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May 30, 2014

Filth

Grade: C-

*This review was originally published at Movie Mezzanine.

Telling a story entirely through the perspective of a film’s main character is a tricky proposition if that character is a drug-addled, hallucinating, misogynist wreck of a human being. Such filmmaking is tantamount to daring the audience to endure a high-tempo, stylistically overbearing exercise in full and leave the theatre with their sanity intact. “Enter the mind of this wretched man and exit exactly like him” seems to be what Filth, Jon S. Baird’s take on the Irvine Welsh novel of the same name, instructs us to do. This is an adaptation that doubles down on Welsh’s already raucous prose and delivers a film that slowly tightens its noose around the audience’s neck before finally kicking them off the chair.

Bruce Robertson (James McAvoy) is the center of the film’s universe, the man whose perspective we share. Filth takes two parallel but separate routes in defining this character –both ‘character’ and ‘defining’ used very loosely here: the first through his daily routines in the police force and the second through hallucinatory flashbacks. The former shows him to be a corrupt cop who obliterates anything that blocks his path to self-satisfaction and gaining a promotion. He forces himself on underage women, consumes more drugs than seems humanly possible, sleeps with his colleagues’ wives and plays brutal, life-changing pranks on his coworkers; the latter, the flashbacks, show him to be a guilt-ridden father whose broken marriage has left him without the wife and child he seemingly loves despite himself. It is also implied that a childhood incident which led to the death of his brother has caused irreversible trauma.

Filth begins with Bruce’s assignment to a case involving the murder of a Japanese student by a violent gang of Edinburgh youth, but it is immediately evident that his mission is not solving the mystery, but fulfilling as many self-destructive, hedonistic desires as possible. These digressions from the original case are repeated multiple times, and combined with Bruce’s hallucinations, are designed to emulate his state of mind. Instead, they serve to divest the plot of any coherence. Neither the gradual exposition of Bruce’s past, nor the unyielding persistence with which his misdemeanor is portrayed can make his character believable or relatable.

May 13, 2014

The Possibilities Are Endless

Grade: B/B+

*This review was originally published at The Film Experience

 When Scottish singer-songwriter Edwyn Collins suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 2005, his movement became restricted, his memory was lost and his speech became limited to four phrases that he repeated over and over again: “yes,” “no,” “Grace Maxwell” (the name of his wife) and “the possibilities are endless.” There was little chance of him getting his health back on track, let alone restarting his career, but that last phrase in his small vocabulary proved to be prophetic. With the help of his ever-caring wife and son, Edwyn gradually began to piece his memories back together, took on painting and slowly began to form new sentences again, recalling and even singing his old lyrics.

Edwyn’s story is a tear-jerker and, packaged in a documentary film titled, aptly but unimaginatively, The Possibilities Are Endless, it raises red flags for audiences averse to emotionally charged collections of heartfelt talking head interviews so prevalent in documentary cinema. Fortunately, there is no sign of that in Edward Lovelace and James Hall’s film, an astonishing work that subverts all expectations of formal construction, while painting an empathetic and incisive portrayal of the singer’s life.

In tracing Edwyn’s process of regaining his memories, the film adopts his point of view, manufacturing a sensory experience akin to his perspective of interacting with the Scottish landscapes of his home. Sleekly photographed and expertly cut, Possibilities combines archival footage on grainy film recordings from Edwyn’s life with digitally shot, haunting images of the misty highlands and recreations of his youth starring his son. The framing breaks Edwyn’s current state into fragments, focusing on the empty spaces as he stares off into space and picks up details that others dismiss. Then it reverts to expansive long shots of his hometown and the eerie presence of the calm seaside. The film is strictly defined spatially, but paradoxically, the empty spaces and the frightening sameness of nature embody Edwyn’s struggle to place his past.

It’s a hypnotic experience, and an utterly heartbreaking one. It’s difficult to hold back tears as we watch Edwyn fail to recount simple anecdotes, mistake numbers and memories for one another and remain helplessly passive in a studio he had once built. Possibilities does a brilliant job of immersing the audience in his struggle, making his gradual liberation all the more meaningful, but it does so by avoiding sentimentality. The audience is invited to live Edwyn’s experience and ruminate on his surroundings. The resulting experience is almost spiritual, one that leaves the audience thinking differently about life itself. The struggle we witness is all Edwyn’s, the catharsis is ours.

May 11, 2014

The Double

Grade: B+

*This review was originally published on Movie Mezzanine

The Double opens with a medium close-up shot of Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), seated in a moving train. The lights in the tunnel fill the frame intermittently, as do the eerily flickering lights in the train car. Simon seems lost in the disturbing harmony of the moment until silence is interrupted by a mysterious man telling him that he is occupying the man’s seat. The next shot shows the car to be nearly empty, but Simon complies with absolute meekness and spends the rest of the ride stood, leaving the seat to the man. This small interaction in the opening sequence summarizes the state of Simon’s life, his timid character and his infatuation with a coworker – a woman we first meet here as Simon’s gaze fixates on her through the small window to the adjacent car.

The Double is Richard Ayoade’s second feature film, following 2010’s cutesy and artfully designed Submarine. For his next try behind the camera, the British comedian has chosen to adapt Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella of the same name. In the original text, the protagonist Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin is a government employee. Here, renamed to Simon James, the man works at a mysterious company, the job of which few but Simon himself seem to understand. But the nature of the job isn’t of importance and neither are most other plot details. This is a film that conveys its story through atmosphere and mood, rather than sequential plot points. That we learn Simon’s project to be about regression analysis doesn’t tell us about the dull repetition of his job so much as the image of claustrophobic, identical cubicles in which he sits next to other nameless faces, clacking away on his keyboards as the maniacal manager Mr. Papadopoulos – a hysterically hilarious Wallace Shawn – imparts frequent wisdom about productivity.

Ayoade’s The Double is essentially timeless. It exists in a universe as much informed by Orwellian paranoia and Kafkaesque psychological terror as it is by Dostoevsky’s original text. This isn’t our contemporary office environment, nor is it of any particular time in the past. Then again, the specificities of time are unimportant, as this temporal ambiguity exaggerates the environment’s absurdity; shaping the mood is what Ayoade is aiming for. This office and Simon’s ghostly, unadorned apartment close in on the audience much as they do on Simon. Cinematographer Erik Wilson uses harsh lighting in minimal doses and leaves large portions of the frame in utter darkness, compounding the sense of mystery and extending Simon’s agitation to the audience.

May 7, 2014

Beyond Clueless

*This review was originally posted at The Film Experience as part of my coverage of the Hot Docs Film Festival.

Grade: B/B+
In the history of cinema, there are few genres that receive as little acclaim or critical analysis as the high school film does. British critic Charlie Lyne's (of Ultra Culture blog fame) visual essay is therefore a treasure for enthusiasts of recent film history. In Beyond Clueless, he examines teenage characters in a wide variety of films produced between 1996 and 2004. Little of the titular film is shown, though its influence over the films that came after it looms large. From The Craft to Mean Girls, from The Faculty to Rules of Attraction, via Spider-man, Final Destination and everything in between, the high school student is analyzed through the tumultuous process of entering that period of adolescence and exiting it unscathed and transformed.

Beyond Clueless itself takes on the narrative arc of a teen movie. Divided in five chapters that are designed to embody the high school experience, it begins with ‘Fitting In’ and ends with ‘Moving On.’ No new material is added to the clips taken from the films discussed, but crucially, the lengthy essay is narrated by Fairuza Balk, star of The Craft, whose somber but familiar voice instills the film a teen personality of its own. Although the study is academic in approach, what is beautiful about this documentary is it doesn’t rob its subjects – the epitome of plastic pop culture – of their romantic and nostalgic charm. It is as loving toward them as it is critical.

The framework for the experiment is the thematic similarities that connect the films: stories about being outcast, misfit, repressed or misunderstood. Sexuality plays as big a part in Beyond Clueless as it does in many depictions of teenagers in the films of the era, from the high-minded likes of American Beauty to allegorical camp like Idle Hands. Formal similarities are also explored as the film charts visual tropes and even shot by shot resemblances between the subjects – in one particular sequence, more than a dozen passionate kisses in swimming pools across different films highlight in equal measure the creative bankruptcy and the glorified fantastical ideas of romance in the high school film. Ultimately, Beyond Clueless is an incredibly personal experience to its young director. Having spent his adolescent years watching these films, his genuine enthusiasm for the material shines through the screen. Here are films that defined an era for cinephiles of a certain age, yet never receive a retrospective examination. That this director does so with such passion is a triumph, made all the better for its deep insight, sharp humour and careful structure.

May 1, 2014

April Screening Log

Emilie Dequenne in Rosetta

Before the Last Curtain Falls (Wallner, 2014, C+/B-)
The structure of the film - about a group of gay and transsexual performers organizing one last tour before they are too old to perform - gets repetitive near the end, but the heart is at the right place. This is a compassionate look at a cathartic, therapeutic experience for an unfairly marginalized group of people. 

Actress (Greene, 2014, B+) (review)
"Actress is a film about the line at which presented and represented realities meet, the point where performance becomes truth. That the film tackles these intricate concepts with vigorous formal inventiveness and a unique and fluid visual style makes it an exceptional treat. It belongs to that rare breed of documentary film that doesn’t content itself with merely observing its fascinating subject, but engages with it on a textual level."

A Dress Rehearsal For an Execution (Tavoosi, 2013, D+)
The idea of recreating a famous, politically charge image of an execution that defined its photographer as much as it drove him to a life in obscurity, using actors from socially oppressed backgrounds, is noble but the film fails to elicit any meaning from the exercise, or any emotions from the audience.

Children of Heaven (Majidi, 1998, B+)
The emotional beats, though never manipulative, are blatantly schematic, but the final fifteen minutes of the film redeem the faults of everything leading up to those moment. It is virtually impossible to finish Children of Heaven without tears streaming down one's face even after multiple viewings.

Hamoun (Mehrjui, 1990, A)
The troubled twentieth century struggle of the traditional Iranian society to accept, adopt and adapt to modernity and the complexities of defining women's new role in the post-Islamic revolution country are embodied in Mehrjui's articulate film. A measured study of the collective identity crisis caused by a nation's fixation on progress in the face of tradition.

Rosetta (Dardenne Brothers, 1999, A)
Economical in its visual approach and reticent in narration, the Dardenne brothers' tense, gritty and gripping portrayal of resilience and integrity in the face of destitution is the cream of the Palme d'or winning crop.

The Immigrant (Gray, 2014, B+/A-)
Gray's gold-saturated aesthetic evokes in the audience an unshakable sense of melancholia in the audience, not entirely unlike what the film's central trio feel about love, life, each other and the broken American dream in the 1920s New York.

Dash Akol (Kimiai, 1971, B+)
Sadegh Hedayat's original source novella is one of the landmarks of modern Iranian literature, a text that piercingly examines the culture of chivalry and the psyche of the Iranian man. Kimiai's adaptation captures the book's spirit and insight, and meticulously externalizes the text's entrenched social and religious identities through design, dialogue, music and performance.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014, Russo/Russo, C-)
Possibly the best entry so far in the Marvel cinematic universe, a fact that only speaks to the low standards the studio has set for itself. Structurally inept, visually nauseating and emotionally uninvolving, with a few good moments peppered few and far between.

The Father (Majidi, 1996, B-) (review)
The weakest of Majidi's four films about children, but an engaging effort nonetheless. The Father's examination of deep rooted patriarchy in rural Iran is precise and the performances by the central quartet are incredibly powerful but the finale undermines the film.

Gheisar (Kimiai, 1969, B+)
Hampered by technical errors, asynchronous sound and lack of proper restoration, Gheisar leaves a lot of to be desired formally, but as the defining feature of the popular 'Tough Guy' genre, its significance and appeal cannot be overstated. The thrills of the film and its iconic dialogue and performances hold up nearly five decades after it first charmed Iranians.

Argo (Affleck, 2012, C+)
Less and less rewarding on each new screening, Argo is reduced to a xenophobic, dull and cliched thriller. A self-congratulatory pat on the back for Hollywood with an infuriatingly myopic view of Iranians, the impression of political awareness and importance is a product of the film's impeccable design, but there isn't much to ponder beneath the surface.

Noah (Aronofsky, 2014, C+)
Aronosfky's vision of the story of Noah's Ark is as unique as it is bland. Aesthetically limited to the familiar confines of modern fantasy cinema, Noah is reasonably entertaining to sit through but it is surprising that this ideologically barren film has incited such intense reactions from religious groups.

A Time For Drunken Horses (Ghobadi, 2000, B+)
Ghobadi's formal decisions are at times overtly calculated for maximum emotional punch, but his compassion, political shrewdness and the narcotizing beauty of the atmosphere he paints make the film an undeniably powerful experience, and an utterly heartbreaking one.

Hellboy (Del Toro, 2004, B) (review)
An oddity in the pantheon of superhero films; Del Toro and Perlman's witty, warm and soulful rendition of this everyman superhero captures the atmosphere of the original comic book aesthetically and emotionally.