DAILY FILM DOSE: A Daily Film Appreciation and Review Blog: 2010 Films

Showing posts with label 2010 Films. Show all posts

Sunday, 12 February 2012

Easy Money

Easy Money (2010) dir. Daniel Espinoza
Starring:Joel Kinnaman, Matias Padin Varela, Dragomir Mrsic

***

By Alan Bacchus

Did you see Safe House this weekend? Well, the job that got director Daniel Espinoza the gig was probably his home spun Swedish thriller Easy Money, which premiered at TIFF 2010 and was repped by the Weinstein company.

Jorge is a Spanish-speaking immigrant who has recently escaped from prison and reunited with his pal and partner-in-crime. In conflict with Jorge is Mrado, part of an Eastern European mob with whom he has a beef in the competitive underground cocaine syndicate. The only Swede of the bunch is JW, a ladder-climbing university student secretly working as a cabbie in order to afford the expensive suits and other high-class accoutrements it takes to get in with the rich kids he idolizes. When presented with an opportunity to make some really big money, JW finds himself caught in the cocaine drug war between Jorge and Mrado.

Espinoza’s treatment of crime is in the world of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet and Animal Kingdom version of cinema, a world treated with realism and characters painted with various shades of grey. Heroes and villains aren’t so easy to define. Espinoza is clever to subvert our expectations and shift around his heroes and villains, double-back on his characters and reveal realistic motivations for everyone involved.

The common denominator of the three characters is the desperate need for survival and the desire for security and success. For JW, it’s his need to escape the life of poverty from his childhood. For Mrado, it’s his young daughter he finds himself protecting. And Jorge’s sister and newborn niece prompt him to re-evaluate his priorities.

Each of the fine actors playing the roles brings freshness, deep commitment and an inhabitation of their characters. Dragomir Mrsic as Mrado gives the best performance, and his best scene is a touching car ride confession after he has taken custody of his daughter. In this scene he reveals the abuse he received from his father, which caused him to become the hardened criminal he is today.

The social realism visual effect is laid on thick – too thick, perhaps. The handheld camerawork is a given in these types of stories now, but Espinoza shoots his characters so tight all the time that the film is essentially a series of close-ups. As a result, the director loses the power of this cinematic tool.

With everything presented as a close-up, the world is too closed in visually, barely allowing us time to breathe. Consequently, Espinoza’s realism dies out towards the end and is replaced by heightened melodrama. The double-crosses, betrayals and bloody sacrifices of brotherhood in the third act take us into a less satisfactory sensationalized crime genre. Espinoza does leave us with one last fantastic scene before he cuts to black. It’s a terrific bookend to the opening scene, which completes JW’s dramatic arc in grand fashion.

Saturday, 14 January 2012

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2010) dir. Niels Arden Oplev
Starring: Michael Nyqvist, Noomi Rapace, Sven-Bertil Taube, Lena Endre, Peter Haber

***½

By Alan Bacchus

Since the discussion of the first Tattoo movie in relationship to the new film comes up all the time for me, why not repost my original review of the Niels Arden Oplev version. For the Fincher version, click HERE.

The success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy books is widely known – a European phenomenon, which over this past year has finally broken in North America. All three films based on the three books, including The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have already been shot, completed and released abroad to mega box office success. So, for once, North America has been left as the ‘last to know’ about these stories.

Not much has been made of the success of its North American theatrical release yet, but it’s an achievement. Considering the ‘in and out and get to the DVD release’ pattern of most films these days, its 13 weeks in release in a modest number of theatres is remarkable. Though it's only garnered a modest $7.3 million dollar take, the distributors and exhibiters seemed to have hit the sweet spot of its release – just enough theatres for it to maintain a solid word of mouth momentum and profitability, and a precedent for how smaller films can have lasting power in the cinema.

As for the movie, it’s just as remarkable. It’s a thrilling slice of Euro-pulp and a heavily plotted investigative, serial killer, feminist melodrama. Slick production value, salacious subject matter and an instantly iconic performance by Noomi Rapace make this the guilty pleasure of the year – a truly epic and inspired piece of airport trash.

Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is a shamed investigative political journalist who has found himself sentenced to prison for apparently slandering a prominent politician publicly in his latest article. At his worst moment he receives a call from an even more prominent Swedish businessman, Henrik Vanger, who wants to hire Mikael to investigate the murder of his niece from 1966. With six months of freedom before having to serve his sentence and without a job, Mikael accepts the offer and soon becomes embroiled in a complex and sordid 40-year-old trail of family squabbles, neo-Nazism tendencies, gruesome sexual fetishes and grisly murder.

Meanwhile, a young 24-year-old tattooed and pierced goth chick, Lisbeth Salander (Noomie Rapace), the anti-social yet brilliant investigator who hacked into Blomkqvist’s computer on behalf of Vanger, is on her own path of adventure. Out of the blue she’s been told her guardianship (she's still being recognized as a youth) has been transferred to an especially slimy attorney. He turns out to be a masochist who subjects Lisbeth to humiliating sexual torture. That is, until she turns the tables and exacts some sweet revenge against him. After this escapade she joins up with Blomkvist to help solve the 40-year-old cold case.

This rather quick synopsis only scratches the surface of hair-raising peculiarities that make up this narrative. Particularly gruesome is the lengthy build-up to Lisbeth’s history. We don’t know much about her, but her physical appearance suggests a rebellious attitude and a hardened emotional exterior due to some trauma in the past. When the despicable court-appointed guardian enters her life her character is taken to the extreme. The actions of the guardian don’t make much sense logically, but it reinforces with severity Larsson’s pervasive theme of misogyny. The film successfully teases us with flashbacks to Lisbeth as a child and the death of her father via a lit match and some gasoline – a history we just might see fleshed out in The Girl Who Played With Fire.

As a serial killer genre film, director Oplev hits all the right buttons stylistically to entrap us in the complex web of evidence, back story, politics and the delightfully bad deeds of his killer. There’s a lot of procedural information thrown at us, but it’s expertly revealed like peeling the layers of an onion to provide maximum tension. If anything, the final reveals don’t quite elevate its shock value to anything higher than what we saw happen to Lisbeth at the beginning. And the rather sappy reunion that happens in the denouement is a tad too soft for this otherwise darkly cynical film.

Unfortunately, looking ahead to the other films, it appears the director Niels Arden Oplev directed only the first film and another director helmed the last two. In a few months we’ll see if the other two meet the expectations satisfied by Tattoo.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Alliance Films in Canada.

Saturday, 3 September 2011

John Carpenter's The Ward

John Carpenter's The Ward (2010) dir. John Carpenter
Starring: Amber Heard, Jared Harris, Mammie Gummer, Daniella Panabaker

**

By Alan Bacchus

Well, it's fun to have John Carpenter back after so many years dormant and more than a decade of forgettable films, even if this latest effort is not the reverie we all hoped for. At least it’s a pure horror film. There are no vampires or ghosts on Mars. But there is a contained location, specifically a psych ward in the '60s, and the ghost of a missing or dead girl tormenting a group of female patients.

We're treated to a classic Carpenter opening including a number of establishing shots of the ward strung together. Before that we see Carpenter’s heroine, a gorgeous and athletic Kristen (Heard), lighting her house on fire, an act that sends her to the looney bin. It’s 1966 and the ward is something we’ve seen in numerous films before - cold, dehumanizing decor, ornery doctors and nurses who seem to care little about the patient’s well being, and of course, experimental treatments like electro-shock therapy and labotomization. Kristen hangs out with other gorgeous young gals, inmates we presume are crazy too.

It doesn’t take long for Kristen to figure out there’s something not right about the ward, specifically an ominous dark-clad figure making creepy appearances around the building. Based on the glum reaction of Dr. Stringer (Harris), this seems to be a part of why Kristen is here. A few of the gals try to escape but are caught and killed by the demon ghost before Kristen has her one-on-one confrontation, and, as we can expect with these period mental patient films, all is not as it seems.

Carpenter manages to engineer a few scary sequences with creative ways to make us jump. His demon woman is a wholly Carpenter creation, a grotesque humanoid in a dress resembling one of the devil worshippers in Prince of Darkness.

But what’s sorely missing is the rich texture Carpenter used to have between his scary moments. Think of the build up in They Live before Roddy Piper first put those sunglasses on, or the monotonous music tones of Ennio Morricone in The Thing, or the religious back story in Prince of Darkness, or John Houseman’s opening campfire story in The Fog. There are no feelings like these in The Ward.

Carpenter’s later pictures have all been plagued with bad casting. Here Amber Heard is simply not believable as a tortured girl from the '60s, too generically beautiful to be psychotic. The stilted dialogue of all the girls feels more like a high school clique than four crazies in a psych ward. Thus, when Carpenter’s not trying to scare us, it’s all flat and devoid of atmosphere.

Sadly, Carpenter has lost his touch, but not without a superb body of work behind him. The Ward is like those last few films from Alfred Hitchcock, admirable but forgettable.

The Ward is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Alliance Films in Canada.

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole (2011) dir. John Cameron Mitchell
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Weist, Miles Teller, Tammy Blanchard, Sandra Oh

****

By Alan Bacchus

There's no doubt that Rabbit Hole is a painful film. It's about a couple dealing with the absolute worst kind of pain – the loss of one’s son, a toddler. Despite the pain and stress between Becca and Howie, we so desperately yearn for them to get through it. Miraculously, the film manages to humanize every character, creating organic conflict without melodramatically exploiting the tragedy. It’s a great film, which received some decent coverage during awards season but sadly not nearly enough.

Nicole Kidman plays Becca, who is in the middle of a grieving period after seeing her 4-year-old son tragically killed in a car accident. She and her husband, Howie (Eckhart), are doing their best to deal with it. It’s been eight months, and the stress is weakening the joints of their marriage. For Howie, coping means going to group therapy, watching old videos of his son and maintaining their domestic lifestyle. On the other hand, Becca needs change. Packing up the baby clothes, removing the car seat and mocking the therapy sessions seem like spiteful reactions to Howie.

Writer David Lindsay-Abaire purposefully evens the scales between the two. No one is right and no one is wrong, yet their marriage is crumbling. They quickly start to lead more independent lives. Becca finds comfort in meeting Jason, the young man who drove the car that killed her son, and Howie quietly flirts with Gaby (Sandra Oh) from group therapy.

Director John Cameron Mitchell rings out some remarkable austere tension in these moments. The chemistry between Howie and Gaby is palpable, and we’re never quite sure what he should do. Though the interactions between Becca and Jason are innocent, there is some sexual tension there. We understand both of their reactions, and the fact that we’re not told who to side with propels the story forward with a surprisingly aggressive thrust.

Eckhart and Kidman are fantastic as Becca and Howie – it’s some of the best work either actor has ever done. But the discovery is the young actor playing Jason, Miles Teller, who is simply astonishing. His mesmerizing and earth-shatteringly real reactions to such extreme sadness are spot-on perfection.

Mitchell satisfies our needs as the audience and hits those strong emotional buttons. Scenes of infinite sadness and loud shouting matches are the stuff Academy voters love to see. But the power of this movie is what keeps the couple together – an inexplicable bond of their love for each other and the love of their son. This is what makes the film so compelling, hopeful and celebratory of life.

Friday, 10 June 2011

Another Year

Another Year (2010) dir. Mike Leigh
Starring Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville and Ruth Sheen

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

One of 2010's critical darlings, Another Year charts the four seasons of middle-class Londoners Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) while they idle on down the road of mutual contentment. As the married couple potter about their garden share, the household peace is breached by the pitiful lives of friends and family, with Mary the secretary (Lesley Manville) leading the parade of the wretched.

Like a bleeding mutt following Gerri home from the office, jittery Mary is a post-menopausal harpy who's desperate for the stability of her friends and hungry enough for a man I'd spray her with a fire extinguisher if I met her at a party. Tailing right behind Mary in the Failure Olympics is Tom's old chum Ken (Peter Wight), a shlubby wreck in track pants reeking of smoked B&H fags and spilt ale. As Mary sniffs about their adult son, the happy duo goes about their simply wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful lives together.

Another Year can be viewed in duality: either Tom and Gerri exist as kind hearts who chide their loved ones for moronic choices; or maybe they're sanctimonious bastards who gain illumination and contentment from the follies of the world's Marys and Kens. The opinion of my gal had the sun shining out of Tom's and Gerri's backsides, but to me they had it both ways – I've revelled in others' lousy relationships and most likely so have you. It's a better past-time than golf and far more stimulating.

I'm surprised Another Year was the highest-rated film among critics at Cannes. This doesn't speak well either of Cannes 2010 or the attending critics. The acting is mostly first-rate (I like Jim Broadbent's work in Leigh films, with his best moment as W.S. Gilbert in 1999's Topsy-Turvy) with some solid laughs, but when Mary and Ken communicate their demons to the audience it's usually shrill and transparent enough that I wondered if anybody else sharing their scenes was deaf or just slow-witted.

My concerns with Manville’s and Wight's performances lie with Mike Leigh's direction and his editor for the camera takes that were selected – unless all takes featured caricatures of desperate binge-drinkers, in which case the fault is all on Leigh. If Mary showed up in her state and I was a geological engineer like Tom or a councillor like Gerri I'd have her in the back of a taxi towards a shrink with a pile of Xanax in double-time. Yet, in Another Year the Broadbent and Sheen characters remain frustratingly, unrealistically serene about Mary for most of the film. This unreality wouldn't fly in an NYU student project, and this shouldn't fly in the work of a master. Additionally, the bait of an early subplot with Imelda Staunton is dispensed as load-bearing for the theme instead of a worthy story of its own. Leigh has again also chosen to film in a 2:39 aspect ratio that's ill-suited to his comedies and dramas. Unless Ruth Sheen is going to crack open corruption in MI5 and Broadbent is off to sack Rome, perhaps the use of anamorphic lenses creates false expectations in a middlebrow film, no?

Despite my grievances there is some good to this film.

Another Year is available on Blu-ray from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Monday, 6 June 2011

The Human Resources Manager

The Human Resources Manager (2010) dir. Eran Riklis
Starring: Mark Ivanir, Gila Almagor, Noah Silver, Guri Alfi, Roni Koren

***

By Alan Bacchus

A touching black comedy with a heart of gold, The Human Resources Manager is the story of a jaded and grumpy HR Manager stuck with the duty of delivering the corpse of a former employee to her estranged Eastern European family for burial.

Thought it’s an Israeli film, there’s a strong European flavour to it, like the work of Aki Kaurismaki. The film arrives on DVD courtesy of Film Movement, which is curating festival films as part of a DVD of the Month club. The staid, deadpan comedic tone fits in well with many of their other titles.

The film is part road trip journey, but it’s mostly a character study of the unnamed worker bee who works as the HR Manager at a large bakery in Israel. When an employee turns up dead in a car bomb explosion, the media links the worker to the bakery. After a defamatory article against the treatment of the deceased employee breaks, the company assigns our reluctant hero, the HR Manager, to band-aid the situation. This means setting the record straight with the press, a particularly suspect tabloid reporter, and making his company look thoughtful and decent. Soon the man finds himself lugging the corpse and coffin around town looking for a next of kin to relieve him of his duty.

Despite his annoyance with the situation, his conscience compels him to stay with the dead woman and find her relatives in Romania. Now he finds himself a fish out of water, a Jew in the devout Catholic, post-Communist doldrums of rural Romania, where the formerly cynical man transforms into a humane gentleman.

Director Riklis (The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree) conveys a gritty naturalistic style typical of this kind of mid-range budget international feature. The Dardenne Brothers come to mind, but they never really had a funny bone. The dead-pan comedy and vérité authenticity reminds us of the Romanian films of today, or even some of those early Kieslowski films from Decalogue.

By its very nature, the act of transporting a dead body across such a large distance gives this an existential quality. Though we never meet the dead woman, the fact that her body is unwanted by everyone the man encounters forces us to consider the effect of her life on the lives of others. The comedic irony of the man who is barely connected to her suddenly becoming her caretaker, and thus developing a strange attachment to her, is fascinating, soulful and reflective.

The Human Resources Manager was an Official Selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, among others, and is now available as the DVD of the Month from Film Movement.

Thursday, 19 May 2011

Vanishing on 7th Street

Vanishing on 7th Street (2010) dir. Brad Anderson
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jacob Latimore

**

By Alan Bacchus

The title of this picture has a very Twilight Zone feel to it. Perhaps it's by design. After all, the high concept at core here is clearly influenced by the seminal work of TZ writer Richard Matheson. It’s the I Am Legend/Last Man on Earth scenario recycled again. Some kind of unexplainable apocalyptic disaster results in a massive power outage, but not just electronics – the sun itself. There are no zombies or vampires in this case. Instead, it’s simply darkness itself representing the evil lurking and stalking the survivors.

The director, Brad Anderson, is the main attraction here. Genre-philes know him from his brilliant low-budget horror film Session 9. Unfortunately, his subsequent efforts, the moody, atmospheric mind-bender The Machinist and the Hitchcockian train-actioner Transsiberian were too faulty to match the promise of Session 9. Despite some minor tingling of the spine in the opening act, Vanishing on 7th Street is not a return to form.

It’s a terrific opening. Bone-chilling, actually. Hayden Christensen is a television news producer who is caught in a massive power outage. But when he searches out others in the building, he discovers everyone is gone – literally vanished, with their clothes on the floor the only remnants of their places on earth. We see the same thing happening through the eyes of Paul (John Leguizamo), an AMC Cinema projectionist. The imagery of the clothing left on the floor outlining the vanished bodies is stunning.

Where did they go? What happened to them? We don’t know exactly, but some kind of evil force in the shadows creeps up and steals their bodies and souls. Much like The Fog encroaching on the villages of John Carpenter’s seaside town, the shadows on 7th street are eerie and scary supernatural entities.

Brad Anderson shoots these scenes with great precision, using a slow and purposeful pace to amplify every moment of suspense. But after this set-up with the four main characters congregating together, the second act stalls. Unlike Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later or even Shaun of the Dead, the foursome, which also includes a young boy and a hysterical mother who has just lost her child, is hopelessly dull and uninteresting. As customary, the group tries to piece together what’s happening in the rest of the world, hypothesizing about what kind of apocalypse they’re in, and specifically, how to get to some kind of safe haven located in Chicago. Unfortunately, the group is too passive, and without this forward momentum the film runs out of gas quickly.

Thandie Newton, who plays the crying and inconsolable grieving mother, is like fingernails on a chalkboard and plainly looks lost in this kind of genre film. Hayden Christensen does a decent job portraying Luke as a twitchy, reluctant leader. John Leguizamo’s back in this kind of role – remember his turn as the obsessed parent in the similarly-themed Shyamalan film The Happening? He’s crippled with an injury for most of the film, which is an unfortunate and unintentional metaphor for the staleness of the film’s second and third acts.

Brad Anderson does the best job he can, creating a unique and unsettling atmosphere. But like The Machinist, with very little script or characters to work with, his tonal aspirations amount to just another forgettable horror film.

Vanishing on 7th Street is available on Blu-ray and DVD from EOne Entertainment in Canada.

Thursday, 5 May 2011

Archipelago

Archipelago (2010) dir. Joanna Hogg
Starring: Tom Hiddleston, Lydia Leonard and Amy Lloyd

**1/2

By Blair Stewart

Featuring a family that's adrift from each other while periodically acting windy and volcanic, Joanna Hogg's Archipelago in hushed tones drags up memories of that most peculiar endurance test over minefields and barbed fences – a family holiday in tight quarters.

On the English Isles of Scilly, the stiff-lipped trio of adult son Edward (Tom Hiddleston), daughter Cynthia (Lydia Leonard) and mother Patricia (Katy Fahy) reunite to see Edward before he's off to Africa for missionary work. The exterior surroundings of weathered, broken trees hemming in the unstable nuclear family are far more hospitable than the interior of their summer house; not for the first time, father has gone AWOL and Patricia is on the phone in the other room talking about it. While his mother's banshee caterwauling seeps through the walls, Ed has sunk into a post-everything ennui with AIDS work as a balm for his stunted growth. And in the next room over, Cynthia's depression has settled into misanthropy. They're joined within the stuffy chamber of mutual acrimony by Rose, the sensible cook (Amy Lloyd) who will no doubt have an anecdote to tell at her own family gathering, and Patricia's painting teacher (Christopher Baker), who toddles about to offer gentle wisdom on dull ears.

The environment of the kitchen becomes damp with Ed's awkwardness when he develops a half-hearted shine to Rose, but just as well, as he could be passing the time until the poisonous fumes clear upstairs (which is unlikely to happen). If the mood was any more unpleasant, the rental car stuffed with my bickering relatives from a traumatic childhood road trip to Disneyworld would arrive - pass me the comic books and kiddie asthma inhaler from the glove compartment please.

A window briefly illuminated with sunlight until the clouds obscure the dark rooms once more, the emotions of Archipelago flutter about without culmination. Patricia and her brood have been stuck in repressive silence for ages, and we're just witnessing the present lousy vacation until future lousy weddings/funerals/reunions. Hogg's interest isn't in mainstream emancipation of the soul but the aesthetics of simmering resentment in off-kilter surroundings, with close-ups avoided for locked-in middle-distance framing heavy on indoor shadows, somewhere between Haneke's interiors and an upper-class fishbowl. The acting, some of which is performed by non-professionals, is uncomfortably good, with Tom Hiddleston's Edward a fine specimen in impotence and Leonard's Cynthia a powder keg bitch. It also helps that the siblings are the strongest written characters in the film.

Archipelago isn't for all tastes despite the intelligence of its construction. Outside of the craggy, inspired setting on the island, the story seems better suited to the stage, where an audience can sweat it out in the same room as the miserables. Otherwise, the work is lacking essential drama. We have walked into the middle of a protracted dispute of mutterings in long-shot, and I was in need of some shouting and a revealing close-up.

Archipelago is a skillfully made film of detail, but one that underwhelmed in ambition.

Friday, 29 April 2011

Somewhere

Somewhere (2010) dir. Sofia Coppola
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

As quiet as a whisper and as light as a feather – blink and you’ll barely miss Somewhere, Sofia Coppola’s latest picture. It's a self-confessed antidote picture to the historical and political pressure of portraying Marie Antoinette in her last film. There’s nothing tricky or complex or clever here. It’s a leisurely-paced, poetic vérité film. Take it for what it is.

Coppola admits to wanting to make an experimental film of sorts, a mood piece about feelings and tone and character. But this isn’t really a stretch for Coppola by any means. It’s a natural extension of her continued fascination with the irony of celebrity and the loneliness of fame. Like Bill Murray’s Bob character in Lost in Translation, Stephen Dorff’s Johnny Marco is a not-too-disguised version of himself, a vagabond actor living in a hotel – the stereotypical life of a bad-boy celebrity. But he also has a daughter, Cleo (Fanning), a sprite 11-year-old, who when her mother abandons her, comes into Johnny’s company. It’s a relationship that might just cause him to change his life for the better.

This is familiar territory, yet Coppola’s no-bullshit style and strict adherence to authenticity and naturalism eschews all the melodramatic clichés of other similar films. Marco changes gradually over the picture, resulting in a very traditional character arc, which satisfies all that we require and desire from any clichéd melodramatic Hollywood picture. This is where Coppola succeeds in creating something personal and experimental but also satisfying and somewhat moving.

While it’s personal, Coppola’s normally vivacious cinematic language is dulled in this picture. There was a palpable sense of energy in both Translation and Antoinette (not in The Virgin Suicides), which is missing here. Her lengthy takes of Marco driving his car in circles (an obvious metaphor for his vapid inner malaise), or Marco staring outside his window, or Marco holding his breath under water are more tedious and uninspired uses of her camera.

With that said, Coppola choreographs a number of brilliant set pieces. Cleo’s figure skating number, for instance, is hypnotic – a simple two-shot scene showing Fanning doing a rudimentary figure skating routine intercut with Dorff’s reactions. Without dialogue, the scene tells us how much Marco has missed in Cleo's life and his innate desire to reconnect with her.

Marco and Cleo’s trip to Italy for his latest junket is also the fun celebrity deconstruction stuff we saw in Lost in Translation. Dorff’s handlers carefully placing him in photo ops and press conferences contrasted against his glum internally tormented psyche is dynamic.

Whether one considers Marie Antoinette a success, Coppola’s ambitiousness to broaden her cinematic world was admirable. And so, some 4 years later, her retreat into the safety net of the Lost in Translation world is disappointing.

Somewhere is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Alliance Films in Canada.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff (2010) dir. Kelly Reichardt
Starring: Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, and Shirley Henderson

****

By Blair Stewart

It was around the lengthy shot of Shirley Henderson running across the waste of Oregon's Empty Quarter that I had an inkling I was watching a good film. A pack of emigrants in the awkward stage of the American westward migration follow wilderness trekker Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood) on his uncharted hunch towards points unknown. As this film is a bastardized true story, you can assume the settlers’ decision made for a historically unwise shortcut.

A survivalist Western or a cautionary tale from the female perspective, Meek's Cutoff depicts the struggles of human endeavour from the micro-level of three covered wagons at the buffoonish mercy of Meek, all tan buffalo hides and cowboy-shirted bluster, onwards to green grasses that might just be over another hill, thataway. Michelle Williams is Emily, one of the wagoners' wives, cannier than Henderson's brittle missionary, braver than young Zoe Kazan of the fickle gold-seeking couple. Emily and her husband Solomon (Will Patton) stand across the divide of gumption from Greenwood's Meek, and as the wheels croak along dry beds, the campfire whispers grow louder as the water becomes scarcer.

Beyond the dehydration, mountain fever, and Meek's unreliable drunkard shtick that could kill all of them, the tension is further ratcheted up for the travellers with the capture of a lone Indian (Rod Rodneaux), who could be hostile but will also suffice as their saviour if they correctly understand his foreign gestures for water.

Meek's becomes a parable for our age at the fault lines of race and global cohabitation, with the dilemma of the Indian's presence depicted honestly. He thankfully doesn't speak in honourable platitudes, with his strange nature and pagan tongue matching the unease of the dire surroundings. So the wagons stumble down deeper into the valley.

It's rare to view an overlooked perspective on an old-hat film genre such as the lonesome Western, but Meek's succeeds in depicting the quiet dread of the women folk going about their chores while the men folk, out of earshot, discuss the facts of their survival and whether anyone needed to be lynched or throttled that day. Emily and the wives are off-stage extras eavesdropping on a sloppy performance concerning the slim chances of their existence. The mere act of loading gunpowder into a rifle becomes as leaden with portent as the hypothermia killing Jack London's protagonist's in To Build a Fire.

The cast is mostly sterling aside from my indifference for Paul Dano's mannered work, with Greenwood as enjoyably broad as his beard is manky, seeming to arrive straight from the same off-beat travelling Wild West act as Jeff Bridges recent take on Rooster Cogburn. Michelle Williams, in her second lead role for a Reichardt film, plays a fairly modern protagonist (and a mildly unbelievable one based on the time period) with aplomb and admirable cunning when needed. As the director of the praised indies Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt climbs above the modest ambition of her past work into the forefront of American filmmakers making essential stories, as the ending of Meek's Cutoff itself arrived with the surety of buckshot over the plains. So far, it's the best film of 2011 I've seen.

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I (2010) dir. David Yates
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Alan Rickman, Ralph Fiennes

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Frequent visitors to this blog might be familiar with my continued frustration with this series. It might be my fault for not paying attention very closely. But with each successive film after the third episode of the series, the narrative plotting, character motivations and general themes have been like a car spinning its wheels.

It’s been six films now and 10 years, and yet I feel no emotional movement or stake in the jeopardy of these characters. In fact, the most surprising disappointment is the lack of character development for the three leads. I mean, hell, we’ve seen them grow up as kids into teenagers, and other than some minor arguments, cat fights and sullen sulking, these characters are as dull and boring as their child counterparts from The Philosopher’s Stone.

But let’s concentrate on this latest film. Lord Voldemort and his ‘Death Eaters’ have asserted their dominance and control over Hogwarts and placed a dark cloud over the entire world (Earth, I guess? Or just London? Or Britain?). Potter, who is still considered the ‘chosen one’ even though he exhibits nary an ounce of ingenuity, inspiration, or even leadership, has fled to safety using a potion that creates multiple identical versions of himself. While in hiding, a wedding takes place, which alerts Voldemort. This causes Harry, Hermione and Ron to flee to London, where they discover more secrets about the maguffin-like Horcruxes.

The Horcruxes have to be destroyed for some reason, which sends Harry, Hermione and Ron on a Tolkien-like quest across rural England. This leads to the Deathly Hallows, another maguffin-like trio of symbols (a wand, a stone and a cloak), which have to be found before Voldemort discovers them.

Of course, this is a silly summary of the plot, but having been confused by the previous films, it’s the only way to write it. In watching these films now, it’s too late to go back and try to understand who knows what and why, where everyone is and why, and who has what potion or instrument of magic required to kill Voldemort or Harry, so it’s best just to enjoy the eye candy.

Deathly Hallows Part I certainly has the best action of the bunch. In fact, we’re never in the stodgy old Hogwarts Castle (indeed that location has certainly run its course). Instead, we’re treated to some car chases and some gun/wand fights. We never really get a good hand-to-hand fight sequence, but I guess the magic of the wand replaces the need for fisticuffs.

The Potter/Hermione/Ron trio is still boring and dull, and the same goes for Voldemort and the baddies. As an aside, why doesn’t Voldemort have a nose? It’s truly grotesque to look at, and not like a cool bad-guy facial scar or other nasty disfigurement. It’s just plain ugly. As such, Voldemort has never been a bad guy to quietly root for or identify with.

SPOILER alert – there is a genuinely sad moment at the end when Dobby, the little troll-like house elf, dies. He's perhaps my favourite character in the whole series. Tear.

Apologies to all Harry Potter fans for this extremely cheeky review. I’m genuinely glad I’m the only one who doesn’t really get it.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part I is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Warner Home Entertainment.

Sunday, 24 April 2011

Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (2010) dir. Rowan Joffe
Starring Sam Riley, Andrea Riseborough, John Hurt, and Helen Mirren

**

By Blair Stewart

Youthful Pinkie Brown has a pretty boy smile with a heart and soul like a burnt-out piece of meat, nothing left on the plate but some gristle. As the razor-thugs of Brighton cannibalize each other for the protection money and racecourse stubs Pinkie peeps opportunity after his mentor cops it to their rivals. The lad might look a small fry in a sordid haunt but once implicated in gangster payback by a good-girl Catholic witness our wee Pinkie becomes a shark in blood-waters.

Graham Greene's Brighton Rock clawed at the squirmy underbelly of England between the Great Wars, a filthy country stewing in vices and religious angst with Pinkie's teenage psycho on a moral see-saw across from the dull, virtuous Rose flagellating for the Virgin Mary. A 1947 film adaptation by John Boulting not only introduced a memorable creepshow Sir Richard Attenborough in his breakthrough lead role, but the film itself now resides on the same shelf of British film standards along with The Third Man, A Matter of Life and Death and Great Expectations.

Rowan Joffe, son of Roland, who was responsible for The Killing Fields, takes a ballsy step in his debut by updating a classic with Pinkie in the middle of the 1960 Mods and Rockers youth riots of Quadrophenia lore. Sam Riley (who previously made for a bang-on Ian Curtis in the Joy Division biopic Control) steps into Pinkie's shoes, a thirty-year old acting as a teenager more admirably than most people, namely my own broken-down ass. As the Irish waitress, Andrea Riseborough plays an oblivious small-town Red Riding Hood as she mistakes Pinkie's skulking for courtship. Hovering about the curdled love story is Helen Mirren as Rose's knowing boss with raised hackles around the boy, and together with an elegantly wasted John Hurt they play junior detectives. In a cameo, Andy Serkis leaves a trail of resplendent Brylcreem sleaze as the local heavy.

The desperation of scrubs on the margins of the criminal trough produces a yearly crop of worthy film subjects, with David Michod's recent and most excellent Animal Kingdom coming to mind, but this remake (or 're-imaging' or 're-invigorating') of Greene's work has too much starch to it and just ends up poorly baked. Although I can believe Mirren and Hurt as wastrels killing time off the clock in the local pub, the rest of the main cast has a sheen of fakery around them, with a pivotal riot sequence sticking out artificially in example. The 'rampaging' Teddy Boy extras look like they're just going through the motions, and I couldn't buy into Joffe's version of the time, place, or as mentioned, most people. Riley and Riseborough simply don't inhabit their characters, and no amount of vintage set decoration could distract from the dearth of mortal guilt in their eyes when their mouths were saying otherwise.

I came away from Brighton Rock with the impression that the story was updated by three decades for the simple reason of Pinkie on a 60's Vespa looks cool, which just doesn't cut it. Style can only go so far when you fuddle about with the classics. Classics might have heaps of style, but it's the substance that gives a work longevity.

Wednesday, 20 April 2011

Casino Jack

Casino Jack (2010) dir. George Hickenlooper
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Barry Pepper, Rachelle Lefevre, Jon Lovitz, Kelly Preston

***

By Alan Bacchus

Perhaps three stars doesn’t quite do justice to the tremendous achievement of turning this complex story – the heinous real-life actions of super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff – into a sharp, scathing and satirical feature film.

The story of Jack Abramoff (Kevin Spacey), the wily Republican lobbyist who, for however short a time, exploited just about every loophole in American capitalism to establish a wealthy empire, was made into a head-spinning but entertaining comprehensive documentary by Alex Gibney just a year prior to this film. Hell, it even had the same name – Casino Jack – with the subtitle, The United States of Money. The dramatized version could have gone a number of different ways, with numerous stories to be told about the rise and fall of Abramoff, and director Hickenlooper and his filmmaking team confidently find the absolute right tone through which to tell this story.

Hickenlooper begins with Abramoff already established as a super-lobbyist. He’s exploited the low minimum wage laws in the US-controlled Marianas Islands to amass a small fortune, the fruits of which he uses to cozy up to a number of influential congressmen, including the now infamous Tom De Lay. Next up for Abramoff is the cash cow that is Indian casinos. Because of Native American land sovereignty, the casinos can operate with little interference or regulation from the government.

Writer Norman Snider and director Hickenlooper do a remarkable job transforming this story into a very carefully calculated black comedy, the tone of which generates laughs, and most importantly, gets to the heart of how and why Abramoff was able to defraud so much money from the American tax payers. It’s the basis of American capitalism, a system which, for good and bad, encourages people like Abramoff to walk the fine moral and ethical line in order to squeeze as much money out of the system as possible.

Hickenlooper keeps a brisk pace jet-setting around the world to follow his characters. Miraculously, most of this film was shot in Toronto, creatively using Canadian locations to double for numerous international locations, including Miami, Scotland, Washington and more, all contributing the full-scale scope of their influence.

But it’s the performance of Kevin Spacey, who was deservedly nominated for a Golden Globe this year, that makes this film a success. It's a terrific show-offy performance, his best in a decade. Spacey moves between an affable wannabe with delusions of being a Hollywood movie character like the Godfather and the ruthless businessman/entrepreneur only a country like the United States could create. Barry Pepper plays Abramoff’s loose-cannon right-hand man, Mike Scanlan, who makes a wonderful supporting character. Both men are portrayed as naive frat boys intoxicated by money and power and supremely cocky and brazen, amplifying their performances to the extreme for the sake of comedy and to complement the astonishing level of immaturity that brought them down.

Sadly, George Hickenlooper died at a young age last year, before the film even received its theatrical release. It's a shame, but his legacy is strong. Other than Casino Jack, he will also always be remembered for his great Apocalypse Now documentary Hearts of Darknness.

Casino Jack is available on Blu-ray and DVD from E1 Entertainment in Canada.

Tuesday, 19 April 2011

The Way Back

The Way Back (2010) dir. by Peter Weir
Starring Jim Sturgess, Ed Harris, Colin Farrell and Saoirse Ronan.

**

By Blair Stewart

Slawomir Rawicz performed a heroic feat of endurance after the Polish army officer was imprisoned to suffer the likelihood of a wintry death in a Stalin-era gulag. But Rawicz's memoir The Long Walk told the story of him breaking out of the gulag with a ragtag gang of prisoners and their feats of survival as they traversed the unforgiving lands of Siberia, the Gobi desert and even the mighty Himalayas to find a safe haven in British-occupied India. It’s an extraordinary tale of courage and fraternity under the most dire of circumstances, worthy of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay's stamina or the Stella Maris College's Old Christians Rugby Team survival while trapped up in the Andes.

Sadly, The Long Walk was mostly bunk.

A Soviet amnesty pardon for foreign soldiers saved Slawomir's hide, not an indomitable will to live, no doubt much to the chagrin of explorers who've retraced Rawicz's steps after being inspired by his negligible exploits. He was also jailed for killing a member of the NKVD (the KGB back in the old days) instead of false charges of spying by the Soviet authorities, as he had stated. I found this out after the film, but with my opinion of The Way Back fairly concrete by the time, I was doubly-disappointed. Oh well, Farley Mowat's a pretty good bullshitter too, and you don't see too many Canadians complaining about Never Cry Wolf, do you?

Peter Weir, as one of Australia's greatest directors, had the rug pulled out from under him on a recent adaptation of Shantaram with Johnny Depp, most likely buying property in development hell for good. This despite Weir's 2003 Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World standing as one of the finest films Hollywood has produced in the past two decades, and a fair reason why I was looking forward to The Way Back. Jim Sturgess stars as a noble Rawicz-ish fellow unjustly imprisoned in Siberia. Our protagonist hatches a plan to escape through the Earth's cruelest terrain with the accompaniment of a wildcat Russian thug (Colin Farrell) of unknown whereabouts, a taciturn American (Ed Harris) of unknown whereabouts, a Polish girl (Saoirse Ronan) of unknown whereabouts and the other escapees consisting of a hodgepodge of unknowns.

Now, the essentials of a great movie are all in play; Weir's directing, Russell Boyd as Weir's cinematographer, a fine, if unspectacular, cast and an epic story from a now-iffy source. And yet the journey becomes a chore.

The obvious challenge of telling the story is taking the viewer from point A to point B while maintaining interest in what happens within the vacuum, and The Way Back can't sustain internal drama during the travels.

The problems build from the title card. After the enjoyably self-indulgent sequence of Hans Landa's verbal jousting in Inglorious Basterds’ opening act, it's hard to view the cross-examination of Sturgess's character by the Russkies in this work and not feel the moment should be filed under 'canned predictable interrogation'. We've watched this scene many times before, so how can it be done better? Perhaps lay a sacrifice at the risky altar of 'artistic license'?

The usual plot boxes are ticked off on the path to the end credits – water and food are found, water and food are lost, a few contract players and a top-liner drop dead, life goes on, roll credits and get the hell out of the theater. I found the predictability of The Way Back crushing. This could have been a subject worthy of a Maurice Jarre sweeping score and iconic roles for all. Colin Farrell does fine work as the wild card murderer, and Ed Harris does his Ed Harris thing, but otherwise it's just English actors doing their best Russian impersonations on the cusp of looking for 'moose and squirrel'.

Now, despite my regard for Master and Commander, there's a flaw to it that still pricks me on subsequent viewings, and it occurs once again in the first half of Weir's latest. It's his disregard for building dramatic action in vital scenes. In the climax of Master and Commander, when the French warship is barrelling towards Russell Crowe's men, Weir eschewed the tension as they quickly leapt into battle, whereas the likes of Leone would have drawn out the drama like putty.

If the audience hasn't walked out on you, why not have some fun with suspense and denial of release? In his latest work, a pivotal moment would be the jailbreak before the death march down to India, where tension can be ratcheted up as the men flee their captors. But what do we get? A few hushed exchanges and then a sharp cut to the men stumbling through a blizzard post-escape. If the source material is faked, surely you could take liberties, no? If the rest of your film is exhaustion, starvation and walking (and walking, walking, walking...), perhaps one should make the most of the opportunity. This struck me as a dry, half-assed approach to the material – a re-hashing of movie tropes to 'just play it safe'. Perhaps the family-friendly influence of benefactors National Geographic Films and Imagenation Abu Dhabi weighed upon the filmed content, as in reality, Saoirse Ronan wouldn't have lasted long in the company of desperate Russian criminals. I'm not too certain of the validity of some of the classic sequences in David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai and Malick's The Thin Red Line (my Dad, after viewing the latter, spoke of the Malick scripted soldier's voiceover as, "Any Marine who started whining and going on about nature like that during the battle of Guadalcanal would have been shot for sedition."), but I can't argue with their cinematic results. You take a risk, you might get an award. You play it safe, and the film passes you by.

I hope this isn't the case with Peter Weir.

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

Black Swan

Black Swan (2010) dir. Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Natalie Portman, Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey

****

By Alan Bacchus

The success of this film is kind of astounding; $100 million + box office take from a meagre $15 million budget, but which looks invisible to any production limitations. Its Oscar nominations are perhaps the most surprising. Whether you think movie awards are popularity contests, superfluous self-stroking or dependent on shameless campaigning, the validation of Darren Aronofsky in the company of the superlative list of nominees has immense value. Well, he should have gotten a nomination for The Wrestler, but no need for sour grapes anymore.

Unlike the films of the other nominees for Best Director (Fincher, Hooper, the Coens, Russell), Black Swan exists solely to titillate our nerves, creep us out and scare us to bits. The fact is, there isn’t too far to go before hitting the bottom of these characters, particularly Natalie Portman, who plays Nina Sayers, an ambitious dancer who essentially sells her soul in order to become the best dancer she can be. Sure, in the extreme, the film comments on the psychology of artists and the inner madman/psychopath that often plagues great artists, but that’s about the extent of what we can read into this film.

Unlike The King’s Speech, The Social Network, et al, Black Swan is devoid of historical perspective, cultural significance or any romanticism of any kind. It’s Aronofsky exercising his muscles in cinematic manipulation. The joy of Black Swan is its technical purity, the type of cinema Hitchcock or Polanski used to make, largely emotionally vacant exercises in scare tactics. Despite the dark material, Black Swan is a fun movie. Fun? Really? Yes, this picture is meant to be fun. Take the fetish-like close-ups of Nina's fingernails deteriorating. Aronofsky must have known most of his audience would turn away long before we see the gory hangnail rip off half her finger. The doppelganger teasing, lesbian sex, masturbation – this is the stuff Polanski tempted us with in Repulsion and what Brian De Palma or David Lynch would do.

Like these masters, Aronofsky uses the tools of cinema – the visual and the aural – to move us to darker places and stimulate our senses.

Aronofsky’s command of his instruments is inspiring. His edgy camera work is jarring from the outset. His handheld camera, which captures the beautiful and elegant ballet dance routines, is rigorous and immediately puts us into the point of view of his troubled dancer. His control of the colour palette is just as sharp and controlled. Key designers Matthew Libatique, Thérèse DePrez and David Stein fill this world with shades of grey, black and white, complementing the black swan/white swan dualities. Sure, it’s not a subtle metaphor, but it results in a distinct, consistent look, which aids in Aronofsky’s scare tactics. And then there’s the use of mirrors, which might seem like a hackneyed horror film trick, but proves to be a venerable, reliable old device.

Though I haven’t read the script on its own, it would appear to serve the sensibilities of a director like Darren Aronofsky; a well structured, air-tight 100 pages or so, but light enough to be blown up with a robust cinematic style. And the marriage of these technical tools with equally adroit performances hits the high mark of what Hitchcock and Polanski achieved in their heydays.

Black Swan is available on Blu-ray and DVD from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. It's a fabulous disc featuring a well-produced and informative making of documentary. No EPK bullshit.

Sunday, 3 April 2011

Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3-D

Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3-D (2010) dir. Werner Herzog
A documentary featuring Werner Herzog

**

By Blair Stewart

The Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in the south of France was an early turning point in human expression, intuition and endurance when you factor in the climate during the Upper Paleolithic period (32,000 years ago, or when most of Europe was a continental ice cube). In 1994, a team of speleologists followed an air draft down into the untouched cavern that preserved the oldest cave paintings in recorded civilization, which provided incredibly vivid detail.

Beyond piles of outwitted predators' bones from prehistoric rituals, the paintings were found etched with a three-dimensional perspective. A horse with an outline of eight legs flowing across limestone that was radiated by dancing firelight would have the illusion of movement, no doubt a source of joy, long before Muybridge's mark was due. Because of the fragile existence of the unearthed treasures, the French government has kept public viewing of the cave under tight restrictions.

Enter Werner Herzog, one of the leading figures of the New German Cinema movement encompassing both fiction and documentary. World traveller, opera director and a deadpan old-kook to boot, Herzog was granted limited access to Chauvet for an excursion into 3-D filmmaking. The turquoise beauty of the Ardèche river region certainly pops in that format, but the billowing details of the actual paintings themselves sadly can't translate well in the muted glow of the handheld camera lights and necessary cinema glasses. The imagery captured despite the limitations of 3-D are still striking. A preserved child's footprint seems freshly laid if not for the elapsed time, the red handprints of one caveman share space with the clawed graffiti of extinct cave bears, and everywhere stalactites hang rudely in the frame like a dog's drool.

The cave is a film's dream setting, and yet I found myself drifting into slumber despite my eagerness for Herzog's documentaries due to his many triumphs, from 1974's The Great Ecstasy of the Woodcarver Steiner to the 2007 Oscar-nominated Encounters at the End of the World. The mixture of a heavy cello score, Herzog's unhelpful monotone voice-over and the dim image was too much for my wits. The director's patented curveball-logic questions during his geological/archaeological interviews about the dreams of the long-dead artists detracted from the subject, as did the blatantly obvious written moments for his scientists (Herzog's best fictional work has the quality of fact, while many of his documentaries have meddling fingerprints somewhere among the pre-planned set pieces) and an ill-suited coda involving crocodiles.

The lingering questions that remain from the paintings will mostly be left unanswered, and while it's important to ask about their intentions and praise their achievements, it's mostly futile to put words in a dead caveman's mouth.

Thursday, 31 March 2011

Waste Land

Waste Land (2010) dir. Lucy Walker
Documentary

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

The title of this film refers to the hopeless environment in which its subjects ply their trade as ‘garbage’ pickers in the world’s largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro. For avant garde artist/photographer Vik Muniz, this serves as the source for his next international artistic creation.

Best known for his ‘Pictures of Chocolate’ series from the late 90s, the Brazilian native drew pop art style portraits out of chocolate syrup while working in New York. Now in 2006, Muniz, along with his documentary crew helmed by Lucy Walker, attempts to create great art from the most useless of substances – garbage.

This goal comes after declaring to the camera that after achieving his wealth and success, he had become dissatisfied with fine arts. And this latest project serves as a homecoming for Muniz, an effort to give back to his homeland where he grew up with little opportunity to succeed other than his own talent and desire for success.

Muniz is clear with his plan and enters the landfill with his still camera and his assistant looking for subjects that will serve as the chief artistic associates for his venture. With Walker’s camera behind Muniz we get to meet a unique subculture of labour, colloquially called ‘garbage pickers’, but more appropriately ‘pickers of recyclable materials’ or catadores in Portuguese. These individuals have one of the most unenviable jobs in modern society – sifting through waste to pick out plastic bottles, cans and other materials to sell to recycling companies for very little money. Like vultures, we watch in astonishment at the kind of muck and filth these people will search through in order to find their objects of value.

But within this despair, Walker and Muniz find an insatiable verve for life. All the catadores get paid and make a living, and they all have an interesting story about how they ended up in such squalor. The most emotional story is from Isis, a beautiful young girl whose life spiralled downward when her three-year-old son died of pneumonia – a story recounted by Isis in a devastatingly emotional confession. Tiao’s story is the most inspiring, as he has been a catadore since age 7, but his perseverance and pride in his job helped him develop a union for the pickers, protecting them from being exploited for their labour.

Muniz doesn’t so much give his subjects a free helping hand as encourage them to express their own latent artist talents and transform the ugliness of their world into something profoundly beautiful. The works of art that result are astonishing. They include large-scale reproductions of other famous works, such as the Death of Marat, made entirely out of garbage and photographed into entirely new works of art.

By the end we come to love Muniz’s subjects like members of our own family, completely invested in their journey. And with the proceeds fully split among the catadores, when we watch the auction price of Tiao’s Marat piece go up and up and up, it’s a wholly satisfying realization of their collective dream.

Waste Land is available on DVD from EOne Home Entertainment in Canada.

Wednesday, 23 March 2011

The Last Play at Shea

Last Play at Shea (2010) dir. Paul Crowder, Jon Small
Documentary

***½

By Alan Bacchus

It was such a surprise to see how terrific this film is. It’s a straight-to-video release presumably timed to coincide with baseball spring training fever, which has just begun. With this clever and surprisingly insightful documentary, we get to experience the significant pop culture events that surrounded the famed (and infamous) Shea Stadium in Queens, New York—home of The New York Mets.

In 2010, the stadium was demolished to make way for a brand-spanking new facility, a dramatic leap in comfort compared to aging old Shea. After the final baseball game, fans were treated to a farewell concert from Billy Joel, a Long Islander, whose career seemed to mirror that of Shea itself. Directors Crowder and Small cleverly intercut footage from Joel’s concert with the history of the revered facility, and as a surprisingly profound bonus, the career of Joel himself, which seems inextricably linked to Shea.

Filling in the gaps is narrator Alec Baldwin (yep, another Long Islander). His smooth voice is the perfect choice to give us the omniscient historical information about the Stadium and its relationship to the city of New York.

I have no connection to New York, but I am a sports fan and at one time I was a die-hard baseball fan. And so when Crowder and Small relive the key events of Shea, we get to experience some of the most dramatic moments in baseball history again. There are those first few years when the team was the worst in baseball history, losing 100+ games five years straight. Then they miraculously won the pennant and the World Series in 1969 with some supernatural help from a random black cat that ran onto the field and in front of the rival Dodgers’ dugout. There’s also the glorious 80s featuring that great team of Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Gary Carter, et al, and that dramatic victory over Bill Buckner and the Red Sox. If the film stopped there, we’d have a great sports documentary worthy of HBO’s sports series or ESPN’s 30 for 30 series.

Equal to the baseball dramatics is Shea’s significance as a concert hall and the site of that legendary Beatles performance in 1964, which signalled both the birth of Beatlemania in the United States and the introduction of the stadium to the world. Outside of the U.S., Shea became synonymous with The Beatles and was thus in demand by the biggest bands in the world for their concerts. Footage of The Beatles, The Police, and of course Joel himself is thrilling to watch.

Again, if the film ended here, Crowder and Small would have had a terrific documentary on their hands. The third through line involves the storied career of Billy Joel himself, from his humble beginnings in a hard rock band to his management troubles, his hiatus and his reinvention as a solo artist. Crowder and Small don't settle for periphery information or B-plots to cut away to, they dig deep into Joel’s personal life, including the career victories and setbacks that make up this fascinating artist. It doesn’t hurt to have Christie Brinkley’s full participation. Egads, even in her 50s she’s still a stunning beauty. And thankfully for Joel, she’s still on good terms with him and a key person in his life.

Tying everything together is the presence of Paul McCartney, who makes an appearance at Billy Joel’s concert. It’s dramatized to maximum effect, as his appearance brings the past full circle to the present. It’s a shame this film was not included in the A-list film festivals (it premed at Tribeca, which is pretty good actually) and that it didn’t even have a theatrical release, where it could have received its due publicity. Now, it will sadly be relegated to a one-sentence inclusion in the DVD releases columns in your urban weekly. So all you fans of sports and music, please seek out this film.

The Last Play at Shea is available on DVD from Alliance Films in Canada.

Monday, 21 March 2011

Carlos

Carlos (2010) dir. Olivier Assayas
Starring: Starring: Édgar Ramírez, Alexander Scheer, Alejandro Arroyo

***1/2

By Alan Bacchus

The Blu-ray cover of this exciting new release looks like a cross between Terminator Salvation and a robot character from Transformers. It's actually the face of Edgar Ramirez as Carlos. It's a bold cover that will likely attract more mainstream Blockbuster shelf surfers or Netflicks surveyors than the retro-cool theatrical poster of this film. The title of the movie was even changed to Carlos the Jackal to exploit the nickname by which the public knows this story but is actually never mentioned in the film. I have no problem with this – the more eyes on this work the better. Assayas brings Euro-art house credibility to what is essentially a procedural action film told with maximum realism, cinematic swagger and panache.

The new Blu-ray features both the five-and-a-half-hour mini-series version, which also played out of competition at Cannes, and the theatrical cut, which runs a bit over two-and-a-half hours. Though one version is literally half the length of the other, they both feel remarkably similar. Each film is anchored by its three acts. The first covers the introduction of Carlos to the International Palestinian Liberation movement funded indirectly by the Iraqi government via white-collar terrorist Wadie Haddad.

Carlos's early movements and cocksure attitude are dramatized with great speed, as we rush through assassination attempts, parcel bombings and other smaller tasks in a whip-fast montage effect. Both films feature a remarkably similar second act. It shows the step-by-step procedural details of the notorious Vienna OPEC Raid in 1975, where Carlos led a six-person team into OPEC headquarters and took hostages from Austria to Algeria to Libya and Yemen.

After zipping through the early years, virtually the entire second chapter takes place in the two days of this hijacking. Even within this shrunken timeline, Assayas makes every movement, action and decision a nail-biting affair, ringing out genre-style suspense and thrills as good as any Hollywood crackerjack.

Where the long version departs from the short version is in the third act, which shows the last 15 years of Carlos's career. It presents the downfall that began with the fallout of the OPEC event, leading to his last days as a free man in the '90s in Africa. Arguably, after reaching the high at the midpoint of part two, the film peters out due to the excessive running time, and it never achieves the true cinematic climax it deserves. And unfortunately, neither version cracks the third act.

Narrative deficiencies aside, Carlos succeeds magnificently because of the remarkable state of realism achieved by Assayas. We never feel like we're being manipulated by cinematic conventions or "action scenes." It's distinctly un-Hollywood without the art house pretension. We're also privy to one of the best performances of anyone last year (including Colin Firth) from Edgar Ramirez, who speaks numerous languages, endures De Niro-worthy weight gain to change his appearance over time and, most importantly, conveys the swagger that made Carlos one of the most unlikely political celebrities in the world.

Sunday, 20 March 2011

Morning Glory

Morning Glory (2010) dir. Roger Michell
Starring: Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton, Patrick Wilson

**1/2

By Alan Bacchus

Morning Glory comes from the director of Notting Hill and the writer of The Devil Wears Prada. But those factors weren’t the reasons I was attracted to this film. Instead, it was the fact that Roger Michell directed Changing Lanes, in which he elevated a humdrum script to one of the best thrillers-with-a-brain in the past 10 years. Of course, Morning Glory is not a thriller but a genre film with the potential to be elevated by the direction of a smart filmmaker. Unfortunately, Michell fails in this task, as he delivers only an adequate film while meeting the expectations of the genre.

This is not a traditional romantic comedy per se. But like The Devil Wears Prada, it’s a "career comedy." Here, our hero, Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams), is a young, ambitious career gal in the cutthroat "entertainment" business – in this case, morning television. She works at one of those saccharine morning shows that serve mostly to warn commuters about inclement weather and traffic jams. Yet behind the scenes, it's not so warm and cozy. When the unemployed Becky takes a job as the producer of the lowest rated morning show on the lowest ranked network, she finds herself up to her neck in complicated office politics, bloated egos and high-stakes pressure from network execs. Becky's big gamble is hiring aging former news anchor Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford), now a drunken egomaniac with a superiority complex.

Despite the battling of egos between Mike and co-anchor Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton), Becky manages to lift the show from the doldrums of the ratings basement, making her program respectable both to morning show purists and upper-crust journalists, to whom Pomeroy feels beholden.

The love sub-plot with colleague Patrick Wilson is relegated to b-story insignificance, as it's clear Michell and McKenna want to tell a story about a strong, young woman making it in the fast-paced world of television in glamorous Manhattan. There isn't much of a curtain to lift in this area, as films such as Network, Broadcast News and Tootsie have already done this 20-plus years prior. That being said, Michell's fast-paced direction props up the predictable trajectory of the script higher than what would be expected from a lesser filmmaker.

Unfortunately, everyone is let down by the presence of Harrison Ford as Pomeroy. We all know Ford is well passed his expiry date as a leading man. And while he doesn't "lead" the show here, he's the main foil for Becky and is thus integral to the film's success. Ford's well-known public surliness aids somewhat in Pomeroy's characterization, but like most of everything Ford has done lately, there's no energy or life in the performance. It's phoned in via his star time machine. Ford's former glory, intensity, rogue charm and comic affability are completely gone. Films like these live and die by casting, and while this film isn't dead, it's inert and unmemorable.

Morning Glory is available on Blu-ray and DVD from Paramount Home Entertainment.

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