Cinequest

The Grand Seduction: funniest movie of the year so far

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THE GRAND SEDUCTION
THE GRAND SEDUCTION

The Canadian comedy The Grand Seduction is the funniest movie of the year so far.  It’s a MUST SEE.

Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges, The Guard, The General, Braveheart) and Gordon Pinsent (Away from Her) play isolated Canadians try to snooker a young doctor (Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights) into settling in their podunk village. They enlist the entire hamlet in an absurdly elaborate and risky ruse, and the result is a satisfying knee-slapper that reminds me of Waking Ned Devine with random acts of cricket.

The Grand Seduction opened this year’s Cinequest on an especially uproarious note. The audience, including me and The Wife, rollicked with laugh after laugh.   Like Ned Devine, I think that The Grand Seduction can become a long-running imported art house hit like The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel or The Full Monty.

Words and Pictures: unusually thoughtful romantic comedy

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words picturesIn the unusually thoughtful romantic comedy Words and Pictures, Clive Owen and the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche star as sparring teachers. The two play world-class artists – Owen a writer and Binoche a painter – who find themselves in teaching jobs at an elite prep school. As they spiritedly disagree over whether words or pictures are the most powerful medium of expression, they each admire and are drawn to the other’s talent and passion.

Words and Pictures contains the wittiest movie dialogue in many moons and reminds us that real wit is more than some clever put downs. Owen’s English teacher worships the use of language to evoke original imagery and also revels in pedantic wordplay – the more syllables the better. When his boss asks him, “Why are you always late?”, he retorts “Why are you always dressed monochromatically?”.

The reason that he IS always late is that he’s an alcoholic hellbent on squandering his talent and alienating his friends and family. This is a realistic depiction of alcoholism and of its byproducts – unreliability, broken relationships and fundamental dishonesty. In an especially raw scene, he expresses his self-loathing by using a tennis racquet and balls to demolish his own living space. Top notch stuff.

Binoche plays a woman of great inner strength and confidence who has been shaken by the advances of a chronic illness. According to the credits, Binoche herself created her character’s paintings.

Words and Pictures sparkles until near the end. When the students make the debate over words vs pictures explicit in the school assembly, the intellectual argument loses its force and the tension peters out. So it may not be a great movie, but Words and Pictures is still plenty entertaining and a damn sight smarter than the average romantic comedy.

I saw Words and Pictures earlier this year at Cinequest.

Ida: best movie of the year so far

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IdaOpening more widely tomorrow, the Polish drama Ida, which I saw at this year’s Cinequest, is the best movie I’ve seen this year.

The title character is a novice nun who has been raised in a convent orphanage. Just before she is to take her vows in the early 1960s, she is told for the first time that she has an aunt. She meets the aunt, and Ida learns that she is the survivor of a Jewish family killed in the Holocaust. The aunt takes the novice on an odd couple road trip to trace the fate of their family.

The chain-smoking aunt (Agata Kulesza) is a judge who consumes vast quantities of vodka to self-medicate her own searing memories. But the most profound difference isn’t that the aunt is a hard ass and that the nun is prim and devout. The most important contrast is between their comparative worldliness – the aunt has been around the block and the novice is utterly naive and inexperienced (both literally and figuratively virginal).  The young woman must make the choice between a future that follows her upbringing or one which her biological heritage opens to her.  As Ida unfolds, her family legacy makes her choice an informed one.

The novice Ida, played by newcomer Agata Trzebuchowska, is very quiet – but hardly fragile. Saying little, she takes in the world with a penetrating gaze and a just-under-the-surface magnetic strength.

Superbly photographed in black and white, each shot is exquisitely composed. Watching shot after shot in Ida is like walking through a museum gazing at masterpiece paintings one after the other.  Ida was directed and co-written by Pawel Pawlikowski, who also recently directed the British coming of age story My Summer of Love (with Emily Blunt) and the French thriller The Woman in the Fifth (with Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke).  He is an effective and economic story-teller, packing textured characters and a compelling story into an 80 minute film.

Ida is also successful in avoiding grimness. Pawlikowski has crafted a story which addresses the pain of the characters without being painful to watch. There’s some pretty fun music from a touring pop/jazz combo and plenty of wicked sarcasm from the aunt.

Ida won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.  Ida was my pick as the best film at Cinequest, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature.

Dom Hemingway: full throttle into a brick wall

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dom hemingway
The title character in Dom Hemingway is always in a determined hurry, one of those guys whose brow is always 12 inches in front of his feet.  He is played by Jude Law as a force of nature who takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.  Dom Hemingway is a none-too-smart professional safe-cracker who has taken the rap for his partners and is just getting out after twelve years in the slammer. He’s been fantasizing about what he wants to do when he gets out, and he intends to do it all in as compressed a time period as possible. Unfortunately, as he tells a small boy, “Dom is English for unlucky sonofabitch”.  His headlong onslaught into misadventure is ribald, profane and pretty funny.

This movie is not a masterpiece.  Think of Dom Hemingway as The Wolf of Wall Street Lite.  Still, Jude Law is very watchable and very funny, as is Richard E. Grant as his almost-as-unlucky and almost-as-dim buddy.  Director Richard Shepard made a much better movie in 2005, The Matador with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear.  Still, Dom Hemingway works as a pedal-to-the-metal romp.

I saw Dom Hemingway three weeks ago at Cinequest 2014.

CINEQUEST 2014: festival recap

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IDA
IDA

A deep selection of comedies, international cinema and spotlight films combined for a very strong program at Cinequest 2014. My pick for the festival’s best film is the Polish drama Ida. Although not all of the films engaged me, the only bad movie this year was the incoherent Chinese thriller Parallel Maze.

COMEDIES

This year, Cinequest programmed 22 comedy features (which seems like an unusually high number), and that paid off with some of the festival’s most popular films. I thought the funniest was the dark, dark Hungarian comedy Heavenly Shift about a rogue ambulance crew. Probably two of the top four most popular movies at Cinequest (along with Ida and the Canadian weeper Down River) were the opening night’s The Grand Seduction and the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants. The American indie satire Friended to Death (which had its world premiere at Cinequest) also broke through – and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it soon in theatrical release.

INTERNATIONAL CINEMA

As I said, my pick for best film at Cinequest was Ida, about a Polish novice nun in 1962 who, just before she takes her vows, learns that she is the child of Jewish Holocaust victims. Also remarkable for its authentic and textured characters was the Slovenian classroom drama Class Enemy. And, of course, Heavenly Shift from Hungary and Hunting Elephants from Israel were festival highlights.

Once again, it’s just impossible to give too much credit to Cinequest’s international programmer Charlie Cockey. Unfortunately, just before the fest, Charlie developed a cough that kept him home in Brno, Czech Republic, so we missed him here in San Jose. Before the fest, I profiled Charlie with Cinequest’s Charlie Cockey: The Man Who Goes to Film Festivals.

SPOTLIGHT FILMS

Cinequest’s program of spotlight films are the bigger movies that are screened just once, usually at the California Theatre. In the past these have included some celebrity-driven events that have been the weakest links in the fest (only Grand Piano fit this profile in 2014).  But, over all, in the 2014 Cinequest, the spotlight films sparkled, especially: The Grand Seduction, Mystery Road, Words and Pictures, Teenage, Unforgiven and Dom Hemingway.  Cinequest also gets a lot of cred for having LA Times critic Kenneth Turan introduce last year’s Bay Area masterpiece Fruitvale Station.  In 2014’s Cinequest, you could do well just by showing up to the California Theatre every night at 7 PM.

For my comments on over 20 of this year’s Cinequest movies, see my CINEQUEST 2014 page.

photo courtesy of The Wife
photo courtesy of The Wife

Cinequest: Mystery Road

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MysteryRoadCinequest spotlighted the contemporary murder mystery Mystery Road, set in the Australian outback.  An indigenous detective returns to his small town to encounter racist co-workers, a drunk and shiftless ex-wife and a resentful teenage daughter.  The daughter is a concern because her gal pals are starting to turn up murdered one by one.  Mystery Road is a solid but unexceptional police procedural except for two things:

  • the very strong lead performance by Aaron Pederson, who brings out the inner conflict within a guy who needed to leave his hometown and his marriage but is tormented by the consequences of those decisions; and
  • the movie’s climactic gun battle between guys using hunting rifles through telescopic sights – a real show stopper .

Hugo Weaving chews up some scenery with a supporting role as a cop with ambiguous motivation.  Weaving, with his supporting roles in The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, etc., may be the world’s most financially successful character actor.  I first saw Weaving in the 1991 Proof, the breakout film for then 26-year-old Russell Crowe.  In Proof, Crowe plays a young buck who falls in with an eccentric blind man (Weaving) and an uncomfortably needy and manipulative woman (Genevieve Picot).  Proof (available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from iTunes and Amazon) is an excellent and oft overlooked film.  Mystery Road has its moments, too.

Cinequest: Happenings of the Eighth Day

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happeningsThe extremely trippy Happenings of the Eighth Day is a pure art film, for better and for worse.  It consists of some live action sketches wedged into some moody montages of characters driving around or walking on the beach and lots of evocative snippets of file footage and news photos. The sketches often center around a movie-within-a-movie and are tongue-in-cheek funny.  The fourth wall is often broken, with the script tossed into and out of scenes and, most hilariously, when the boom lowers into a scene and then the sound guy himself sits down with the actors.  The iconic movie images range from the pioneering silent The Kiss to Fritz the Cat.  There are very graphic and provocative film clips from the Holocaust, 9/11, Sarajevo and other horrors.

Some random comments:  There’s a frequent use of video insets.  Happenings employs the handheld background used famously in the Danish The Five Obstructions (see photo below).  Even by Hollywood standards, the actresses were merely ornamental.

Happenings isn’t about a conventional narrative, so what’s going on here? Writer/director/actor/cinematographer/co-editor/actor Arya Ghavamian says that the theme is the oppression which he felt in his boyhood Iran and continues to feel in American society, a feeling he describes as “consistent paranoia”.  Hmmm.

Here’s my ambivalence:  With its humor, vivid imagery and driving music, Happenings almost worked for me as eye candy.  But the clash between the smirking characters and the images of real atrocities seemed exploitative, and it put me off.  Now, if you buy into Ghavamian’s explicit intention – a contemplation of oppression – the atrocity shots are justified, but I didn’t find that message coherent, nor did I think that it fit within the appealing overall slyness of the film.  But, with the exception of a couple sketches that ran on too long and some moments that were annoying or offensive, I found it pretty entertaining.

Happenings of the Eighth Day is a VERY low-budget film, and its sound is particularly bad and its editing is particularly good.

I saw Happenings of the Eighth Day at its World Premiere at Cinequest in the San Jose Repertory Theatre and, I’ve got to say, no premiere in the history of cinema could have been any closer to its filming locations.  The San Jose Rep is on the Paseo de San Antonio and 75% of the movie’s exteriors were shot along the Paseo from the Cesar Chavez fountains and the Fairmont Hotel past the Post Office to The Movie Gourmet’s own personal bench between Philz Coffee and the Tangerine salon. A former Philz barrista even appears in the film.

happenings2

 

Cinequest: best bets for the final weekend

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CLASS ENEMY
CLASS ENEMY

FRIDAY

  • Friended to Death: this sharply funny indie satirizes our obsession with social media. TMI becomes LOL.
  • Heavenly Shift: the hilariously dark (very dark) Hungarian comedy about a rogue ambulance crew with a financial incentive to deliver its patients dead on arrival.

SATURDAY

  • One of Cinequest’s most thought-provoking films, the Slovenian classroom drama Class Enemy.
  • The British crime lark Dom Hemingway with Jude Law – a probable crowd pleaser.

SUNDAY

  • The Encore Day selections have yet to be announced (except for The Farmer and the Chef and Slingshot), but I wouldn’t be surprised if one of Cinequest’s biggest hits so far, the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants, gets another screening.

Cinequest: Teenage

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teenageThe most important ingredient for a documentary is a good story, and Teenage has just that – the 20th century emergence of a hitherto unknown phenomenon: the teenager. Teenage postulates that through the end of the 1800s, kids – by going to work when they were 12 – transitioned directly from the child’s world to the adult one; the advent of child labor laws gave the 12 to 18-year-olds the leisure time to express all of that hormone-driven energy. Combined with the generational disgust felt by the young for the older generation that had wasted much of their cohort in WWI, that mix of rebelliousness, immaturity and bad judgement we now as the modern teenager was born – and has driven our popular culture ever since.

To make the case for that thesis, filmmaker Matt Wolf has assembled some stunningly evocative file footage and sprinkled in some re-creations.  The re-created characters are read by the likes of Jena Malone and are shot in color.  The problem is that some of the black-and-white footage ALSO has the look of re-creation, so I couldn’t tell what was a historical document and what was the filmmaker’s interpenetration of the period. This was just enough to lose me. I wish Wolf had the faith to let his file footage speak for itself.  Still, it’s a good story, and worth the watch.

Cinequest: The Illiterate

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AnalfabetasThe Illiterate is a Chilean two-hander of a drama. A woman in her mid-50s can’t read. She navigates life by telling passersby that she has lost her glasses and needs them to read the signage to her. A woman in her 20s comes to read her the newspaper. Prompted by an unread letter from the older woman’s father, the younger woman decides to teach her to read. The older woman is proud and prickly, and they clash. Each has a meltdown as we move from first to second to third act. When she finally reads the looming letter from the father, it’s underwhelming.

The illiterate is played by the accomplished and appealing Chilean actress Paulina Garcia (Gloria), and The Illiterate is mostly an excuse for Garcia to act up a storm. Not much else here.  Too bad, because I love promoting Chilean cinema and really wanted to like this.