The Well Digger's Daughter (Thursday, July 12, 2012) (63)

Perhaps best known for Claude Berri's two 1986 adaptations of his novels, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Marcel Pagnol remains one of the most important romantic writers and filmmakers of the pre-War era in France. Described by Jean Renoir as "an author of genius," Pagnol mostly wrote about early-mid-twentieth century rural France and all the colorful, modest and immodest people who live there.

Daniel Auteuil, who played Ugolin, the stubborn farmer in Jean de Florette, makes his writing and directoral debut with an adaptation of Pagnol's The Well Digger's Daughter, a light story that seems to fall in perfect like with the films of Berri, not to mention the lighter fare of Renoir or Pagnol himself.

Pascal Amoretti (Auteuil) is a very proud well digger in southern France. His devoted daughter, Patricia (the absolutely gorgeous Astrid Berges-Frisbey), takes care of him and his passel of young kids now that the mother is dead. Due to some quick economic figuring, Patricia had been partly raised in Paris by a rich lady and only came back south recently. Because of her brief flirtation with bourgeoisdom, she tilts her head a bit too far up and has a slightly fancy air about her.

She meets Jacques Mazel (Nicolas Duvauchelle), the son of the local grocery store owner and a dandy and a total snob. He woos her and she gives in quickly -- and they have a quick fling in the hay loft. He is then sent off to War (WWI) suddenly and is unable to tell her he loves her, etc. She becomes doubly sad, not just losing her boyfriend, but also because she gets pregnant from their tumble.

Pascal and her go to the Mazel house to ask for help, but they turn them away, seeing them as gold diggers. When news arrives that Jacques has died in battle, Pascal sets himself to raising his grandson with pride in his family and a bitterness for others.

There is a lot of discussion here about classism, sinful pride and snobbery and how it comes in all shapes and sizes from all directions. At first the Amorettis are treated badly by the Mazel's for being poor, but then Pascal responds by treating them with contempt for being out of touch. Jacques and Patricia's relationship, though brief, is filled with each one trying to gain upper-hand through money, body or psychology.

This film plays mostly as a charming chamber piece, light and funny at times and melodramatic at others. It is a very good movie with a seemingly timeless story, although it is not really brilliant and feels ultimately small and sometimes too shallow. Still, it's enjoyable and done in a very clean, naturalistic way.

Stars: 3 of 4

Take this Waltz (Saturday, June 30, 2012) (61)

Canadian dynamo actress/writer/director Sarah Polley's first feature film Away from Her is a very interesting, personal look at love and devotion during Alzheimer's. The film has the decency and carefulness of Atom Egyoan, a director Polley worked with in the past as an actress, and shows a tremendous amount of restraint and talent. In her second film, Take this Waltz, Polley looks again at love and devotion, although this time from a younger point of view. One could see this film as a "prequel" to Away from Her, as an examination of a couple struggling to stay together. 

Margot (Michelle Williams) is a woman in her late-20s/early-30s who lives with her loving husband Lou (Seth Rogan). They lead a rather typical young urban life (in Toronto, natch), where she writes travel guide books and he is a cookbook author. On a visit to a tourist destination she meets a guy to whom she's immediately attracted. Lo and behold, it seems he's her next-door neighbor, Daniel (Luke Kirby). The two flirt for awhile and end up beginning an affair together. 

Margot, who never expected to fall out of love with Lou, is suddenly faced with an existential dilemma about the future of her marriage. We see how happy she is with Daniel and how hum-drum her married life is. 

Polley has a really nice style and a very careful and visually connected presentation. She tells much of the emotional story through simple camera angles and compositional elements. At one point while Margot is struggling with her feelings for the two men, we see a straightforward shot of the married couple on two sides of the kitchen window. She's inside with (diegetic) music playing, while he sits outside on the porch, cut off from her literally and emotionally. 

Later, we see Margot and Daniel on a date in a carnival tilt-a-whirl. Polley shoots the pair from inside the car, so they stay in the shot, while the rest of the world literally spins around them. Both of these shots are very clever and translate volumes of emotional material efficiently. This is the touch of a great director who is able to convey deep feelings in a naturalistic context without the audience noticing. 

A strange recent trend in (Canadian) cinema is not knowing when to end a film -- or ending it a whole scene or section too late (see Heartbeats and Incendies). Polley suffers a similar fate as she adds on an unnecessary coda that shows Margot in the months that follow her decision about the two men. This does serve to tie up the story in a very neat and tidy way, and makes her personal journey a slight bit more complete, but it really just gives more information that doesn't help us understand her psychology more. (There's also a totally silly over-the-top sex montage that is more laughable than powerful.) The film would have been much cleaner and tighter without this postscript. 

Still, this element is mainly a writing issue (the script is also by Polley) and doesn't really take anything away from the very good picture that precedes it. Polley is clearly a very talented director and seems to have an independent vision for filmmaking and story telling. I very much look forward to her next film  -- and hope she knows when to stop it at the right time.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Hunter (Sunday, April 15, 2012) (39)

There's been something interesting going on in Australian cinema in recent years. A country once dominated by Brits and Peter Weir, where it seems every other Hollywood star comes from (can you think of an action movie or costume drama in the last 15 years that didn't have one Aussie in it?) has strangely produced only a small amount of fresh directing and writing talent. And yet there seems to be something bubbling down there. A handful of interesting, if not totally successful, films in the past few years have come to represent some sort of renaissance downunda.

One of the standouts from this new class is the recent film The Hunter, directed by Daniel Nettheim, adapted by Alice Addison from a novel by Julia Leigh. This is a very elegant contemporary Western set in the mysterious world of ecoterrorism, bio-pharmacology and extreme survivalism. Martin David (Willem Dafoe) is some sort of extreme-outdoorsman-for-hire who is given the mysterious task of researching the possible existence of Tasmanian tigers, long though to be extinct, by a mysterious bio-tech company. Martin is a total badass, like a Bear Grylls with a gun and no camera crew.

He gets to his Tasmanian base camp in the home of a rural single mother, depressed after the mysterious disappearance of her outdoorsman husband, and her two young kids (super charming and sweet kids... and I don't really get kids). He finds that he's totally unwelcome by the locals who are loggers and figure his work will result in them losing their work. He's also pressured by the environmental hippies who monitor the actions of the loggers. He goes into the wilderness looking for signs of tigers (which are really closer to wolves than big cats), and finds himself being stalked along the way. Back at the base camp, he improves the lives of the broken family he's living with, but the attention he brings might also be risking their safety as well.

I know very little about Tasmania, but apparently it's rugged and beautiful, looking a lot like Alaska or the woody parts of the upper Midwest. It's one of those places that looks so good on screen that you wonder whether it's beautiful cinematography (by Robert Humphreys) or just photography of a gorgeous place. Nettheim has a nice touch, using lots of helicopter shots, which can frequently be cliche, but help here to get a sense of the bigness of the spaces and the smallness of people.

Isolation and loneliness is a repeated theme throughout the film, as there is only minimal music used (mostly diegetic) and lots of silence. Dafoe has a stoic calmness, that's somewhat unsettling and also strangely kind (he seems to be a good guy in the way he deals with the family). The two kids are clearly desperate for his attention when he arrives at their house, partly because they're young and happy, but mostly because they're incredibly lonely and are looking for some sort of attention or break from their dull lives.

Perhaps the idea is that in the conflict between nature and humans, the sides are not evenly matched. As Martin seems to be the best human out there to unlock the secrets of the wilderness for a company who hopes to do something probably ugly with his findings, he is outmatched, a small being in the vastness of the outback (think of astronaut Dave Bowman floating through the silence and coldness of outer space in 2001: A Space Odyssey). But there's also a feeling that in the human world, we don't even give one another basic assistance in the form of love or kindness, which turns us into lone wolves in our daily lives. Business interests try to exploit this for financial gain, creating a conflict between those who want to connect to others and those who would rather hurt one another, between those who want to live with nature and who want to constantly battle against it.

There is a unspeakable sadness that pervades the film, eerily, heartbreakingly brought to life when Martin gets the family's turntable working and Springsteen's song "I'm On Fire". The missing dad had previously hooked speakers up into the trees, so when the music comes on, the area is surrounded by the melancholy song, reminding us of the relative silence that preceded it.

At times Nettheim get's a bit tied up in banal script elements, like his poor reception from the locals when he arrives or a overly sentimental penultimate scene. Still, he does a really interesting job otherwise with a story that doesn't really feel like a masterpiece.

The Hunter is a good solid movie, and although it's not perfect, it is a lot of fun and a clever twist on a classic Western talk of an outsider coming into a small town to shake things up.

Stars: 3 of 4

Turn Me On, Dammit! (Monday, March 26, 2012) (32)

It seems like most teen-angst-high-school-sucks movies come in two tones: one is a rather silly comedic one where adults look back on their time as teens and amplify silly traits of kids and adults; the other way is a bit darker and presents the story from the kids' point of view, resulting in kids talking, feeling and thinking like grown-ups. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's Turn Me On, Dammit! is different from both of these styles as it seems to present the story from a teen girl's point of view, but in a frank, non-condescending way. Lead characater, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), is not biterly sarcastic like a Juno or a Mean Girl (because no girls talk or think like 30-year-old screenwriters), but is filled with self-doubt, fear and lots and lots of libido.

Set in a a tiny village in rural Norway, the story deals with a small event in Alma's life that turns into a major high school drama, as frequently happens with 15-year-olds. Alma is always incredibly horny and when she's not masturbating in her bedroom at night (loudly) she calls phone sex hot lines and masturbates on the kitchen floor (while the dog watches). One day at a party her crush, Artur (Matias Myren) pulls out his dick out of his pants in front of her and rubs it on her skirt. Not knowing how to react, she goes to the bathroom and masturbates again (of course!).

When she gets out she tells her two best friends, Sara and Ingrid (Malin Bjorhovde and Beate Stofring). Ingrid, a classic mean girl, is jealous of Alma because she's also in love with Artur (it's a really small village, so he's one of only a handful of boys) so she tells everyone that Alma said this and is lying. Immediately Alma becomes a social pariah and is desperate to regain her friends and her mid-level status... but kids are shits and irrationally mean.

There's a wonderful joy to the film that one rarely sees in movies (almost never in American fare). Alma is clearly awesome and her advanced sexuality feels natural (and deeply erotic). The film opens with a clever montage showing static shots of the village's highlights with voice-over by Alma listing what we see: mail boxes, a bus stop, a mountain, stupid sheep. This bitterness doesn't take over the story, like it does in Juno, but just gives a realistic frame for the story. Alma herself is upbeat and hopeful. Yes she's sarcastic and has an active fantasy life (sometimes shown in action, sometimes wonderfully presented in black and white stills), but she's totally normal and not smarter or more beautiful than anyone else there.

In this debut narrative feature, Jacobsen beautifully shows the world from Alma's point of view. Her emotions are frequently underlined by soundtrack cues -- it wouldn't be a melancholy though oddly optimistic Norwegian moment without a Kings of Convenience song or two. At other times we see Alma's fantasy life jump into her story momentarily confusing us (and her) as to what is real and what is a dream. It's totally fun, interesting and compassionate to Alma, who is a totally awesome but normal teenage girl with a very active imagination.

There's something so refreshing about seeing naturalism on screen that's happy and unembellished. This is a movie that does exactly that. Life goes from normal to chaos to normal, much like any one of a hundred days in a teen's life, or in anyone's life, really. Despite the fact that this setback hurts Alma deeply for a period of time, even she can see that it's a small thing in the long run.

Stars: 3 of 4

Turn Me On, Dammit! opens in New York City on March 30 and in Los Angeles on April13.

Free Men (Thursday, March 22, 2012) (31)

Free Men, co-written by Ismael Ferroukhi and Alain-Michel Blanc and directed by Ferroukhi, deals with a hidden-in-recent-history moment of World War II-era Paris when North African Muslims helped and fought along with the Resistance. Most interestingly, the story is presented in a very human and naturalistic style -- similar to preWWII-era French cinema (think something like Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange or Carné's Port of Shadows).

As the film opens, Paris has already fallen to the Nazis and we see the familiar tapestry of policemen, with SS and Vichy officers elbowing to get power. In a mosque in Paris, the imam, Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit (Michel Lonsdale), has a mini empire where he leads his faithful, but also protects several Jews, many of whom also come from Algeria and Morocco. Into this garden comes Younes (the fabulous Tahar Rahim), a petty criminal and black marketeer who is looking to get away from the heat of police after a few sloppy jobs. He falls in love with the people in this corner of Paris, particularly a singer of Arabic ballads (who happens to be Jewish) and a woman, Leila (Lubna Azabal), who happens to be a communist agitator.

This is not a fancy movie with elaborate formal qualities or complicated plot twists. It is a nice and straightforward film about a moment in time, where the history of Nazis and Vichy bureaucrats, Germans and French, Muslims and Jews, Arabs and Whites, French and North Africans came into direct contact. It has the loving, humanist tenor of a Renoir work, deeply believing in the goodness of people to fix bad situations through working together. This is a clever decision. It's not a flashy action flick, which it could have been, but is a more gentle, elegant story.

Rahim, who formally lead A Prophet, Audiard's masterpiece from 2010, is fantastic here again. He's confident without being arrogant, young but not immature. He's such a joy to see on screen, brightening up any shot with his movie-star magnetism. Lonsdale is, of course, great -- just as he's been for the past 40-some years. Azabel, who has a few more pictures coming up soon, is intelligent and beautiful -- an interesting Arab answer to Betty Bacall or Ingrid Bergman (though she's more like Bacall in To Have and Have Not here than Bergman in Casablanca).

I'm surprised we're not taught more about the role of North Africans in the Resistance movement in history class. This film is illuminating, but also warm and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

Gerhard Richter - Painting (Sunday, March 18, 2012) (30)

It's possible that Gerhard Richter's color-field abstract painting are the best example of the physical work that goes into the creation of art, the formalism of a canvas. In her new documentary, Gerhard Richter - Painting, Corinna Belz, shoots the German post-modernist in his studios and in museums and galleries where he fights with the paint and the canvases to create his work.

As a process documentary, this is absolutely amazing. We see how Richter takes a blank white canvas and adds big swaths of color, seemingly at random, then takes Plexiglas trowels of different lengths to smudge the paint. He then covers over one layer with another, then scrapes again to reveal the hidden and random color fields beneath. Finally he applies paint directly to the edges of these massive knives and goes over the surfaces another time, removing and adding color at the same time.

It is never clear to us when he is done with a work or at what state he is in. At one point an assistant jokes that it's better to not comment on anything because he'll take a positive remark as a sign that the picture is bad and will start over from the begging, thus wasting everyone's time.

We get small glimpses of his mindset and his approach to his pictures, but he remains particularly sphinx-like about what he does and how he knows when pictures are done (I guess he has to keep some secrets).

There is a wonderful small moment as he looks at old family snapshots and comments that he has no memory of the scenes or the people in them (his parents) and can't actually account for the surrounding areas, beyond the borders of the image. It's such a wonderful overintelectualized and particularly East German view of the world. A fetishization of the banal and bleak. Still, it offers an interesting prism through which to see his work. He makes pictures that we can see, concentrating on composition and relationships of shapes and color. Any other content for him is noise and irrelevant.

The best moments in the film come when the canvases he works on fill up the entire screen and we see him moving across it scraping with his Plexi-ledge. Frustratingly, Belz includes moments of his representational pictures that seem to confuse the story and become noise for us. Still, this is an excellent example of some of the best moments in the recent trend in artistic process docs (there have been dozens, including recent ones on Louise Bourgeois and Richard Serra).

Stars: 3 of 4

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (Tuesday, March 14, 2012) (27)

David Gelb's film Jiro Dreams of Sushi has one of the move evocative names in recent memory. The documentary opens with the eponymous sushi chef talking about his dreams and then we see some of his creations, in a dreamlike slow motion, in wide angle. This film is a dreamscape of rice and fish.

It's a documentary about an 85-year-old three-star Michelin sushi chef in Tokyo who practices his craft in a way that has largely disappeared in our contemporary world, particularly the celebrity chef culture, where fame pushes some to change menus, make concessions on quality or rarely work as one manages one's empire of restaurants, books and TV shows. Jiro is not that chef.

The film looks at lots of different aspects of his restaurant and his view of the world, inasmuch as it relates to his 10-seat sushi restaurant. His main deputy is is eldest son Yoshikazu, who has worked by his side for a few decades now. He is clearly another great sushi chef, but the bar his father has set is so high, he might never be properly respected for his talent. We see how the son goes to the fish market to buy the best product, how they have special relationships with all the vendors, how they have a special kind of rice they serve that has to be prepared a special way. We see how they have a long line of apprentices who work for 10 years under Jiro's (and, to a lesser degree, Yoshikazu's) tutelage, learning the perfect way to slice fish, or massage octopus (40-50 minutes rather than 30 minutes, you naifs!).

Gelb embraced the minimalist beauty of the sushi gestalt by using several Philip Glass works for the score. The only problem with this is that it then begs a lopsided comparison with Morris' The Thin Blue Line and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, both of which used original Glass music. Gelb really can't hold a candle to those masters. And here is where the film stops being a revelation and starts being a regurgitation of styles that the director picked up in film class.

Yes, sushi-making is beautiful and Japan has this amazing culture that appreciates craft and slowness and beauty in the midst of urban chaos, but do we really need every shot to be some camera trick or gimmick? Every set-up is at a funny diagonal, there's a ton of slow motion, a lot of wide angles, a lot of double-exposed images bleeding from one thing to another. It's all a bit too complex for such a simple work.

I get that Jiro probably has more in common with a dancer than with a typical chef, but I wish things were just a bit simpler and less stylized.

One interesting moment, when Yoshikazu goes to the fish market and to an auction for tuna (which, by now, has been shown on American TV dozens of times already) we see that the auctioneers in this market have an amazing sing-songy, playful cadence to their calling, less rednecked than American-style livestock auctions and more ethnic music. Sadly, Gelb buries these songs in a pit of recycled symphonic music, so we can't even appreciate what we're seeing and hearing. It would be like he's cooking fatty tuna. Totally unnecessary and borderline reckless.

The film generally loses it's way by trying to turn what should be a tight little short (35 minutes would suffice) into a feature. At one point we follow Jiro to his home town where he visits with some elementary school classmates. This is totally off-topic, especially because Jiro has been, heretofore, very reticent about his family history. This is just a bit too much.

Gelb makes a nice movie, but I would recommend he take some advice from great sushi masters like Jiro and concentrate more on the taste and quality of his dish and less on the volume and quantity of it. Using mostly borrowed, complex style doesn't help the film, and a lot less here would have been much more.

Stars: 3 of 4

Footnote (Friday, March 9, 2012) (25)

Joseph Cedar's Footnote was Israel's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race this year - and it is a very good film, well worth watching. It has a very dark and cerebral tone that generally has the comic feeling of Jonze's Being John Malkovich -- a bit of a latter-day screw-ball with lots of bleakness.

Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) and Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) Shkolnik, are two leading Talmudic professors in Jerusalem. Father, Eliezer, a broken man filled with almost no love left inside, has spent his entire life researching variations in versions of the Talmud, only to blocked by his main academic rival. His greatest accomplishment is being referenced in a footnote by his mentor. Uriel, his son, a joyful husband and father himself, has become a leading expert on Talmudic traditions, softer subject matter that the father resents. He seems to be a pushover in life and in his family, but a very good man.

One day Eliezer is surprised to get a phone call that he won the most prestigious national prize for scientific research, after he tried for dozens of years, but always came up blank. He seems like a changed man all of a sudden, finding some joy in his accomplishment. The next day, however, Uriel is called to the prize committee's office where they tell him that he was supposed to win rather than his father and that his father got the phone call by mistake (they're both Professor Shkolnik, after all). He now has to figure out a way of convincing the committee to give his father the prize despite internal academic political issues.

The film explores the intersections of truth and fiction, hard scientific research and fluffy social scientific observation. Both men would argue their work is hard research, but Cedar certainly suggests that there's some chest puffing involved in all academic work. There is also a very glib idea that all academic work really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the real world -- that internal politics of any organization have as much to do with what gets out and its impact as the significance of the work has.

Cedar uses a very sarcastic style throughout, both in his script and in the formal presentation. When Uriel visits the committee in their offices to discuss the problem, there are seven people (he makes eight) in a tiny closet of a room. Whenever anyone wants to get in or leave, they have to rearrange the chairs in a funny bit of physical comedy. Cedar cleverly mixes wonderfully rich long takes (the first shot lasts for about 8 minutes) with elegant dutch angles and interesting lenses. At times there's a jokey score, at other times there is pure silence, as different characters struggle with internal hopes and fears.

There are also, sadly a handful of untied up elements that seem to lead nowhere, but also don't really act as MacGuffins (the big prize itself is a true MacGuffin). There's a bizarre suggestion that Eliezer has a former girlfriend who comes back (actually it's really not clear who this woman is... I'm just guessing that she's an ex) and Uriel struggles with his ne'er-do-well son who is happy to sit and watch TV rather than studying. These things really should have been cleaned up and cut out -- the film would have been a lot tighter without them.

This is a very funny and smart movie and a lot of fun to watch, with great acting throughout (because everyone really plays it straight and not over-the-top, which it really is). I'm happy it doesn't dwell on the rather tired trope of father-son relationships and deals more with the means of academia and the reality of "Truth" and acknowledgment as these are much more interesting ideas with more room for fresh comedy.

Stars: 3 of 4

Bellflower (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (160)

I'm always a bit suspicious of movies that are hailed by the press for being made on a shoestring budgets because that's way too inside-baseball for me and says nothing about how good the film is -- and most of them are terrible. Such was the case when I first heard about and saw trailers for Evan Glodell's Bellflower. It was made for almost no money over the course of a long time while writer/director/producer/editor Glodell and his co-stars Jessie Wiseman and Tyler Dawson helped to scrape money together to get it made. Big freaking deal, I thought.

Then I saw the trailer, which looked like a silly Mad Max, post-apocalyptic story of cars and motorcycles with lots of fire, explosions and blood. Hmm -- doesn't look promising. Then I read a few synopses of the film: Two friends spend all their free time building flame-throwers and weapons of mass destruction in hopes that a global apocalypse will occur and clear the runway for their imaginary gang "Mother Medusa". Every single article or interview said the same thing (so did Netflix). So when I finally watched the movie, I was shocked to find that this summary has almost nothing to do with the actual film (which makes me think that most people who write about movies don't actually watch them but just borrow from press releases ... written by publicists who also don't watch movies).

The only elements that are correct is that it's a movie about two friends, they build a flame thrower and twice mention an imaginary gang called "Mother Medusa". But that's sorta like saying Casablanca is about a drunk American who hates Nazis more than his ex-girlfriend's husband. It really misses the whole point of the film.

Bellflower is named for the street in LA where Woodrow (Glodell) lives. He's a pretty normal hipster with unclear direction, hanging out at bars and building machine stuff with his best friend Aiden (Dawson). They moved to LA for no particular reason, but are a bit obsessed with Mad Max and other motor-themed apocalypse movies. They are trying to build a flame thrower, though it's not clear why, and they love tinkering with cars and motorcycles.

One night they meet Milly (Wiseman) at a bar along with her best friend Courtney (Rebekah Brandes... who might not be able to act but is totally gorgeous). Woodrow and Milly fall madly in love and go on a first date... to Texas. Something about Milly makes Woodrow a tough guy and he starts making crazy decisions and getting in brawls. After a few weeks together they stats to fall apart, and he catches her in bed with another dude, leading him to start sleeping with Courtney. All this time, Woodrow has fantasies about fast cars, blowing shit up and violently getting revenge on Milly.

This is a bit of a post-mumblecore movie (considering the budget and the amount of young people fucking and talking about relationships), with a bit of a fantasy twist. It's a pretty clever pastiche -- the exact kind of movie Woodrow and Aiden would make if they were shooting movies instead of building a flamethrower. Glodell's clever script turns from romantic drama to post-apocalyptic story, but only in Woodrow's mind. This is not an end-of-days story, as the synopses would have you believe, this is a story of love and loss and a dark fantasy that comes out of the contemporary world.

Yes, it was made for almost no money, but it looks great and has a very nice and relatable lost-Generation-Y narrative. It should be seen -- but not for the explosions and flame throwers or Camaros painted matte black (cool), but because it's a pretty good movie and well made.

Stars: 3 of 4

Blank City (2011) (Wednesday, March 8, 2012) (158)

There are few subjects I like more for documentaries than New York in earlier eras. In Blank City, French director Celine Danhier, looks at the downtown art scene, particularly the culture of filmmakers, in the East Village in the late 1970s and early 1980s -- one of the worst eras in the recent history of New York City.

Following on the heels of the experimental art filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Jonas Meekas, Jack Smith, Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, a large group of drug- and alcohol-addled kids started shooting small movies with Super-8 cameras they borrowed, rented or stole. This is the same era and the same group of people who brought you bands like the Talking Heads, Blondie and the Ramones -- a very CBGB-based set who lived somewhere from Avenue C to Bowery and from Houston to 14th Street. The city was broke and dangerous and their films were weird and terrible and amazing.

Dozens of artists, actors and filmmakers from the era are interviewed with clips from many of their movies. Probably the most famous of those people are Jim Jarmusch, Steve Buscemi and Deborah Harry. We see how the movement went from the so-called "No Wave" films, which were rather chaotic and improvised, frequently sexual and about the desolation that surrounded the filmmakers, to the "Cinema of Transgression" of Nick Zedd, Richard Kern and Lydia Lunch (don't worry - I don't know most of these people either), that was more hyper-political and in-your-face. We see how the movement died when the neighborhood started getting nicer again in the late '80s and some of the (better) directors (like Jarmusch and Susan Seidelman) moved on to bigger projects.

This is a really fun and interesting documentary about the very recent past that seems to have been buried as if it took place a century ago. There's a constant sense throughout that despite the fact that New York City was terrible in that era, it was also wonderful. As much as hipsters bitch about how nice and yuppified the city is now, even East Williamsburg is nicer than Alphabet City was then. We probably won't ever see another time when groups of artists could rent lofts to live in for $50 a month... and, sadly, we won't ever again see such an enormous and weird output of art

Stars: 3 of 4

Last Days Here (Tuesday, March 6, 2012) (24)

The documentary Last Days Here opens with an old man sitting on a shity couch lighting a crack pipe. "Did you see where that rock of crack fell?" he asks as he searches beneath the cushions for a bit more drugs. This is Bobby Liebling, the once and future lead man for the heavy metal band Pentagram -- the best hard rock band you've never heard of.

The film follows Liebling and his friend, manager and number-one fan Sean 'Pellet' Pelletier, who discovered the band several years ago and has been trying to get Bobby to make a new record or go on tour ever since. Bobby is a life-long drug addict (heroin, meth, crack ... you name it) and has some significant clinical paranoia (or something) that makes him think his skin is infected... which leads him to pick at it until he draws blood. He's also one of the great American heavy metal artists, bridging the space between Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols, as one person in the film put it.

Not only do we see the history of Pentagram - a band from suburban Washington, D.C. who could have made it had Bobby been easier to deal with in the early '70s - but we also see how Bobby's life is today. In his mid-50s, he lives in the basement (or "sub-basement") of his parents' suburban row house and he basically does nothing with his time aside from sleep and do drugs. His parents seem aloof to his situation and his Jewish mother hopes he'll find a nice woman to help him out. Good luck with that.

But his life does appear to turn around for a moment, as he gets hospitalized and clean and then connects with a fan (a really hot young fan!) for whom he moves to Philadelphia to be near. But, as with most addicts and young girls who fall in love with sick old men, things fall apart and Bobby seems to be on the brink of death yet again.

There is always an element to a movie like this where you worry as a viewer that you are taking part in the exploitation of such a man. It's hard to avoid that fact that he is deeply sick and damaged and the "objective film crew" seems to do nothing to help him (though in this case, directors Don Argott and Demian Fenton do seem to help, inasmuch as Bobby does get help from Pellet and others). It's not easy to sit and watch a man slowly burn his wick almost to the end (several times).

Bobby is tremendously charismatic, even in his drugged haze -- a bit reminiscent of Lemmy from Motorhead (and his documentary from last year). He has a magnetic personality, and seems to be a master of performance, which is clearly part of the problem for him. One could blame his parents or his friends (Pellet, specifically) for letting him get so bad, but ultimately it's clearly a hard situation for them too (his parents seem to wash their hands of him, and of the movie at some point).

This is the most recent in a rash of heavy metal documentaries, including Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Anvil! The Story of Anvil, Iron Maiden: Flight 666, Until the Light Takes Us and Lemmy, and this is a solid one. It's fun to learn about the detailed history of something that nobody knows and Bobby's contemporary drug story is interesting and sometimes tragic, without being too cutesy or precious. I'm pretty sure I'll never buy a Pentagram record in my life, but I'm glad I know more about them now.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Forgiveness of Blood (Saturday, February 25, 2012) (19)

American filmmaker Joshua Marston really likes making movies not set in America. His last and most major film to this point was Maria Full of Grace from 2004, about a girl who becomes a drug mule to get cocaine from Columbia into the U.S. In his new film, The Forgiveness of Blood, Marston looks East at Albania and the curious tradition of family blood feuds there.

Nik and Rudina are two teenagers living in a rural part of Albania. When their father and uncle get in a fight with a neighbor and accidentally kill him, their lives change dramatically. In Albania, there are hard and fast rules concerning blood feuds. All men of age (or near it) are legitimate targets for retribution attacks, which means they must not leave their houses in order to stay safe. The problem is that the family who is feuding with them bends the rules of the tradition, so they intimidate and threaten Rudina, who should be off-limits as a girl, and Nik's younger brother, who should be too young to be involved.

With their father goes into hiding in the countryside to avoid getting hurt or put in jail, Rudina has to pick up the slack he leaves, stepping away from school to run his daily bread cart route. Nik, also not able to be in school, is a typical 17-year-old, interested in video games, his friends and girls, although those things become less interesting when he's trapped in his house for weeks on end.

This is a very interesting film about a subject that I didn't know much about going in. I particularly like the frankness of the situations and how the tradition of the feud is not judged, despite our Western ideas of it's madness. There is something particularly compelling and upsetting about the film being set in such a remote and seemingly poor location, where the family has a horse and cart as their main transportation, but where the kids play video games, record videos on their phones and post stuff on Facebook. It's an unexpected and beautiful clash of cultures that is happening in Albania, where shedding "less civilized" traditions of blood feuds is necessary and difficult as the digital world races in the door.

As with Maria Full of Grace, Marston has an elegant, straightforward style, very sympathetic to the young people who are caught in situations outside of their control. There is an unsentimental view of the impossible dilemma that Nik and Rudina find themselves in, a mere microcosm of the greater problem such blood feuds could cause the country going forward.

I should note also that despite the fact that Marston has no particular connection to Albania, he spent time there before co-writing the script and shooting the film. The Albanian Academy of Film actually submitted this film to the Oscars for consideration for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, but there were some political objections raised about Marston's Americanness and it was rejected. This is still a very good film and it's a shame the Oscars couldn't have kept it in the running.

Stars: 3 of 4

Michael (Saturday, February 18, 2012) (14)

Michael is a very uncomfortable and unsettling film that is mystifying in it's minimalism as it is disturbing in its subject matter. The title character is a very stereotypical Austrian businessman working at an insurance company. When he gets home from work with bags of groceries, he walks through his kitchen to the door to his cellar. As he opens the door we notice right away that there is soundproofing foam on the inside of it. Weird.

At the bottom of the stairs there is a metal door with a cross-brace lock on it. He opens it and flips a switch in the circuit breaker next to the door. Inside is a young boy, Wolfgang, about 10-years-old. He has a nice-looking kids room, a bed and toys, a sink and a toilet. It seems Michael keeps him down here as his personal and secret rape slave.

The film moves along very slowly with not much ever happening. At one point Michael, who is as geeky and affected as you can imagine an insurance man might be, goes on a weekend ski trip with friends from work. At another time Wolfgang suggests that he's lonely, so Michael goes out to a go-kart track to find another boy to steal and lock up with him. The man's motives are never totally clear, aside from bizarre control and, of course, sex.

Writer-director Markus Schleinzer, who has mostly worked as a casting director for Michael Haneke to this point (we see where he got his bizarre and frank story or sexuality from!) paints a very interesting, emotionless picture here, using minimal color (mostly Michael's house and existence is white and beige) and no score. We never really understand what he's thinking and can only assume certain things. Does he represent all of Austrian business culture or all Austrian men? Is this just one man's story of dangerous obsession? It's never clear - and that's part of what's so great about this film.

There is no judgement, putting us in the remorseless emotional space of a co-conspirator to this heinous act. Furthermore, the few times that Michael's strictly controlled world seems like it might collapse, we worry that he will be caught - a classic Hitchcockian trick of alignment and post-modern sympathy.

Schleinzer surprises us several times with unexpected events or outcomes of certain actions. We are never comfortable and always expecting the unknown. This is a great trick and makes watching the film more engaging that it might be otherwise (say, in a more mainstream story about pedophilia, slavery and abuse). I'm not totally sure there's a lot in this film, however, and think that the meta-emotional reactions we might have to watching the film is more important than the story itself. I really like those aspects, as a film-goer who likes to be put in an uncomfortable space, but I wish it could have been a great plot and a great meta-story.

Stars: 3 of 4

Bullhead (Saturday, February 18, 2012) (13)

I'm not really convinced that the story told in Michael Roskam's film Bullhead is at all scientifically possible, but it's a pretty enjoyable one, if a bit silly. The film opens with Jacky (Matthias Schoenaerts), an absolute hulk of a Belgian man, posing naked in the mirror after a shower. He has muscles everywhere. He then goes to a mini-fridge and gets vials of some drug and takes out a syringe. We then jump to an exchange between a group of Flemish cattlemen talking about how the cops are arresting some of their brethren who use hormones to increase the size of their cows.

We then see a flashback to how when Jacky was a kid his father bought growth hormone for his cattle. One day, the daughter of the hormone dealer caught Jacky's eye and before he could make a move on her, her brother, chased Jacky away and ended up effectively castrating him with rocks (ouch!). It seems that from that point on, Jacky was injected with growth hormone (human, we have to assume, rather than bovine) until he got to be the enormous size he is in the present.

Now, years later, the girl who once interested Jacky as a kid is his main fascination. He begins to stalk her (somehow she doesn't know who he is) and as the cops begin to figure out that he's involved in a massive cow doping cartel, the woman finds out who he is as well.

One interesting aspect to the story is that the setting is some place right on the Flemish and Wallonian border and we see clearly that the two peoples hate each other. Only a few of the Flemish speak French and only a few of the Walloons speak Flemish (Jacky is Flemish and his lady obsession is Walloon). I feel like we don't see this schism in film very frequently and it's interesting. Both parts make the whole, but they don't trust and resent each other. This brings up a clever link between the split duality of Belgium and, of course, the duality of testicles (ooof - that's a bit silly, isn't it?).

There is a great Belgian look to the film that I love. It has the stark reality of blues, grays and browns that have become synonymous with other Belgian filmmakers, like the Dardenne brothers, or the blessed Chantal Akerman. I guess it's this natural quality that is most compelling about the film, but also it's biggest problem.

In the end, the film is a rather over-the-top light action flick, certainly with more ennui and more pathos. Many details of the story fall apart because they seem like deus-ex-machina devices rather than plausible elements (such as how Jacky's childhood bully is now in a hospital mostly paralyzed and unable to speak due to an accident or how the grown woman doesn't know who Jacky is). The story begins to fray at the edges with all these silly parts.

I like this film, but I admit it has some problems. It's a pretty good story and the idea of a man-giant being ball-less and miserable because he's less of a man is interesting. Perhaps the bovine and human hormone link is too neat and tidy for me. Still, it's well made and has some compelling moments.

Stars: 3 of 4

Undefeated (Friday, February 17, 2012) (12)

Ever since Hoop Dreams, documentarians have been obsessed with movies about sports teams, particularly ones in inner cities. In the past few years there has been a rash of mediocre ones that have minor interest and bad scripts. Considering this background, Undefeated, directed by Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin, is a real triumph as it tells a very compelling story of a football team, focuses on a few interesting and exciting kids and uses some wonderful moments to tell a heart-warming tale of success despite poor odds.

This is not a film about a high school team going undefeated over the course of a season, after all, they lose their first game only a few minutes into the film. The title refers more to the concept of not being beaten down and not giving up. It's the philosophy of the team's hero coach, Bill Courtney.

Courtney is a slightly out of shape middle aged white guy who owns a lumber supply company in Memphis. Following his life-long dream of coaching a football team, five years ago he became the volunteer head coach of the Manassas Tigers in North Memphis. Manassas High School was recently rebuilt, so their physical facilities look nice, but the student body comes from very poor families with very little support. The school has a history of being one of the worst football teams in Tennessee for most of the last 40 years, but through hard work and discipline, Courtney has turned them back into a contender.

We follow star linemen O.C. Brown and Montrail "Money" Brown (not related), who are two of the senior leaders of the team, either physically or in effort and drive. O.C. is a typical giant of a lineman who struggles with his grades as he gets interest from many division 1A college football programs. Meanwhile, Money is a great student, but is a bit undersized to play on the line, so he makes up for his physical deficiencies by working twice as hard on the field.

At some point another kid, Chavis Daniels, gets out of juvee, where he spent about two years for assault, and continues to have issues with controlling his anger and his mouth. He gets in fights with coaches and other players and Courtney has to figure out how to use him on the field and how to not give up on him, as that would be a veritable death sentence for the young man.

Formally documentaries are difficult to inject too much style into, as their primary purpose is to explain something. Non-fiction is simply not as expressive and malleable a medium to easily make beauty. There is one moment in this film, however, that is one of the loveliest moments from a documentary I can think of in a long time. It's subtle and was probably the result of a lucky camera man shooting the right thing at the right moment, rather than being scripted by a director, but it's powerful and perfect for a moment. A tip of my cap to the directors for connecting two disparate elements from two parts of a film into one lovely shot.

This film is one of the five nominees for Best Documentary Feature and it would be very deserving of the prize were it to win. It's a very good film, unsentimental, efficient and well made. Considering it probably could have done well just being OK (like so many other recent sports team docs), I consider that a great achievement.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (Saturday, February 11, 2012) (8)

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth deals with the rise and fall (literally) of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis in the late 1950s through the early 1970s. The film serves as a response to those who believe in the mythology that grew up around the development at the time of its failure, some of which still lasts today.

The Pruitt-Igoe development was designed and built in the mid-1950s to replace the dilapidated tenement houses of poor inner-city St. Louis. A modernist dreamscape, the concept was that the poor families who lived in the slums could all move to a bright and new housing project, pay modest rents and grow economically. The problem was that at the time the project was built, there were few jobs available to the working poor black community in St. Louis and with a baroque web of Welfare laws, families were torn apart just to stay above water.

Almost immediately the apartment blocks began to show signs of wear and tear. Security and maintenance teams had their budgets cut and within a few years, the Pruitt-Igoe buildings were in terrible shape. Of course this had everything to do with the situation of the tenants rather than their character or qualities. This specification was lost, however, by the time the buildings were condemned and raised in the early 1970s (the footage of that demolition was used prominently in Godfrey Reggio's brilliant Koyaanisqatsi). At that point, public housing, poor inner-city blacks and urban areas were seen as the problem, for which the might not be a solution.

The film is told very well and mostly chronologically and thematically, interviewing historians and former residents of the buildings. We see how the buildings represented the modernist ideal of a new city built out of whole cloth and populated instantly. We see how it was a wonderful and frightening place to live at different times and how tearing it down was probably the only possible thing to do.

This is a very effective movie about a very important topic. It's efficient, compelling and far-reaching. It's easy to see how some of the conclusions made by some of the interviewees are reflected in our world today. This is a nice small film that has a big impact.

Stars: 3 of 4

In Darkness (2011) (Friday, February 10, 2012) (152)

Agnieszka Holland's film In Darkness is not a typical Holocuast film, although it certainly has many similar threads and themes that are familiar to the genre. This is the more unseen view of things -- literally unseen. The film tells the story of a group of Jews in the Lvov Ghetto in Poland who snuck into the sewer in an effort to escape their dire situation. When they got down there, they ran into Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a non-partisan Catholic sewer inspector who figured he could make a bit of money from them by showing them a good hiding place and keeping them stocked with food and other goods they would need for survival.

Once he put them in a relatively secret spot in an off-tunnel, insisting that only a dozen of them could live down there, he found that such a pure business relationship was not totally morally fulfilling. He and his corpulent wife Wanda (Kinga Preis) found themselves caring for the Jews more and more, ultimately risking their own lives for these people. Once the Ghetto was liquidated in 1943 their challenge increased as Nazi and Polish police inspections sped up and intensified.

There is something particularly interesting about a film that is mostly shot in darkness (as the title would suggest). There is a strange power to the mixture of grays and blacks, shadows and peeks of light that is rather mystifying. Of course, there is something particularly unsettling about no knowing what is coming in the distance or from around the corner. Probably most powerful about this film, and the cinematography by Jolanta Dylewska, is that we are put in the exact psychological space of the hiding Jews. As they hear distant noises in the far-off tunnels, which might be humans and might just be water, steam or gas, they are afraid... but so are we.

This is also a film about living in shit - literally. For years and years these people live in and next to a lagoon of human waste that seems to be everywhere in their space. They must eat and clean themselves, take care of mundane life things and then get into more specialized ones all within the nose of such a place. That some of the people try to have sex in it (totally ignoring for a moment that they're doing it next to their colleagues) is both disgusting and compellingly human. Add to this the greasy, dirty shots of tunnels (one of which looks particularly vulvic) and there's an interesting interplay between the disgusting and the erotic.

What is done technically with this film is really beautiful and the story Holland tells is as amazing and heroic as any from the Holocaust. Still, I feel there is a slight lack of thematic interest for me in what is shown. Yes, this is a great film, but something about it feels a bit like just another harrowing story of survival. Like a beautiful impressionist painting, there is not much to dislike about this film, but it still leaves me wanting a bit more to chew on. Perhaps this is unfair and I should merely appreciate a good story told well, but I still feel a bit less than totally thrilled.

Stars: 3 of 4

The Arbor (2011) (Thursday, February 8, 2012) (151)

I am always interested in films that make leaps in formal conventions and are daring about how they present their information. Such is the case with Clio Bernard's film The Arbor, a pseudo-documentary about English playwright Andrea Dunbar. Bernard presents Dunbar's story as a series of actual audio interviews of Dunbar and her family recorded in the 1980s that are dubbed over actors playing the parts of these people. Most of the time the syncing is so close that we lost track of the formal process, as if the actors were simply speaking the lines of these sad, poor Yorkshire characters.

Dunbar came to some prominence and notoriety in the late 1970s with a short play called "The Arbor", which autobiographically told of her life and background. At the time she was a poor girl living in counsel estates in West Yorkshire. She wrote the play for a school project at age 15, but it was entered into a national competition, which it won. It was produced by the Royal Court Theater, with whom she would develop a brief relationship with.

From there she wrote a screenplay for the Alan Clarke film Rita, Sue and Bob Too, which was also autobiographical and dealt with many of the same characters and situations. All this time, she was generally on drugs and drunk and had three babies out of wedlock (the first was to a Pakistani man, which became the subject of her first play). She would go on to write a third play along similar lines before dying of a brain hemorrhage in 1990.

We then see how Dunbar's drug and alcohol abuse and the grinding poverty they lived in changed the lives of her kids. Her eldest daughter got hooked on drugs as well, worked as a prostitute and was convicted of killing her own baby with Methadone.

This is a very interesting, bleak look at the modern world, and one that we don't see all that often. It has the feeling of something that Andrea Arnold might have made (or Alan Clarke), and certainly feels as desperate and depressing as the story is. There is a helplessness to the whole thing that I find appealing and yet alienating. It's hard to identify with any characters because they're all so broken... and because the formalism of the piece gets in the way.

I'm not totally sure what I'm supposed to make of the this process and how I'm supposed to feel about the separation between the characters and myself that I feel. Is the point that I am as separated from them because of the dubbing as they are from one another? This is an interesting concept, an interesting Marxist technique in the midst of this anti-neo-liberal tale. I appreciate what Bernard is trying to do here more than I like the final product. I feel like it's a bit underdeveloped. Still, it's a very interesting and good film.

Stars: 3 of 4

Haywire (Sunday, January 29, 2012) (5)

Steven Soderbergh is a good and talented filmmaker. Above everything else, he's a great watcher of other, older movies. Maybe that's why I generally like his movies, or, at a minimum, find his work interesting, because I feel like he's a movie watcher just like I am.

His newest film, Haywire, is a really fun, small action film that plays very much like one of those sleek post-Bond action flicks, like John Boorman's Point Blank (with Lee Marvin). The story here is not too complicated (well, there are lots of moving parts to it, but it's not too hard to follow), the action scenes, fights and chases, look great, it does not spending too much time dwelling on character development and pathos (it's an action film, after all) and it all ties up well in the end.

Mallory (MMA star Gina Carano) is a super spy who works for some private firm that consults with the CIA. When a job goes pear-shaped she finds that people on her own team might be out to get her and she looks to find them before they can find her. She seems always a half-step ahead of them and is not afraid to put on heels and a black dress and kill people (like a girl James Bond). It's a very sleek movie, though nothing too deep or psychologically rigorous.

It's always a big risk to cast a non-actor in a major role, especially one like this which is not really autobiographical. I think Soderbergh rather enjoys making the audience feel uncomfortable with non-actors in major roles, a bit of a thumbing his nose at Hollywood tradition.

Carano does a very good job here, actually (much better than the last non-actor SS had in one of his movies, when anal porno superstar Sasha Grey was in The Girlfriend Experience in 2009), and comes off as an aw-shucks girl next door... but a badass one. She's totally sexy - and thick, which is doubly sexy - and plays well opposite the various males who want to lay her (Michael Fassbender, Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor). I'm not sure she has a lot of other acting roles left in her career, but this is a great effort here.

I also appreciate that this is a pocket-sized action flick. It's a lot of fun and doesn't have the bombasity of a bigger-budget action movie, like a Mission: Impossible or a late-model Bond. It's got a great look, a great soundtrack (by David Holmes), and is a lot of fun.

Stars: 3 of 4

Phil Ochs: There But for Fortune (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (147)

There But for Fortune is a very good biodoc about the life and career of the great folk singer and Lefty activist Phil Ochs. It shows how he came up in the late-'50s Greenwich Village folk scene, how he was friendly and competitive with Dylan and how he got involved in the various civil rights and anti-war movements of the Left. The third act, about his fall into manic-depression and his ultimate suicide is a bit rocky as it features less music and, as a result of his doing fewer interviews, more speculation by his friends.

Still, the music throughout the film is, of course, fantastic, and this really shows Ochs as the musical and cultural genius and firebrand that he was. It's sad that he's not thought of by most in the same way Seeger, Dylan and Baez are, but his work clearly stands shoulder-to-shoulder with any of theirs.

Stars: 3 of 4