SDFF ’13: The Fifth Season

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, Netherlands

Fifthseason

La cinquième saison
****/****
starring Aurelia Poirier, Django Schrevens, Sam Louwyck, Gill Vancompernolle
written and directed by Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth

by Walter Chaw It begins as a puzzle, the active-engagement kind where a film, maybe an art film not very good and certainly not lacking in pretension, wears all the hopes of its creators on its sleeve. But then, out of nowhere, Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s The Fifth Season (La cinquième saison) ties together all the pretty pictures into an entirely honourable updating of a few of the ideas from, but most importantly the atmosphere of, Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man. Truth be told, the pictures are more than just pretty: they’re stunning at times, and it’s easy to be mesmerized by them–by their surrealism and meticulous framing, and, at the end of it all, by their gorgeous absurdity. This is rapturous filmmaking that in its first minutes watches two teens kiss, tentatively, in the cold and the woods, their breath trembling the soft down on each other’s faces. We feel, with them, the discovery of something new. The Fifth Season is a film about textures, but rather than just be a film about textures, it does something that maybe Terrence Malick’s movies do, certainly Bela Tarr’s: it makes its form comment on its function.

SDFF ’13: Blue Ruin

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

Blueruin

****/****
starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, Amy Hargreaves, Kevin Kolack
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw Six years after his surprisingly poignant, unexpectedly deft, and, of course, funny debut Murder Party, multi-hyphenate Jeremy Saulnier (he writes, directs, and photographs his movies) returns with something very much like a genre masterpiece with Blue Ruin, the best Coen Bros. noir since they were making them. Grim in exactly the way that can be delightful, it’s paced beautifully, written beautifully, and performed, that’s right, beautifully. Saulnier’s intelligent script is a model of restraint and a strong sense of humour. Macon Blair’s reluctant avenging angel Dwight is someone I’ve never met before in a movie, and when Dwight seeks out old pal Ben (Devin Ratray) for help at some point, well, I’d never met him before, either. It’s fair to say that nothing that happens in Blue Ruin happens the way I thought it would happen, if it happens at all. Note an early moment in the picture where Dwight sets up an ambush and doesn’t pay it off, or that standard thing in movies now where the hero goes to a drugstore to pick up the supplies they need to perform self-surgery, which here ends with…that would be telling. All the requirements are there for a grand satire, it’s true, yet Blue Ruin isn’t that. Instead, it’s a film that understands exactly what it is and what space it occupies, and at the end it’s not merely an extraordinary character piece (Blair’s turn would be star-making in a just universe), it’s also a nimble thriller full of outrageous fortune and stunning reversals meted out perfectly between its breathless moments and the moments where it breathes.

SDFF ’13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance

Brokencirclebreakdown

***/****
starring Johan Heldenbergh, Veerle Baetens, Nell Cattrysse, Geert Van Rampelberg
screenplay by Carl Joos & Felix Van Groeningen, based on the play by Johan Heldenbergh & Mieke Dobbels
directed by Felix Van Groeningen

by Walter Chaw Felix Van Groeningen’s The Broken Circle Breakdown eventually loses impetus and becomes political theatre, but until it does it’s exceptional melodrama, raw and emotional. It walks the fine line for a while, staying just this side of exploitation in its alinear tale of a little girl who gets cancer and her parents–how they met, the aftermath, and then the far aftermath. The film’s central event, then, isn’t the child’s fate, but rather the meet-cute of the parents, with squarish Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) asking about Elise’s (Veerle Baetens) tattoos in the parlour where she works. A bit shocked, and maybe titillated, that each has a story of a different man attached to it, he invites her to, essentially, come see him perform with his bluegrass band in a tiny club down the way. Van Groeningen, working from an original idea and stage play by Heldenbergh, adroitly alternates the events of the film with Didier’s band’s songs; in other words, The Broken Circle Breakdown owes a greater kinship to Cabaret than to Once–even though, at its best, its intent leans more towards the personal than the political. This means, of course, that once it becomes more political than personal, it also loses its rudder and balance. Already, effortlessly, about so much, it stumbles badly when it tries to be.

SDFF ’13: Soft in the Head

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals
**½/**** directed by Nathan Silver by Walter Chaw Nathan Silver's second film in less than two years (he reports he now has four in the can) is the surprisingly affecting Soft in the Head, which works as a detailed study of lives of loud desperation. Natalia (Sheila Etxeberria) is a drunk, makes bad object choices, and is an all-around loser who also has the misfortune of being really pretty, making her the target of just about everyone she comes in contact with. Exteberria, the sister of an ex-roommate of Silver's, is a true find, as is Ed Ryan as kind,…

SDFF ’13: Go Down Death

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals
½*/**** written and directed by Aaron Schimberg by Walter Chaw Okay, I'm gonna take a stab at this one. Aaron Schimberg's aggressively pretentious Go Down Death is an attempt to speak to the idea that communal storytelling is the key way in which humans communicate culture. Ostensibly based on a lost folklorist's collected works, it acts like a Guy Maddin, looks like early Jim Jarmusch, and really doesn't work at all, because if the film is a variation on a theme, it's a riff that goes on way, way too long. I spent an evening once watching mushroom prints, stained…

SDFF ’13: Tricked

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Netherlands, Thriller
Steekspel */**** directed by Paul Verhoeven by Walter Chaw Its title maybe referring to the audience, Paul Verhoeven's newest is a pain-in-the-ass gimmick piece done by a filmmaker I used to really admire and maybe don't so much anymore. The first third is dedicated to a built-in, manic "making-of" featurette that essays, in deadly, deadening detail, how Verhoeven posted four pages of a script online, then invited anybody with a laptop and a Starbucks to submit the next five pages, and the next, and so on and so forth, thus pushing Verhoeven out of his comfort zone and inspiring him…

Starz Denver Film Festival ’13: All Together Now

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music
**½/**** screenplay by Ryan Kasmiskie & Alexander Mirecki directing Alexander Mirecki by Walter Chaw Two scenes: one featuring a bonfire-illuminated kiss against a forest backdrop, the other a man standing on a platform in a clearing as a crowd fills in around him. Both are captured in glorious 16mm, shot through with grain and lit by natural light; both are suffused with a magical, twilit glow that only really happens in exactly this way when you use old, some would say obsolete, technology. These moments almost, by themselves, justify the existence Alexander Mirecki's All Together Now. At the least, there's…

MHHFF ’13: Shorts Program #4

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Music, Short Films

Mmhhffshorts

Next Exit **/**** (UK, 14 mins., d. Benjamin Goodger) A light bit of nothing, Next Exit is a little Ludditism along the lines of that one episode of the American “The Office” where Michael Scott follows the bad instructions of his GPS directly into a lake. The performances are good, the direction is fairly pedestrian, and the story, about a girl who accepts a ride home from a pub one night, has a couple of decent twists but is ultimately more mildly clever than disturbing or compelling. In its short time, it does manage to cover the bases in terms of going out of cell-phone range and the suggestion of a cyclical ending, but it fails mostly in terms of generating much in the way of horror or comedy. Mostly, I had trouble with the idea that anyone would think a hotel–or a hospital, or anything–is located in the middle of the woods.

MHHFF ’13: +1

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Plusone

***/****
starring Rhys Wakefield, Logan Miller, Ashley Hinshaw, Natalie Hall
screenplay by Bill Gullo
directed by Dennis Iliadis

by Walter Chaw David (Rhys Wakefield) screws up and loses girlfriend Jill (Ashley Hinshaw), only to run into her the night of a gigantic, hedonistic, Gatsby-esque party attended by rave strippers, DJs, and drug dealers. An unlikely place to stage a comeback, David, with buddy Teddy (Logan Miller), coaxes Jill into a conversation that goes south–but then the lights cut out, there’s a weird meteorite event outside, and David finds himself with the opportunity to try the conversation again: same place, different Jill. It seems that something’s created a quantum split–a little bleed-over maybe from a parallel dimension that twists time and creates doubles of all the revellers, though only a few notice. The ones who don’t party on in a kind of nightmarish inattention that reminds of the dreamscapes of Miracle Mile and After Hours; the ones who do begin to wonder what will happen when the time-slips overlap and they find themselves attempting to share the same space as their doppelgängers.

MHHFF ’13: Haunter

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Haunted

*/****
directed by Vincenzo Natali

by Walter Chaw A Paperhouse/Coraline kind of movie that mixes all that familiar guff into a paste with the can’t-leave-this-house crap from The Others and, oh, why not, Beetlejuice, too, Vincenzo Natali’s follow-up to his unfairly-maligned Splice is the genuinely bad Haunter, which plays every bit like a collection of “Resident Evil” cut-scenes. Abigail Breslin is Lisa, a period-’80s teenager in a Siouxsie and the Banshees T-shirt who, in a real knee-slapper, deadpans that “meat is murder” to her mother’s offer of meatloaf, because The Smiths, get it? Doesn’t matter. What matters is that Haunter is a master of overstatement (it wouldn’t surprise me if this Lisa is an homage to the Staci Keanan Lisa), even taking a moment at the end to pay tribute to Carpenter’s Christine for really no other reason than that it can’t help being hyperbolic: the screaming is screamier, the whispering is whisperier, and it doesn’t rain, it pours. Lisa is trapped in the last day of her life with her family in a sort of Groundhog Day conceit, except that she’s a ghost who eventually figures out that the same evil ghost dude guy has been killing young girls just like her for decades, and that it’s up to her to break the cycle. This leads, of course, to a scene from the ending of Ghost–no, not that one, the one before it where the villain gets dragged to hell by bad special effects.

MHHFF ’13: FFC Interviews “We Are What We Are” Director Jim Mickle

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

Jmickletitle

The Curtis Hotel is right across the street from the Denver Performing Arts Complex–a city block “hollowed out” in the middle that houses Denver’s premier venues: the ones for the opera, the ballet, the symphony, and touring companies of Broadway productions. On a hot day in September, I walked through the complex, under the four-storey-high glass canopy, to the Curtis. It’s a fun place, this hotel; the floors have themes. I met Jim Mickle on the superhero floor, on the morning his film was to screen at the 4th Mile High Horror Film Festival. He’s a tall guy, affable, friendly, and not at all what I was expecting after watching his sober, dense, matriarchal horror movie We Are What We Are. I expected, at the least, a tweed coat with leather patches on the elbows. On the last day of publicity for the film, after which he was returning to editing duties on his adaptation of Joe Lansdale’s awesome noir Cold in July, I promised I would try to avoid asking him questions he’d already answered a few dozen times before–although I couldn’t resist bringing up Kelly McGillis and Witness because, yeah, I’m a big, giant dork. We started off, though, talking about Antonia Bird’s Ravenous and his own film’s Ravenous feel.

MHHFF ’13: Big Bad Wolves

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Film Festivals, Israel, Thriller

Bigbadwolves

***/****
starring Tzahi Grad, Llor Ashkenazi, Rotem Keinan, Dov Glickman
written and directed by Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

by Walter Chaw A winning, stylish mixture of black humour, perversion, and character study, Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s Big Bad Wolves presents a popular moral quandary in a way that would make Park Chan-wook proud. Indeed, it would fit comfortably in a conversation with that director’s “Vengeance Trilogy” as a companion piece in theme, even execution, to Sympathy for Lady Vengeance that finds a father and a rogue police officer brutally torturing an unassuming schoolteacher because they both suspect he’s responsible for the death of a little girl. With the question of guilt beside the point, the real thrust of the piece is the toll that some actions take on the soul, no matter why they’re undertaken. Crucially, it’s not a product of the United States or South Korea, two cultures married to a specific kind of morally relativistic nightmare that have produced films like this for years, but of an Israeli movie industry that marks this as only their second “horror” release. (The first, incidentally, was a product of this same writing-directing team: 2010’s Kalavet.) For an Israeli thriller to tackle the issue of the zero-sum game of rendition and torture without due process feels dangerous–particularly with the ancillary character of an Arab man on horseback who is wry, handsome, and utterly normal, nay, the only normal one in the entire film.

MHHFF ’13: We Are What We Are (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Wearewhatweare

***½/****
starring Bill Sage, Ambyr Childers, Julia Garner, Michael Parks
screenplay by Nick Damici and Jim Mickle
directed by Jim Mickle

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It begins with a leaf falling into a river and a woman, confused and trembling, declaring to a shop owner that she’s fine but that the damp will sometimes get into her head. Jim Mickle’s smart, downcast We Are What We Are looks to Nature as not just insensate, savage, but also the first testament to a greater power. It locates the source of religion in the need to control Nature, more specifically to find meaning in the capricious-seeming meaninglessness of the universe. It implicates the ugliest, most selfish aspect of Nature in the founding of the United States, mining resonance in the idea of “Manifest Destiny”–in the process giving women a starring role: positions of real power in which they’re depended upon for their strength rather than exploited for some idea of their weakness. We Are What We Are enacts a matriarchal melodrama in that way; connecting the feminine aspect to Nature is nothing new, of course, but the picture does so in a way that feels true and is in its own way touching. It opens with a quote that seems Biblical (later, one of the characters will ask another, “Is that from the Bible?”–it’s not then, either), which serves the multifoliate purposes of establishing the mood of the piece, clarifying that religion is born in the breast of man, and establishing a woman as the artifactor of the Word. The woman with the damp in her head, a mother, falls into water and drowns–the first of several images of baptism in the picture, and one that predicts the flood imagery running throughout. Water suggests change, unearths things, washes them clean. It’s all heavy stuff, I know, yet the thrill of We Are What We Are is that it’s about all these things without being obviously about any of it.

MHHFF ’13: Ghost Team One

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror

Ghostteamone

*½/****
directed by Ben Peyser & Scott Rutherford

by Walter Chaw Kind of a cross between Paranormal Activity and American Pie, Ben Peyser and Scott Rutherford’s Ghost Team One is buoyed by a game cast and a certain relentlessness but let down by an extended conclusion that finally crosses the line from offensive-but-funny to offensive-offensive. Before that, there’s virgin Sergio (Carlos Santos) and his horny, neo-Stiffler buddy Brad (J.R. Villarreal) outfitting their pad with cameras and enlisting a third, largely-unseen buddy at the handheld in the pursuit of ghost-hunting–or so they tell the beautiful Fernanda (Fernanda Romero). Really, this project seems designed around the chance of maybe capturing some uploadable gonzo porn. This promises oodles of nudity in a supernatural-tinged sex romp, but, alas, what we get are a lot of masturbation jokes and an Asian burlesque from otherwise-hilarious frat-boy Chuck (Tony Cavalero), which starts in a bad place and descends to a very bad place during an extended exorcism scene. Opportunities to attack Mormons are squandered along with the chance to craft something with the sort of ’80s lawlessness of The Last American Virgin. The film can’t even take a successful swipe at The Blair Witch Project, though it tries.

MHHFF ’13: Cheap Thrills

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller

Cheapthrills

***½/****
starring Pat Healy, Sara Paxton, Ethan Embry, David Koechner
screenplay by Trent Haaga & David Chirchirillo
directed by E.L. Katz

by Walter Chaw A lean, mean, pleasantly unpleasant little clockwork from first-time director E.L. Katz, Cheap Thrills feels and acts like the best kind of noir–the kind where you don’t like anyone very much. Reuniting Pat Healy and Sara Paxton from The Innkeepers (another movie that disproves the maxim that genre film is in trouble), this is a fairly stunning, if a bit on the nose, parable of our recessionary state, as car mechanic/aspiring writer Craig (Healy) is faced with the eviction of his young family from their tiny apartment and a layoff from his already-not-paying-enough job. Drinking his sorrows away at a bar, he runs into an old buddy, Vince (a fantastic Ethan Embry), and an odd couple, Colin (David Koechner) and Violet (Paxton), celebrating Violet’s birthday. Mysteriously wealthy, it seems that Colin is looking to solve the puzzle of what to get the impossibly pretty younger wife who has everything, and the answer is to stage a series of increasingly sadistic stunts between Craig and Vince for various bounties. $200 for saying something to the meth-addict at the bar to make her slap you; $500 if you hit the strip-club bouncer first. The stakes escalate, tensions rise, and it all ends with probably the single best expression of the current state of manhood in the lower-middle-class United States circa 2013.

Mile High Horror Film Festival ’13: An Introduction

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Horror


by Walter Chaw I’d been vaguely aware of the Mile High Horror Film Festival its previous three years to the extent that I’d reached out at some point to see about coverage, but it came to nothing and was easy for me to ignore. Then a good friend moved from the Denver Film Society to the newly-opened Denver location of Alamo Drafthouse as creative director, and one September morning, I found myself driving down to meet with him and chat about his new position. This Drafthouse is beautiful, by the way, and for cinephiles in the Denver area, it’s a hope devoutly wished, answered. If you don’t support this venue and its mission statement (“to save cinema,” its co-owner, Tom, declared to me proudly), you don’t deserve it. Anyway, in the cavernous, leather-lined lobby, I met my friend, who had just come from a planning meeting with festival founder Tim Schultz. Handshakes facilitated, I got in touch with ace PR guy Travis Volz a few days later, and suddenly found myself sitting in a little booth across from Jim Mickle, director of a very, very good remake/not-really-a-remake of We Are What We Are.

TIFF ’13 Wrap-Up

Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Film Festivals, Palme d'Or Winner, TIFF

Moebius

by Bill Chambers The cause célèbre at this year’s TIFF was critic Alex Billington’s 9-1-1 call. For those living under a rock, what happened was that Billington entreated Festival volunteers to do…something…about the guy using his light-emitting cell phone at a P&I (press and industry) screening of Ti West’s The Sacrament. When they declined, Billington dialled emergency services, live-tweeting the whole sorry affair as a gift to the gods of schadenfreude. This is indeed absolutely childish and cowardly behaviour, yet a similarly insufferable sanctimony deluged the incident in think pieces and @ replies, some of them from yours truly. Yes, crying wolf to 9-1-1 is irresponsible, though I imagine Billington’s wasn’t the first or even second false alarm Toronto EMS received that morning. Yes, P&I screenings are free, throwing Billington’s sense of entitlement into relief, although they do come with the Faustian obligation to write about them at some point. (Something that isn’t made easier by a viewing filled with peripheral distractions.) And, sure, industry folk need to be able to conduct business in a darkened theatre if it comes to that, because TIFF is a buyer’s market ultimately supported by the wheeling-and-dealing that happens over a ten-day period.

TIFF ’13: Almost Human

Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, TIFF, ZERO STARS
ZERO STARS/**** written and directed by Joe Begos by Bill Chambers The picture's opening titles are in John Carpenter's familiar white-on-black Albertus font and intercut with fragments of exposition like the intro to Prince of Darkness while some neo-Alan Howarth works the minor keys on a synthesizer. But as the makers of Almost Human have already given the game away in an endless, stilted prologue, what may sound like loving homage feels in context like a desperate play for credibility, a dog whistle meant to reassure the horror geeks they're in good hands. They're not. Set in the late-'80s, because…

TIFF ’13: Why Don’t You Play in Hell?

Posted in2013, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Japan, TIFF

Whydontyouplayinhell_03

***/****
written and directed by Sion Sono

by Angelo Muredda Two of the funniest films at TIFF were, of all things, elegies. Like the doppelgänger duo of The Double and Enemy and the misdirected-revenge double-bill of Bastards and Prisoners, Raya Martin and Mark Peranson’s La última película and Sion Sono’s Why Don’t You Play In Hell? seemed to be sharing a direct line, commiserating over the demise of celluloid while huddled together in an abandoned cinema, bracing for the digital apocalypse in mock terror. Tonal and thematic overlaps aside, however, the films diverge in their cases for the relative importance of filmmakers at this moment of crisis. La última película directs its satirical energies towards Alex Ross Perry’s self-satisfied hero, a director on a mission. Sono’s by turns delirious and sentimental film goes the other way, all but deifying its energetic schlockmeister, who prays to the Movie God as a teen that he might one day make something worthy of 35 mm and finds his prayers answered ten years later, when a pair of warring yakuza clans commission him to turn their grand battle into a cinematic time capsule, to be screened at the homecoming for one of the mobster’s jailed wives.

TIFF ’13: Mission Congo

Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF
**½/**** directed by Lara Zizic and David Turner by Bill Chambers Too satisfied with being--and too short to be anything but--a hatchet job, Mission Congo is nevertheless a worthwhile reminder that televangelists are crooks, something that's all too easy to forget in this age of video-on-demand. (Out of sight, out of mind.) The film is a documentary account of the opportunism that sprang up around the Rwandan genocide, specifically "The 700 Club" host Pat Robertson's "Operation Blessing," which was ostensibly established to fly medical supplies, water, and, of course, missionaries to a bordertown refugee camp in crisis from a cholera…