Energy Future in Limbo in The Last Mountain
Deep in the heart of West Virginia sits Coal River Valley. Once upon a time the Appalachian Mountain range loomed over the top of this community, looking down on it like Greek Gods overlooking their domain. But now, with the advent of Mountain Top Removal and the easing of restrictions against it during the George W. Bush presidential administration, most of this range has been decimated, one last mountain all that remains of this once pristine wilderness.
The documentary The Last Mountain examines the battle going on inside Coal River Valley, asking questions about the continued viability of coal mining, the political influence massive corporations like Massey Energy have both on local and national levels, the health risks associated with Mountain Top Removal, alternate sources of energy production and the economic effects upon communities of coal production is slowed or stymied. While its point of view and opinions on the subject are not in question, director Bill Haney and his fellow filmmakers still allow industry spokesmen like West Virginia Coal Association president Bill Raney to make their case for continued production. Not so much even-handed as open-minded, this forceful and impacting documentary is as much an indictment of how energy is produced in the Unite States as Inside Job was in how it eviscerated Wall Street.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of 2004’s Crimes Against Nature, is our eyes and ears for this journey, He travels into the heart of West Virginia and to other hot spots of alternate Green Energy production and does his best to examine them in most ways possible. He meets with Coal River Valley residents impacted the most by the devastation caused by Mountain Top Removal, listening to their stories and assisting as they try to get politicians, corporate leaders and others to here their insistent cries for change.
Still, it isn’t like this movie is a “Frontline” or “60 Minutes” style piece of journalism doing its best to stay out of the way and allow viewers to make up their minds for themselves as to the plusses and minuses of what is being presented. Haney and company are definitely making a proactive piece showcasing the ills of coal mining and production, doing their best to show how wind power and other forms of Green Energy production can create jobs and help economies.
My earlier mention of Inside Job was not out of left field because, like that film, even though this one is also an opinionated piece trying to hammer its points home it’s not like the facts it presents are all that in question. You believe the information imparted, just about every single bit of it, the science and the realities for these communities combining together in a way that is heartfelt, moving and, most importantly, infuriating. Watching the Appalachians disappear and listening to Bill Raney say that it’s okay boggled my mind in a way that had me silently fuming, and I can’t see how anyone watching this film won’t come away wondering how in the world we allow stuff like this to continue to go on.
The sad part about all of this is that many have already made up their minds on this issue and will refuse to allow it to be changed, no matter what information is thrown their way. You can tell people about the millions their community could be making from wind turbines and yet they’ll frustratingly still believe the paltry thousands they receive from the likes of Massey Energy are more important and produce more jobs. You can tell people how the coal industry has shed 40,000 positions and yet increased their profits by over a 100-percent and yet they’ll still believe the opposite is true. Facts no longer seem to matter anymore, fiction becoming truth in a way that’s remarkable and disturbing.
Films like The Last Mountain serve a greater purpose then as they try to turn away a tide that has only seemed to build into a titanic wall over this past decade or so. It shows how David can still face down Goliath and come away, if not victorious, at least having made significant changes to the field of play. This is a movie people like me need to extol the virtues of and those in the target areas need to see for themselves. Change doesn’t happen overnight, but at least Haney has helped add to a conversation that will hopefully continue to build until the point that the powers that be have to stop feigning cluelessness and begin to engage in the debate themselves.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
INTERVIEW - Mike Mills and Ewan McGregor ("Beginners")
(Not) Absolute Beginners
McGregor and Mills On Telling a Story of Fathers, Sons and the Talking Dogs that Bind Them Together
I found writer and director Mike Mills’ Beginners starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent to be nearly perfect. The story of a lonely artist named Oliver (McGregor), the movie weaves together disparate strands of narrative going from past to present with subtle ease. It follows our hero’s love affair with beguiling yet wounded French actress Anna (Laurent) while also showcasing his emotionally surreal relationship with his seventy-something father (Plummer), an esteemed art historian who has recently come out of the closet and is facing down terminal cancer.
I sat down Mills and McGregor with a couple of other local critics to discuss the film during the pair’s brief stay attending the Seattle International Film Festival. Our wide-ranging conversation touched upon a number of topics, spiraling from here to there with energetic bravado, and while our time together was sadly much too short the information gathered was fascinating.
“This is where my parents met,” says Mills candidly. “They went to Garfield High. I keep thinking that this story [Beginners] kind of started here in a funny way. But I was born in Berkeley, California and we lived in Santa Barbara, so I moved the story to L.A. because that’s where I live and where I know.”
Working from his own experiences was important to the filmmaker because so much of the script was inspired by his actual relationship with his own father who had come out to him as gay after the death of his mother and proceeded to live the kind of life he’d denied himself up to then. But while the inspiration sprung from reality, that doesn’t mean events in the film paralleled Mills’ own life or the one of his father in any sort of concrete or discernable way.
“The body and soul and psyche and spirit and energy of [the film] is actually pretty different,” he admits. “Christopher [Plummer] isn’t my dad and that was never the goal. It was more to just take this man’s predicaments and desires and fears and to run with [them]. Christopher’s a bit more grand. He customizes in some very nice ways, and actually helped me tell a better portrait of my dad.”
“There’s this scene where he’s telling [Oliver] how the mom proposed to him and how the mom knew, and that scene was really short when we started filming. Christopher came to me and said that he needed to tell [his son] more because Oliver was being mean and judgmental and [Chris] felt he needed to defend himself. He just kind of roughed it out and I just filled in some of the facts and I loved that when it got to that kind of place I knew I was getting somewhere.”
At the same time, with so much going on, the nonlinear state of the narrative, the fact there’s a talking dog (speaking through subtitles), the potential for Beginners to lapse into melodramatic sentimentality or overindulgent whimsy is a constant threat. Yet the movie never does, a fact of which the director is proud.
“I remember saying [to the cast], oh my god, help me keep this from being a narcissistic self-pitying sentimental memoir,” states Mills. “I was like, you guys [the cast] have to do it now. You have to own the characters, take it over, make it your own story and communicate with the audience.”
“All I can really say is I was afraid of it being sentimental. I didn’t want it to be. I love films that are naturalistic and organic, where you feel that the truth of life is in there somewhere but hopefully not manipulative. That’s all the things I admire like that and I’m just trying to emulate what I admire, and these guys [the cast] are so good at making a connection between themselves and making their own relationships that isn’t me and my dad but something that is alive. Ewan and Christopher really have something very alive between them and I kept trying to put wood under that fire so [the film] wouldn’t be just my family and my stuff.”
“You’re very kind to say that,” interjects McGregor, “but it was also it would never be that way [overly sentimental] because the writing wasn’t that way. What you see was more or less on the page. It didn’t ever come across as sentimental or self-pitying. It was never like that.”
“And maybe a piece of that is [due] to my real dad’s energy,” questions Mills. “That’s the first thing Christopher said, ‘I love that it has no self pity. Not a drop.’ And I was like, you would say that Christopher because you were born in [1929]. That is that generation. You don’t complain, you don’t whine, you keep going forward. Especially when my dad came out, he was even more that way, going for more of [what] he wanted and never looking back.”
For McGregor, being a part of Beginners was a no-brainer. While the actor has appeared in projects big (Angels & Demons), small (The Pillow Book), in-between (Miss Potter), instant cult phenomena (Moulin Rouge) and culturally significant (the Star Wars prequels), his process of picking scripts hasn’t changed much since his Danny Boyle double-whammy days in Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.
“I don’t get my pick of material,” admits the actor. “I can’t call my agent and tell him get me this or get me that. I rely on what comes my way and I’ve been really lucky with the people I’ve worked with and the stories I’ve been a part of. And I’m very uncomplicated about it. I read scripts as they come in and generally I don’t know very much about them [beforehand]. It’s what grabs me [and] this one grabbed me.”
Sometimes the call is so out of the blue and unexpected it can’t help but seem like a practical joke, or at least that was the case when McGregor was approached to star in The Ghost Writer. “I was on the set of Men Who Stare at Goats,” recalls the actor with a smile. “I was standing in a parking lot in the desert in New Mexico when my agent rung up and said Polanski wants you in his picture. It was like f**king hell, is this some sort of joke? Say that again. That was a good moment.”
“But I don’t have any complicated process; it’s just if it [the script] grabs me. I was reading one the other day and I realized I was just looking at a series of scenes go by and I couldn’t make it into a movie in my head, and after about 40 pages I thought this just wasn’t going to be for me; nothing’s happening. And then another script, when you pick it up, if it starts playing like a movie in your head and you start imagining yourself as the character [that’s] good. You get that feeling like when you’re reading a novel and you’re getting towards the end and you start putting it down, reading a page at a time because you don’t want it to leave your life. If you have that feeling with a good script then that is a good sign.”
For most films dealing with the issues of coming out, of families dealing with members revealing their homosexuality, issues of religion, culture and other exterior forces always seem to come into play. In Beginners, Mills refuses to patronize, refuses to allow his characters an easy villain to blame misfortune, whether perceived, imagined or actual, upon. At the same time, the director does find a few places to point some fingers, even if his doing so is up to the audience to ascertain how pointed his criticisms are.
“There is sort of villain,” he admits, “and to me that is American History. There’s the psychiatrist who says [Hal’s] gayness is a mental illness, and the way the vice squad is in the film, that’s a real institutional villain. It’s quiet and it’s in the background but it is hugely there. Even the anti-Semitism that’s in the story with the mom who gets kicked off the swim team for being half-Jewish, it’s that history that they’re all up against.”
“In terms of love the villain would be these old stories, these old fears. There’s this monologue towards the end where [Oliver] says we finally stopped the stories in our heads and I could see Anna in 2003 saying I love you, crying, talking and all of that. For me, these are all the more insidious villains because they’re internalized; they’re the villain we half help crush us down.”
“It’s all those things, right? I don’t even know [the answer]. My real dad I don’t even know. In terms of what was his commitment to my mom? Was it all self-sacrifice? Did he really love her? It’s so ambiguous. One day I can feel one thing; one day I can feel another.”
Tackling all of these contrasting themes and making them resonate was important to McGregor, and although the film itself presented plenty of challenges, especially in regards to its nonlinear structure, the actor wanted to dig into every one of Oliver’s cells. The trick he and Mills came up with to help with this was a novel one making the actual shooting of the picture that much more engaging and energetic.
“We shot two films,” explains McGregor. “We shot the father-son story in its entirety as one film, and then we stopped and rehearsed the second one. After that we shot the second film, both more or less in order. My looking back, my remembering stories that took place with my father while with Anna, I was literally able to do that, I was literally able to recall those moments because we’d shot them already.”
“And we shot them differently,” adds Mills. “Christopher and Mélanie are so different, so it kind of changed the whole tenor [of the production]. It’s like me and Ewan went and met all these other people; that was my experience. We sort of had this traveling show, shot the dad’s story all blocked off and in very careful tracking shots. Theatrical. But the stuff with Mélanie was handheld and in the round. I’d always encourage people to not block it off and to go anywhere they wanted, especially with the love story. I didn’t want them to be controlled. I wanted them to be wild.”
Looking back, McGregor is reticent to state which characters have been his favorites or which films have meant the most to him. At the same time he seems to understand where he has come from, constantly looking to challenge himself and improve as an actor while not shying away from the performances he’s given in the past.
“They all have meant something,” he says proudly. “They all [the character] have to mean something. Different degrees, I suppose, but if you’re connected to what you are doing, and god hope that you are, then you’re always exploring elements of your own life. I don’t know which one meant more or less, it’s difficult to say because when you make a movie it’s for people to watch so it is up to them.”
“Some of the films obviously changed my life. A film like Trainspotting changed the course of my life because it was the film that kicked me into people’s consciousness in a more international sort of way. But there were other films that were really important to me that other people didn’t take much notice of and that’s fine. And I don’t wish that they would have gotten [more acclaim], it’s just the way things are.”
“It can be disappointing if people don’t see them, but I don’t really know and it doesn’t matter to me so much because people come up and talk about all of them at some point or another. A film like Velvet Goldmine which didn’t do as much business is probably one of the films people talk to me about the most. It maybe as a film didn’t work 100-percent of what we were trying to do but it was a great attempt at something different.”
“Or like The Pillow Book, which was so important to me. I can see how it defines me as an actor, that film. It was my second movie, and I remember it being like this beautiful dream. And he’s funny, [director Peter] Greenaway is just not at all what you’d expect. You always got the impression that nothing you could say would be of any interest to him. But what we achieved in that film is so beautiful, and I love what it is about and I learned so much.”
With potentially five films coming out in 2011, one wonders if overexposure is something McGregor worries about. It’s a question that shouldn’t be asked. “I like to work,” he says with a grin. “I really do. I like to make films. I’ve had a nice run of it, and it happens from time to time when they all sort of jam up but it doesn’t really matter to me. As long as you like what you’re in and you feel like it is worthwhile then it really doesn’t matter.”
McGregor and Mills On Telling a Story of Fathers, Sons and the Talking Dogs that Bind Them Together
I found writer and director Mike Mills’ Beginners starring Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent to be nearly perfect. The story of a lonely artist named Oliver (McGregor), the movie weaves together disparate strands of narrative going from past to present with subtle ease. It follows our hero’s love affair with beguiling yet wounded French actress Anna (Laurent) while also showcasing his emotionally surreal relationship with his seventy-something father (Plummer), an esteemed art historian who has recently come out of the closet and is facing down terminal cancer.
I sat down Mills and McGregor with a couple of other local critics to discuss the film during the pair’s brief stay attending the Seattle International Film Festival. Our wide-ranging conversation touched upon a number of topics, spiraling from here to there with energetic bravado, and while our time together was sadly much too short the information gathered was fascinating.
“This is where my parents met,” says Mills candidly. “They went to Garfield High. I keep thinking that this story [Beginners] kind of started here in a funny way. But I was born in Berkeley, California and we lived in Santa Barbara, so I moved the story to L.A. because that’s where I live and where I know.”
Working from his own experiences was important to the filmmaker because so much of the script was inspired by his actual relationship with his own father who had come out to him as gay after the death of his mother and proceeded to live the kind of life he’d denied himself up to then. But while the inspiration sprung from reality, that doesn’t mean events in the film paralleled Mills’ own life or the one of his father in any sort of concrete or discernable way.
“The body and soul and psyche and spirit and energy of [the film] is actually pretty different,” he admits. “Christopher [Plummer] isn’t my dad and that was never the goal. It was more to just take this man’s predicaments and desires and fears and to run with [them]. Christopher’s a bit more grand. He customizes in some very nice ways, and actually helped me tell a better portrait of my dad.”
“There’s this scene where he’s telling [Oliver] how the mom proposed to him and how the mom knew, and that scene was really short when we started filming. Christopher came to me and said that he needed to tell [his son] more because Oliver was being mean and judgmental and [Chris] felt he needed to defend himself. He just kind of roughed it out and I just filled in some of the facts and I loved that when it got to that kind of place I knew I was getting somewhere.”
At the same time, with so much going on, the nonlinear state of the narrative, the fact there’s a talking dog (speaking through subtitles), the potential for Beginners to lapse into melodramatic sentimentality or overindulgent whimsy is a constant threat. Yet the movie never does, a fact of which the director is proud.
“I remember saying [to the cast], oh my god, help me keep this from being a narcissistic self-pitying sentimental memoir,” states Mills. “I was like, you guys [the cast] have to do it now. You have to own the characters, take it over, make it your own story and communicate with the audience.”
“All I can really say is I was afraid of it being sentimental. I didn’t want it to be. I love films that are naturalistic and organic, where you feel that the truth of life is in there somewhere but hopefully not manipulative. That’s all the things I admire like that and I’m just trying to emulate what I admire, and these guys [the cast] are so good at making a connection between themselves and making their own relationships that isn’t me and my dad but something that is alive. Ewan and Christopher really have something very alive between them and I kept trying to put wood under that fire so [the film] wouldn’t be just my family and my stuff.”
“You’re very kind to say that,” interjects McGregor, “but it was also it would never be that way [overly sentimental] because the writing wasn’t that way. What you see was more or less on the page. It didn’t ever come across as sentimental or self-pitying. It was never like that.”
“And maybe a piece of that is [due] to my real dad’s energy,” questions Mills. “That’s the first thing Christopher said, ‘I love that it has no self pity. Not a drop.’ And I was like, you would say that Christopher because you were born in [1929]. That is that generation. You don’t complain, you don’t whine, you keep going forward. Especially when my dad came out, he was even more that way, going for more of [what] he wanted and never looking back.”
For McGregor, being a part of Beginners was a no-brainer. While the actor has appeared in projects big (Angels & Demons), small (The Pillow Book), in-between (Miss Potter), instant cult phenomena (Moulin Rouge) and culturally significant (the Star Wars prequels), his process of picking scripts hasn’t changed much since his Danny Boyle double-whammy days in Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.
“I don’t get my pick of material,” admits the actor. “I can’t call my agent and tell him get me this or get me that. I rely on what comes my way and I’ve been really lucky with the people I’ve worked with and the stories I’ve been a part of. And I’m very uncomplicated about it. I read scripts as they come in and generally I don’t know very much about them [beforehand]. It’s what grabs me [and] this one grabbed me.”
Sometimes the call is so out of the blue and unexpected it can’t help but seem like a practical joke, or at least that was the case when McGregor was approached to star in The Ghost Writer. “I was on the set of Men Who Stare at Goats,” recalls the actor with a smile. “I was standing in a parking lot in the desert in New Mexico when my agent rung up and said Polanski wants you in his picture. It was like f**king hell, is this some sort of joke? Say that again. That was a good moment.”
“But I don’t have any complicated process; it’s just if it [the script] grabs me. I was reading one the other day and I realized I was just looking at a series of scenes go by and I couldn’t make it into a movie in my head, and after about 40 pages I thought this just wasn’t going to be for me; nothing’s happening. And then another script, when you pick it up, if it starts playing like a movie in your head and you start imagining yourself as the character [that’s] good. You get that feeling like when you’re reading a novel and you’re getting towards the end and you start putting it down, reading a page at a time because you don’t want it to leave your life. If you have that feeling with a good script then that is a good sign.”
For most films dealing with the issues of coming out, of families dealing with members revealing their homosexuality, issues of religion, culture and other exterior forces always seem to come into play. In Beginners, Mills refuses to patronize, refuses to allow his characters an easy villain to blame misfortune, whether perceived, imagined or actual, upon. At the same time, the director does find a few places to point some fingers, even if his doing so is up to the audience to ascertain how pointed his criticisms are.
“There is sort of villain,” he admits, “and to me that is American History. There’s the psychiatrist who says [Hal’s] gayness is a mental illness, and the way the vice squad is in the film, that’s a real institutional villain. It’s quiet and it’s in the background but it is hugely there. Even the anti-Semitism that’s in the story with the mom who gets kicked off the swim team for being half-Jewish, it’s that history that they’re all up against.”
“In terms of love the villain would be these old stories, these old fears. There’s this monologue towards the end where [Oliver] says we finally stopped the stories in our heads and I could see Anna in 2003 saying I love you, crying, talking and all of that. For me, these are all the more insidious villains because they’re internalized; they’re the villain we half help crush us down.”
“It’s all those things, right? I don’t even know [the answer]. My real dad I don’t even know. In terms of what was his commitment to my mom? Was it all self-sacrifice? Did he really love her? It’s so ambiguous. One day I can feel one thing; one day I can feel another.”
Tackling all of these contrasting themes and making them resonate was important to McGregor, and although the film itself presented plenty of challenges, especially in regards to its nonlinear structure, the actor wanted to dig into every one of Oliver’s cells. The trick he and Mills came up with to help with this was a novel one making the actual shooting of the picture that much more engaging and energetic.
“We shot two films,” explains McGregor. “We shot the father-son story in its entirety as one film, and then we stopped and rehearsed the second one. After that we shot the second film, both more or less in order. My looking back, my remembering stories that took place with my father while with Anna, I was literally able to do that, I was literally able to recall those moments because we’d shot them already.”
“And we shot them differently,” adds Mills. “Christopher and Mélanie are so different, so it kind of changed the whole tenor [of the production]. It’s like me and Ewan went and met all these other people; that was my experience. We sort of had this traveling show, shot the dad’s story all blocked off and in very careful tracking shots. Theatrical. But the stuff with Mélanie was handheld and in the round. I’d always encourage people to not block it off and to go anywhere they wanted, especially with the love story. I didn’t want them to be controlled. I wanted them to be wild.”
Looking back, McGregor is reticent to state which characters have been his favorites or which films have meant the most to him. At the same time he seems to understand where he has come from, constantly looking to challenge himself and improve as an actor while not shying away from the performances he’s given in the past.
“They all have meant something,” he says proudly. “They all [the character] have to mean something. Different degrees, I suppose, but if you’re connected to what you are doing, and god hope that you are, then you’re always exploring elements of your own life. I don’t know which one meant more or less, it’s difficult to say because when you make a movie it’s for people to watch so it is up to them.”
“Some of the films obviously changed my life. A film like Trainspotting changed the course of my life because it was the film that kicked me into people’s consciousness in a more international sort of way. But there were other films that were really important to me that other people didn’t take much notice of and that’s fine. And I don’t wish that they would have gotten [more acclaim], it’s just the way things are.”
“It can be disappointing if people don’t see them, but I don’t really know and it doesn’t matter to me so much because people come up and talk about all of them at some point or another. A film like Velvet Goldmine which didn’t do as much business is probably one of the films people talk to me about the most. It maybe as a film didn’t work 100-percent of what we were trying to do but it was a great attempt at something different.”
“Or like The Pillow Book, which was so important to me. I can see how it defines me as an actor, that film. It was my second movie, and I remember it being like this beautiful dream. And he’s funny, [director Peter] Greenaway is just not at all what you’d expect. You always got the impression that nothing you could say would be of any interest to him. But what we achieved in that film is so beautiful, and I love what it is about and I learned so much.”
With potentially five films coming out in 2011, one wonders if overexposure is something McGregor worries about. It’s a question that shouldn’t be asked. “I like to work,” he says with a grin. “I really do. I like to make films. I’ve had a nice run of it, and it happens from time to time when they all sort of jam up but it doesn’t really matter to me. As long as you like what you’re in and you feel like it is worthwhile then it really doesn’t matter.”
- Portions of this article reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
MOVIE REVIEW - "Trollhunter"
Inventive Trollhunter Forgettable Fun
Volda College students Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) and Johanna (Johanna Mørck) go into the Norwegian countryside to document a series of recent bear attacks, coming across an unlicensed stranger named Hans (Otto Jespersen) who is apparently hunting them illegally. Keeping to himself, unwilling to answer questions, they follow this strange, weathered man as he goes on his nightly hunts, filming everything in hopes of catching something useful for their school documentary project.
What the capture is footage trolls, actual bona fide live under a bridge smell the blood of a Christian man turn to stone in sunlight trolls. Turns out the government has gone out of their way to hide their existence for eons, hiring ex-soldiers like Hans to keep the population in check and keep the public from knowing their out there. But he’s tired of the secrecy, doesn’t like the layers of bureaucracy he has to wade through in order to do his job. It’s time the truth about trolls was uncovered, and these three excitable and driven college students are just the ones to help him get the word of their existence out to the public.
The Norwegian import Trollhunter is another ‘found footage’ film along the same lines as [Rec], The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. It is another entry in the genre, all shaky-cam over the shoulder footage capturing the action in documentary-like detail in attempt to make it a more visceral and realistic experience for the audience.
While I’m tired of this trend it must be admitted that writer/director André Øvredal fantastical real world fairy tale opus gets the job done, delivering a 90-minute entertainment that’s as silly and nonsensical as it is a heck of a lot of fun. While there are some dry spots, and while it doesn’t always come together, for the most part this movie is an engaging and inventive treat filled with imagination. The filmmaker has crafted a mythology for his hunter and for the creatures that he is tracking that is as wild as it is inspired, seemingly no stone left unturned making things far more believably authentic than they would have been otherwise.
At the same time, this is awfully slight stuff, and like most films in this genre at a certain point the surprise vanishes as there is only one way for things to come to an end. As glorious as the final hunt is (the crew finds itself pitted against a massive “Jotnar” troll hiding in frigid and icy mountains of Norway, Hans blaring “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” over his vehicle’s speakers in order to draw it out into the open), what happens at the end of it is hardly a shock. These pictures are sadly starting to lose a little of their allure, and it’s going to take some major shaking up on the part of a filmmaker intent on smashing convention into pieces in order for that to happen.
Øvredal is not that filmmaker. For all his movie’s massive amounts of whimsy and imagination he rarely strays from the expected template. As much fun as learning about “Ringlefinches” and “Tosserlads” is (they’re variety of trolls) seeing it through the camera lens as photographed Thomas, Kalle and Johanna is strictly by the numbers. The rapid-fire dialogue, the running through the woods in confusion, the wavering focus of the camera as it eyes the gigantic Jotnar, all of it and more has been done so many times before the impact can’t help but be lessened, and for all its strengths that’s one minus difficult to get past.
Still, like I already stated Trollhunter can be a major blast. Jespersen is great as the oafish Hans, his indignity as he dons a metal suit of armor to extract a blood sample from a sick Ringlefinch or the way he bristles at filling out his ‘Slayed Troll Form’ fitting the character to perfection. The first encounter with the Tosserlad is so good it literally caused me to squeal in embarrassingly girlish glee, while some of the bureaucratic jokes (including the ones involving imported bear carcasses) are downright inspired. In short, for all its over-familiarity I liked this movie and had a heck of a time watching it, and as late night rentals or fodder for midnight matinees go Øvredal’s fantasy-fueled opus fits the bill nicely.
Volda College students Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) and Johanna (Johanna Mørck) go into the Norwegian countryside to document a series of recent bear attacks, coming across an unlicensed stranger named Hans (Otto Jespersen) who is apparently hunting them illegally. Keeping to himself, unwilling to answer questions, they follow this strange, weathered man as he goes on his nightly hunts, filming everything in hopes of catching something useful for their school documentary project.
What the capture is footage trolls, actual bona fide live under a bridge smell the blood of a Christian man turn to stone in sunlight trolls. Turns out the government has gone out of their way to hide their existence for eons, hiring ex-soldiers like Hans to keep the population in check and keep the public from knowing their out there. But he’s tired of the secrecy, doesn’t like the layers of bureaucracy he has to wade through in order to do his job. It’s time the truth about trolls was uncovered, and these three excitable and driven college students are just the ones to help him get the word of their existence out to the public.
The Norwegian import Trollhunter is another ‘found footage’ film along the same lines as [Rec], The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. It is another entry in the genre, all shaky-cam over the shoulder footage capturing the action in documentary-like detail in attempt to make it a more visceral and realistic experience for the audience.
While I’m tired of this trend it must be admitted that writer/director André Øvredal fantastical real world fairy tale opus gets the job done, delivering a 90-minute entertainment that’s as silly and nonsensical as it is a heck of a lot of fun. While there are some dry spots, and while it doesn’t always come together, for the most part this movie is an engaging and inventive treat filled with imagination. The filmmaker has crafted a mythology for his hunter and for the creatures that he is tracking that is as wild as it is inspired, seemingly no stone left unturned making things far more believably authentic than they would have been otherwise.
At the same time, this is awfully slight stuff, and like most films in this genre at a certain point the surprise vanishes as there is only one way for things to come to an end. As glorious as the final hunt is (the crew finds itself pitted against a massive “Jotnar” troll hiding in frigid and icy mountains of Norway, Hans blaring “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” over his vehicle’s speakers in order to draw it out into the open), what happens at the end of it is hardly a shock. These pictures are sadly starting to lose a little of their allure, and it’s going to take some major shaking up on the part of a filmmaker intent on smashing convention into pieces in order for that to happen.
Øvredal is not that filmmaker. For all his movie’s massive amounts of whimsy and imagination he rarely strays from the expected template. As much fun as learning about “Ringlefinches” and “Tosserlads” is (they’re variety of trolls) seeing it through the camera lens as photographed Thomas, Kalle and Johanna is strictly by the numbers. The rapid-fire dialogue, the running through the woods in confusion, the wavering focus of the camera as it eyes the gigantic Jotnar, all of it and more has been done so many times before the impact can’t help but be lessened, and for all its strengths that’s one minus difficult to get past.
Still, like I already stated Trollhunter can be a major blast. Jespersen is great as the oafish Hans, his indignity as he dons a metal suit of armor to extract a blood sample from a sick Ringlefinch or the way he bristles at filling out his ‘Slayed Troll Form’ fitting the character to perfection. The first encounter with the Tosserlad is so good it literally caused me to squeal in embarrassingly girlish glee, while some of the bureaucratic jokes (including the ones involving imported bear carcasses) are downright inspired. In short, for all its over-familiarity I liked this movie and had a heck of a time watching it, and as late night rentals or fodder for midnight matinees go Øvredal’s fantasy-fueled opus fits the bill nicely.
Friday, June 3, 2011
MOVIE REVIEW - "Beginners"
Profound Beginners a Beguiling Trip
Writer and director Mike Mills’ Beginners is the best film I’ve seen so far this year. The follow up to the filmmaker’s wonderful 2005 effort Thumbsucker, this inventive and surprising comedic drama of fathers, sons, relationships, sexuality and life is an engaging emotional frolic filled with numerous delights. It is a marvel of storytelling and character, telling a relatively familiar and potentially melodramatic tale in a way that feels different, new and profound.
Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is in a relationship with quietly eccentric French actress Anna (Mélanie Laurent). They met at a costume party, he dressed as Sigmund Freud and dealing with an emotional whirlwind involving his late father Hal (Christopher Plummer) and she looking like a dowdy Charlie Chaplin struggling with laryngitis. They find themselves relating on a level both intimate and therapeutic, each discovering an easygoing catharsis in spending time together.
Presented in a smooth, oddly beguiling nonlinear fashion that feels like bits and pieces of Oliver’s memories wrapping one around the other and presenting themselves at the most naturalistic of times, Mills handles all of the multifarious tangents of his protagonist’s journey with remarkable ease. From his current relationship with Anna, to his recollections of his mother (Mary Page Keller) as a child (Keegan Boos), to the dual discoveries of his father coming out of the closet as an old man and dating a much younger one (Goran Visnjic) as well as learning he is also fighting terminal cancer, much of our hero’s travails weave themselves around the viewer in a way that consistently enthralls.
More than that, the film achieves an emotive authenticity that resonates far beyond the norm. It speaks to universal truths about who we are, what we want to with our lives, our hopes, our dreams and, sometimes most of all, our inherent fears, all of which feel strikingly universal. It doesn’t matter how surreal some of the corners are that Mills decides to mine and it seems perfectly natural when whimsical idiosyncrasies like subtitled talking dogs get thrown into the equation, all of it working in a way that rings of honesty and truth making Oliver’s self-exploratory struggles all the more reflective.
McGregor has rarely been better. He taps right into this milieu from the start and does wonder with it. He brings Oliver out of his shell, makes him sparkle even when insecurity, rage or timidity threaten to do him in. He lets his bravery come in stages, allows him to wrestle with the issues generated by his upbringing in a way I could relate to and feel sympathetic with. The past has always affected the future, who we were having much to do with who we are becoming and in the way we respond to adversity, whether perceived or actual. McGregor makes this battle, one that holds the key to potentially allowing him to happily pursue a romantic relationship and find contentment in his professional life, feel innately personal, allows the audience to join in on it with him, and as such makes the character all the more genuine because of it.
Plummer equals him, deftly underplaying his role where a lesser actor would have made him the center of the attention and taken the excitable and sexually liberated old man into the realm of caricature. His performance anchors the picture, showing multiple sides that allow Oliver to get a glimpse of a life fully lived and not one to be apologized for, even if all facets of it weren’t always entirely out in the open.
There’s so much more to Beginners than this, however, its sum total not an easily divined equation that can be put forth in a simple mathematical form. Mills pulls the heartstrings but doesn’t strum them, makes his case for living life in the open but doesn’t get didactic while doing so. He’s taken inspiration from his own family history and divined truths that are as universal as they are remarkable, crafting a stunning work of comedy, drama, romance and regret that had me silently cheering long after I’d left the theatre.
Writer and director Mike Mills’ Beginners is the best film I’ve seen so far this year. The follow up to the filmmaker’s wonderful 2005 effort Thumbsucker, this inventive and surprising comedic drama of fathers, sons, relationships, sexuality and life is an engaging emotional frolic filled with numerous delights. It is a marvel of storytelling and character, telling a relatively familiar and potentially melodramatic tale in a way that feels different, new and profound.
Oliver (Ewan McGregor) is in a relationship with quietly eccentric French actress Anna (Mélanie Laurent). They met at a costume party, he dressed as Sigmund Freud and dealing with an emotional whirlwind involving his late father Hal (Christopher Plummer) and she looking like a dowdy Charlie Chaplin struggling with laryngitis. They find themselves relating on a level both intimate and therapeutic, each discovering an easygoing catharsis in spending time together.
Presented in a smooth, oddly beguiling nonlinear fashion that feels like bits and pieces of Oliver’s memories wrapping one around the other and presenting themselves at the most naturalistic of times, Mills handles all of the multifarious tangents of his protagonist’s journey with remarkable ease. From his current relationship with Anna, to his recollections of his mother (Mary Page Keller) as a child (Keegan Boos), to the dual discoveries of his father coming out of the closet as an old man and dating a much younger one (Goran Visnjic) as well as learning he is also fighting terminal cancer, much of our hero’s travails weave themselves around the viewer in a way that consistently enthralls.
More than that, the film achieves an emotive authenticity that resonates far beyond the norm. It speaks to universal truths about who we are, what we want to with our lives, our hopes, our dreams and, sometimes most of all, our inherent fears, all of which feel strikingly universal. It doesn’t matter how surreal some of the corners are that Mills decides to mine and it seems perfectly natural when whimsical idiosyncrasies like subtitled talking dogs get thrown into the equation, all of it working in a way that rings of honesty and truth making Oliver’s self-exploratory struggles all the more reflective.
McGregor has rarely been better. He taps right into this milieu from the start and does wonder with it. He brings Oliver out of his shell, makes him sparkle even when insecurity, rage or timidity threaten to do him in. He lets his bravery come in stages, allows him to wrestle with the issues generated by his upbringing in a way I could relate to and feel sympathetic with. The past has always affected the future, who we were having much to do with who we are becoming and in the way we respond to adversity, whether perceived or actual. McGregor makes this battle, one that holds the key to potentially allowing him to happily pursue a romantic relationship and find contentment in his professional life, feel innately personal, allows the audience to join in on it with him, and as such makes the character all the more genuine because of it.
Plummer equals him, deftly underplaying his role where a lesser actor would have made him the center of the attention and taken the excitable and sexually liberated old man into the realm of caricature. His performance anchors the picture, showing multiple sides that allow Oliver to get a glimpse of a life fully lived and not one to be apologized for, even if all facets of it weren’t always entirely out in the open.
There’s so much more to Beginners than this, however, its sum total not an easily divined equation that can be put forth in a simple mathematical form. Mills pulls the heartstrings but doesn’t strum them, makes his case for living life in the open but doesn’t get didactic while doing so. He’s taken inspiration from his own family history and divined truths that are as universal as they are remarkable, crafting a stunning work of comedy, drama, romance and regret that had me silently cheering long after I’d left the theatre.
MOVIE REVIEW - "The First Grader"
Knowledge is Power in The First Grader
Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge (Oliver Litondo) is 84-years-old. A resident of a tiny Kenyan village, the solitary man is a former Mau Mau freedom fighter who stood up to the British imperialists during his youth and suffered unspeakable consequences for doing so, the tragedy of which he is still trying to get over all these decades later.
It has been announced that his country’s ruling powers are offering free education to every Kenyan citizen. Maruge cannot read and he values learning above all else, but when he arrives at the small school run by headmistress and teacher Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris) he is told he is much too old to enroll. Undaunted, he will not be deterred from his quest, slowly winning over the young educator and all of the children under her and her staff’s tutelage.
Based on a true story, it’s easy to see why director Justin Chadwick’s (The Other Boleyn Girl) inspirational effort The First Grader has struck such a chord with festival audiences around the world. It is a rousing entertainment, one that hits right to the gut and speaks to the very best of what we hope to be, its saga of a man battling for the simple right to learn one just about anyone anywhere can relate to and empathize with.
And if it were that simple I’d be more than willing to overlook a lot of this film’s many melodramatic faults. Maruge’s story is one I thrilled to, watching this elderly man weave his way into the village school and standup for his rights bringing me close to cheers. With simple, documentary-like verisimilitude, yet still working on a beautifully widescreen cinematic scale, Chadwick presents this central tale with sincerity, simplicity and care, rarely layering on the saccharine letting onscreen events speak for themselves.
But I sadly must emphasize the word “rarely,” because whenever the filmmaker strays from the here and now and travels back to Maruge’s youth things don’t quite cut as moving a swath. So much is said in Litondo’s eyes, written in every wrinkle on his face, every move of his body, that a lot of what happened during his younger days didn’t require depiction. Chadwick layers on the symbolism during the flashbacks, spelling things out for the audience in a way that is melodramatic and belittling.
The tragedy of what this one-time warrior and current wannabe scholar went through is undeniable, but the power behind it is lost when shown in overly indulgent detail. When left to Litondo, sitting there, trying to explain Kenya’s history with a hesitant smile to a group of wide-eyed children, describing in detail his personal travails to a horrified yet caring Harris, the film soars to new plateaus, all of them frustratingly undermined every time Chadwick chooses to depict in visuals what only needed to be illustrated in words.
Not that I’m dismissing The First Grader because of this. Just the opposite, really, as so much of it moved me and caught me off guard I can’t begin to call it anything even close to a failure. Newcomer Litondo is extraordinary, while the wonderful Harris equals him transforming a stock, cliché character into a figure who feels vibrant, alive and new. The pair play off one another with delectable ease, each sharing scenes with the children that took my breath away. There is wonderful subtlety on display during the scenes at the school, the emotion of the piece coming through with loudly euphoric glee, the tears flowing from my eyes at the end justly earned and ones I didn’t feel at all bad about shedding.
It helps considerably that the movie is breathtaking in its beauty, magnificently photographed by Rob Hardy (Is Anybody There?). His camerawork takes in the African scenery in a way that put me right in the middle of the proceedings. From the dusty, crowded streets of the country’s capital city to the unenlightened emptiness of Maruge’s village, there is a sublime old-school feel to everything that enraptured my soul, and as long as the director focused on current events my issues with the film evaporated into nothingness.
Unfortunately, Chadwick can’t leave well enough alone, and while I understand his desire to showcase past histories (and appreciate his unflinching attitude toward the horrific lengths Britain went to keep its empire), the stirring human element of the piece has trouble rising above some of the melodrama on display during these sequences. While The First Grader does ultimately manage to get itself out of the muck and mire of this emotional syrup, it isn’t without somewhat diminishing Maruge’s awe-inspiring story. I liked this movie, I just think the lessons it teaches could have been more powerful and long-lasting had the past remained an ethereal dream haunting our hero, finally overcome by his newfound ability to learn from, talk about and educate others in regards to their meaning complex meaning.
Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge (Oliver Litondo) is 84-years-old. A resident of a tiny Kenyan village, the solitary man is a former Mau Mau freedom fighter who stood up to the British imperialists during his youth and suffered unspeakable consequences for doing so, the tragedy of which he is still trying to get over all these decades later.
It has been announced that his country’s ruling powers are offering free education to every Kenyan citizen. Maruge cannot read and he values learning above all else, but when he arrives at the small school run by headmistress and teacher Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris) he is told he is much too old to enroll. Undaunted, he will not be deterred from his quest, slowly winning over the young educator and all of the children under her and her staff’s tutelage.
Based on a true story, it’s easy to see why director Justin Chadwick’s (The Other Boleyn Girl) inspirational effort The First Grader has struck such a chord with festival audiences around the world. It is a rousing entertainment, one that hits right to the gut and speaks to the very best of what we hope to be, its saga of a man battling for the simple right to learn one just about anyone anywhere can relate to and empathize with.
And if it were that simple I’d be more than willing to overlook a lot of this film’s many melodramatic faults. Maruge’s story is one I thrilled to, watching this elderly man weave his way into the village school and standup for his rights bringing me close to cheers. With simple, documentary-like verisimilitude, yet still working on a beautifully widescreen cinematic scale, Chadwick presents this central tale with sincerity, simplicity and care, rarely layering on the saccharine letting onscreen events speak for themselves.
But I sadly must emphasize the word “rarely,” because whenever the filmmaker strays from the here and now and travels back to Maruge’s youth things don’t quite cut as moving a swath. So much is said in Litondo’s eyes, written in every wrinkle on his face, every move of his body, that a lot of what happened during his younger days didn’t require depiction. Chadwick layers on the symbolism during the flashbacks, spelling things out for the audience in a way that is melodramatic and belittling.
The tragedy of what this one-time warrior and current wannabe scholar went through is undeniable, but the power behind it is lost when shown in overly indulgent detail. When left to Litondo, sitting there, trying to explain Kenya’s history with a hesitant smile to a group of wide-eyed children, describing in detail his personal travails to a horrified yet caring Harris, the film soars to new plateaus, all of them frustratingly undermined every time Chadwick chooses to depict in visuals what only needed to be illustrated in words.
Not that I’m dismissing The First Grader because of this. Just the opposite, really, as so much of it moved me and caught me off guard I can’t begin to call it anything even close to a failure. Newcomer Litondo is extraordinary, while the wonderful Harris equals him transforming a stock, cliché character into a figure who feels vibrant, alive and new. The pair play off one another with delectable ease, each sharing scenes with the children that took my breath away. There is wonderful subtlety on display during the scenes at the school, the emotion of the piece coming through with loudly euphoric glee, the tears flowing from my eyes at the end justly earned and ones I didn’t feel at all bad about shedding.
It helps considerably that the movie is breathtaking in its beauty, magnificently photographed by Rob Hardy (Is Anybody There?). His camerawork takes in the African scenery in a way that put me right in the middle of the proceedings. From the dusty, crowded streets of the country’s capital city to the unenlightened emptiness of Maruge’s village, there is a sublime old-school feel to everything that enraptured my soul, and as long as the director focused on current events my issues with the film evaporated into nothingness.
Unfortunately, Chadwick can’t leave well enough alone, and while I understand his desire to showcase past histories (and appreciate his unflinching attitude toward the horrific lengths Britain went to keep its empire), the stirring human element of the piece has trouble rising above some of the melodrama on display during these sequences. While The First Grader does ultimately manage to get itself out of the muck and mire of this emotional syrup, it isn’t without somewhat diminishing Maruge’s awe-inspiring story. I liked this movie, I just think the lessons it teaches could have been more powerful and long-lasting had the past remained an ethereal dream haunting our hero, finally overcome by his newfound ability to learn from, talk about and educate others in regards to their meaning complex meaning.
MOVIE REVIEW - "Submarine"
Quirky Submarine Charts an Entertaining Course
Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) has it all figured out. He’s filmed this movie about his life in his head a few thousand times, taken the Super 8 negative out of the camera editing it into the perfect cinematic coming of age super story. He will get the ultra peculiar and totally cool Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) to notice him. He will save his parents Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill’s (Sally Hawkins) marriage, keeping his mother away from the clutches of former flame and current New Age self-help guru Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine). And, most importantly, he will have sex before his fifteenth birthday, losing it to Jordana in a bit of romantic perfectionism worthy of the great love songs of the late twentieth century.
As descriptions go, I’m going to leave my one of British screenwriter and director Richard Ayoade’s Submarine right there because to say more, doesn’t so much ruin the surprise, but take the fun out of watching the filmmaker’s freewheeling, pessimistic yet oddly uplifting cinematic debut. Based on the popular novel by Joe Dunthorne, the movie doesn’t exactly rewrite the coming-of-age genre handbook. But it is made with energy, verve, vision and ingenuity, and while the places it goes and the lessons that are learned aren’t exactly a surprise discovering them is still plenty enjoyable.
The film is cast to perfection. All of the supporting players take their characters do some wonderful things with them, Taylor, Hawkins and Considine enlivening proceedings to such an extent you can almost imagine a motion picture revolving solely around them being nearly as satisfying as this one is. They lend glorious support, keeping relative newcomer Roberts focused and on his game, forcing him to rise to their level making Oliver a far more curiously intriguing introspective roustabout than he arguably would have been otherwise.
And rise to this challenge he does. In almost every scene, he is required to go places that aren’t altogether pleasing, do things that challenge the audience and take him to the precipice of loosing their sympathies. There are choices Oliver makes that had me shaking my head, annoyed and angered at him for his selfish stupidity. But thanks to Roberts I believed that these choices, while wrong, were made for reasons the character felt secure in. Better, and even more importantly, I believed he was learning from them, becoming a better person who would hopefully mature into something greater than the some of his parts thanks to these emotional and interpersonal failures.
At the same time, some of this does feel too familiar, bits and pieces right out of The Graduate meets Ferris Beuller’s Day Off meets Rushmore playbook. There were times when the movie frustratingly stops dead in its tracks, hinting at moving someplace interesting only to stutter and sidestep, going for the easy joke or the obvious visual instead. A third act bit of vandalism is oddly placed, while an early sequence involving teenage bullying went on longer than necessary while also coming to an unsatisfying resolution.
Yet I loved a lot of Submarine, got a kick out of the way Roberts and Paige played off one another, find happy satisfaction in the smooth icy-blue images Erik Wilson (The Hills Have Eyes). Composer Andrew Hewitt’s score mixes perfectly with former The Smith’s guitarist Johnny Marr’s original songs, the two finding a melodious symmetry that always seems to fit the tone and the attitude of the picture perfectly. The way it ended also couldn’t help but bring me to a smile, the last image so poetically open-ended I almost let out a contented sigh.
As debuts go, BBC television stalwart Ayoade has crafted a pretty darn good one. The dialogue is crisp, clean and inventive, while his script moves from place to place with a confident ease that obvious from the very start. Submarine may not be entirely original and might no go to places I haven’t visited before but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a grand time watching it all the same. I got a great kick out of it, and the next time Ayoade decides to set sail I can’t wait to go aboard and come along for the ride.
Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) has it all figured out. He’s filmed this movie about his life in his head a few thousand times, taken the Super 8 negative out of the camera editing it into the perfect cinematic coming of age super story. He will get the ultra peculiar and totally cool Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige) to notice him. He will save his parents Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill’s (Sally Hawkins) marriage, keeping his mother away from the clutches of former flame and current New Age self-help guru Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine). And, most importantly, he will have sex before his fifteenth birthday, losing it to Jordana in a bit of romantic perfectionism worthy of the great love songs of the late twentieth century.
As descriptions go, I’m going to leave my one of British screenwriter and director Richard Ayoade’s Submarine right there because to say more, doesn’t so much ruin the surprise, but take the fun out of watching the filmmaker’s freewheeling, pessimistic yet oddly uplifting cinematic debut. Based on the popular novel by Joe Dunthorne, the movie doesn’t exactly rewrite the coming-of-age genre handbook. But it is made with energy, verve, vision and ingenuity, and while the places it goes and the lessons that are learned aren’t exactly a surprise discovering them is still plenty enjoyable.
The film is cast to perfection. All of the supporting players take their characters do some wonderful things with them, Taylor, Hawkins and Considine enlivening proceedings to such an extent you can almost imagine a motion picture revolving solely around them being nearly as satisfying as this one is. They lend glorious support, keeping relative newcomer Roberts focused and on his game, forcing him to rise to their level making Oliver a far more curiously intriguing introspective roustabout than he arguably would have been otherwise.
And rise to this challenge he does. In almost every scene, he is required to go places that aren’t altogether pleasing, do things that challenge the audience and take him to the precipice of loosing their sympathies. There are choices Oliver makes that had me shaking my head, annoyed and angered at him for his selfish stupidity. But thanks to Roberts I believed that these choices, while wrong, were made for reasons the character felt secure in. Better, and even more importantly, I believed he was learning from them, becoming a better person who would hopefully mature into something greater than the some of his parts thanks to these emotional and interpersonal failures.
At the same time, some of this does feel too familiar, bits and pieces right out of The Graduate meets Ferris Beuller’s Day Off meets Rushmore playbook. There were times when the movie frustratingly stops dead in its tracks, hinting at moving someplace interesting only to stutter and sidestep, going for the easy joke or the obvious visual instead. A third act bit of vandalism is oddly placed, while an early sequence involving teenage bullying went on longer than necessary while also coming to an unsatisfying resolution.
Yet I loved a lot of Submarine, got a kick out of the way Roberts and Paige played off one another, find happy satisfaction in the smooth icy-blue images Erik Wilson (The Hills Have Eyes). Composer Andrew Hewitt’s score mixes perfectly with former The Smith’s guitarist Johnny Marr’s original songs, the two finding a melodious symmetry that always seems to fit the tone and the attitude of the picture perfectly. The way it ended also couldn’t help but bring me to a smile, the last image so poetically open-ended I almost let out a contented sigh.
As debuts go, BBC television stalwart Ayoade has crafted a pretty darn good one. The dialogue is crisp, clean and inventive, while his script moves from place to place with a confident ease that obvious from the very start. Submarine may not be entirely original and might no go to places I haven’t visited before but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have a grand time watching it all the same. I got a great kick out of it, and the next time Ayoade decides to set sail I can’t wait to go aboard and come along for the ride.
MOVIE REVIEW - "We Are the Night"
Darkly Erotic Night Worth Sinking Teeth Into
Lena (Karoline Herfurth) isn’t doing well. The 18-year-old teen is on probation for a number of crimes, not the least of which is for being a particularly skilled pickpocket, using the fruits of her labor to keep herself clothed in rags and barely fed. She been battered and bruised by life in a way most people couldn’t understand, and although there’s a sunny personality just underneath surface trying to break free – a personality intelligent and attractive vice detective Tom Serner (Max Riemelt) got a fleeting glance at during a random bridge-side encounter – it’s going to take an act of God or the hand of fate to see it blossom.
Make that a pair of teeth. Sexy Louise (Nina Hoss) has been around for longer than she cares to admit, looking for women like former silent movie siren Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) and rambunctious 1980’s teenybopper Nora (Anna Fischer) to become her immortal companions. She spies Lena by chance, the lost young woman inadvertently wandering into her underground Berlin industrial nightclub, and the moment she does she the insatiable love-starved blonde knows she must have her.
German import We Are the Night is an old school return to vampire norms in the vein of The Lost Boys except with an obvious twist in regards to the gender of the principals. Beginning with a totally kick-ass bang 10,000-feet up in the air, and concluding with a giddily silly allusion to a potential second chapter that will unquestionably never see the moonlight of night, I had so much fun watching this exercise in gory genre silliness I almost don’t know where to begin. The bottom line? Director and co-writer Dennis Gansel (Before the Fall) has made a seriously entertaining motion picture, and one I’m almost certain to add to my hi-def library when it hits Blu-ray at some point later this year.
Does that make it perfect? Heck no. There are undeniable leaps in both logic and continuity that are as harebrained as they are unfortunate. Other than the central relationships Lena has with both Louise and Tom the remainder of the characters remain sadly ephemeral, and other than a wonderful third act reunion between a twenty-something looking mother and her now elderly, barely cognizant daughter it’s not like the other two women at the center of this blood-sucking maelstrom are given much to do.
Additionally, for as much fun as Gansel and fellow writer Jan Berger have playing with vampire convention, at a certain places there aren’t a lot of places for this film to go. You know how it has to end, have a good idea of what the consequences of Louise and Lena’s deathly dance macabre is going to be. There is little surprise to the outcome, and as energetically and as enthusiastically as this final confrontation is choreographed and displayed there is a humdrum familiarity to it that takes away some of the viscerally intense kick and denudes the suspense.
Not that I particularly care. All the actors here are excellent, especially Herfurth, Hoss and Ulrich, each of them enlivening their scenes in a way that had my eyes glued to the screen. Gansel directs with an electric confidence, and even when he’s treading familiar waters he does so in a way that’s always a bit off-center and a little outside of the norm. There are tons of great visual asides and idiosyncratic quirks I totally adored (Lena learning to walk on walls being a particularly awesome one), while the aura of sexually intense hostility he manages to generate between his protagonist is virtually sweltering.
It’s a vampire film, yes, and one where a seemingly lost soul is given the power and the freedom she’s always desired only to discover the plusses aren’t worth the price to her humanity. I’ve seen this story before, many times, and there’s not a lot story-wise keeping We Are the Night from being a forgotten direct-to-DVD throwaway. But the performances are so good, the directing so strong and the film itself so much fun it doesn’t matter that originality isn’t as strong as it arguably could have been. I liked this movie, liked it a lot to be perfectly frank, and if Gansel did make a second one (which I totally doubt) I’d be willing to sink my teeth into it without a second thought whatsoever.
Lena (Karoline Herfurth) isn’t doing well. The 18-year-old teen is on probation for a number of crimes, not the least of which is for being a particularly skilled pickpocket, using the fruits of her labor to keep herself clothed in rags and barely fed. She been battered and bruised by life in a way most people couldn’t understand, and although there’s a sunny personality just underneath surface trying to break free – a personality intelligent and attractive vice detective Tom Serner (Max Riemelt) got a fleeting glance at during a random bridge-side encounter – it’s going to take an act of God or the hand of fate to see it blossom.
Make that a pair of teeth. Sexy Louise (Nina Hoss) has been around for longer than she cares to admit, looking for women like former silent movie siren Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) and rambunctious 1980’s teenybopper Nora (Anna Fischer) to become her immortal companions. She spies Lena by chance, the lost young woman inadvertently wandering into her underground Berlin industrial nightclub, and the moment she does she the insatiable love-starved blonde knows she must have her.
German import We Are the Night is an old school return to vampire norms in the vein of The Lost Boys except with an obvious twist in regards to the gender of the principals. Beginning with a totally kick-ass bang 10,000-feet up in the air, and concluding with a giddily silly allusion to a potential second chapter that will unquestionably never see the moonlight of night, I had so much fun watching this exercise in gory genre silliness I almost don’t know where to begin. The bottom line? Director and co-writer Dennis Gansel (Before the Fall) has made a seriously entertaining motion picture, and one I’m almost certain to add to my hi-def library when it hits Blu-ray at some point later this year.
Does that make it perfect? Heck no. There are undeniable leaps in both logic and continuity that are as harebrained as they are unfortunate. Other than the central relationships Lena has with both Louise and Tom the remainder of the characters remain sadly ephemeral, and other than a wonderful third act reunion between a twenty-something looking mother and her now elderly, barely cognizant daughter it’s not like the other two women at the center of this blood-sucking maelstrom are given much to do.
Additionally, for as much fun as Gansel and fellow writer Jan Berger have playing with vampire convention, at a certain places there aren’t a lot of places for this film to go. You know how it has to end, have a good idea of what the consequences of Louise and Lena’s deathly dance macabre is going to be. There is little surprise to the outcome, and as energetically and as enthusiastically as this final confrontation is choreographed and displayed there is a humdrum familiarity to it that takes away some of the viscerally intense kick and denudes the suspense.
Not that I particularly care. All the actors here are excellent, especially Herfurth, Hoss and Ulrich, each of them enlivening their scenes in a way that had my eyes glued to the screen. Gansel directs with an electric confidence, and even when he’s treading familiar waters he does so in a way that’s always a bit off-center and a little outside of the norm. There are tons of great visual asides and idiosyncratic quirks I totally adored (Lena learning to walk on walls being a particularly awesome one), while the aura of sexually intense hostility he manages to generate between his protagonist is virtually sweltering.
It’s a vampire film, yes, and one where a seemingly lost soul is given the power and the freedom she’s always desired only to discover the plusses aren’t worth the price to her humanity. I’ve seen this story before, many times, and there’s not a lot story-wise keeping We Are the Night from being a forgotten direct-to-DVD throwaway. But the performances are so good, the directing so strong and the film itself so much fun it doesn’t matter that originality isn’t as strong as it arguably could have been. I liked this movie, liked it a lot to be perfectly frank, and if Gansel did make a second one (which I totally doubt) I’d be willing to sink my teeth into it without a second thought whatsoever.
MOVIE REVIEW - "Kung Fu Panda 2"
Subdued Panda Returns to Kick Butt
Thanks to Dragon Warrior Po (voiced by Jack Black) and the members of the Furious Five Tigress (voiced by Angelina Jolie), Monkey (voiced by Jackie Chan), Mantis (voiced by Seth Rogen), Viper (voiced by Lucy Liu) and Crane (voiced by David Cross) the Valley of Peace is at, well, peace, their collective awesomeness allowing tranquility to blossom. But when word reaches Master Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman) that the whole of China and Kung Fu itself is in desperate danger thanks to the machinations of the evil peacock Lord Shen (voiced by Gary Oldman), Po and the gang must travel across the whole of the country in order to thwart his plans.
It goes without saying that Kung Fu Panda 2 does not cast the same spell as its 2008 predecessor. The surprise is gone, only anticipation remaining, an eager wish that this summertime animated sequel could somehow be as mesmerizing and as enjoyable the original magically proved to be.
While not as fresh or as inspired as the first film, this second chapter in roly-poly panda Po’s journey is not without its charms. By focusing on the rotund kung fu master’s parental saga, by telling the story of how he came to become the son of noodle-making goose Mr. Ping (voiced by James Hong), the movie is a sweetly sentimental peon to family and how DNA alone does not always make a loving father. Their bond, their love, their story is the one that drives this sequel forward, and for all the action-packed pyrotechnics it is this emotional familial anecdote that ultimately allows this one to resonate.
At the same time, the central adventure at the center of all this is beyond thin. Even at a brisk 90-minutes there is a heck of a lot of filler, the majority of the characters given very little to do other than to kick a little butt and assist Po as he slowly trudges towards his ultimate showdown with Lord Shen. The plot is completely laid on the table in the first ten or fifteen minutes, and by and large it doesn’t get anymore developed as the film goes along. The middle portions trudge along from set piece to set piece, and as eye-popping and as spectacular as many of them are there isn’t a ton nuance or dimensionality (or for that matter surprise) to the central narrative itself.
Not that this sequel isn’t without plenty of merit. The action sequences are stunning, the animation as good as anything DreamWorks has ever delivered. There is some great vocal work by newcomers Oldman and Michelle Yeoh (playing a prescient goat named The Soothsayer), and I really dug the stuff regarding Po, Mr. Ping and the panda’s awakening to his family’s – and his original village’s – most unspeakable tragedy. The final confrontation is suitably thrilling, and the reunion between father and son at the end actually brought a small tear to my eye.
But there is a lot that doesn’t quite cut it. Some potentially interesting new characters like kung fu legends Master Oxen (voiced by Dennis Haysbert) and Master Croc (voiced Jean-Claude Van Damme) are given little of interest to do, while returning members of the Furious Five Monkey, Mantis, Viper and Crane might as well not be in the movie at all. As I’ve already said there is a heck of a lot of padding helping this reach feature length, while the closing setup for a future sequel is more annoying then it is anything else.
Not that any of this matters. For the most part Kung Fu Panda 2 manages to get the job done, and while the magic of the original has been diminished there is still just enough of it to allow this sequel to entertain. More importantly, the kids in the preview audience I saw it with couldn’t get enough of the darn thing, Po kicking just enough butt to make the idea of a third adventure one I am perfectly comfortable with.
Thanks to Dragon Warrior Po (voiced by Jack Black) and the members of the Furious Five Tigress (voiced by Angelina Jolie), Monkey (voiced by Jackie Chan), Mantis (voiced by Seth Rogen), Viper (voiced by Lucy Liu) and Crane (voiced by David Cross) the Valley of Peace is at, well, peace, their collective awesomeness allowing tranquility to blossom. But when word reaches Master Shifu (voiced by Dustin Hoffman) that the whole of China and Kung Fu itself is in desperate danger thanks to the machinations of the evil peacock Lord Shen (voiced by Gary Oldman), Po and the gang must travel across the whole of the country in order to thwart his plans.
It goes without saying that Kung Fu Panda 2 does not cast the same spell as its 2008 predecessor. The surprise is gone, only anticipation remaining, an eager wish that this summertime animated sequel could somehow be as mesmerizing and as enjoyable the original magically proved to be.
While not as fresh or as inspired as the first film, this second chapter in roly-poly panda Po’s journey is not without its charms. By focusing on the rotund kung fu master’s parental saga, by telling the story of how he came to become the son of noodle-making goose Mr. Ping (voiced by James Hong), the movie is a sweetly sentimental peon to family and how DNA alone does not always make a loving father. Their bond, their love, their story is the one that drives this sequel forward, and for all the action-packed pyrotechnics it is this emotional familial anecdote that ultimately allows this one to resonate.
At the same time, the central adventure at the center of all this is beyond thin. Even at a brisk 90-minutes there is a heck of a lot of filler, the majority of the characters given very little to do other than to kick a little butt and assist Po as he slowly trudges towards his ultimate showdown with Lord Shen. The plot is completely laid on the table in the first ten or fifteen minutes, and by and large it doesn’t get anymore developed as the film goes along. The middle portions trudge along from set piece to set piece, and as eye-popping and as spectacular as many of them are there isn’t a ton nuance or dimensionality (or for that matter surprise) to the central narrative itself.
Not that this sequel isn’t without plenty of merit. The action sequences are stunning, the animation as good as anything DreamWorks has ever delivered. There is some great vocal work by newcomers Oldman and Michelle Yeoh (playing a prescient goat named The Soothsayer), and I really dug the stuff regarding Po, Mr. Ping and the panda’s awakening to his family’s – and his original village’s – most unspeakable tragedy. The final confrontation is suitably thrilling, and the reunion between father and son at the end actually brought a small tear to my eye.
But there is a lot that doesn’t quite cut it. Some potentially interesting new characters like kung fu legends Master Oxen (voiced by Dennis Haysbert) and Master Croc (voiced Jean-Claude Van Damme) are given little of interest to do, while returning members of the Furious Five Monkey, Mantis, Viper and Crane might as well not be in the movie at all. As I’ve already said there is a heck of a lot of padding helping this reach feature length, while the closing setup for a future sequel is more annoying then it is anything else.
Not that any of this matters. For the most part Kung Fu Panda 2 manages to get the job done, and while the magic of the original has been diminished there is still just enough of it to allow this sequel to entertain. More importantly, the kids in the preview audience I saw it with couldn’t get enough of the darn thing, Po kicking just enough butt to make the idea of a third adventure one I am perfectly comfortable with.
Monday, May 30, 2011
"Codependent" and Loving It
First off, I’ve been remiss this year updating the SIFF Blog. For that I apologize. I have no decent excuse other than to say being unemployed sans day job and trying to balance freelance deadlines, as well as going to plenty of festival movies and interviewing a bunch of filmmakers, my attention as far as the blog has been concerned hasn’t exactly been front and center. Again, not a good an excuse, but an excuse all the same, so please make of it what you will.
As for updating now, the film that struck my fancy and one I feel needs a bit of attention is the weird Woody Allen meets Ed Wood meets “Scooby-Doo” meets Men In Black romantic comedy Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek (she’s the coauthor of the pretty great book A Practical Handbook for the Actor, which I totally didn’t realize until a few days after seeing her movie), the movie is a sweetly off-center Black and White low budget frolic that’s one part Manhattan, one part Plan 9 from Outer Space and one part it’s own entirely unique schizophrenic self. It got my attention, and while I can’t say it’s remotely perfect that doesn’t mean I didn’t end up enjoying myself any bit less.
The basic setup concerns a trio of lesbian space aliens named Zoinx (Susan Ziegler), Barr (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (Jackie Monahan) sent to Earth to have their hearts broken and thus make them incapable of feeling. Why? Back on their home world conventional science says that inhabitants are feeling to much, love filling them up so completely that their emotions are leaving their bodies and destroying the ozone layer. How to fix it? Go to Earth, get into a relationship and end it as brutally as possible, destroying your capacity to feel and thusly saving the ozone layer.
Here on our planet there is lonely greeting-card store clerk Jane (Lisa Haas), a shy, rather dowdy introvert who is too scared to act on her emotions whenever she catches someone’s eye. She ends up meeting Zoinx and is immediately taken with her forthright cavalier personality, trying to come out of her shell while at the same time figuring out this bizarre bald-headed woman’s impulsively nonplussed extroverted personality.
So it takes a little while to get going, the first 15 or 20 minutes not playing as well as I’d have liked them to. Additionally, an oddball pair of secret government agents staking out the aliens doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting, and although some of the conversations did get me to giggle (especially one revolving around the gender status of the elder agent’s wife) really all the scenes between the two did was pad this sitcom meets “Saturday Night Live” premise to feature length.
Be all that as it may, I liked this film. I loved the interplay between Haas and Ziegler, while a scene in an apartment complex hallway between Kaplan and Monahan is an absolute knockout in regards to its emotional sincerity. There are some seriously delicious sight gags, one of which involving a rotating desert case that got me to laugh out loud. Most importantly, what the films says about relationships – not gay relationships but all relationships – is absolutely priceless, making the movie something a timeless keepsake that should make it worth revisiting one, five or even ten years down the line.
I sat down with Olnek and Monahan at Seattle’s downtown W Hotel for what was supposed to be brief chat. But was supposed to be a few minutes quickly transformed into three-quarters of an hour, the three of us chatting about everything and anything forgetting about the time altogether. It was a great conversation, and while I’d like to go into all of it in detail as far as this blog is concerned I’m thinking I should keep things relatively brief.
Monahan, a local favorite at some of New York’s most prestigious comedy clubs including The Laugh Factory, The Comedy Store and Caroline’s on Broadway, wasn’t quite sure what to make of her director once she signed on for the film. “She does everything her own way,” says the actress and comedienne. “I didn’t get to read the whole script. [Madeline] just told me the premise of it [and] had me look at shorts that she did.”
“The shorts I loved, and I liked the idea of the movie, but it was odd not being allowed to read a finished script. But if she [hadn’t] done the shorts I don’t think I’d have been as gung ho about it. While we were filming I just had a script filled with my scenes, and the first time I saw the whole movie and knew the whole idea was when I saw it at Sundance.”
“That was my way of disorienting her,” laughs Olnek. “But Woody Allen does that, only allows his cast the parts of the script featuring their character, and a lot of the times the actors plot together to try and get the parts of the script that they don’t have. I thought that was very interesting when I found that out because I think for the comedy part of it the excitement comes from the idea, the freshness of it, and if you have it [the whole story] than some people plot it all out in their heads and the spontaneity of the humor can be lost. It makes the spark die down. I didn’t want that to happen here.”
So where did this idea come from? How does a filmmaker connect the dots between Ed Wood, 1950’s kitsch sci-fi cinema, Woody Allen and lesbian romance?
“Where’s the lesbian Dude, Where’s My Car?, why can’t we for political reasons assert our right to have a good time?” says Olnek with a smile. “Apart from that, I guess I kind of a felt that once you come out and once you own what you want those feelings can be a floodgate of feelings. Some people have described them as being a kid in a candy store period. But once you’re no longer in denial and once you’re owning your identity it feels like the whole world has changed and everything just feels so much bigger.”
“From there in writing [the script] I had this thought that once you’re acknowledging what you’re feeling and you’re aware of it and it can feel so big that this crush is so much bigger than [a single person], that you can see it for yourself. They’re not my feelings, that they’re so large they’re in the environment. They’re permeating the atmosphere.”
“From there, I came up with the idea of this planet where it was believed that when the [inhabitants] felt too much their feelings would rise up out of their body and effect the ozone layer so they would have to be sent to Earth and have their hearts broken. And all the overly emotional people just happened to be lesbians.”
“Since I’ve been young I’ve liked surprises,” adds Monahan, “and this movie offered plenty of opportunity to be surprised. It was a challenge but it was also really exciting, and while I was tempted to try and find out what was going on and to ask the other actresses [about their scenes] I was able to restrain myself. It’s like Christmas. My mom would tell me to not sneak into the closet to find out what my presents were and I never really did. Because of that, I enjoyed the process of making this film.”
One of the reasons I ended up becoming so enamored with the film was that, even with its faults, even with portions that sat there like a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit searching for a reason to continue, the central romantic metaphors all rang true. In many ways Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is the antithesis of so many LGBT-themed films. It presents these romances as normal, as everyday, as nothing to get all crazy hot and bothered about. It showcases a world that hopefully, ten years from now, 20 years from now, will be a reality, and the fact that it is about women in love with one another doesn’t even enter into a person’s thought process. I like that the movie lives in a world that just is while also hinting at a world that might be, presenting the search for love as a normal everyday conundrum all of us – male, female and everything in-between – can relate to.
“I think that’s beautifully stated,” beams the director. “I think that’s what gives people hope. When you talk about what people are going to think when watching this movie, what lesbians are going to think, what kids are going to think, by telling a story that’s hopeful affects people in a way that’s positive and I think they take that hope away with them.”
“I hope people are still watching it 30 years from now,” says Monahan matter-of-factly. “I think people will. I think it’s timeless. I just think it’s an enjoyable movie and that people will want to watch it. But I also hope that, as times change, it’s not as relevant as it is now, that it will be seen as a romantic comedy and not a film [about lesbians]. It’s timeless in its humor and with the relationships, and I hope – I think – people will [take note] of that.”
“It’s about the search for love and it’s about how scary that is,” adds Olnek. “The essence of it is something that will last. At one point we thought about putting more topical stuff in, thought about having an alien carrying a newspaper with headlines about gay marriage votes and the like. But in the end the central metaphor is still there and we didn’t need the specifics. We feel it’s an eternal story, the search for love, and we definitely see years from now people will hopefully still be watching it.”
As for updating now, the film that struck my fancy and one I feel needs a bit of attention is the weird Woody Allen meets Ed Wood meets “Scooby-Doo” meets Men In Black romantic comedy Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same. Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek (she’s the coauthor of the pretty great book A Practical Handbook for the Actor, which I totally didn’t realize until a few days after seeing her movie), the movie is a sweetly off-center Black and White low budget frolic that’s one part Manhattan, one part Plan 9 from Outer Space and one part it’s own entirely unique schizophrenic self. It got my attention, and while I can’t say it’s remotely perfect that doesn’t mean I didn’t end up enjoying myself any bit less.
The basic setup concerns a trio of lesbian space aliens named Zoinx (Susan Ziegler), Barr (Cynthia Kaplan) and Zylar (Jackie Monahan) sent to Earth to have their hearts broken and thus make them incapable of feeling. Why? Back on their home world conventional science says that inhabitants are feeling to much, love filling them up so completely that their emotions are leaving their bodies and destroying the ozone layer. How to fix it? Go to Earth, get into a relationship and end it as brutally as possible, destroying your capacity to feel and thusly saving the ozone layer.
Here on our planet there is lonely greeting-card store clerk Jane (Lisa Haas), a shy, rather dowdy introvert who is too scared to act on her emotions whenever she catches someone’s eye. She ends up meeting Zoinx and is immediately taken with her forthright cavalier personality, trying to come out of her shell while at the same time figuring out this bizarre bald-headed woman’s impulsively nonplussed extroverted personality.
So it takes a little while to get going, the first 15 or 20 minutes not playing as well as I’d have liked them to. Additionally, an oddball pair of secret government agents staking out the aliens doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting, and although some of the conversations did get me to giggle (especially one revolving around the gender status of the elder agent’s wife) really all the scenes between the two did was pad this sitcom meets “Saturday Night Live” premise to feature length.
Be all that as it may, I liked this film. I loved the interplay between Haas and Ziegler, while a scene in an apartment complex hallway between Kaplan and Monahan is an absolute knockout in regards to its emotional sincerity. There are some seriously delicious sight gags, one of which involving a rotating desert case that got me to laugh out loud. Most importantly, what the films says about relationships – not gay relationships but all relationships – is absolutely priceless, making the movie something a timeless keepsake that should make it worth revisiting one, five or even ten years down the line.
I sat down with Olnek and Monahan at Seattle’s downtown W Hotel for what was supposed to be brief chat. But was supposed to be a few minutes quickly transformed into three-quarters of an hour, the three of us chatting about everything and anything forgetting about the time altogether. It was a great conversation, and while I’d like to go into all of it in detail as far as this blog is concerned I’m thinking I should keep things relatively brief.
Monahan, a local favorite at some of New York’s most prestigious comedy clubs including The Laugh Factory, The Comedy Store and Caroline’s on Broadway, wasn’t quite sure what to make of her director once she signed on for the film. “She does everything her own way,” says the actress and comedienne. “I didn’t get to read the whole script. [Madeline] just told me the premise of it [and] had me look at shorts that she did.”
“The shorts I loved, and I liked the idea of the movie, but it was odd not being allowed to read a finished script. But if she [hadn’t] done the shorts I don’t think I’d have been as gung ho about it. While we were filming I just had a script filled with my scenes, and the first time I saw the whole movie and knew the whole idea was when I saw it at Sundance.”
“That was my way of disorienting her,” laughs Olnek. “But Woody Allen does that, only allows his cast the parts of the script featuring their character, and a lot of the times the actors plot together to try and get the parts of the script that they don’t have. I thought that was very interesting when I found that out because I think for the comedy part of it the excitement comes from the idea, the freshness of it, and if you have it [the whole story] than some people plot it all out in their heads and the spontaneity of the humor can be lost. It makes the spark die down. I didn’t want that to happen here.”
So where did this idea come from? How does a filmmaker connect the dots between Ed Wood, 1950’s kitsch sci-fi cinema, Woody Allen and lesbian romance?
“Where’s the lesbian Dude, Where’s My Car?, why can’t we for political reasons assert our right to have a good time?” says Olnek with a smile. “Apart from that, I guess I kind of a felt that once you come out and once you own what you want those feelings can be a floodgate of feelings. Some people have described them as being a kid in a candy store period. But once you’re no longer in denial and once you’re owning your identity it feels like the whole world has changed and everything just feels so much bigger.”
“From there in writing [the script] I had this thought that once you’re acknowledging what you’re feeling and you’re aware of it and it can feel so big that this crush is so much bigger than [a single person], that you can see it for yourself. They’re not my feelings, that they’re so large they’re in the environment. They’re permeating the atmosphere.”
“From there, I came up with the idea of this planet where it was believed that when the [inhabitants] felt too much their feelings would rise up out of their body and effect the ozone layer so they would have to be sent to Earth and have their hearts broken. And all the overly emotional people just happened to be lesbians.”
“Since I’ve been young I’ve liked surprises,” adds Monahan, “and this movie offered plenty of opportunity to be surprised. It was a challenge but it was also really exciting, and while I was tempted to try and find out what was going on and to ask the other actresses [about their scenes] I was able to restrain myself. It’s like Christmas. My mom would tell me to not sneak into the closet to find out what my presents were and I never really did. Because of that, I enjoyed the process of making this film.”
One of the reasons I ended up becoming so enamored with the film was that, even with its faults, even with portions that sat there like a bad “Saturday Night Live” skit searching for a reason to continue, the central romantic metaphors all rang true. In many ways Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same is the antithesis of so many LGBT-themed films. It presents these romances as normal, as everyday, as nothing to get all crazy hot and bothered about. It showcases a world that hopefully, ten years from now, 20 years from now, will be a reality, and the fact that it is about women in love with one another doesn’t even enter into a person’s thought process. I like that the movie lives in a world that just is while also hinting at a world that might be, presenting the search for love as a normal everyday conundrum all of us – male, female and everything in-between – can relate to.
“I think that’s beautifully stated,” beams the director. “I think that’s what gives people hope. When you talk about what people are going to think when watching this movie, what lesbians are going to think, what kids are going to think, by telling a story that’s hopeful affects people in a way that’s positive and I think they take that hope away with them.”
“I hope people are still watching it 30 years from now,” says Monahan matter-of-factly. “I think people will. I think it’s timeless. I just think it’s an enjoyable movie and that people will want to watch it. But I also hope that, as times change, it’s not as relevant as it is now, that it will be seen as a romantic comedy and not a film [about lesbians]. It’s timeless in its humor and with the relationships, and I hope – I think – people will [take note] of that.”
“It’s about the search for love and it’s about how scary that is,” adds Olnek. “The essence of it is something that will last. At one point we thought about putting more topical stuff in, thought about having an alien carrying a newspaper with headlines about gay marriage votes and the like. But in the end the central metaphor is still there and we didn’t need the specifics. We feel it’s an eternal story, the search for love, and we definitely see years from now people will hopefully still be watching it.”
Friday, May 20, 2011
Welcome to SIFF 2011 - an Interview with Artistic Director Carl Spence
With the start of the 37th annual Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) last night with the local premier of the crowd-pleasing The First Grader, I thought it would be fun to again take a moment to sit down with Artistic Director Carl Spence and talk about what audiences can expect from this year’s 25-day event. “It does always seem to come around quickly,” chuckled Spence as we began are chat. “We started working on this year’s festival in earnest in last September, but in reality sometimes it feels like we started yesterday.”
While the size and the scope are as audacious and as massive as ever (257 features, 184 shorts, 74 countries represented), there have been some changes to this year’s festival that might take some filmgoers a bit of getting used to. For many, the biggest change to SIFF will be the introduction of the “Pathways,” ten different categories that programmers hope will help audiences organize their film-going calendar based on their likes, interests and moods. These Pathways are split up into the likes of, “Love Me, Do!”, “Sci-Fi and Beyond,” “Face the Music” and “Spellbinding Stories,” all fairly self-explanatory as far as describing the sorts of features might be residing within.
“We’ve not really changed the programming, per se,” explains Spence, “but we have changed how we’re trying to deliver information. We are focusing on these Pathways as an attempt to potentially diversify our audiences, trying to help people not get overwhelmed by the enormous size of the festival and the enormous amount of choices they have. How can we help the larger audience the programming better? How can we help people discover a film they might not otherwise have chosen? For the Pathways, it is about helping a person choose what type of the film they might want to see at that particular moment.”
“I’m excited about films in each of the Pathways. The ‘Love Me, Do!’ is really interesting because it’s not just about romance, it’s also about love in all forms whether it be father-son relationships or relationships between lifelong friends. My favorite film, probably, Weekend from the U.K., is in [this Pathway]. It just captivated me; made me really believe in the idea of romance again. Not that I’d forgotten completely, but anyone who is married or has been in a long-term relationship it [the film] just reminds how love can be such a great journey.”
One of the areas Carl is particularly proud of is this year’s lineup of LGBT themed motion pictures. Running the gamut of genres and topics, this is one area of the festival the artistic director couldn’t talk more exuberantly about.
“The selections this year are pretty diverse,” he says. “Do You See Colors When You Close Your Eyes? made in Bellingham is an interesting film. There’s Beginners with Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer and written and directed by Mike Mills; it’s a really great film.”
“We also have something interesting from Algeria, A Few Days of Respite, where a professor and his lover pursue a relationship in a place where to do so is a death sentence. There’s also the amazingly titled Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same from the U.S., and I think one people will really find interesting is Man at Bath from [director] Christophe Honoré. It’s a touching poem of love and relationships; it’s very French. And then there is our annual Gay-La film, August, which this year is a World Premier and one I think people will be excited about.”
Carl talking about Beginners leads me to ask about this year’s tribute guests, the aforementioned Ewan McGregor and esteemed extreme sports filmmaker and adventurer Warren Miller whom SIFF is bestowing a Golden Space Needle for Lifetime Achievement. Both have proven themselves in the entertainment world, one with his daring performances and the other by his six-plus decades of showcasing outdoor wintertime excitement in all its Widescreen fury.
“Warren Miller my not be as appreciated by the traditional film industry but he is a true pioneer,” states Spence. “He went were others had never gone. He broke ground, creating the sports-action film before there was even such a genre. He’s a masterful storyteller, a great filmmaker, so I think it makes total sense to look at his career and to honor his work, especially because he has such a strong connection to the Northwest. It was just time.”
“Ewan McGregor is just someone I’ve and others have admired for many, many years. Trainspotting was a huge hit here at [SIFF] and won the Golden Space Needle audience award for Best Film, was the first award Danny Boyle ever got. With McGregor, he has such an amazing reach, and I think all four films we’re screening showcase that. There’s Beginners, obviously, and there’s Perfect Sense which is sort of a post-apocalyptic love story. As for older selections, we’re showing The Pillow Book, which is arguably one of [director] Peter Greenaway’s best films but also showcases an amazing performance from McGregor; he brought so much to that. And Moulin Rouge!. You kind of have to show Moulin Rouge!. But then, that’s just a sampling of what he’s done and the type of rolls he’s had. We’d show more if we could.”
As in previous years, SIFF strives to showcase the cinematic world at all of its levels. From low budget no-name indies, to unheralded foreign imports, to large-scale Hollywood productions like Kung Fu Panda 2, programmers go out of their way to represent every facet of the filmmaking experience.
“It’s part of what makes us different,” says Spence. “That’s my philosophy. Celebrate film as well as [celebrate] movies, whatever that difference might be. I think there are great films and there are great movies. We’re just looking for interesting films that for whatever reason we love with a passion and feel like tell a good story; that’s the most important part.”
“But we’re also focused on the audience. We’re audience-driven. We have a lot of sponsors but they’re not huge, dollar amount sponsors so we rely on the audience. We depend on the audience to make things happen. If we don’t cater to the audience in some extent then we’re not [going to succeed]. It’s a balance in having films that people might be interested [in], films people are dying to see and films we want people to go see that they might not have discovered or heard about otherwise.”
Programming SIFF is a massive job, and as Artistic Director it is one Carl has been focused on for quite a few years now. Thing is, as exhaustive as it can be, it isn’t a job the cool-headed film lover sees himself relinquishing anytime soon.
“I think I’ll want to keep doing this until I get bored,” responds Spence, “and I’m not close to being bored as of yet. I’ve been doing a lot of interesting things, looking at ways to do things differently so we’re just not doing the same thing over and over and over again every year. I think I have one of the best jobs I could have so as long as I stay in Seattle I don’t see another job that I could have in film I’d love or enjoy doing near as much. No matter what I do I think I want to always stay involved in the arts. I can’t think of anything else that I would want to do.”
- Portions of this artical reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Moviefreak.com is proud to present our 6th annual coverage of this 37th edition of the Seattle International Film Festival. Starting today and running all the way until June 13, please check our Blog for reviews, thoughts, interviews and highlights of this year’s events as seen through Sara’s increasingly-bleary eyes. For the best, most complete coverage of one of the most popular and the largest film festivals in the entire world, your number one destination is right here at Moviefreak.com.
While the size and the scope are as audacious and as massive as ever (257 features, 184 shorts, 74 countries represented), there have been some changes to this year’s festival that might take some filmgoers a bit of getting used to. For many, the biggest change to SIFF will be the introduction of the “Pathways,” ten different categories that programmers hope will help audiences organize their film-going calendar based on their likes, interests and moods. These Pathways are split up into the likes of, “Love Me, Do!”, “Sci-Fi and Beyond,” “Face the Music” and “Spellbinding Stories,” all fairly self-explanatory as far as describing the sorts of features might be residing within.
“We’ve not really changed the programming, per se,” explains Spence, “but we have changed how we’re trying to deliver information. We are focusing on these Pathways as an attempt to potentially diversify our audiences, trying to help people not get overwhelmed by the enormous size of the festival and the enormous amount of choices they have. How can we help the larger audience the programming better? How can we help people discover a film they might not otherwise have chosen? For the Pathways, it is about helping a person choose what type of the film they might want to see at that particular moment.”
“I’m excited about films in each of the Pathways. The ‘Love Me, Do!’ is really interesting because it’s not just about romance, it’s also about love in all forms whether it be father-son relationships or relationships between lifelong friends. My favorite film, probably, Weekend from the U.K., is in [this Pathway]. It just captivated me; made me really believe in the idea of romance again. Not that I’d forgotten completely, but anyone who is married or has been in a long-term relationship it [the film] just reminds how love can be such a great journey.”
One of the areas Carl is particularly proud of is this year’s lineup of LGBT themed motion pictures. Running the gamut of genres and topics, this is one area of the festival the artistic director couldn’t talk more exuberantly about.
“The selections this year are pretty diverse,” he says. “Do You See Colors When You Close Your Eyes? made in Bellingham is an interesting film. There’s Beginners with Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer and written and directed by Mike Mills; it’s a really great film.”
“We also have something interesting from Algeria, A Few Days of Respite, where a professor and his lover pursue a relationship in a place where to do so is a death sentence. There’s also the amazingly titled Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same from the U.S., and I think one people will really find interesting is Man at Bath from [director] Christophe Honoré. It’s a touching poem of love and relationships; it’s very French. And then there is our annual Gay-La film, August, which this year is a World Premier and one I think people will be excited about.”
Carl talking about Beginners leads me to ask about this year’s tribute guests, the aforementioned Ewan McGregor and esteemed extreme sports filmmaker and adventurer Warren Miller whom SIFF is bestowing a Golden Space Needle for Lifetime Achievement. Both have proven themselves in the entertainment world, one with his daring performances and the other by his six-plus decades of showcasing outdoor wintertime excitement in all its Widescreen fury.
“Warren Miller my not be as appreciated by the traditional film industry but he is a true pioneer,” states Spence. “He went were others had never gone. He broke ground, creating the sports-action film before there was even such a genre. He’s a masterful storyteller, a great filmmaker, so I think it makes total sense to look at his career and to honor his work, especially because he has such a strong connection to the Northwest. It was just time.”
“Ewan McGregor is just someone I’ve and others have admired for many, many years. Trainspotting was a huge hit here at [SIFF] and won the Golden Space Needle audience award for Best Film, was the first award Danny Boyle ever got. With McGregor, he has such an amazing reach, and I think all four films we’re screening showcase that. There’s Beginners, obviously, and there’s Perfect Sense which is sort of a post-apocalyptic love story. As for older selections, we’re showing The Pillow Book, which is arguably one of [director] Peter Greenaway’s best films but also showcases an amazing performance from McGregor; he brought so much to that. And Moulin Rouge!. You kind of have to show Moulin Rouge!. But then, that’s just a sampling of what he’s done and the type of rolls he’s had. We’d show more if we could.”
As in previous years, SIFF strives to showcase the cinematic world at all of its levels. From low budget no-name indies, to unheralded foreign imports, to large-scale Hollywood productions like Kung Fu Panda 2, programmers go out of their way to represent every facet of the filmmaking experience.
“It’s part of what makes us different,” says Spence. “That’s my philosophy. Celebrate film as well as [celebrate] movies, whatever that difference might be. I think there are great films and there are great movies. We’re just looking for interesting films that for whatever reason we love with a passion and feel like tell a good story; that’s the most important part.”
“But we’re also focused on the audience. We’re audience-driven. We have a lot of sponsors but they’re not huge, dollar amount sponsors so we rely on the audience. We depend on the audience to make things happen. If we don’t cater to the audience in some extent then we’re not [going to succeed]. It’s a balance in having films that people might be interested [in], films people are dying to see and films we want people to go see that they might not have discovered or heard about otherwise.”
Programming SIFF is a massive job, and as Artistic Director it is one Carl has been focused on for quite a few years now. Thing is, as exhaustive as it can be, it isn’t a job the cool-headed film lover sees himself relinquishing anytime soon.
“I think I’ll want to keep doing this until I get bored,” responds Spence, “and I’m not close to being bored as of yet. I’ve been doing a lot of interesting things, looking at ways to do things differently so we’re just not doing the same thing over and over and over again every year. I think I have one of the best jobs I could have so as long as I stay in Seattle I don’t see another job that I could have in film I’d love or enjoy doing near as much. No matter what I do I think I want to always stay involved in the arts. I can’t think of anything else that I would want to do.”
- Portions of this artical reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Moviefreak.com is proud to present our 6th annual coverage of this 37th edition of the Seattle International Film Festival. Starting today and running all the way until June 13, please check our Blog for reviews, thoughts, interviews and highlights of this year’s events as seen through Sara’s increasingly-bleary eyes. For the best, most complete coverage of one of the most popular and the largest film festivals in the entire world, your number one destination is right here at Moviefreak.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)