Tag Archives: drama

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

SIFF 2013: What We Saw (Part 2)

Keep track of all The SunBreak’s festival coverage on our SIFF 2013 page.

Tony: I Declare War is a Canadian drama that’s got an enormous amount going for it. It’s convincingly acted by its very young cast, boasts a script with a definite feel for exactly how real kids sound when interacting with each other, and it takes viewers to some refreshing and surprising places given its Stand by Me meets Lord of the Flies set-up. All of those positives make the movie’s lack of emotional pull all the more frustrating. Sure to inspire a lot of respect, but not a lot of love.

I’ll give Just Like a Woman one thing: It inspired a visceral reaction in me–just not one the filmmakers intended. Sienna Miller stars, and she remains a luminescent presence on camera. Miller tries gallantly here as a put-upon working-class Chicago girl road-tripping to Santa Fe for a belly-dancing competition. But aside from the undeniable enchantment of her’s and fellow leading lady Golshifeh Farahani’s gyrating midriffs, Just Like a Woman is nothing short of horrible–a beautifully-shot but insultingly stupid weld of Thelma and Louise and The Full Monty that hits indie-movie cliches with the same mechanized cynicism that Michael Bay applies to action-movie tropes in a Transformers movie.

Audrey: Speaking of women, After Tiller documents the last four American doctors who openly perform late-term abortions, in the wake of Dr. George Tiller’s church assassination. If an expecting mother finds out about major fetal abnormalities late in the pregnancy, hie thee to Colorado, Maryland, or New Mexico to meet the only doctors who still perform these procedures out of concern for the mother’s well-being and duty as a doctor, as well as a general stubbornness and a blatant refusal to be bullied. This is a three-hanky flick, as some of the personal stories are devastating.

Tony: Like any capably-made music doc, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me stands as a must for fans of its subject. It also offers an interesting mini-history of the band’s relationship with Stax offshoot Ardent Studios, and some unintended insight into how the band’s variety of power pop just might have been a little too insular and melancholy for its own good (this, coming from a big fan).

No such detachment exists with A Band Called Death, which some have been calling (with a degree of validity) the Searching for Sugarman of punk rock. The story of three African-American brothers ushering in punk a good two years ahead of schedule (only to have their music go unacknowledged for decades) sports several great real-life characters, and a latter-year resurgence pregnant with bittersweet drama. Amazing stuff, even if Death’s radical mutation of Motor City garage rock and proto-hardcore isn’t your cup of tea.

MvB: Also in the documentary aisle at SIFF, I saw More Than Honey, The Act of Killing, Breathing Earth, Barzan, and The Human Scale.

Once again, bees prove an immensely entertaining documentary subject — in More Than Honey, made by Markus Imhoof, a small-time Swiss beekeeper himself, the bees and the people who care for them get a close-up. The camera peers into hives for births and deaths, narrating the bees’ complicated lives for the viewer: waggle dances, mating, cell construction. You meet prototypical American bee-capitalist John Miller who claims to hear greenbacks in their buzzing, a Swiss beekeeper concerned about racial purity, Austrians who manufacture queen bees, a group of Chinese workers pollinating by hand, and another American beekeeper who’s getting honey from Africanized bees.

Audrey: The bee cinematography was outstanding. Beauty is truly in the eye of the bee-holder.

Josh: I often think that documentaries have a bit of a leg-up in the festival circuit. I’m pretty bad about seeing them during the year, so that’s a novelty in and of itself. And it’s usually a lot easier to tell whether the topic (if not the execution) will be interesting from the capsule description. But More than Honey exceeded expectations on both fronts — it was both fascinating and beautifully executed. In the Skype-powered Q&A with an awake very-early-Imhoof, he recounted the painstaking and time-consuming lengths he and the crew took to capture such amazing footage of bees at work and in flight, suggesting that it would have been less expensive to do the whole unbelievably-detailed footage with computerized insects. One of my college dorm mates was an enthusiastic entomologist; so I thought I’d gotten earfuls on these pollinators but this documentary was revelatory — from the potential salvation of Africanized honeybees to the mass transit of bees around the country to do commuter pollination and the arresting scenes of China’s attempts to replace bees with humans.

MvB: Yes, Imhoof’s larger thesis is that colony collapse disorder is just one more evil brought about by bees’ industrial serfdom — in essence, it’s our civilization that’s to blame. That’s a critique not too far from that made by Danish architect Jan Gehl, who is the presiding genius (the film never really lets you get to know him as a person) of The Human Scale, a sometimes earnestly soporific, sometimes gripping account of why cities prioritize the movement of goods and vehicles over the health and welfare of the people who live in them. (Kinds of vehicles are prioritized, too — the visit to Dhaka contrasts the huge amount spent on roads for cars that few can afford with the rickshaws that most use.)

All the elements come to a head in the concluding Christchurch segment, where post-quake reconstruction offers human-scale urban planning the prospect of more than safer crosswalks and cycle tracks. Though the residents seem quite clearly to prefer to limit building heights to six or seven stories, the central government isn’t convinced they know best.

I think Josh, Audrey, and I were all left agog by The Act of Killing, which features Joshua Oppenheimer tagging along with Indonesian death-squad gangsters as they recount how many people they killed in the 1960s for being, nominally at least, communists. They’re celebrated to this day as defenders of their homeland — a TV host applauds them for their “humane” efforts in killing mass numbers of people — but at least one is troubled now by nightmares from his past. Or is he a sociopath trying out a new persona? The film is funny, surreal, and intensely disquieting.

Audrey: The Act of Killing is by far one of the most unique movie experiences I’ve ever had. Run, do not walk, if you get the chance to see Suharto’s movie-obsessed thugs who “won” a war and got to write their mythology forced to confront their actions against their fellow countrymen. When there’s no formal reconciliation process (a la Rwanda) because those who committed atrocities are still in power, Oppenheimer gets a least a few of these mercenaries to undertake some well-needed psychotherapy via making their own movie to recreate and preserve their role in history.

Josh: Oh, I agree. It was a glimpse into such a bizarre world that I’m still having trouble reconciling the meaning of the parade of ever-more mind-boggling scenes. I completely understand why this film got more “programmer pick” recommendations than any other in the fest’s calendar. With its backing from Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, we can only hope that it gets wider distribution, if only for an opportunity to re-watch and try to decode all of the happenings.

MvB: Breathing Earth, from director Thomas Riedelsheimer of Rivers and Tides fame, never decides if it’s a profile of artist Susumu Shingu and his wind-powered, Calder-like installations, or a travelogue, as Shingu and his wife travel the world looking for the best spot for Shingu’s wind-powered artistic commune (Bag End with tiny rooftop windmills). The Italians don’t like the restaurant idea that’s incorporated — competition — while the bemused German real estate agents showing off a remediation site have no idea what to make of Shingu’s wife as she pretends like she’s walking on a lunar landscape. Often enough, though, Riedelsheimer just lets you watch scenes of almost unearthly beauty — Shingu’s tiny Daleks-in-a-pond making breezes visible, Monarch butterflies swirling in a Mexican forest.

MvB (con’t): Whoops! I almost left off Barzan, the local documentary about Iraqi refugee and Bothell resident Sam “Barzan” Malkandi, who was deported back to Iraq after having built a life for himself here in the U.S. Co-directors Alex Stonehill and Bradley Hutchinson reconstruct how Malkandi, a Kurd, was pressed into service for Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran; a theatre actor and director, Malkandi sounds like he went AWOL, and hid from Iraq security forces for years. Post-9/11, he was a beloved family man, living in Bothell with his second wife and a daughter and son, when the Department of Homeland Security arrived at his doorstep, claiming he was tied to Al-Qaida, though they could offer no evidence of his complicity in an actual plot. I don’t know what Stonehill and Hutchinson personally believe, but while the film advocates for hearing Malkandi’s side of the story, it’s hard to know what to believe. The use of sand-painting animation for recounted memories underscores the uncertainty.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

Film Reviews: Leviathan, Night Across the Street, and The Angels’ Share

Northwest Film Forum‘s showing of the documentary Leviathan is nearing the end (May 2) of its extended run, at which point you’ll have to find another source for lengthy closeups of fish viscera swirling about in a fishing boat’s bowels. It’s fair to call the film a documentary, but it’s unlike most of the recent agitprop crop in its quest for an immersive experience, rather than one mediated by argumentative discourse. As NPR explains, the film’s creators, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, are both from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, which “encourages art that explores the sensory experience of being inside a particular culture.”

If you’ve been to sea (Seattle movie-goers may be more likely to answer in the affirmative), it may not be quite as disorienting as it is for the landlocked. Familiarity with boat- and sea-sounds will let you identify the ship’s engine, the whine and groan of its winches, and the wind slapping through cables, even though a good portion of the goings-on take place at night, darkness all around outside a cone of light. Speech is mostly absent (except for the scene where an exhausted captain dozes to an episode of Deadliest Catch), and there’s no voiceover at all.

Then there’s what you choose to make of what you see, which is sometimes otherworldly and beautiful, sometimes this-worldly and stomach-churning. The filming was largely done with a series of small cameras mounted to people’s chests or attached to places people couldn’t go (trailing through the water after the boat like a net). In one long, mesmerizing sequence, the sea is rightside-up, and scores of upside-down gulls course after the boat each time the camera surfaces in a wave trough. You also see tons of net-crushed fish, eyes popped out, squirt from the net into a hold, where later they’ll be gutted, the camera picked up the way the deck swims in blood.

At times the camera joins the lifeless or near lifeless carcasses as they float about, the ship making its wallowing way, or watches the bloody water spill out the ship’s sides, with gulls in pursuit. With no clear purpose — you begin the film aboard the ship and end it there, 87 minutes later — much rests upon your capacity to patiently witness without demanding further justification.

Night Across the Street, also at the Film Forum, also ends its run on May 2. For those who know Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz from his magisterial costume-drama Mysteries of Lisbon, some preoccupations (lost love, suicide) may seem familiar, but Night‘s structure is much more poetic and associational than it is narratively causal. Ruiz spares no effort in ensuring that his film teaches you how to watch it: There are imaginary (well, it’s all imaginary, a phenomenology of mind) dialogues with French novelist Jean Giono that set up the film as a game of marbles, watching discrete events whether fantasized or “real” clack against each other.

So it is that the film contains a young boy who also appears to be the old man on the verge of retirement (both have conversations with Long John Silver, but I think only the boy talks with Beethoven, who becomes outraged when he’s taken to a movie theater and hears his music* in a Western, à la the William Tell Overture and The Lone Ranger). The boy has gotten a bad grade in math that he’s trying to weasel out of, but he’s frequently derailed and detoured in that dreamlike way that is called Fellini-esque. The retiree, in contrast, lives in a boarding house that is a nest of conspiracy, and is sure that someone means to kill him.

The confabulation can be so intense that you lose your bearings. Who’s an orphan? Is that pile of bodies a reference to something? Are those the boy’s real parents? To connect scenes, Ruiz may make them rhyme (a scene ends with a character mentioning one topic, and another opens with a character riffing on the same thing), or create repetitions (horizon, wind, boat). Mirrors abound (as do doorways that seem to be mirrors), as do mentions of Mallarmé, the symbolist poet. Drama loses intensity in the realm of symbol — a death can merely mean that someone left, or was transformed.

*I think it may have been a piece by Beethoven. The scene went by before I was sure what was happening.

Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share opens May 3 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. It stars a gang of teen or twenty-something Glaswegians who, though not incorrigible, have had their brushes with the law. Paul Laverty was Loach’s writing partner so it’s not clear who shoulders the responsibility for the paint-by-social-consciousness-numbers way that the film gets to its feet. You meet ringleader Robbie (a wiry, scarred, track-suited Paul Brannigan) as his girlfriend is about to give birth to their child, and the event provides the conventional catalyst for his reform, though Loach — while making it clear that Robbie’s environment played its part — doesn’t shirk from showing the drug-fueled viciousness that Robbie is trying to escape with his social striving.

Initially, the characters’ dialogue doesn’t leave much room for subtext — if having a baby has changed things, by god, someone will state for the record that, yes, having a baby has changed things. But just as you’re settling back for a gritty-but-trite story of personal redemption told with a Scottish burr, Loach switches it up on you, and the film becomes a low-fi heist movie, with some Scotch tastings thrown in. It’s remarkably casual, a little like mumblecore in its artless observation of people’s interactions, except that yes, they do seem to be plotting a theft, and the movie (which you thought was prodding for the straight and narrow) digs into its popcorn and applauds their ingenuity.