Cinequest

Cinequest: Unforgiven

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Unforgiven
Unforgiven is the Japanese remake of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Unforgiven, starring Ken Watanabe (Inception, The Last Samurai, Letters from Iwo Jima).   Since Clint’s career was boosted by a remake of Yojimbo (A Fistful of Dollars), it’s fitting that his Unforgiven is remade as a samurai (technically a post-samurai) film.  [Remarkably, it’s been 22 years since Clint’s Unforgiven – a powerful comment on both violence and movie violence.]

This Unforgiven is set in remote northern Japan beginning in 1869, as the samurai of the defeated Shogun are hunted down by the new government.  We all know the story – a prostitute is disfigured, and her peers hire some retired killers to kill the perps.  One of old vets is Jubee (Watanabe) the once invincible action hero who is now defeated and still reeling from personal loss (Eastwood’s Bill Munney in the 1992 film). When a younger man is troubled by his first kill, Jubee advises, “Drink until you forget. You’ll remember later”. His conscience remains tortured by an unpardonable atrocity that he committed during his fighting days.

Some of the vistas are so grand that they remind me of Kurosawa’s Ran and Kagemusha.  Director Sang-il Lee’s version is more beautiful, funnier and more crisply-paced than Eastwood’s original.  But Eastwood’s was more profound – and the comment on violence was more accessible.  In both versions, there’s a ruthless and despicable villain to be dispatched. The killing is unadorned and very, very personal.

Ken Watanabe is always good, and here he channels Clint to produce a character worn down and defeated by tragedy, but still plenty dangerous.  In perhaps an even better performance, Akira Emoto plays his comrade Kingo (the Morgan Fairchild role).

It’s pretty ambitious to remake a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.  Unforgiven passes the test.  It’s a damn fine movie.

Cinequest: Grand Piano

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grandpianoExpressly Hitchcockian in style, Grand Piano is a wannabe thriller that unfortunately falls short. Elijah Wood plays a superstar concert pianist who has spent five years in seclusion after melting down from stage fright. As he sits at the piano for his big comeback concert, he receives a threat: if he misplays even one note, either he or his wife will be immediately killed. Already a bundle of nerves, he must navigate his way through the performance while trying to find his tormentor.

What Grand Piano has going for it is Elijah Wood. Who else would you cast for wide-eyed terror (or wide-eyed anything for that matter)?  But the plot is just too contrived to engage us. So the manipulative suspense is there, but, ultimately, not the thrills.

Cinequest: Hunting Elephants

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Hunting ElephantsAlong with The Grand Seduction, the Israeli caper comedy Hunting Elephants has been the audience favorite at Cinequest. Apparently, Israelis see just as little generosity, fair-mindedness and decency in their bankers as we do in ours. When a particularly smarmy banker goes too far, a victimized family unleashes a team of septuagenarians led by a 12-year-old to make things right. The old guys are veterans of Irgun, the Zionist terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on your perspective) who forced an end to the British Mandate in Palestine, so they’re a particularly tough set of characters (even ravaged as they are by age). To their – and his – discomfort, they are teamed with an effete and pretentious scoundrel from the British stage (Patrick Stewart).

The genius of Hunting Elephants is that it combines the comic potential of a coming of age story, a geezer liberalization tale, a gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight saga and a fish-out-of-water (the Patrick Stewart character) farce. Mixed with the poignancy of the boy and the old men grasping for some dignity, the result is satisfying crowd pleaser.

Cinequest: I’m the Same, I’m Another

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imthesameimtheotherIn I’m the Same, I’m Another, a man in his 30s is on the run with a 10-year-old girl. Writer-director Caroline Strubbe challenges the audience to figure out why and from whom and to what end they are running – and even what is the relationship between the man and the girl.  Although I’m the Same, I’m Another is a Belgian film, the two Dutch-speaking characters primarily speak in English.
We worry about the welfare of the child, so there is a consistent tension over the film’s 110 minutes. At the end, we learn the general category of the relationship between the man and the girl and the trajectory of what will happen to each of them, but not much more.
I generally like movies that require the audience to meet the story halfway instead of having the story all wrapped and dropped on your porch like a UPS parcel. And I’m definitely OK with an ambiguous ending. But I’m the Same requires a helluva investment from the audience – two hours with not much action and plenty of anxiety.  Ultimately, I didn’t think that the payoff was worth the two hours of angst.
SPOILER ALERT: What I’m the Same does especially well is the portrait of the girl who has been traumatized by a sudden loss. Although she is not overtly abused by the man, and although he provides her with basic needs, and although her need for attachment draws her to bond with him, it’s clear that he is not going to be able o address her emotional damage in the long run.  Because they hide out in an industrial outpost on the northern British coast, both their impoverished and furtive circumstance and the dreary setting contribute to a pretty grim cinematic experience.

Cinequest: Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot

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ZoranThe Italian comedy Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot is centered around Paolo, a hard-drinking slob who works in a cafe kitchen in the Italian region that borders Slovenia.  Boorish as he is, Paolo is mostly marked for his unrestrained selfishness.  “You are a bad man,” he is told.  When an aunt dies, he is dismayed to learn that, not only has he not inherited anything of value, he is to burdened for a few days by her grandson, his nephew. Having been raised in isolation, the nephew is an odd duck with some tendencies of autism and/or Asberger’s. Paolo wants to dump the kid until he finds out that the nephew is a savant in one area that Paolo just might be able to exploit.

The comedy comes from the outrageousness of Paolo’s bad behavior (a very funny sprinkling of ashes, for example) and his venal attempts to profit from the nephew.  Of course, he has an opportunity for redemption at the end.  Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it, it’s all pretty funny, and Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot is a pretty satisfying little comedy.

Cinequest at festival midpoint

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photo courtesy of The Wife
photo courtesy of The Wife

The 2014 edition of Cinequest has emphasized comedy, and that has paid off with some of the festival’s biggest hits:

  • The Grand Seduction: Cinequest’s opening night film was this uproarious Canadian knee-slapper – a Waking Ned Devine with random acts of cricket.
  • Friended to Death: this sharply funny idie 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.
  • Hunting Elephants: an Israeli caper comedy with Patrick Stewart (as you’ve never seen him).

The other most popular Cinequest hits have been the exquisite Polish drama Ida and the Canadian weeper Down River.  I also particularly like the Slovenian class room drama Class Enemy.

Most of these films are still scheduled to play in the last half of the festival.  Subject to Cinequest’s exhibition rights, I’m guessing that the most likely candidates for Cinequest’s Encore Day on Sunday, March 16 are Ida, Friended to Death, Down River, Hunting Elephants and Class Enemy.

Cinequest: Friended to Death

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FRIENDED TO DEATH
FRIENDED TO DEATH

What kind of douchebag would fake his own death to see who shows up to his funeral?  Indeed, in the comedy Friended to Death, there’s a reason why everyone calls Michael Harris a douchebag.  He is a colossal jerk who revels in the misfortunes of others.  In his job as a parking enforcement officer, he’s a gleeful Johnny Appleseed of misery.  Worse yet, he is a social media addict who narcissistically insists on constantly blasting his escapades on Facebook and Twitter.  He’s oblivious that his own social media proves himself to be the asshole everybody says that he is.

You know that Michael is ripe for a comeuppance, and he gets a dose of his own medicine when one of his premature vehicle tows unleashes an unhinged enemy for life.  There are plenty of madcap moments as Michael (Ryan Hansen from TV’s Friends with Benefits) and his reluctant co-conspirator Emile (James Immekus) frantically try to conceal their hoax.

Friended to Death writer-director Sarah Smick and co-writer Ian Michaels archly comment on the “social” in social media.   Their Michael Harris says “I have 417 friends – you don’t expect me to know ALL of them!” and “I speak in text”.  Really smart comedy writing is pretty rare, and Smick and Michaels have the gift.  Michaels got the idea after reading about a guy who faked his own death and wrote scathing rebukes to those who missed his faux memorial.  By dropping that kernel into our current environment of over-sharing, Smick and Michaels were able to alchemize it into a biting social satire.

Smick and Michaels are longtime collaborators who married last October.  In 2011, Smick and Michaels brought their equally funny Here’s the Kicker to Cinequest; (Michaels directed that one).   Here’s the Kicker is available streaming on YouTube and is also is out on DVD.

In Friended to Death, Smick and Michaels play characters trying to expose the fraud.  They are very good in their roles, as is veteran Robert R. Shafer (Bob Vance in The Office) as that boss who just can’t restrain himself from yelling.

In Friended to Death, TMI becomes LOL.  Pointedly smart and well-crafted dark comedies don’t come along every day.  Don’t miss Friended to Death, playing again at Cinequest tonight and on Friday.

Cinequest: The Grand Seduction

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Cinequest opened on an especially uproarious note with the Canadian comedy The Grand Seduction.  The audience, including me and The Wife, rollicked with laugh after laugh.

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.

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.  And I would definitely see it again.

Cinequest: Parallel Maze

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Parallel MazeThe Chinese thriller Parallel Maze tries to be Psycho with parallel universes thrown in.  Unhappily, it is a shoddy and incoherent film.  Here’s how you could end up with Parallel Maze: show an eighth grader Upstream Color, hand him a digital camera along with 200 bucks and tell him, “Make THAT”.

Ed Wood is alive, and he is Chinese.  Parallel Maze employs – from time to time and for seemingly no reason – every conceivable film effect: shaky cam, jump cuts, split screen even animation.  It’s all just kinda thrown up there. And in the Psycho like shower scene, you can tell right away which character is the slasher, which fatally dilutes the impact.

It’s clear that the filmmakers are movie lovers – besides a movie-within-the-movie and the explicit homage to Psycho, there are references to movies from Love Story to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  The parallel threads of the story’s structure and the movie references were a promising start, but the low production values and random filmmaking techniques are just too distracting.

I saw Parallel Maze at its world premiere at Cinequest.

This weekend at Cinequest

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Don't miss IDA at noon on Saturday
Don’t miss IDA at noon on Saturday

My feature articles and comments on individual Cinequest movies and my feature articles are linked at CINEQUEST 2014.  Follow @themoviegourmet on twitter for real-time Cinequest coverage.  Here are my tips for Cinequest films this weekend:

TODAY

Heavenly Shift: I howled at this hilariously dark (very dark) Hungarian comedy about a rogue ambulance crew with a financial incentive to deliver its patients dead on arrival. North American premiere at 2:30 PM.

SATURDAY

A special screening of Fruitvale Station: the masterpiece debut from Bay Area filmmaker Ryan Coogler, introduced by LA Times and NPR Morning Edition movie critic Kenneth Turan.

Haven’t seen it, but the chatter in festival queues is universally positive for the Canadian weeper Down River.

Words and Pictures: I haven’t seen this romantic comedy starring Clive Owen and the ever-radiant Juliette Binoche as sparring teachers, but it figures to be a crowd pleaser.

SUNDAY

A noon screening is your last chance to see one of the very best films at Cinequest, the polish drama Ida, which won the International Critics’ Award at the Toronto International Film Festival.  Justifiably very popular at Cinequest.

Hunting Elephants: I haven’t seen this Israeli caper comedy starring Patrick Stewart, but it’s picked up positive buzz at the festival.

Here’s the 2014 Cinequest program and ticket information.