TIFF ’14: Nightcrawler

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

Nightcrawler

**½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Riz Ahmed, Bill Paxton
written and directed by Dan Gilroy

by Angelo Muredda What would we do without Jake Gyllenhaal, who’s grounded every self-serious and thinly-sketched high-concept Movie About Something he’s appeared in since Rendition at least? The committed star pulls off the same magic trick to even more impressive effect than usual with Nightcrawler, Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut after toiling away as a screenwriter on less pedigreed fare like Real Steel and Two for the Money as well as big brother Tony’s most recent Bourne franchise effort. The Nightcrawler partisans–and they’ll be numerous and vocal–will likely downplay such hacky origins along with the filial leg-up that producer Tony no doubt provided. (How many first-timers get to work with DP Robert Elswit?) But why should they when Gilroy’s own film is about nothing so much as the corrosive effects crony capitalism wreaks on that heretofore-unsatirized American institution (certainly not covered more intelligently and presciently by a nearly forty-year-old film whose title rhymes with get work) of headline news?

TIFF ’14: Maps to the Stars

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, TIFF

Mapstothestars

*½/****
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bill Chambers There’s something vaguely pathetic about Bruce Wagner continuing to write these Los Angeles tapestries that send up the movie business, since his Hollywood career peaked in the early-’90s (and the vision of these satires is ossified thereabouts). And getting David Cronenberg–someone so insularly Canadian, and probably the last filmmaker to pore over the trades–to direct one of them is lunacy, albeit potentially inspired in the way that getting a German to helm Paris, Texas was. Indeed, though, Maps to the Stars is the blind leading the blind, taking place in an obsolete world where Carrie Fisher, playing herself, is some kind of industry gatekeeper and a remake of an old black-and-white melodrama is the hottest project in town. Fresh off the bus from Florida, the mysterious, lightly-disfigured Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) arrives in L.A. with an ally in Fisher, who helps get her a job as the personal assistant to high-maintenance Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore), an actress haunted by both her own former glory and the superstardom of her late mother (Cronenberg’s paper-doll muse Sarah Gadon). Havana has regular, sexually-charged sessions with self-help guru Dr. Stafford Weiss (John Cusack), father of teen sensation Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), a nightmare of Bieberian entitlement who, like Havana, has lately been receiving unwelcome visitations from the dead.

Telluride ’14: ’71

Posted in****/****, 2014, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK, War

'71

****/****
starring Jack O’Connell, Paul Anderson, Richard Dormer, Sean Harris
screenplay by Gregory Burke
directed by Yann Demange

by Walter Chaw I’m old and stupid enough to have contextualized the “Troubles,” the armed conflict in Northern Ireland between the Catholics and Protestants, the IRA and the Brits, into a few U2 songs and that Paul Greengrass movie named after the same incident as…um, that one U2 song. I believed it was a tense period marked by a few unpleasant incidents. Yann Demange’s debut feature ’71 has shown me exactly how ignorant I’ve been of recent history, with a film he himself describes as an excoriation of our propensity, across nations and time, for sending our young men off to fight “dirty” wars. It’s absolutely harrowing, and it provides no respite to its tension. The best type of history, it’s alive and vital, thought-provoking and utterly, dispiritingly familiar. It reminded me a lot of Gallipoli; and as with Gallipoli, I feel like ’71 will be the moment a young actor (Jack O’Connell this time) becomes a star. It’s brilliantly shot, smart, and brutal. I went in it not knowing a thing about the film or what it portrayed and left a true believer.

TIFF ’14: Ned Rifle

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Road Movie, TIFF

Nedrifle

***/****
written and directed by Hal Hartley

by Bill Chambers The third, shortest, and presumably final entry in an improbable film series of seesawing returns, Hal Hartley’s Ned Rifle is the religious component of a triptych that has thus far loosely tackled Art (Henry Fool) and Politics (Fay Grim). Titular Ned (Liam Aiken) is the offspring of drifter Casanova Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan) and hapless Fay Grim (Parker Posey), the latter of whom begins this movie in prison as a result of Henry’s antics, consigning Ned to the care of a reverend (Martin Donovan) and his family. Wanting to biblically avenge his mother, Ned follows a trail of breadcrumbs back to his deadbeat dad; yes, the film has the same basic quest premise as Fay Grim, though it takes the form of an askew It Happened One Night this time instead of another globetrotting “Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?” journey. Ned’s interloping travelling companion is Susan (Aubrey Plaza–not a fan, but she curtails her most irritating mannerisms here, and looks dynamite), a grad student with a hidden agenda that somehow entails writing her thesis on the poetry of Simon Grim (James Urbaniak) and ghost-authoring Fay’s memoirs. (“Susan’s brilliant, and she’s a good person, but she’s totally fucked-up,” Simon warns Ned. He could be describing any Hal Hartley protagonist.) A God-fearing Born-again, Ned fends off what he perceives as her advances, but he bristles with jealousy once they track down Henry at a mental hospital and she becomes drawn into his father’s orbit, like so many before her.

Telluride ’14: Showcase for shorts

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, France, Short Films, Telluride, Telluride 2014, UK

Tellshorts2014

Toutes des connes **/**** (France, 6 mins., d. François Jaros) Recently redubbed Life’s a Bitch, Toutes des connes is a fitfully-engaging relationship dramedy composed of a few dozen ultra-shorts featuring a guy (scriptor Guillaume Lambert) who breaks up with his girlfriend, goes through stages of grief and acceptance, then gets back together with the girl. It’s well done for what it is, but it feels like it needed half the time to be what it is. Toutes des connes doesn’t do anything surprising or innovative, announcing itself conspicuously as a calling-card film for director Jaros. Yes, I see that you can shoot and edit, though the grieving dude with the shaving-creamed face staring at the mirror thing was funnier in Raising Arizona.

TIFF ’14: Waste Land

Posted in2014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Belgium, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

Wasteland

**/****
written and directed by Pieter Van Hees

by Bill Chambers Ominously chaptered after the weeks in a pregnancy, Waste Land begins with an encouraging but deceptive touch of absurdity, as Brussels homicide detective Leo Woeste (Jérémie Renier) placidly stands in for the victim at a nauseatingly fresh crime scene while the addled perpetrator tries to reconstruct the murder for a forensics team. Leo’s next case, involving the occult-related death of a young Congolese immigrant, coincides with wife Kathleen (the appropriately-named Natali Broods) announcing she’s with child–her second, Leo’s first–and planning on aborting it due to her husband’s grim attachment to his profession. He goads her into keeping it by pledging to quit the force once he’s through with this latest investigation, but it proves an unreasonable vortex that soon has him becoming infatuated with the dead man’s sister (Babetida Sadjo) and going off the grid, as well as the proverbial deep end.

Telluride ’14: Rosewater

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Rosewater

*½/****
starring Gael García Bernal, Kim Bodnia, Haluk Bilginer, Shoreh Aghdashloo
screenplay by Jon Stewart, based on the book Then They Came for Me by Maziar Bahari
directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s hyphenate debut Rosewater, based on briefly-imprisoned Iranian-born Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari’s memoir Then They Came For Me, is painfully earnest, suffering from the first-timer disease of being both unimaginatively shot and laboriously About Something. It’s a message movie, and there’s no crime in that, but it’s laid out so carefully that any sense of tension–or drama, really–is sapped out of it, simplifying its message to the point of inconsequence and, eventually, making the picture vulnerable to mockery. Rosewater is one of those movies that makes you cringe because although you believe in its politics, it isn’t helping the cause. Consider the moment where one of Bahari’s jailers cracks wise about Abu Ghraib because America, see, is just as bad as Iran, maybe in many ways: I was distracted by the moist sound of 1,200 eyes rolling at the same time. It also doesn’t help that this issue film casts Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as Iranian-Canadian Bahari. This “best actor for the role” nonsense has to have a limit, lest Daniel Day-Lewis one day play Martin Luther King; this Christmas, Leonardo DiCaprio is Buddha. Chill out, we’re post-racial, brah! Rosewater is the kind of shit that gives liberals a bad name, and for as much as I like and often admire “The Daily Show”, it’s very much the movie the host of “The Daily Show” would make.

Telluride ’14: Two Days, One Night

Posted in****/****, 2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Directors: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Twodaysonenight

Deux jours, une nuit
****/****
starring Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Pili Groyne, Simon Caudry
written and directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

by Walter Chaw Somewhere in the middle of the Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night, Sandra (Marion Cotillard), trying to convince her sixteen co-workers to vote to allow her to keep her job at the expense of a bonus of one thousand euros, accuses her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) of turning off the radio because the song is too sad and he fears she’s too fragile for it. She turns it back on. It’s Petula Clark’s French-language cover of Jackie DeShannon’s “Needles and Pins,” “La Nuit N’en Finit Plus.” Shot in the Dardennes style, close and over the shoulder, Sandra looks at Manu slyly for a second, pumps up the volume, and laughs. Cotillard is disarming, as always, and she’s so natural in this moment–in all of the film, but in this moment in particular. It’s stunning. Her Sandra is absolutely compelling throughout. Her victories are ecstatic; her defeats are deflating. About an hour in, I realized that Two Days, One Night is a fable–a literal one, with a heroine undergoing a series of trials, forced to say the same things like a Belgian Bartleby to a sequence of different people in different situations. Even her exit line at the end of every encounter (“Thank you, goodbye”) is identical each time. It’s through this repetition that the film finds a rhythm, sure, but also room for Sandra to learn and for Two Days, One Night to paint as complete and sympathetic a picture of depression as there’s ever been.

Telluride ’14: Foxcatcher

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Sports, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller

Foxcatcher

***½/****
starring Steve Carell, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Vanessa Redgrave
screenplay by E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman
directed by Bennett Miller

by Walter Chaw Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher is timely because of its excoriation of the 1%–and timeless because of the care with which it handles relationships between men, and between men and their mothers. It has faith in its audience in a way that’s rare and always has been, leaving wide swaths of exposition buried in glances and gestures, making itself into something that’s very much like the amateur wrestling it ably recreates in the film. It’s a big movie composed of subtle movements; it’s reticent. It’s also grounded by unbelievable performances from Mark Ruffalo, an actor I really like who’s never been better; and Channing Tatum, who reduces himself to a pure distillation of his masculinity and will probably be underestimated as a result. An early moment with Ruffalo and Tatum–playing Olympic champion wrestlers and brothers Dave and Mark Schultz, respectively–as they train in a dingy little college gym, is grim and wordless, bloody and violent, and capped by Dave cuffing his little brother and asking for a hug as he drops him off. It’s brotherhood in its intimate complexity in just a few gestures.

Telluride ’14: The Imitation Game

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014, Thriller, UK, War

Imitationgame

**½/****
starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear
screenplay by Graham Moore
directed by Morten Tyldum

by Walter Chaw Benedict Cumberbatch is amazing, truly, in Morten Tyldum’s better version of A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game. Based on the life of logician and mathematician Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park genius who broke the Enigma code but was later pilloried for his homosexuality, the film is conventional in every way save Cumberbatch, who, frankly, had never particularly appealed to me before now. His Turing is clearly (to a guy in the middle of all this sudden awareness of Autism) somewhere on the Autism spectrum, incapable of building relationships and understanding metaphors, making him the perfect person, in his (mis)understanding of the world, to break codes. All language and every subtlety of human interaction is a puzzle for him, you see; breaking the unbreakable German Enigma cipher is simply another of the same variety. The Imitation Game, however, is crystal clear, lockstep in narrative and exposition and careful to leave no child behind as it explains how Turing and his team of irregulars managed to build the first computer and defeat the Nazi war machine by intercepting its communications. At the end, its message is the same as The Incredibles‘, though housed in a far more conventional motor: different is good, and you shouldn’t criminalize homosexuality, because what if a gay guy is the saviour of the free world and you just chemically-castrated him and caused him to kill himself? As messages go, that’s not a tough one to get behind.

Telluride ’14: Wild

Posted in2014, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Wild

**/****
starring Reese Witherspoon, Thomas Sadoski, Michiel Huisman, Laura Dern
screenplay by Nick Hornby, based on the novel by Cheryl Strayed
directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

by Walter Chaw Wild is exactly what you think it will be and is that for what feels like forever. It’s the inspirational true story of smack-addicted party girl Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon), who, after reading a lot of well-known volumes of collected verse, cleans out an REI store and sets out to walk the PCT up the Western coast. And she likes Snapple. Yeah, it’s a commercial about regaining white privilege after trying to give it away, complete with more rapey moments than expected. That’s not fair: Cheryl doesn’t so much give her privilege away as indulge in the perks of it to the point where a trio of hale, happy-go-lucky trail-bums dub her the “Queen of the PCT” for all the favours and special treatment she receives along the way. It also takes time for Cheryl to thank REI for being her most favouritest corporation ever for replacing her faulty boots, so that happened.

Telluride ’14: Birdman

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Birdman

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
*/****
starring Michael Keaton, Zach Galifianakis, Edward Norton, Andrea Riseborough
screenplay Alejandro González Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris, Jr. & Armando Bo
directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

by Walter Chaw A benighted, gangly thing midway between a mid-life crisis Black Swan and the Noises Off version of Brazil, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman is the lonesome yawp of a limited, one-trick-pony given now to defensiveness and self-consciousness. Assailing the tale of a washed-up former mega-star of superhero blockbusters, Riggan Thompson (Michael Keaton, check), who's trying to gain a measure of self-respect on Broadway in a Raymond Carver adaptation he wrote, directed, and is starring in, the picture doesn't do anything it doesn't warn us about first and then apologize for after. It covers the three preview performances leading to opening night in one, digitally-unbroken take, making room along the way for Method asshole Michael Shiner (Method asshole Edward Norton)–who steals both the play Birdman is about and the play-within-a-play conceit of the movie by stealing the movie–and tons of narrative melodramatics, including a neurotic leading lady (Naomi Watts), Riggan's burnout daughter (Emma Stone), and his stressed-out lawyer/manager (Zach Galifianakis). The whole story roils with desperation and disappointment, and the film-as-object does the same–the transparency between those two things (cine-reality and sad-truth-of-it reality) cited repeatedly in the screenplay-by-committee in exhausting, self-abnegating fashion. Birdman is an incredible bore. The closest analogue in feel is Todd Solondz's unfortunate riposte to his detractors, Storytelling, but at least that one wasn't all tarted up in attention-grabbing technical pandering. Birdman is about as clever as that Blues Traveler song: the tedious offense of idiots calling you an idiot.

Telluride ’14: Second Variety or: An Introduction

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2014

Tell1

by Walter Chaw You get into trouble when you expect the things you love the most in your life to be the salvation for bad choices. I was in a job last year that I hated. It paid well, and I took the money without thinking over-much that it was money for lying to people who trusted and respected me so they would continue to be productive for an organization that didn’t care about them. I was good at this. To quiet the little voices that began to fray around the edges of “everything I’m supposed to do,” I taught, and I wrote, and I identified myself as a writer and a critic and a teacher whenever someone asked me what I did. I came to Telluride last year at the invitation of a friend at a point where I thought of suicide a lot and couldn’t figure out why exactly that was. I didn’t review much anymore. I didn’t want to watch movies. I didn’t know what made me happy–I didn’t understand why nothing made me happy. Then there was the attendant self-loathing where you realize you have it made and shouldn’t you just stop complaining?

Hot Docs ’14: The Overnighters

Posted in2000s, 2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Hotdocsovernighters

***/****
directed by Jesse Moss

by Angelo Muredda The intersection of the financial crisis and the North Dakota oil boom has turned Williston, ND into an unlikely mecca in the past few years. The influx of unemployed men who’ve left their homes for a new, thoroughly American, and probably-doomed shot at redemption on the oil fields is the subject of Jesse Moss’s Sundance-feted The Overnighters, a complex look at how this mass exodus and uneasy resettlement has brought the residents of Williston to the limits of their compassion and brotherly love. The film focuses on the Herculean efforts of pastor Jay Reinke, who has turned his church into a makeshift home base for the new arrivals–to the chagrin of the facility’s neighbours, who are skeptical about the men’s scruffy appearance and possible criminal backgrounds, and the open hostility of the town newspaper, which wages war on Reinke’s new congregation by publishing a list of former sex offenders harboured in the church as well as in the pastor’s own home.

Hot Docs ’14: Joy of Man’s Desiring

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Hotdocsjoy

Que ta joie demeure
***/****
directed by Denis Côté

by Angelo Muredda Although it’s set in a factory rather than a zoo, Denis Côté’s Joy of Man‘s Desiring makes a fitting companion piece to his own Bestiaire. Where the minimalist, formally austere Quebec filmmaker’s previous documentary unfolded through a series of static frontal tableaux featuring animals displaced into some rather unnatural habitats, surrounded by bars and cages (the most extreme one being Côté’s own mise-en-scène), his newest focuses on the alienated humans behind the machines that yield all manner of metal alloys, wood cases, and garments. Following an elfin worker’s dramatic monologue about the nature of labour and human intimacy–she’s played by an actress, the first of many instances where Côté throws a theatrical dirt bomb into the staid form of nonfiction–the symphonic title sequence sets the tone. It’s a montage of self-propelling machines engaged in uncannily human dance moves, more unnerving still when considered in the context of some of the curiously mechanical human behaviour that follows, like when a worker loops around a cart full of boxes, elegantly dispensing a ream of Scotch tape as if he’s wrapping a mummy.

Hot Docs ’14: Actress

Posted in2014, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Hot Docs 2014

Hotdocsactress

***½/****
directed by Robert Greene

by Angelo Muredda “It wasn’t just the character,” Brandy Burre muses in voiceover as she watches herself in the kitchen in an artfully-framed dishwashing scene during the opening moments of Robert Greene’s Actress: “It’s me. I tend to break things.” That’s an appropriately wily introduction to a documentary that adroitly blends domestic melodrama, biography, and sociological study. “Brandy Burre is Actress,” the surprisingly ostentatious (for nonfiction) title card announces, and so it goes: Burre stars as herself, a Master’s-holding former supporting player from “The Wire” who took a break from acting after the birth of her first child, and who now seeks to get back in the game at a moment when her long-term relationship appears to be breaking apart like the dishware.

Synchronicity: FFC Interviews Aharon Keshales & Navot Papushado, writers/directors of “Big Bad Wolves”

Posted in2014, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews, Israel

Bigbadwolvesinterviewtitle

Just a couple of weeks after I caught writer-director Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves at the 4th Mile High Horror Film Festival, Quentin Tarantino, having seen it himself at the Busan International Film Festival, declared it to be his favourite movie of 2013. Turns out QT screening the picture at a South Korean event represents a special kind of synchronicity, given that both he and South Korea’s fulsome genre cinema were key influences on Kehsales & Papushado. Seeing both of Keshales and Papushado’s films when I did (before I got a chance to screen Big Bad Wolves, I was inspired by the buzz on it to track down their 2010 debut, Rabies) felt like a bit of synchronicity in itself–or, at least, I felt lucky that I was able to catch this wave right at the moment that it crests and heads to shore. When I reached out to Mr. Keshales to see if he might be interested in an interview, he was quick to agree and then, over missed connections, a miscommunication about time zones (8 p.m. in Israel is 11 a.m. in Colorado, go figure), a bad Skype link, a newly-purchased cell-mike still package-fresh, and finally a cell call from a street in Israel (where Papushado almost got creamed by a car) to a suburb in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, I was able to chat at last with Keshales and Papushado: the faces–the only ones, as it happens–of Israeli horror and a new day dawning in Israeli cinema.

SDFF ’13: Borgman

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller

Borgman

****/****
starring Jan Bijvoet, Hadewych Minis, Jeroen Perceval, Sara Hjort Ditlevsen
written and directed by Alex van Warmerdam

by Walter Chaw Screening at the SDFF and now travelling with the Alamo Fantastic Fest, Alex van Warmerdam’s Borgman gets the Yorgos Lanthimos Award for Most Devastating Absurdist Metaphor for Familial Dysfunction. Smart as hell and unapologetically surreal, its central motivating image is a tableaux vivant of Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare,” tipping off not just the ethos of the film, but also that there may be running threads concerning mothers (Fuseli was Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover), monsters (Mary being the mother of Mary “Frankenstein” Shelley), the empowerment of women (the mother again), nightmares, of course, and maybe Romanticism, if only in the picture’s awareness and perversion of nature. Demanding a specific kind of active spectatorship, Borgman is a complex film with heat, and somewhere in the middle of it there’s a performance within a performance that ends with a declaration of intent that stands as one of the most existentially chilling things in cinema this year.

SDFF ’13: I Used to Be Darker

Posted in2013, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music
***/**** directed by Matthew Porterfield by Walter Chaw Matthew Porterfield's quiet and humane I Used to Be Darker provides an interesting contrast to Richard Linklater's talkier improvisations while covering the same interpersonal landscapes of how people speak to one another, react to one another, and interact physically within a space. One of the first images is of a little Irish girl, Taryn (Deragh Campbell), taking a knife to a couple of paintings. It's a rejection of many things, as well as a declaration. I Used to Be Darker will privilege the cinematic (i.e., showcase the complexity and eloquence of communication…

“Are Movies Breaking Bad?”: See Walter Chaw in Person

Posted in2013, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals
Our own Walter Chaw will be speaking on a panel tomorrow (Sunday, November 17th) at the Starz Denver Film Festival. From the Denver Film Society website: Are Movies Breaking Bad? Happening: Sunday, November 17, 12:15 PM Duration: 120 Minutes Venue: SDFF Sie FilmCenter Lines along various parts of the entertainment/arts continuum seem to be blurring on a daily basis. Long gone are the days when watching a movie meant buying a ticket and sitting in a theater. But over the past decade or so, series—most aired on premium cable channels—have accomplished what many criticize the movies for not doing: focusing…