3 Alman / Hd Kalite Film İzle / 720p Tek Parça

Yönetmen: Tom Tykwer
Oyuncular:Sophie Rois, Sebastian Schipper, Devid Striesow, Annedore Kleist, Angela Winkler
Tür: Komedi, Drama, Romantik
Yapım Yılı: 2010 (119 dk)

Filmin Özeti : Hanna ve Simon 20 yıldır beraberdirler, aklı başında kişilerdir. İlişkiler, çocuk sahibi olma isteği, beraber eve çıkma, kaçıp geri dönme. Haber sunucusu Hanna ve sanat teknisyeni Simon, 20 yıla tüm bunları sığdırmışlardır fakat artık pek önlerini görememektedirler. Ta ki ikisi de, birbirlerinden habersiz aynı erkeğe, Adam’a aşık olana kadar.

The Well Digger's Daughter (Thursday, July 12, 2012) (63)

Perhaps best known for Claude Berri's two 1986 adaptations of his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Marcel Pagnol remains one of the most important romantic writers and filmmakers of the pre-War era in France. Described by Jean Renoir as "an author of genius," Pagnol mostly wrote about early-mid-twentieth century rural France and all the colorful, modest and immodest people who live there.

Daniel Auteuil, who played Ugolin, the stubborn farmer in Jean de Florette, makes his writing and directoral debut with an adaptation of Pagnol's The Well Digger's Daughter, a light story that seems to fall in perfect like with the films of Berri, not to mention the lighter fare of Renoir or Pagnol himself.

Pascal Amoretti (Auteuil) is a very proud well digger in southern France. His devoted daughter, Patricia (the absolutely gorgeous Astrid Berges-Frisbey), takes care of him and his passel of young kids now that the mother is dead. Due to some quick economic figuring, Patricia had been partly raised in Paris by a rich lady and only came back south recently. Because of her brief flirtation with bourgeoisdom, she tilts her head a bit too far up and has a slightly fancy air about her.

She meets Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the son of the local grocery store owner and a dandy and a total snob. He woos her and she gives in quickly -- and they have a quick fling in the hay loft. He is then sent off to War (WWI) suddenly and is unable to tell her he loves her, etc. She becomes doubly sad, not just losing her boyfriend, but also because she gets pregnant from their tumble.

Pascal and her go to the Mazel house to ask for help, but they turn them away, seeing them as gold diggers. When news arrives that Jacques has died in battle, Pascal sets himself to raising his grandson with pride in his family and a bitterness for others.

There is a lot of discussion here about classism, sinful pride and snobbery and how it comes in all shapes and sizes from all directions. At first the Amorettis are treated badly by the Mazel's for being poor, but then Pascal responds by treating them with contempt for being out of touch. Jacques and Patricia's relationship, though brief, is filled with each one trying to gain upper-hand through money, body or psychology.

This film plays mostly as a charming chamber piece, light and funny at times and melodramatic at others. It is a very good movie with a seemingly timeless story, although it is not really brilliant and feels ultimately small and sometimes too shallow. Still, it's enjoyable and done in a very clean, naturalistic way.

Stars: 3 of 4

Magic Mike (Sunday, July 1, 2012) (62)

Film directors these days seem to trip into genre holes, where they make one kind of movie, either action movies, comedies, dramas, trashy popcorn fare, etc. Steven Soderburgh, on the other, hand makes all sorts of different kinds of movies, and seems to approach the movies he makes these days as experiments in genre analysis, more than just story-telling itself.

Last year he made Contagion, which, although being disappointing, was a contemporary effort at a disaster flick. Earlier this year was Haywire, a very small and totally solid bite-sized action movie. Now he comes out with Magic Mike, a movie that is more about an examination of trashy exploitation fare (something out of the late-'70s and early-'80s) than it is about male strippers. To look only at the beefcake on stage is to miss the point of the movie. This is a send-up of that moment when B-movies went mainstream, the kind of thing you would have seen playing on a loop on some Turner network in the late-'80s and groaned but continued to watch (and now quote to your friends nonstop).

The eponymous Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) is a scrappy young man in Tampa who works as a roofer and handyman during the day and a stripper at night. His boss, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the entertainment boss of the review show is a bit older and has bigger dreams than just taking over the Gulf coast. Mike seems to have no problems with the women, sleeping with whomever he wants. One day he takes under his wing a younger guy at the construction site, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is a bit of a lost soul and lives on the couch of his (super hot) older sister, Brooke (Cody Horn).

Mike gets Adam to strip one night and Dallas believes he has the goods to do the work and become part of the troupe. Mike and Adam become best friends, of course, until Adam gets naively involved in side projects like drug deals. Mike has to figure out what his figure is (if it's with Brooke or not) and how he can work with Dallas and Adam going forward.

On its surface, this is a ridiculously stupid movie. There is nothing complicated about the plot and the elements of the narrative (from the guys being construction workers to Brooke being silly hot but unable to connect to guys) seem banal or even forced. Yet Soderbergh is too smart a guy to not know what he's doing. He includes all of these details because this is what the genre dictates. (This reminds me a bit of Verhoeven's Showgirls, a superficially ridiculous movie that recasts All About Eve as a story of strippers in Las Vegas. But there too, a surface look misses the point of what the director is doing. He's mocking the genre and mocking the ridiculous consumerist culture of entertainment and movie-going.) 

Soderbergh is also, of course, very interested in an examination of the genre and how more broadly it can be a Nicholas-Ray-like critique of masculinity in our culture. These men are all perfect physical specimens, of course, but they generally function only a half-level above drooling dogs. The lifestyle that Dallas represents and advocates is empty and impotent in the long run, and Mike has to go through the journey to discover this. Throughout all of this there's the paradox that these super-men are doing a job that's incredibly homoerotic, but makes women get horny. 

For me, this is a really fun and interesting film, partly because it's just silly and sexually interesting and partly because, on a meta level, it's a very harsh criticism of our culture. I love that for most it comes off as not being political in the slightest, just being an easy-to-swallow pill. Soderbergh shows (again) that he's a great actors' director and gets a hell of a performance out of Tatum, that's both multi-faceted and profound. Listing the actors the director has worked with over the years shows that he knows what he's doing on set; watching this movie shows that he's really thinking about a lot of interesting stuff behind the camera as well.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Take this Waltz (Saturday, June 30, 2012) (61)

Canadian dynamo actress/writer/director Sarah Polley's first feature film Away from Her is a very interesting, personal look at love and devotion during Alzheimer's. The film has the decency and carefulness of Atom Egyoan, a director Polley worked with in the past as an actress, and shows a tremendous amount of restraint and talent. In her second film, Take this Waltz, Polley looks again at love and devotion, although this time from a younger point of view. One could see this film as a "prequel" to Away from Her, as an examination of a couple struggling to stay together. 

Margot (Michelle Williams) is a woman in her late-20s/early-30s who lives with her loving husband Lou (Seth Rogan). They lead a rather typical young urban life (in Toronto, natch), where she writes travel guide books and he is a cookbook author. On a visit to a tourist destination she meets a guy to whom she's immediately attracted. Lo and behold, it seems he's her next-door neighbor, Daniel (Luke Kirby). The two flirt for awhile and end up beginning an affair together. 

Margot, who never expected to fall out of love with Lou, is suddenly faced with an existential dilemma about the future of her marriage. We see how happy she is with Daniel and how hum-drum her married life is. 

Polley has a really nice style and a very careful and visually connected presentation. She tells much of the emotional story through simple camera angles and compositional elements. At one point while Margot is struggling with her feelings for the two men, we see a straightforward shot of the married couple on two sides of the kitchen window. She's inside with (diegetic) music playing, while he sits outside on the porch, cut off from her literally and emotionally. 

Later, we see Margot and Daniel on a date in a carnival tilt-a-whirl. Polley shoots the pair from inside the car, so they stay in the shot, while the rest of the world literally spins around them. Both of these shots are very clever and translate volumes of emotional material efficiently. This is the touch of a great director who is able to convey deep feelings in a naturalistic context without the audience noticing. 

A strange recent trend in (Canadian) cinema is not knowing when to end a film -- or ending it a whole scene or section too late (see Heartbeats and Incendies). Polley suffers a similar fate as she adds on an unnecessary coda that shows Margot in the months that follow her decision about the two men. This does serve to tie up the story in a very neat and tidy way, and makes her personal journey a slight bit more complete, but it really just gives more information that doesn't help us understand her psychology more. (There's also a totally silly over-the-top sex montage that is more laughable than powerful.) The film would have been much cleaner and tighter without this postscript. 

Still, this element is mainly a writing issue (the script is also by Polley) and doesn't really take anything away from the very good picture that precedes it. Polley is clearly a very talented director and seems to have an independent vision for filmmaking and story telling. I very much look forward to her next film  -- and hope she knows when to stop it at the right time.

Stars: 3 of 4

Beast of the Southern Wild (June 26, 2012) (60)

Beasts of the Southern Wild, by first-time feature co-writer and director Behn Zeitlin, is much more of a portrait of an emotional moment and feeling than it is a narrative story that follows a character from one point in her life to another. It has the eerie lyricism of a Terrence Malick film (particularly Days of Heaven) as it examines the relationship between neorealism and magical realism that can coexist in a child's psyche.

Loosely described, the film tells the story of Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), an 8-year-old girl being raised by her father, Wink (Dwight Henry) in a (fictional) area called the Bathtub in southern Louisiana, in the wilderness south of New Orleans. It seems in this near-post-apocalyptic time, the polar ice caps have melted and have flooded the low bayou. Residents of the Bathtub live a semi-amphibious lives jumping between boats, house trailers perched in high trees and houseboats. There are several dozen residents in this community, where they seem to live life in a non-linear, joyful way. There is a sense that somewhere north of them is civilization, continuing mostly as it seems for us today, while they down below try to avoid that world.

Hushpuppy and the other kids her age go to a makeshift school where their teacher Miss Bathsheeba (Gina Montana) teaches them they they "are all just meat". She tells them that they have to watch out for themselves because if they don't some other animal will come to eat them.

Hushpuppy's mother, it seems, has left in the years before, although it's never totally clear whether she actually walked away from the Bathtub or if she died and Wink just told the girl that her mother had "left". This concept is one of the first times we are faced with an oblique concept due to a mix of fantasy and reality in Hushpuppy's perception of the world. She is haunted by visions of massive beasts running roughshod over the land toward the Bathtub to eat them.

Throughout the film, Zeitlin interjects moments and scenes that don't totally follow in a narrative path, but add to the general feeling of happiness and innocence of the location. The film opens with a magnificent party, shot hand-held, that easily conveys the joy of the village and the community feeling of all the people. Later, there is a craw fish boil with singing and a wonderful feeling of warmth and support as Hushpuppy is taught how to open crabs by "beasting" them (ripping them) apart.

Zeitlin cleverly plays with New Orleans culture and recent history as he alludes to typical tropes from the area. One moment, above all others, is particularly powerful, as the Bathtub is flooded by a storm and the residents blow up the levee that separates the Bathtub from the mainland. When they do this, the water drains, like out of a tub, into the land above. This is a very deep and significant allusion to the common conspiracy theory that the US government blew the hold in the levees that flooded the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Here it's the poor people (mostly black) who are flooding the richer, nicer areas north of them.

Stylistically, Zeitlin weaves a very interesting tale, where dream-like sequences of the wild beasts, in Hushpuppy's imagination, are cut in with more hard-nosed, brutal images of the living conditions of the people and their struggle to survive. Added to this are segments that seem to exist neither in a totally naturalistic place nor a totally fantastical place, as when Hushpuppy and some of her friends go out looking for her mother and end up in a floating brothel in the bayou where the girls dance with the prostitutes (whores in New Orleans, an allusion to several New Orleans movies and stories over the years). The story becomes a spectrum of reality and surreality, ranging in degree from one shot to the next. At one point the Bathtubbers are discovered by what seems to be FEMA workers and taken to a hospital. Suddenly everything is clean and made of plastic in right angles. It's both super-real (from our point of view) and incredibly uncanny (from Hushpuppy's point of view).

The cinematography by Ben Richardson is beautiful and dreamy. It seems to be shot mostly digitally, though that adds a quickness and naturalness to settings and situations. We see lens flares and sun spots as the hand-held camera pans around a dark room, lit only by the sunlight peeking through the cracks in the wooden shack wall. The music, by Dan Romer (the brother of a close friend of mine, full disclosure) and Zeitlin is ethereal and classical in a sense not normally seen in a small film like this. It is very evocative of Morricone's score for Days of Heaven, as well as the Saint-Saens "Carnival of the Animals"excerpt from the same movie.

This is an excellent first film that shows a true directoral voice and point of view. I appreciate that Zeitlin doesn't answer too many questions, but leaves us open to figure out the puzzle ourselves. As a snap-shot story, there is no tidy ending, only a slow fade out of the characters and action. This is a movie about dreams, and as such, is hard to nail down as meaning one thing or another. Yes, some of the imagery is a bit heavy-handed, though that too is the nature of dreams. At time this film is frightening, exuberant, dark, funny, sad and hopeful. This is a roller coaster of emotion and tone, but feels warm and very well made.

Stars: 4 of 4

Moonrise Kingdom (Sunday, June 3, 2012) (53)

Wes Anderson is basically the most accomplished director working today at making really symmetrical shots in movies. I can't think of another director who puts as much effort into creating each and every shot and filling the screen with "a look"that evokes some sort of phantom nostalgia -- that is, nostalgia for something that has never really existed and only comes through in a simulacral least common cultural denominator. He makes beautiful movies that are technically perfect. Seriously. The problem is that his movies are frequently so denatured, so dehumanized that it's hard to connect to tehm. All the doors seem to be sealed from the inside with a rich, battery goo that we'd like to lick, but can't break through.

Moonrise Kingdom is probably his most form-forward film to date. The story is particularly banal, but the art direction, colors, lighting and sounds are overwhelming. The film opens in 1965 with a gorgeous title sequence (Wes loves titles) that makes the Bishop family house (located on some New England island that doesn't really exist, but seems like it really could) seem like a doll's house. We casually meet Suzy (Kara Hayward), 12, the oldest child and the only daughter. She has a precocious mind and is always reading and doing non-kid things.

We then meet Sam (Jared Gilman), 12, a boy at the local boy scout-like camp across the island, who is an orphan being passed from one foster family to another when he's not alienating himself from his peers who see him as a nerd, and overachiever and a freak. Both Sam and Suzy are outsiders in any nuclear family and connect (during a community theater pageant) over their mutual weirdness. The agree to run away together and explore the island together. They claim to deeply be in love with one another and seem to see the world more clearly than the gray adults who surround and dominate them.

There is what seems to be a superficial examination of "authority" and "childlike wonder" and how the two ideals do not relate. Clearly the scout camp has some connections to the Vietnam war that is lurking over the shoulders of each boy (although the fact that they all seem to be white and upper-middle class could possibly suggest a bitter attack on the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" reality of the conflict), or even related to the present wars the US military is in. But then I have to ask, so what? How does this banal attack on war bare any relevance on the twee love story we see between Sam and Suzy?

Formally, Anderson is very interesting, though I'm not sure why he chooses to do what he does. Almost every set-up in the film is a short interior or an exterior with a short depth of focus. (The two long shots of the film seem to be accidents, or the exceptions that prove the rule.) These mostly normal to short-lens shots give us an uncanny feeling of unease, making this whole world a doll's house (like in the titles). This is an interesting effect, but I'm not sure what to do with the information.

Is Anderson making an anti-Jean Renoir film, where humans are stage-settings for some bigger kabuki story? (Are we merely playthings of the gods?) Why? This doesn't really seem like a political movie - and it seems to be politically moderate or middle, if anything - but this could be an interesting window to see the world (somewhat reminiscent of the implied Marxist polemic in Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman). I love taking theory and critical thought (like that of French film thinker André Bazin) and turning it on its head, but I don't really understand why Anderson is doing that -- and I'm not sure if he knows either. At least there's not evidence in the text that these questions lead anywhere but into a deep chasm of uncertainty.

Is he intentionally trying to make it difficult for us to connect to the characters and the story or is he just looking to make a movie that alienates on a superficial level, not knowing it is incredibly hard for us to make any visceral connection? Are the impossibly symmetrical shots a critique of a world that is in fact incredibly lopsided? Is Anderson a formal polemicist who is sneakily assaulting our political traditions through overindulgent stylistics? I don't know if the answers to these questions are really present in the film. This isn't really ambiguity or obliqueness; it's just under-developed.

Taking away all the theory, this is a great looking and sweet, if unfulfilling love story between two presexual kids. That's nice. But so what? Why should I love this movie? What is its point? I really don't get it.

Stars: 2 of 4

Goodbye First Love (Sunday, April 22, 2012) (42)

There's something about Mia Hansen-Love's films that just don't work and don't connect for me. Her last film, The Father of My Children, never really came together and seemed like a good movie with a bad script and an unpolished concept. It's clear that Hansen-Love is a talented director (although I can't say yet that she's more than just merely "talented"), but I would say that she's a mediocre screenwriter and that her films suffer from garbagey melodrama that connects more to banal ideas of "romance" than to any real-world in which her stories take place.

Such is the problem with her new film, Goodbye First Love. It's the story of a high school girl, Camille (played by the fetching Lola Créton), who has a deep love for her teen boyfriend, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). He's a few years older than she is and when he forgoes college for a shapeless trip to South America (the French love Ché!), the two lose touch. She takes this very hard and tries to kill herself (natch) and then comes out of the hospital without the lust for life she previously had.

She then goes to architecture school and begins to work for her professor, Lorenz (Magne-Havard Brekke), who she also starts to sleep with, date and move in with. He's an older Norwegian man with an ex-wife and kid in Berlin who loves Camille's sensibility and reserve. Meanwhile, she struggles with her never-ending love for Sullivan and the constant wanting what she can't have.

I guess this isn't really the kind of movie I would ever relate to. I don't go in for sentimentality much and never really understand stories like this. For me, the concept of "first loves" is trite in the deepest possible way, and something that is more forced on us by gossip magazines and "girl culture" than by anything particularly psychological or human. What the hell is so special about Sullivan for Camille? He seems like a typically nice, distant and youthful boyfriend and their connection is much more suggested (by the fact that she can't ever get over him) than shown to us. When she ends up with Lorenz (as gross and cliche as it is to fuck your professor... seriously), it's maddening that she can't just be happy with him, but longs for Sullivan.

Herein lies an interesting dilemma for me. If film viewing is really an experience of identification and alignment with certain characters, it's impossible for me to connect to this film because I'm supposed to identify with Camille, but I can't because I think she's a fastidious moron. Meanwhile, I understand that many people (most people) would totally align with her because of how they're wired emotionally.

This leads to a bigger problem about the film, buried in the script, which is that Hansen-Love really doesn't do much to link us to Camille other than giving the briefest of outlines of her character. We only see the biggest moving parts of her persona, namely that she's 17 at some point and madly in love with a boy. This shorthand functions as the only information we get about her. For many this is enough to totally understand everything she feels at all moments. For others, like me, this seems under-written and under-developed.

Hansen-Love is truly a good director and is able to show a pretty movie with a nice use of technical factors. She is, however tripped up by her reliance on middlebrow scripts that don't show her skills as well as possible. I hope she continues to grow and make better films in the future.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Day He Arrives (Saturday, April 21, 2012) (41)

Hong Sang-Soo's film The Day He Arrives fits squarely in a category of "oblique movies," films that function as much as a pure art film as it does as storytelling. There is basically a beginning and end, but the middle gets rather murky -- on purpose -- and it is in this fog, and because of this fog, that the tale comes alive and turns something banal into something wonderful.

Concentrating again on the reflexive world of "film culture," as he did with his last film Woman on the Beach, the movie focuses on the day film professor and director Sangjoon arrives in Seoul to meets up with his friend Youngho. Sangjoon first visits an ex-girlfriend, and walks down the street meeting and talking to several strangers. He meets a trio of film students who recognize him and invite him to eat a meal with them. He later meets up with Youngho and a woman who works with him. The waitress at this restaurant is flirty and they all four begin to talk. At the end of the night they leave as normal.

The next thing we see, without any explanation is the same story beginning again (or, at least beginning after Sangjoon leaves the ex's apartment). Most of the specifics about the thread are different, conversations has some similarities although people meet in different places and go in different directions, but the important structural elements (such as Sangjoon eating at a restaurant and leaving with a woman) remain intact and recognizable. We see three full cycles of the same story, each a bit different.

Of course, the first thought in any film-goer's mind is that this seems like a twist on Rashomon-type story, where the reason for the variations is because different people remember the situation differently. However it doesn't seem to be that straightforward. This isn't so much about different points of view of the same story, but different possibilities of the same very small events. It also doesn't involve multiple narrators, but just a single third-person omniscient one.

It's never clear, nor does it matter, whether each of these scenarios actually plays out in Sangjoon's life, if he imagines the same situations happening differently (maybe he ends up with the waitress at the end of the night, maybe with Yongho's colleague), or if it's just Hong riffing on a small idea -- possibly a meta work on the nature of the medium with screenwriter/filmmaker playing god at the human chessboard. There is a sense that Hong is improvising on a theme the way a Jazz saxophonist might twist and expand a standard, so you know what you're hearing, though you never heard it this way before.

Hong really gives us no clear answers about what he's looking to achieve here (unlike with the Kurosawa, where it's pretty clear he's exploring the nature of subjectivity) and this is what makes the film interesting and fun. It has a playfulness and an alacrity that raises this essay from purely theoretical and alienating to familiar and warm. We get into the game of the film, waiting for the next story rhyme, enjoying how variations from past events will come back. At one point a highway sign flashed for less than a second in the first shot of the film comes back near the end -- not creating any great meaning, but highlighting that the act of film viewing is deep and should be engaging.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Post Mortem (Friday, April 13, 2012) (38)

The final sequence in Pablo Larrain's Post Mortem is one of the most interesting, evocative and incisive images I can remember in any film in a long time. After watching the main character Mario (Alfredo Castro) deal with his uneventful and lonely life for 90 minutes, he finally cracks and starts acting out the psychological difficulty that's inside him. Out of emotional desperation he has become friends with his neighbor, a stripper and cabaret star, Nancy (Antonia Zegers). Theirs is really not an emotional friendship, nor really much of a friendship at all. They both function as some external power forcing the other to connect with something else in the world.

They both are struggling to deal with the events of the moment, namely the Pinochet coup d'etat over Allende in 1973 Chile. Mario works in the morgue and is involved in the autopsy of Allende himself, after his assassination. This act, and the coldness and passivity of his job shakes him to his core. He is rather incapable of connecting to people on an emotional level and his very gray life seems to be filled with nothing but difficulty. In one magnificent scene, Mario and Nancy sit at opposite ends of his small kitchen table and quietly begin to weep, for no particular reason, though we know it has to do with the overwhelming pain and struggle of their respective lives.

Back to the last scene of the film, through a series of events, Mario gets involved in helping Nancy's family who are leftist radicals. He hides her brother in the shed in his back yard and after finally cracking, starts to pile stuff and junk in front of the door. Tables, chairs, coffee tables, small things, big things. He's literally trying to keep his feelings inside, lest they get out and overwhelm his life.

This might seem like a bit obvious (the tightly wound man breaks down and seems to go crazy with a physical action that represents his internal turmoil), but it's performed and produced beautifully and deeply emotionally. What's more is that it's not a simple act, but a long and drawn-out one that seems to go on past the point of normal limits, past the point of our comprehension. It moves from a simple, superficial psych tick to an important symbolic action, to an extreme cry for help, unlike what you find in typical storytelling.

Meanwhile, as is typical of the New Chilean Cinema style, this scene, and the whole film, has a rigorous naturalistic, neorealist tone. Everything is washed-out gray-brown-yellow, shabby and bleak. People are more interested in simply fucking their co-worker (not Mario, but people he works with) than making any real connections. The inner turmoil every character suffers is internal and poorly expressed because they're all broken people.

Larrain does a wonderful job with this very small story and makes it much more powerful than it might seem on the page. The film runs on an internal inertia that seems contained mostly in the gaps between actions. It's not the Allende autopsy that throws Mario, per se, but the constant pushing of his workaday life and the difficulty he has making connections. There is a lot of silence in the film and that becomes very powerful. Castro's performance, in particular, really leads this film and moves it along. He always seems on the edge of a cliff, about to jump off, but terrified of making any action. Larrain uses this dual tension brilliantly to create an eerie but relateable tone.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Monsieur Lazhar (Friday, April 13, 2012) (37)

French-Canadian Philippe Falardeau's film Monsieur Lazhar was one of the nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2012 Oscars. It is a celebration of everything that is wonderful about modern multiculturalism and how people are good inside if you give them the chance to show you what's in their heart. This sentiment makes me a bit sick as it's so sunny and saccharine it's almost impossible to be interesting. Even with a story that has some rather dark and challenging moments, the film really only falls into the predictable category of "movies about teachers and students who seem different but connect with love." 

Bachir Lazhar is an Algerian immigrant to Montreal who turns up at an elementary school the day after a popular teacher has hanged herself in her classroom on a school morning. As the administrators and kids come to grips with the loss of their friend and guide, he explains that he was a teacher in a similar school in his homeland and is the process of getting his asylum status in Canada. At first he's an odd fit for the school, which has a rather liberal view of educational (teachers are called by their first names, students are encouraged to sit in a circle rather than rows). He has a more traditional process, including an autocratic style and dictation from old texts involving complex, arcane language. 

As he comes to learn about the pain the students are feeling (one boy and one girl who witnessed their teacher killing herself moments before class began), Monsier Lazhar begins to relax and thrive in this environment. At the same time, it seems he wasn't entirely forthcoming about his background and his status in the country and in the school could be in doubt. 

This is a nice film, but nothing very interesting. The real tension rests on whether the kids accept him as positive force, but we've seen this movie dozens of times before and know they always do. Then there's a bit of tension based on the silly and incidental fact that the school doesn't do a thorough check of his life before hiring him... but that's not really interesting and has nothing to do with the emotional development of the story. 

This feels much more like a prescribed series of events than any story I can become particularly invested in. We know there will be tension with the students and other teachers, we know he'll come to be loved, we know there will be ongoing cultural disconnections, we know it probably can't last. At no point do we really care what happens to the moving parts, because they really only function as parts in the greater banal story. 

It's very nice that this was nominated for the Oscar, but it's clearly not as good as other foreign language films that were also (it's not even the best French-Canadian film from 2011). It has all the hallmarks of sweet movie (and I generally like any movie that begins with a grizzly hanging), but none of the oomph of something I really care about. 

Stars: 2 of 4 

Keyhole (Tuesday, April 10, 2012) (35)

Guy Maddin is the most interesting and best Canadian filmmaker working today and easily one of the best filmmakers from any region. I have a never-ending respect for David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan, two directors whose work in the past has been spectacular, but Maddin has eclipsed them and developed a new style and visual language along the way. His films fall somewhere between narrative and experimental works on a filmic spectrum, frequently using documentary elements and always dealing with nostalgia and subconscious through a Brechtian formalist language. He walks the line of being fun and funny, but also uncanny, sometimes uncomfortable and frequently difficult.

His latest work, Keyhole, is all of these things. It's not really a linear narrative film, not totally experimental (despite being commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State), but also totally weird and unsettling. All the while it's thrilling, exuberant and firmly sarcastic. It is a film told in a "fugue state" style, making elements disconnected, obscured and abstract. It is wonderful and fascinating.

The story of the film is really secondary to the formalism and thematic content, but deals with a noir-like plot involving a man named Ulysses (Jason Patric), who returns to his home after a botched job with his underworld lackeys. He brings with him a young beauty, Denny (Brooke Palsson), and a bound young man, Manners (David Wontner), who seems to be his son. In the house on the upper floor is his wife, Hyacinth (Isabella Rossellini), and an old man who claims to be her father, guardian of all memories in the house. This geezer walks around, out of shape, in his underwear, dragging with him a heavy chain that seems to keep him tied to the building itself. Ulysses must struggle to get to his wife, deal with Old Man Memory and figure out what to do with his two prisoners.

As a dream-essay, the film doesn't move along in an A-to-B fashion, but jumps from one thing to another in a sometimes bizarre or difficult way. Characters don't seem to be really alive or dead, but suspended in mid-flight between two places (waking and sleeping, still and dynamic, past and present). Just like a dream, there are small circular stories connected with other circular stories, making the film slightly more difficult to follow... though if you sit back and enjoy it, everything becomes clear. (Part of this structure is that there is a somewhat Marxist element of having no internal dynamism, making it hard to know what is next or when it will end. This is certainly a challenge, but a thrilling and, ultimately, a rewarding one.)

From one scene to the next, Ulysses goes from hard-boiled B-movie noir star to a nervous everyman dealing with his memories and his demons. The house becomes his subconscious, his journey though it, like his classical namesake, becomes his psychoanalysis. The eponymous keyhole in the door to the upstairs bathroom (where Hyacinth and Old Man Memory seem to live) serves the purposes of being a small view into a distant recess of memory as well as a hole through which Ulysses can pull threads (literally). The reason the story feels choppy, difficult and strange is because it's Ulysses' therapeutic journey. My shrink father once said that psychoanalysis is the act of taking down a wall, brick by brick, and then rebuilding it slowly with better mortar... that seems pretty apt here in the case of this house.

Aside from all of this elegant presentation and plot, what makes Maddin's films so clever and enjoyable is how technically interesting they are. He's a master of juxtaposition, editing and pacing. Images are frequently on screen for seconds or only several frames, signaling something in our brains, but remaining distant enough that we feel we are just short of making a connection. Characters come and go through dark canals and obscured spaces, making the act of watching one of his films (this one in particular) a game, but one with no rules that are easy to win. It's a new kind of filmmaking, a doorway to more avante-garde material, reminiscent of the work of Bruce Connor, but shown through the prism of something almost familiar and narrative. It's difficult to define, but thrilling to behold.

Stars: 4 of 4

The Hunter (Sunday, April 15, 2012) (39)

There's been something interesting going on in Australian cinema in recent years. A country once dominated by Brits and Peter Weir, where it seems every other Hollywood star comes from (can you think of an action movie or costume drama in the last 15 years that didn't have one Aussie in it?) has strangely produced only a small amount of fresh directing and writing talent. And yet there seems to be something bubbling down there. A handful of interesting, if not totally successful, films in the past few years have come to represent some sort of renaissance downunda.

One of the standouts from this new class is the recent film The Hunter, directed by Daniel Nettheim, adapted by Alice Addison from a novel by Julia Leigh. This is a very elegant contemporary Western set in the mysterious world of ecoterrorism, bio-pharmacology and extreme survivalism. Martin David (Willem Dafoe) is some sort of extreme-outdoorsman-for-hire who is given the mysterious task of researching the possible existence of Tasmanian tigers, long though to be extinct, by a mysterious bio-tech company. Martin is a total badass, like a Bear Grylls with a gun and no camera crew.

He gets to his Tasmanian base camp in the home of a rural single mother, depressed after the mysterious disappearance of her outdoorsman husband, and her two young kids (super charming and sweet kids... and I don't really get kids). He finds that he's totally unwelcome by the locals who are loggers and figure his work will result in them losing their work. He's also pressured by the environmental hippies who monitor the actions of the loggers. He goes into the wilderness looking for signs of tigers (which are really closer to wolves than big cats), and finds himself being stalked along the way. Back at the base camp, he improves the lives of the broken family he's living with, but the attention he brings might also be risking their safety as well.

I know very little about Tasmania, but apparently it's rugged and beautiful, looking a lot like Alaska or the woody parts of the upper Midwest. It's one of those places that looks so good on screen that you wonder whether it's beautiful cinematography (by Robert Humphreys) or just photography of a gorgeous place. Nettheim has a nice touch, using lots of helicopter shots, which can frequently be cliche, but help here to get a sense of the bigness of the spaces and the smallness of people.

Isolation and loneliness is a repeated theme throughout the film, as there is only minimal music used (mostly diegetic) and lots of silence. Dafoe has a stoic calmness, that's somewhat unsettling and also strangely kind (he seems to be a good guy in the way he deals with the family). The two kids are clearly desperate for his attention when he arrives at their house, partly because they're young and happy, but mostly because they're incredibly lonely and are looking for some sort of attention or break from their dull lives.

Perhaps the idea is that in the conflict between nature and humans, the sides are not evenly matched. As Martin seems to be the best human out there to unlock the secrets of the wilderness for a company who hopes to do something probably ugly with his findings, he is outmatched, a small being in the vastness of the outback (think of astronaut Dave Bowman floating through the silence and coldness of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But there's also a feeling that in the human world, we don't even give one another basic assistance in the form of love or kindness, which turns us into lone wolves in our daily lives. Business interests try to exploit this for financial gain, creating a conflict between those who want to connect to others and those who would rather hurt one another, between those who want to live with nature and who want to constantly battle against it.

There is a unspeakable sadness that pervades the film, eerily, heartbreakingly brought to life when Martin gets the family's turntable working and Springsteen's song "I'm On Fire". The missing dad had previously hooked speakers up into the trees, so when the music comes on, the area is surrounded by the melancholy song, reminding us of the relative silence that preceded it.

At times Nettheim get's a bit tied up in banal script elements, like his poor reception from the locals when he arrives or a overly sentimental penultimate scene. Still, he does a really interesting job otherwise with a story that doesn't really feel like a masterpiece.

The Hunter is a good solid movie, and although it's not perfect, it is a lot of fun and a clever twist on a classic Western talk of an outsider coming into a small town to shake things up.

Stars: 3 of 4

Free Men (Thursday, March 22, 2012) (31)

Free Men, co-written by Ismael Ferroukhi and Alain-Michel Blanc and directed by Ferroukhi, deals with a hidden-in-recent-history moment of World War II-era Paris when North African Muslims helped and fought along with the Resistance. Most interestingly, the story is presented in a very human and naturalistic style -- similar to preWWII-era French cinema (think something like Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange or Carné's Port of Shadows).

As the film opens, Paris has already fallen to the Nazis and we see the familiar tapestry of policemen, with SS and Vichy officers elbowing to get power. In a mosque in Paris, the imam, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (Michel Lonsdale), has a mini empire where he leads his faithful, but also protects several Jews, many of whom also come from Algeria and Morocco. Into this garden comes Younes (the fabulous Tahar Rahim), a petty criminal and black marketeer who is looking to get away from the heat of police after a few sloppy jobs. He falls in love with the people in this corner of Paris, particularly a singer of Arabic ballads (who happens to be Jewish) and a woman, Leila (Lubna Azabal), who happens to be a communist agitator.

This is not a fancy movie with elaborate formal qualities or complicated plot twists. It is a nice and straightforward film about a moment in time, where the history of Nazis and Vichy bureaucrats, Germans and French, Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Whites, French and North Africans came into direct contact. It has the loving, humanist tenor of a Renoir work, deeply believing in the goodness of people to fix bad situations through working together. This is a clever decision. It's not a flashy action flick, which it could have been, but is a more gentle, elegant story.

Rahim, who formally lead A Prophet, Audiard's masterpiece from 2010, is fantastic here again. He's confident without being arrogant, young but not immature. He's such a joy to see on screen, brightening up any shot with his movie-star magnetism. Lonsdale is, of course, great -- just as he's been for the past 40-some years. Azabel, who has a few more pictures coming up soon, is intelligent and beautiful -- an interesting Arab answer to Betty Bacall or Ingrid Bergman (though she's more like Bacall in To Have and Have Not here than Bergman in Casablanca).

I'm surprised we're not taught more about the role of North Africans in the Resistance movement in history class. This film is illuminating, but also warm and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

Bellflower (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (160)

I'm always a bit suspicious of movies that are hailed by the press for being made on a shoestring budgets because that's way too inside-baseball for me and says nothing about how good the film is -- and most of them are terrible. Such was the case when I first heard about and saw trailers for Evan Glodell's Bellflower. It was made for almost no money over the course of a long time while writer/director/producer/editor Glodell and his co-stars Jessie Wiseman and Tyler Dawson helped to scrape money together to get it made. Big freaking deal, I thought.

Then I saw the trailer, which looked like a silly Mad Max, post-apocalyptic story of cars and motorcycles with lots of fire, explosions and blood. Hmm -- doesn't look promising. Then I read a few synopses of the film: Two friends spend all their free time building flame-throwers and weapons of mass destruction in hopes that a global apocalypse will occur and clear the runway for their imaginary gang "Mother Medusa". Every single article or interview said the same thing (so did Netflix). So when I finally watched the movie, I was shocked to find that this summary has almost nothing to do with the actual film (which makes me think that most people who write about movies don't actually watch them but just borrow from press releases ... written by publicists who also don't watch movies).

The only elements that are correct is that it's a movie about two friends, they build a flame thrower and twice mention an imaginary gang called "Mother Medusa". But that's sorta like saying Casablanca is about a drunk American who hates Nazis more than his ex-girlfriend's husband. It really misses the whole point of the film.

Bellflower is named for the street in LA where Woodrow (Glodell) lives. He's a pretty normal hipster with unclear direction, hanging out at bars and building machine stuff with his best friend Aiden (Dawson). They moved to LA for no particular reason, but are a bit obsessed with Mad Max and other motor-themed apocalypse movies. They are trying to build a flame thrower, though it's not clear why, and they love tinkering with cars and motorcycles.

One night they meet Milly (Wiseman) at a bar along with her best friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes... who might not be able to act but is totally gorgeous). Woodrow and Milly fall madly in love and go on a first date... to Texas. Something about Milly makes Woodrow a tough guy and he starts making crazy decisions and getting in brawls. After a few weeks together they stats to fall apart, and he catches her in bed with another dude, leading him to start sleeping with Courtney. All this time, Woodrow has fantasies about fast cars, blowing shit up and violently getting revenge on Milly.

This is a bit of a post-mumblecore movie (considering the budget and the amount of young people fucking and talking about relationships), with a bit of a fantasy twist. It's a pretty clever pastiche -- the exact kind of movie Woodrow and Aiden would make if they were shooting movies instead of building a flamethrower. Glodell's clever script turns from romantic drama to post-apocalyptic story, but only in Woodrow's mind. This is not an end-of-days story, as the synopses would have you believe, this is a story of love and loss and a dark fantasy that comes out of the contemporary world.

Yes, it was made for almost no money, but it looks great and has a very nice and relatable lost-Generation-Y narrative. It should be seen -- but not for the explosions and flame throwers or Camaros painted matte black (cool), but because it's a pretty good movie and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

17 Girls (Saturday, March 3, 2012) (22)

The first think to know about Delphine and Muriel Coulin's film 17 Girls is that it's technically really great. Muriel worked for a time as an assistant camera tech on Kieslowski's French films and she knows how to shoot stuff and make it look really nice. The second thing to know about the film is that the lead actress, Louise Grinberg (OMG -- possibly a Jew?!!?), is one of the most gorgeous women ever on on the planet. The third thing to know about the film is that those first two things don't really matter, because it's such a silly story that it comes off as over-the-top and ridiculous, making it hard to relate to and a bit forgettable.

The film follows a clique of five girls who, when their leader, Camille (Grinberg), gets knocked up and then another girl seems to get knocked up, all decided they should all get pregnant and live in some later-day hippie commune, or something (apparently with no daddies around). Considering this group is so cool, other girls in the school also follow their lead and get pregnant.... until there are 17 of them.

Because it's French there is a commentary on post-War Modernist culture and the end of the industrial dream in former industrial coastal France (the film takes place in Lorient in Brittany). There's a lot of discussions with teachers and parents about how political an action this is (apparently it is loosely based on a story like this that happened in Glauchester, Mass a few years ago). The girls also discuss these things, though they seem to be grasping at straws more than any significant ontological and philosophical discussion.

There is a really nice mix of static and moving shots throughout the film. The last shot is particularly nostalgic and evocative as it tracks down a beach from the inland side of the dunes shooting people on the sand slightly out of focus. The story, however, is a rather silly and ties up in a cheap way.

The script is really the weakest part of the film -- which is saying a lot considering most of the girls are played by non-actors from the region. I think there's a nugget of a good idea here, but it doesn't develop in an interesting way. Either the third act should have been re-written or the whole thing should have been an existentialist short with an elliptical ending. What we get looks nice, but doesn't really feel like much.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Forgiveness of Blood (Saturday, February 25, 2012) (19)

American filmmaker Joshua Marston really likes making movies not set in America. His last and most major film to this point was Maria Full of Grace from 2004, about a girl who becomes a drug mule to get cocaine from Columbia into the U.S. In his new film, The Forgiveness of Blood, Marston looks East at Albania and the curious tradition of family blood feuds there.

Nik and Rudina are two teenagers living in a rural part of Albania. When their father and uncle get in a fight with a neighbor and accidentally kill him, their lives change dramatically. In Albania, there are hard and fast rules concerning blood feuds. All men of age (or near it) are legitimate targets for retribution attacks, which means they must not leave their houses in order to stay safe. The problem is that the family who is feuding with them bends the rules of the tradition, so they intimidate and threaten Rudina, who should be off-limits as a girl, and Nik's younger brother, who should be too young to be involved.

With their father goes into hiding in the countryside to avoid getting hurt or put in jail, Rudina has to pick up the slack he leaves, stepping away from school to run his daily bread cart route. Nik, also not able to be in school, is a typical 17-year-old, interested in video games, his friends and girls, although those things become less interesting when he's trapped in his house for weeks on end.

This is a very interesting film about a subject that I didn't know much about going in. I particularly like the frankness of the situations and how the tradition of the feud is not judged, despite our Western ideas of it's madness. There is something particularly compelling and upsetting about the film being set in such a remote and seemingly poor location, where the family has a horse and cart as their main transportation, but where the kids play video games, record videos on their phones and post stuff on Facebook. It's an unexpected and beautiful clash of cultures that is happening in Albania, where shedding "less civilized" traditions of blood feuds is necessary and difficult as the digital world races in the door.

As with Maria Full of Grace, Marston has an elegant, straightforward style, very sympathetic to the young people who are caught in situations outside of their control. There is an unsentimental view of the impossible dilemma that Nik and Rudina find themselves in, a mere microcosm of the greater problem such blood feuds could cause the country going forward.

I should note also that despite the fact that Marston has no particular connection to Albania, he spent time there before co-writing the script and shooting the film. The Albanian Academy of Film actually submitted this film to the Oscars for consideration for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, but there were some political objections raised about Marston's Americanness and it was rejected. This is still a very good film and it's a shame the Oscars couldn't have kept it in the running.

Stars: 3 of 4

Attenberg (Friday, February 24, 2012) (18)

When watching Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg, it is important to keep in mind that the writer-director got a masters in Performance Studies. Her film is as much a study of motion, dance and performance as it is a narrative. Considering this fact is also central in understanding that this is not a typical film with a standard "A to B" structure, nor is it an "easy" movie where you walk out feeling happy that you just saw some nice storytelling.

It is a challenging and a strangely cold film, though a totally beautiful one. It is one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time. It feels very much like Giorgos Lanthimos' brilliant 2010 film Dogtooth (for which Tsangari was an Associate Producer), though much more human and relatable.

The film centers on Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who takes care of her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) in the last stages of cancer treatment. They live in a small mining town on the water that Spyros designed at some point in the past 30 years, now seeming to have nearly no inhabitants in it. It's a typical Modernist village, with rectilinear streets and buildings, awkward public spaces and difficult, cold interiors.

When she's not taking her father to the hospital for his tests, Marina spends much of her time driving visiting scientists around for the local mining firm. As the story goes on, her main rider is an engineer (Lanthimos... yes, the same guy who directed Dogtooth) who she finds theoretically attractive, despite the fact that she's generally not interested in sex and has no experience with it.

One of her main interests is hanging out with her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). The two almost exclusively talk about sex; Bella is a normal 23-year-old who likes sex, has a boyfriend and likes talking about it and she's rather obsessed with teaching Marina all she knows. Marina, meanwhile, seems reticent about her sexuality or any erotic emotions.

All of this is rather simple and straightforward and makes up most of the plot ... which is to say very little happens in this story. What keeps it interesting the whole time, though, is that Tsangari formally tells a separate story, different from the general narrative. The film is a master class in the differences and effects of static and moving camera work. Almost all of the standard narrative elements are shot with static shots. Tsangari has a keen eye for composition and these shots are almost all interesting, contrasting deep shots with shallow ones and characters at different points in space .

In the middle of all these static story-telling scenes, Tsangari intercuts sequences of uncanny dance and movement performed by Marina and Bella. At first glance these seem a bit out of place and disconnected, and they all use moving cameras. Why this stark change in style all of a sudden? Well, these near-nondiegetic moments seem to function as some sort of dream-space, or at least non-chronological pieces of the story. Both characters intently look at the camera as they do these actions, reminding us that we are watching two performers, who might be the characters we know them as, but might just be two random people dancing. Certainly these dynamic shots are more liberating than the rest of the static ones.

There's a wonderful long dolly shot following Marina pushing Spyros down a long hall in the hospital. Here is where the dream world crosses over for a moment with the earthly, Modernist world. In fact, the whole film functions as a long and effective criticism of Modernist ideals. For one thing, Spyros himself criticizes his own design, saying he built this unnatural space on the top of sheep meadows. He gets into the concept that there was not a natural evolution in this town (or perhaps in Greece in general) from one era to another (from agriculture to industry), but that the Modernist era came along and sat on history, forcing its emotionless will on everything. He's ashamed of his greatest accomplishment as he gets ready to face the unknown. (There's an interesting analysis of the current Greek debt crisis here, more incisive than many news reports.)

This leads Marina's other main hobby, which is watching the nature films of Sir David Attenborough. Both Spyros and Marina (when he's at home and not in the hospital) love to watch the scientist talk about monkeys and other jungle creatures and sometimes re-enact their strange movements and screams. She seems to have a connection with natural, evolutionary things more than she does with other people. She is the product of Modernism, devoid of deep sentiment and disconnected from other things. The title of the film, at this point, becomes a Modernist respelling of Attenborough's name.

Tsangari has all the actors speaking their lines in particularly monotone, dispassionate style, possibly inspired by Richard Maxwell or other Post-Modern theater or performance creators. Again, this underlines the strangeness and non-humanness of the setting and the people in the film. All of the actors are wonderful, but particularly Labed and Mourikis, who seem to have a fun time as they do mundane things (and also seem to interact in a wonderful and intimate way that fathers and daughters who love one another really do).

This is a deeply interesting and thematically difficult film. Whereas Lanthimos' Dogtooth was a bit of joke, playing mostly with semiotics in a bizarro non-place, Attenberg seems to take the argument one step farther. Tsangari shows how the Modernist legacy in every-day life has magnified certain behaviors and alienated us from our natural states of being. She raises simple bathos to near holy, fetishistic levels, mixing weirdness and beauty in connected (and disconnected) moments. This is what modernity is. She does this all in a gorgeous and elegant way with techniques far beyond her years.

Stars: 4 of 4

Michael (Saturday, February 18, 2012) (14)

Michael is a very uncomfortable and unsettling film that is mystifying in it's minimalism as it is disturbing in its subject matter. The title character is a very stereotypical Austrian businessman working at an insurance company. When he gets home from work with bags of groceries, he walks through his kitchen to the door to his cellar. As he opens the door we notice right away that there is soundproofing foam on the inside of it. Weird.

At the bottom of the stairs there is a metal door with a cross-brace lock on it. He opens it and flips a switch in the circuit breaker next to the door. Inside is a young boy, Wolfgang, about 10-years-old. He has a nice-looking kids room, a bed and toys, a sink and a toilet. It seems Michael keeps him down here as his personal and secret rape slave.

The film moves along very slowly with not much ever happening. At one point Michael, who is as geeky and affected as you can imagine an insurance man might be, goes on a weekend ski trip with friends from work. At another time Wolfgang suggests that he's lonely, so Michael goes out to a go-kart track to find another boy to steal and lock up with him. The man's motives are never totally clear, aside from bizarre control and, of course, sex.

Writer-director Markus Schleinzer, who has mostly worked as a casting director for Michael Haneke to this point (we see where he got his bizarre and frank story or sexuality from!) paints a very interesting, emotionless picture here, using minimal color (mostly Michael's house and existence is white and beige) and no score. We never really understand what he's thinking and can only assume certain things. Does he represent all of Austrian business culture or all Austrian men? Is this just one man's story of dangerous obsession? It's never clear - and that's part of what's so great about this film.

There is no judgement, putting us in the remorseless emotional space of a co-conspirator to this heinous act. Furthermore, the few times that Michael's strictly controlled world seems like it might collapse, we worry that he will be caught - a classic Hitchcockian trick of alignment and post-modern sympathy.

Schleinzer surprises us several times with unexpected events or outcomes of certain actions. We are never comfortable and always expecting the unknown. This is a great trick and makes watching the film more engaging that it might be otherwise (say, in a more mainstream story about pedophilia, slavery and abuse). I'm not totally sure there's a lot in this film, however, and think that the meta-emotional reactions we might have to watching the film is more important than the story itself. I really like those aspects, as a film-goer who likes to be put in an uncomfortable space, but I wish it could have been a great plot and a great meta-story.

Stars: 3 of 4

Bullhead (Saturday, February 18, 2012) (13)

I'm not really convinced that the story told in Michael Roskam's film Bullhead is at all scientifically possible, but it's a pretty enjoyable one, if a bit silly. The film opens with Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), an absolute hulk of a Belgian man, posing naked in the mirror after a shower. He has muscles everywhere. He then goes to a mini-fridge and gets vials of some drug and takes out a syringe. We then jump to an exchange between a group of Flemish cattlemen talking about how the cops are arresting some of their brethren who use hormones to increase the size of their cows.

We then see a flashback to how when Jacky was a kid his father bought growth hormone for his cattle. One day, the daughter of the hormone dealer caught Jacky's eye and before he could make a move on her, her brother, chased Jacky away and ended up effectively castrating him with rocks (ouch!). It seems that from that point on, Jacky was injected with growth hormone (human, we have to assume, rather than bovine) until he got to be the enormous size he is in the present.

Now, years later, the girl who once interested Jacky as a kid is his main fascination. He begins to stalk her (somehow she doesn't know who he is) and as the cops begin to figure out that he's involved in a massive cow doping cartel, the woman finds out who he is as well.

One interesting aspect to the story is that the setting is some place right on the Flemish and Wallonian border and we see clearly that the two peoples hate each other. Only a few of the Flemish speak French and only a few of the Walloons speak Flemish (Jacky is Flemish and his lady obsession is Walloon). I feel like we don't see this schism in film very frequently and it's interesting. Both parts make the whole, but they don't trust and resent each other. This brings up a clever link between the split duality of Belgium and, of course, the duality of testicles (ooof - that's a bit silly, isn't it?).

There is a great Belgian look to the film that I love. It has the stark reality of blues, grays and browns that have become synonymous with other Belgian filmmakers, like the Dardenne brothers, or the blessed Chantal Akerman. I guess it's this natural quality that is most compelling about the film, but also it's biggest problem.

In the end, the film is a rather over-the-top light action flick, certainly with more ennui and more pathos. Many details of the story fall apart because they seem like deus-ex-machina devices rather than plausible elements (such as how Jacky's childhood bully is now in a hospital mostly paralyzed and unable to speak due to an accident or how the grown woman doesn't know who Jacky is). The story begins to fray at the edges with all these silly parts.

I like this film, but I admit it has some problems. It's a pretty good story and the idea of a man-giant being ball-less and miserable because he's less of a man is interesting. Perhaps the bovine and human hormone link is too neat and tidy for me. Still, it's well made and has some compelling moments.

Stars: 3 of 4

Rampart (2011) (Sunday, February 12, 2012) (153)

Rampart is Oren Moverman's sophomore film, and as with many second efforts, it's a bit of a mess. Well, really, it's a lot of a mess. It takes place in 1999 in Los Angeles where a super cop, David Brown (Woody Harrelson), has made a bad name for himself in his precinct, the Rampart Division near Downtown. He has a reputation as a badass for allegedly killing a man who was a serial date rapist ten years earlier. He lives in the garage behind the house of his ex-wives who are sisters (Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche) and has a hard time connecting to his two daughters (one by each wife). He seems to be a sex addict and a drunk incapable of getting his life together and walking a straight line.

At some point he is videotaped beating a man after a short chase and his career is threatened. He then gets into more shit when he gets into another altercation. Just when it seems his situation can't get worse, as he's being investigated by internal affairs agent Ice Cube, he begins an affair with the ex-lawyer of the man he is accused of killing years ago.

The script, co-written by Moverman and James Ellroy (he knows LA cop stuff, right?!), is a total mess. I can't easily summarize what happens in the film because its direction changes three times in the second act. At some point it seems like a Bad Lieutenant-type melodrama, at others it seems like a ripped-from-the-headlines Rodney King-style story, at other times like a Leaving Las Vegas-style tale of entropy. There are about a dozen characters with a decent amount of screen time who are ultimately totally unnecessary to the film (including former Harrelson's co-star from Moverman's last film Ben Foster, playing a homeless veteran who has something to do with giving info as a narc).

I feel like there are enough good things in this film that if it had been rewritten and recut it could be a good film (take out 30 minutes and it would be an interesting and small piece). In its current form, however, it is a messy and overflowing heap of stories that don't really connect or lead anywhere interesting.

Stars: 1.5 of 4