Authors: Angelo Muredda Archives - Page 12 of 13

Hot Docs 2012: Legend of a Warrior (d. Corey Lee)

April 29, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Martial Arts, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Director Corey Lee stages a moving reunion with his infamous but distant father in Legend of a Warrior. As a martial arts grandmaster and lauded trainer famed for ushering former pupil Billy Chau to a kickboxing world championship, Frank Lee spent his son’s formative years in gyms, training surrogate children while Corey went largely unattended. Now his son is trying to reconnect, relocating to the elder Lee’s Edmonton gym for a rigorous five-month training program that will submerge him in his charismatic father’s world while taking him away from his own young children. What follows is both an observational record of that process and a subtle father-son melodrama, punctuated by animated interludes that turn Frank’s early days in Canada and youth in Hong Kong into a comic-strip biography.

Hot Docs 2012: She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column (d. Kevin Hegge)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda A few minutes into Kevin Hegge’s long-gestating She Said Boom: The Story of Fifth Column, a critic calls the titular feminist post-punk act an art band that wasn’t necessarily arty. That sounds like an interesting distinction, but it’s also as far as the idea goes in a doc that almost makes up in enthusiasm what it lacks in depth. Hegge sets a fast pace, and the early history of intellectual centre and drummer GB Jones and lead singer Caroline Azar’s collaboration nicely establishes their dynamic of cryptic rock deity and big-sweatered frontwoman, with plenty of footage of…

Hot Docs 2012: The Boxing Girls of Kabul (d. Ariel Nasr)

April 28, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

by Angelo Muredda Ariel Nasr’s The Boxing Girls of Kabulopens with clandestine footage of an execution in Kabul’s Olympic Stadium, where members of the Taliban force a woman to crawl before shooting her at close-range. That image haunts the alternately uplifting and sobering narrative that follows, which shadows the faltering Olympic hopes of a trio of young female boxers in a country where patriarchal attitudes toward women, particularly athletes, range from mild acceptance to violent hostility. This is a vibrant film, coloured by the verve of its protagonists, Shahla and siblings Sadaf and Shabnam, who speak candidly about their progressive values and their anxieties about the precariousness of their position amidst threats of assault and kidnapping. They’re presented as jocks, so it’s especially jarring when their future turns out to depend less on their athleticism than on the volatile political conditions of their country and its stance on the rights of women.

Hot Docs 2012: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (d. Alison Klayman)

April 27, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Like Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb’s vital This is Not a Film, Ai Weiwei: Never Sorrydelights in capturing its dissident subject lounging in the company of animals. Panahi has his iguana, which roams the Tehran high-rise to which he’s been confined by Iranian authorities, and Ai, a target of systematic harassment by the Chinese government, has his cats, one of whose ability to open doors mystifies him. By framing Ai in this domestic scene, director Alison Klayman finds warmth in an artist recognized for his compulsive refusal to comply with draconian authority – see, for instance, the series of photos where he smashes ancient pots and strategically places his middle finger in front of cultural landmarks. Situating Ai as a cat man might seem precious, but Klayman is also doing sly political work here. She’s demystifying an avowed radical, and showing (without telling) how his oppositional stance to the government in projects like a multi-year effort to catalogue the students who died in 2008’s Sichuan earthquake due to shoddily constructed buildings are born not of snark but out of a real respect for individuals, be they undocumented students or pets.

Hot Docs 2012: Wildness (d. Wu Tsang)

April 26, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda “They call me Silver Platter.” That's the opening salvo of Wu Tsang’s Wildness, which hands its narrating duties off to the so-named bar in the East end of Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, a safe space for undocumented Latina trans women that turns into a largely cissexual queer hipster party called Wildness on Tuesday nights. It’s a bumpy ride from there. Tsang, the performance artist who started Wildness, smartly establishes MacArthur Park as a palimpsest, constantly transformed by waves of gentrification, economic collapse, and immigration. (That none of these terms are spelled out is also nice.) He brings the same consideration to the complex history of the Silver Platter, attending even-handedly at first to the owners and to the bar’s shifting clientele.

Hot Docs 2012: The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche (d. Maya Gallus)

April 26, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Newmarket-born author Mazo de la Roche hit the big leagues in 1927 when her third novel Jalna, the first entry in a lucrative sixteen-part series, won a $10 000 award from the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. In terms of prestige – particularly Canadians’ favourite sort, the kind that’s granted from elsewhere – you could think of her boon alongside Yann Martel’s Booker win in 2002, which similarly propelled a relatively unappreciated home-grown talent to international literary celebrity. But few people make the connection these days, or read de la Roche at all. Maya Gallus’s playful docudrama The Mystery of Mazo de la Roche does a good job of redressing this lacuna. Through a mixture of dramatic re-enactments with actress Severn Thompson, bitterly funny interviews with de la Roche’s adopted daughter, and talking head testimony from Canadian authors Susan Swan and Marie-Claire Blais, the film situates de la Roche both within her early celebrity in Canada and within the larger cosmopolitan movements of first wave feminism and modernism, with which she was loosely allied.

Hot Docs 2012: Bones Brigade: An Autobiography (d. Stacy Peralta)

April 25, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012, Sports

Stacy Peralta returns to skateboarding culture with mixed results in Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. A sort of sequel to Dogtown and Z-Boys, which focused on his mates in early 1970s crew Zephyr, Peralta’s new film turns to the titular group of talented young misfits that he and business partner George Powell recruited in 1978, who went on to dominate the sport for the next decade. Like Dogtown, this is a likeable memory box of a movie, which briskly mixes up talking head interviews with scratchy archival footage and snapshots visibly manipulated by the director’s own hand. Peralta has a knack for converting alternative social history into this strangely effective hybrid of MTV and family album aesthetics. His firsthand experience and easy conversance with his subjects – who sometimes boyishly narrate his past actions to him with the kind of reverence guys usually reserve for dads and deities – makes for a good hook, and certainly there are worse tour guides through skater culture than a scrappy Jeff Daniels doppelgänger. Still, for an autobiography, this enthusiastic campfire reunion can feel cursory, especially at a bloated two-hour running time.

Hot Docs 2012: Ballroom Dancer (ds. Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed)

April 25, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2012

by Angelo Muredda Early in Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom Dancer, we see 33-year-old Russian ballroom dancing champion Slavik tell his students that a dance between two people is an everyday story, not a big drama. The goal, he tells them, is to get on the other person’s wavelength. Slavik’s lesson is taken by Bonke and Koefoed’s film, which strives to get on the physical and emotional wavelengths of an aging artist who can’t get back to his salad days with former partner and reigning champion Joanna. His training sequences with new (younger) partner and lover Anna are rendered in dynamic camera movements that position the spectator as a surrogate partner in their tense mating dance, which yields disappointing results in competition. The filmmakers find a way to capture less obviously visually charged moments as well, framing Slavik and Anna in two-shots that emphasize their distance from one another even as they share the same space: Anna seems always to be hovering in the background on her Blackberry, eager for a window out. Slavik’s journey is a tricky one, then – a quest for self-mastery negotiated with another person who has her own set of goals.

Damsels in Distress (2012)

April 19, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Greta Gerwig, Adam Brody, Analeigh Tipton, Megan Echikunwoke
written and directed by Whit Stillman

Damsels in Distress is a hard movie to sink your teeth into–a stick of gum soaked in brine. Whit Stillman’s first effort since 1998’s The Last Days of Disco, it’s a light-headed fantasia that’s committed to its gonzo vision, best expressed by a character who calls her favourite soap scent “very precise.” Very precise, indeed: Less wealthy than Metropolitan‘s socialites, Damsels‘ cadre of female sophomores breathe even more rarefied air. Though each actress works her peculiar cadence into these pronouncements to uncanny effect, they seem possessed by their creator even more than is typical for Stillman’s characters, genteelly handling accusations of hypocrisy with defenses like, “We are all flawed. Must that render us mute to the flaws of others?” Stillman’s rigorously formal dialogue is always a trial-by-fire for actors–easily passed in Last Days by Kate Beckinsale, for example, but stumbled over by Matt Keesler, who looks embarrassed to identify as a “loyal adherent to the disco movement”–but something’s different this time. Always accused of being hermetic but usually too enamoured with other people’s ephemera (e.g., collections of Scrooge McDuck memorabilia) for that to be true, this time he’s properly set up shop in the projection booth at the back of his mind.

The Deep Blue Sea (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Theatrical, UK

***½/****
starring Rachel Weisz, Tom Hiddleston, Simon Russell Beale
screenplay by Terence Davies, based on the play by Terence Rattigan
directed by Terence Davies

In Of Time and the City, Terence Davies's self-described love song and eulogy for his native Liverpool, the director halts his psycho-geographic walking-tour of old haunts at one point to pay backhanded tribute to the Merseybeat movement. With the meteoric rise of The Beatles, he pronounces in sulky baritone, the well-crafted love songs on which he was weaned became, overnight, as antiquated as curling tongs. Yet just as abruptly as pop turned beat, the young Davies went another way: "I discovered Mahler," he drawls, "and responded completely to his every overwrought note." Davies's studiously unfashionable gravitation to the Romantic, largely for its affinities with the torch songs he so recently mourned, finds apt expression in his sixth feature, a beautifully overripe adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea. Like its source, the film chronicles the misfortunes of Hester (Rachel Weisz), a judge's wife in postwar London who leaves her cerebral older spouse, William (Simon Russell Beale), for sexual fulfilment with wastrel Royal Air Force pilot Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), and subsequently finds herself unloved and in limbo. Only a recent convert to such reckless emotional indulgence, Hester, when we meet her, is very much the Mahler sort. Despite its apparent distance from more clearly autobiographical films like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, then, Davies is an ideal steward for this material–every bit as attentive to matters of exquisite sadness as his protagonist.

High Chicago (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

**/****
starring Colin Salmon, Karen LeBlanc, Fulvio Cecere, Michael Xavier
screenplay by Robert Adetuyi
directed by Alfons Adetuyi

There's a nice bit in Alfons Adetuyi's debut feature High Chicago where gambler and aspiring cinema proprietor Sam (Colin Salmon) screens Ralph Nelson's Lilies of the Field for his wife (Karen LeBlanc) at a deserted drive-in theatre. The Sidney Poitier star vehicle, about a roving handyman who stops at an Arizona farm and meets a group of nuns who are convinced he's been divinely commissioned to build them a chapel, is a smart intertext for a movie about a man on his own quixotic journey to build a drive-in theatre in Africa, not least because Poitier's performance earned him the first competitive Oscar for an African-American man. This isn't the only time the film, set in 1975, recalls important milestones in black popular culture: Sam's slow-motion, funk-inflected entrance to the poker table in the opening scene sets him up as a contemporary of figures like Richard Roundtree and Ken Norton, while his high-stakes gambling spree is scored to Fela Kuti's "Let's Start." It's the most compelling example, though, because it rises above blank name-checking and provides sorely-needed context to a narrative that too often trades on clichés about gamblers going for one last game. There's probably a good movie to be made from the outline of brother Robert Adetuyi's screenplay, and surely something interesting about this yearning to trace a lineage of black entrepreneurial spirit starting from Poitier–an obvious target, but why not?–yet High Chicago settles short of the goal.

Fightville (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

***/****
directed by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein

A few minutes into Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Fightville, we see a couple of young MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) trainees wrestling in the stark confines of a shithole tucked away in a Louisiana strip-mall. The gym's popping red-on-white colour scheme resembles nothing so much as the Space Station V lounge, but the weirdest thing might be the (unseen) stereo blasting Falco's "Rock Me Amadeus" to set the mood. Tucker and Epperlein have a good eye and ear for this strange minutiae, and it's this low-key humanity that makes their follow-up to more sombre, Iraq-centered docs like How to Fold a Flag and Gunner Palace as compelling as it is. While an early backstage glimpse of bandaged wrists and wastebaskets overflowing with bloodied paper towels suggests a high-minded melodrama about the corporeal cost of fighting for a living (think The Wrestler), the filmmakers thankfully turn out to be much more interested in the daily grind that a commitment to the sport entails.

Footnote (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Israel, Theatrical

Hearat Shulayim
***/****
starring Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi
written and directed by Joseph Cedar

by Angelo Muredda Joseph Cedar’s Footnote (Hearat Shulayim) begins with what looks like a son’s loving tribute to his intellectual origins. Rising to accept his invitation to the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities, slick Talmud scholar Uriel Scholnik (Lior Ashkenazi) waxes reverent about the professional example set by his uncompromising father, Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba), himself a Talmud scholar who spent the better part of his adult years toiling away on textual variants observed in microfiche while his son cut his teeth on high theory. We stay tight on Eliezer, his head bowed and his mouth locked in a grimace, as his son tells an anecdote about a survey he had to fill out as a primary student, identifying his father’s profession. “Say that I’m a teacher,” the younger Scholnik recalls Eliezer saying, portraying a man at once too modest to own up to his repute as a philologist and fixated on the pedagogical value of his work–an obsession Uriel claims to have happily inherited.

Payback (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Theatrical

***½/****
written and directed by Jennifer Baichwal, based on Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood

by Angelo Muredda Midway through Payback, Jennifer Baichwal's fifth feature documentary, we're given an alarming overhead view of the Gulf of Mexico after the BP oil spill. At first, all we see is a dark pool of water, but before long a sickly orange substance starts tracking left through it, nearly filling the frame. The orange stuff, we're told, is chemical dispersant, and its job is to both break up the oil slick and push it below the surface, whatever the cost to the animal and plant life that happens to already be there. Not least for the way it suggests a scale that's been thrown out of balance, it's a striking visual metaphor for Baichwal's subject, which is the impossible work of translation we undertake whenever we try to square intangible debts with material payouts–in this case, dispersing oil with toxic chemicals. As one commentator points out, it'll be decades before we know just how large the ecological debt we've amassed as a result of the Gulf spill is–and even then, to think of it in terms of dues paid is to forget that dead fish can't cash cheques.

Being Elmo (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Constance Marks

My 2-year-old nephew's favourite YouTube video is a "Sesame Street" clip where Elmo's birthday card to fellow monster Rosita is swept away by the wind. It's a bizarre little skit, devoid of anything like closure or uplift, but the nephew gets caught up in it every time. He narrates, tearing up and saying, "Oh no!" as Elmo does, and asking where the card went, though he already knows. Then it ends, and he promptly demands, "Again." I didn't know what to make of this at first, but my sense, watching Constance Marks's Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, is that the titular red guy is a sort of Everykid for preschoolers, feeling what they feel. The film charts Kevin Clash's impressive rise from inner-city Baltimore puppeteer to one of Jim Henson's trusted collaborators. It's a straightforward and strictly chronological account, beginning with his preteen years of making puppets out of his dad's trench coats and following him through to his work on "Captain Kangaroo," Labyrinth, and most importantly "Sesame Street." Long-time Muppet ally Whoopi Goldberg is our throughline, narrating in her sweetest story time voice and telling us things like, "One of Kevin's first characters was Hoots the Owl!" as we see, well, Hoots the Owl.

Project X (2012)

April 17, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Teen, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Thomas Mann, Oliver Cooper, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Dax Flame
screenplay by Matt Drake and Michael Bacall
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

by Angelo Muredda With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow made the case for the producer as auteur–a spiritual godparent to screenwriters' Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumulo's every deferred comedic beat. It's only taken one try–the perfunctorily- titled, written, and staged Project X–but Todd Philips can now claim the same, to everyone's great detriment. Late in the game, protagonist Thomas's dad surveys the wreckage of his vanilla son's soiree and says, with something like pride, "I didn't think you had it in you." It's a callback to the strained thematic machinations of The Hangover Part II, where straight-laced Stu (Ed Helms) recognizes he has a "demon" in him, and if that makes him a horrible spouse, then so be it. While Project X is suffused with the same deep misogyny and awe before Dionysian dickishness as its producer's directorial work, it's also a testament to Helms's grounded performance as those films' mild-mannered demon-in-wait–and proof of how unsustainable Philips's poisonous alchemy is in the hands of the truly useless. That would be first-time director Nima Nourizadeh, who has no instinct for narrative, characterization, or composition, and whose licentious camera unfailingly roves up the skirt of every 18-year-old extra lassoed in what the press notes eerily call a "nationwide talent search." Woe and hilarious Taser gags to anyone who searches for talent here.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (2011)

April 17, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, France, Theatrical

Les neiges du Kilimandjaro
**½/****
starring Ariane Ascaride, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Gérard Meylan, Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet
screenplay by Jean-Louis Milesi and Robert Guédiguian
directed by Robert Guédiguian

by Angelo Muredda Committed leftist Robert Guédiguian's newest film The Snows of Kilimanjaro opens with a lottery. The local Marseilles shipyard is set to lay off twenty workers, and faithful union leader Michel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) has been entrusted with carrying out the draw, eventually calling out even his own name–entered voluntarily despite his privileged position. The titular snows refer not to the Hemingway short story of the same name but to a popular song recited at Michel's premature retirement party, a paean to the middle-class luxuries of touring the world in one's golden years and a good fit for the African vacation his friends have ordered for him and his wife, Marie-Claire (Ariana Ascaride, excellent). Alas, before the couple gets its due, Michel's unionist chickens come home to roost in the form of a humiliating robbery of the travel fund later that evening, which could only have been committed by one of the party's guests–likely one of the unfortunate nineteen other names he called out earlier that week.

A Man Escaped (1956)

April 17, 2012****/****, 1950s, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, France, Theatrical

Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut
****/****
starring François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod
written and directed by Robert Bresson

by Angelo Muredda “This is a true story. I’ve told it as it happened, unadorned. –Robert Bresson.” So begins A Man Escaped, with a handwritten statement of purpose that throws down a gauntlet to itself. Based on the memoirs of French Resistance member André Devigny (here rechristened Fontaine (François Letterier)), who escaped from Lyon’s Fort Montluc prison just hours prior to his execution, the film delivers on its ambitious promise. It stays faithful to this claim to tell the story unadorned except with the light garnish of Fontaine’s cool descriptions of the task before him–really an ever-unfolding expanse of smaller tasks like chipping away at a doorframe with a spoon over a month’s time. Its focus is almost strictly on matters technical, to the point where even its spiritual ruminations spring organically out of moments of real labour. When a fellow prisoner’s escape attempt is undone by his overeager hope for his next life to begin, he passes his knowledge of the precise spot he went wrong onto Fontaine with the solemnity of a wizened gamer delivering an annotated walkthrough to a novice. If these men are going to be reborn, we’re assured, it’ll only be by their own hands.

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 6, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Christmas, Comedy, DVD

**/**** Image B Sound B Extras D
starring John Cho, Kal Penn, Danny Trejo, Neil Patrick Harris
screenplay by Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg
directed by Todd Strauss-Schulson

by Angelo Muredda The funniest moment in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas lasts about three seconds and comes at the end of a barrage of trite digs at the Occupy Wall Street movement that could have been written by Herman Cain at the height of his powers of lucidity. Harold (John Cho), who over the course of these movies has graduated from restless investment banker to high-rolling trader, has just been given a 3D TV that's promised to "make Avatar look Avatarded," and he's about to leave the office through a mass of protestors when Princeton pal-turned-assistant Ken (Bobby Lee) begs to take the bullet for him. The bullet turns out to be a bunch of eggs, launched at the screen at various speeds and from various angles in the first of at least a dozen meta-3D gags that are supposed to be hilarious because having things thrown at you in 3D sucks. It's a shock when the shot of the aftermath is actually pretty good: poor Ken lies traumatized (or dead?) in a pool of yolk as a Lisa Gerrard knockoff wails incomprehensibly on the soundtrack, à la Black Hawk Down.

J. Edgar (2011) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

February 6, 20122011, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD, Romance

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Naomi Watts, Armie Hammer, Judi Dench
screenplay by Dustin Lance Black
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda To say that latter-day Clint Eastwood is an acquired taste seems slightly inaccurate, in that it implies a certain consistency on both the filmmaker's and the viewer's part: while even Invictus and the "Touched by an Angel" outtake Hereafter have their fans, you don't find many of them championing, say, the delirious Europop ballads that punctuate the former. ("And it's not just a game/They can't throw me away/I put all I had on the line," sings a mysterious crooner whose song is played in toto as Mandela descends his helicopter and paces the rugby field.) So let's propose instead that the master of sepia's recent output has been rather like a series of inkblots, in which perfectly smart people have seen completely different things. Some, for instance, find much to admire in the simultaneously milquetoast and monstrous Million Dollar Baby, which I've always read as Eastwood's last laugh at disability-rights activists for a failed lawsuit involving an inaccessible inn he ran years prior; others dismiss Gran Torino, his most watchable film since Unforgiven, as a rare spot of trash. All of this is to say, rather sheepishly, that I kind of liked fusty old J. Edgar, even as I recognized it as a train-wreck throughout. People have been very kind to Eastwood in this restless period, calling his choice of projects as disparate as Changeling and Letters from Iwo Jima "varied," but it's only with J. Edgar that I've understood their spirit of generosity: It's such a chameleonic grab-bag of ideas, good and bad, that some of it can't help but appeal, regardless of whether the entire thing works. (It doesn't.)