Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Never heard of this festival, but sounds like there was a cool line-up this year, and today’s spy had done a great job of looking at some of the films that played there. Addison, take it away...
Hi, I just got back from my hometown of Chatham's film festival, Film Columbia, and I wanted to tell you about it. I'm a big fan of the site and all, and this is my first opportunity to review a movie that hasn't been out in theatres for a month. And I really wanted to stick it to the movies that sucked, but I'll get to that later.
First, here's the big one: The American premiere of Polanski's The Pianist. How did my tiny hometown in upstate New York end up getting that premiere? I don't know. But damn, that's a movie. There's not a whole lot I can say about The Pianist, you really have to see it for yourself. Before I saw it, I wouldn't have believed a guy alone in an apartment dying of jaundice for an hour would be interesting, but I was proven wrong. I had pretty much given up on Polanski after The Ninth Gate. It seemed like he had caught a bad case of the George Lucas syndrome (that is, losing all sense of cinema in one's old age), but I was proven wrong again. The only way I can describe the movie is as a cross between Castaway and The Diary of Anne Frank. One of my favorite details of the movie is that in the very first shot, there's a tilt up from the hands of the pianist to his face. The guy actually could play the piano, and they got that out of the way in the first shot, so I wouldn't have to be nervously watching his hands for the entire movie. I learned after the fact that the soundtrack was done by a professional musician, even though the actor could look like he was performing, somewhat like Backbeat, and I'm sure many other movies. But that's a pretty small part of it, an insignificant detail that just makes a great movie that much better. Anyway, a producer, Jim Schamus, was there and said that they'd have a tough time marketing it, it being about the Holocaust and coming out at the same time as a bunch of other 'Oscar calibre' movies. So go see it, don't let this one slip through the cracks. It's apparently already the highest grossing film ever in Poland.
Next, a find I wasn't expecting, Diamond Men. Apparently, this movie, starring Robert Forrester of Jackie Brown, and Donnie Wahlberg, of the Backstreet Boys, came out on September 11th. As you might imagine, it didn't get a lot of press coverage. This movie is worth seeing, if only to get to see Forrester, the Chevrolet of actors, in another great lead role. He plays a weathered old diamond salesman being forced into retirement, training flashy new hire played by Wahlberg. Forrester is sort of a tougher, grumpier version of Philp Baker Hall in Hard Eight, and Wahlberg is sort of a poor man's version of his brother, Marky Mark. But they have a good chemistry, there's a lot of genuine laughs, and the story of how they eventually come to be friends is very believable and touching. There's a fair amount of diamond salesman terminology thrown around, which is nice. It's good to know the writer knows what he's talking about. That being said, sadly, the last act of the movie becomes concerned with Forrester meeting the archetypal happy whore and a big heist of the diamonds. Sort of a tired Hollywood finale for a solid character driven movie. But, it's a shame this movie got lost in the shuffle. If it comes out on video, or is ever re-released, check it out.
Personal Velocity was showing too. I remember reading that this movie was winning all sorts of crazy awards, and frankly, I'm not sure how. That's not true, I do know how. This movie could easily convince you that it's hip and smart. It's shot on DV, has three hip young actresses, Kira Sedgewick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk, and is three short stories with similar themes. Sounds like just the kind of hip, edgy movie a film festival would be looking for, but, well, there's just not much to it. The only thing these three stories seem to have in common is that the three women are all kind of slutty, and the first two women hear about an accident the third woman is involved in. Honestly, if you assembled three randomly chosen half hour movies about women, you would be able to find just as many, if not more common themes between them. Maybe they weren't supposed to have common themes, I don't know. Maybe I don't understand them because I'm not a woman, and I don't understand that what it's all about is using their female sexuality for empowerment, or something to that effect. Although, if that's the case, I've seen other movies do it better. This movie is okay, and worth a watch, but it's not really worth all the hype it's been getting. Although it doesn't seem to have any major distribution, so maybe it got about what it deserved.
Of course, with every festival, there are disappointments. World Traveler being the biggest. Billy Cruddup and Julianne Moore are in it? Sign me up! But neither of them could save this train wreck of a movie. This is sort of a darker, less enjoyable version of Jesus' Son. Billy Cruddup wanders aimlessly around the country, drinking way too much scotch (I think they're trying to tell us that alcoholism is bad). He befriends a guy at the construction site and then tries to make out with his wife (hitting on your friends' wife is also bad, turns out). Cruddup is a no fun, amoral character on the run from his wife and kid for no particular reason. I think he feels smothered by them or something, it's not made terribly clear, unless you count the occasional cutaway to him being arrested at an airport. Whether this scene is dream sequence, flashback, or premonition is unclear for far too long. It reeks of student film. Whatever the problem is, it's impossible to feel any kind of sympathy for him at all. He drinks like a fish, screws over pretty much everyone he meets, and not even in a fun sadistic way either. He's just boring and mean. Not even mean. Boring and uncaring. Near the end of the movie, he goes to visit his father. Turns out, his dad left him when he was a kid! What irony! What malaise! I can't wait for the prequel to this where we get to see his dad leave him! And the reason Cruddup is traveling the world now is that he wished his father had left him to travel round the world, and not just to move into a different house somewhere. Deep. He even says the words 'world traveler.' Now, maybe it's just me, but when someone says the title that late in the movie, it's just stupid. Happened in Saving Private Ryan, happened in The Good Girl. Happens in Personal Velocity too. It just comes off as too didactic, as if that scene is the rosetta stone of the movie. Not that anything was going to salvage this movie that late in the game. This movie does not deserve the small amount of success it will probably get.
And then there are the true klunkers of the festival. Movies that had no expectations to fulfill, but were are still just terrible. We have that in Fisher Steven's Just a Kiss. Stevens was there to present it, and offhandedly implied that no one who lived in upstate New York ever stayed out past ten o'clock and let it slip that he didn't know the name of the festival. I could go on and on about how bad this movie was. Stevens also talked bitterly about Richard Linklater's Waking Life, complaining that Linklater had beaten him to the punch in rotoscoping over live actors. Couple things, Fish:
a) Linklater actually had a purpose in his rotoscoping, he was creating a dream-like world, a world that wouldn't have worked in plain live action. All you do is call attention to obvious things like tracing over just the keys when a woman is trying to decide whether or not to go to someone else's apartment, or tracing over the blood when someone slits their wrists.
b) Linklater's animators made one of the most beautiful movies I had ever seen, and it was robbed of best animated feature at the Oscars. Your movie looks like you put it through some sucky iMovie effect.
c) Ralph Bakshi was rotoscoping people before you learned your lame Indian accent for Short Circuit.
Just a Kiss is a movie about relationships that seems to be written by someone who has never been in a relationship. Or has been living in a Hollywood mansion for a decade and is trying to remember what it's like to be a human being. Marisa Tomei is over the top as 'the bad girl,' a role I'm sure she was very excited to play. It doesn't fit her that well, and it's a lousy part to begin with. Taye Diggs shows up, and I suppose, in an attempt to look not racist, they made Diggs use all sorts of big words that no one would ever actually use. I half expected him to put on a graduation cap and start smoking a pipe like some kind of absurd cartoon character who just got hit by a smart laser beam. And then there's that girl who looks and acts like Heather Graham, who was in Sugar and Spice. I'm not going to bother looking up her name in the imdb, she was so bad. Some of her lines sound like she learned them phonetically, she's that bad. There is nothing sincere or even remotely believable about this movie. None of the characters do anything that anyone would ever do in real life in the given situations. I'm sure Stevens would argue, that's the point, that's why I traced over some of the parts, to create this weird, dark world. It doesn't work. Did I mention it's out of sequence for no reason? Sadly, this movie got the most laughs out of any at the festival. It made me sick.
As this email is getting long, I'll wrap it up. Blue Car was another notable, starring David Strathairn. Good, solid, high school girl coming of age movie. Funny, sad, smart, I hope it does well. So that's it from Film Columbia. If this makes it to the site, you can call me Addison De Witt. Is that name taken already? If it is, feel free to come up with something funny yourself.
Why would that already be used? It’s your real name, right? I mean... these are ALL our real names, right?
And for the record, I agree completely about DIAMOND MEN, a low-key charmer that deserved to be seen. Roger Ebert showed it this year when I went to his Overlooked Film Festival, and I had a chance to talk to writer/director Dan Cohen and star Robert Forster. It’s a real labor of love for them, and it’s a winning film that will entertain the hell out of you wherever you finally get a chance to catch up with it.
"Moriarty" out.
