Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
His intro’s short and sweet, so mine will be, too.
Harold Hellman here with more SIFF reviews for you!
***
MAD LOVE - written and directed by Vicente Aranda
Part epic Shakespearean tragedy, part trashy bodice-ripping romance, "Mad Love" (Spanish title "Juana la Loca," or "Joan the Mad") tells an interesting, sometimes frustrating story about royal passion and betrayal in medieval Spain. I'm not enough of a scholar to offer an informed opinion on the film's historical veracity, but I can say that the film's intended audience will probably love it.
The historical angle is set up in the film's opening minutes, introducing the elderly Queen Joan as a prisoner in her own kingdom, accused of insanity and victimized by treachery. We then flash back to when she was a princess in Castile, bound for Flanders where she will be wed to Archduke Philip, whom she's never met, for political reasons.
The Harlequin-romance angle comes with the appearance of Philip; he's almost a caricature of the typical book-cover hero, with chiseled features, dark eyes, and long, flowing black hair. Joan, experiencing a sensual awakening under his practiced hands, falls for him immediately, but her passion quickly turns into obsession. He turns out to be a cad, of course, but not a thoroughly evil one; he's actually more of a puppet of his ambitious advisers, who are working behind the scenes to steal the queen's authority.
The film is physically gorgeous; the rich widescreen photography literally pours down into the viewer's eyes. The acting is also quite good, from the supporting roles on up to Daniele Liotti, aka the Harlequin Hunk, who surprises with a subtle, thoughtful performance. It's the lead role, though, that owns the emotional fireworks, and Pilar López de Ayala is mesmerizing, taking Joan from youthful innocence through jealous fury to wounded resignation.
The problem, though, is that as presented in the film, Joan just isn't that smart or well-balanced, which makes it difficult for the viewer to sympathize with her plight. Her love for Philip rapidly escalates beyond her control, making her behavior frequently irrational and self-destructive. She seems unaware or uninterested in the political plots swirling around her, and focuses on her husband's unfaithfulness to a severely unhealthy degree. At times, you want to reach up and shake her by the shoulders, screaming at her to pay attention to the knives poised at her back. The film seems to want to make the case that the accusations of Joan's madness were totally fabricated by her political enemies, but her choices nonetheless take her into a fairly nutty neighborhood, which is pretty frustrating from a storytelling perspective. Many viewers, I'm sure, will give up caring long before her final spiral into destruction.
That won't matter, though, to the target audience --
women (mostly) who will express feminist outrage at
history's mistreatment of yet another member of the
sisterhood, but who secretly keep a couple of
steamy-but-tragic romance novels hidden in the
nightstand. For them, "Mad Love" will be a thoroughly
guilty pleasure, and a hot-blooded dream come true.
***
KENNEWICK MAN - directed by Ryan Purcell and Kyle
Carver
During the Q&A that followed the screening of "Kennewick Man: An Epic Drama of the West," an audience member asked the filmmakers, if it were up to them, how they would resolve the bitter dispute over ownership of the ancient remains of the title. The two co-directors looked at each other, briefly flummoxed, and stammered out a noncommital reply that didn't really answer the question. This non-response is an indication of their even-handed treatment of the material, which is both admirable for its willingness to give almost every side of the debate a legitimate hearing, as well as unfortunate in that perhaps a less literal handling of events would have helped the flow of the film.
For anyone who didn't see the flurry of international publicity a few years ago, Kennewick Man refers to a skeleton that was found on the bank of the Columbia River in Washington State in 1996. As soon as testing revealed that the bones were unbelieveably old -- an almost-unheard-of nine thousand years -- all sorts of competing interests descended to lay claim to the remains. Anthropologists and archeologists understandably wanted to study the ancient remains, but a local Indian tribe objected, saying that the body was probably Native American and thus needed to be returned to the earth per their customs and beliefs. Caught in the middle was the Army Corps of Engineers, in whose actual possession the remains had landed, and who had to rely on the multitude of incredibly complex (and never fully legally tested) federal laws and regulations about native graves to guide their decision-making.
The film lays out these events primarily in chronological order, starting with the discovery of the bones (by a couple of jamokes, essentially, who were on the beach because they were trying to sneak into the hydro races without paying), then following through their initial identification, the beginnings of the conflict, the inevitable lawsuit, the swarm of claimants with nonmutual interests, and so on. What could have been an impossibly large cast of characters is kept manageable by assigning a single "face" to each point of view -- the archeologist who's clearly sick of being considered the bad guy, the eerily calm tribal representative, the Army Corps bureaucrat who seems distinctly uncomfortable about being part of the fracas, etc. Color commentary is provided by an area author who's been following the controversy.
The film does a good job explaining the nature of the conflict and the various viewpoints involved; everyone gets his say, and except for a couple of local meddlers and a ludicrous pseudo-Norse cult that shows up halfway through, everybody seems to have a legitimate point. Unfortunately, the events don't really lend themselves to chronological arrangement, and the film runs out of energy about twenty minutes before it's over. The debate starts to get repetitive, which is probably accurate but is deathly dull to watch, and worse, because the claimants are still arguing in court as I write this, there's no ending to the tale. A far more innovative structural approach seems to be demanded, as it would have enhanced the drama inherent in the situation and maintained the film's narrative tension. The filmmakers try to spice things up by occasionally accompanying the voice-over with snippets of ironic stock footage culled from various archives, but more often than not these seem to be perplexingly irrelevant inclusions that don't much inform the material.
The film deserves credit, especially in its first two-thirds, for seeing the subtle, dark humor of the situation. The subtitle "An Epic Drama of the West" seems tongue-in-cheek; this isn't so much an epic drama as it is a farce, driven by hubris and angry overreaction, and a lot of it is quite funny indeed, as the combatants run around and crash pointlessly into one other's incompatible philosophies. It seems obvious that a few different choices right at the outset could have averted the whole unfortunate mess, and the film makes clear that it's these early missteps that have caused the parties to entangle themselves beyond their ability or willingness to extricate themselves.
But again, the overly literal sequence-of-events
approach turns out not to be the best way to present
this material, and the circularity and repetition of
the last twenty minutes erases the memory of the
film's much more successful first hour. It would take
a clever filmmaker indeed to figure out how to better
organize and present the conflict; as it is,
"Kennewick Man" is simply an average recounting of an
extraordinary situation.
***
SKINS - directed by Chris Eyre; screenplay by Jennifer
D. Lyne, from the novel by Adrian C. Louis
Despite a lack of clear narrative focus, and despite a few moments of awkwardly amateurish writing and acting, Chris Eyre's new film "Skins" is a work of remarkable depth and power.
While Eyre's previous film "Smoke Signals" falls comfortably into the road-movie genre, "Skins" is harder to categorize. It tells the story of two brothers on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation on the southern border of South Dakota; we meet them briefly in childhood, and then move forward to the present, where we find the younger brother has become a reservation policeman, while the older brother, now a Vietnam veteran, is a broken-down drunk.
The choice of setting is not an accident. Pine Ridge is considered the poorest place in the United States (as is mentioned during a short prologue), and is the site of the notorious Wounded Knee massacre. It is, essentially, a Third World territory located in the heart of the richest nation in the world. The film was shot entirely on-location, giving its world an absolute, unquestionable authority.
The plot is both simple and complicated. Basically, the relationship between the two brothers is the primary story; the younger of the two, Rudy (Eric Schweig) is frustrated by how his elder, Mogie (Graham Greene), drinks constantly and embarrasses himself, but he still tries reaching out -- for example, inviting him to a police picnic with predictably unfortunate results. And Mogie, for his part, regularly spouts off about Indian politics, exhorting Rudy toward a sense of activism that the younger man apparently doesn't share.
But at the same time, there's a lot of other stuff going on, events that don't seem to relate to the main conflict and that contribute to the unfocused feel of the story. Rudy, discouraged by the lack of attention paid to reservation crimes by outside authorities and unknown to his brother, turns to vigilantism to right the perceived wrongs, masking his face and, for example, attacking a pair of ne'er-do-wells with a baseball bat. He also goes about his day-to-day police business; at one horrifying stop, he discovers a dead man with his foot in a bear trap set out by a homeowner to catch thieves. Eventually, all of this does coalesce, sort of, into a spine-tingling climax.
The power of "Skins" is that it takes us into a world we've rarely seen on-screen, and it introduces us to characters we're more comfortable dismissing as cliches. Chief among these, of course, is Mogie, the whiskey-swilling Indian who lives from one VA check to the next. This is obviously one of the most ubiquitous and tenacious stereotypes of all, but "Skins" actually manages to present Mogie as a full-fledged human being. This isn't about PC revisionism, either; these characters are deeply flawed. Mogie may be portrayed as more than the cliche, but he's still a shiftless, self-destructive alcoholic whose days are spent lounging on the porch of the liquor store and who's almost a stranger to his son. And neither is Rudy perfect: He's having an affair with a married woman, for example, and in the middle of the film one of his vigilante stunts goes horribly (if more than a little coincidentally) wrong. In these two key roles, Schweig and Greene turn in utterly spectacular performances, carrying the film between them.
There is, it should be said, a sense of confusion in the movie about its intended audience. Is this a movie made by Indians, for Indians? Or do the filmmakers want to communicate with white viewers (and other ethnicities) who have never seen this world? There's a scene in which Rudy and Mogie explain the horror of Wounded Knee to Mogie's son that doesn't make a lot of sense dramatically; it beggars belief that the kid doesn't know this already, and as a result it comes off as lecturing the audience instead. But on the other hand, there are some aspects of Indian spirituality that will probably be unclear to people unfamiliar with these beliefs, most notably the repeated intervention of a trickster spirit in the form of a spider.
In the end, none of these problems turns out to be
fatal, and the last ten minutes are some of the
strongest in the film, taking us from a deeply moving
Sioux wake to a final act of very public defiance.
It's this last act that defines the film, producing a
searing image bordering on the inflammatory. "Skins"
overcomes its flaws largely because it's so
uncompromising in its search for honesty and
integrity, and deserves to be seen by a wide audience.
MOVIE GEEK CENTRAL
