Sundance ’07: Fido

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Sci-Fi, Sundance, Zombie
*/**** starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson screenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie directed by Andrew Currie by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes, a grade-school teacher turns…

Sundance ’07: Teeth

Posted in2000s, 2007, Authors: Alex Jackson, Film Festivals, Horror, Sundance, Thriller
*½/**** starring Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein by Alex Jackson I was very excited when I first stumbled upon the notion of the vagina dentata, as it provides for a distinctly female version of sexual aggression: Unlike the male rape drive, it's not about power, it's about taking power away from men--cannibalism and castration. I should have known that Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth would not be the film to really explore this notion as soon as I learned that it's literally about a teenage girl who discovers she has teeth in her…

Sundance ’06: Punching at the Sun

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

*½/****
starring Misu Khan, Nina Edmonds, Hassan El-Gendi, Ferdusy Dia
written and directed by Tanuj Chopra

by Alex Jackson Punching at the Sun follows the life of South Asian Queens teenager Mameet Nayak (Misu Khan). Mameet: (1) Lives in the shadow of his older brother, who was gunned down in his family’s convenience store; (2) Falls in love with the neighbourhood sneaker salesgirl, Shawni (Nina Edmonds); (3) Identifies deeply with hip-hop culture; and (4) Feels that South Asians, due to their physical similarity to Arabs, are being unfairly mistreated in the aftermath of 9/11. The chief problem with Punching at the Sun is the sheer breadth of material it tries to cover. Writer-director Tanuj Chopra hasn’t narrowed down his subject or angle–he seems to want to show us as much of what it’s like to be a South Asian Queens teenager as possible. Even then, I have my doubts as to the film’s anthropological validity. Attacks towards South Asians mistaken for Arabs have been rather scattered, and I have to wonder if Chopra chose to highlight them because it struck a chord of truth about the South Asian-American experience, or because it makes for a juicy movie.

Sundance ’06: Into Great Silence

Posted in****/****, 2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Sundance, Switzerland

Die Große Stille
****/****
directed by Philip Gröning

by Alex Jackson I actually saw director Philip Gröning’s previous film at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival. It was called L’Amour, l’argent, l’amour, and it was kind of awful, I guess, very long and very pretentious. But it was kind of mesmerizing, too, and the mesmerizing and the awful become inextricable–it’s the sort of “bad” movie that only a true genius could make. Gröning’s Into Great Silence is in the same insane tradition. I offer no intellectual defense towards either of these two movies; I don’t know if I’m complimenting the Emperor on his new clothes or not; all I know is that I watch them and something…just…clicks. Into Great Silence is a documentary filmed inside the Grande Chartreuse, the head monastery in France’s Carthusian Order. Gröning passively and reverently observes the monks going through their daily routine, making little comment or inquiry as to the who, what, or why of it. Title cards containing relevant Bible verses–printed in French and translated into German, which is then translated into English–surface throughout the 164-minute runtime. Gröning continuously returns to a sequence where the monks stare uncomfortably into the camera for some period of time. He repeats the image of a red light burning in otherwise utter darkness and the image of an airplane flying over the monastery.

Sundance ’06: A Darkness Swallowed

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, Sundance
***/**** directed by Betzy Bromberg by Alex Jackson A Darkness Swallowed is an experimental film consisting entirely of extreme close-ups of fossils, skins, rocks, and water droplets. There is a brief passage of voiceover in the beginning and a full-length soundtrack, but that's it as far as narrative cues are concerned. The film is supposed to be about the "nature of cellular memory" and "the physical traces that memories leave behind on and inside our bodies, and on and inside the earth." I had a considerably more banal philosophical question on my mind while watching it: I saw things in…

Sundance ’06: By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, France, Sundance
***/**** directed by Cédric Laty & Vincent Gérard by Alex Jackson I'm certain that William Eggleston is a real photographer; I'm a little less sure that Cédric Laty and Vincent Gérard are real Frenchmen: I can't find anything about them on the Internet not directly related to this movie. You would understand my skepticism were you to see By the Ways, A Journey with William Eggleston, which plays like a particularly bizarre practical joke. The film purports to be a study of Eggleston's life and work, but it's actually more of a Parisian love letter to American cars, the American…

Sundance ’06: Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Concert Doc, Documentary, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Music, Sundance

Awesome; I Shot That!
½*/****
directed by Nathanial Hörnblowér

by Alex Jackson Given that I was about halfway through a really nasty cold when I saw The Beastie Boys‘ Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That!, I probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind to judge its merits. With that disclaimer in place, this has to be the loudest movie I have ever seen. At the end of the ordeal, I felt as though band members Mike D, Adam Horowitz, and Adam Yauch had burrowed inside my brain and gone to work with an iron frying pan. I’ll cop to preferring masochistic cinematic experiences in general and getting angry and frustrated by movies that want little more than to cheer me up–but from now on, I’m going to draw the line at Beastie Boys concert films. At their 2004 Madison Square Garden show, The Beastie Boys handed out cameras to 50 audience members with instructions to shoot anything that interested them; Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! was culled from their footage. It sounds like a pretty daffy idea, but the results are much better than you would expect–or, more accurately, they seem to reflect the vision of director Yauch (credited as Nathanial Hörnblowér). The visuals are every bit as aggressive as the music: they push you down, smash your skull against the pavement, and don’t stop until they see the pink stuff. There are few moments where The Beastie Boys are not performing and there are few shots that don’t underscore the music. It’s cinematic, it’s fast, and it leaves you bruised and wounded.

Sundance ’06: Adam’s Apples

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Comedy, Crime, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, Germany, Sundance

Adams æbler
*/****
starring Ulrich Thomsen, Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Nicolas Bro
written and directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

by Alex Jackson Adam’s Apples begins with a Danish skinhead (Ulrich Thomsen) getting off a bus at a halfway house out in the country and keying the vehicle as it drives away, immediately telling us that this isn’t going to be a movie that seriously considers the economic origins and social ramifications of the Danish white-supremacist movement. The skinhead, whose name is Adam, meets the other inhabitants of the halfway house, which include an Arabic stickup-man (who speaks in adorably broken Danish and only robs stores he has a political beef with) and an obese, bearded, childlike sex offender, just so the film can unfairly invite comparisons to Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor. The halfway house is run by Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a widowed minister who may very well be crazier than his flock! He’s kind of out of it, refusing to believe that his brain-damaged son isn’t able to walk or talk and always firmly turning the other cheek whenever Adam confronts him with the obvious or beats him up in frustration. Ivan requires Adam to think up a short-term goal and follow through on it. Adam rebelliously wisecracks that he would like to bake an apple pie; Ivan, the good-natured idiot, assigns Adam to take care of the church’s lone apple tree. Adam’s Apples is a combination of the “Loveable Crazies” and “The Reformation of Grumpy Bear” sub-genres of pandering middlebrow pap.

Sundance ’06: Thin

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance
**½/**** directed by Lauren Greenfield by Alex Jackson Everybody hates the anorexic/bulimics. It's a disease exclusive to spoiled white girls with "negative body image"--a pseudoscientific catchphrase of the pseudoscientific psychiatric community that dominated in the diagnosis-happy 1970s. While people in the rest of the world--the rest of the country, even--starve from hunger, these rich brats "restrict" themselves or "purge." Not helping matters any re: Thin, the rare documentary to revolve around something other than Iraq or exotic animals, is that it's a film about an upper-middle-class disease targeted at an upper-middle-class audience. This is an easier subject for them to…

Sundance ’06: Cinnamon

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
*½/**** starring John Bowles, Erin Stewart, Ashley Bowles, Larry Bowles written and directed by Kevin Jerome Everson by Alex Jackson Taking my cue from the official description in the Sundance Film Festival Film Guide, I've been referring to Cinnamon as "the black race-car driver movie." Depiction of race in the movies is a real dilemma: Being black is either meaningful or meaningless. If it's meaningful, that means the black identity is distinguished from non-blacks and is more or less alien and incomprehensible to non-blacks. If being black is meaningless, well, then why make a racing movie with an all-black cast?…

Sundance ’06: The Ground Truth

Posted in2000s, 2006, Authors: Alex Jackson, Documentary, Film Festivals, Sundance, War
The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends **/**** directed by Patricia Foulkrod by Alex Jackson Too often, I feel that critics and audiences place documentaries at the kids' table, refusing to critique them on the same level they do fiction films. Narration from the director, sit-down interviews with the subjects--in terms of filmmaking, we let documentaries get away with a lot of really primitive shit we probably wouldn't otherwise. Patricia Foulkrod's The Ground Truth is a pretty good rant, but not much of a movie; Foulkrod made it because she had a burning desire to say something, not because she…

Sundance ’06: Jewboy

Posted in2000s, 2006, Australia, Authors: Alex Jackson, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance
***½/**** starring Ewen Leslie, Naomi Wilson, Saskia Burmeister, Leah Vandenburg written and directed by Tony Krawitz by Alex Jackson Following his father's death, Orthodox Jew Yuri quits his rabbinical training and applies for a job as a taxi driver. He's mad at God, mad at his Jewish faith, and eager to experience a world that has been denied him all his life. Jewboy is perhaps the best Martin Scorsese film Martin Scorsese never made--and by that I mean, of course, the Scorsese of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and The Last Temptation of Christ rather than the more imitated (and imitable)…

Sundance ’06: The Proposition

Posted in2000s, 2006, Australia, Authors: Alex Jackson, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK, Western

*/****
starring Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt
screenplay by Nick Cave
directed by John Hillcoat

by Alex Jackson In his review of Rene Cardona’s exploitation quickie about the Jonestown Massacre Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Roger Ebert describes how Cardona ends the film with photos of the real-life victims while the audience is solemnly reminded that “those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” prompting Ebert to crack, “So remember, don’t drink cyanide.” I only wish that John Hillcoat’s The Proposition were that lucid in delivering its Important Lesson. This is a movie at least as gory and brutal as Eli Roth’s Hostel, the highlights being an exploding head and an extended, Gibson-esque flogging of a prisoner. And Hillcoat loves flies: they’re always buzzing over the carrion, the human corpses, the gourmet meals, and the sweat of the film’s grotesquely hairy Australian men. I don’t have a problem with gore per se, but I do have a problem with the self-important joylessness with which it’s depicted here–and frankly, The Proposition hasn’t any justification for its austere tone.