Father Geek here with our version of Ye Olde Towne Cryer, Paul Revere and his last report from the Boston Film Party... Lots of cool films below soooooo dig in...
Love In The Time Of Money
Love In The TIme Of Money isn't a feature so much as it's a group of nine shorts arranged like a relay race - the first ten minutes deal with two characters, and that segues into the next ten minutes, which have one character from the last leg and one new one, until that segment is over and the new character continues on...
Movies have been playing with narrative structure ever since there have been movies, and I know this film's gimmick is not terribly original. Still, it lets writer/director Peter Mattei get some recognizable names (Jill Hennessy, Steve Buscemi, Rosario Dawson, Carol Kane) into a low-budget film by giving him some scheduling flexibility, and it also allows him to strip those stories down to their bare essentials. Each individual story is presented in a very straightforward manner, but it also means that the movie is uneven. An early segment with a contracter and a society wife, for instance, feels terribly staged and awkward, while a later one with her husband and Steve Buscemi as a truly awful artist is much more visual and entertaining. Transitions are mostly awkward, too.
Scheduled to open in NYC and LA on November first.
The Warrior
I like unpredictable movies, which don't hew too closely to genre standards. Really, I do. But, darn it, those standards exist for a reason! When a warrior decides he's had enough of bloodshed and lays down his sword, but the warlord's men come to his home, burn it, take his son and slit the boy's throat... Well, that should lead to an ass-kicking.
For better or worse, though, Asif Kapadia's The Warrior doesn't go the Steven Seagal route. Instead, Irfan Khan's warrior heads into the mountains, with another young man following, looking to... I'm not sure, exactly. He's laid down his sword, though, so he doesn't knock off the rest of the warlord's men who are trailing him one-by-one. As a result, a whole bunch of innocent civilians get killed and he looks like he feels pretty bad about it before finally dispatching one.
To be fair, though, this could have been mangled. The IMDB lists it as being in Hindi, while the Miramax print shown was in English. If the IMDB's right, it's a very good dub, but still... It leaves open the question of how much Miramax might have cut to get it down to an 86-minute running time.
Miramax has this one tentatively scheduled to open 9 May 2003, but I wouldn't mark it on the calendar - this is the kind of movie Miramax could put off for years (and the version screened in Boston isn't worth waiting for)
City Of God
Wow. I'm just blown away by this film, which, if the Boston Film Festival had awards (which I was in charge of giving out), would probably just edge out Standing In The Shadows Of Motown.
The movie starts off in a Rio de Janiero marketplace, as a street vendor butchers and cooks chickens for his customers. There are lots of quick cuts to a rooster who seems to know how doomed he is, but by chance the rooster escapes, leading a group of kids on a merry chase through the streets, until finally a young man with a camera is about to grab it - trapped in the middle of the street between a group of gangsters on one side and the police on the other. The man happens to be our narrator, and tells us that to understand how this came about, we have to start at the beginning - 15 years earlier, in the sixties...
So begins a very episodic movie, as we follow the narrator, "Rocket", and a group of other kids and teens growing up in one of the slums of Rio, the so-called "City Of God". The stories are varied, tales of crime, love, youth, innocence, murder, jealousy, fame (or infamy), sadness, and laughter. Like a good television series, these vignettes are entertaining in and of themselves and add up to an extremely satisfying macrostory. While there are at least a couple dozen important characters, the movie eventually becomes about two characters who are eight years old as the story starts, Rocket and Little Dice (later Little Zé).
It's clear early on that Rocket is basically good and Zé is basically not good at all, but the two aren't antagonists - Rocket would much prefer to keep his head down and stay out of the way of people like Zé. However, by starting with the characters that young, director Fernando Meirelles and screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani do a couple of things - first, they get some of our sympathy. When a gangster offhandedly kills his sidekick late in the movie for talking too much, it's not just a Tarantino-esque bit of black comedy; we've "known" this guy since he was playing youth soccer, and to see him just snuffed out makes the gangster into a real sociopath, not just a guy going through standard movie actions. Also, it shows how young the cycle of violence can start in the face of crushing poverty. By the end of the movie, eight-year-old kids with guns and murder on their minds are not just believable, but almost inevitable.
As bleak as this movie can be, it doesn't deny hope. Rocket's a good kid who doesn't have what it takes to be a successful hoodlum, and the segment where he tries is funny but also sort of sweet. While terrible things happen on a regular basis, the movie doesn't completely drown the audience in darkness - characters fall in love, make friends, and get themselves into ridiculous situations. There's plenty of black comedy, too, because situations that are terribly tragic are also often absurd.
This is bravura filmmaking, one of the best of the year, if not the best. It's apparently on Miramax's schedule for January-February '03 - they're probably looking at it as a front-runner for the "Best Foreign Language Film" Oscar, and I can't blame them for thinking that way.
Bark!
Okay, about a week ago, I was sitting across town, listening to Vanessa Parise talk about how she'd written and directed Kiss The Bride because there weren't a whole lot of great roles for women out there, and I could understand that. But I can't figure out why the heck Heather Morgan would write Bark! and give herself the role of Lucy, a woman who basically spends the movie either barking at people or heavily sedated. It strikes me as not doing yourself any favors.
Even more curious is what some pretty decent actors are doing in it. Not so much the other lead, Lee Tergesen (Peter, Lucy's husband) - he's fine, and actually does a pretty good job of showing his anguish at being unable to do anything to help his wife, who seems to think she's a dog. But Lisa Kurdow as the couple's vet? Hank Azaria as Peter's layabout friend? Vincent D'onofrio as a twitchy psychiatric resident who really wants to be a harp player?
Actually, I can understand it - these are all guys who have steady TV jobs, and Bark! gives them a chance to stretch, to take absurd, damaged characters and make the audience feels something for them. Which is well and good until an audience is involved, because there's a good chance that the audience is going to expect a story to go along with the freakshow.
Bark! gives them one, but maybe not the one they'd like. In Bark!'s world, human beings have a very loose hold on mental stability. Few of us go as far off the deep end as Lucy, but none of the characters are what you'd call normal, and the solution may not be to get better or get away but to learn to live with the insanity of your family and friends. It's an uncomfortable thought in a movie that never lets you get comfortable - though the visit from Lucy's dysfunctional family is probably the most squirmy part.
Despite the cast, this isn't a comedy. It's also definitely an acquired taste.
Big Shot's Funeral
Last time I checked, the People's Republic of China was technically a communist country. But there's always been some capitalism that's been able to sneak in through the cracks, and as the world gets more wired and interconnected, it's no longer sneaking through the cracks - it's bashing the walls down like a battering ram - and, if Big Shot's Funeral is any indication, being adopted by the Chinese so enthusiastically as to scare Americans.
It all starts innocently enough. Yoyo (You Ge) is being hired by a pretty Chinese-American named Lucy (Rosamund Kwan) to be the cameraman for an upcoming DVD's "making-of" feature. Director Don Tyler (Donald Sutherland) is remaking The Last Emperor, and Yoyo is to follow him around. That he doesn't speak much English is practically a plus - Lucy isn't looking for creativity from him, just a passive set of eyes.
But Tyler takes a shine to him, and they start to talk, though some things get lost in translation, even when Lucy's around. Yoyo's description of a "happy funeral", one for those who have lived long, productive lives, becomes "comedy funeral". And then, while suffering a stroke after being fired from the picture, Tyler directs Yoyo to give him a "comedy funeral". Yoyo knows nothing about this, so he calls a con-man cum concert promoter friend. But who's going to pay for it - Tyler was broke. Well, they'll sell advertising, and TV rights. And, oh yeah, Tyler's not actually dead yet, just in a coma, though the doctors say its only a matter of time. And then...
There are lots of "and then..."s. A simple misunderstanding becomes an international television event, and while both Yoyo and his friend get in way over their heads, Lucy becomes horrified at how commercial Tyler's funeral is becoming. There's a great sense of mounting absurdity, with the whole thing moving fast and funny. Attempts to do the right thing only cause more trouble. It's farce on a grand scale.
Sony apparently has no schedule for releasing this in America - probably desperately trying to decide how to market this madness (and to whom), down to whether it's a Columbia or Sony Classics film. When they do get it figured out, give it a look, especially if you like broad, satirical comedy.
The Lawless Heart
Film snobs look at mainstream film and talk about how there's no creativity, pointing out multiple giant asteroid movies or animated bug movies. But the same thing happens with indie movies, if what played at the festival is any indication. It's probably just coincidence that Kiss The Bride comes so close on the heels of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, or that the likes of Love In The Time Of Money and The Lawless Heart come out so near 13 Conversations About One Thing. It's too soon for them to be knock-offs - heck, The Lawless Heart did the festival circuit last year - it's just that only one or two of these similar films will wind up getting anything resembling wide distribution.
So, the question is, just how good is this parallel situations/intersecting storylines film? It's not bad. The individual stories are well-told, although I might question the order of the segments. All three start off at a funeral for Stuart Marsh, a restauranteur on the Isle of Man. First, we follow Dan, Stuart's brother-in-law, who flirts with the florist and then ponders an affiar. Once that story is more or less wrapped-up, we rewind, and see the same time period from the point of view of Nick, Stuart's boyfriend. And then again from cousin Tim's perspective. All three liked Stuart much more than they like each other, and all three find themselves dealing with women who should set off warning flags.
It's a pretty well-told movie, although it seems sort of imbalanced because Nick's and Tim's stories are more linked than either is with Dan's (Nick and Tim wind up sharing an apartment). So while it's a nifty surprise to see background situations from Dan's story revisited in Nick's, the setup for Tim's seems a bit too obvious. This film was clearly done on a low budget, but manages to mostly work.
A note on the release - apparently, it's scheudled to play New York in mid-November. Both the IMDB and the festival program list an 86 minute US running length, but the print screened in Boston was definitely longer - probably the 99-minute UK cut.
No News From God
Here's a high-concept for you - competing emissaries from Heaven and Hell vie for the soul of a boxer, who, though apparently insignificant himself, could tip the scales in either direction. Especially since the war between heaven and hell is not going so well for heaven - this could be all it takes for hell to win. Oh, and did I mention that these competing angels are both beautiful women, played by Victoria Abril and Penelope Cruz?
Sadly, the struggle for the boxer's soul isn't terribly interesting. He's a fairly repugnant character, actually. Much more fun is writer/director AugustÃn DÃaz Yanes's conception of Heaven and Hell, and the fight between them. Heaven is a scene from a black-and-white, postwar movie set in Paris; everyone speaks French and hangs around in classy nightclubs and the Eiffel Tower is always visible over the next building. Hell is an English-speaking bureaucratic nightmare. God hasn't been heard from in a while, and Hell's board of directors is trying to replace its current CEO, who is harsh but fair. And, eventually, circumstances force Lola (Abril) and Carmen (Cruz) to work together.
The movie's big problem is that the Earthbound characters are not nearly as much fun as the various demons and angels. Those outsize characters and situations are just more entertaining than the common, everyday ones.
Paul Revere riding off into the Sunset...
