TIFF ’13: MANAKAMANA

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

Manakamana_01-1

***½/****
directed by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez

by Angelo Muredda The most spectacular sequence in Leviathan, the last major film to come out of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, captured a horrifying seagull raid from the perspective of the birds’ prey, the camera appended to a boat and darting through the water alongside a school of anxious fish. MANAKAMANA, co-directed by the lab’s recent graduates Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez, doesn’t quite have the money shot of its predecessor, but its very existence as a finished product feels like the fulfillment of a delicate magic trick. Forgoing the dozens of lightweight cameras that made Leviathan such a visceral experience, Spray and Velez fix their single camera on a cable car as it travels over the valleys of Trisuli in Nepal, carrying all manner of local pilgrims and tourists to the titular temple. We follow the car as it goes up and down over the valley eleven times, alternately watching the restless, contended, and excited passengers register every bump and dip of the trip and feeling swept along ourselves, thanks to a transparent glass window that overlooks the hills. (As Dennis Lim pointed out in the LA TIMES, each ride’s duration of about twelve minutes neatly lines up with the length of a roll of 16mm film.)

Telluride ’13: Gravity

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Telluride, Telluride 2013, Thriller

Gravity

**½/****
starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney
screenplay by Alfonso Cuarón & Jonás Cuarón
directed by Alfonso Cuarón

by Walter Chaw Alfonso Cuarón’s eagerly-anticipated, already-buzzy follow-up to the tremendous Children of Men is Gravity–a title that doesn’t reference the Ray Bradbury story “Kaleidoscope,” to which the film owes at least a little credit (in addition to the premise and theme, Gravity also lifts the character name “Stone”), or any real meat at the heart of the story. It’s not for lack of trying, as Cuarón and son/co-writer Jonás attempt, after the emotional tissue connecting the protags of Children of Men, to graft another lost-child drama onto a larger science-fiction conceit. What results is probably the most venue-dependant release of a year that includes Pacific Rim–if you can see it in IMAX 3D, you ought to: the biggest screen with the best sound. It’s possibly the first film since Avatar that actually works with the extra dimension, despite having been converted in post-production; at times while screening Gravity at the Werner Herzog Theater in Telluride, I felt a bit vertiginous. It’s an effect that no doubt had everything to do with the dual-projection and the custom-designed sound system by Meyers Sound. I talked to several techs from the company running around before the show, tweaking, testing, making sure that organs physically shifted during the presentation. My favourite story of the festival is how Cuarón, from the auditorium, instructed the booth to turn up the audio to just less than twice the “acceptable” volume.

Telluride ’13: 12 Years a Slave

Telluride ’13: 12 Years a Slave

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013, UK

**½/****
starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano
screenplay by John Ridley, based on the book by Solomon Northrup
directed by Steve McQueen

by Walter Chaw With performances this good, with a director this astonishing, the only thing that could make it less than transcendent, I’m afraid, is source material so well-respected, so revered truth be known, that it limits the places the cast and director might otherwise go. What I’m saying is that the prospect of Steve McQueen making a slave narrative is one to savour, celebrate, induce chills in the hearts of every serious scholar of cinema as experiential philosophy–and the prospect of Steve McQueen adapting Solomon Northrup’s (as related to white lawyer David Wilson) 12 Years a Slave is one to inspire some level of inevitable disappointment. What I expected was to be blown away by Michael Fassbender and Chiwetel Ejiofor’s performances–and I was. What I didn’t expect was to be disturbed by a few instances of manipulation of the document that seem driven by something other than good faith. Why, for instance, would one portray the death of a black conspirator on a slaver ship bound for Louisiana at the hand of a white crewman about to rape a sympathetic figure, when the document reveals this conspirator was taken by smallpox? For the sake of drama? Were the roles reversed, this kind of narrative manipulation would take on a decidedly different hue.

TIFF ’13: The Past

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Mystery, TIFF
**/**** directed by Asghar Farhadi by Angelo Muredda The Past is a heartbreaker, a badly misjudged project that retraces each major step of Asghar Farhadi's A Separation but arrives at the finish line with little to show for itself. Like Farhadi's previous film, we start with a divorce, this time between Parisian Marie (Bérénice Bejo, channelling Marion Cotillard's more hysterical performances, especially for Christopher Nolan) and the now Tehran-based Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa), who flies back into town to sign the papers and see his ex off into her new relationship with Samir (Tahar Rahim). That Samir has his own troubled…

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 2

Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Noah

A Grand Canal ***/****
19 mins., d. Johnny Ma
Beasts in the Real World *½/****
8 mins., d. Sol Friedman
Daybreak (Éclat du jour) ***/****
11 mins., d. Ian Lagarde
Noah ***½/****
17 mins., ds. Walter Woodman & Patrick Cederberg
Out *½/****
8 mins., d. Jeremy Lalonde
Seasick **½/****
4 mins., d. Eva Cvijanovic
Young Wonder *½/****
6 mins., d. James Wilkes

by Bill Chambers It opens with a bride and groom saying their vows, but as subtitled voiceover from writer-director Johnny Ma informs us, this is not a romance. A Grand Canal dramatizes the last days of Ma’s father, a Chinese boat captain who angers a mob boss by turning away a shipment, then makes things worse in trying to collect on the boss’s debt. Mei Song Shun–astonishingly, a newcomer–is powerful as a proud man reduced to grovelling in a scene exceptionally well-calibrated for tension and pathos, considering this is both a short film and a student film. Shun is so good, in fact, that it feels like a betrayal of his performance when Ma decides to up and break the fourth wall with B-roll of himself directing and narration elaborating upon the therapeutic value of this endeavour.

TIFF ’13: Devil’s Knot

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Crime, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, Film Festivals, Thriller, TIFF

Devilsknot_01

**/****
directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda Something is off in Devil’s Knot, the third film about the West Memphis Three in as many years, and it isn’t just the Satanic panic that turned a bereaved community against three wrongfully accused teenagers. Although its Tennessee setting takes him far from his usual haunt of Toronto, this material seemed like a slam dunk for Atom Egoyan, who’s done his best work in films about parents dwelling in the endless hangover of their children’s premature deaths. It’s a shame, then, that his new film feels like a wheel-spinning exercise rather than a deepening of old themes. Egoyan’s approach to this tapped-out story hits the dramatic and formal beats you’d expect from his filmography: here we get a child’s cryptic, disembodied voiceover about what he’s seen; there, a videotaped testimony that conceals more than it discloses. Ambiguity is the name of the game, just like in The Sweet Hereafter, where everything turns on young Sarah Polley’s poker face as she ushers the adults around her into the topsy-turvy world of the title.

TIFF ’13: Short Cuts Canada Programme 1

Posted in2013, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Short Films, TIFF

Subconsciouspassword_01

Cochemere **/****
12 mins., ds. Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski
Gloria Victoria **/****
7 mins., d. Theodore Ushev
Pilgrims ½*/****
8 mins., d. Marie Clements
Remember Me **½/****
15 mins., d. Jean-François Asselin
Subconscious Password ***/****
11 mins., d. Chris Landreth
The Sparkling River **½/****
18 mins., ds. Félix Lajeunesse & Paul Raphaël

by Bill Chambers TIFF 13’s Short Cuts Canada programme starts viewers off in the deep end with Cochemere, a bifurcated, CG-embellished mix of puppets and live-action in which a nude, polarized Mother Nature, presumably (Google tells me the title means “mother checkmark” in English), intrudes on a stormy utopia to nourish with milky saliva the uncanny fauna, who then appear to return the favour in outer space, their rapey, goblinlike presence prompting a shapely, flame-haired astronaut to start masturbating in her sleep. Sometimes enchanting–the opening images seem found, like the hidden universes of Microcosmos (and, hey, a little Barbarella kinkiness goes a long way)–but ultimately impenetrable. Perhaps all you need to know is that St. Thomas Aquinas is thanked in the credits.

Telluride ’13: Tim’s Vermeer

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013
**½/**** directed by Teller by Walter Chaw Teller, of magician/illusionist/debunking/bullshitting duo Penn & Teller, makes his directorial debut with a documentary that, even at a fleet 79 minutes, feels a little long. For a while, though, Tim's Vermeer paints a compelling picture of inventor (fellow illusionist and 3-D designer) Tim Jenison as he indulges his peculiar obsession with proving that Dutch master Johannes Vermeer used some kind of camera obscura optical trickery to achieve his photo-realistic style. The case seems ironclad by the end as Jenison recreates the entire room depicted in Vermeer's "The Music Room," sets up his little gizmo-whatsit,…

Telluride ’13: The Unknown Known

Posted in****/****, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013
****/**** directed by Errol Morris by Walter Chaw Errol Morris returns to The Fog of War form in what could be seen as a complementary piece: a feature-length conversation with Donald Rumsfeld called, appropriately, The Unknown Known. It's a phrase that repeats throughout a picture that's scored in a Philip Glass-ian way by Danny Elfman (who at one point channels Michael Small's music for The Parallax View) and ends with a rimshot that would be funnier if it weren't terrifying. Different from The Fog of War and an apparently repentant Robert McNamara, The Unknown Known's Rumsfeld comes off as not…

Telluride ’13: Tracks

Posted in2013, 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…

Telluride ’13: An Introduction or, The Stand

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Film Festivals, Telluride, Telluride 2013

Telluridethestand

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 of 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.

“Shrink-Ray”

Posted in2013, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blog
Please excuse this self-indulgent post, but the latest episode of my side-project "The Monster Show", "Shrink-Ray," just went live, in glorious 1080p. Thanks for checking it out, I hope it's a pleasant waste of your time. If you like what you see, you can catch up with previous instalments here.

Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Mystery, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

Qws1

Q
***/**** Image B- Sound B- Extras C
starring Michael Moriarty, Candy Clark, David Carradine, Richard Roundtree
written and directed by Larry Cohen

by Bryant Frazer Writer-director Larry Cohen makes exploitation look easy. His iconic Black Caesar was basically a remake of Little Caesar with a black cast; his mutant-baby flick It’s Alive amplified the generational rift created in families by the social revolutions of the 1960s and early-1970s to horror-movie proportions. Cohen is so commercially savvy that his screenwriting career has continued, in earnest, into the 21st century, placing projects like Phone Booth, Cellular, and Captivity at the Venn-diagram intersection between high-concept appeal and low-budget execution. He also has an instinct for character, and it never served him better than it did in Q, which is the story of a little criminal in a big city as much as it’s the story of a huge feathered serpent lording over Manhattan. Q was set up quickly (in two days, to hear Cohen tell it), after Cohen was fired from an adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, and it features a terrific cast (Michael Moriarty, David Carradine, and Richard Roundtree) improvising many of the scenes in a screenplay that was being written as the shoot progressed to take advantage of whatever New York locations Cohen was able to secure. The result isn’t quite a great monster movie, but it gets maybe 80 percent of the way there.

The Oxbow Cure (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Claudia Dey
screenplay by Yonah Lewis, Calvin Thomas, Lev Lewis
directed by Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas

by Angelo Muredda The latest in a wave of immersive, formally-sophisticated works from young Toronto filmmakers that includes Kazik Radwanski’s Tower and Igor Drljaca’s Krivina, Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas’s The Oxbow Cure expresses a bold new vision even as it fits itself snugly within established Canadian cultural traditions. As a film about a woman who heads off to an isolated cabin to treat a mystery illness, you could say it’s indebted to David Cronenberg’s ’70s output, and its unhysterical depiction of a body in the throes of a profound, if still mostly imperceptible, transformation make it a more worthy heir to the queasy body horror of Shivers and Rabid than the baroque flourishes of Antiviral. Cronenberg echoes aside, for students of Canadian literature, the minimalist plot might also recall Margaret Atwood’s seminal novel Surfacing, which similarly sends a young woman in crisis off into the woods on a sort of vision quest, exposing her to the elements of her home country and to the uncivilized mirror image of herself it offers up.

Prince Avalanche (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

Princeavalanche

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Emile Hirsch
screenplay by David Gordon Green, based on the film Either Way by Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurdsson
directed by David Gordon Green

by Angelo Muredda The standard line out of Sundance on Prince Avalanche, David Gordon Green’s tragicomic stop between the puerility of The Sitter and the Southern Gothic of his upcoming Joe, was that it was a return to form after some time spent in the wilderness. That’s true enough insofar as its dashed-off buddy travelogue, a loose adaptation of the Icelandic movie Either Way, is sweet where The Sitter is cynical, but one has to wonder at this point whether any of Green’s studio trifles can be considered outliers when their worldview is so consistent with the ostensible real deals. Even the least of his films shares a thematic interest with the others in redeeming wayward losers; by that token, Prince Avalanche isn’t a triumphant comeback so much as a familiar motif recapitulated in a more pleasant, minor key.

The Burning (1981) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack

Posted in1980s, 2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Horror, Revenge, Scream/Shout! Factory

Burning1

**½/**** Image B Sound B Extras A
starring Brian Matthews, Leah Ayres, Brian Backer, Lou David
screenplay by Peter Lawrence and Bob Weinstein
directed by Tony Maylam

by Walter Chaw The pleasures of Tony Maylam’s The Burning, such as they are, arise when one engages it in an extra-textual conversation about why at the end of the American ’70s there suddenly bloomed an exploitation slasher subgenre to provide a nihilistic gateway into the Reagan ’80s. Really, when you look at the wonderland of ’80s blockbuster cinema, there is throughout an undercurrent of Friday the 13ths and Elm Street flicks, of course, but also stuff like Slumber Party Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, Maniac, Camps Cheerleader and Sleepaway, Mother’s Day (which Roger Ebert referred to as a “geek” show–the kind that bit heads off chickens, not the kind that founded Apple)…all the lurid VHS covers that made browsing the neighbourhood rental joint such delicious taboo delight. It’s that thrill that The Burning captures and evokes still–that feeling adolescent boys of a certain age got, pre-Internet, by renting something they shouldn’t rent with the suspicion, nay, promise, it would provoke the same erotic tingle as hardcore porn would in a couple years’ time. It’s a movie very much like Tolkien’s writing: if you don’t discover it in junior high, you’ll never appreciate it the way it was meant to be appreciated again.

A Hijacking (2012)

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Denmark, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

Kapringen
***/****
starring Søren Malling, Pilou Asbæk, Dar Salim, Roland Møller
written and directed by Tobias Lindholm

by Angelo Muredda Finely-tuned but incurious about most of what falls outside its blinkered gaze, A Hijacking is about as good as this sort of stripped-down procedural filmmaking gets–Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low reconfigured for a telephonic showdown between Somali pirates and Danish shareholders. Only the second feature from Tobias Lindholm (who proves much more capable as a director than as the author of The Hunt‘s lazy allegorical punts about the concern-trolling parents of small-town Denmark), the film feels like the work of a yeoman who’s in no hurry to be recognized as a visual stylist unless the material should merit such flourishes. Annoying as that no-frills approach can be in countless austere imitations of the Dardennes and Michael Haneke, it’s more than welcome here in a film whose title might otherwise have ended with a gaudy exclamation mark.

In a World… (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Theatrical

Inaworld

***/****
starring Lake Bell, Demetri Martin, Fred Melamed, Rob Corddry
written and directed by Lake Bell

by Angelo Muredda If In a World… seems a bit busy, it’s because it has a lot on its plate. The feature debut from “Children’s Hospital” star, narrator, and sometimes-director Lake Bell, the film displays all the classic calling cards of an under-appreciated multi-hyphenate talent’s break for the mainstream: a plum starring role, punchy dialogue, and a high concept. That conceit, of a female voiceover artist moving up within the ranks of a tetchy, male-dominated industry, comes with its own baggage, instantly reminding us of the relative scarcity of high-profile American comedies shepherded by women. It’s a lot for a first feature to take on, and what most impresses about In a World…, which manages the neat trick of being both funny and thoughtful without tipping into melodrama, is its apparent effortlessness–the impression that Bell is casually navigating complicated territory.

Europa Report (2013)

Posted in2013, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Pseudo-Documentary, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

Europareport

**/****
starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvyst, Sharlto Copley
screenplay by Philip Gelatt
directed by Sebastián Cordero

by Walter Chaw Sebastián Cordero’s found-footage sci-fi flick Europa Report tells the tale of the first manned trip to the titular moon of Jupiter in search of some kind of lifeform lurking there beneath a thick layer of ice. Never mind that this is a premise Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two already explored to similar consequence, nor that Europa Report is essentially an intergalactic The Blair Witch Project: best to focus on an unfortunate framing story that dumbs down the proceedings, emotionally and intellectually, at the exact moment the picture appears to be gaining momentum. It’s all the more puzzling, given the existence of something so pandering and condescending, that the group apparently most enamoured with this movie is the scientific community, who I would have guessed would have taken more offense at being talked down to. Maybe they’re so beaten into submission by the idiotic things Damon Lindelof passes off as “science” that they’re willing to forgive Europa Report its more minor trespasses.

On the Road (2012) – Blu-ray Disc

Posted in2012, 2013, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Coming of Age, Drama, Road Movie

Ontheroad1

*½/**** Image C+ Sound A- Extras D+
starring Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen
screenplay by Jose Rivera, based on the novel by Jack Kerouac
directed by Walter Salles 

by Angelo Muredda “You goin’ some place, or just goin’?” a fellow traveller asks Sam Riley’s Sal Paradise in the long-gestating, still-undigested On the Road, Walter Salles’s handsomely-mounted but stiff adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s hipster Bible. While that’s a dangerous line to adapt in such an aimless movie, it isn’t even the most unfortunate moment of meta-commentary within the first ten minutes. Consider Sal’s panicked voiceover about the text he’s spinning out, ostensibly the same one we’re trudging through: “And what is there to talk about exactly? The book I’m not writing? The inspiration I don’t feel? Even the beer’s flat.” What, indeed? What’s left to say about a project that insists on reviewing itself at regular checkpoints and keeps finding its inspiration wanting?