Film Festivals Archives - Page 25 of 46

Telluride ’13: Tracks

September 2, 20132013, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

*/****directed by John Curran by Walter Chaw Kind of like a dustier Eight Below, in which Mia Wasikowska walks four camels and a dog across the Australian Outback in a whimsical death march that I find, at my age (40), amazingly selfish and borderline sociopathic. Tracks is based on the true story of "camel lady" Robyn Davidson, who, in 1977, walked across a huge stretch of Australia because she really hated being around other people. Davidson says, by way of charming voiceover narration, that she didn't want to be a whiny bitch like the rest of her generation, but she replaces…

Telluride ’13: An Introduction or, The Stand

August 31, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

by Walter Chaw It's a six-and-a-half hour drive from my
home in Arvada, CO to Telluride on the Western Slope, and there are two ways to get
there. One way is all highway; the other way is all beauty. I took the
second route, and it made all the difference. I've been in a dark, difficult
place for a long time now, or, at least, long enough in the parlance of
near-crippling depression. I was caught in eddies; I had become inert. I had
almost completely stopped writing. Not just essays like this one, but reviews,
too, which I used to be able to pump out with I think alarming speed and ease.
Early on, someone asked my editor how I did it; at times over the last couple months, I wondered if I'd ever write like that again. Things are hard when you're dark.
Getting out of bed was a negotiation–getting out to a screening was a near act
of God. The thought of accidentally eavesdropping other people's thoughts was
agony. The times I did, of course, were good, because the guilt I would have
felt had I gone and not written on the privilege would have been untenable.
Would that the guilt of not writing on home-video releases have the same
lubricative effect.

Hot Docs ’13: When I Walk

May 6, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Disability, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Jason DaSilva

by Angelo Muredda Midway through When I Walk, Jason DaSilva's seven-year record of his experience since an early diagnosis of multiple sclerosis at age 25, the filmmaker wonders what his future will be, his life an ever-moving series of targets since illness and disability became a part of it. It's to DaSilva's great credit that that curiosity about what will become of him is developed in more than prurient ways with an unexpected but welcome detour into what it means to struggle through the normal checkpoints of a committed relationship–babies and all–when one also has a degenerative illness with an uncertain endgame. That isn't to say we should celebrate the film simply for being something other than a depressive's video diary of his body gone awry, but that DaSilva's hook is honestly come by and cannily placed. What's more, it pays off to the extent that DaSilva is a mordantly funny subject, candid about his bodily quirks, his vanities, and his anxieties.

Hot Docs ’13: Fuck for Forest

May 6, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Michael Marczak

by Angelo Muredda "Don't you think we're already fucked anyway?" a twentysomething European reveller bathed in neon light asks an environmentalist recruiter early on in Fuck for Forest, Michael Marczak's gorgeously-lensed and strangely resonant nature documentary about a very strange pack of wild animals, the titular porn collective-cum-NGO. It's a decent question, but you don't get the sense that the sweet young Berliners to whom it's directed have much of a clue about how to answer. Their approach to saving the world, which Marczak never openly laughs at but never quite endorses either, is to turn the surprisingly good coin they make from their vaguely nature-themed amateur pornography into angel investments towards causes they believe in. A gently detached observer who drops in on the audio track only for occasional Jules and Jim-inspired backgrounders on our daffy leads, Marczak is an ideal mock-tour guide for the group's journey to Peru, where they scope out a group of locals who want to preserve the Amazon.

Hot Docs ’13: Remote Area Medical

May 3, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***½/****
directed by Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman

by Angelo Muredda When he was seriously injured in the jungle thirty years ago, broadcaster and philanthropist Stan Brock tells an interviewer in Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman's powerful Remote Area Medical, the nearest doctor was over 26 days' worth of travel away–23 more than if he'd been on the moon, as an astronaut once told him. You can tell that Brock has massaged that anecdote into a homily with repetition, but rather than seeming slick, his pitch for greater medical care for those stuck in remote areas and extreme conditions has an air of earned righteousness about it, the sound of human decency filtered through experience. That same spirit of professionalism and earnestness pervades Reichert and Zaman's film, which profiles not the volunteer pop-up clinics Brock initially founded in faraway parts of the world but one right in his adoptive home of Tennessee, where hundreds of uninsured working-poor citizens line up days in advance for a fighting shot at care.

Hot Docs ’13: NCR: Not Criminally Responsible

May 2, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by John Kastner

by Angelo Muredda The ending of Taxi Driver could well be the start of John Kastner's NCR: Not Criminally Responsible. Where Scorsese's paranoiac dream closes with Travis Bickle returning to his cab after his bloodbath as either an undeserving hero or a delusional phantom, Kastner's film opens with an admirably complex consideration of what it means–for everyone from victim to convict to society at large–to reintegrate into Canadian culture a violent criminal who's been found not culpable for his actions. Kastner begins with the conditional release of Sean Clifton, a previously undiagnosed and ostensibly nonviolent Cornwall man who one day stabbed a young woman in a Walmart parking lot. Despite their spiritual belief in the power of rehabilitation and the doctors' assurances that Clifton is now medicated, the victim's family is understandably vexed. And, despite our own best liberal intentions, so are we.

Hot Docs ’13: Shooting Bigfoot

May 2, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Mystery, UK

***/****
directed by Morgan Matthews

by Angelo Muredda There's a Weakerthans song called "Bigfoot!" about a Manitoba ferry operator who was harassed by local media for disclosing his alleged encounter with the furry legend. It's an oddly affecting little thing, especially around the chorus, where the man insists–likely just to himself–that he won't go through it all again "when the visions that I've seen will believe me." If nothing else, Morgan Matthews's genre-crossing Shooting Bigfoot confirms that the loneliness and hermeticism of the poor Manitoban's life after Bigfoot–defined by a vision he can't possibly share, for obvious reasons–is pretty standard stuff in the cult of sightings. Mixing Werner Herzog's eccentric profiles with both Christopher Guest's institutional satire and an unexpected but not unwelcome helping of The Blair Witch Project, the film starts as an arm's-length survey of Bigfoot culture before fully immersing itself in its manic compilation of signs and wonders.

Hot Docs ’13: Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer

April 30, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, Hot Docs, Russia

**½/****
directed by Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin

by Angelo Muredda Civil disobedience is about as uncinematic as political protests get, so credit Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin for making Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer a more or less compelling paean to the troupe's fortitude against Russian orthodoxy. The film chronicles the ongoing legal battle that ensued from the feminist collective's 15-second guerrilla performance of a song called "God Shit" at the altar of St. Christ Church in Moscow. The impromptu number, captured in fuzzy cellphone video that's the most stirring footage in the movie by a mile, got masked performers Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Ekaterina Samutsevich, and Mariya Alyokhina a 3-year sentence at a penal colony for simultaneously dumping on the Orthodox Church and Putin. That such a minor demonstration could inspire such a heavy-handed state response is just one of the hooks the filmmakers exploit to strong effect in their look at how deeply religious values are embedded in Putin's Russia, which turns relatively minor acts of punk rebellion into the most vital expressions of political dissent.

Hot Docs ’13: Downloaded

April 29, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

***/****
directed by Alex Winter

by Angelo Muredda Who would have expected both Bill and Ted to become a pair of slick documentarians about media revolutions? Just last year there was the Keanu Reeves-produced Side by Side, and now, Alex Winter's Downloaded, an engaging if overly twee sort-of prequel to The Social Network about the formation and early death of Napster. Downloaded moves at a good clip, establishing early on both the company's miraculous birth over a bunch of IRC chats between nerdy cofounders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker (interviewed in a ridiculous penthouse suite that Facebook built) and the larger systemic changes in information-management that produced their baby, the first major decentralized file-sharing system. Winter gets utopian about the spirit of exchange that ensued when campus-dwellers started trading their Nirvana concerts and Sugar Ray singles in the late-Nineties, but you can forgive him for getting misty-eyed: It's easy in retrospect to forget just how easy and inevitable library consolidation through downloading became when Napster took off.

Hot Docs ’13: Interior. Leather Bar.

April 26, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

*/****
directed by James Franco and Travis Mathews

by Angelo Muredda Whatever goodwill James Franco built up with his mesmerizing turn in Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers is bulldozed by Interior. Leather Bar., his second infuriating Hot Docs appearance in as many years. Ostensibly a recreation of a lost 8-minute sequence from William Friedkin's Cruising that was to show Al Pacino's undercover detective intimately crowdsourcing a gay S&M bar for a serial killer, this is nothing short of an incompetent lecture on queer theory and the importance of being a heterosexual ally to the community from a vain graduate student and, even worse, a tourist.

Hot Docs ’13: The Manor

April 26, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Family, Film Festivals, Hot Docs

**½/****
directed by Shawney Cohen

by Angelo Muredda "I call myself a filmmaker," Shawney Cohen muses off the top of his debut feature The Manor, "but I've actually been a strip-club manager for longer." Family inheritances have long proven fertile ground for emerging documentarians, like Sarah Polley with Stories We Tell just last year. Still, Cohen has a distinctive enough angle here, given the unusual visual dynamics of his family (dad's overweight, mom has an eating disorder) and its business, the titular Guelph club that Cohen's father has been running for over 30 years.

A Man and a Woman: Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva – TIFF Cinematheque Retrospective

January 15, 20132013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Blog, Film Festivals, France

by Angelo Muredda When Michael Haneke’s Amour met its first wave
of hosannas at Cannes, the press seemed eerily unanimous with respect to all
but the film’s place within the German-Austrian taskmaster’s oeuvre. Although
some were quick to call it the warmest of his many portraits of couples in
crisis (it would be hard not to be), others saw it as of a piece with his
austere horror films about complacent bourgeois hoarders reduced to ashes by
external invaders–in this case, not the home intruders of Funny Games or Time
of the Wolf (though there is a break-in, for those keeping
score), but the more insidious threat of age-related illnesses. The truth is
probably somewhere between those poles. It’s no surprise that the key
players in this two-hander are named, as they always seem to be in Haneke’s
pictures, Anne and Georges Laurent–sturdy middle-class monikers for tasteful
piano teachers. But it’s difficult to wholly ascribe the universal quality we often
associate with Haneke’s Laurents to the familiar, if weathered, faces of
Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who–far more than the chameleonic
Juliette Binoche or Isabelle Huppert, other Haneke collaborators–recall a
bygone era of French cinema.

Wrapping Up TIFF ’12

September 25, 2012****/****, 2012, Action, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog, Comedy, Coming of Age, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Horror, Thriller, TIFF

by Bill Chambers There’s something a little ghoulish about still reviewing TIFF movies at this late date, I know, but I wanted to briefly touch on a few of this year’s selections I never got around to reviewing in full, before they became indistinguishable dots in the rearview.

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

September 21, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Brad Bernstein

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

TIFF ’12: Imogene

September 21, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Comedy, Film Festivals, Romance, TIFF

a.k.a. Girl Most Likely
**/****
directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

by Bill Chambers The Wizard of Oz is the paradigm for Kristen Wiig's first starring vehicle since Bridesmaids–though for the sake of managing expectations, it's probably better to think of Imogene as Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's follow-up to their dire HBO flick Cinema Vérité. The movie opens with the title character as a child playing the lead in an unlikely school production of The Wizard of Oz and lodging the precocious complaint that Dorothy's desire to return to drab Kansas is irrational. Many years later, Imogene is an aspiring/failed playwright in the Laura Linney-in-The Savages mold reduced to staging a suicide tableau in a last-ditch effort to win back her ex-boyfriend (Brian Petsos). The frenemy (June Diane Raphael, who's in every goddamn movie like this) who finds her instead calls 9-1-1, and Imogene, thanks to the intervention of the Sitcom Fairy, is forced to serve out her mandatory psych stay at home–specifically, her childhood home in Atlantic City, where her man-child brother Ralph (Christopher Fitzgerald) still lives with their gambling-addict mother (Annette Bening), mom's weird boyfriend (Matt Dillon), and Lee (Darren Criss), the young boarder who moved into Imogene's old room.

TIFF ’12: The Paperboy + At Any Price

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Mystery, Sports, Thriller, TIFF

THE PAPERBOY
*/****
directed by Lee Daniels

AT ANY PRICE
*/****
directed by Ramin Bahrani

by Bill Chambers The great Pete Dexter writes tersely about criminal perversity in the southern United States; the problem in adapting him to the cinema is that without his hardboiled prose, which lends everything he writes the whiff of reportage (a newspaperman originally, he turned to novels after drug dealers beat him nearly to death over one of his columns), the psychosexual situations he describes threaten to collapse into camp. Because of this, Dexter and Precious/Shadowboxer auteur Lee Daniels sounded like a match made in Hell to me, but the blunt force of Daniels's shamelessness proves strangely compatible with Dexter's writing in The Paperboy, based on the latter's 1995 best-seller. If only he could direct! Daniels is like a less bourgeois Henry Jaglom, cutting between a panoply of indifferently-composed shots like a frog on a griddle with little feeling for either spatial or character dynamics.

TIFF ’12: Silver Linings Playbook

September 18, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Family, Film Festivals, Robert De Niro, Romance, TIFF

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

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

TIFF ’12: Leviathan

September 15, 2012****/****, 2012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, TIFF, UK

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

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

TIFF ’12: Blackbird

September 15, 20122012, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

***½/****
written and directed by Jason Buxton

by Bill Chambers Jason Buxton's Blackbird is an important film but a primally engaging one that doesn't feel at all like medicine or, God forbid, an Afterschool Special. The destined-for-greatness Connor Jessup is Sean Randall, a broody but essentially sweet teen who lives with his divorced dad (Michael Buie) and loves from afar the popular Deanna (Alexia Fast). Sean's a modern-day Boo Radley, an artistically-inclined goth kid stranded in a passive-aggressive sports culture: His father operates the Zamboni at the local rink where Deanna's boyfriend–Cory (Craig Arnold), natch–practices hockey. Cory torments Sean at school, and a guidance counsellor suggests that rather than retaliate Sean vent his spleen on paper–which he does, via a hypothetical revenge scenario ("It's a story") he stupidly cross-posts to the Internet. The torch-wielding villagers show up at his subsequent court hearing like it's a town-hall meeting; in this post-Columbine world, he's never going to get a fair shake.

TIFF ’12: Everyday

September 14, 20122012, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Christmas, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

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

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