Music Archives - Page 2 of 10 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Telluride ’19: Judy

September 4, 20192019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance, Telluride, UK

*½/****
starring Renée Zellweger, Jessie Buckley, Finn Wittrock, Michael Gambon
screenplay by Tom Edge, based on the stageplay "End of the Rainbow" by Peter Quilter
directed by Rupert Goold

by Walter Chaw One problem with hagiographies is that when bad things happen to the sainted subject, it comes off as maudlin and self-pitying. Another problem with hagiographies is that they're boring, since they're largely impenetrable to anyone not already in the choir. Take Rupert Goold's Judy, for instance, a hagiography of one of the two or three most biographied figures from Hollywood's golden age, Judy Garland: Mickey Rooney's erstwhile song and dance partner, Dorothy Gale, gay icon, mom to Liza (and Lorna and Joey), and deeply troubled trainwreck who died of a barbiturate overdose at the tender age of 47. She's played by Renée Zellweger in the film with an eye towards puckish grit and mawkish imitation, imagining a character instead of a person in a movie designed to do exactly the same thing. What's assumed, though, is that people will know going into the film why Judy was essentially homeless as Judy opens; how she thought a run at the Hippodrome (then the "Talk of the Town" nightclub) in the City of Westminster, London might rescue her financial calamities; and what it was exactly that made her so appealing to so many for so long. That's a lot of assumptions and, you know, fair enough, because I can't think of anyone else who'd possibly be interested in Judy, anyway.

The Doors (1991) [The Final Cut] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 24, 20191990s, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, France, Music, Netherlands

**/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kevin Dillon, Kathleen Quinlan
written by J. Randal Johnson and Oliver Stone
directed by Oliver Stone

by Bryant Frazer Oliver Stone’s lofty take on California psychedelic rock band The Doors begins near the end, with a thickly bearded Jim Morrison–Val Kilmer, delivering a well-practiced but largely soulless imitation of the ’60s cultural icon–slouched in a dark Los Angeles studio recording lines of spoken-word poetry. “Did you have a good world when you died?” he demands. “Enough to base a movie on?” The setting is December, 1970, a few months before Morrison voluntarily exiled himself in France–perhaps to dodge a potential prison sentence after his arrest for lewdness on stage–and a little more than six months before his death in Paris. Stone fills all of that in later, but he starts here, not just because the poem Morrison is reading, “The Movie,” is too apropos for a filmmaker as literal-minded as Stone to resist, but also because Morrison’s demonstrated preoccupation with death and storytelling dovetails so nicely with the film’s manifestation of same. Stone includes a formative event from Morrison’s early life: His family is driving through the desert when they pass the aftermath of a car accident where an elderly Navajo man is bleeding to death at the side of the road. Young Jim, rubbernecking, locks eyes for an instant with the Native American and, just like that, picks up a fellow traveller. Stone digs the idea. Throughout the film, he has Morrison seeing Native spirits at key moments, dancing at Doors performances, or lurking in the corners of parties. He also gives Morrison a stalker: a mysterious man (an uncredited Richard Rutowski, who later collaborated on the screenplay for Stone’s Natural Born Killers), well-built and sometimes nude, who represents death and occasionally materializes at the periphery of the action, not unlike the reaper from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

Her Smell (2019)

April 23, 2019****/****, 2019, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Music, Theatrical

****/****
starring Elisabeth Moss, Cara Delevingne, Dan Stevens, Amber Heard
written and directed by Alex Ross Perry

by Walter Chaw

“When I needed it, no one ever put a hand on my back and told me it was gonna be alright.”

This is Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss) on stage at a performance by her band, Something She, and she’s two hours late, as it happens–as is her habit and her custom. All she does is inflict pain, her mother (Virginia Madsen) tells her; Becky, a black vortex of drama, tells her mom to lay off the drama. It’s a practice of narcissists to project their toxic behaviour on the people around them, but Becky, who acts very badly indeed, isn’t the only bad actor. Her mom has a manila envelope full of something Becky’s long-absent father wants Becky to see and the mother bringing it to her daughter at this moment, knowing her daughter is explosively unstable, is a form of narcissism, too. It’s the person in your life who wants you to process your experience in the same way they process theirs–emotional bullies engaged in the tyranny of the weak. Becky’s bandmates are at once enablers of her behaviour and disdainful of it. Her ex, former DJ and now long-suffering single-dad Danny (Dan Stevens), brings his and Becky’s toddler around for a visit with his new young girlfriend (Hannah Gross) in tow, because that’s just a selfish, terrible idea, too. The first third of Alex Ross Perry’s Her Smell is a collision of flawed people self-medicating, self-deluding, doing their best on the fly in the middle of a hurricane of fame and other people’s expectations and making the worst possible decisions. It’s claustrophobic to the point of panic attack, and Perry, with DP Sean Price Williams, composer Keegan DeWitt, and editor Robert Greene, beautifully orchestrates the walls crashing in. It’s relentless and suffocating. And if you’re wired a particular way, it’s also uncomfortably familiar.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

November 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

*/****
starring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Mike Myers
screenplay by Anthony McCarten
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's a real tragedy behind Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer's formula biopic of Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and Queen, and it's not Mercury's rise and fall and rise and fall and posthumous rise. No, it's that a life lived as rebuke to boxed-in functionality is now boxed into a functional, easy-to-parse package. Not the first person to say it but the only good version of this movie is Walk Hard, and there's never been a bad version of this movie, not really. It's oatmeal. It's always okay. I genuinely love Singer's X-Men films. Superman Returns is a masterpiece. There was a time when the idea of Singer doing this would've promised a keen, incisive coming-out melodrama, but even that's been neutered by Singer's defensive posturing against real-life, possibly criminal ugliness and its looming threat of legal repercussions. His well-publicized dismissal from the project in its eleventh hour is the most Mercury moment of the whole thing and it happened behind the scenes. When the most interesting scene in Bohemian Rhapsody is a contentious press conference where Mercury's sexuality is attacked as the movie warps and stutters around him, you get the sense of the On The Waterfront apologia that almost was rather than the sop to popular taste this is.

A Star is Born (1976) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

October 3, 20181970s, 2018, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

***/**** Image A+ Sound B Extras B
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

by Sydney Wegner Two-and-a-half hours ago, I didn’t care one bit for Barbra Streisand. As a mega Kris Kristofferson fangirl, I was grudgingly willing to endure her performance alongside him in A Star is Born. I grew up with people who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to her music; I’d never seen any of her movies. All I knew of her besides the larger-than-life fame and cloned dogs was her legendary ego. Diva, control freak, crazy, stuck-up–many of these distasteful adjectives stemming from the troubled production of A Star is Born. Despite its awards and box-office success (it was the third highest-grossing film of 1976), the years have not necessarily been kind, and almost every recent review has mentioned her presence as overwhelming the movie. That is, the lack of chemistry between the leads, the way the movie skips over chunks of badly needed character development to make room for her songs, and the fashion disasters are frequent complaints with one common target: Babs.

TIFF ’18: Teen Spirit

September 18, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Teen, TIFF, UK

**/****
written and directed by Max Minghella

by Bill Chambers Pity about Teen Spirit, since it opens so well. Elle Fanning scrolls through her MP3 player to find the perfect song to start things off. A beat drops, and then we get the usual assortment of corporate logos. There's another great moment early on, where Fanning, having turned down a ride home from a slurring stranger who comes on like a dirty old man, is waiting at a bus stop late at night when she spies a group of young hooligans heading in her direction. The camera swipes across Fanning from one potential threat to the other: a clever visual that shows she's between a rock and a hard place. She chooses the dirty old man, Vlad (Zlatko Buric). He's a bear, but at least she wouldn't be outnumbered. Director Max Minghella clearly inherited some filmmaking chops from his old man, the late Anthony Minghella, though he asserts his individuality by shooting in anamorphic widescreen (something Anthony eschewed despite specializing in epics), and his overall style is relatively spastic; I waited in vain for Minghella to resist a gratuitous edit or camera movement. Fanning, by the way, plays a teenage chanteuse named Violet, forced to hide her passion from her mother (Agnieszka Grochowska), a proud, stern Polish immigrant who just wants her daughter to wait tables with her and stop these pop-star pipe dreams. It's a cold, cruel world out there where men abandon their families, after all, so you need a job you can depend on.

TIFF ’18: Cold War

September 14, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Poland, TIFF

**/****written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski by Angelo Muredda Pawel Pawlikowski follows up on the airless perfection of Ida with the ostensibly warmer but equally over-manicured and emotionally distant Cold War, a more historically trenchant La La Land for postwar Poland. Leave it to Pawlikowski, who never met a compelling, age-lined face he didn't want to frame in an artfully-arranged tableau, to mute even the potentially energizing opening montage of folk performers doing their bits before his ethnographic camera and its onscreen extension, the extended mic of pianist and recruiter Wiktor (Tomasz Kot, whose passing resemblance to Will Forte makes…

TIFF ’17: Brad’s Status

September 18, 20172017, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

**½/****
starring Ben Stiller, Austin Abrams, Jenna Fischer, Michael Sheen
written and directed by Mike White

by Angelo Muredda Nobody captures the insidiousness and pervasiveness of depressive thinking quite like Mike White, who returns to the middle-aged professional anxiety and panic-inducing Impostor Syndrome of “Enlightened” with Brad’s Status, a quiet, obstinately minor film that largely unfolds through the emotionally-stunted protagonist’s daydreaming voiceover critiques of his own minimal actions onscreen. Brad’s Status positions itself as a lower-middle-class American B-side to Éric Rohmer in its focus on one man’s interrogation of his own moral failings, a modest goal it mostly pulls off.

TIFF ’17: Suburbicon + Bodied

September 10, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Satire, Thriller, TIFF

SUBURBICON
*½/****
starring Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, Oscar Isaac, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen and George Clooney & Grant Heslov
directed by George Clooney

BODIED
*½/****
starring Calum Worthy, Jackie Long, Charlamagne Tha God, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Joseph Kahn & Alex Larsen
directed by Joseph Kahn

by Bill Chambers The best parts are obviously the Coens’ and the worst parts are obviously director George Clooney and co-writer Grant Heslov’s. Trouble is, the best parts aren’t that great and the worst parts…yikes. A period piece set in the Eisenhower era, Suburbicon centres around the eponymous suburban development (that the title isn’t just a pun unto itself is the first red flag, to borrow one of the movie’s pet phrases), which has controversially allowed a black family to breach this all-white neighbourhood. Next door, horn-rimmed patriarch Gardner Lodge (Matt Damon) lives a pleasant life with his little-leaguer son (Noah Jupe), wheelchair-user wife (Julianne Moore), and sister-in-law Margaret (also Moore). (One of them’s blonde, like the other Elvis in Kissin’ Cousins.) One night, while Jupe’s Nicky is lying in bed listening to the radio, a pair of thugs (Glenn Fleshler and Alex Hassell) breaks in and holds the family hostage. Everyone is chloroformed, but Mrs. Lodge’s system can’t handle it, and Gardner is left a widower. When the home-invaders are caught and put in a police line-up, Nicky can’t figure out why his father won’t positively ID them. They have very recognizable faces, after all. Using the Coen Brothers’ casting director, Ellen Chenoweth, Clooney populates the frame with the sort of memorable oddballs you see in their films, actors who seem like they’re always being looked at through a wide-angle lens.

Baby Driver (2017)

June 26, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Music, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Ansel Engort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jamie Foxx
written and directed by Edgar Wright

by Walter Chaw Edgar Wright is a good filmmaker and a better fan. The things he likes, he likes better than other people. It makes him the perfect choice for a zombie movie, a buddy movie, an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type alien-invasion movie, even a videogame movie. What Edgar Wright doesn’t appear to be is the type of Sidney Lumet/Walter Hill, gritty 1970s action-film auteur he’d probably like to be. With his new film, he’s going for Report to the Commissioner but coming up with The Super Cops–and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, except that straining for one impacts the effortlessness and unfiltered joy of the other. Baby Driver lands somewhere in the area of Peckinpah’s The Getaway with its nasty rogue’s gallery and Hill’s The Driver with its enigmatic hero and his way with cars before sliding off the rails at the end, which feels like, of all things, the climax of Christine. Yet for a few effortless minutes at the beginning, it’s something all its own, and it’s delirious. It’s the feeling you get when you first see Shaun of the Dead: like watching a favourite film for the first time again. I like that Wright loves all of these guys and their movies, but I wish he’d pick a lane. I admire his ambition and taste a great deal. But his far-ranging interests have made a disjointed mix-tape of this picture. It’s the kind you make to impress instead of from the heart. For what it’s worth, and it’s not worth a lot, I just selfishly sort of wish he’d do more Cornetto films. How many flavours are there, anyway? At least seven, right? Let’s get on that.

Vinyl: The Complete First Season (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 24, 20162016, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Music, Television

Image A- Sound A Extras B-
“Pilot,” “Yesterday Once More,” “Whispered Secrets,” “The Racket,” “He in Racist Fire,” “Cyclone,” “The King and I,” “E.A.B.,” “Rock and Roll Queen,” “Alibi”

by Bill Chambers A feeling of déjà vu pervades HBO’s “Vinyl”, and not just because it’s so prototypical of the network’s taste in weekly dramas. The first–and simultaneously last–ten episodes are a somewhat hellish loop of stylistic motifs, crutches, and tics. Refrains are a musical conceit, and this is a show about the record industry, so maybe there’s a thematic defense for the repetition. But with all the imbibing that goes on on screen, “Vinyl”‘s periodicities (running out of synonyms!) begin to make the most sense as cues to take a shot. This review should provide all the drinking prompts you need while also serving as a post-mortem for the series, which got cancelled just as I sat down to write about it.¹ At the risk of beating a dead horse, here’s what went wrong–and, occasionally, right–with “Vinyl”.

Green Room (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

July 17, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Music, Thriller

Greenroom1

****/**** Image B Sound A Extras B
starring Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Alia Shawkat, Patrick Stewart
written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier

by Walter Chaw I wonder if Jeremy Saulnier has ever made something that wasn’t, in its dark heart of hearts, a comedy. I hadn’t considered this before a dear friend suggested it after a screening of Green Room, and it caused me to reassess Saulnier’s previous films, Murder Party and Blue Ruin. The labels “hardcore” and “brutal” don’t feel exactly right, though his work is certainly both at times. There’s a Mel Brooks quote I like that defines tragedy as you getting a paper-cut–it hurts, it’s awful, it’s terrible–and comedy as somebody else falling into a sewer and dying. Saulnier’s films are litanies of horrible, unimaginable calamities befalling generally well-meaning schlubs who are altogether unequipped to deal with them. Murder Party, his feature debut, set the template. Its protagonist is a lonely guy who answers a general invitation to attend a Halloween “Murder Party,” where he discovers that he’s the only guest and that all of the hosts have decided to murder him. It’s the most obviously comic of his pictures, and it ends with a moment of crystal-blue melancholy as it becomes clear that the audience has sutured not just to this guy’s guilelessness, but to the loneliness driving him as well. Blue Ruin is a masterpiece of the same sort of mechanics. It’s delightful: delightfully funny, delightfully smart, delightfully brutal. The hero of that piece, played by Macon Blair (who has a key role in Green Room), is another nebbish pulled from obscurity to be, briefly, the hero of his own life.

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

August 14, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***/****
starring O’Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Exhilarating until it turns into a “Behind the Music” special, F. Gary Gray’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton (hereafter Compton) is most affecting for just how timely are its self-aggrandizing tales of police brutality and racial profiling. Amid a sequence that reprises the Rodney King tape, it occurred to me that we’re talking about something that happened almost 25 years ago; all we’ve done in the time intervening is lengthen the list of martyrs and sites of atrocity. Progress that a movie that deals as directly as Compton does with race and the police exists in any form, I guess, but it’s cold comfort in the face of what feels like a treadmill built on a Moebius strip. Call it a national farce and a tragedy that what is obviously an auto-mythology plays so much like objective, sober documentary and evening newscast. God bless America.

Limelight (1952) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

July 8, 20151950s, 2015, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Chaplin, Directors: Charles Chaplin, Drama, Music, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Charles Chaplin, Claire Bloom, Sydney Chaplin, Nigel Bruce
written and directed by Charles Chaplin

by Bryant Frazer The opening titles of Limelight describe the film modestly but self-consciously as “the story of a ballerina and a clown.” The clown, of course, is Chaplin himself, playing a faded superstar of the stage named Calvero. The ballerina is Chaplin’s own discovery, Claire Bloom, playing a beautiful and earnest young dancer. The story is about their relationship–how a washed-up old comedian takes a despairing young performer under his wing and gives her the confidence to become a great artist, even as his own career fades into irrelevance. The main dilemmas facing Calvero–his steadily advancing age and the fickleness of his public–were the same ones that bedevilled Chaplin at the time.

Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets (2014)

June 18, 20152015, Authors: Bill Chambers, Concert Doc, Documentary, Music, UK

**½/****
directed by Florian Habicht

by Bill Chambers There's an episode of "The Larry Sanders Show" where tragic sidekick Hank Kingsley asks producer Artie what he thinks of him opening his solo act with Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel." "It's a showstopper, Hank," Artie says, briefly raising Hank's hopes before delivering the kicker: "Never open with a showstopper." I was reminded of this at the outset of Pulp: a Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets, which opens with the title band giving a rousing performance of their "Common People" that is, for those of us watching after the fact, vicariously thrilling. "[1996] won't produce a more indispensable song," wrote rock authority Robert Christgau, and indeed, "Common People" went on to crystallize the Britpop movement and be covered by the disparate likes of Tori Amos and William Shatner. If you're a dilettante like myself, you go into this first sanctioned documentary about Pulp (lead singer Jarvis Cocker receives a "concept" credit alongside director Florian Habicht) wishing to hear "Common People," and what follows pales for the instant gratification–at least until it becomes clear that "Common People" had to be up front: for purposes of this film, it's nothing less than the national anthem.

TIFF ’14: Seymour: An Introduction; Love & Mercy; Whiplash

September 18, 20142014, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, TIFF

SEYMOUR: AN INTRODUCTION
***½/****
directed by Ethan Hawke

LOVE & MERCY
**½/****
directed by Bill Pohlad

WHIPLASH
**/****
written and directed by Damien Chazelle

by Bill Chambers Ethan Hawke’s first documentary isn’t the affected thing its Googler-confusing, appropriated-from-Salinger title would suggest. (And perhaps we should be grateful he didn’t go with Suddenly Seymour, Seymour Butts, or I Know What You Did Last Seymour.) Intimate but not prying, Seymour: An Introduction profiles the homuncular Seymour Bernstein, a former pianist of some renown who withdrew from the concert circuit in his prime to focus on teaching piano, hoping to stave off the neuroses of fame. Hawke decided to make the film after receiving some life-altering advice from Bernstein at a gathering, as if compelled to share his good fortune with the world, and that generosity of spirit courses through a piece that looks for wisdom, not pathology, in its subject’s hermetic existence (57 years alone in the same New York apartment) and monk-like devotion to music. A forgotten genius, Bernstein also proves an unsung raconteur in enthralling stories that place him at the centre of a real-life Sunset Boulevard or on the front lines of Korea; he commands the screen in lingering close-ups and holds court with equally-captive audiences of confrères and disciples, despite his professed stage fright. The picture builds to Bernstein’s first live performance in decades, a recital Hawke has arranged in a gesture that seems like a betrayal yet has the not-undesirable effect of making Bernstein look oddly heroic. If possible, he’s an even more expressive individual when filtered through the keys of a Steinway.

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)

December 8, 2013****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, France, Music, Theatrical, UK

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw I love the Coen Brothers, despite my suspicion that most of their movies don’t think much of me at all. What’s often read as disdain for their characters I’ve read mainly as antipathy for their audience: I believe they like their characters just fine, it’s just that they could give a shit about your opinion of what happens to them. I love the Coens for their literary acumen, for their fine ability to understand not simply the form of genre–and, in their adaptations, of authors–but the entire function as well. They don’t just adapt Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis novels, they adapt those writers’ entire bodies of work. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a remarkable retelling of The Odyssey, for instance, because in addition to following the outlines of the poem, it adapts its themes and storytelling strategies; it’s a dissection and a representation and glorious, of course. They return now to The Odyssey–or, at least, to the character of Odysseus–in Inside Llewyn Davis, a picture set in 1961, among the bohos and coffee shops of a Greenwich Village on the verge of Bob Dylan and the counterculture, and it’s populated with lost souls in overlapping underworlds. Transpose that passage from Homer where Odysseus fills troughs with sheeps’ blood to draw the undead (and finds his poor deceased mother there at her drink) to scenes in Pappi’s (Max Casella) infernal nightclub as proto-hipsters and neo-beatniks assemble blandly on the edge of a trembling something while performers bleed out before them. In rituals for new gods, after all, there must be lambs to slaughter.

SDFF ’13: I Used to Be Darker

November 24, 20132013, 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…

SDFF ’13: The Broken Circle Breakdown

November 7, 20132013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, DIFF/SDFF, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Romance

***/****
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.

Starz Denver Film Festival ’13: All Together Now

November 3, 20132013, 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…