The Future (2011) — Miranda warning

With Miranda July's The Future now opening in theatrical release beyond the festival circuit, I'm moving my May write-up from the Seattle International Film Festival screening to here and now.


The press blurb that lured me in:

With droll humor and touches of magical realism, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) tells the story of a young couple who decide to take thirty days to explore their destinies. This whimsical experiment leads to some surprising revelations about the uncertainty of what the future holds.

I like Miranda July. Rather, I like the concept of Miranda July: multimedia performance artist, musician, writer, actor, film director, and fellow erstwhile Portlander at the same time I lived there. I've enjoyed her short fiction. Her 2005 writing-directing-acting debut feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, made a strong impression, so this, her sophomore film, has been on my anticipation list. Critics' ten-for-a-dollar descriptors such as "quirky" and "surreal," or even the grandiloquent yet leaky umbrella term "magic realism," typically don't put me off, and indeed can be suitable attractors for me.

Miranda July's The Future is indeed quirky, with segments of dour whimsy that employ the surreal to explore the dissolution of an L.A. couple's relationship through magic realism tropes — including voice-over narration that's ostensibly from a cat, a man's desire literally stopping and fragmenting time, and a full moon that gives indifferent relationship advice.

For my tastes it's also, like Me and You and Everyone We Know, a shade too "twee" and "precious" — other easy descriptors that, especially when coupled with "self-seriously," do tend to push me away. 

In any case (and despite its current standing as 2011's most defiantly unmemorable title), I went into The Future fully prepared to engage with it through every port. And so I did for roughly the first half.

After four years together and each in their mid-thirties, Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater) are examining their rote, unfulfilled lives and forecasting a rote, unfulfilled future coming fast. For Jason, turning 40 is just five years away, and 40 is practically the same as 50, and after that, well.... "It's too late for us," he glums. Starting with the film's title, this theme of time getting away from us is central here.

They plan to adopt a damaged cat, Paw-Paw (whose cloying high-pitched narration comes voiced by July) from an animal shelter. But because Paw-Paw has been injured in the wild, the couple must wait 30 days until the cat's injuries heal at the shelter before cementing their relationship in its cat-owning phase. They imbue adopting the cat, like every other mundane shift in their flat-affect lives, with the life-quaking importance of childbirth or a death sentence. They characterize the waiting period as "our last month ever."

So with 30 days to get their capital-L Life shit together, they focus on "being alert" to everything around them, being open to opportunities to find themselves and actualize their true personas. (Or whatever the current phraseology is.) Jason literally pulls the plug on his job as a phone-in tech support drone, and Sophie quits her position teaching dance (rather, "dance") to five-year-olds.

There's the setup, the premise that hooked me enough with its humor and my willing questions about what colorful surprises July was going to unfold like origami out of these two drab, emotionally and vocally monotone, empty characters. (Later on, Sophie's flat affect remained so changeless and severe that, by the last half-hour, I wondered if she was meant to be brain-damaged. Honestly, I did.)

And for a while their thin story continued on satisfactorily: His determination to encounter new people and experiences quickly lands him in another drone job, this time selling young trees as a door-to-door environmental activist. (When Sophie notes, "You're not environmental," he replies that he appreciates the outdoors being out there somewhere.) On his route, he engages with an eccentric elderly man who seems to need Jason's attentions as much as Jason needs to feel engaged with a human being in the same room. Meanwhile, Sophie's frustration at her immediate failure to fulfill a simple goal — one new YouTube solo dance video for each of the thirty days — soon lands her into an affair with a drab stranger (David Warshofsky) in the suburbs.

At this pivot point, the film gradually started detaching itself from me like a damaged retina. Once Jason discovers the affair, July shifts to a darker tone and a Donnie Darko vibe. As time unlocks from a linear progression, July piles on the inexplicables. What is suggested when the moon (in the voice of the aforementioned eccentric elderly man) tells Jason that by laying his hand on guilt-ridden Sophie's head he has made 3:14 in the morning last for days? How much, if any, of Sophie's affair and submersion in suburban wifely humdrummery is real or some splintered-time dream-state? Why does the man's young daughter want to bury herself in the yard up to her neck? And then there's the yellow shirt that crawls by itself until Sophie uses it as a conceptual-dance body-condom.

Again, on paper none of those should push me away. Here, though, with Jason stopping and splitting time to prevent losing Sophie, with the moon giving him uncertain wisdom, and Paw-Paw interjecting in July's squeaky child-like voice with dislocated, seemingly tacked-on meditations on waiting and wildness and death and the afterlife (two finger-puppet cat paws are all we see, so it's not unequivocally clear exactly who or what that voice is supposed to be), what I wished to find intriguing soon became merely annoying, followed by similar annoyances, then still more stacked drearily further until ... as I checked my watch ... I disengaged wholly from the narrative, the characters, their relationship, and whatever meaning or import July was trying to impart through it all.

If there are, as the promo copy states, "surprising revelations" to be had in Miranda July's The Future — perhaps the shiver of an experienced truth expressed in a new way, or some unique turn of the prism through which I see life, relationships, or the reality-warping effects a dissolving relationship can have on the inner and outer lives of its participants — I missed them. Or else I saw them and yet still hoped to be surprised.

We've all experienced our own relationship crashes in our adult lives, and certainly I've been in Jason's position: that desire to just stop the crunch's forward motion, to make it all not be happening, to suspend reality long enough to fix the broken bits. "If only" spoken as an alchemical incantation rather than an impotent whimper. Likewise, I so, so get Sophie's frustration at her blocked creative self-expression. And yet rather than feel the shiver of penetrating identification with what was happening on the screen, I experienced no revelation more surprising than a desire to shift in my seat.

Movie-watching being, ideally, a two-way experience, I'll cop to some likely fault or missing component in my half of the equation. Rather than brushing it off as some error on July's part, I feel as though I came to this particular screening unequipped with whatever built-in code key I should have to decipher whatever she was trying so resolutely to communicate. After all, I appreciate movies that try to make me work for it, that ask me to be a co-player in the communication. In this conversation at least, July and I were speaking on the same frequency for about an hour before she started adjusting the dial in ways that didn't engage me enough to keep up.

As a filmmaker July displays a skilled, artful eye and a certain welcome economy in her craft. But narratively, The Future struck me as analogous to a university-press novella whose author was so determined to be "literary" with 21st-century mod magic-realism technique that she exchanged the Story for the Aesthetic, leaving both damaged and under-served.

For what it's worth, a fellow audience member behind me, as the lights came up at the end, sighed with the chill wind of discontent and said, "Good thing she added the cat."

The Future played at Sundance, and Sundance-buzz reviews such as here (indiewire.com), here (nymag.com), and here (film.com) liked the film more than I did, so their experience with it may align better with your own, should you choose.

Music: The Decemberists
Near at hand: Tin House 41

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 — The Thief of Bagdad: Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.

Something else SIFF does that makes me happy: screenings of acclaimed vintage films along with all the new titles. This year we get Powell and Pressberger's Black Narcissus from 1947, Fellini's La Dolce Vita ('60), and this high fantasy spectacle from 1924 starring Douglas Fairbanks, who all but leaps from the screen to radiate sheer boisterous charisma like the Malibu sun.

The Thief of Bagdad: Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.
U.S., 1924/2011
SIFF's page with trailer

When this title first pinged my SIFF radar, my response was a mix of geeky excitement (my fondness for silent-era classics being what it is) and forehead-puckering curiosity. That E.L.O.? Jeff Lynne's overelaborate electro-orchestral pop group that, alongside Abba and Frampton, saturated the '70s airwaves like Chiffon margarine with "Livin' Thing," "Telephone Line," "Mr. Blue Sky"? Plus that Shadoe Stevens? (Okay, honestly, I had to look him up. Thank you, Wikipedia.)

Why? As The Stranger's SIFF Picks put it: Because shut up, that's why.

Actually, I'm on board with any project that exposes new audiences to the great movies from the 1910s and '20s, and this rollicking, ambitious Arabian Nights adventure-romance-fantasy, starring Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and directed by Raoul Walsh, is indeed one of the greats (albeit not one of my top faves from the era). This "re-imagined" version also came with a high buzz quotient from the SIFF programmers.

So I was particularly excited to catch this one on a big screen with a big audience. I was not disappointed.

I won't go deep into the particulars of the film itself (TV Guide and Movie Diva offer fine overviews). I will note that it presents Fairbanks, playing the roguish slacker-thief who must prove himself worthy of the Princess, at his most flamboyantly dashing — all bare-chested vim and lithe athleticism as he runs, leaps, bounds, scales walls, and fights a giant spider under the sea, stopping occasionally to woo his high-born love or strike a swashbuckling pose, fists on hips, head tossed back in a hearty laugh. At 42 (!) he looks damn good doing it and is undoubtedly having a hell of a lot of fun. Watching him here, it's not at all surprising that The Thief of Bagdad was his favorite of all his movies.

The story itself is rudimentary stuff: our hero races his comic-book rivals (princely suitors of an unambiguously odious lot) to collect Plot Coupons in a blithely dispatched quest fantasy to win the Princess. What props it up are the film's ageless fantastical attractions: the gorgeous story-book Bagdad built of curvy dreamscape minarets and willowy arcing interiors like an inspiration for Dr. Seuss; a magic rope, a flying carpet, and, in the spectacle-rich second half, episodes set in the Valley of Fire, the Valley of the Monsters, a Sirens' lair on the ocean floor, the Cavern of Enchanted Trees, the Abode of the Winged Horse, and the Citadel of the Moon.

The vast sets and their screen-filling ornamentation were designed by the great art director William Cameron Menzies, and their grace and opulence still impress. The Thief of Bagdad was one of the most expensive productions of the era, and you can see all over the screen that the money was well spent.

All the leads here, especially Fairbanks, display the highly emotive, florid pantomime acting style that by '24 was already heading out of fashion in favor of more naturalistic performances. But nobody gesticulated with snappy, robust gusto like Fairbanks and it's just petty carping to imagine him doing it any other way. His final screen moments deliver one of the most memorable Hero exits in cinema history, in a stunt that could have ended up crushing dozens of day-worker extras if that steel-plate Magic Carpet came crashing down instead of zooming with triumphant flourish over their heads and into the starry Arabian skies.

Silent-film buffs are also treated here to beautiful Anna May Wong as the sparsely clad slave girl aiding and abetting the villainous Yellow Peril Mongol Prince, and Noble Johnson (mostly wasted) as the Prince of the Indies.

The 145-minute print itself was in good shape for an unrestored public-domain master, with only infrequent reminders of the original's 87 years of age. The color tinting was handled with a mindful touch, reproducing the original ochers and blues to good effect.

As for the post-colon "Re-imagined by Shadoe Stevens with the Music of E.L.O.": The newly applied musical scoring worked, often very well, although if you're not a die-hard E.L.O. fan (I'm lukewarm on the subject) some of the choices are repetitive and probably won't dazzle you as being "like the music was written for the film" (as Stevens reports was Jeff Lynne's assessment of an early cut). As the lights came up at the end, a number of my fellow attendees expressed high praise for the doubly retro pop mashup, and I can't say I have firm grounds to disagree with them.

Afterward, as Elizabeth and I were chatting about it at a watering hole in Seattle's Pike Place Market, she said that for her the E.L.O. score was the least interesting part of the event. As a relative newbie to silent-era films, she felt that it was a keener pleasure just to see The Thief of Bagdad in a theater at all.

Stevens himself attended the screening, speaking before and after the show and sitting just a couple rows behind us. Still a SoCal shaggy-blond at 64, Stevens clearly has been allowed access to that secret Goldie Hawn Improbable Youth Extension Treatment Center we all know exists in Hollywood somewhere. To hear him tell it, his youthful enthusiasm stems directly from his first viewing of The Thief of Bagdad as a boy. That experience made a life-shaping impression, as great films are wont to do, and this "re-imagining" is the result of his 30-years-long "obsession" to give "this real piece of 20th century art" a "definitive, perfect-perfect absolute final" musical scoring. With it he can share both the film and his pure fanboy love buttressed by, as he put it, "fanaticism at its most absurd." Before the show started I overheard him tell someone, "I made it for myself," and that sincere fan-geeky passion showed through the frames, earning him the right to place his ostentatiously spelled name up there in the title.

Unfortunately, TToB:RbSSwtMoELO is not a commercial project for wide release outside festivals and special screenings, at least not yet. It's still a work in progress as Stevens solicits studio support and investment funds to refine it with a fully restored print and a new digitally processed color palette inspired by the paintings of Maxfield Parrish, whom Fairbanks had wanted originally for the film's artistic design team. It's a shame that Parrish didn't take the job, so I'd love to see what Stevens might do to help us finally see what might have been.

Stevens told us that over the past thirty years he has put together some fifty different versions of the film in his home studio, laying down music tracks from classical to rock to experimental in various combinations. The all-E.L.O. score is the one he's most satisfied with. Me, I'd snap up a DVD or Blu-ray that brought home The Thief of Bagdad with five or ten or twelve of the diverse audio mixes he's assembled over the years, each score shaping a different experience of the film.

That I woke up today with "Mr. Blue Sky" stuck in my head I won't necessarily count as a negative. But if it happens again tomorrow... well played, Stevens, well played, sir.

Music: Rolf Lislevand, Nuove Musiche
Near at hand: Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2011

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 — LOVE

One of three SIFF screenings of the day, the other two being Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff and Another Earth.

Alert: This movie made me uncharacteristically cranky.

LOVE
Presented by Angels & Airwaves
USA, 2011
SIFF's page




LOVE (all caps, ::teeth grating::) sure is glossy and technically impressive, alright. Writer-director William Eubank knows how to put great-looking images on a screen. (From the evidence here, if he directed a Civil War film I'd see it in a heartbeat as long as someone else wrote the screenplay.) The film's narrative premise — an astronaut, alone on the International Space Station in the year 2039, is cut off and abandoned by Earth after an unknown cataclysm wipes out human civilization below — is conceptually a strong one, and for the most part it's well presented (before it descends into disjointed, fatuous incoherence). I applaud that it's a 100% independent production, as Eubank mentioned in his opening remarks. A real labor of love, years in the making. No question.

But goddamn. What a load of tedious, baldly derivative (the ghost of Stanley Kubrick has already phoned his lawyer), vapid abstruseness that's "deep" only in quotation marks in the manner of a sophomore poetry major who can't stop bonging out to vintage '70s-'80s art-rock and yet still misses the finer points of the Alan Parsons Project, Rick Wakeman's concept spectacles, and Yes album cover art. (Not surprisingly then, LOVE emerged from a concept album by progressive rockers Angels & Airwaves. The film's Wikipedia page has that history.)

The plot, if that's what we can call it, opens with an extended Civil War sequence focusing on a captain in a doomed battle, then jumps forward to its near-future scenario with the astronaut. In the orbital station, the isolated space traveler discovers the captain's diary from 1864 (seriously?). The writer-director's intention behind this moment might have been to suggest some sort of metaphysical link between the captain and the astronaut, to kindle a sense of awe in the inexplicable joining of two doomed men across time and space.

Instead, it's a ridiculous, seemingly desperate moment, absurd and "mysterious" but not in any good way that's evocative or grabbing. I suspect quite strongly, based on the evidence presented on the screen, that Eubank shoehorned footage from an aborted Civil War film into an undeveloped and unworkable sci-fi premise, hoping that through some alchemy the two would fuse and transform shit into Shinola.

There's no Shinola here.

By the half-way mark, I wasn't so much watching it as simply staring at it, like an aquarium filled with pretty fish that I wished would do something, maybe interact with one another or eat fish flakes ... anything.

LOVE's attempts to shine a blacklight bulb on the wall-poster themes of Connection, Communication, and Love (rather, LOVE) — and then missing each target entirely — would be funny if the whole experience wasn't such a dreary exercise in wanky grandiloquence and clear but wasted talent.

Generally speaking, movies, particular indies, that hang their hats on being "ambiguous" or "narratively challenging" or "interpretive" are not a barrier to entry for me. As regular readers here know, I can appreciate a less-is-more approach or the challenge of filling in blanks myself. LOVE, though, just keeps piling on the more like potatoes and gravy at Country Kitchen, bloating the interpretive ambiguities until they practically sweat poseur grandstanding and ostentatious impenetrability. The result is pretty, yes, but also ultimately counter-productive and, in its final moments, LOL pretentious in the arch manner of creativity stuck in the notebook doodlings of adolescence.

The guy sitting next to me: twenty-something, pleasant, chatty, thrilled to have come all the way from Boston just for this screening because he's such a fan of Angels & Airwaves. As the lights came up at the end, I got up and wished him a good visit to Seattle. He just sat there, stony-faced, as if calculating a way to get his round-trip airfare back.

Oh, and the squad of logo-bearing "astronauts" positioned inside the theater like an FM radio "Morning Zoo" ribbon-cutting at the mall's new Apple Store — just don't.

Besides, while standing in line I received word that my friend Kij had just won her second Nebula Award. And I'm not going to let this sample of dull ponderousness harsh that buzz.

I mean, goddamn.

Music: Simone
Near at hand: A bumblebee the size of an Everlasting Gobstopper thumping against the inside of the window (what the?)

SIFF — Another Earth

One of three SIFF screenings of the day, the other two being Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff and LOVE.

Another Earth
USA, 2011
SIFF's page
Official site



Another Earth is a film I utterly loved as I exited the theater. It moved me, impressed me as a modestly budgeted indie, and gave me a movie-going experience that flipped my expectations (which were admittedly few, as I went into the theater unspoiled by any word beyond the SIFF blurb). I came away certain that we'll be seeing more from director Mike Cahill — whose sculptor-sharp economy of editing and directing impressed me right out of the gate — and especially his lead player Brit Marling, who co-produced and co-wrote the script while also being photogenic like a marketing manager's dream.

Afterward, though, as I sit here writing this, I'm conflicted. Now that the immediate reaction has worn off, I'm not certain that watching Another Earth a second time wouldn't annoy the piss out of me.

It's a matter of a story that invites us to peer into its depths and folds and symbols, to give it a good deep-think, and hooray for that; but as I sit here peering into those folds and deep-thinkery, I'm coming up wondering how much of my initial thrill derived from factors outside the movie itself — a particularly pleasant breakfast a few hours earlier, or the sheer pleasure of seeing three previously unknown films in good company on a nice May day in Seattle.

Hmm.

After celebrating her acceptance into MIT in astrophysics at age 17, Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling in what I imagine will be a breakout performance) is responsible for a drunken car crash that destroys the family and therefore the life of John Burroughs (William Mapother) and sends her to prison for four years; meanwhile a mirror planet Earth has appeared in the sky, opening questions of what it represents if there's another you there too — perhaps a You who made different choices or for whom chance (or fate or destiny or whatever) dealt a different hand.

After Rhoda gets released from prison, she seeks out John. At the moment of their first meeting, what begins as an act of contrition and repentance is overpowered by the weight of her shame and remorse, twisting the moment into a new trajectory of lies and evasions. It's that trajectory which gradually opens a deeply fraught emotional relationship and co-dependency between Rhoda and John; meanwhile, he remains unaware of just who she is and how her life has already intersected his.

On the one hand...

Despite its distinctive high-concept science-fiction component, it does a disservice to describe this moody chamber piece as a "science fiction movie," a label that automatically barnacles a set of tropes and expectations onto the film that don't and shouldn't apply to what's actually here. That alternate Earth is more than a MacGuffin, not just another artificial Plot Device familiar in conventional science fiction. Although Isaac Asimov's Foundation books get a nice visual shout-out in the film, and the new Earth is treated as a thing of orbital mechanics and a physical place (a millionaire is sponsoring a contest to visit the planet in his private-venture shuttle, a contest Rhoda enters), there's more of Borges than Buck Rogers here.

Again: hooray for that.

Anyone who watches the film fretting about such things as orbital dynamics and Newtonian laws (where has it been and why is it here now? what about tidal forces?) is missing more than just the point. For one thing, worrying how a duplicate Earth could be there is trivial given the existence of a duplicate Earth at all.

On the other hand...

When it comes to that crucial suspension of disbelief, Earth 2's existence can't help but bring up nagging questions even if they are beside the point. Evidently it did for Cahill and Marling too, and the script stumbles when it tries fleetingly to address the issue. Yet instead of successfully lampshading Earth 2's more credulity-straining conundrums, the script compounds them with pseudo-science rubbish dialogue.

On the one hand...

The appearance of "Earth 2" is crucial to the twining of Rhoda and John's individually broken lives, providing a literally overhanging presence that adds a metaphorical layer onto Rhoda and John's intimate earthbound story, a layer that magnifies like a telescope lens the film's themes of human connection, communication, redemption, and the universal "what if?" questions of personal fate, choices, identity, and that thing T.S. Eliot said about "In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."

On the other hand...

As a poetic metaphor it's as obvious and anvilicious as, well, as a big ol' planet hanging over your head.

On the one hand...

Brit Marling, who carries the film through nearly every frame, and Mapother deliver strong performances that are, like the look and feel of Another Earth as a whole, subdued and self-possessed.

Mike Cahill's cinematography is striking and atmospheric, and his directing and editing are spare and finely controlled. The narrative is communicated with welcome single-stroke economy as if the material had been chiseled down to core essences. He displays a keen sense of cinematic less-is-more, which I always appreciate.

On the other hand...

A subplot involving Rhoda's elderly, Indian co-worker Purdeep (Kumar Pallana), who has poured bleach into his ears — and during the film, his eyes — to deafen and blind him to his own life's tragic sorrows, jumps the tracks early on. He begins as a standard-issue cinematic Worldly Wisdom vending machine for Rhoda, and ends in a hospital scene built on sentimental clichés so hoary that I wanted to bleach my own eyes and ears. Given the strengths evident elsewhere in the script, I'm curious as to why this character remained in the final film at all.

Oh, and the essay contest, its sponsor, and Rhoda's entry: I'm not buying it, alas.

On the one hand...

I appreciate that the narrative's axis spins on Rhoda insinuating herself into John's life in ways that emerge from her own understandable, relatable damage and weakness and desire to somehow make amends.

On the other hand...

Her self-serving naivete grates. I predict that some critics will bash her kneecaps for being both duplicitous and clueless to the further devastation she's setting up for John. Now, this didn't bother me so much at the time as I was fully engaged with their story as I was watching it unfold. But in retrospect I find my feelings for her shifting from sympathy to annoyance at how superficially she's drawn as a character. I can retcon it by reminding myself that Rhoda is 21 years old and everyone at that age, especially someone so traumatized, is naive and clueless and superficial and flailing, but that does not necessarily make her actions palatable.

On the one hand...

A great deal here really worked for me as I watched it. Another Earth is not "riveting" in the way the word usually gets applied to a movie, and yet there I was, knuckle-chewing riveted like I haven't felt in a long time. And then that final button in the final scene — I tell you, it left me wanting to high-five the screen.

On the other hand...

I'm not finding that Another Earth maintains its gravitational hold on me as I distance myself from it. Too much of its surface crumbles at a touch.

Another Earth received a standing O at its Sundance premiere, where Fox Searchlight won distribution rights in a bidding war that included Focus Features and The Weinstein Company. I just hope the new marketing attention does not not not try to sell it as a Science Fiction Movie. It is that, yes, but it lies so far outside that generic label that to sell it as such, especially in a summer packed with sci-fi wheezes such as Transformers and aliens and superheroes, does a disservice to the movie and to its potential audience.

Music: Tom Waits
Near at hand: Coffee cup from the Shipping Dock Theatre Co., Rochester, NY