Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Norm’s in Montreal right now, and he’s got a great look at the festival that’s underway there, followed by a review from this weekend’s studio-sponsored sneak of THE RING. First up, the festival stuff...
Hey Moriarty,
While the Festival des Films du Monde gets more exposure, the Festival of new Cinema and Media of Montreal offers a selection of films from around the world that tend to be more modern, artistic and thought-provoking, as well as a wide array of multimedia installations.
Here are my impressions of the films I've seen since the fest started Thursday,
BOLLYWOOD / HOLLYWOOD
As the title suggests, Deepa Mehta’s delightful new movie marries the goofiness of Bombay musicals with the charm of the best Hollywwod romantic comedies, all the while being hilariously irreverent towards both genres. Rahul Khanna plays an Indian-Canadian millionaire who’s so fed up with the pressure of his family that he hires an escort (the absolutely adorable Lisa Ray) to pose as his Indian wife-to-be. Much hilarity, joyful song and dance numbers and a surprisingly touching love story ensue. I loved the actors, loved the music... Loved the whole movie, basically! “Bollywood/Hollywood” is as much fun as "Monsoon Wedding".
GAMBLING, GODS AND LSD
More a travelogue than a documentary, Peter Mettler’s film takes us from Toronto to India by the way of Nevada and Switzerland, showing us religious fanatics, gamblers, junkies, erotic electro-stimulation, the implosion of a Las Vegas casino, a Bollywood film shoot, Mountain Valley, Hindu rites, Swiss mountains, raves, a dog show, rivers, planes, bungee jumping, clouds... The result is alternately fascinating and boring as a dog’s ass. And while it scores some insights into the human condition, a lot of the movie comes off as pretentious hogwash. There’s a near-brilliant 88 minute pic somewhere in there, too bad it’s lost in an overblown 3 hour long (and I mean long) student film.
GOOD ROCKIN' TONIGHT: THE LEGACY OF SUN RECORDS
Sam Phillips might be a shameless self-promoter, but you must admit that what he did in the 50s in his Memphis studios did affect music forever. As he puts it himself, the thing about the Sun sound is that he didn’t care if it was country, blue, rock & roll or an amalgam of them, all that mattered to him is how a record made you feel. Bruce Sinofsky’s documentary doesn’t dig much deeper than that, failing to address issues like how, even though Phillips initially put out records by black artists in the belief that “the only thing that wasn’t segregated was the radio dial”, from his discovery of Elvis Presley onwards Sun Records mostly focused on black music played by white acts.
Still, you gotta appreciate all the great music the film packs, be it vintage performances by the likes of Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis or new recordings of Sun classics by everyone from Paul McCartney to Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, Mark Knopfler Ben Folds Five and Live. Unfortunately, even the musical content is a mixed blessing as it devotes much time to obscure Sun artists and questionable reinterpretations by Third Eye Blind, matchbox 20 and Kid Rock.
THE TRIALS OF HENRY KISSINGER
This is the third documentary I see at the festival, and it’s another totally different approach. Where “LSD” was contemplative and philosophical and “Sun Records” was harmless and self-congratulary, “The Trials of Henry Kissinger” is a passionately inquisitive film determined to uncover the truth and hopefully inspire action. In a manner not unlike Michael Moore’s, Eugene Jarecki makes an infuriating case against Kissinger and exposes the hypocrisy and deviousness of US Foreign Policy.
The film argues that if dictators like Milosevic and Pinochet can be brought before a tribunal for crimes against humanity, so should Kissinger. Jarecki, using journalist Christopher Hitchens’ book as a starting point, establishes that the former National Security Advisor:
- sabotaged the 1968 negotiations between the Johnson administration and the North Vietnamese to position himself in a place of power with the Nixon camp, which was elected after the peace talks collapsed (the war in Nam continued for years, causing thousands more useless casualties)
- supervised the illegal secret bombings in Cambodia that killed thousands of civilians
- green-lighted the genocide in East Timor
- ordered the coup against the democratically elected President of Chile and approved the kidnapping and subsequent murder of a General who opposed said coup, which could then proceed and install Pinochet’s regime of terror in 1973 on... September 11.
It would be hard not to draw a parallel with the other 9/11, which reinforces the film’s query: if the US is so adamant about hunting down those responsible for the deaths of innocents, why aren’t they prosecuting Kissinger? Jarucki’s film needs to be widely seen and discussed. The manipulation and secrecy of this most objectionable Nobel Peace Prize can’t go on any longer.
I'll be seeing a dozen more movies before the end of the fest on the 20th, I'll send you a couple more reports along the way.
Norm
And now here’s his look at the film that seems to be genuinely scaring audiences for the most part...
Hey Drew,
I saw the sneak preview of The Ring tonight, here are my thoughts.
The opening is straight out of a teen horror movie à la "Scream" or "Urban Legend". Two high school girls are alone in a big empty house, discussing this story they’ve heard about a videotape that’s “like somebody’s nightmare” (more accurately, like a bad student film ripping off Bunuel’s “Un Chien Andalou”) and when you’re done watching it, the phone rings and a girl tells you you’re gonna die in seven days. And what do you know, it’s been one week since one of the girls watched a weird tape and got a weirder phone call, and all kind of spooky things start happening around the house... Cut to a few days later as journalist Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) looks into the mysterious circumstances of the girl’s death, finds the infamous tape and pops it in the VCR. Drrrring. “Seven days...”
I must say this is an intriguing premise. Actually, I’ve said it already, when I saw the Japanese film this is based on at FantAsia a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, “The Ring” is not as successful as the original, which I didn’t even like all that much. In both films, the investigation that follows the initial set-up is uninteresting and dull. Scene after scene have the journalist researching video technology and looking through old newspapers, conveniently talking to herself so we clue in along with her. Even worse is how unlikable and one-dimensioned the characters are. Rachel is this cold, distant career woman, her ex-boyfriend (Martin Henderson) is quietly uncaring and their son (David Dorfman) is precocious yet creepy, like kids tend to be in post-"Sixth Sense" thrillers. These people are so passive and joyless that we’re not concerned about whether watching the tape will kill them: they all seem dead already.
Director Gore Verbinsky overcompensates for the lack of excitement by drenching the film in atmosphere, to the point where every shot feels dark and damp. The skies are always cloudy and/or rainy and even when we’re inside, the few lights are too dim. Eventually, as the back story of the tape and the girl on the phone becomes clearer (though we never understand the whys and hows, which is the point I think), the film does grow some tension; the scene with the horse in particular scared the beejesus out of me. I liked the wickedly twisted ending too, even if it’s not as cleverly delivered as in the Japanese version.
On the whole, “The Ring” is not a worthless film, but it suffers from being almost all set up and no payoff. It flirts with the idea of doubling as a metaphor for the way television and cell phones deaden not only our brain cells but our souls, which could explain how numb and joyless the characters and everything around them is... But even if that was the intent, screenwriter Ehren Krueger doesn’t come close to exploring this theme enough to justify how joyless the film itself is.
Norm
Well, guess it’s not a universal thing. That’s cool. I think THE RING’s got a lot of hype built so far, and maybe it’s a good thing to knock expectations back several pegs. Thanks, Norm, for both reports. Good stuff...
"Moriarty" out.
