In the Uzbek drama 40 Days of Silence, a teenage Tajik girl undertakes a ritual vow of silence for forty days. The mystery for a non-Tajik or -Uzbek audience is why she would do this? And, we wonder, what is going to happen?
These questions are not answered definitively in 40 Days of Silence, but we sense that the stakes are life and death. The girl’s progress is related dreamily, and it’s not always clear what is happening – or whether it is really happening.
The most outstanding aspect of 40 Days of Silence is its sound design, a collection of noises not EXACTLY music, but musical in effect.
40 Days of Silence is slow but mesmerizing. It works as an art film, but is not for audience members that are uncomfortable with ambiguity.
In a society with capital punishment, someone must perform the executions. There’s a paradox inherent in the act of killing to punish killing. In Patty Dillon’s powerful documentary There Will Be No Stay, we meet the people who live with that paradox most personally:
a Georgia warden who has given the order to commence executions;
a Texas chaplain assigned to keep the condemned placid on the gurney ;
and two South Carolina correctional officers who have plunged the vials for lethal injections and mashed the buttons for the electric chair.
The effect that capital punishment has had on these men – connected to neither the victims or perpetrators, is profound and thought-provoking.
Filmmaker Dillon (who also narrates) starts with an anti-death penalty point of view, but There Will Be No Stay is anything but a screed. Having the sense to keep the movie focused on these four personal stories makes it stronger stuff.
There Will Be No Stay is filled with chilling statements like “Our eyes would meet…my eyes would be the last he would see on this planet” and “73% of Texas is in favor of execution. I can tell you that 73% of people who have witnessed an execution are NOT in favor”. And there are lots of factoids about the workaday aspects of contemporary American executions. (Alarmingly, South Carolina offers no training in the operation of the electric chair – the guards just have to wing it.)
I saw the deeply affecting There Will Be No Stay at Cinequest 2015.
In the paranoid thriller Demaphoria, an amnesiac is trying to re-discover his identity and learns that he has been involved in some pretty shady and dangerous business. It’s a familiar but promising set-up. Unfortunately director Ross Clarke, who adapted the screenplay from the Craig Clevenger novel, drives this movie version right into the ground.
To start with, the beginning of the film looked so slick and superficial that I thought it was a commercial until I saw Ron Perlman, who I knew was in the film (but not for long enough). There is so much quick-cutting in Dermaphoria that I started counting the seconds between them – and I only came up with three shots that lasted over three seconds in the first eight minutes of the film. This is a bad sign – if you’re timing the duration of the cuts, you’re not engaged in the story.
Things brightened up once actor Walton Goggins (Justified) showed up. But then I realized that he was just playing Boyd Crowder while dressed as John Waters (bow tie and pencil thin mustache). And the role of his idiot henchman (Lucius Falick) was the worst screen acting I’ve seen in at least a year.
It takes a lot to keep me from sticking around to see the ending of a thriller set in New Orleans with actors that I enjoy (Perlman, Goggins), but I had to walk out.
In the Company of Women begins with a sixty-something guy hiring a male gigolo – not for sexual favors – but to be his wing man for a night on the town. The older guy’s long marriage has ended, and he thinks he needs some tips about prowling for women. This is a classic Boys Behaving Badly set-up, but In the Company of Women morphs into an unexpectedly sweet tribute to enduring love.
Along the way, there are plenty of War of the Sexes and Odd Couple laughs. There’s a very funny set of dating “rules”, and lines like “How do you expect to be yourself around women without alcohol?”.
Writer Shoji Silver stars as the cocksure and incredibly glib younger man. He is exceedingly handsome and perhaps even more cynical. As the younger man verbally jousts, the older man’s (Paul Eenhoorn) sincerity and depth come through. Eenhoorn is perfect as a guy who is earnest, but also very perceptive (he recognizes how the younger man’s emotions are sparked by the mere mention of his father). If you don’t remember Eenhoorn from the geezer road trip comedy Land Ho!, make sure you see that delight.
Director Khalil Silver (Shoji’s brother) masterfully changes the tome of the movie without a bump. The young guy starts out giving the advice on dating, but then he receives the advice from the older man on life. I saw In the Company of Women at its Cinequest 2015 world premiere, and women audience members, in particular, seemed to love it.
Okay, here’s the first Must See of 2015 – the hilariously dark Argentine comedy Wild Tales. Writer-director Damián Szifron presents a series of individual stories about revenge.
We all feel aggrieved, and Wild Tales explores what happens when rage overcomes the restraints of social order. Think about how instantly angry you can become when some driver cuts you off on the highway – and then how you might fantasize avenging the slight. Indeed, there is story that has the most severe case road rage since Spielberg’s Duel in 1971. Now Wild Tales is dark, and you gotta go with it. The humor comes from the EXTREMES that someone’s resentment can lead to.
One key to the success of Wild Tales is that it is an anthology. In a very wise move, Szifron resisted any impulse to stretch one of the stories into a feature-length movie. Each of the stories is just the right length to extract every laugh and pack a punch. The funniest stories are the opening one set on an airplane and the final one about a wedding.
The acting is uniformly superb. In one story, Oscar Martínez plays a wealthy man in a desperate jam, who buys the help of his shady lawyer fixer (Osmar Núñez) and his longtime household retainer (Germán de Silva) – until their prices get just a little too high. The three actors take what looks like it’s going to a thriller and morph into a (very funny) psychological comedy with a very cynical view of human nature.
One of the middle episodes stars one of my favorite film actors, Ricardo Darín, who I see as the Argentine Joe Mantegna. I suggest that you watch Darín in the brilliant police procedural The Secrets in Their Eyes (on my top ten for 2010), the steamy and seamy Carancho and the wonderful con artist movie Nine Queens.
Wild Tales has been a festival hit (Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance) around the world and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar. I saw Wild Tales at Cinequest 2015.
Queen and Country is director John Boorman’s autobiographical look back at his own young manhood. In 1987, Boorman’s Hope and Glory revisited his London childhood during WW II, and now we see Boorman’s experience as a very young man drafted into the Korean War-era British army. The protagonist goes through basic training and is posted in the home nation as a military typing teacher. Along the way, he learns what happens when 1) a petty tyrant subjects you to ridiculously stupid requirements and 2) when you become infatuated with someone crazier than you are.
Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur, The General) is an excellent filmmaker, and Queen and Country is well-crafted. The story isn’t compelling enough to make this a Must See, but it’s wry and warm-hearted, and moderately entertaining.
I saw Queen and Country at Cinequest 2015 at a screening with John Boorman present. Boorman was more memorable than was Queen and Country, especially when he reflected on his eccentric cult sci-fi film Zardoz: “It went from failure to classic without passing through success”.
Don’t miss the most overlooked nugget at Cinequest 2015. The Hamsters (Los Hamsters) is a delightfully dark social satire about a riotously dysfunctional Tijuana family. The dad, mom and two teenagers are going to such lengths to hide secrets from each other that they are completely oblivious to the drama in the others lives. In his first narrative feature, writer-director Gil Gonzalez has crafted a comedy that is completely character-driven, compressed into a very fun 71 minutes.
This family is in the upper middle class and the dad is desperately trying to stay there, the mom is denying any signs to the contrary and the kids are too spoiled and self-absorbed to notice any odd behavior by the parents. The acting is strong, especially by Angel Norzagaray, who plays the weary but driven, hangdog dad.
And here’s a bonus – Los Hamsters was filmed in Tijuana, and it’s great for a US audience to see this city as it is seen by its residents, not by its visitors.
Los Hamsters plays Cinequest today again on March 7 at Camera 12. See you around the fest. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.
The final (scheduled) screenings of these gems are today:
CORN ISLAND: This exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama is a Must See for Cinephiles. If it doesn’t turn out to be the best contemporary art movie at Cinequest 2015, I’ll be shocked.
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s.
ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters.
See you around the fest. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.
The final (scheduled) screenings of these gems are today:
THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult.
DIRTY BEAUTIFUL: An American indie comedy that is decidedly NOT a by-the-numbers battle of the sexes.
FACTORY BOSS: I haven’t yet seen this narrative about the manager of a Chinese sweatshop factory getting squeezed, but I’ve hearing good things around the fest. One of my friends, who has been to factories in Shenzen, entered a screening a little late and initially mistook it for a documentary.
Tonight is the eagerly awaited L’ATALANTE, rarely seen on the big screen. It’s the 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion. Richard von Busack, the highly respected film critic for Metro, will receive a Media Legacy Award at the screening.
I also liked the documentary THERE WILL BE NO STAY, a powerful examination of American capital punishment from the perspective of the executioners.
See you around the fest. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.
We’re halfway through Cinequest 2015. What are the biggest hits and the most delightful surprises?
Cinequest’s Director of Programming/Associate Director Mike Rabehl was definitely right: he predicted BATKID BEGINS and WILD TALES to be among the biggest audience pleasers. The opening night audience reveled in BATKID BEGINS, and WILD TALES, the darkly comic Argentine collection of revenge stories, rocked the California Theatre.
And how about those surprise gems?
CORN ISLAND: This exquisite and lyrical Georgian drama is a Must See for Cinephiles. If it doesn’t turn out to be the best contemporary art movie at Cinequest 2015, I’ll be shocked.
ANTOINE ET MARIE: A brilliantly constructed French-Canadian drama with two unforgettable characters.
THE CENTER: An absorbing and topical American indie drama about the seductiveness of a cult.
IN THE COMPANY OF WOMEN: Unexpectedly sweet, this starts out with a Boys Behaving Badly set-up and then morphs into a tribute to enduring love.
FACTORY BOSS: I haven’t yet seen this narrative about the manager of a Chinese sweatshop factory getting squeezed, but I’ve hearing good things around the fest. One of my friends, who has been to factories in Shenzen, entered a screening a little late and initially mistook it for a documentary.
The most underrated movie at Cinequest? Somehow, the biting darkly hilarious Mexican social satire LOS HAMSTERS is flying under the radar. I think this tale of a dysfunctional family is both very smart and very funny.
It’s also been a notably strong year for the documentaries at Cinequest:
ASPIE SEEKS LOVE: A surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a guy looking for love like anyone else, but whose social skills are handicapped by Asberger’s.
MEET THE HITLERS: Tracking down real people burdened with the Fuhrer’s name, this successful doc weaves together both light-hearted and very dark story threads.
THERE WILL BE NO STAY: a powerful examination of American capital punishment from the perspective of the executioners.
Most promising film yet to come? I’d say Tuesday night’s L’ATALANTE:, rarely seen on the big screen. It’s the 1934 masterpiece of French writer-director Jean Vigo, who died at age 29 soon after its completion. Richard von Busack, the highly respected film critic for Metro, will receive a Media Legacy Award at the screening.
See you around the fest. You can find my festival coverage, including both features and movie recommendations, on my Cinequest page. Follow me on Twitter for the very latest.
