandon_help_line.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/susan_sarandon_help_line.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Tue, 20 Jan 2009 06:18:52 -0800 Cold Souls and Paper Hearts

What is the shape and size of a human soul? Does it look like a chickpea? A gumdrop? A pet rock? And if you could somehow extract your soul from your body, what would be left? Would you still be you? These are among the concerns taken up by writer-director Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls, an amusing divertissement that has injected some welcome levity into a Sundance dramatic competition dominated by visions of poverty, incest, domestic violence, dead children, bloody border crossings and the shadow of 9/11.

Barthes' film, which could alternately be called Being Paul Giamatti, features the hangdog American Splendor star as himself, in a gently existential comedy about the little-known but highly lucrative world of international soul trafficking. During the rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya, Giamatti begins to feel weighed down by Chekhov's lovelorn, chronically dissatisfied protagonist, finding himself unable to slip out of character when he goes home at night. At the suggestion of his agent, the actor puts his soul on deposit at a Roosevelt Island "soul storage facility" run by a kooky David Strathairn (not playing himself), then later opts for a soul transplant courtesy of a black market of Russian-harvested souls ferried to the U.S. in the bellies of human mules (one of whom is played by the excellent Russian actress Dina Korzun, last seen at Sundance as the wife of Rip Torn in Forty Shades of Blue).

Maria Vasilyevna Voinitskaya Full of Grace? Not exactly. Like a lot of Sundance entries past and present, Cold Souls begins with a blast of self-assured ingenuity that it doesn't quite sustain over the course of the entire feature. (I for one longed to see more of the havoc all Giamatti's soul-swapping wreaks on his marriage to an underused Emily Watson.) But Barthes' low-fi futurism, generous good humor and respect for the audience's literacy are easy to admire, and make Cold Souls vastly preferable to this year's other competition film about people searching for the answers to life's big questions.

In writer-director John Hindman's Arlen Faber, Jeff Daniels plays to the back row as a reclusive Philadelphia author who 20 years ago published a book, Me and God, that came to define spirituality for an entire generation. Now, as reclusive authors are wont to do in Sundance movies, Faber is slowly lured out of his shell by an aggressively annoying cast of supporting characters that includes an overbearing, overcaffeinated single mother (Lauren Graham) and a self-pitying alcoholic bookseller (Lou Taylor Pucci). "Hell is other people," Faber says at one point, quoting Sartre; but unlike the self-absorbed, misanthropic writer Daniels so effortlessly brought to life in The Squid and the Whale, this one never convinces as anything but the destined-to-be-lovable central figure in a wide-screen sit-com.

An existential quandary of a different sort drives director Nicholas Jasenovec's Paper Heart, a hydra-headed narrative/non-fiction hybrid in which the diminutive Asian-American comedienne Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) sets out on a cross-country journey to discover whether true love is a reality or merely an illusion. For a while, as Yi decamps in Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma, where she poses her disarming questions to an assortment of ministers, psychics, biology professors and barroom gurus, Paper Heart is a delight, as are the construction-paper-and-fishing-wire animated interludes Yi uses to dramatize key events from the lives of the several longtime married couples she interviews along her way. Of considerably less interest is the contrived "B" storyline (which eventually becomes the "A" storyline) in which Yi's own budding romance with Superbad and Juno star Michael Cera (who appears as himself) wreaks havoc with her progress on the documentary. But in Sundance -- as in most relationships -- a 60/40 success/failure ratio is nothing to scoff at.

]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/cold_souls_and_paper_hearts.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/cold_souls_and_paper_hearts.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:27:26 -0800 Taking No Chances

Those searching for signs of how leaner economic times are being felt at Sundance 2009 need look no further than the fact that the festival's opening weekend yielded only one major sale -- and that one was something of a foregone conclusion. Although the tepid reaction to director Antoine Fuqua's Brooklyn's Finest from critics and audiences alike led upstart Senator Entertainment (which paid a reported $5 million for the North American distribution rights) to immediately start calling the film a "work in progress," you had to figure that if a cop drama from the director of Training Day, starring Richard Gere and Ethan Hawke, couldn't close a deal at Sundance this year, it really was going to be a long 10 days in the snow.

Meanwhile, one of the best films to premiere thus far in the festival's dramatic competition isn't even seeking a theatrical deal, but will go straight from Sundance to HBO in a little over one month's time. The movie is called Taking Chance and it would, admittedly, be a tough sell to moviegoers even in a boom market. Based on the journal kept by now-retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael R. Strobl as he escorted the body of a decorated PFC killed in Iraq back to his family, Taking Chance has the double misfortune of arriving at a moment when the industry has reached an undeniable state of Middle East fatigue. "If they even see 'Asalaam alaikum' on the page, they close the script," one well-known Hollywood screenwriter recently told me, citing as an example a spec script he had recently sold, then been asked to rewrite so as to remove any reference to Iraq, Afghanistan or Islam. The box-office implosion of Ridley Scott's recent Body of Lies seems to have been the straw that broke this particular camel's back, but even many smaller, more indie-flavored dramas and documentaries about America's Middle East misadventures have been greeted with similar audience apathy.

I myself came with some degree of trepidation to Taking Chance, which on paper sounds like an unholy marriage of two recent films that tried and failed to effectively dramatize the homefront impact of the Iraq campaign: the vomitously maudlin Grace Is Gone (in which John Cusack shilled shamelessly for an Oscar as a father hiding the death of his Marine wife from his two young daughters) and the Paul Haggis-ed In the Valley of Elah (in which Tommy Lee Jones' Iraq vet son turns up dead and Jones responds by hanging an American flag upside-down). Then there's that too-clever-by-half title, Taking Chance -- because, you know, the fallen Marine's name was Chance and he's being taken home. And yet, this is an Iraq movie that consistently defies your expectations, and then exceeds them.

The directorial debut of the veteran indie producer Ross Katz (whose credits include In the Bedroom and Lost in Translation), Taking Chance announces early on that its intentions are of a procedural (rather than polemical) nature. The film begins on a black screen, while the soundtrack illustrates the Mahmoudiyah IED attack that leaves PFC Chance Phelps among its casualties. Katz then goes on to document the preparation and transportation of Phelps' body as it is packed into ice on the landing strip of a German air base, flown to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, x-rayed for explosives, vacuumed of moisture, cleansed (along with Phelps' personal belongings) of dried blood and finally prepared for burial. No detail is too small or insignificant for Katz -- one scene depicts the tailoring of new uniforms for the dead. All of it is filmed with a stark, clinical intensity that suggests this is work performed day in and day out, over and over again.

For many filmmakers, the default inclination would be to bring us as close as possible to Phelps, whether by way of flashbacks or testimonials -- to put an individual face on what might otherwise seem just another flag-draped casket. But it speaks to the tact, simplicity and intelligence of Katz's approach that he elects to keep Phelps a largely abstract figure -- or, rather, a representative one, of all those men and women who fight and die for our country, regardless of whether we approve of the conflict in which they fight.

It's hard, I think, for a movie to engender much respect for the U.S. Military these days, let alone convince you of the fundamental goodness of people, but Taking Chance manages to do both precisely by not trying too hard to do either. Katz's film is, at heart, a classically structured road movie that begins in the suburban homes and corporate military offices of Quantico, Virginia and gradually winds its way to the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. In between, Strobl (who is played in the film by Kevin Bacon) encounters ordinary citizens who disarm him -- and us -- with their quiet kindness and dignity: the flight attendant who gives Strobl her crucifix; the pilot who tells him he can remember the name of every killed-in-action soldier he has ever transported; and the old Korean War vet (a superb Tom Aldredge) who invokes a bygone era's sense of honor and duty. By that point in the film, we seem to have traveled not merely West, but back in time -- a feeling capped by a country funeral that Katz stages as though it were an outtake from My Darling Clementine.

Taking Chance isn't always as good as that. Like many first-time directors, Katz has a tendency to use original music as an emotional crutch, and his subtle, tasteful direction occasionally verges on being too discrete for its own good. Still, Katz has made one of the few Iraq movies that, along with Brian De Palma's Redacted, Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and parts of Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, feels vital to our celluloid record of this seismic moment in American history. He has also created an extraordinary showcase for Bacon, who is the sort of actor audiences get in the habit of taking for granted (he has never been nominated for an Oscar) because he is so consistently good and so rarely self-aggrandizing. Here, his largely nonverbal performance consists of a rigid military posture and a face that is a remarkable palimpsest of grief and the impotent rage Strobl (a Desert Storm vet) feels at having passed up his chance at a second tour of duty.

This is a movie to see, whether on large screens or small. That most people will only be able to experience it the latter way is unfortunate, yet entirely understandable, given that theatrical distribution -- for all but the biggest Hollywood blockbusters -- has now devolved into a loss leader for DVD sales and cable broadcast. So it's not all that surprising that HBO Films, which had a modest theatrical success in 2002 with Real Women Have Curves and another one the following year with American Splendor, set a February 21 broadcast date for Taking Chance before Sundance even began. Factor in the day-and-date cable/theatrical models already being embraced by IFC Films and Magnolia Pictures and we may well be entering the era in which the true success of indie movies will be measured not in ticket sales but rather in TiVo downloads. Happy viewing. ]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/taking_no_chances.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/taking_no_chances.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:19 -0800 G'day Sundance

For the first time in its 25-year history, the Sundance Film Festival opened Thursday night with a movie from Australia. It was also the first time the festival has opened with a feature-length animation -- one, I feel confident in saying, that is among the strangest animated films ever made. Written and directed by Adam Elliot (who won an Oscar in 2004 for his 23-minute animated short, Harvie Krumpet), Mary and Max chronicles the unusual pen-pal relationship between a shy, gloomy eight-year-old Australian girl from the Melbourne suburbs and an obese, 44-year-old Jewish man living in New York. They meet by chance, when Mary (voiced at first by newcomer Bethany Whitmore and later by Toni Collette) rips Max's name out of an international address book at her local post office and writes him a letter on a whim.

That begins 20 years of correspondence in which Mary and Max (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) become each other's best (and effectively only) friend in the world, despite the paralyzing anxiety the former's letters strike in the latter (with their uncomfortable questions like, "Where do babies come from?"), and despite the efforts of Mary's perpetually plastered, kleptomaniac mother to stop the letters dead in their tracks. And who can blame her, really? After all, this sort of relationship between an older man and a pre-pubescent girl just isn't done, just isn't normal.

Well, as it happens, nothing in Mary and Max is within even shouting distance of normal. A true outsider's movie, the closest it comes to a "well-adjusted" or "socially acceptable" character may be the bully who terrorizes young Mary on the schoolhouse playground. But the rest of Elliot's claymated ensemble suggest the love children of Roald Dahl and Todd Solondz -- among them Mary's withdrawn, taxidermy-obsessed father, her legless, agoraphobic neighbor and the nearly blind atheist woman who regularly cooks Max bowls of disgusting soup. (And to think, I haven't even mentioned Max's imaginary friend, Mr. Ravioli.) In Elliot's world, even the animals are outcasts: Mary gives shelter to a rooster that falls of a slaughter wagon, while Max's pet cat is a one-eyed stray with chronic halitosis. Max is also the owner of a series of pet goldfish, all named Henry, each of whom dies a stranger and more grotesque death than the one before -- as for that matter do many of the movie's human characters.

Pixar this most certainly isn't. In fact, where most feature-length animated films, by sheer virtue of the painstaking labor involved, aim to reach the broadest possible audience, Mary and Max -- which took over a year to produce, at an average rate of five seconds of finished animation per day -- is as insular and private as any live-action "personal filmmaking." As it happens, Elliot did base the film in part on his own longtime pen-pal relationship with a New York man diagnosed (like Max) with Asperger Syndrome, the autism-like disorder that limits its sufferers' ability to interpret nonverbal communication. But when I say Mary and Max is a personal film, I mean more in spirit than in letter. I mean that this is a movie that seems to well up from a place of such pain and suffering that it's as if Elliot had cut open some long scabbed-over wound and let it bleed anew all over the screen. Certain to traumatize children (and even some adults), Mary and Max may be the first "cartoon" that will find its most sympathetic audiences in support groups and mental hospitals.

This isn't exactly new territory for Elliot, whose films could be considered the antidote to 98 percent of Hollywood movies and television programs, with their smiling, airbrushed characters who rarely encounter a problem that can't be resolved by the end of act three, and who seem far more plasticine than Elliot's clay avatars. The title character of Harvie Krumpet was a Touette's-afflicted Polish refugee who gets struck by lightning, loses a testicle and eventually succumbs to the ravages of Alzheimer's and suicidal depression. Likewise, Mary and Max spirals towards suicide (and electroshock therapy), occasionally permitting a ray of hope to shine down on the characters, only to just as soon dash it with storm clouds. When the post-graduate Mary authors a book-length study of Asperger's, a humiliated Max shows his appreciation by ripping the "M" key from his typewriter and dropping it in the mail. And when Mary finds what she thinks is love in the form of a handsome classmate, he turns out to have his own very special, very male pen-pal -- with benefits.

The depressive air weighs heavy, but never quite overwhelms the film, thanks to Elliot's unfailing ability to find moments of levity amidst the pervasive despair. In spite of everything I've said thus far, Mary and Max is a very funny movie that manages to laugh at its eccentric characters without mocking them, reducing them to grotesques, or suggesting that they should strive to "overcome" their "handicaps." In Elliot's view, to paraphrase the Firesign Theatre, we're all manic depressives on this bus, and how much you enjoy the film may well depend on whether you share in that opinion or simply can't understand why these miserable people don't quit their whining and get with the program.

When I left the opening-night screening of Mary and Max, I wasn't entirely sure if Elliot had pulled the thing off, and even 36 hours later, I think the movie errs in the way of many a debut feature made by directors accustomed to working in the short form. That is, it runs out of ideas before it runs out of running time. At 60 minutes, the movie might have been great. At 90, it remains a strikingly original, uncompromising piece of work. Visually, it is a marvel of tinsel-and string, hand-crafted design, from the pale, pear-shaped characters to its vision of New York City as a chiaroscuro urban jungle in which the only flashes of color are those that arrive in the post from Down Under. Then there is Hoffman's splendid performance, which demands an even more dramatic vocal disappearing act than Truman Capote's adenoidal whine. Max's voice -- a raspy, Yiddish-inflected huff -- is so difficult to imagine issuing forth from Hoffman that if you didn't know it was him you, well, wouldn't know it was him. And what greater compliment can one pay a character actor than that?

In the eight years that I've been covering Sundance, this is one of the only times the opening night film has been less than a calamitous failure, and maybe the only time it has been a movie of serious ambition, worth talking, thinking and arguing about afterward. "This can be a very inspiring time for artists," Robert Redford opined on the stage of the Eccles Theatre just prior to the Mary and Max screening, trying to put some kind of optimistic spin on the current hard times. That's the sort of programmatic spiel (like last year's dubious festival mantra, "Focus On Film") that usually makes hardened Sundance vets roll their eyes. But after seeing Mary and Max, I can't help thinking that Redford might be on to something.

]]> http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/gday_sundance.php http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/2009/01/gday_sundance.php 2009 Sundance Film Festival Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:58:09 -0800