I can’t imagine that I’ll have a better filmgoing experience
this year than I did at the sold-out screening of Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930), a celebrated classic of
silent Soviet montage that here featured live musical accompaniment by the
18-piece Altos Orchestra. Despite the
film’s vaunted reputation, I admit that I’d never been able to connect with it
when I watched it on a TV screen, but seeing Dovzhenko’s majestically poetic
imagery splash across the Oriental Theatre’s massive main screen as the Altos’
moving original score filled the auditorium finally made the film’s mastery
click into place for me. It was a stark
reminder of the superiority of the big screen, public moviegoing experience to
home viewing.
Thanks to On Demand and instant streaming services, it’s
never been easier to keep up with the state of the cinematic arts. On the other hand, it’s perhaps never been
more difficult to see current releases the way they are designed to be seen, in
a theatre. Unless you live in a major
film market like Los Angeles or New York, a great deal of interesting and
exciting films from all over the world simply aren’t going to make it to a
theatre near you – and if the movies are small enough, you might not even get
the chance to catch up with them at home, which is why events like the
Milwaukee Film Festival are so vital to our current film culture.
In addition to special archival screenings like the
aforementioned screening of Earth,
the fifth annual Milwaukee Film Festival presented more than 100 new feature
films and 100 short films. (Full
disclosure: I was on the short films
screening committee this year, and have been on the feature films screening committee
in the past). This year’s lineup was so
stacked that it would’ve been impossible to see everything noteworthy even if I’d
taken an extended vacation from work (or if I hadn’t gotten a head cold that
caused me to sit several days out). I
simply couldn’t find room for Breathing
Earth (the latest gorgeous-looking documentary from Thomas Riedelsheimer,
director of 2001’s Rivers and Tides),
the J. Hoberman-approved biopic Hannah
Arendt, the acclaimed Danish Somali pirate drama A Hijacking, the intriguingly creepy looking documentary The Institute, Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise:
Hope, or the surreal erotic film Vanishing
Waves. As always, I’m sure there
were plenty of fantastic movies that weren’t even on my radar – discussing
films with other attendees in between screenings, I heard great things about
the relationship drama The Broken Circle
Breakdown, locally made documentary Date
America, provocative documentary God
Loves Uganda, and the bee-themed documentary More Than Honey. Below are
capsule reviews of the feature films that I did manage to see.
12 O’Clock Boys
(Lotfy Nathan, USA, 75 min.)
Director Lotfy Nathan’s feature film debut is one of the
most beautifully filmed and edited documentaries in recent memory. With crisp slow-motion footage and an
energetic hip-hop soundtrack, Nathan captures the grace and recklessness of a
loose collective of Baltimoreans who perform insane dirt bike and ATV stunts on
crowded public streets. The film doesn’t
commit fully to the gorgeous impressionism of its extreme sports sequences –
and the brief asides about tragic accidents that some of the riders have been
involved in feel like token nods to social responsibility rather than serious
looks at the negative ramifications of the crew’s illegal brand of extreme
sports – but overall this is an exhilarating look at a singular
phenomenon. B
The Act of Killing
(Joshua Oppenheimer, Denmark/Norway/UK, 116 min.)
The most mesmerizing, terrifying, and all-around audacious
movie of the year is documentarian Joshua Oppenheimer’s unblinking look at the
very worst of humanity. In 1965 and ’66
the Indonesian military staged a coup in which they exterminated the nation’s
Communist party (and anyone who they arbitrarily decided was a
Communist). Rather than being punished
for their war crimes, many of the perpetrators have remained major players in
the Indonesian political structure, and are even celebrated as heroes by the
country’s media. The provocative hook of
Oppenheimer’s film is that he has encouraged these criminals to recreate their
atrocities in the style of the Hollywood movies that they love. Even while attempting to portray themselves
as heroes, the self-described “gangsters” inevitably end up exposing themselves
as vicious thugs, and much of the film’s queasy fascination lies in the way
that these recreations make some of these men become self-aware of their
awfulness for seemingly the first time.
In the film’s unforgettable conclusion, one of these fearsome killers,
having struggled to portray the role of a victim in one of the reenactments, is reduced to
a pathetic dry-heaving shell that couldn’t be further from the macho action
hero that he’s always imagined himself as.
A
Ain’t Them Bodies
Saints (David Lowery, USA, 96 min.)
David Lowery’s moody, impressionistic crime story has more
craft than originality. But while the
film’s aesthetic instantly brings to mind Badlands
(1973) and Thieves Like Us (1974),
it’s not because Lowery is ripping those classics off so much as because he’s
tapping into the same rich vein of weird old Americana. The elements are familiar – an outlaw (Casey
Affleck), his lover (Rooney Mara), the kindly sheriff (Ben Foster), the wise
old man (Keith Carradine) – but the terrific cast, the poetic dialogue, and
Bradford Young’s beautiful cinematography combine to make Ain’t Them Bodies Saints feel like a timeless tale rather than a
tired retread. B+
Beyond the Hills (Christian
Mungiu, Romania, 152 min.)
Director Christian Mungiu made a name for himself with
2007’s intense abortion drama 4 Months, 3
Weeks and 2 Days, and his new, equally harrowing film confirms his status
as the most talented member of the Romanian New Wave. Alina (Cristina Flutur) plans to help her
best friend Voichita (Cosmina Stratan) escape from her secluded monastic life,
but severely underestimates Voichita’s commitment to her cause. As it becomes increasingly clear that
Voichita isn’t on board with the plan to run away, Alina’s behavior becomes
more erratic, violently disrupting her sedate surroundings. The monastery’s attempt to help the troubled
woman in the only way it knows how – by performing an exorcism – has tragic consequences. That plot synopsis might make this film sound
like a simple anti-religious screed, but while Mungiu is certainly critical of
the repressive atmosphere of the monastery, he also makes it clear why that
lifestyle might offer genuine solace to underclass people who have been left
behind by the uncaring institutions of the secular world. The film is also beautifully shot without
seeming overly composed, and could be enjoyed simply as a masterful
demonstration of the many ways that framing can be used to emphasize the growing
distance between two friends. A-
Blancanieves
(Pablo Berger, Spain, 104 min.)
Pablo Berger’s silent, bullfighting-themed variation on Snow
White won Best Film at the most recent Goya Awards (Spain’s equivalent to the
Oscars), but, like The Artist (2011),
it never really transcends its gimmicky origins as an homage to silent cinema. Still, the film does have its charms, mainly
found in its gorgeous cinematography and scenery. B-
Bound by Flesh
(Leslie Zemeckis, USA, 95 min.)
This biography of conjoined twin sideshow stars Daisy and
Violet Hilton is a textbook example of a documentary ruining a compelling story
with a generic talking heads aesthetic.
The sisters’ rise to prominence on the vaudeville scene is depicted with
the exact same tone as their gradual fall from grace, giving the film a generic
feel that is totally at odds with its subjects’ colorful life story. C
Closed Curtain (Jafar
Panahi & Kamboziya Partovi, Iran, 106 min.)
In 2010, the great Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi was
sentenced to a 20-year ban on filmmaking due to the subversive political
content of his films. Closed Curtain is the second movie that
Panahi has made in secret and had smuggled out of the country since then. It begins as a compelling allegory for
Panahi’s current life situation, with a writer (played by co-director Kamboziya
Partovi) boarding himself up in his house so that the authorities won’t become
aware of his dog’s existence (dogs are considered unclean under Islamic
rule). The sudden arrival of two
mysterious people seeking shelter from the law brings exactly the type of
attention that the writer was hoping to avoid.
This opening half of the film is exciting and tense, featuring brilliant
use of offscreen sound as unseen assailants storm around outside the writer’s
house. Unfortunately, when Panahi
himself takes over as the protagonist in the second half of the film (as if the
allegory wasn’t already clear enough), the film turns into a clumsily symbolic
retread of material from 2011’s far superior This is Not a Film. Panahi’s
focus on his current predicament is understandable, but hopefully he’ll find a
way to make a film about any other subject next time rather than continuing to
cover the same ground. B-
The Crash Reel (Lucy
Walker, USA, 108 min.)
This documentary follows professional snowboarder Kevin
Pearce from his rise to fame on the extreme sports circuit to his struggles to
re-enter the scene after a failed stunt leads to a traumatic brain injury. At various points it seems that the focus of the
film will be on Pearce’s rivalry with Shaun White, on his family’s post-injury
frustration with his determination to get back into the sport, or (most
compellingly) as an indictment of the corporate sponsors who push young
athletes into ever more dangerous situations, but director Lucy Walker favors a
generic all-encompassing approach that makes the film feel indistinct despite
its interesting subject matter. The
MTV-style editing and common TV-sourced snowboarding footage seems especially
limited in such close proximity to the far more artistically accomplished 12 O’Clock Boys. C+
Drug War (Johnnie
To, China, 107 min.)
Prolific Hong Kong action director Johnnie To’s first film
financed by and produced in mainland China appears at first to be a straightforward
battle of wills between a determined undercover police officer (Sun Honglei)
and a questionably trustworthy informant (Louis Koo) as they attempt to
infiltrate a major drug cartel. While
the film does work wonderfully as a brutally streamlined action film, and is
less outwardly bizarre than something like To’s 2010 MFF entry Vengeance, there is still plenty of
offbeat humor around the margins, and the film has a slyly satirical take on
the nature of drug enforcement. Though
the police are nominally the good guys and the drug dealers are ostensibly the
bad guys – probably a necessity to get the film past the Chinese censors – it’s
clear that this is a rigged game, with the humorlessly stoic authorities using
their seemingly unlimited resources to torment the more personable dealers. Mild subversion aside, Drug War will probably be best remembered for concluding with one
of the more relentless and over-the-top shootouts in recent memory. B
Enzo Avitabile Music
Life (Jonathan Demme, Italy, 80 min.)
Italian multi-instrumentalist Enzo Avitabile is less
well-known (at least in the United States) than previous Jonathan Demme music
documentary subjects like Talking Heads and Neil Young, but this charmingly
low-key film makes a strong case for his talent. The film is basically a series of
performances where Avitabile is joined by master musicians from all over the
world, performing gorgeous music with largely esoteric instrumentation. A little more context for Avitabile’s life
and career might have been instructive, but Demme’s decision to let the music
speak for itself keeps the film lively and fun.
B
Free the Mind
(Phie Ambo, Denmark/Finland, 80 min.)
The subject matter of this documentary – the treatment of
post-traumatic stress disorder through non-chemical means – is interesting and
vital, which makes it all the more disappointing that the film’s focus is so
scattershot. The 80 minute running time
just doesn’t leave enough room to properly tell the stories of two Iraq war
veterans, a young child struggling to get past an experience where he was
trapped alone in an elevator, and a
University of Wisconsin doctor whose Buddhist studies have influenced his
experimental treatment techniques. C
House with a Turret (Eva
Neymann, Ukraine, 81 min.)
This child’s eye view of a Soviet Union devastated by World
War II was adapted from an autobiographical novel by Friedrich Gorenstein. When his mother passes away from illness in
the middle of a trip, the young protagonist (Dmitry Kobetskoy) is forced to fend
for himself in a world of starving, desperate adults. The film’s long take, deep focus aesthetic
brings to mind the classical European cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela
Tarr. Though director Eva Neyman is
clearly working in the tradition of those giants, her beautifully composed film
is one that either Tarkovsky or Tarr could’ve been proud to include in their
respective oeuvres. The black-and-white
cinematography is stunning, leavening the film’s thick air of misery with its
sheer beauty. B+
In the House
(Francois Ozon, France, 105 min.)
Having not been impressed by Swimming Pool (2003), the only other film I’ve seen by
writer-director Francois Ozon, I had fairly low expectations for his latest
meta commentary on the nature of storytelling, revolving around a teacher
(Fabrice Luchini) who is increasingly sucked into the ongoing narrative of the
writing assignments of his most mysterious student (Vincent Schmitt). Fortunately the script (adapted from a play
by Juan Mayorga) is as witty as it is clever, and Luchini is hilarious as the
comfortably bourgeois teacher with frustrated artistic ambitions. For a film that is commenting on the clichés
of erotic thrillers, the film never becomes particularly sexy or thrilling, but
the light comic tone assures that it never suffers from the heavy handed
pretensions that brought down Swimming
Pool. B
Laurence Anyways
(Xavier Dolan, Canada, 168 min.)
Laurence Anyways
is the type of wildly impassioned project that takes so many risks that it
constantly seems on the verge of collapsing under the weight of its
ambitions. 24-year-old writer-director
Xavier Dolan (already on his third feature film) isn’t always in full command
of everything he’s trying to do, but it’s impossible not to admire the
stylistic chances he takes in telling the decade-spanning story of a man
(Melvil Poupaud) undergoing a gradual sex change, and the girlfriend (Suzanne
Clement) who struggles with adapting to his shifting sexual identity. Poupaud and Clement’s excellent performances
keep the story grounded even as Dolan indulges his most flamboyant artistic
whims, including a splendidly goofy sequence where the couple walks through a
storm of raining sweaters. B+
The Pervert’s Guide
to Ideology (Sophie Fiennes, UK/Ireland, 136 min.)
The second collaboration between iconoclastic psychoanalyst
Slavoj Zizek and director Sophie Fiennes (after 2006’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema) is a freewheeling essay about the
hidden meanings that Zizek finds in popular Hollywood entertainments ranging
from The Sound of Music (1965) to The Dark Knight (2008). Not all of Zizek’s theories are as insightful
as his hilarious class-based analysis of the ending of Titanic (1997), but there is a mesmerizing forcefulness to his
nonstop Slavic drawl that carries the movie over its brief rough patches. B
Post Tenebras Lux
(Carlos Reygadas, Mexico/France/Germany/Netherlands, 115 min.)
Admittedly impenetrable yet undeniably stunning, Carlos
Reygadas’ fourth feature offered the best pure sensory experience of this
year’s festival. Like Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), Post Tenebras Lux mixes an intensely
personal family story with metaphysical flights of fancy, and once again the
combination is as awkward as it is fascinating.
The film may ultimately be less than the sum of its parts, but many of
those individual elements – a CGI devil stalking around a live action house
during a storm; a bathhouse orgy that is somehow simultaneously sedate and
intense; an impromptu rendition of a Neil Young song that is all the more
haunting for being completely off-key; an abrupt self-decapitation - are as
sublime and as beautifully filmed as anything in recent memory. The lightning bolt edit between the first two
scenes single-handedly justifies the Best Director award that Reygadas received
for this film at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
B+
The Rambler
(Calvin Lee Reeder, USA, 97 min.)
This tale of a stoic drifter (Dermot Mulroney) attempting to
reconnect with his family after a stint in prison aspires to be the ultimate
midnight movie, combining the splatter humor of Evil Dead II (1987) with the nightmarish surrealism of David Lynch and
the outrageous sleaze of a Troma production.
Unfortunately all of director Calvin Lee Reeder’s effects seem borrowed
from better films, and the incompatible influences ultimately cancel each other
out, making this just another pre-fabricated grindhouse wannabe cult item. A scene where a succubus vomits on the
shackled hero sums the film up nicely:
rather than seeming funny or scary or even particularly weird, it is
merely gross. D
Reality (Matteo
Garrone, Italy, 116 min.)
I was not as blown away by Matteo Garrone’s breakthrough
film Gomorrah (2008) as most critics
were, so I was looking forward to this goofy farce simply as a radical change
of pace. But while Gomorrah may have been too didactic for its own good, its
single-mindedness at least gave it a certain forceful vitality that is
completely missing from this slackly paced follow-up. A fishmonger (Aniello Arena) becomes obsessed
with appearing on a popular reality show, to the point that he ultimately gives
away all of his possessions. Despite the too-obvious satirical target, this
story might have worked had Garrone consistently amped up the lunacy to match
his protagonist’s story arc, but stylistically the film works backwards,
beginning with a party scene that suggests Fellini-esque carnival extravagance and
then slowly settling into a dully respectable tonal register that just doesn’t
work for comedy. C-
Sightseers (Ben
Wheatley, UK, 98 min.)
Ben Wheatley’s third feature lacks the daring tonal shifts
of his impressive previous efforts Down
Terrace (2009) and Kill List
(2011), but still features the careful attention to character and the stylistic
swagger that set the director apart from the pack of young horror
filmmakers. This horror-romantic comedy
hybrid follows a young couple (Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, both hilarious) on an
initially peaceful RV road trip that turns violent whenever other tourist’s
slight them. The concept (a romantic comedy
where the couple is made up of complete sociopaths) is fairly one-note, but
it’s a note that Wheatley and his stars play exceptionally well. B
Something in the Air
(Olivier Assayas, France, 122 min.)
Though this early-‘70s period piece is reportedly based on
events from director Olivier Assayas’ youth, its narrative suffers from the
same stasis as his previous film, Carlos
(2010); it is clear, literally from the first shot, that Assayas thinks that
his student activist protagonists are poseurs.
Assayas may be in a rut as a storyteller, but thankfully he remains one
of the most expressive and energetic directors alive. The fetishistic attention to specific
“revolutionary” tchotchkes and fashions of the ‘70s keeps the film engaging
even as Assayas seems to insist that we not invest in his characters. B-
Stories We Tell
(Sarah Polley, Canada, 108 min.)
Actress Sarah Polley’s deeply personal documentary begins as
a chronicle of her free-spirited mother, gradually turns into a gripping
investigation into her unexpectedly complicated family tree, and ultimately
uses this specific story to ruminate about the untrustworthiness of subjective
memories in general. Polley spends too much of the
film’s climax expounding on that last point, and she also relies too heavily on
Super 8 home video footage throughout the film, as if she doesn’t realize how
fascinating her own story is. But it
really is an entertaining, wild
story, and one of the more enthralling documentaries of the year. B
This is Martin Bonner
(Chad Hartigan, USA, 83 min.)
Many popular works of art claim to be about redemption, but This is Martin Bonner is the rare film
that actually deals with that subject matter in an adult, realistic way. The story revolves around the titular social
worker’s (Paul Eenhoorn) attempts to help a repentant drunk driver (Richmond
Arquette) readjust to society after a twelve-year stint in prison. Bonner is dealing with his own crisis of
faith, seemingly related to some unspecified family trauma, and his own
distance from his loved ones mirrors the ex-con’s strained relationship with
the daughter (Sam Buchanan) who grew into a different person during his prison
stay. This material could’ve easily
turned into melodrama, but writer-director Chad Hartigan favors an understated,
humane approach that is perfectly complimented by the subtle, lived-in
performances of Eenhoorn and Arquette. This is Martin Bonner isn’t particularly
stylish – it could probably be just as easily enjoyed on a laptop screen as in
a cinema – but the lack of flash is appropriate to the story. The film isn’t small, it’s life sized. B+
Upstream Color
(Shane Carruth, USA, 96 min.)
The quality of surreal, dreamlike films is even more
subjective than the quality of most art; you either get hypnotized by them or
you don’t. Having been mightily
impressed by Shane Carruth’s previous film, Primer
(2004), I was prepared to follow him pretty far down the rabbit hole on Upstream Color, but I have to admit that
I couldn’t really get on the film’s inscrutable wavelength. This could be because of my preference for
the long-take, creeping dread of something like Mulholland Drive (2001) over the Nicolas Roeg-style non-stop
fragmented editing Carruth employs here, or it could be because the obscure
plot (having something to do with a mad scientist using a virus that infects
the memories of its protagonists) seems less like a compelling mystery than a
somewhat clichéd sci-fi story told from an odd angle. Carruth certainly deserves credit for his
industriousness – he wrote, directed, scored, co-edited, starred in, and even
helped operate the camera on this film, and made a slick looking product on a
shoestring budget. I just wish that he
had used his undeniable talent on something more compelling than footage of
pigs milling around, or his lead characters arguing about which of their
memories are real. Aside from one
mesmerizing scene in which the wormlike virus makes its way through the female
lead’s (Amy Seimetz) body, the film is largely tedious. Don’t take it from me, though; this is one of
the most acclaimed films of the year. C
War Witch (Kim
Nguyen, Canada, 90 min.)
Though it was a nominee for Best Foreign Film at this year’s
Academy Awards and a winner of the Competition jury prize at this year’s
Milwaukee Film Festival, War Witch is
a fairly generic litany of “third-world” suffering. It’s pretty much exactly what you would
expect a film about a Congolese child soldier to be. There’s nothing particularly wrong with
Canadian director Kim Nguyen’s handling of the material – the cinematography is
terrific, and Rachel Mwanza is impressive as the young protagonist – but the
film has nothing surprising or edifying to say about the plight of child
soldiers. C+
Wolf Children
(Mamoru Hosada, Japan, 117 min.)
Mamoru Hosada’s fantastical anime is a multi-layered coming
of age story about a woman tasked with raising two wolf/human hybrids on her
own after her shape-shifting lover is killed during a hunt. The animation is pretty but fairly generic,
but the patient unfolding of the story is a nice alternative to the manic
pacing of most children’s films, and the ways that the narrative’s events cause
the children to either embrace or reject their lycanthropic heritage are
surprising and touching. B
