Greatest Hits (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Esoterica, Mexico, Theatrical

Greatesthits

Los mejores temas
***½/****
starring Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez, José Rodriguez López, Luis Rodriguez
written and directed by Nicolás Pereda

by Angelo Muredda Odd as it might seem for a 30-year-old director to get a retrospective, you can see the logic behind TIFF Bell Lightbox’s series on Nicolás Pereda, whose six features demonstrate a remarkably consistent vision stemming from Pereda’s interest in gently setting an audience’s narrative expectations on their side. Pereda, who’s been relatively unheralded in his adoptive home of Toronto (despite his sturdy international reputation and his 2011 feting at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, to name just one laurel), brings the sophistication and focus of an old hand to each of his formally rigorous but unassuming projects. Although it’s his most recent work, there’s perhaps no better starting point for the uninitiated than the aptly titled Greatest Hits, which sees Pereda gathering his cast of players for a twist on the family reunion.

Take This Waltz (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance

Takethiswaltz1

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B
starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen, Luke Kirby, Sarah Silverman
written and directed by Sarah Polley

by Angelo Muredda As both literary adaptations and first features go, Sarah Polley’s Away from Her was an astonishing exercise in restraint. Working from Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” about a seventysomething married couple whose longstanding private games turn into something else when Fiona (Julie Christie) is diagnosed with dementia, Polley forewent the ostentatious route of many first-time directors by telling the story straight. It’s become customary, in speaking of that film, to chalk up this directness to the source material–Munro is, after all, known for her frankness, and apart from the expansion of Olympia Dukakis’s character and a Hockey Night in Canada gag, Polley ported her narrative beats over more or less wholesale. But Munro has a certain nastiness, not least in her omniscient narrators’ cutting observations, that’s largely absent from Polley’s adaptation, which has particular sympathy for Gordon Pinsent’s reformed husband, who’s more of a forgetful cad in the short story. It’s a standard line to say that Munro reserves judgment, particularly towards her adulterers, but what of the ghoulishness of her characterization, in Lives of Girls and Women, of small-town scolds who say things like, “The law-yer, didn’t he think he was somebody?” Polley doesn’t get sufficient credit for translating what she can of that prickliness–which also runs through “Bear”–and molding the rest into something unabashedly romantic.

The War Room (1993) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1990s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blu-ray Disc, Documentary, The Criterion Collection

***/**** Image B Sound B Extras B+
directed by Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker

by Angelo Muredda “When I think of an old calendar, I see George Bush’s face on it.” How things have changed since lead Democratic strategist James Carville made that case against then-incumbent President George H.W. Bush in the winter of 1992, long before the rise of Dubya necessitated the use of such cumbersome initials. The War Room, a fly-on-the-wall account of the wildly successful but not always charmed Bill Clinton campaign from the POV of his key operatives, now feels like a time-capsule itself, an old calendar from an era before the internet and Super PACs radically changed the way presidential campaigns were run from moment to moment. Far from feeling hopelessly outdated, though, Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s unofficial sequel to Pennebaker’s work on Primary, which followed JFK’s vanquishing of opponent Hubert Humphrey, is an illuminating look at how one of the most successful national campaigns in modern electoral history was waged from an unassuming office in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Your Sister’s Sister (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Romance

Yoursistersister1

**½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass, Mike Birbiglia
written and directed by Lynn Shelton

by Angelo Muredda Lynn Shelton tends to swim in the deep end of the mumblecore pool. More improvisatory than the scripted films of the Duplass brothers (despite their overlap in casting), her work, in an odd sort of way, is probably closer in spirit to Joe Swanberg’s. Swanberg’s shabbier DIY aesthetic masks the heady nature of his projects, which explore the same three or four ideas about modern relationships in forms as disparate as the anthology film (Autoerotic) and the meta-slasher (Silver Bullets). In Humpday, Shelton nicely marries her high concept–to make a movie about hetero male insecurity writ large–with a pair of naturalistic performances that elude Swanberg’s scratchier efforts. Her M.O. appears to be to let her actors fumble through a convoluted situation that, on the strength of their characterizations, never feels as unnatural as it probably should.

Midnight’s Children (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Fantasy, India, Theatrical

Midnightschildren

**/****
starring Satya Bhabha, Shahana Goswami, Rajat Kapoor, Darsheel Safary
screenplay by Salman Rushdie, based on his novel
directed by Deepa Mehta

by Angelo Muredda It’s a nice bit of synergy, good for at least one heavily-latexed Tom Hanks reincarnation, that Deepa Mehta’s adaptation of Midnight’s Children should come out so soon after the Wachowskis’ and Tom Tykwer’s ill-fated stab at Cloud Atlas, perhaps the only contemporary novel more labyrinthine than Salman Rushdie’s magic-realist opus. So earnest are both efforts that one is tempted to ignore their fundamental failures as either cinema or adaptation and bow to the good intentions of the faithful stewards. Yet one wonders about the value of such graceful gestures when, combined, the two films take up a staggering five hours–indefensible, given the limpid mysticism they have to show for themselves at their muted conclusions. Read together, they’re proof that in the absence of a real necessity for adaptation, big novels make for small movies.

Magic Mike (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, DVD, Theatrical

Magicmike1

**½/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Cody Horn, Matthew McConaughey
screenplay by Reid Carolin
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Angelo Muredda Magic Mike opens with Saul Bass’s red-and-black Warner Bros. logo, retired in 1984. That gesture is meant, I think, to pitch what follows as a throwback to smarter studio fare along the lines of Hal Ashby’s Being There, but it also courts less flattering comparisons to the likes of the Police Academy movies. Steven Soderbergh’s latest pop exercise falls somewhere between those two poles–a little too close for comfort to the Guttenberg side. Conceived as a loose riff on star Channing Tatum’s time as a male stripper, it has a solid run as a cheerful smut delivery mechanism before hanging up its thong to become a rote ‘80s melodrama about good kids corrupted by bad drugs. If the howl of “Yes!” that greeted the first bared ass at my screening is any indication, that transformation won’t hurt the bottom line (a figure these strippers always seem to have on their minds), though it does make Magic Mike another promising yet half-baked Soderbergh project instead of a good movie, sans asterisks.

Keep the Lights On (2012)

Keep the Lights On (2012)

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Thure Lindhardt, Zachary Booth, Julianne Nicholson, Paprika Steen
written and directed by Ira Sachs

by Angelo Muredda Life imitated art when Ira Sachs’s Keep the Lights On won the Teddy for best feature at the 2012 Berlinale. In the film, the same honour–albeit in the documentary category–goes to Erik (Thure Lindhardt) for his long-gestating profile of queer photographer and filmmaker Avery Willard, a project Sachs himself realized this year, concurrently with his fictional surrogate. Despite the intimate overlaps between Sachs’s life and his most affecting movie to date, knowing the writer-director’s background going in is hardly a prerequisite to falling for Keep the Lights On‘s honest charms. Sachs lets his biography seep into the material, effectively colouring it blue.

Dark Shadows (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Directors: Tim Burton, DVD, Horror, Vampire, Werewolf

Darkshadows3

*½/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green
screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith, based on the television series “Dark Shadows” by Dan Curtis
directed by Tim Burton

by Angelo Muredda Like so many of his recent dioramas, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows starts off looking suspiciously like a real movie. The director’s tendency to Burtonize cherished texts into gauche self-portraits is suppressed in an economical opening that tells with a straight face the dolorous tale of Barnabas Collins, once-imprisoned and newly-freed vampire star of Dan Curtis’s late-afternoon soap. The mood is sombre–a nice hat-tip to Curtis’s morose series, which, if you’ll pardon the wonky chronology, played out like a Smiths song drained of irony. Alas, before long Barnabas awakens in 1972 to meet his distant relatives and dissipated hangers-on, and the mere presence of pasty-white, pink-shaded, ginger-wigged Helena Bonham Carter as family psychiatrist Julia Hoffman is enough to break the spell. Carter’s mannered and carefully sculpted weirdness alerts us that this is yet another wax museum standing in for a film no one had the heart to finish.

TIFF ’12: Far Out Isn’t Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Brad Bernstein

by Angelo Muredda “If you want to give them an identity, children should be traumatized,” illustrator Tomi Ungerer says in Far Out Isn’t Far Enough, speaking about his life as much as his career obsession with drawing the macabre. Brad Bernstein’s feature debut has the benefit of an articulate subject with a captivating life story, from his confused wartime upbringing in Strasbourg–“the sphincter of France,” as he calls it–to his early American days as a freelancer, to his later erotic drawings (of “bondage and so on,” he explains) and role as a sort of artist-in-residence for the civil rights movement. What it lacks is assurance, frequently getting in the way of its powerful material with hammy stylistic flourishes and a treacly score better suited to a Disney-channel docudrama.

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Esoterica, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Beyond4

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras F
starring Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos, inspired by the book Be Your Self by Mercurio Arboria
directed by Panos Cosmatos

by Angelo Muredda Panos Cosmatos claims he wasn’t allowed to watch R-rated movies as a kid and had to make do with the lurid box covers he saw on video store shelves. Rising above those less-than-ideal conditions, the first-time helmer and son of famed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George P. Cosmatos makes an auspicious debut with Beyond the Black Rainbow. As befits its retro title, this is a bravura pulp homage that recreates the feeling of a preteen creeping down the hall to catch a sidelong glance of the bygone genre cinema pulsing out of the living-room TV and painting the walls orange. Still, it’s best approached not as a found object from that time, but as a mood piece–a sustained exercise in atmospheric nostalgia for what LCD Soundsystem eloquently called the “unremembered ’80s.”

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

***/****
directed by David O. Russell

by Angelo Muredda Awards season does strange things to American filmmakers in search of gold hardware. Last year, Alexander Payne delivered his James L. Brooks movie in The Descendants, toning down his tartness for a family drama both more palatable and significantly shoddier than usual. There’s a comparable transformation in the cards this year for David O. Russell, who showed signs of mellowing with 2010’s The Fighter but was still miles from the Cameron Crowe job he’s now pulled off, to surprisingly strong effect, with Silver Linings Playbook, a Jerry Maguire for manic depressives.

TIFF ’12: Something in the Air

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, France, TIFF


Après mai
**½/****
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Angelo Muredda Those who see Olivier Assayas’s new film stateside will be met with an ambivalent gesture right from the title card, which juxtaposes the Godardian red and blue of the French title, “APRES MAI” (“After May”), with the mousy English translation, “Something in the Air.” The French is the more precise, referring to the dispirited state of radicals following the events of May, 1968, while Thunderclap Newman’s yearning anthem about armed insurrection evokes only a roughly simpatico version of late-’60s American idealism falling into ’70s cynicism. Vague as the English title reads by comparison, though, it turns out to be the more fitting of the two. Indeed, for all of Assayas’s personal attachment to this material, Something in the Air isn’t significantly more illuminating about the period than something like Almost Famous, which uses the titular song to roughly the same effect, evincing the same impossible nostalgia for a time when everyone was supposedly moving together on one big bus, so to speak.

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

****/****
directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel

by Angelo Muredda What is there to say about Leviathan, a nearly-wordless maelstrom of ravenous seagulls, blood-red waves, and severed fish-heads piled to the horizon? Colleagues at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel take the sensory as seriously as the ethnography here, producing a truly singular documentary account of a commercial fishing vessel off the New Bedford coast that puts the so-called immersive quality of 3-D baubles like Avatar to shame. Their work more than lives up to the biblical title, delivering what might be described as a fish-eye view of the Apocalypse.

TIFF ’12: Everyday

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF, UK

**½/****
directed by Michael Winterbottom

by Angelo Muredda Michael Winterbottom makes projects more than he makes films, and happy are the rare few that bridge the gap. Everyday comes close at times, with no thanks to the unnecessarily tricked-out structure, which picks up with a young British family at holiday satellite points spread out over a five-year period and watches them cope with separation anxiety in between. In theory, this narrative-by-checkpoint strategy most resembles 2004’s dismal 9 Songs, where Winterbottom watched a dull relationship bloom and die in the span of nine dull concerts and miserable sex scenes, but the film can’t help but be improved by the material this time.

TIFF ’12: Frances Ha

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Coming of Age, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Angelo Muredda There’s a lot to love in Frances Ha, but the highlight is surely a tracking shot of star, muse, and co-writer Greta Gerwig clumsily bounding through the streets of Brooklyn to the sounds of David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” (In a daily dispatch for mubi.com, Fernando Croce astutely toasts her “galumphing radiance.”) You could read this moment as either a joyous corrective to Michael Fassbender’s miserable NYC jog in Shame or a direct lift, down to the song’s abrupt stop, from Leos Carax’s Mauvais sang–think of Gerwig as the Ginger to Denis Lavant’s Fred. Or you could just accept it as the clearest expression of the film’s ambling structure: a lovely headlong dive through traffic en route to somewhere safe but rewarding.trans-2476182

TIFF ’12: To the Wonder

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

**/****
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Angelo Muredda For a long time, it seemed like Terrence Malick would vanish altogether before he made a serious misstep, but for better or worse, he’s now delivered To the Wonder, the bum note that forces you to warily retrace a major artist’s career. A muted greatest-hits compilation of Malick’s oeuvre, To the Wonder borrows whole apostrophized lines to God from The Tree of Life, nicks The Thin Red Line‘s trick of meting out disembodied humanist voiceovers across the cast (including an underused Javier Bardem), and re-stages Pocahontas’s carefree romp through the palace gardens in The New World via a young girl’s joyous dance through the aisles of a supermarket. It’s all here, in a manner of speaking, but as the little girl tells her mother at one point, “There’s something missing.”

TIFF ’12: Tabu

Posted in****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Brazil, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Portugal, Silent, Spain, TIFF

****/****
directed by Miguel Gomes

by Angelo Muredda Tabu opens, fittingly enough, at the movies, with an old melodrama about an explorer who’s just been turned into a brooding crocodile. That’s the first of many transformations in a protean film that shifts gracefully from ironic postcolonial critique, to essay on the cinema as a means of appropriation and reincarnation, to thwarted love story. While those layers may seem impossible to navigate, take heart: Director Miguel Gomes’s great coup is to let this complex material flow instinctually from its emotional core. Fluidity is key to Gomes’s aesthetic, which pairs the breathless momentum of a page-turner with the non-sequitur progression of a dream. Case in point, a moment when Pilar (Teresa Madruga), the first half’s protagonist, sees a movie with the stuffy man who loves her. Pilar is visibly moved by what’s on screen, but we never see it, hearing only a Portuguese cover of “Be My Baby” on the soundtrack–a thread left dangling only to be gingerly picked up in the second half. “You know what dreams are like,” as one character tells us: “We can’t command them.”

TIFF ’12: Ship of Theseus

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, India, Netherlands, TIFF

***/****
written and directed by Anand Gandhi

by Angelo Muredda The feature debut of Indian playwright (and occasional soap writer) Anand Gandhi, Ship of Theseus puts its dramaturgical origins up front. Gandhi’s film begins with a philosophical conceit from Plutarch–the question of whether a ship that’s been repaired using parts from other vessels can be considered the same ship at all–and workshops it through three seemingly-disconnected stories set in modern-day Mumbai. All three strands, which unfold like a series of one-act plays, are preoccupied with the biological analogy of Theseus’s broken-down ship, a leaky body that needs an organ transplant to survive. And while the finale that brings them together is unnecessarily tidy, the individual segments strike a fine balance between humanism and intellectual rigor.

TIFF ’12: A Royal Affair

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Czech Republic, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Romance, Sweden, TIFF

En Kongelig Affære
***/****
directed by Nikolaj Arcel

by Angelo Muredda A Royal Affair isn’t exactly Barry Lyndon, but as period pieces go, it’s surprisingly robust, the rare costume drama that takes a genuine interest in how the unruly personalities of rulers and politicians determine a nation’s political outcomes as much as the ideologies they represent. It doesn’t seem so promising at first, beginning as it does with a title card that sets the scene with ominous overtones. “It is the Age of Enlightenment,” we’re told in the tasteful font of “Masterpiece Theatre”, and while the rest of Europe has gone through a massive philosophical and ethical shift with respect to its perception of peasants and landed gentry, Denmark has remained an outpost of the old, thanks in no small part to the conservative court that pulls the strings of mad young King Christian (Mikkel Følsgaard, Best Actor winner at Berlin). Enter his blushing new Welsh bride and our narrator, Caroline (Alicia Vikander), a revolutionary intellect–her book collection doesn’t pass the Danish board of censors–who flounders in the country she now rules until things are livened by Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), a German doctor and secret pamphleteer of the Enlightenment sent to bring sense back to the erratic King.

TIFF ’12: Reality

Posted in2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Italy, Satire, TIFF

***½/****
directed by Matteo Garrone

by Angelo Muredda Reality, Matteo Garrone’s follow-up to the urban planner’s nightmare of Gomorrah, is a nasty little thing, at once an indictment of the mass delusion of celebrity culture and a finely-wrought character study of Luciano, a fish merchant and small-town Neapolitan crook who dreams of being a contestant on “Big Brother”. Luciano is played with wide-eyed wonder and deep sincerity by Aniello Arena, a mafia hitman currently serving a life sentence for a triple-homicide–unlike his modest fictional counterpart, who’s involved in a baffling scheme to resell pastry-making robots on the black market. It’s a terrific performance, somehow sweet and deranged in equal measure, and it’s the reason Reality works as well as it does when it begins to assume his warped perspective.