Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 11 of 14

The Female Eye Film Festival

June 21, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, Theatrical

by Angelo Muredda Following the boys-only slate of the Cannes Film Festival, which made room for tepidly-received efforts from the likes of Andrew Dominik and Lee Daniels but shut out women in a comparable phase of their careers, June has been a surprisingly fruitful month for female directors of North American independents. Not that it's compensation for that snub, but it's heartening to see Lynn Shelton's Your Sister's Sister and Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz get the lion's share of positive indie press in recent weeks, putting them in good company with Wes Anderson, whose Moonrise Kingdom did make Cannes's official selection. You could think of the Female Eye Film Festival, now entering its tenth year and running through June 24^th at Toronto's Carlton Cinemas, as a low-key companion to those higher-profile releases.

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (2012)

June 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Matthew Akers

by Angelo Muredda Forty years into a celebrated career kicked off by the intense bodily exposures of 1973’s Rhythm10, a solo show in which she put herself through twenty rounds of five-fingered fillet, Marina Abramović has earned the right to call herself the grandmother of performance art. “I don’t want to be alt anymore,” the Belgrade-born, New York-based artist admits early in Matthew Akers’s engaging bio-doc Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, indulging for a rare moment in her accomplishments. It’s a testament to both her frankness and Akers’s tasteful curatorial approach to her oeuvre that there’s nothing pretentious about the statement, only a clear-eyed assessment of the distinct phases in an artist’s life and work.

That’s My Boy (2012)

June 14, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**/****
starring Adam Sandler, Andy Samberg, Leighton Meester, Susan Sarandon
screenplay by David Caspe
directed by Sean Anders

by Angelo Muredda For the first time since 2009’s Funny People, That’s My Boy finds Adam Sandler straying from his usual stable-mate Dennis Dugan, this time putting his trust in Sex Drive director Sean Anders and “Happy Endings” showrunner David Caspe. At first, you wonder why he bothered. The opening, a 1984-set flashback to the sexual misadventures of a young Sandler (Justin Weaver) cut from the same cloth as The Waterboy‘s eminently punchable Bobby Boucher, isn’t promising: vagina jokes drop from the sky with the leadenness of an unaired pilot, and everyone’s features are shellacked into oblivion by floodlights on loan from life-insurance ads. Things aren’t much better in the present, where we meet the adult Donny spitballing ways out of a financial crisis–he owes the IRS some $40,000–with New York Jets head coach Rex Ryan, on hand for no discernible reason except to make us miss the Brett Favre scene in the Farrelly brothers’ much funnier There’s Something About Mary.

The Woman in the Fifth (2012)

June 13, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Mystery, Poland, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

La femme du Vème
*½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Kristin Scott Thomas, Joanna Kulig, Samir Guesmi
screenplay by Pawel Pawlikowski, based on Douglas Kennedy’s novel
directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Pawel Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth, Romanian femme fatale Margit (Kristin Scott Thomas) tells glum American writer Tom (Ethan Hawke) not to worry about his writer’s block. “You have the makings of a serious work now,” she reassures him: “A broken life, down-and-out in Paris.” Intended as a key to the film, a hint that we aren’t watching real events at all but rather their translation into an American’s grim European masterwork, this exchange does nothing so much as outline the limits of Pawlikowski’s imagination. His first feature since 2004’s unsettling My Summer of Love, this is an odd misstep, the kind of bad movie that can only be made with the purest of intentions. I don’t doubt that Pawlikowski, working from a thriller by American writer Douglas Kennedy, believes in this idea that good novels are born of wretched experiences–that being a disgraced literature professor and stalled artist shaking down phantoms in run-down Paris gives you a direct line to authenticity. But it’s the sort of half-baked conceit that defines countless shallow genre texts shooting for arthouse credibility, the hallmark of a Secret Window knockoff that begs to be taken as seriously as a good Paul Auster novel.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

June 3, 20122011, 2012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Mystery, UK

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A+ Extras B
starring Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Michele Mulroney & Kieran Mulroney
directed by Guy Ritchie

by Angelo Muredda On my way out of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, I overheard a woman telling her friend that it was “the sort of thing you have to see a second time.” Presumably she meant the intricate scheme by which “Napoleon of Crime” Moriarty (Jared Harris, suitably menacing) seeks to deliver Europe into an early Great War, a mystery so trite that its solution hinges on whether Holmes (Robert Downey Jr., inching dangerously towards Johnny Depp levels of hackdom) can get a hold of his nemesis’s pocketbook. But showing us everything for a second time is very much Ritchie’s M.O. There are about twenty minutes of movie in A Game of Shadows, all told: the rest is instant replay, a shameless parade of alternate angles and slow-motion recaps of bullets firing out of barrels or getting jammed in the process. It’s as if in lieu of the finished product, Ritchie submitted home footage of his own work in the editing suite, dazzled by Final Cut Pro’s array of grey filters and motion blurs.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

May 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand
screenplay by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola
directed by Wes Anderson

by Angelo Muredda In his post-mortem of the 65^th Cannes Film Festival, over which he presided as jury president, Nanni Moretti complained that a number of Competition filmmakers seemed “more in love with their style than with their characters.” Whether Moretti had festival opener and Competition entry Moonrise Kingdom in mind is debatable, but this is the kind of criticism Wes Anderson has faced throughout his career. Moonrise Kingdom won’t win many holdouts over to Anderson’s corner: Those who think he’s spent the last 16 years building dollhouses may snicker from the first sequence, where the camera laterally tracks through an actual dollhouse of a set to find a mid-1960s family sequestered in tiny rooms, parsing their magazines and adventure novels. Those baffled by The Darjeeling Limited‘s juxtaposition of Kinks songs with snippets of Merchant-Ivory and Satyajit Ray scores may also scoff as the camera tracks past a battery-operated record player pushing out Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra,” an educational piece narrated by a disembodied voice that neatly introduces “all the separate parts of the orchestra.” As if to facilitate a no-hard-feelings exit for the unenthused, Anderson telegraphs his aesthetic from the overture.

Last Call at the Oasis (2012)

May 24, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Jesica Yu, based on the book The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud’homme
directed by Jessica Yu

by Angelo Muredda Last Call at the Oasis is the latest casualty of Michael Moore’s success. Like virtually every other North American informational doc with an activist slant since Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, Jessica Yu’s film tackles a serious issue–unequal access to the world’s dangerously finite freshwater supply–with a barrage of animated charts, righteous talking-head interviews, ironically spliced music cues (Johnny Cash’s cover of Bob Nolan’s “Cool Water,” Pink’s “Raise Your Glass”), and archival footage from less enlightened educational fare, in this case 1948’s “The Adventures of Junior Raindrop.” Besides having an obvious facility with these tropes, Yu has her heart in the right place; as with Participant Media’s other non-fiction efforts (among them, An Inconvenient Truth and Waiting for “Superman”), with which this film shares its DNA, the politics are sound, landing firmly on the side of the disenfranchised and the weak, in hopes of bringing attention to what might otherwise be a lost cause. But there comes a point where the deluge of aesthetic shortcuts overwhelms the message, and makes the good work these movies are striving to do seem hopelessly routine.

Men in Black 3 (2012)

May 23, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, United Arab Emirates, Will Smith

**/****
starring Will Smith, Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin, Emma Thompson
screenplay by Etan Cohen, based on the Malibu comic by Lowell Cunningham
directed by Barry Sonnenfeld

by Angelo Muredda That Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men in Black 3 isn’t garbage comes as a surprise ten years after the first terrible sequel, and amidst reports of a troubled shoot that got underway before there was even a screenplay. As detailed in a NEWSWEEK piece on the production, Will Smith’s enormous trailer guzzled fuel and idled for months while the script was hashed out on dirty napkins, looking like a readymade symbol for a lead balloon in the making. Still, that it isn’t the bust it could have been shouldn’t make us too generous towards what’s essentially a bloated and very expensive nostalgia trip not to its setting of 1969 but to the first film’s release year of 1997, a time that’s probably too near to really miss.

Turn Me On, Goddammit (2011)

May 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Norway, Romance, Teen

Få meg på, for faen
(a.k.a. Turn Me On, Dammit!)
***/****
starring Helen Bergsholm, Malin Bjørhovde, Henriette Steenstrup, Beate Støfring
screenplay by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, based on the novel by Olaug Nilssen
directed by Jannicke Systad Jacobsen

by Angelo Muredda Turn Me On, Goddammit opens with a provocation worthy of its title. Our introduction to fifteen-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) finds her on the kitchen floor, masturbating to a phone-sex line (she’s a preferred caller and sort-of friend to operator Stig (Per Kjerstad)) while her dog watches with interest. That’s some hook, but Jannicke Systad Jacobsen’s first dramatic feature after a string of documentaries is at its best when it bypasses this kind of frontal assault and plays to Jacobsen’s strengths, namely her delicate touch with nonprofessional actors and sharp distillation of the gender politics of small-town life. While the film nicely delineates its washed-out setting of Skoddeheimen, a remote mountain village in Norway whose welcome sign kids unfailingly raise a middle-finger to on the bus ride home from school, Jacobsen’s real boon is to capture a spectrum of teens’ sexual attitudes within a hermetically-sealed but still fairly typical environment. While that might make Turn Me On, Goddammit sound like a dry sociological tome, Jacobsen and Bergsholm, in her debut, are adept at making Alma not a blank Norwegian Everygirl but someone who’s credibly starting to cultivate her sexual proclivities in a hostile space.

The Grey (2012) – Blu-ray + DVD

May 14, 20122012, Action, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, Thriller, UK

**½/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney, James Badge Dale
screenplay by Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, based on Jeffers’s short story “Ghost Walker”
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Angelo Muredda The teaser for Joe Carnahan’s The Grey closes with Liam Neeson MacGyver-ing a wolf-punching power glove out of mini-liquor bottles. It’s a great hook, and easily the best trailer of the year. It’s also kind of a lie. To be fair, Carnahan’s latest–after the dreadful one-two (wolfless) punch of Smokin’ Aces and The A-Team–is a career-saving return to form, although Narc was hardly epic stuff. Adapted from a short story by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, The Grey ambitiously aspires to be a Jack London-esque exploration of ruffians fighting for their lives against an unmoved wilderness; tonally, it sits somewhere between the gritty naturalism of “To Build a Fire” and the bros-only philosophical seminar of The Sea-Wolf. Carnahan brings an admirable seriousness to this task and invests his band of rogues with some nice human touches, but there’s a dopiness to this material that doesn’t always pass muster. Watching The Grey‘s arctic powwows between protagonist Ottway (Neeson) and his sad burly men, I was most reminded not of endangered-man potboilers but of The Breakfast Club, which similarly gathers a group of rejects around the high-school equivalent of a makeshift fire for some prime bonding. Slogging through these men’s tales of woe isn’t exactly detention, but eventually, it does start to feel like homework.

Keeping Score: FFC Interviews “Payback” Filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Margaret Atwood

May 10, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Interviews

It’s PAYBACK’s time

March 16, 2012 | The Massey Lectures are as much a Canadian institution as the RCMP, so it’s fitting that I spotted honorary Mountie Paul Gross in the audience of Margaret Atwood’s closing talk back in 2008. Landing at the anxious first crest of the financial crisis, Atwood’s lectures, collected and published as the best-selling Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, were regarded as the latest in the internationally-renowned author’s string of prophesies come true. (The Handmaid’s Tale‘s dystopian vision of an American theocracy that reduces women to reproductive concubines might now be mistaken for Rick Santorum’s four-year prospectus.) Yet Atwood wastes no time in announcing that debt is not in vogue so much as hardwired into human patterns of thinking. Nor does she offer financial advice, playfully following her interest in score-keeping wherever it takes her, whether to the Victorian novel, where a parent’s balance sheet can make or break a marriage, or to how we think about the penance in penitentiaries.

Hot Docs 2012: Loose ends

May 5, 20122012, Australia, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda

The Betrayal (d. Karen Winther): The director returns to her spotty history in this intermittently affecting but mostly flat exercise. Winther combs through old journals and interviews both her parents and former friends in her effort to get to the bottom of a colossally stupid and damaging decision, when she was a troubled 15-year-old, to volunteer her far-left friends’ whereabouts to a known neo-Nazi group. As a portrait of 1990s Oslo’s political bifurcations, the film is fairly compelling, but Winther is maddeningly vague about her ideological inclination in any phase of her life, and her frequent voiceovers about uncovering why she did what she did grate more than they illuminate. In any case, it’s the wrong question. **/**** (Special Presentations)

Hot Docs 2012: The World Before Her (d. Nisha Pahuja)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda The winner of Hot Docs’ Best Canadian Feature award, granted just two weeks after it snagged top doc honours at Tribeca, Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her is a fearless and intricately structured portrait of a nation split down the middle. The film sets out to explore women’s uneasy place in an increasingly modernized and globally inflected but still traditional India by observing how a pair of institutions go about raising girls, and to what end. Pahuja’s riskiest and ultimately smartest move is to juxtapose the personality-making rituals of the Miss India pageant with a Hindu nationalist training camp that prepares young girls to marry young, obey, and take up arms against Muslim and Christian neighbours, should the good fight of a united Hindu nation come to their doorsteps.

Hot Docs 2012: Summer of Giacomo (d. Alessandro Comodin)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Italy

***/****

by Angelo Muredda Conceptually sandwiched somewhere between Maren Ade’s terrific Everyone Else and Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Alessandro Comodin’s Summer of Giacomo is a richly textured portrait of dumb love in the grass, times two. As the lengthy credits of electric blue font superimposed on black and scored to languid birdsong suggest, this is chiefly an aesthetic experience, and Comodin delivers a gorgeously lensed (on 16mm) account of twentyish Giacomo and Stefani’s wayward hike through the countryside in search of a river by which to set up camp for the afternoon. The press notes tell us that Stefani is a childhood friend, but that hardly matters: all that we gather and need to gather is that something might have happened at some point, but outside of this hike, it’s over. What we’re left with, then, apart from their pathfinding and inevitable squabble, is a dense sensory record of the seriously goofy and – this is nicely underplayed – deaf Giacomo’s experience. His cochlear implant is briefly glimpsed in the first over-the-shoulder shot of him clanging randomly at a drum set, and you could happily read the film as an experiment in attending to the sounds, both slight and explosive, that pass through the device en route to his dufus skull.

Hot Docs 2012: Only the Young (ds. Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet)

May 5, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda Like a delicate magic trick, Only the Young is best watched in a state of rapt fascination. An unostentatious feature debut from Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet, the film chronicles a few months in the lives of three impossibly sweet teens in a desert town. Impressively, it does so without signposting major events along the way. Instead, we weave through their relationship and family dramas with only their changing hairstyles as obvious chronological markers, catching everyday lyricism in first car rides and teen girls’ catlike head nudges.

Hot Docs 2012: ¡Vivan Las Antipodas! (d. Victor Kossakovsky)

May 4, 20122012, Argentina, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Chile, Documentary, Film Festivals, Germany, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Netherlands

***½/****

by Angelo Muredda “The world spins, but they’re always below us.” That’s one of the many pearls in Victor Kossakovsky’s ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a high-concept travelogue that fleetly covers four pairs of dry-land spots at exact opposite ends of the earth. The opening epigraph from Lewis Carroll aside, Kossakovsky gravitates to such homespun maxims rather than headier stuff, and the film is all the more dazzling for it – an intoxicating riff on the Looney Tunes bit where Yosemite Sam digs through an outcrop and lands in China. While he’s interested enough in the locals, particularly the source of that comment, two guys who ferry busted cars over their pontoon bridge in Argentina, the director generally turns his Red camera to beautiful images of animal life, fauna, and architecture, weaving strange textures out of his startling juxtapositions between, for instance, a volcanic rock formation in Hawaii and an elephant’s hide in Botswana.

Hot Docs 2012: The Frog Princes (ds. Omar Majeed and Ryan Mullins)

May 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

**/****

by Angelo Muredda The Frog Princes is so big-hearted you wish it had more to say than “way to go.” Copping its framing device from Rushmore, the film shadows a theatre troupe over a few months as it prepares for its debut performance of The Frog and the Princess. The hook is that the performers all have developmental disabilities and are part of an initiative headed by Stephen Snow, a psychotherapist who teaches drama therapy at Concordia. “Steve” to his players, Snow comes across as an amiable guy whose high standards inspire self-confidence and a good work ethic in people from whom society shamefully expects little. There’s joy in seeing actors like cutely named Ray-Man, a young man with Down Syndrome, channel their untapped self-confidence into something tangible. Ray-Man makes a sharp contrast with Tanya, a clinically depressed woman with Prader-Willi Syndrome, whose nastiness and frequent minor meltdowns give the film a welcome edge whenever she’s onscreen.

Hot Docs 2012: Shut Up and Play the Hits (ds. Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern)

May 3, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Music

***/****

by Angelo Muredda “It’s like a sad hipster DJ Revolutionary Road.” That’s recently-retired LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy on first single “Losing My Edge” in Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern’s by turns ebullient and funereal Shut Up and Play the Hits. “Losing My Edge” is one of the dance-rock act’s infamous “position songs.” You could think of it as a hunted gazelle’s lament before the wolves swoop in, masquerading as a thirtysomething’s off-the-cuff recitation of his musical knowledge before a pack of preternaturally all-knowing twentysomethings who are “actually really, really nice.” It’s probably the best example of Murphy’s uncanny ability to position himself at the edge of things – in this case between the accumulated experience of old-school music appreciation (it’s not for nothing that the last LCD album was called This Is Happening) and new digital ways of knowing by downloading in massive quantities. Credit Lovelace and Southern, then, for positioning their film at the same edge, and delivering a concert film of LCD’s last show at Madison Square Garden that’s a self-consciously dead record of a living wake, announcing itself as a funeral even before the credits.

Hot Docs 2012: Who Cares? (d. Rosie Dransfeld)

May 2, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

***/****

by Angelo Muredda A vérité portrait of a group of sex workers in Edmonton, Rosie Dransfeld’s Who Cares? is a sobering and uncondescending look at vulnerable people who work without a safety net on the outskirts of society. The film begins with a pair of police officers on a task force called Project Care, which spearheads other departments’ investigations of sex worker murders by registering the DNA of the living so they can be identified in the event that, as one officer puts it, “something bad should happen.” That’s an alarming concept, and Dransfeld leaves the officer’s euphemism about an intervention that only happens after death hanging uncomfortably. It isn’t that their heart is in the wrong place, the film suggests, as the men express real sympathy and concern for the daily abuse these women face, but that their structural response to the problem leaves these workers invisible and unprotected until they’re gone.

Hot Docs 2012: Finding North (ds. Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson)

May 1, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

**½/**** by Angelo Muredda An incendiary political missive in search of a good movie, Finding North is as frustrating as it is revelatory. Directors Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson come at the problem of hunger in the United States with the statistical acumen of seasoned journalists. Their conceptual scope is expansive, covering everything from the daily struggles of Rosie, a seriously malnourished fifth grader, and Barbie, a single mother of two, to more abstract problems like the federal government’s complicated dance around subsidies for enormous agribusinesses at the expense of local farmers. With the help of some unexpectedly poignant commentary from…