Sundance Report: D'Angelo Reviews Zoo, Finds Precious Little Horse-Fucking
1/25/2007 5:00:00 PM
When the history of cinema's second century is written, 100 years from now, I'm guessing that the defining characteristic of its first decade will turn out to be the blurring of the line between narrative features and documentaries. Nicholas Barker's Unmade Beds (1997), in which four lovelorn subjects re-enacted scenes from their own lives, may have been the first film that stubbornly resisted all attempts to place it in one category or the other; ten years later, Robinson Devor's Zoo, inspired by the real-life case of a man who was killed while having sex with an Arabian stallion, makes the distinction itself seem utterly meaningless. Sundance has placed Zoo in the Documentary Competition, but on what grounds I couldn't really say. Devor has created a deliberate disjunction between sound and image, and if his interviews with the zoophile community and others associated with the incident clearly constitute nonfiction, the pictures that accompany those words—lyrical recreations, inventions, and allusions—are as vividly imaginative as anything in the oeuvres of Terrence Malick or Claire Denis.
Sounds awesome, no? But like Devor's previous film, Police Beat, which screened here two years ago, Zoo strikes me as an eminently admirable muddle, fascinating in conception but frustrating in execution. Devor collaborated on the scripts for both films with Stranger columnist Charles Mudede, and they both evince a strange, hypnotic detachment that keeps the viewer at arm's length. Given that it's about men who have sex with animals, Zoo is remarkably non-judgmental, but that's largely because it's fundamentally non-everything; Devor pushes his imagery so deep into abstraction that he threatens to lose sight of his ostensible subject altogether. (In the Q&A following my screening, he dmitted that he's far more interested in the mysteries of the Seattle landscape and the banality of potluck dinners than he is in the morality of zoophilia.) In theory, that sounds right up my alley, but as I was watching the film, I found myself growing increasingly weary of being lulled—I began to long for judgment, or at least for more active journalistic engagement with such a troubling subculture. Ultimately, Zoo is neither fiction nor nonfiction. It's a tone poem, and if you can get behind the idea of a tone poem about a dude getting plowed by a horse, you may find it unforgettable.
-- Mike D'Angelo
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Sundance Report: Whitefield Reviews The Night Buffalo
1/25/2007 4:00:00 PM
Coming into the festival this year The Night Buffalo was one of the films I was most excited about seeing, but I left the Tower Theater in Salt Lake City last night severely disappointed. Part of what drew me to this film was a script written by Guillermo Arriaga (Amorres Perros, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Babel) based on his own novel. For his sake, while exiting the theater I hoped this was just a classic case of "the book was better than the movie,” but seeing him listed as a producer and learning that director Jorge Hernandez Aldana is a friend of his convinced me I can’t let Arriaga off the hook that quickly.
In fact, the script, with Arriaga’s typical unexplained time shifts, is actually the worst thing about the movie. The story centers on a young man Manuel (Diego Luna) plagued by the suicide of his best friend Gregorio, partly inspired by the fact that Manuel is now fully entangled and in love with Gregorio’s former girlfriend. In earlier films, Arriaga’s temporal shifts and disjointed story lines worked towards creating a kind of uneasy energy that would ultimately reveal itself once all the pieces of the puzzle were on the table. Here, the broken narrative never gives us a real sense of the relationship between Manuel and Gregorio, and with only bits and pieces to go on we are never sure whether to despise or sympathize with Manuel.
Diego Luna has only really sold me on a character once -- as a clumsy adolescent in Y Tu Mama Tambien -- and here he broods, curses and skulks through his performance without ever giving us a hint of what is going on inside this young man. The direction and camerawork aren’t particularly bad, merely unexceptional. It’s the weaknesses in the story and script that are this film’s real downfall. We are given several, explicit sex scenes between Luna and three young, beautiful Mexicanas but by the end they feel gratuitous. In fact, one character is brought in only to strip and confess her love for Manuel, never to be explained or seen again. By the time the movie spiraled into a forced drama of gunshots, tear-streaming confessions, and police pursuit, I found myself confused and annoyed. I couldn’t even begin to tell you what any of it added up to.
-- Bryan Whitefield
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Video of the Day: Star Wars Battle, Done Entirely With Hands
1/25/2007 3:00:00 PM
Ok, how awesome is this? It’s the “Battle of Yavin,” from the climax of the original Star Wars, done entirely with hands.
No mummenschanz jokes, please.
(Hat tip: Cinematical.)
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Sundance Report: Whitefield Reviews Red Road
1/25/2007 2:15:00 PM
Red Road, Andrea Arnold’s feature debut after several successful shorts, started as an experiment conceived by Lars Von Trier and his Zentropa production company. According to Arnold, a group of three filmmakers were given seven characters with brief descriptions for each and told to write a film including all of them. Each film will tell different stories, but with the same characters and the same actors playing them. This is the first of the three and looks and feels very much like some of the early Dogme 95 films made by Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, among others, with its use of real locations, handheld cameras, natural light, and a story littered with dark secrets. Using these techniques to her advantage, Andrea is able to craft an extremely personal point of view with a kind of over-the-shoulder intimacy to it.
The film (which premiered at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning the Jury Prize) follows Jackie (Kate Dickie), a CCTV camera observer who, while watching surveillance footage, recognizes the face of a man from her past. The disturbing emergence of this figure compels Jackie into increasingly dangerous and irrational actions. With its mix of raw and surveillance footage, stark landscapes and troubled characters, Red Road strikes a genuine, consistent tone of unease. But that sense of disquiet is not mere atmospherics. In the end, it goes towards putting the viewer very much inside the situation, into Jackie’s head, and helps to clarify the characters’ actions. The film does offer a slim, albeit much needed, ray of hope in its conclusion -- and certainly raises interest in the other two projects associated with it.
-- Bryan Whitefield
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Sundance Report: D’Angelo Treads Carefully, Reviews Waitress
1/25/2007 1:15:00 PM
Anybody who's heard me talk about Fabián Bielinsky's stultifying The Aura, which I saw here a year ago, knows that I don't award bonus points to the recently deceased. So it was with some trepidation that I headed to yesterday's press screening of Waitress, the movie Adrienne Shelly had just submitted to Sundance when she was senselessly murdered in her own apartment last November. Though I'd been a fan of Shelly-the-actress in her films with Hal Hartley, I'd skipped both of her previous efforts as writer-director, mostly because reviews and word of mouth suggested that they weren't especially good. Advance word on Waitress was much more enthusiastic, but that could easily be chalked up to sentiment, it seemed to me; the last thing I wanted to do was inform the world that this lovely woman's final project stinks, and that everybody else must be holding their noses out of respect for her memory.
Color me relieved. Waitress was never going to set the world ablaze, but it's a funny, charming, refreshingly levelheaded portrait of "a woman in trouble" (to borrow a logline from the guy who came up with the Log Lady), the kind of movie that initially seems a bit clunky and forced but grows on you as you spend more time in the company of its distinctively addled characters. Keri Russell fairly bulldozes her way through the title role, expertly suggesting that the pregnant, unhappily married Jenna is too harried by myriad demands on her time to indulge in reflection; when Shelly finally gives her a moment of stasis—an entire montage of stasis, actually, in which the only thing that changes is our heroine's expression—the effect is so magical that you can forgive the fact that it's been set to Cake's "Short Skirt/Long Jacket." And while Jenna's abusive redneck husband (Jeremy Sisto) is a walking cliché, few filmmakers have had the courage to depict impending motherhood with such sardonic disdain, even in the ultimate service of what appears to be Shelly's valentine to her own children. ("Dear dumb baby," begins one of Jenna's several letters to her unborn fetus.)
Still, I must be getting soft, because my favorite element of Waitress was Shelly's own performance as Dawn, Jenna's mousy colleague at the diner. Sporting retro cat-eye specs and slinging a broad Southern accent, Shelly is essentially playing Vera to Russell's Alice and Cheryl Hines' Flo, and she's every bit as endearing. (That said, it's in these scenes that the film most resembles a moderately entertaining sitcom rather than a sharp indie drama.) When Dawn begs Jenna to give her a quick restroom makeover before she heads out on her "five-minute date," then looks in the mirror and exclaims, "Wow, you made me almost pretty," you can hear a lifetime of disillusion packed into those half-dozen words, tinged with a tiny speck of hope. In the course of Waitress' 104 minutes, I fell for the actress again; when the final shot of Dawn showed her waving goodbye to the camera—well, I can't speak for the rest of the house, but there certainly wasn't a dry eye in my face.
-- Mike D’Angelo
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Didn’t Get Into Sundance? Hell, Didn’t Get Into Temucula Valley DigiFest? Have No Fear…
1/25/2007 12:30:00 PM
A PR specialist in selling bad films gives us “How To Sell An Awful Film In 12 Easy Steps.”
Hilarious stuff. An example:
“Number 4: Solicit Reviews from Legitimate (Sounding) Websites
“Luckily, a lot of important-sounding movie websites (something like, say, "TheCriticsChoice.com" or "TheDVDCritic.com") belong to lonely guys living in rural hamlets who are desperate for something to write about and easily bribed into giving a film four stars in exchange for some free screeners and a vaguely worded invitation to the “world premiere.” Of the ten fake movie critic sites that I use, six are in West Virginia, two are in Virginia, one is in Kentucky and one is in North Carolina. Go figure. Most of these guys (and they're always GUYS) can't get Fed Ex deliveries, since they're all on some rural route or use PO Boxes. Once they post the glowing tribute on their websites — the links usually arrive in my inbox within ten minutes — I can proudly quote their raves on our movie posters, websites, and marketing materials.”
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Sundance Report: Whitefield Reviews Never Forever
1/25/2007 11:45:00 AM
Gina Kim, a visual and conceptual artist, as well as a professor at Harvard, gives us a surprisingly sensitive and mature first feature with Never Forever. It’s the story of an infertile husband driven to a suicide attempt, and his wife who is willing to do anything to restore his happiness and give him the gift he desires. In the lead role of Sophie, Sundance It-girl (and Departed love interest) Vera Farmiga displays a captivating beauty in a demanding part, full of high emotional stakes. Since her character refuses to reveal her true feelings at all costs, the audience is left to read Sophie’s inner life through repeated close-ups of her face and crystal blue eyes. The film hinges on Sophie’s journey from self-sacrifice to a self-fulfillment that ultimately reawakens her desire, both physically and in her will to reclaim her own life. Strangely, Sophie finds the redemption and answers she lacked through prayer and organized religion in the sins she commits to try and save her marriage.
This could have easily gone down the path of excruciating melodrama, but the subtle grace of Kim’s writing avoids that pitfall. Her use of warm natural light and color to tell the story also comes across as a cinematically sophisticated choice. The heart of this movie comes through in the shared moments between Sophie and Jihah (Jung-woo Ha) the young illegal immigrant she hires, then becomes intimate with. The success of this film depends heavily on Farmiga's performance. And, as evidenced by the well-deserved standing ovation she received at the film's Q&A afterwards, I'd say that success is assured.
-- Bryan Whitefield
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Sundance Update: More Stuff Gets Bought, Pundits Divided, Dakota Lashes Out
1/25/2007 11:00:00 AM
- This year’s Sundance buying frenzy has been so outrageous that even films that didn’t screen at the festival are selling.
- Even as more burnt-out pundits buy into the whole “Worst. Sundance. Ever” theory, there are some, like Scott Foundas, who appear to be enjoying themselves.
- Dakota Fanning is annoyed by people criticizing her decision to star in Hounddog.
- New York Magazine talks to Amir Bar-Lev, director of the hit doc My Kid Could Paint That.
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Morning Deal Report: Reasons to Post Pictures of Maria Bello, and a Soccer Movie Bidding War
1/25/2007 10:00:00 AM
- Maria Bello and Ray Liotta will star in the thriller Downloading Nancy, in which Bello will play “Nancy, an unhappy wife who, instead of committing suicide, meets a man over the Internet and hires him to kill her. Problems arise when they form a relationship.”
- After “an intense multistudio bidding war,” which included Steven Spielberg, Disney, and Harvey Weinstein, Universal has won the movie rights to a New York Times article about “a group of soccer-playing refugee kids who settled near Atlanta.” And it was only published this past Sunday. Must have been some article.
- David Wenham (Faramir from the Lord of the Rings films) has joined the cast of Baz Luhrmann’s Hugh Jackman-Nicole Kidman epic Australia.He will play the bad guy in the film, “a station manager who is plotting to possess the ranch, called Faraway Downs,” which Kidman’s character has inhabited.
- Eddie Murphy may star in Paramount’s NowhereLand about “a successful financial exec who suddenly loses his confidence and finds his career going down the drain. He discovers the answers to his problems within the imaginary world created by his daughter.” It’s like Pan’s Labyrinth meets The Pursuit of Happyness.
In case you were wondering, Netflix is still kicking ass left, right, and center.
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Sundance Report: D'Angelo Reviews Son of Rambow
1/24/2007 5:00:00 PM
Imagine Lukas Haas' character from Witness abruptly transformed into Jason Schwartzman's character from Rushmore, and then further imagine that oddball juxtaposition as rendered with a distinctly British sensibility, and then add a dollop of '80s nostalgia, and you'll have a pretty good sense of the goofy fun to be had watching Son of Rambow, which may well become a minor hit -- it's already been scooped up by Paramount Vantage -- provided that audiences aren't put off by a title that seems to demand an explanatory "[sic]." Written and directed by Garth Jennings (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), the film pivots upon the unlikely friendship that develops between two 11-year-old boys -- one of them (Will Poulter) an incorrigible ruffian, the other (Bill Milner) a member of the Plymouth Brethren, which seems to be a rough U.K. equivalent of the Amish. Since the Brethren frown upon any exposure to pop culture, young Will can't believe his eyes when his new buddy Carter shows him a bootleg VHS copy of First Blood -- the first movie he's ever seen in his life. Before long, spurred by a television contest for young filmmakers, Will and Carter have begun creating their own remake/homage to Stallone's one-man forest assault, wielding a massive '80s-era video camera with all the naive confidence and ludicrous ambition of the Max Fischer Players.
Son of Rambow lacks the melancholy undercurrent that made Wes Anderson's film something truly special, but it definitely brings the funny. The premise itself is pure gold, and Jennings demonstrates exquisite comic timing in one absurd vignette after another -- some of the best bits come from a tangential subplot involving a French foreign-exchange student whose streaked hair and leather pants leave the Brits awestruck. ("Bonjour...L'Angleterre," he solemnly intones into a microphone upon arrival, as if he'd just kicked off the first leg of his world tour.) Like too many contemporary comedies, Rambow gets bogged down a bit with sentiment in its third act, as Jennings provides a helpful lesson about the True Meaning of Friendship. But it helps when the gooey homilies are addressed to a little kid who's both dressed up and addressed as Colonel Trautman.
--Mike D'Angelo
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