Well ol' Paul Revere shouted out the following reviews from the Boston Film Fest as he galloped past the Geek Headquarters Compound late last night rousing Father Geek from his dream quest... Nice selection of flicks...
Roger Dodger
Ah, that indie staple - the highly verbal movie about how men and women want different things from a relationship. They're somewhat universal, they can be shot cheap, and they please the cast because actors like getting a chance to run their mouths. You could probably have a film festival just for this type of film in a different city every week without repeating much.
Roger Dodger is about par for the course. Campbell Scott plays Roger, an advertising copywriter with a gift of gab, as a slick guy who fills his conversation with smart-sounding stuff like the "utility theory of evolution". His boss (Isabella Rossellini) has just opted to end their relationship, and he's feeling kind of punchy when his 16-year-old nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg) shows up, in town to visit colleges, and eventually gets around to mentioning that Roger has the reputation of being a ladies' man... Could he give Nick some tips?
What follows, of course, is Roger being as bad an influence as you might expect ("Alcohol has been used as a tool for making social interaction more effective for thousands of years - you drink that drink!"). It's fairly entertaining, even if Nick is mostly a device to give Roger (and the other characters) someone to whom they can tell their opinions. Nick's sweet enough that Roger's advice doesn't quite take, especially as Roger's attempts to get Nick laid get more and more cynical over the course of the night.
The cinematography is disappointing - I wondered if they were just using available light; much of the picture was dark and murky, making it tough to see what was going on. The performances are okay. The movie's pretty average for a common genre; the black-ish comedy of Roger's unthinking attempt to corrupt a kid are really all that makes this one stand out.
This movie is expected to get a limited release starting in October.
Intacto
Lion's Gate could have a real winner in this Shyamalan-esque Spanish thriller. Both the name and the plot suggest a resemblence to Unbreakable, but it does go off in a different direction.
The opening sequence lays out the high-concept pretty well. Inside Casino Ucanca, a man is at the roulette table and can't lose. Rather than asking him to leave, though, the casino calls upon Federico (Eusebio Poncela), who simply touches the man on the hand. Suddenly, his win streak is over; walking away, Federico idly drops a token into a slot machine and walks away as it pays of handsomely.
So there's the premise - some people are not only somehow supernaturally luckier than others, but they can steal the luck of others. These gifted ones have a secret society, and though Federico is close to the top, the casino's owner (Max Von Sydow) is at the apex. Displeased with Federico, the owner steals his luck and sends him away.
Seven years later, a plane crashes, with the only survivor (of 250 passengers and crew) an escaping bank robber named Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia). Federico, having read of this survivor, helps him escape, and the pair are pursued by Sara (Mónica López), a beautiful but scarred detective who must learn about this hidden world to track them down.
Director and co-writer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo shows a sure hand with his first feature. Concepts are (mostly) explained well, and the various games of chance the lucky ones compete in as Federico and Tomas try to make their way back to Ucanca are fun to watch; I won't spoil them. And one of the final showdowns is fiendishly clever: Three very lucky people, two guns, and one dark room.
But, there is a but... Why are they playing the games to begin with? Federico wants revenge, okay, but why would any other lucky people come to Ucanca? It's like some formalized Highlander thing, with the stakes just as high - if you lose. It doesn't seem like any of the lucky ones are doing anything with their gift other than play ritualistic games.
If someone decides to do an American remake (I'd put it at 50-50), hopefully they'll do a little more with how this gift helps and hinders these versions of Ringworld's Teela Brown outside the games. In the meantime, Lion's Gate plans an early-'03 release for the original.
Skins
Not a bad movie at all.
The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is, a voiceover informs us, the poorest county in the United States. There's no work and alcoholism is a plague; most of the calls policeman Rudy Yellow Lodge (Eric Schweig) is sent out on are liquor-fueled domestic disturbances. It's not just at work, either - his Vietnam-vet older brother Mogie (Graham Greene) seems determined to drink himself to death.
The movie starts out looking like a murder mystery, but that's quickly dispatched. It evolves into an examination of the complicated relationship between Rudy and Mogie - as a child, Mogie was the strong one, carrying Rudy to a hospital after a potentially-fatal spider bite - and Rudy's frustration with his life, which leads him to try and take action outside the law.
Featuring good lead performances and a deft directorial touch by Chris Eyre, Skins is a thoughtful, realistic film that worth seeking out. Opens in limited release beginning 27 September.
Tully
The print screened was still titled The Truth About Tully, but the director says that the name has been changed to avoid confusion with Johnathan Demme's Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie.
It's an interesting film. Most independent films are city-based productions, probably as a matter of practicality (the needed technical crew and facilities are more likely to be present) and, well, snobbery - the people who make most movies are city folks, and probably presume that city life is more interesting, and more dramatic, than life in rural areas. If rural life is shown at all, it's either disparaging (this is what I got away from) or idealized (I returned here to cleanse my soul).
The title character of Tully doesn't feel like he's got it bad. Tully Coates Jr. (Anson Mount) and his brother Earl (Glenn Fitzgerald) don't mind the work on their father's farm and women are drawn to Tully; his life's sort of in a good equilibrium, and he just breezes along. That all threatens to change, though, when Tully Sr. (Bob Burrus) gets a letter informing him that a lein has been put on the farm for $300,000 he can't find in debt he didn't run. Meanwhile, Tully finds himself getting closer to Ella Smalley (Julianne Nicholson), a local woman studying to be a vet who's not the blond, easy stereotype he's used to.
The story is told in a fairly straightforward manner. Family secrets are pried from the profoundly sad Tully Sr. slowly, as he feels befits his shame. The characters are all well-played, although Nicholson is probably the only member of the cast that most audience members will recognize.
Opens in limited release starting 1 November.
Standing In The Shadows Of Motown
It's this simple: If the audience applauds, loudly, not just at the end but in the middle of the movie, it gets four stars.
Standing In The Shadows Of Motown is joyous. It tells the story of The Funk Brothers, the group of Detroit jazz and blues musicians who were Motown's studio band from the time the label started in 1958 until it moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s. It also reunites the band, both on-stage to beform some of the label's greatest hits and in "The Snake Pit" (Motown's main recording studio) and various other Detroit locations to reminisce about what it was like back in the day.
Director Paul Justman and producer Alan Slutsky (who wrote the original book) have one simple goal - to let the audience get to know the men who created such a huge part of the soundtrack of America. There's no axes to grind about how they had mostly toiled in anonymity, and though there is sadness when they talk of how one member of the group died, it's for the most part half bull session and half jam session.
The stories, sometimes backed up by re-creation footage, are always entertaining. Drummer Uriel Jones especially has a knack for spinning a tale, such as when he describes how Motown was paying him (and all the other musicians) $100 a week to spy on each other to make sure they weren't recording for other companies. Piano-player Joe Hunter has a majesty to him as he tells his tales, and the filmmakers were lucky enough to interview the late Robert White about his guitar performance on "My Girl" while still trying to get financing for the movie.
Sometimes they get lucky - in the Q&A after the film, Justman said he practically snuck up on Me'Shell NdegéOcello and (white) bass player Bob Babbitt with a hand-held camera and was able to catch them talking about how much of a factor (or non-factor) race was in late-60s Detroit during rehearsal. Drummer Richard "Pistol" Allen died soon after filming.
Oh - and the music is great. They gathered a good group to front the band during the performance pieces - Gerald Levert, Joan Osborne, NdegéOcello, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Chaka Khan, and Montell Jordan, and those parts are fantastic. The audience's favorite seemed to be Osborne & company's rendition of "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted?", but it's all good. I'm getting the soundtracks.
Artisan is planning on a limited (~30 city) release in mid-November; hopefully, it'll be successful enough to warrant an expansion. Let's not only hope that happens, but make it happen.
Rabbit-Proof Fence
What director Phillip Noyce churned out in the nineties wasn't as bad as, say, Joel Schumacher, but he didn't exactly distinguish himself with bland fare like his two Jack Ryan movies or The Saint. Fortunately, he went back home to Australia and created something quietly extraordinary in Rabbit-Proof Fence.
In 1930s Australia, "half-caste" children - those with both white and Aborigine parents - were routinely taken from their parents and brought to camps to be trained as domestic servants. In a horrifying scene toward the start of the movie, sisters Molly (Everlyn Sampi) and Daisy (Tianna Sansbury), along with their cousin Gracie (Lauara Monaghan) are taken from their home at Jigalong station and brought 1200 miles south and placed in a squalid camp. People who run away are brought back by Moodoo (David Gulpilil), a native tracker whose own daughter is at the camp.
Still, 14-year-old Molly is a fair tracker and hunter herself. Soon, when being told to empty the bucket that serves as their dormitory's toilet on her way to church services, she looks up at the sky and tells 8-year-old Diasy and 12-year-old Gracie that they're leaving while the rain that's coming will cover their tracks. She remembers the rabbit-proof fence that runs all the way across Australia, right through Jigalong, and figures that they can follow it home.
What follows is a beautifully photographed journey and battle of wits. There's a fierce intelligence to Molly, and Moodoo comes to respect her from afar. Also present is "Chief Protector" Neville (Kenneth Branagh), who makes the most disturbing kind of villain - one who tries to do good based upon beliefs that modern audience will hopefully find horrifying. That he appears genuinely concerned about how the girls will fare crossing the desert doesn't negate that he apparently feels that the Aborigines should be bread out of existence.
The acting is very good all around. The kids don't talk much, and when they do, it's with the least amount of words necessary to communicate their ideas (neither does Moodoo; perhaps that's just a part of the culture). It makes them somewhat eerie, but also means that every word, movement, and facial expression counts, and they never come up short.
Noyce has another film in the festival, The Quiet American, with a higher-profile cast (Michael Caine, Brendan Fraser) that I likely won't have time to see until its regular release. If it's half as good as Rabbit-Proof Fence, then he's having a remarkable year.
This one's expected to be released starting 29 November.
Auto Focus
Less impressive, by a wide margin, is Paul Schrader's Auto Focus. It is relentless in pounding the same points home about its static characters, in the end making me weary rather than intrigued.
The movie stars Greg Kinnear as Bob Crane, star of "Hogan's Heroes", photography buff, and sex addict. At times I wondered if the movie would be better with Jim Carrey in the role, since Kinnear seems to be trying to hit the same note Carrey did in Man On The Moon. It's a good performance, I guess, since I didn't "see" Kinnear as much as Crane, but on the other hand he doesn't give the audience much reason to care what happens to him. Willem Defoe is little better as Crane's AV guru John Carpenter; he does the overanxious nerd all right, but that's really all there is to the character.
A big problem with this movie is its unevenness in tone. At times, it seems to want to come off as a parody, and its shifts to being more serious is anything but smooth. It's also numbingly repetitive - Crane's hobbies destroy his marriage, and then he remarries and destroys his new marriage in the exact same way. Sure, that may be what really happened, but it's not exactly interesting to watch. Rita Wilson and Maria Bello don't have much to do as the two Mrs. Cranes, either.
Maybe it was just disappointing because I'd seen two excellent movies earlier in the day. I'm more inclined to think it's just a bad movie.
Paul Revere, riding off...
