SIFF — The Names of Love

The Names of Love
Le Nom des gens
France, 2010
Official website

Until Midnight in Paris, we've gone so many years between good Woody Allen movies ('cuz God knows he wasn't making them) that it took other filmmakers to provide our "Woody Allen movies" for us. For instance, Julie Delpy's 2 Days in Paris from 2007 struck me favorably as a comedy that chimed several WoodyAllenesque bells. Now The Names of Love, a funny, sexy, very French comic romance struck me that way again and then some.

• A witty, character-based script? ✓  
• A serious-minded, uptight guy meets a kooky "free spirit" woman; they're hopelessly mismatched, yet they somehow discover their inherent rightness together? ✓  
• They occasionally break the fourth wall to wryly address us directly? ✓  
• Characters interact with younger versions of themselves or imagined figures from the past? ✓
• The cringe-comedy dinner scene that brings together their polar-opposite parents? Big ✓

The Names of Love manages to tick those boxes without feeling derivative or anything less than director Michel Leclerc's own, and it's one of my favorite movies on this year's SIFF roster.



While succeeding as a clever, briskly paced comedy, The Names of Love also dips its spoon into some heavy themes: generation-scarring family history, sustaining memories vs. sedating forgetfulness, Arab-Jewish relations, immigration, and the experiences of French Jewish families under the Nazi occupation of WWII. The origins of sexy young Baya's insouciant promiscuity, while handled well, will be a sensitive point for some viewers.

As Annie and Alvy Baya and Arthur, Sara Forestier and Jacques Gamblin are new names on my future Go See list. Forestier's flighty, impudent Baya is an uncontainable half-Algerian hard-lefty who engages her political activism by fucking right-wingers, thereby converting them to the side of good via that brief, vulnerable moment during love-making when a man is susceptible to redemption.

Granted, there's no getting around the trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (Fille Manic rêve Pixie?), but Forestier commits to the part with such fearlessness (e.g., her obliviously nude scene in the Paris Métro) that it's worth seeing the type played out again so well. Also quite fine is Gamblin as the heretofore unruffled older man who endures much for the sake of (eventually) love, or at least its "quirky" approximation. The bumpy flight of their relationship ultimately lands on a tarmac that struck me as too sweetly safe and conventional, at odds with what came before. But it's still "nice" and probably secured the feel-good vibe it aimed for.

To get all the humor, non-French viewers might benefit from an annotated guide to the film's references, ranging from topics domestic (Gamblin's "Arthur Martin" shares his name with a line of French kitchen appliances of excellent repute), pop-cultural (French talk-show intellectual/philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy is jarringly translated in the English subtitles as, yes, "Woody Allen"*), and political (immigration issues; former politico Lionel Jospin makes a funny appearance as himself; and it's a safe bet that the punchline name-checked Sarkozy won't be adding this title to his Netflix list).

Even so, The Names of Love made me happy and I recommend it with enthusiasm.

* Update: This has been corrected in the version of the film now available via Amazon streaming. 

SIFF — Sound of Noise

Sound of Noise
Sweden, 2010
Official website




"This is a gig! Listen and no one will get hurt!"

One of my "must see" festival favorites, although not quite an unqualified one.

A band of musician "terrorists" strike out to save their city from the "contamination of shitty music," notably the happy-whistling muzak piped everywhere through ubiquitous white speakers. They execute their city-wide four-movement Music for One City and Six Drummers with the stealthy intrigue of an Oceans 11 operation. By staging elaborate and dangerous guerrilla public performances, they make their point not with bombs or guns but with anarcho-flash-jam concerts created on the spot using whatever "instruments" happen to be nearby. Their first movement, a medico-rave piece in a hospital, uses a celebrity-patient prepped for hemorrhoid surgery as a precision-pitched drum — that is, until he flatlines, after which the defibrillator paddles provide their own new rhythm.

Tracking down the perps is a hangdog police detective (Bengt Nilsson) who is so profoundly tone-deaf that music is physically and mentally painful to him, the result of his ugly-duckling upbringing in a family of musical prodigies. (His parents named him Amadeus, and his brother is a renowned symphony conductor.) So naturally he's the right man for the investigations. "They're musicians, and they will strike again," he says as his colleagues scoff. Naturally, cracking the case becomes an increasingly, and painfully, personal experience. Amadeus' unexpected sort-of romance with the gang's lovely female leader (Sanna Persson) leads to a sort-of salvation for him, though not in the way I expected.

While Sound of Noise avoided the pat resolution I anticipated, the ending still fell flat for me. It works fine on a story level, but dramatically it lacks a good solid punch. As the film drives forward it becomes less about the musicians and their mission, and more (ultimately entirely) about Amadeus and his more intimate, less percussive needs. The narrative doesn't so much arc as narrow, like air moving through a tuba in the wrong direction. That said, the means by which Amadeus takes charge of getting those needs met is inspired.

Sound of Noise is catchy and bright, a film I recommend without hesitation even if it doesn't quite maintain its full allegro pulse.

SIFF — 7 films: Detective Dee, Young Goethe, Lovecraft, John Cleese, and more

The title links go to SIFF pages with trailers and info.


Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
International trailer at YouTube
China, 2010

Here's China's entry in the epic-spectacle, CGI-heavy, Pirates of the Caribbean/Lord of the Rings franchise sweepstakes, and as such it's a high-flying, sword-flashing entertaining fantasy. It's fun in an old-fashioned adventure serial mode, both dazzling and cheesy in ways that jolt my brain's Oh Boy Yeah gland.

The seventh-century Tang Dynasty is portrayed as a fantastical steampunk alt-history, a place of lustrous palaces, sky-scraping statuary, mighty anachronistic fleets in the harbor, an oracular talking deer, and a mysterious force that spontaneously combusts human beings in grisly CGI detail. (There are probably flying, fire-breathing dragons one kingdom over, but George R.R. Martin got there first.)

It's here where the legendary Detective Dee (Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau) is called out of exile by the hard-as-iron Empress Wu (Carina Lau) to solve the spectral problem threatening her power and her life. The thing is, it was Empress Wu who chucked this kung fu-capable Sherlock Holmes into a distant prison in the first place for leading a rebellion against her. So, yeah, their relationship is rocky.

The martial arts scenes (ample leaping, twirling, bashing, whip-lashing, and gravity-negating wire-fu) were choreographed by Sammo Hung, whom I miss from the days of Jackie Chan in his prime. Hung also supervised the art direction, which adds an even showier layer of gosh-wow on display throughout the film. And it was gratifying to see Tony Leung back as the bad guy.

This one was a candy treat; a bit draggy now and then ("let's get the story moving again, please"), but it looks gorgeous, the cast is a pleasure to see in action, and the clear sense that it's the beginning of a commercial franchise (a prequel is in the works) detracts from the fun only as much as you think it should. Recommended, absolutely.

Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame, by the way, is only the latest iteration of a long-standing series of stories about Tang Dynasty crime-solver Judge Dee (Wikipedia), a character inspired by the historical figure Di Renjie (c. 630–c. 700), magistrate and statesman of the Tang court. In 1974, an American ABC-TV pilot, Judge Dee, starred Khigh Dhiegh (Wo Fat on Hawaii Five-O and brainwasher Dr. Yen Lo in 1962's The Manchurian Candidate) as the roving judge in seventh century China, deciding right and wrong and solving crimes. It didn't get beyond the pilot stage, alas.



Young Goethe In Love
Germany, 2010

It's like eating cotton candy in the shower.

I enjoyed Young Goethe In Love while I was in the act of watching it. It's pretty, it's amusing, and it hits some pleasant romantic notes (sometimes with a meat pounder, but still). Its cast is attractive (alt title: The Sorrows of Young Matthew McConaughey), more than capable, and all-around appealing.

However, afterward the whole experience dissolved from my mind, leaving no impression, the movie being such insubstantial airy sugar churned out of a machine.

Its English title is market-driven to remind us favorably of Shakespeare in Love*, and YGIL is so unabashed in its attempts to ape its Oscar-winning forerunner that the whole enterprise feels like a cynical, second-rate knock-off. That feeling isn't helped by the film's rabbit-out-of-a-hat climax, which drenches us in abrupt plot goo that aims for a feel-good closer but instead clangs a transparently manipulative "Oh, puh-leeze <eyeroll>" note.

It's good but forgettable, and the more you know about the authentic Johann Wolfgang von Goethe the more you'll feel tempted to throw something heavy at the screen.


* On the other hand, its original exclamation-pointy German title, Goethe!, unsettlingly evokes a musical from the '60s or Marge Simpson's "Oh, Streetcar!"



The Whisperer in Darkness
US, 2011
Official website
Making-of blog

I'm a sucker for a Lovecraft adaptation, despite my experience with the poor ones outnumbering the good ones by a scary, one might say squamous, margin. Knowing that The Whisperer in Darkness came from Sean Branney and Andrew Lehman, the filmmakers behind one of the good ones, 2005's The Call of Cthulhu, made adding its midnight-movie world premiere to my schedule a no-brainer. (If you see what I did there, you win the brass Mi-Go.) While The Call of Cthulhu told its story in the ingenious guise of a silent film from the 1920s, Whisperer was shot and written as a 1930s Universal-style noir-horror film, another hook that reeled me right in.

(Full disclosure: I nodded off a time or two during the screening, though that may have been me inadequately caffeined up beforehand for a midnighter.)

A faithful (to a fault) adaptation of one of H.P.'s keystone stories, this modestly budgeted but ambitious and mostly successful exercise in fannish dedication packs in many of the groceries you want from a full-blooded Lovecraft film: sinister and profane rites, eldritch alien god-beings, a creepy New England setting, and a steadfast academic (Matt Foyer, very good) from Miskatonic U. who's doomed by not dropping his investigations when things start getting seriously weird (talking brains in jars typically being a useful tip-off).

But as usual, the script is the weakest link, and the special effects fail to convince at the climax right when we need them at their best. For an HPL film this is one of the good ones, yet it reaffirms my contention that the most effective Lovecraft movies are those that strive for quality "Lovecraftian" pastiche/homage rather than a punctilious devotion to ol' H.P.'s actual, you know, words and ragged plotting. (Book-a-Minute's "ultra-condensed" summation of HPL's collected oeuvre fits this and other Lovecraft films to a tee.)



Spud
South Africa, 2010
Official website

In my post on Submarine, I noted that "coming-of-age" is a genre as freighted with hoary conventions as Las Vegas in May. Spud proves the point by pulling out every trite, overdone convention in the box as if we've never seen them before. Indeed, if it were not so competently executed, it would come perilously close to being the Date Movie or Superhero Movie of the Disaffected Male Teen Coming-of-Age form.

Good thing it's well done then. Yes, this umpteenth iteration of that form is over-familiar and almost aggressively ordinary, but it's solid and good-looking aaaaaaaand it features John bloody Cleese (!) back again as the English boys boarding school teacher from Monty Python's Meaning of Life crossed with Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society. So there's that.

Set in 1990 South Africa, with Nelson Mandela's release and the slow dismantling of the apartheid system very much part of the background, Spud just rises above its old-shoe trappings through a fine performance from Troye Sivan as 13-year-old "Spud" (nicknamed by his mates for his pre-pubescent male under-enhancement), a sturdy script, and proficient production values across the board.

Spud is based on a best-selling South African novel of the same name, which practically guaranteed that it would be precision engineered for mainstream commercial appeal. The film plays it so straight and safe that it has its own postal code in the Comfort Zone. While director Donovan Marsh didn't freshen up those old shoes, he did manage to get some extra mileage out of them.

Prediction: Neither good enough nor bad enough to make an impression, Spud won't stir a single ripple in the cinema pond, and this will be last we hear about it.



Lys
Germany, 2010

Here's a good-looking but cripplingly underdeveloped and, even at only 52 minutes, wearisome eco-disaster parable.

In the near-future, a high-tech "clean" power plant goes catastrophically unstable as it draws mysterious "anima" life force energy from the earth. After an amnesiac teenager, Lys (Hanna Schwamborn), is found in the reactor core, her connection to the reactor and its anima force, a connection that dates back to the day of her birth, takes on alarming properties of creation and destruction.

The film's over-familiar cautionary message — essentially, don't mess with Mother Nature — remains a worthy one, but Lys struggles to express it compellingly, using its characters not as people but as movable type on a message board. Like the reactor at its center, Lys generates not raw power so much as a sparkly New Agey woo that throws fuzzy soft filters in front of any potentially thoughtful ideas. Basic storytelling elements such as narrative cohesion, suspense, and character development are short-shrifted, subordinated to the parable. A framing device — the scientist behind the project, held at gunpoint in a post-apocalyptic Berlin, tells the tale in a flashback confessional — feels tacked on to make up for those shortcomings, but falls way short.

I'd be more impressed by Lys if someone told me that it's a film-school senior-year student project. Lys is the feature debut of 31-year-old Krystof Zlatnik, who studied at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, so that might not be far off the mark. He has a good eye behind the camera, but his sense of narrative — plotting, character, structure — is clubbed to death by his desire for meaning-laden metaphor, and you can't effectively create the latter without mastering the former. (Readers following my SIFF reviews have heard me gripe about this before.)

At 52 minutes Lys is an awkward length (was it timed for TV broadcast slots?), and this is a rare film that I think would benefit from an additional 30 minutes of exposition and story, provided that a less mediocre, more fully fleshed-out screenplay came with the deal.

Lys came preceded by the thematically compatible Roman's Ark, a 24-minute Australian short tracking a survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Roman is a botanist who every five years emerges from his underground bunker and stasis chamber to check on the return of Earth's viability. During one of his ventures into the barren wastes, he rescues a woman. However, the stasis chamber isn't built for two. What he then chooses to do — and to sacrifice — sets up a final reveal that pleased me quite satisfactorily.

Although spanning over a 1,000 years of story time, this spare, wordless film held itself together better than Lys, again proving the value of shorts that fine-tune to multiple decimal places their focus and conciseness.



The Importance of Being Earnest
Presented by Roundabout Theatre Company, L.A. Theatre Works, and BY Experience
Roundabout Theatre's page

As a theater jock from way back, I'm twelve kinds of thrilled by the National Theatre Live series, which broadcasts live (in this case, digitally recorded) theater productions in high-def to cinemas. One of my most romantic evenings ever with Elizabeth involved a twilight stroll along London's Queen's Walk between two productions at the National Theatre, and I regret that we can't replicate that evening once a month or so. So the NT Live series has all kinds of pleasing resonances for me.

Under the aegis of NT Live, this production from New York's Roundabout Theatre, shown as a "special presentation" at SIFF Cinema, saved us a trip to Manhattan while still serving up one of the best Broadway shows I've seen. Earnest opened in January and is currently a Tony Award nominee for Best Revival of a Play, Best Performance by a Lead Actor (wonderful Brian Bedford, who also directed, as Lady Bracknell), and Best Costume Design.

Oscar Wilde's Earnest is an an easy play to enjoy, but a notoriously difficult one to put on well; that is, it takes a smart cast, plus a director fully tuned in to the play's tone and beats, to find its delicate fulcrum points without leaning into the humor until the whole thing topples over into the sort of "Look at us being all OscarWildey, wink-wink" burlesque that makes Wilde cry in Author Heaven. So one of the superb qualities here is the way director Bedford and his cast, not least of which being Bedford himself as the play's center of gravity, found the precise pitch of Wilde's witty, bon mot-festooned classic. This production sparkles, and Wilde's sharp satire of upper-class social twittery is allowed to speak clearly in meticulously funny but not vaudevillian ways. What Bedford can communicate through facial expressions alone deserves its own Tony.

David Hyde Pierce introduced the show, and during the intermission we got a dressing-room interview with Bedford and a discussion on the play between the actor Alfred Molina and a Wilde scholar.

For the rest of the day I went around speaking with pristine enunciation and clipped, round tones.

On the spot iPhone art by Elizabeth.

Music: Susannah McCorkle, "Do You Miss New York?" (Yes.)
Near at hand: Kai with Duck

SIFF — Littlerock, On Tour

A double-header this time.

Littlerock
U.S., 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



After their rental car breaks down, Japanese brother and sister Rintaro and Atsuko are stranded for two days in the dead-ender California town of Littlerock, where the chief commodities are "partying," throwing rocks, and (for the few forward-minded) dreaming about being anyplace else. They find themselves at a rowdy party of townies, drawing Atsuko, who speaks no English whatsoever, into a group of brodude locals. Two of the guys immediately set their eyes on her. One is Cory, the sort of awkward misfit who's likely doomed to be somebody's victim all his life. The other is handsome, laconic Jordan, for whom her feelings are, for a while, significantly warmer. The siblings split when Rintaro insists they continue their planned trip to San Francisco but Atsuko chooses to stay with her new friends that, she tells him, are unlike their friends back home.

Even at only 83 minutes, this small, quiet character piece stretches its quantity of story rather thin. But not long after I began wondering where all this was going the final moments arrived, and with them some pleasing resonances and a nicely restrained reveal about the purpose of the siblings' trip, which seeks to perhaps resolve a generation-scarring family history.

For Littlerock, director Mike Ott took the Someone to Watch prize at the Indie Spirit Awards, and I can nod agreeably to that. He frames some striking images, and he deftly handles a low-key mood that hums with a muted tension, pulling us through. His amateur cast also delivers plenty to feel good about here. The film is ultimately too slight to leave a lasting dent in my memory, but I can't deny that this warm look at dislocation and communication is well crafted and carefully performed.


On Tour
Tournée
France, 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



Here's my one significant SIFF disappoint so far, and the fact of that has me sitting here wondering where I went wrong as a viewer as much as where the film went wrong for me. 

Mathieu Amalric has been on my Go See list ever since The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, so his presence here as not just the star but also the writer-director put On Tour near the top of my SIFF Go See roster. That and its milieu of live-stage showbiz performers, in this case a troupe of American New Burlesque stars — played by authentic American New Burlesque stars — touring the harbor towns of France with their troubled, self-destructive manager Joaquim (Amalric). Amalric derived his "dramedy" story from a memoir by Colette. At the 2010 Cannes Amalric took the main film critics prize as well as the Best Director Award for On Tour. You watch that trailer and how could you not put this one on your Oh-hell-yeah list? Everything here seemed sure-fire to reel me right in.

But instead, On Tour managed to feel wearyingly longer than its 111 minutes. Joaquim's personal conflicts with his past associates, the bridges he burned long ago now that he desperately needs one after an important performance venue has been taken away from him, came off as fragmented, under-supported and, by the three-quarter mark, just so much empty sound and fury. Amalric himself is quite fine as always, and imbues Joaquim, a selfish and self-defeating dick for the most part, with the charm of a once-great impresario now permanently on the skids he greased himself somewhere along the way. Yet the film could have got on just as well without Joaquim, I think, and I probably would have enjoyed it more had that been the case.

Because far more interesting are the burlesque performers, the true-blue artistes playing (after a fashion) themselves: Mimi Le Meaux, Kitten on the Keys, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Evie Lovelle, and Roky Roulette. They are independent-minded professionals getting by in a tough game through brassy tenacity, purposefulness, and their individual singing, dancing, tassel-twirling talents. They come through the screen with greater naturalism, life, and dimension than Joaquim, and with half the script wordage.

Early on, one of the performers shouts to recalcitrant Joaquim from the rehearsal stage, "We don't need you. The show is our show." If only On Tour had taken that as its premise and spine, bringing the performers and their stories to the fore while delivering on the potential of their separation from the manager whose personal failings are at best stalling their careers (their longed-for big debut in Paris is quashed by his unexplicated past history there). That would have been the movie I'd wanted to see.

For a "road movie," On Tour doesn't actually seem to go anywhere. There are hints and feints toward revealing backstory behind the character of Joaquim and, among his performers, soulful Mimi, but they remain loose strands only. The level of narrative we do get seems unconcerned with following through on whatever strands it presents. What's here isn't enough to prevent On Tour from feeling, to me, as though it's the rough and protracted middle third of a three-part story about choices, making good, and sequined showbiz grit.

It's a colorful but frayed feather boa with both ends clipped.

Music: Sondheim, Company (2007)
Near at hand: almond flax muffins

SIFF — Troll Hunter

Every year among the award-hopeful dramas, impassioned documentaries, and deep-feeling character studies steeped in cinéma melancholia, SIFF spices up the scheduling grid by slotting in a handful of no-apologies popcorn flicks. Within that group you can typically find at least one imported Scandinavian scare-'em debuting at a midnight showing. This year it's Troll Hunter, the kind of movie the film-snob in me won't touch with a ten-foot Twizzler; meanwhile my inner monster-kid rushes to be first in line. The monster-kid won, as usual, and Elizabeth and I joined friends at the theater early enough to secure primo balcony seats among an enthusiastic packed-house audience. That's how you should see a film like Troll Hunter. I'm glad we did.

Troll Hunter
Trolljegeren
Norway, 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



In recent years Norway and its border buddies Sweden and Finland sure have made moody, atmospheric horror movies a top popcult export — Villmark (2003), Cold Prey (2006), Frostbitten (2006), Let the Right One In (2008), Dead Snow (2009), Hidden (2009), Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010).... Hey, it's only natural from the moody, atmospheric land that gave us Beowulf, lutefisk, and Renee Zellweger.

Norway's entry in the "found footage" subgenre, Troll Hunter continues the trend with a Cloverfield-scale monster flick pitting flesh-eating behemoths against puny humans with night-vision cameras and modern weapons, plus a hush-hush secret government agency trying to keep the lid on the monsters' very existence.

What makes Troll Hunter stand out, though, is the welcome addition of a wry comic edge that makes the whole thing more at home under the Horror-Comedy label than Horror-Thriller.

Then Ole says to Sven, "Oh, I thought you said toll bridge."

What makes the formula work is director André Øvredal's straight-faced mockumentary style applied to a tongue-in-cheek premise: the trolls of fairy-tale lore, of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen and Brian Froud illustrations, not only exist; lately they're breaking out of "their territory" to dine on livestock and the occasional unlucky tourist.

Oh, and they're big. Really, really big.

The description on SIFF's page is correct in pointing out the Scooby Doo vibe found in the three college students comprising the foolishly reckless camera crew ("Mystery, Inc.") that insists on discovering what the reclusive, surly stranger Hans is up to. Reputed to be a poacher shooting bears without a license, Hans instead is using the bear carcasses as a cover to explain the misdeeds of his true nocturnal prey. Hans is solitary and world-weary and hates his "shitty job," but he's the Troll Security Service's go-to expert when it comes to troll eradication, traveling into the deepest woods and near-arctic wastes in his foul-smelling, tricked out Range Rover (that's perforated with giant claw marks) and his troll-killing arsenal. As Hans, Otto Jespersen delivers flinty anti-heroicism like he's crossing Henrik Ibsen with Quint from Jaws. This lone gunman may be a pain in his bosses' side, but he knows and understands these brutes like he's the lead in Deadliest Catch: Grimm Reality!

After a surprise encounter with a three-headed "Tusseladd" — Hans expected it to be a "Ringlefinch"; Troll Hunter creates its own troll taxonomy — the man with the plan agrees to let those meddling kids follow him and record his activities. It isn't long before the three young filmmakers wish they'd stayed home and listened to Björk albums instead.

Much of the film's suspense and deadpan humor comes from coupling old Norwegian folk traditions to a modern-day monster movie. Because sunlight turns trolls to stone (when it doesn't cause them to explode outright), Hans' biggest weapon is a bazooka-like infrared flash gun. Trolls can sniff out "the blood of any Christian man," a verifiable fact after it's discovered that one of the students lied during Hans' questioning on this point. Some trolls do indeed dwell under bridges, so the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff gets a dark-funny shout-out along the way.

Troll Hunter is clever and imaginative and good fun. Almost alarmingly, the film never broke its delicate skin of verisimilitude, that make-believe authenticity on which everything else hangs. Its abundant visual FX mix a vérité style with just the proper piquant of Jarlsberg cheese. The handheld mock-doc approach isn't nearly as annoying as we've seen it in other films such as Blair Witch and Cloverfield. Ample use is made of spectacular Norwegian forests, lakes, and icy mountain ranges, including a climactic battle in the forbidding alpine Jotunheimen range, literally the "Home of the Giants" where Norse mythology places the abode of the Rock Giants and Frost Giants.

Troll Hunter is also draggy in spots and would benefit from a 15-minute trim. Still, stay with it until the final showdown with the Godzilla-sized "Rotnar" that has broken through the electric fence surrounding its deep-forest preserve — Norway's long-distance power grid gets a witty cameo role here — a climax that looks sensational and somehow avoids jumping any giant Norwegian sharks.

This morning Elizabeth and I punctuated our waking-up and getting-ready-for-the-day by randomly exclaiming "Troll!" at key moments. I predict we'll be doing it for weeks.

Music: Dvořák's Symphony No. 9
Near at hand: B.B. King concert poster 

SIFF — The Trip

The Trip
U.K., 2010
SIFF's page

My love of British comedy is well documented. So it was a sure bet that I'd make a point to catch British comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon once again playing fictionalized versions of themselves  (after 2006's hit-or-miss self-referential Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, again with director Michael Winterbottom). As ever, Steve Coogan (rather, "Steve Coogan") wears lugubrious angst like an up-market rain jacket. Meanwhile, his relaxed, contented friend Brydon again reminds me that I need to look up more of his work.





The Trip is cut together from a six-episode sitcom that aired on BBC2 last fall. Its premise couldn't be simpler: The Observer contracts Coogan to take a culinary road trip through North England's scenic Lake District, Lancashire, and Yorkshire Dales, specifically the remarkably posh restaurants that dot the rolling countryside hamlets there. With his girlfriend in the U.S. (they're "on a break"), Coogan recruits Brydon — long-time friend, colleague, and personality counterpoint — to keep him company.

From there the film's necessarily episodic structure sets the comic duo free to improvise badinage, one-up and poke at each other, and jockey their vocal impressions in competition (various Sean Connerys and Bond villains, Al Pacino, Woody Allen, and most famously Michael Caine). They extemporize on their careers, their aging, their relative celebrity (Brydon's is currently up while Coogan's has flatlined, which gnaws at him relentlessly), and the collision of Coogan's lofty self-image and aspirations toward art-film success in Hollywood with his callow, uneasy relationship with success and people, including himself.

Comparisons with My Dinner with Andre are inevitable and valid. The Trip simply adds wheels and landscapes with ancient rock walls and herds of sheep, plus of course British humor often as sharp as a fine cheddar. Calling it a British Sideways wouldn't be far off the mark either.

The first hour delivers enough chuckles and fold-over-funny bits to convince us to follow these two anywhere. (Although "Oh no! We're two men in a hotel room with just one bed!" is an old set-up that's thuddingly out of sorts with the fresher material here.) The scene driving through the venerable terrain in the Range Rover, improvising mock kingly dialogue for a BBC historical drama ("Gentlemen, to bed, for we leave at 9:30!" "-ish." -Ish!") will go down as one of this decade's high points in screen funny.

As they dine on fashionably rococo haute cuisine it's clear that neither Coogan nor Brydon knows nor concerns himself much about the often puzzling foodie-wonk delicacies placed before them. (Lollipops "made out of duck fat — why not?") We can simply imagine what The Observer will eventually receive in return for its expense account.

Besides Brydon, Coogan's other (and more vexing) traveling companion — indeed, his most intimate relationship — is his enormous load of anxieties. He carries his wounded-diva narcissism on the surface, and the film's second half does turn the dial up on the underlying poignancy of Coogan's insecurities and mid-life/mid-career trepidations. As Coogan tries to favorably compare himself with Coleridge while on the poet's old turf, even he must see that any resemblance is just wishful thinking. When he beds comely hotel staff in between apprehensive phone calls to his (clearly moving on) girlfriend overseas, we sense that it's less to slake an old swaggering laddish hedonism than it is to prove to himself that his stalled celebrity image is still relevant to somebody somewhere. By the time he puts in a call to his young son to talk about arranging a visit, the plays toward sentiment and pathos feel appliquéd on rather than sincere and natural.

At around the half-way mark, as I began to realize that nothing much was happening here, the film gradually acquired a case of the same-old-same-olds with its nearly unwavering tone and pitch and some recapitulated laughs (such as redundant celebrity impressions). While foisting a story throughline or character arc onto such a freewheeling format would feel intrusive, this theatrical version of The Trip began to feel like what it is: an assemblage pared down from longer material that probably flowed better in six installments televised at weekly intervals.

Soon, though, I got over myself and began to enjoy the movie even more once I embraced the obvious fact that "the plot" isn't even close to The Trip's aim and purpose, and it's a relief that nobody along the way tried to tack-hammer one onto the daily production pages.

Instead, we get a fine, funny study of a friendship, two mates who need each other as counterweights, or maybe as reflective surfaces. Coogan, at least, has found in affable, satisfied Brydon a genuine friend willing to put up with his slings and arrows and tragedian woes. In Brydon, as opposed to his soon-to-be-ex girlfriend or the transitory dalliances along the way or his quote-bellowing fans, Coogan has a true companion willing to laugh with him in their little petty contests, who lets Coogan's drama-queen sensitivities and dissatisfactions roll off his own impervious happiness. Water, duck's back, and the duck's just fine with that.

The pastoral English country scenery is lovely, as you'd expect, all green hills and misty vistas. The stops at hotel restaurants left my mouth set for meals more succulent than theater popcorn. Winterbottom frames it all attractively and unobtrusively, not getting in the way of his leads after winding them up and letting them go.

Coogan and Brydon are a natural Odd Couple pairing with a true-to-life rapport. The parts may be better than the whole, but The Trip is funny enough often enough to please Britcom fans such as myself.

SIFF — Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff

Three more SIFF screenings, this time with Elizabeth. (That image to the right there? She made that on her iPhone while we waited for Cameraman to begin.)

The other two from the day were Another Earth and LOVE.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
U.K., 2010
SIFF's page
Official site



Some people say they want their lives narrated by Morgan Freeman. I say I want mine photographed by Jack Cardiff. It'd look so much better that way.

Cardiff was a renowned cinematographer whose work spans 73 films, documentaries, and TV series between 1935 and 2007. A key innovator in the early use of color in motion pictures, particularly the first Technicolor cameras as big as refrigerators, his nine-decade career (that's not a typo) began in 1918 as a four-year-old actor, the son of performers who occasionally worked as movie extras. Largely unschooled but a reader and autodidact, he found the first inspiration toward his life's success in a cheap porn novel -- take that, moral arbiters — and went on to acclaim working with the great Powell and Pressburger on A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus (for which he won an Oscar), and The Red Shoes. Soon he attracted the likes of Hitchcock, Orson Welles, King Vidor (on War and Peace), John Huston (on The African Queen), Laurence Olivier (The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe), and others well into the current century. For a while he also tried his hand at directing, his most significant film being 1960's Sons and Lovers, which earned seven Oscar nominations and won Cardiff a Golden Globe for directing. In 2001 he became the first director of photography in the history of the Academy Awards to win an Honorary Oscar. His full IMDb filmography — including "special effects camera operator (uncredited)" on H.G. Wells' Things to Come — reads like a film-school course curriculum. He died in 2009 at age 94.

That's just the raw data. To add a personal point of view, director Craig McCall followed Cardiff around for twelve years, interviewing the man at his home, at work, and at the 1998 Cannes festival where Cardiff was Guest of Honor.

Cardiff is welcoming and affable, offering up stories of being on-set with the likes of Powell and Pressburger, Marlene Dietrich (who possessed such a natural expertise for lighting that Cardiff says she could have been a fine cinematographer), Hitchcock, and other legends. Ample film clips and Cardiff's own home movies take us behind the scenes and illustrate the influence on Cardiff (also a self-taught painter) of the Impressionists as well as light-shadow-color masters such as Vermeer, Van Gogh, and Turner to make a film's photography integral to its communication of story, emotion, and psychology.

On hand for testimonials are Martin Scorsese, Lauren Bacall, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, Kathleen Byron, Kim Hunter, Moira Shearer, John Mills, film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and others.

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff doesn't try to be fancy or overly slick or a gushing fanboy hagiography. It's entertaining and revealing, but hardly intimate as it maintains a respectful journalistic distance. Little is revealed about Cardiff's personal life and relationships, and the most scandalous thing here is his early throw-away mention of the industry's "hypocrisy and hyperbole." Cameraman is, however, quite well made as it pulls back the curtain on Cardiff's inventive pioneering work and on an essential but too often slighted filmmaking art. Next time I watch any of his films (I really do just need to finally buy the Criterion Blu-ray of Black Narcissus), I'll be seeing them with newly aware eyes, which makes this doc a success in all the ways that count with me.

It says something about SIFF audiences that this niche documentary packed the house at 11:00 on a gray, drizzly Saturday morning, and received enthusiastic applause at the end.

Music: Joe Sample and Randy Crawford
Near at hand: Little tin of NASA SEMAA mints

SIFF — Paper Birds (Pájaros de Papel)

Another entry from the SIFF press preview screenings, here's one that hit me right on all levels. What attracted me here was the period-piece story involving a vagabond troupe of performing artists, and a milieu that has intrigued me ever since Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive.


Paper Birds (Pájaros de Papel)
Spain, 2010
SIFF's page, including the trailer which I couldn't find elsewhere to embed here.
Official site (in Spanish)
Director Emilio Aragón's site (with Spanish/English language options)


I admit it. I'm a sucker for a heartstring-tugger. And Paper Birds doesn't just tug 'em, it ties 'em to a trailer hitch and guns the engine. Sure, I dig on Tarantino and Asian action flicks and Bruce Willis eradicating terrorist time-bomb nukes with the power of his reflective forehead shine. But if my sentimental streak were any wider Boeing could use it for a landing strip.

There's plenty in this Spanish tragic-comic drama — set during the fraught, shell-shocked period after Spain's civil war, with Francisco Franco's fascist dictatorship newly enthroned — that's conventional, old-fashioned even. There are moments during its 125 minutes when you realize you've seen this part before, probably in Warner Bros. films from the 1940s. Its climax aims only to rend your heart asunder, and then there follows an epilogue that lushly gushes with mush. I swear I haven't noticed my emotions manipulated so baldly and unashamedly since Les Misérables on Broadway. (That I had just sat through the emotionally desolate Perfect Sense might have contributed to my willing susceptibility here.)

Still and all, there's so much about Paper Birds that worked for me that it's one of the more satisfying two hours I've spent in a theater in a long while.

Right off the bat I was pulled in by director Emilio Aragón's warm orchestral score, which from the first moment flows over you like a Castilian summer set to waltz time. The cinematography by David Omedes is similarly gorgeous and rich enough to probably be fattening. And Paper Birds' story of a down-at-the-heels vaudeville troupe struggling to hold it together after war has shattered lives and livelihoods: that speaks straight to the part of me that romanticizes the plucky troupers of bygone sepia-toned yore.

And as I said, I don't mind my strings getting tugged — as long as it's done sincerely and with a certain level of artfulness and craftsmanship. Director Aragón and Paper Birds checked those boxes for me just fine, thank you.

At the center of the screenplay (by Aragón and Fernando Castets) is Jorge del Pino (Imanol Arias, who's marvelous), a wry comedian who disappears for a year after the war kills his beloved wife and young son. When after that year he turns up out of the blue to rejoin the ragged itinerant troupe in Madrid, he's a world-weary cynic soured by his experiences and losses.

Where has he been the past year, and how did he live? He won't say, not even to his friend, ventriloquist Enrique (Lluís Homar). As Jorge and Enrique put their old duo act back together, in comes a precocious artful dodger, Miguel (Roger Princep), an orphan whose performer parents died in the war (or so he claims).

Well, of course Jorge and Enrique end up adopting the boy (rather, it's the other way around), thus turning their act into a trio.

Trouble is, the oppressive Francoist authorities, headed by stern and paradoxical Capitán Montero (Fernando Cayo), have files on Jorge's history as a notorious Resistance fighter (that year away was not spent idly), and so plant an informant within the troupe to observe and report back.

Events come to a head when the troupe is invited ordered to perform for the Generalíssimo himself. Suspicion and closely guarded secrets within the troupe, a wily diva (Carmen Machi), layered character revelations, an assassination scheme, and a plot twist that knocked my socks off (hard to do, really) keep things moving at a brisk clip right up to all that heart-rending and lush gushing I mentioned earlier. Also welcome is Aragón's keen and knowing eye on the power of the performing arts to heal and to create second-chance families.

Performances are superb across the board, with several actors here (Arias, Homan, Machi) that I hope to see again soon.

Paper Birds, which took the audience award at the Montreal Film Festival, is a full-on emotional, nostalgic, three-hanky crowd-pleaser. Especially in its final fifteen minutes or so, it freely fires the big guns of sentiment, yet the key thing is that it does so with its head high, its shoulders back, and its aim sure. Some critics and casual viewers will dismiss the film for that aspect alone — screw 'em. I was a willing target and didn't mind getting hit even as I saw the bullets coming at me. By that point the film had earned the right to pull the trigger thanks to the preceding beautifully rendered, robustly acted, big-souled swirl of suspense, humor, and pathos. (I can imagine mid-to-late-period Chaplin digging the film, and taking notes.) It may be conventional in structure and tone and purpose, it may push its borders into the realm of melodrama, but damn if it didn't hit every one of its targets, leaving me misty-eyed and with this lumpy thing in my throat. And I was okay with that.

I'm just a sucker that way, I guess. 

What's more, Generalíssimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Music: Esperanza Spalding
Near at hand: Iain M. Banks' The Algebraist

SIFF — Submarine

I made it to another SIFF press preview screening today. Unfortunately, I had only enough time to catch one of today's three films. Fortunately it was Richard Ayoade's Submarine, which hit me in all good ways. It also turned me on to Ayoade, an English comedian, actor, and writer (best known for his role in The IT Crowd) making an assured feature debut as a director.

I arrived early, as the buzz on this U.K. indie comedy has been strong since the Weinstein Co. won the bidding war for U.S. rights at the 2010 Toronto festival. Good thing I did — by the time the doors opened the line wallpapered three sides of the multiplex lobby. Late last year the British trailer did its job to impress the film into my cortex, so I've been curious/hopeful about Submarine despite knowing little about it. Apparently I had plenty of company.

SIFF wait lines are great. There, the phrase "Everyone's a critic" isn't necessarily a complaint. Those around me who had just seen Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller's documentary Something Ventured gave it sterling reviews, their cross-talk placing enough little verbal "thumbs up" or "☆☆☆1/2" in the air that I was sorry to have missed it. And SIFF audiences being SIFF audiences, I chuckled inwardly at the self-reinforcing stereotype of the matronly woman who struck up a conversation with me by beginning her first sentence with "One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons is the one..."

Press blurb:

Based on the successful debut novel by Joe Dunthorne, Submarine is the hilarious coming-of-age story of 15-year-old Oliver Tate. Oliver has two summer objectives: to lose his virginity to pyromaniac bully Jordana before he turns 16, and to put an end to his mother's renewed flame for her ex-lover.

Submarine opened in the U.K. in March, and is slated for a June 3 release in the U.S.

Richard Ayoade

Submarine won me over in its opening minutes by evoking Wes Anderson's charcoal gray comic dramas of humanized idiosyncrasies. I wish I could be the first to call Submarine a Welsh Rushmore, but now that I'm sitting here on the couch glancing through reviews of it, I notice that the Wes Anderson vibe is evidently a common response. As a neurosis comedy, it's easy to spot Woody Allen's influence on director Ayoade (restricting the parameters to Allen's late-'70s-early-'80s peak years when Ayoade was but a crawler and toddler). Wisely, Ayoade isn't coy about his film's hat-tips to previous benchmarks in the Disaffected Teen Male genre such as The 400 Blows and The Graduate, both of which are quoted outright. A comparison to Harold and Maude is only so-so tenable, although if Ayoade didn't conjure Bud Cort's Harold as a spirit guide when shaping the look and manner of Craig Roberts' self-absorbed and "moderately unpopular" Tate, I don't know what.

"Coming-of-age" is a genre as freighted with hoary conventions as Las Vegas in May. Yet, the film's visible external influences notwithstanding, Ayoade kept Submarine fresh and authentic through his confident, inventive eye behind the camera plus an adroit feel for rhythm and tone; a wry, clever, layered screenplay (by Ayoade, adapting Joe Dunthorne's 2008 novel) that deftly pitches deadpan humor with the right proportion of subdermal melancholy; and strong performances across the board.

I'll venture that it's a career-maker for young Craig Roberts, fully committed in his first film. ("Unless things get better, the biopic of my life will only have the budget for a zoom out.") TV veteran Yasmine Paige finds Jordana's interesting fulcrum points between a hardcore anti-romantic fire-starter and a girl desiring connection as she undergoes her own growing-up challenges. Oliver's sadsack dad Lloyd, a marine biologist, comes delivered well by Noah Taylor (Almost Famous, The Life Aquatic).

I want to call out Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky, Never Let Me Go), whose choices as Oliver's fluttery, awkwardly concerned mother — tempted by her first love, a kitschy New Age guru and "hippy-looking twonk" with a rock-star-wannabe mullet (Paddy Considine) — prove the value of coiled-spring restraint. Oliver's newfound romance, in all its freshness and naiveté and discovery, kindles within his mum a yearning for that feeling again, which obviously vanished long ago from her marriage to dull, depressive Lloyd. It's not a coincidence that she behaves like a restless teenager at the same time her own restless teenager is experiencing the full flush of First Love. I'd be curious to hear Hawkins discuss her process and choices in crafting the character. No matter what, she's pretty terrific in the role.

This is a twonk.

You're going to see "quirky" attached to this film a lot. Ignore it. It's not just that the word is such an overused catch-all that it's edging out "sardonic" in the Overused Catch-all elimination rounds on Fox's So You Think You Can Be a Movie Critic. The film does deliver a certain sharp edge and the sorts of sly narrative and character turns you'll never find in a, say, Jennifer Aniston rom-com. But it refuses to pile on the quirks like a KFC Famous Bowl™ or substitute easy eccentricities and look-at-me irony that places its well-honed characters and everything they say or do in quotations marks. 

If I felt obligated to quibble, I'd mention that I sensed a little sag in the middle third, and Ayoade stacks up the thematic markers of water and submersion (hence the title) so often that my inner peanut gallery started muttering, "Yes, I get it already."

Quibbles, schmibbles. I thoroughly enjoyed Submarine. In fact, it put me in such a good headspace that I didn't mind (much) having to miss the next film on the day's schedule — the Swiss/Spanish The Most Important Thing in Life Is Not Being Dead — because I didn't want to risk losing the high. 

Today was the final day for the press preview screenings. SIFF proper begins on the 19th. Between now and then I need to get my viewing schedule charted out, starting with recommendations from friends and the big PDF file I received minutes ago listing the favorite films of several SIFF programmers.

Christ, that's a lot of movies.

Yay.

Music: KEXP.org
Near at hand: Brass ex-Soviet compass