Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (Saturday, June 23, 2012) (58)

What's not funny about a doomed romance as the world is about to end?! Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the directoral debut and second screenplay for Lorene Scafaria (who previously wrote the oddly toned Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist), is an offbeat romcom, filled with lots of grossout jokes and a comforting level of sadness that's hard to find in most mainstream fare.

There is an asteroid falling to earth in the next few days and all hopes of human survival are lost. Dodge (Steve Carell) is an everyman with a wife and a comfortable life. As soon as it becomes clear that the end of the world is nigh, his wife bolts, leaving him alone to deal with his fate. He meets crazy English neighbor girl Penny (Keira Knightly) who is looking for companionship as she's stuck in the U.S., while her family is in Britain. The two begin a weird, funny friendship as he promises her that he knows a guy with a plane who could take her home. They go on a road trip, visiting some of the weirds throwing caution to the win in their last days as they drive to this alleged plane.

The whole film feels like it really shouldn't work; it would seem like it has too broad an appeal to really be funny and puts two actors with no particular sexual chemistry together to fall in love. Yet it does work -- in a very uncomfortable uncanny way (not unlike Carell's previous work in "The Office"). Knightly and Carell seem to be in two separate movies, he in a morose man-looking-back-at-the-end-of-his-life-with-regret movie and she in a zaney comedy about a magical girl who doesn't see the world as seriously as everyone else. But Scafaria makes these two styles work together by showing that they each like in the other person what they themselves lack. He's serious and she's silly. 


I'm a little upset that the film goes from something a bit bizarre and unconventional to something more sentimental and conventional in the final minutes, but that doesn't take away from the generally good story and the very funny acting. I really like moves that take big risks, and this is not at all a safe, straightforward story. I appreciate that Scafaria presents a world with very few moments of redemption, where people pay for bad decisions and are mostly unable to change their ways (which is even more of a reason the last two scenes are bad for the overall film). I like the way she mixes happy and sad to make a richer comedy.


Stars: 2.5 of 4

Boy (Friday, March 2, 2012) (20)

Boy is a film about a boy named Boy (James Rolleston). He lives in a Maori village in 1984 and says his biggest interest and biggest hero is Michael Jackson. He's the oldest of four brothers and sisters, his father is in jail and his mother died in childbirth several years before.

Boy has a rich and wonderful imagination, somewhat reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite (ugh), which is to say fantastical and exuberant, though a bit crappy and taped-together. Rather than believing his father is in jail, he has several other secret-agent, super-warrior-type ideas of where he is.

One day his father, Alamein (writer-director Taika Waititi) comes back to the home and picks up his light and moronic criminal activity that got him put in jail in the first place. Of course Boy is thrilled by his return and immediately his dad becomes his biggest hero (he imagines him in several Michael Jackson music videos). But his dad can't be trusted to do anything, let alone manage four kids. As Boy's hopes grow for the life they're embarking on, Alamein falters and everything seems to fall apart.

Formally this is a really fun and wonderful film. The magical realism of Boy's imagination is absolutely adorable and exciting to witness - and Waititi does an amazing job of blending different elements together. There are great small cuts to small and silly side things related to what Boy says, frequently they're animated in a naive, childish style on lined school paper. There are hilarious sequences with Boy imagining his father as Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean or Beat It videos.

This is also a rather small movie that works well and doesn't make anything too cute, which is always a risk with a film about kids. Rolleston does a great job and Waititi doesn't dwell too much on him being in peril or other cheap tricks used by lazy directors around children.

Cuteness can sometimes be cloying for some, of course. It has the bizarreness and gonzoness of The Flight of the Conchords, but a bit more soul than that. It's not a straight comedy, as there are more important family stuff in it, but it's also not a tear-jerking story of a dad trying to clean up his act for his kids. It's a nice, happy medium and works well.

Stars: 2.5 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

The Fairy (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (15)

In their last film, L'Iceberg, Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy created a wonderful film based on dance, movement and physical comedy. It is a film reminiscent of the best of Jacques Tati, but a bit more gonzo, a bit off. In their newest film, The Fairy, they bring the same brightness and exuberance back for another tale of love and janky magic.

Dom (Abel) is a night clerk in a hotel in Le Havre, France. One night, as he's working, a woman shows up (Gordon) saying her name is Fiona and that she is a fairy who can give him three wishes. A bit surprised, Dom asks for a motor scooter as his first wish and unlimited gas as his second wish. Before he can come up with his third wish, the two begin making out and have sex.

It seems Fiona is the worst fairy ever, as her idea for unlimited gas for the scooter is to buy an oil container at the port that Dom can re-fill his small tank out of. She doesn't seem to have any really strong magic skills (though she does make one man fly) and her powers are mostly based on misdirection and cunning (like when she steals an outfit and shoes to wear on a date with Dom). As frequently happens, she gets pregnant and gives birth in a few minutes, and Dom and her have to care for their baby and avoid the people who get more and more frustrated with their clumsy, goofy behavior around the port city.

For me physical comedy is a really difficult thing. When done well (by masters like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or Tati) it is some of the most wonderful stuff on film; when done badly it's painful and forgettable. Gordon and Abel are new masters of physical comedy and add their own hilarious and off-beat twist to the gags. Certainly part of what makes them so appealing is that they're both individually rather strange looking (she's a bit like a more voluptuous Tilda Swinton, he looks like a drag queen out of makeup) and they play a lot with this.

They also run around Le Havre, which is a bit like a movie being set in Jersey City or downtown Miami (not the beachy part), it's ugly and is a failed Modernist concrete hellscape. They're laughing at the averageness of this world, and the idea that such a simpleton as Dom would want a scooter as one of his three wishes (when another man asks to be able to fly).

This is one of the most fun films I've seen in a long time. It's weird and hilarious, silly and wonderful.

Starts: 3.5 of 4

The Sitter (Friday, December 9, 2011) (113)

There are two tracks to director David Gordon Green's career in film: a gritty, dirty, independent, Southern American Gothic dramatic line featuring films like George Washington, Undertow and his best film, All the Real Girls; and a totally different, goofy, gross-out, pot-hazed comedy thread featuring Pineapple Express, the brilliant Eastbound and Down TV show and his latest film, The Sitter. It would be easy to dismiss this latter category as "director-for-hire movies," though I think that would miss the point. I see these two streaks as closer to a director more like Howard Hawks, who made brilliant westerns (Rio Bravo), brilliant film noirs (or is it films noir?) (The Big Sleep) and hilarious screwball comedies (His Girl Friday). I'm not saying DGG is as good as Hawks (that would be silly), but he's just about the only active director now who has that same flexibility with tone and genre. (For what it's worth, he only wrote the dramas he directed; the other films were written by other people.)

Sadly, the script for The Sitter is pretty typical, which results in a rather average movie, rather than a hilarious one. It's a pretty typical babysitter movie. The loser dumbass sitter, Noah (Jonah Hill), gets into all sorts of shenanigans when he's looking after three very self-determined kids (one of whom is played by the brilliantly named Max Records from Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are). They get wrapped up in a chase with drug dealers and cops and have to end up back home by 1am. It's very light, very dirty and has a very warm heart throughout.

Green does a great job with one of the funniest tongue-in-cheek gay camp sequences I've seen in a long time. He's clearly a talented guy. I just wish he would make a few more small dramas again, as his comedies are a bit too silly for his chops.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Beaver (Friday, May 6, 2011) (28)

I first heard about The Beaver, when it won first place on the 2008 Black List, an annual industry round-up of the best unproduced scripts (it's important to note that the script for Tarantino's Inglorious Basterds is #11 on that list... and was one of the best scripts of 2009). It came up again when Jodie Foster became the director of it and cast Mel Gibson as the lead. Then, after production had wrapped in the summer of 2010, the audio tapes of Mel calling his wife terrible names (and other things) came out and the film's release (scheduled for the fall of 2010) was held indefinitely. So finally it's out in theaters (well, sorta... I think it was on 22 screens across the country).

The Beaver is a terrible movie, having nothing to do with Mel Gibson being an anti-Semitic bigot. It has what is actually one of the worst scripts I've seen in a long time that takes shocking, gonzo steps as a way of avoiding banality. It has no structure and the premise, based on a quick read of the psychology Wikipedia entry, is bizarrely naive about what it's getting at. That this movie was ever produced is a testament to how stupid and navel-gazing the movie industry is.

Walter (Gibson) is a massively depressed businessman who also seems to suffer with with mania and schizophrenia. One day, while on a drinking and suicide bender, he finds a stuffed beaver puppet in a dumpster, puts it in his hand and begins to talk to himself in a cockney accent. This externalized superego then gets Walter to go back home, after his wife (Jodie Foster) has kicked him out, and make amends with her and his two sons. His older son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), is a high school outcast who writes papers for his classmates for cash. He hates his father and is trying to do anything in his power to not be like him.

At some point, Porter is contacted by the school valedictorian, Norah (Jennifer Lawrence), to write her valedictory address. He agrees and comes back to her with an offensive piece about how sad she is that her brother overdosed on drugs. Oh - and she likes to paint graffiti, but isn't allowed to do that because her mother doesn't want her to. Are you bored yet? Remember how this was a about a guy who talks with a puppet? Right.

It's a real surprise to me how much of this story is not about Walter and the eponymous puppet. Almost half of the film is about Porter, a secondary character, and about half of that story (a quarter of the film) is about Norah, a tertiary character. I think the idea is that the beaver is for Walter what Norah and Porter are for one another, that is some sort of external force that guides their struggles. The problem is that this simple nugget of an idea is so convoluted that it's almost totally lost. For most of the third act, there is no Walter and there is no beaver. This is stupid.

One amazing thing about the script, by Kyle Killen, is that it seems to be about psychology on the surface (it's about a crazy guy and it's pretty clear that the writer has some idea of what an id, and ego and a superego are), but it's not a very deep examination of anything psychological at all. We see that Walter goes to shrinks in the opening montage (and apparently lays in the couch at one), but he then comes up with the beaver "cure" on his own without any medical guidance (as if the treatment of depression was somehow easy and good for a punchline). After not fundamentally improving with the help of the puppet, he hurts himself in a pretty grizzly way, and then is checked into a psych hospital, medicated, treated off-screen and healed (well, it's a happy ending, so the idea is that he's on his way to recovery). The film isn't really critical of psychology, but it deals with it so lightly that it becomes either a joke or a proxy for "all that's wrong in our world". This is stupid too.

Gibson's performance is much more subdued than he is normally. It's certainly showy - he's really playing a blank cypher for a cockney beaver - but it's not as loud and crazy as he is frequently and he doesn't chew up too much of the set. Foster's direction is fine, if unnoticeable, but I give her as much blame for the terrible structure and script as Killen gets. How on earth could she have let this movie be made with this script?

Hollywood loves movies about shrinks - because everyone in Hollywood is in therapy. Hollywood is not filled with smart people, however. This is the perfect storm of those two things. Somehow people read this script, saw it was a gonzo take on psychotherapy/psychiatry and decided that it was a winner. Nobody ever had the depth of interest or knowledge to pick out the interesting nut of an idea and re-write it. This could have been an interesting and hard-hitting film. Instead it's a joke and is terrible.

Stars: 1 of 4

Super (Saturday, April 2, 2011) (21)

Super is a gonzo comic book movie straight out of the brain of a disaffected 15 year-old boy... or out of the brain of writer/director James Gunn. There is nothing here that your mother would like. It's crass, bawdy and silly - sorta Mystery Men meets Evil Dead.

Frank (Rainn Wilson) is a loser fry cook living in Anytown Exurbia, U.S.A. He has a terrible life and his wife, Sarah (Liv Tyler), hates him and only married him because she was getting straight after a stint in rehab. She leaves him for Jacques (or Jock, as Frank understands his name) (Kevin Bacon) a piece-of-shit strip-mall strip club owner and drug dealer, which sends him into a downward spiral of self-loathing.

One day he goes into a comic book store and meets the clerk there, Libby (Ellen Page). The two decide that they will design their own super hero personae (the Crimson Bolt and Boltie) and fight bad guys on their own. It's very similar in story (and tone) to Kick-Ass and Scott Pilgrim (both from last year).

What follows is one of the silliest Looney-Tunesy riffs I've seen in a long time. It's totally gross with tons of blood and foul language, but totally enjoyable. It's a sad world of despair and cruelty and Frank, as the Crimson Bolt, is violent and remorseless. After he blows someone's head off with a gigantic gun, he steps on his brains to rub in the point.

The script here is hilarious, bittersweet and very clever. Gunn has the perfect mix of stupidity and archness to make the dialogue feel as real as anything you'd see from an art-house think-piece. The acting is fantastic, particularly the supporting cast of Bacon, Tyler and Michael Rooker. Both Wilson and Page are actors who frequently err on the side of overdoing roles, but here they are both understated and give great, painful performances.

The best scene of the film, and one of the best comedy scenes I've witnessed in a long time, has Libby throwing herself at Frank, who is not really interested in her (he is, after all, trying to win back Sarah's heart). She convinces him that if they wear their costumes the sex will be better and easier for him to take and he won't really be cheating on Sarah. She puts on music and does this weird, uncomfortable dance (reminiscent of that Elaine Benes jig from Seinfeld), which is utterly unhot. She then mounts him and proceeds to... well, to rape him in the most silly and awkward way. In terms of "funny rape" scenes (yes, there's a category for that) it's up there for me with the one from Observe and Report (the best funny rape scene ever).

More than anything, this is a tale of melancholia and pitifulness, set in the most average, beige Americana background. It is hilarious, but there is a dark cloud of pain lying below the surface. I think it's a rather deep movie (like Observe and Report) that is wearing a gross-out comedy gown. I think there is more there than meets the eye... underneath the superhero mask.

Stars: 3 of 4

Kaboom (Saturday, January 29, 2011) (4)

Oh boy - what to say about Greg Araki's Kaboom. Well, it's very frank about sex. Uh, yeah - that's about it.

This movie is some sort of gonzo laugh at John Waters-like camp fare, but is sorta impossible to follow and goes off in such weird directions that you lose track of what the hell you're watching.

Smith (Thomas Dekker) is a college freshman living in the dorm. He thinks he's gay, but starts getting interested in some of the hot women he sees around. He has a dream with a mysterious girl in it and then thinks he sees her on campus. He tries to find her and enlists his best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) to help him. She's a lesbian (you see the trend) and always has a strong scowl on her face.

At some point there is a cult that starts recruiting students in the school and seems to have some sort of suicide pact, like Jonestown or Heaven's Gate. Well, they're more like the latter because there's some stuff about celestial bodies and space or something. Somehow Smith's search for this mysterious girl and search for getting laid by as many people (of all genders) as he can runs into the cult story. I'm still a bit mystified about what exactly happens.

Araki uses a rather non-linear structure to the film and it's very hard to follow from one scene to the next. I not sure very much comes from this aside from confusing us. Well, maybe this as something to do with drugs or something, but it's rather difficult to understand.

I fully admit that there might be something great that I'm not seeing here. I think Araki is capable of brilliant stuff (I think his film Mysterious Skin - which was also non-linear - is amazing), but I didn't see it here. To me, John Waters at his best was in Serial Mom and Pecker - two films that mixed the gross-out shock camp of his early work with normal (and hilarious) story lines that were somewhat approachable. Earlier and later stuff he's done (like Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living or Cecil B. DeMented) is just too hard to follow and such pure camp it's hard to connect to. This film is much more like Araki's Desperate Living than it is Mysterious Skin.

Stars: .5 of 4

Jackass 3D (Thursday, November 18, 2010) (148)

There is really not much to say about this film. It's fucking hilarious and gross, shocking, terrible, nauseating and silly. Johnny Knoxville and his gang of weirdos do all sorts of fucked up stuff here that you should never try at home. Oh - and it's fucking great.

I was very impressed with the 3-D and how well is worked here. More than just getting stuff to come out of the screen at you, we really got a sense of intimacy, which actually helped with some of the gags.

I think the grossest ones were the guy who was getting his tooth pulled by a string connected to a car (pulling the whole tooth out, root and all) and the fat guy sweat cocktail, where they make an obese guy wear a rubber suit, go on a stationary bike and then drink the sweat that collects in a cup behind him. Fucking disgusting.

I strongly look forward to the next Jackass movie!

Stars: 3 of 4

Marwencol (Sunday, October 31, 2010) (145)

Filmmaker Jeff Malmberg brings us the film Marwencol, a light-gonzo and wonderful documentary about Mark Hogancamp and his weird "hobby". Several years ago, Hogancamp had the crap beaten out of him (apparently for no particular reason, although maybe there was...) as he left a bar in Kingston, New York. After spending months recovering in the hospital, he found himself back in his modest house with serious brain damage.

At this point he began playing with large-size G.I. Joe-like action figures and created a world in his backyard where he re-enacted fabulous World War II scenes involving the Nazi occupation of the Belgian town of Marwencol (I'm not sure such a town exists). Hogancamp populated the village with figures representing himself (much taller and better looking, but plastic, of course), several of his friends and relations (his lawyer and the DA got figures for themselves), and a world of female bartenders and whores (though really nice and gold-hearted ones, dontcha know). Of course there is also a gang of Nazi soldiers who live in the town.

Hogancamp then began photographing the stories he would create to document the War and the day-t0-day life in the village. Sometimes the Nazi gang would take Mark's double and beat him (like he was beaten outside the bar), sometimes the American soldiers would beat up on the Nazis... because Nazi's are dicks. Sometimes they would all drink peaceably in the bar. Without knowing it, Mark created his own sort of "art therapy" to deal with the psychological pain (PTSD, to be sure) and get a handle on what happened to him.

Malmberg treats Hogancamp's work with the utmost respect and non-judgement. He also frequently puts the camera down on the ground level so we are inside the world of Marwencol interacting with the toy figures. As Mark narrates the story of each scene, we feel the drama of the story he creates. It is really a beautiful presentation.

Ultimately Mark's work is discovered by the New York art world and he is offered a one-man show in Chelsea. We see him struggle with the trip down to the city... and with several secrets that he lives with on a daily basis (I'm not going to tell the secrets here, because they are revealed so wonderfully). Again, Malmberg's gentleness and respect of Hogancamp is wonderful to see in how he deals with his unusualness.

This is a very small movie, but also a very powerful one. I expected this to be rather silly, but it was deeply moving and interesting. What I love is that Hogancamp's "art" is really interesting and aesthetically fabulous and that he basically came up with this "therapy" entirely on his own... and that he wouldn't consider what he's doing either "art" of "therapy".

The presentation is fantastic and I particularly appreciate that Malmberg didn't try to do more with this film than just present the story. There are no significant interviews with art world elites, nor is much time spent on the medical background for what is happening. Malmberg's restraint in this case is especially admirable.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Terribly Happy (Friday, February 5, 2010) (10)

This film is a Danish western, set in the western part of Denmark. It is a quite brilliant modern story that makes clever references to classic Westerns of Anthony Mann, John Ford and Howard Hawks. It is clearly visually inspired by David Lynch and the Coen Brothers, but has its own interesting style that makes it appear to be totally fresh and original.

Robert is a big city cop who is being disciplined after a big screw up. He's sent to a godforsaken town at the edge or civilization to become the new sheriff. This unusual town has only a few dozen residents, a doctor, a grocer, a pastor, a hair dresser and, of course, a bar. All of these people are dominated by Jorgen, the town tough who wears a cowboy hat, rules with an iron fist (almost literally) and takes care of people who get out of line. The fate of most who cross him is the bog outside of town where people can be disappeared in the mud without any evidence.

As Robert learns his way around and learns the politics of unusual town, he meets Ingerlise, Jorgen's wife and live-in punching bag. She's frustrated with her life and interested by Robert and seeks help from him for her situation. Little does he know that trying to help this sad woman will lead him deeper in the madness of this town, where everyone knows everyone's business and knows the rules that govern the place.

Writer/director Henrik Ruben Genz does a wonderful job of weaving a story that's familiar enough to recognize classic western threads (like the new sheriff in town meeting the old thug or the town doc who knows everyone's secrets but can't do anything about it, or the complicity of the townsfolk in the misery of others who sit back and judge from afar) but makes them contemporary enough to make them interesting. He uses a wonderful style with mostly static shots, beautifully filled up frames and amazing color to make what seems like a bleak setting come alive. The townspeople are always sweaty (and filthy) despite the bitter cold outside.

The photography by Jorgen Johansson looks a lot like the work that Roger Deakins has done for the Coen brothers, particularly for films like A Serious Man and Fargo; the music by Kaare Bjerko is a simple minimalist guitar and feels a lot like music Carter Burwell has written for them as well. Overall the style is gentle and peaveful, which belies the grime and violence the is at the heart of the town.

Jakob Cedergren is wonderful as Robert and is a perfect proxy for us. He's clearly a trouble man trying to escape his past - as much he's being sent to this place as punishment. He seems to have a good heart and is always doing things by the book (and even saying exactly that as he does those things). He's as mystified by the people and things he sees as we are and he responds in mostly sensible ways the way we might respond in a similar situation.

Of course the problem is that doing things by the police book is not the same thing as doing things by the book according to this town and these people. Henry Fonda's Wyatt Earp from My Darling Clementine or Clint Eastwood's Stranger in High Plains Drifter come to mind as we see Robert, an outsider, come to put some sense in this town that doesn't really want him.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

A Town Called Panic (Saturday, December 19, 2009) (196)

What's more snobby in the world of animation than claymation? French claymation, of course - and with subtitles! Actually, this is a cute, film along the lines of a gonzo SpongeBob SquarePants about a small village where toy humans and toy animals live and get into all sorts of hijinks.

For Horse's birthday, his roommates Cowboy and Indian (you see, in French, you can say things like 'Indian' and just be cute and foreign and not culturally insensitive! Bonus!) decide to build him a barbecue pit. They order bricks online, but when the delivery arrives, they realize they have way too many. They stack the thousands of bricks on top of the house, leading, of course, to a gigantic mess when the roof collapses and bricks go everywhere. This is just the opening to a bunch of wild and crazy things that ensue.

The style throughout it playful and funny. The characters move like toys rather than articulated characters typical in most animated films (like the Fantastic Mr. Fox), and the high-pitched voices are hilarious, even if you don't understand the French. We never know what to expect around the next corner - and directors Vincent Patar and Stephane Aubier do a clever job throwing a few curve-balls at us.

The biggest problem with the film is that it's not totally a single storyline throughout. It is adapted from a television show where the scenes are each about five-minutes long. As a result, it's feels like a soup in a can, rather than something totally homemade. That is, the story goes in such bizarre directions (funny but weird) that it is easy to lose track of the thread and get a bit bored. I am not sure if the script was written as one story arc, or if this is just an amalgamation of a bunch of shorts (I could see it either way). In the end it feels like something that would work better as a bunch of shorts - even a few 15-minute shorts, rather than a feature. Still, it's silly and fun all around.

Stars: 2 of 4

Big River Man (Sunday, December 13, 2009) (194)

I think the only way to describe John Maringouin's new film Big River Man is to say it is a 'gonzo' documentary. This is to say that it is hilarious and not traditional, frequently skirting standard practices and including narration that has such a particular point of view it becomes almost a narrative film in it's own right. Though most of the film is normal footage, there are scenes that are clearly scripted and acted out - re-enactments or fantasies of what could have happened.

The film tells the story of Martin Strel, arguably the world's greatest endurance swimmer. Strel is from Slovenia, which, as he tells us early on, is shaped like a chicken. Borut Strel, his son, is his manager and the narrator of the movie. Martin has made a name for himself by swimming some of the world's longest and most important rivers, including the Danube, the Yangtze and the Mississippi. This film is about his attempt to swim the Amazon from its source in the Peruvian Andes to its mouth in coastal Brazil. We see how he trains, how he raises money for the trip by pitching energy drinks and doing motivational speeches, and then once he's on the river, how he goes insane and his body begins to fall apart on the 4300km trip.

Borut is more fluent in English than Martin is, but he speaks in broken idioms and nonsensical approximations. He reminds me of Alex, the narrator in Jon Foer's Everything is Illuminated, who names his dog Sammy Davis Jr. Jr. Borut's narration is amazing and hilarious. At one point he and Martin go to the fast food restaurant, the Hot Horse in Ljubljana, Slovenia and Borut says, 'horse bourgers (sic) are like chicken bourgers - but they're made with horse.'

The Strels are joined on the trip by Matthew Mohlke as navigator on the support boat. Mohlke is a bright-eyed upper-Wisconsin man who basically knows as much about the Amazon as he can read on a map. He has no idea which back channels to take in the river and where there might be rocks or rapids, not to mention piranha and crocodiles ahead of them.


Only a few days into the trip, Strel begins to suffer from pain in his shoulders, any number of molds and mildew on his wetsuit, skin problems and sunburns. But he doesn't know the word 'quit' (he actually might not know it in English). He goes on - not because he is hell-bent on finishing as much as because he simply doesn't know that stopping early is an option (chalk that up to his communist upbringing or the fact that he says he was beaten as a child and can endure tremendous physical pain).

As he travels downriver, much like a character in a Werner Herzog movie (Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre: The Wrath of God), he goes insane. In addition, Mohlke goes insane as well, telling long stories about how Strel is Jesus and the morning mist over the river is the Holy Ghost there to witness the swim. As he goes along, he ultimately refuses to eat (not wanting to expend energy putting a fork or spoon to his mouth) and begins swimming at night and against his doctor's orders. Maringouin wonderfully uses actors at specific moments to act out some of Strels hallucinations or Borut's narration. This adds a wonderful phantasmagoric and, again, comedic, aspect to the whole story.

There is an amazing Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now element to this journey. He has a job to do and he cannot not do it. The journey becomes more important and more life-changing than the goal itself. When he finishes (after 66 days), there's a sense that it might not have been worth it as he is a shattered man.

It is unclear whether the voice of Borut is real or not, but it's hilarious. It either is totally real, or it's a constructed, rich persona. Either way it is totally entertaining and amazing to listen to. I guess it's not really fair of me to doubt him just because he sounds too-naive-to-be-true and because it is clear that Maringouin fudges the truth otherwise. All I know is that on Strel's website there is a poll that asks, 'Do you believe that Big River Man film (sic) is premiering at Sundance?' and the choices are: 'Yes, I believe', 'No, I don't believe it!' and 'Maybe, yes'. You can't write stuff that good!

Stars: 3 of 4