(Audrey is at Sundance, courting exhaustion and eye strain. See Take One, and Take Two.)
The Extra Man is the latest by husband-and-wife writer-director team Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini (with Jonathan Ames, adapting his own novel). As the dynamic duo is responsible for American Splendor, I will go with them on any cinematic journey.
In this film, they give Kevin Kline the juicy role of Henry Harrison–the kind of performance that the Academy ignores every year–a senior citizen pseudo-aristocrat, who knows how to get things for free, whether it’s sneaking into the opera or talking wealthy friends into putting him up in Palm Beach. Enter his new roommate Louis Ives, played by Paul Dano, an English lit teacher turned magazine ad salesman, who both fancies himself a gentleman straight out of Gatsby and struggles with some cross-dressing tendencies. Dano, with his flat face and awkward demeanor, is the perfect fit as a psychologically-conflicted aspiring dilettante who often imagines a narrator telling the story of his life. Does this sound like a comedy? Because it is, and a pretty funny one at that. Even with Katie Holmes? Yes, even with Katie Holmes.
Obselidia is a simply precious debut by Diane Bell. Leaving the screening, I heard some complaints that it was too pretentious (depends on what your definition of “pretentious” is) and that the film’s colors were off (flat-out wrong, the digital camerawork is lovely), but this film did it for me completely. Like others, I was completely charmed. Obselidia is twee in the way that Me and You and Everyone We Know is twee, so if you don’t have a sweet tooth, stop right there. But if you think you can handle it, meet George, a librarian who is working on his encyclopedia of obsolete things (see the title)—by typewriter, no less. He includes “love” as an entry in his reference book, but when he meets Sophie, a silent film projectionist, he starts to change his mind.
Meanwhile, the less you know about Catfish, the better. I won’t say much, under filmmakers’ orders. It starts out being about the penpal friendship that develops between Abby Pierce, an eight-year-old burgeoning painter in rural Michigan and Yaniv Schulman, a twenty-four-year-old photographer in New York City. He starts to become friends with her whole family too, and that’s where things start to get weird, in the most modern of ways. The debut feature film by Ariel Schulman (older brother of Yaniv) and Henry Joost is the hot doc at Sundance this year, for good reason. It will sell; you must see it.
Everybody knows Banksy, and everybody loves Bansky. The British vigilante street artist/social commentator/cultural prankster has made some of the most accessible yet profound art since Warhol. Exit Through the Gift Shop is the “Banksy documentary,” in that this is a Banksy-made film (whatever that means), and Banksy “appears” throughout the film (his face obscured and voice modulated to hide his identity, of course).
But this isn’t really a film about Banksy. No, Exit Through the Gift Shop is really about Thierry Guetta, a vintage clothing store owner turned amateur filmmaker, who obsessively chronicled his life in L.A. until he started obsessively chronicling the growing street art movement. (His cousin, mosaic street artist Invader, turned him on to the scene.) Thierry passes himself off as a documentarian and is granted full access to all the biggest artists, including Shepherd Fairey and, finally, the elusive Banksy.
But he’s not really filming a documentary, he’s just filming for the sake of filming, and so what’s the next step? Even Thierry isn’t ready for all that. The movie is both awesome and a trainwreck (it’s billed as “the world’s first street art disaster movie”), with Thierry as a great eccentric subject. He’s a character who doesn’t even realize he’s a character.
My last film of the day (yes, Tuesday was a five-film day) was Holy Rollers, your typical coming-of-age Hasidic drug dealer story. Based on real events, Jesse Eisenberg gets all jewed up to play one of several Hasidim who became couriers, smuggling ecstasy from Amsterdam to New York City in the late ’90s. Of course, this is about more than just drugs; it’s also about the struggle to examine your blind faith and find your own way. It ain’t easy to keep extremely orthodox while smuggling drugs, and director Kevin Asch does a great job of immersing the audience into each of these polar opposite worlds. On the whole, I’d have to say it was the weakest film of the day (the most predictable, at least), but that’s only because this was a great film festival day.