Month: October 2011

First-time director Sean Durkin has created one of the year’s most beguiling films, which is not to say it is free of bewilderment.

MMMM is a moving portrait of the mental and emotional disintegration of a refugee from a rural “cult” of young people (mostly women) drawn into the clutches of an older, tyrannical male leader (John Hawkes, Winter’s Bone).

Elizabeth Olsen, in a razor-sharp performance of nuanced understatement, portrays Martha, the vulnerable victim. After two years as an incommunicado exile only a few hours away, Martha decides to call her estranged sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) and flee the kinky and increasingly bizarre commune. A mutual detachment soon exists between the two that enables an utter lack of communication. Lucy walks on eggshells, merely tiptoeing around the subject of where the hell Martha has been and what happened that is making her act so strangely. Meanwhile Martha (Hawkes dubs her Marcy May) goes into a shell only to come out long enough to fantasize her disconcerting past at the farm. In the back and forth’s between Lucy and her husband’s dreamy Connecticut vacation house, and flashbacks to the Manson-like Hawkes’ bevy of prey, dream and reality begin to blur for her. The filmmaker’s restraint roller coasters from inertia to Martha’s unexpected outbursts and back again. Durkin sure knows how to edit. His juxtaposition of dream/fantasy sequences are jarringly smooth and coincide perfectly with Martha’s mind state to the point that the flashbacks feel more like daydreams and reality seems not really… all there.

Olson, only 22, is an actress to keep an eye on. The younger sister Of The Kate & Ashley Olsen twins, she eschewed child acting despite her proximity to opportunity. It wasn’t until a stint as an NYU theater major that she was ready to take it on and take it on she does. She dives into the character from the get go exposing herself, literally and metaphorically into a character that not many 22 year old actors can even begin to grasp. The nuanced acting, the details, the brilliant distance she creates is fascinating to watch and engulfing to the viewer.

You may complain about the film’s thwarting finale. But if you’re feeling cheated, you missed the whole point of the film. Durkin’s end is only to emphasize the point of what the film is truly about, paranoia. Not a slasher horror tale.

9 Utopias (out of 10)

– You’re an 11-year-old boy living in a home for orphans.
– You’re insistent on finding a way to ecape at every turn.
– You’d do anything to find your father who abandoned you.
– You stumble on a local hairdresser willing to take you in on weekends.

So begins the latest heartwrenching odyssey from the fabulous Dardenne brothers (La Promesse and the wonderful L’Enfant).

Cyril (Thomas Doret) is the antithesis of the adorable movie kid (I.E. Super 8). Self-centered, resentful, and violent, he has one thing on his mind: finding his Dad (Dardenne regular Jeremie Renier). The hairdresser, Samantha (Cecile De France, Hereafter, Mesrine), enables his wish and we’re off to the races. What ensues is a compassionate tale of abandonment, forgiveness and unconditional love. Cyril, willing to take whatever scrap his penniless and shabby father offers, finds only disillusionment. He soon gets into trouble hanging around with a wrong element of older kids. Samantha, at wit’s end, copes with the most extraordinary of challenges.

The Kid With A Bike’s depicton of character transformation is breathtaking. The directors use an economy of style that borrows heavily from their early years as documentary filmmakers. Able to avoid the mawkish, they parlay a harsh realism with an uncanny empathy for their characters, no matter how frightful their actions. The ferocity of Cyril’s intense focus is nothing short of remarkable especially at the moment, one specific scene where his personality turns 180 degrees. It will floor you. Doret gives the best performance by a child actor in recent memory. Those kids from Super 8 have nothing on him.

9.5 Gears (Out of 10)

Everywhere you look these days new films are tackling mental illness, the end of the world, or both. Leave it to provocateur, Hitler commentator, and visual poet Lars Von Trier (Dogville, Antichrist, Breaking The Waves) to tie the two subjects together with an uncanny verve and a vision which, while pitch-dark, contains more than a shred of hope.

In the best of the film’s many excellent performances, Kirstin Dunst (Cannes Best Actress) plays Justine, a new bride who’s experiencing acute depression, which she refers to as feeling “a little sad.” The first half of the film is a brilliant Bergmanesque study of the most primal elements of a dysfunctional family to end all dysfunctional families. There’s a toast from Justine’s raggedy father (John Hurt) that ignores the bride and groom and directly slings an arrow at his shrew of an ex-wife (a stone-cold (fox) Charlotte Rampling). Her reply to the couple is “Enjoy it while it lasts. I hate marriage.” They never get to find out since shenanigans bordering on the surreal soon take place, including an incident with the bride in an uncompromising position with a co-worker on the sprawling front lawn of her sister and brother-in-law’s mansion. Before we know it Rampling’s son-in-law (Kiefer Sutherland) is throwing Rampling’s belongings out the front door and Dunst tells off her advertising agency honcho boss (a perfect Stellan Skarsgard)–all before the cake is even cut. Alexander Skarsgard (True Blood, Stellan’s real life son) plays the clueless groom, not accidentally an American.

Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Dunst’s toe-the-line older sister, is highly memorable as Dunst’s protector and rival. During the film’s key second half her character changes most dramatically as the planet Melancholia heads for a possible collision with The Earth. Gainsbourg is increasingly fretful for her young child despite Sutherland telling everyone not to worry. Science assures the dreaded collision won’t happen. It’s no spoiler to unveil he’s mistaken. His ostensible voice of reason throughout the wedding fiasco as the patriarchal domineering head of the family comes up short, paving the way for the increasingly demented Justine to provide a genuine way of coping with The End. Like Genevieve Bujold in King of Hearts her madness provides the creative sanity for the monumental crisis. The film’s use of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” is a true thing of beauty and Von Trier’s stunning visuals enhance this frightening yet cathartic allegory of life and death. The film’s ending is one of the most moving finales imaginable.

Just try to imagine it…….. it’s better than that.

9 Mad Apocalypses (Out of 10)

It’s not that Aki Kurismaki’s Le Havre uses the director’s trademark deadpan humor to escape from life’s harsh realities. Rather, Le Havre’s exquisitely offbeat style and genuinely believable, quirky characters stand up as a commonsense solution to the film’s theme of the ethics surrounding illegal immigration. Andre Wilms is wonderful as a shoeshine man who hides an escaped stowaway (Blondin Miguel) from authorities who wish to deport him.

Wilms enlists an odd assortment of sturdy-in-their-seediness shopkeepers to help hide the kid. Jean-Pierre Darroussin, steely grimace unwavering, plays a tough if ambivalent police inspector. There’s a great scene of him walking in the local bar and every unwelcoming, menacing face turning toward him in unison. A knowing dog is around to steer Wilms in the right direction. The kid wants to find his grandmother. Wilms has a plan. Since he from his first scene established he may be poor but he’s hardly unworldly, his plan doesn’t surprise us. The people of this village do nothing less than reinforce our faith in humanity. Yet LeHavre is worlds away from sentimentality Of all the world’s finest film auteurs, Kaurismaki may be the most under-appreciated by American art film audiences.

8.5 refugees (out of 10)

A movie about butter sculpting. Ha! As in not-so-funny….

While exhibitng a handful of moments of sharp satire, Butter is largely a toned-down send-up of a Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachman-esque character (Jennifer Garner) smack in the middle of Iowa. The film is far too schmaltzy to effectively hold up a mirror to the timidity and insipidness of America’s heartland.

Director Jim Field Smith (She’s Out Of My League) wants to have it both ways. For every mocking shot he sends out, there are two or three competition comedy Tender Moments. Most involve a 10-year-old African American foster child butter-carver (Vara Shahidi), whose white parents (Rob Corrdry, Alicia Silverstone) seem shocked by her prowess.

Thank heaven Olivia Wilde’s around—not just for serious eye candy but because she’s got a comic chop or two. She plays a stripper turned contestant who’s involved with Garner’s henpecked husband (Ty Burrell) and, soon, their daughter. Hugh Jackman’s also got a small role. He didn’t make out so well. Comedy seems as foreign to him as brain surgery.

Here’s hoping producer Harvey Weinstein was joking about this film’s Oscar potential. He’d do better to concentrate on his sublime The Artist and let Butter sink to its natural level.

4 Clogged Arteries (Out of 10)

According to the new film Miss Bala, the bizarre level of corruption in response to Mexico’s drug cartel violence infests every nook and cranny of the country’s society. Director Gerardo Naranjo offers a searing peek into this harrowing, topsy-turvy world in one of the year’s most inventive films (Mexico’s official entry into this years Academy Awards competition).

Main character 23-year-old Laura Guerrero (an enthralling Stephanie Sigman) her eyes as big and piercing as full moons, transfixes nearly every frame of the film. The aspiring beauty pageant contestant faces no good choices once she’s kidnapped by a nasty gang after witnessing their invasion of a nightclub which she reluctantly attends with a girlfriend. She chooses to comply with the gang’s leader, a self-assured, rigorous Lino Valdez (a convincing Noe Hernandez) rather than watch her father and younger brother go down. Navanjo adroitly and suspensefully shoots even the film’s action strictly from Laura’s standpoint and what follows is a just-enough stylized vision of all hell breaking loose. He perfectly interweaves the gang’s self-described “fearless” progress toward increasingly daring battles with overwhelmed and often corrupt authorities with Laura’s steadfast and stoic coping. In a tribute to Naranjo, whose cinematic style evokes a more pensive Michael Mann, the more outrageous events become, the more plausible they get.

Laura goes on more determinedly with each new humiliation as she chauffeurs, smuggles, and seduces her way into survival. She transcends that very survival instinct with a pathos that surely symbolizes the Mexican people as they have endured the 36,000 drug cartel deaths in the last several years.

The film returns to the beauty pageant theme at a most surprising time. The sullen Laura doesn’t seem to be enjoying her participation, yet the ensuing pageant serves as an incongruous reminder that somehow Mexico’s “normal life” goes on despite many wasted billions of dollars a year joing the lost lives to put a blight on a buoyant country’s aspirations. Like Laura’s non-choices Miss Bala suggests there seems to be no way out of the violence other than emulating Laura’s extraordinary ability to persevere.

8.5 Wild Ass Cartels (Out of 10)

There’s a memorable and telling line in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s intellectually stimulating film about psychoanalysis pioneers Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and the affect a young female patient turned psychiatrist has on their relationship. Freud, happy to finally meet his younger disciple, is also careful to instruct him to stick with rigid scientific method through thick and thin. Jung (a tightly wound Michael Fassbender) suggests pschoanalysis should go beyond providing patients with an understanding of their neuroses and attempt to help the patient find and express his or her true self. Freud (a hypercalm and authoritative Viggo Mortensen) brushes aside this notion by declaring that science stops short of providing any solutions. “Why would we wish to substitute one set of delusions with another?” he asserts.

The essential argument in this film that superbly articulates conceptual differences is that Jung’s vision to move past Freud’s achievements and provide a wider context for human development were met by a stone wall by the movement’s founder. Freud’s insistence that every human behavior was rooted in sexuality further drew a rift between the two men, as did Jung’s notion of the relevance of the supernatural, which Freud regarded as useless “mysticism.”

Of course, what also tore the men apart after an initial harmony was the young woman, Sabrina Spielrein… Enter Keira Knightley, who at the top of the film is being wheeled into a mental hospital, having an rather torrid conniption. In the “hysterical woman” mode of the day Knightley, jutted out jaw and rolling eyes, seems to have emerged out of Cronenberg’s horror movie past. By mid-film she’s enrolled in medical school and goading Jung into cheating on his aristocratic wife and mother of his three children. Later, she’s a psychiatrist herself working for Freud who by this time, has sundered ties with Jung. The transformations are handled with piercing adroitness by Knightley. Three of the year’s best performances are contained in this film but you’ll leave it with Knightley’s prime in your mind.

There’s also a very fine supporting role by the chameleon Vincent Cassel as Otto Gross, himself a shrink and also a cocaine addict, whose personal motto is to never repress anything whatsoever. I can’t anyone think of three more different roles than Cassel’s in Mesrine, Black Swan, and now this film.

A Dangerous Method is Cronenberg’s finest film since the stirring Dead Ringers, also a film about dual natures, a subject expanded on here with Jung’s ambivalence about the nature of his impulses and the wisdom of holding them in check.

The issue of Freud and Spielrein’s Jewishness is first introduced when Freud remarks that the Vienna establishment’s predudice toward the largely Jewish psychoanalysis movement could use a non-Jew adherent as well known as Jung. Freud also suggests to a spurned Knightley, that she forget Jung and stick with her own kind. Sadly and ironically, the film’s coda announces that both Freud and Spielrein’s fates were sadly controlled by the Nazis.

9 Repressions (Out Of 10)

A good chunk of Like Crazy is so minimal you’ll need a magnifying glass to find it.

Director Drake Doremus (2010’s Douchebag, and no he didn’t win the snag award) valiantly tries to emulate masterful British director Mike Leigh by going essentially scriptless. About all this film has in common with Leigh (Another Year, Secrets & Lies, Naked) is a character with a British accent (the winsome, gorgeous, and savvy Felicity Jones). While the chemistry between Jones (a student in Los Angeles who overstays her Visa after falling in love) and furniture designer Anton Yelchin is intriguing at first, things rapidly descend into two parts self-conscious affectation for every one part cinematic, dialogue-free insight.

A drama about a long distance relationship has much potential. It can grow in so many various ways that it is hard to imagine it not finding a steady beat. But the film does tend to feel raw to its core. That is much due to it’s stylistic technique and the improvisation, both of which can be adored as much as they can be hated. Sometimes it feels like the cat got Jones and Yelchin’s collective tongue. A little dialogue in key places can go a long way. When mixed together with the beauty of the film however you find yourself wrapped up in their story which feels like there are no wrong decisions, only mixed up, tangled, like-crazy, emotions.

6.5 Improvises (Out of 10)

The Artist, the nearly totally silent film shot in black-and-white, is pure stunning. If you decide to skip it based on either of those two unique characteristics, you’ll be doing yourself a major disservice.

Director Michel Hazanavicius has constructed no less than a sizzling masterwork celebrating not just the silent film but the film medium in general, both as a whole and as the sum of two very distinct halves separated by the breakthrough of sound. The Artist simultaneously amusingly and poignantly portrays the emotional turmoil suffered by a silent era star (Jean Dujardin) once Hollywood rather quickly transitioned to talkies in the late 1920s. Dujardin, winner of Best Actor at Cannes, plays George Valentin, a Rudolph Valentino-esque god of the silent film. Opposite him is the up-and-coming Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), who Valentin “discovers” and gives a major push to her own eventual stardom Their trajectories are mirror opposites of each other, as Valentin refuses to embrace this revolutionary talking cinema while Peppy nearly overnight becomes a major starlet of the new art form. There’s a scene where Peppy walks by a marquee for a film called “Guardian Angel,” a fitting symbol for her persistent devotion to George (whose own marquee, “The Lonely Star,”sums up his fallen state compounded by his prideful resistance to Peppy’s devoted friendship).

John Goodman and James Cromwell deftly play a studio chief and Valentin’s chauffeur. The film’s hands-down Best Supporting Actor though is a delightful Jack Russell Terrier, who demolishes any preconceived notions you may have about film dogs. The Jack Russell in Beginners ought to take acting lesson from The Artist’s pup.

It may sound outlandish but this exquisitely entertaining film could make a serious run for the Academy Award as Best Film. Harvey Weinstein, no stranger to winning Oscar strategies, will distribute it in America. He will have his work cut out for him though. An additional taboo that could scare away jaded filmgoers is that the The Artist, adhering to the strict Hays Code of the 1930s, contains nothing more explicit than a hug (even kissing was off limits) and no violence either (other than a strategically placed “Bang”). Judging from the sparse crowd at The Prince Theater last night, the film’s awards fate could be limited to a more token “here’s-our-art-film”nomination similar to last year’s nomination for “Winter’s Bone.” That would be a shame. After experiencing this film unleash the realization of just how powerful an out-of-body experience the film medium can unleash, I’m a little worried the rest of the films in The Philadelphia Film Festival will feel downright mundane in comparison.

9.5 Bangs (Out of 10)

To the non-participant a film about the birding passion seems precarious from the get-go. Fraught with the potential to bore silly, The Big Year manages to keep at a distance most technical aspects of (sorry to get pejorative) “bird-watching.” What results nonetheless leaves one no less abashed than had director David Frankel gone for straight-up National Geographic.

That’s because Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson play three rather predictable characters in search of the elusive best-in-the-world-at-what-they-do, which is run around and sight as many avarian species within a calendar year as possible. In between scurrying to airports to sites from the Everglades to the Aleutians, they manage to ignore a beautiful wife (Wison/Rosamund Pike), run a big company (Martin), and struggle with an unappreciative Dad and an overenthusiastic Mom (Black, Brian Dennehy and Diane Weist). We’re supposed to believe at the outset that they are all trying to hide from one another the fact they’re all going for a “Big Year” despite each showing up at the same sighting events. Wilson already holds the world’s record (over 700 species); Pike wants them to work on her fertility. Martin wants to quit as CEO and get with his newborn grandchild. Black, working fulltime, keeps bailing on his boss anytime his ringtone (The Trashmen’s marvelous Surfin’ Bird, of course) beckons him to an imminent sighting.

Everyone’s always leaving foreplay (Wilson), important merger meetings (Martin) or arguments with his Dad (Black) to run to chase the feathered vertebrate. Good scenery abounds, including Pike. The birds look better than in a zoo (though since some are clearly digital, often not as real) but you don’t get to see them for long stretches.

It’s all about the quantity. Or as a British birder in the film quips as he’s pushed aside by an aggressive Wilson, “Only Americans would turn birding into a competition.”

4 light-as-a-feathers out of 10