Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Here’s “Geiger,” a new spy who contacted us about offering up two heaping helpings of festival reviews, and this is the first of his articles. Good stuff, and I’m looking forward to more coverage from him in the near future.

The LA Film Festival got off to a great start this weekend with a collection of really strong narrative and documentary films. The following are reviews of everything I’ve seen, in the order I’ve seen them in…

Interview

Steve Buscemi directed this fine film that stars himself as a political journalist named Pierre who is forced to interview a B-grade movie actress Katya (Sienna Miller). What starts as an awkward sit-down interview in a restauarant culiminates in an evening spent together in her apartment. He discovers a need to actually get to know her outside of the work he has to do for the interview, and she has skeletons in her closet that she feels comfortable enough to reveal to Pierre.

The movie is worth seeing for the two electrifiying performances by the lead. It’s especially rare to see Buscemi in such a commanding leading role, and he never falters for a moment, always keeping us guessing if he truly is a caring guy or a sleezy journalist. Sienna Miller is just as good and keeps up with the main man as a Lindsey Lohan-type who is clearly lonely and unhappy. This could’ve been a clichéd role from beginning to end—a spoiled brat of a movie star who actually has a heart of gold and is just looking for a friend—but Miller keeps us guessing and never allows the character to get one-dimensional. At first it’s hard to believe that this kind of person would allow a journalist—even a seemingly good guy journalist—so close to her within just minutes after meeting her, but we soon discover her insecurities and realize that she really just needs someone relatable in her life.

Visually the movie is very simplistic, with the camera usually just hovering around the characters like a voyeur. Buscemi smartly doesn’t make the movie too cinematic and instead just allows the performances to unravel on-screen. There is a shocking amount of material in Katya’s giant apartment—at least seventy-five-percent of the movie—but the strong material and excellent blocking by the director keeps the events moving. Interview is well-worth seeing, particularly for the solid acting and both funny and poignant writing.

Baja Juarez

Between 1993 and 2005, 432 women were murdered in Juarez, Mexico, and filmmakers Alejandra Sanchez and Jose Antonio Cordero set about to find out how and why. While there are strong aspects to the film, it ultimately starts to run around in circles after awhile and becomes repetitive. However, there are many powerful moments in the film. A storyline involving an outraged mother, whose young daughter was murdered years ago and whose nephew is left rotting away in jail for the crime he didn’t commit, is one of the most compelling aspects to the film. She won’t stop going up against the corrupt figures of the law, and she finally comes face-to-face with the President of Mexico, who calmly silences her and says demeaning things like, “We are doing everything we can… Keep us posted.”

The first half-hour of the film works pretty well, but it all becomes a little much once the film reaches the third act (or, since the film is broken into four chapters, is it the fourth act?). It’s important to showcase all the various mothers and sisters, and also feature material based on criminology experts who take the viewer through all the unjust investigation methods, but all this material would be more effective with a leaner running time.

The Beautiful Ordinary

This film starts as a complete dead zone, with apparently nowhere to go in terms of story, but after awhile, you realize that’s kind of the point. Featuring a strong ensemble of younger actors, this film takes place over the course of 24 hours on the last day of school, summer 1999. The film features fairly stereotypical characters, rather typical storylines, but the unique point of the film is that 24-year-old director Jess Manafort doesn’t have any tricks up her sleeve to throw at us in the climax. The whole movie sort of feels like the last scene of the Sopranos, as we constantly are asking ourselves if something drastic is going to happen. There is a photographer character always looming in the background, taking pictures of each and every character, and his sullen face starts off the movie. I kept thinking he was going to go crazy and gun everyone down in the end. But he doesn’t. There is no real beginning, middle, and end to the movie.

The movie, apparently for Manafort, is a nostalgic, autobiographical journey back to her high school years, leaving not one single cliché un-turned. What makes work at all is the clear joy Manafort has for writing these characters, and the actors make it way better than it has any right to be.

Shorts Program #3

This shorts program featured an eclectic group of six films, with one masterwork, one disaster, and four decent others. The film to seek out from this group is an animated short called Love and War, a dazzling little stop-motion animated short that features animals singing opera while a tragic love story unfolds. It’s absolutely gorgeous and features a haunting musical score. I don’t know if this one’s on the Internet anywhere, but definitely try to find it.

The rest of the shorts aren’t really worth writing home about. The best one next to Love and War is Dear Lemons, which doesn’t really go anywhere but features terrific performances from its child actors. The director clearly has a knack for interesting characters, and I was delighted to hear in the Q&A afterward that she was expanding this short into a feature. Mariel Hemingway appears in a short that has a neat concept but goes on far too long, and a film entitled Happiness left me with none of that by the time the credits rolled. The only real dog in the bunch, however, is a pretentious short called English Language (with English Subtitles). I felt its intentions were noble, but the one-joke scenario doesn’t support the flat story. Without the gimmick of having subtitles tell us what all the characters are thinking, there wouldn’t be much to sustain our interest in the actual story. And it’s LOOONG.

Prison Town, USA

This quiet and affecting documentary is set in Susanville, California. The town used to be filled with possibilities, with jobs in the lumber mills and dairy farms, but now, people have just one major job prospect---employment at one of the four prison facilities in the nearby area. Prison Town, USA, not only explores the problematic economic issues but also gives us glimpses into the lives of various families who are faced with the town’s limited possibilities. The most moving story involves a family of five, whose father stole twenty-eight dollars worth of groceries and was sent to prison for 16 months. His wife barely manages to feed her kids while he’s gone, and when he is released, he struggles to find work in Susanville outside of the prison system. The filmmakers also got access to the prisons themselves, where we see up close the relationship between the prisoners and prison guards. It’s obvious not many of the guards want to be there—they simply have no choice but to work at this job and be able to feed their families. It’s an eye-opening, heart-breaking film.

Resolved

An exhausting but fascinating look at high school debate, Resolved moves faster than most action-adventure movies. The film looks at different groups of debaters, starting with prominently white schools, but the film changes focus and becomes all the better for it when Richard and Louis, two African-American debaters, become the forefront in the material. Knowledgeable and intelligent, but also filled with far more experience than any of the other debaters, they come to the stand with courage and passion, outlining their points not based off of a piece of paper but from memory and heart. It’s no wonder they keep winning debate after debate and ultimately become the #1 debaters of their state—they’re about more than just the strategy.

Director Greg Whiteley, who directed the similarly excellent New York Doll, doesn’t fall into the clichés of making one of those competitive documentary films, a la Spellbound and Wordplay, but instead focuses on the characters and issues at hand. He’s not interested in who wins or loses the debates, and neither should we. While the actual debates themselves get a little tiring after awhile, this film has a lot to offer and is well-worth checking out.

Join Us

This creepy little documentary, in the same vein as last year’s masterpiece Deliver Us From Evil, takes us to an evil place where parents are brainwashed into thinking the only way their children are going to get into Heaven is if they do horrible things deemed right by their minister. Filmmaker Ondi Timoner is given instant access to the parents after the fact, as well as the minister himself, who doubts that he’s ever done anything wrong. He took advantage of these innocent people and their children out of his own bizarre satisfaction, but in every capacity he tries to make himself look like the good guy. It seems bizarre from the get-go when specialists refer to the minister’s practice as a cult, since the parents all seem to be reasonably sane and look perfectly normal. However, that’s exactly what it is, because the man took these people and slowly morphed them into his children, so to speak, to let him do whatever he wanted with them. The only thing the film lacks is a focus on just how these people managed to be manipulated in such a drastic way, but other than that, this is an interesting, eerie film.

What We Do Is Secret

This loud, annoying biopic thinks it’s far more important than it actually is. The film tells the story of Darby Crash, lead singer of the punk bad The Germs in the late 70’s, who lives his life fast and dangerous, never looking back. The majority of the movie is comprised of concert footage that doesn’t really add a lot to the proceedings, and, for those who don’t really care for the music on display, the film becomes a hard sit after awhile. There are solid moments here and there filled with energy and spark, but they never amount to much. The supporting cast, including Bijou Phillips and Tina Majorino, is mostly forgettable, and the faux-documentary format, which has become tiresome as of late, just makes the movie feel extra pretentious.

The only real redeemable quality to the movie is the electrifying performance by Shane West, who sheds everything we knew about him from previous movies like Whatever It Takes and A Walk to Remember and delivers a raw, tortured portrayal. He deserved a better movie.

The Last Winter

Never before have I seen such a great movie falter so much in the final ten minutes that everything that came before seems almost not worth congratulating. Directed by Larry Fessenden, the film has a lot of tension and atmosphere throughout its running time, and the majority doesn’t rely on any sort of computer-generated effects.

Set in the Arctic region of Alaska, the film tells of an oil company’s advance team who are sent to a small camp to establish a drilling base. The group of six or seven begin to hear strange noises from outside, and, when one of the team ends up frozen to death outside, they all begin to become suspicious of each other and dread the possibility of what may lie outside their camp.

Fessenden does a terrific job racketing up the tension. What begins as a glorified Sci-Fi Channel movie becomes better and better as it progresses, with a handful of brilliant scary moments. The actors are all pretty good, and the sense of dread is almost unbearable by the time the third act rears the corner. In the final few minutes, however, we finally see the creature that lurks outside, and the outcome of the two main characters is finally determined, and it’s about as effective and scary as an episode from the fourth season of the Goosebumps television show. It undermines what otherwise is a pretty stellar horror film.

Jump!

Going against what I said before, there’s nothing wrong with the competitive documentary genre. I was merely happy that Resolved didn’t just become that, because there was a lot more to explore in that film. Jump, however, is a purely competitive kind of movie, and it’s all the better because of it. This is a surprisingly exciting look into the sport of jump roping. Coming from a first-time director, this was clearly a film made mostly in the editing room. It never stops to take a breath—we move fast from team to team around the country as they prepare for national competition, and we get swept up in the stakes for each participant. We’re taken through nationals, all the way to the world championship, where even more is up for grabs. Especially moving is the story behind a little girl who suffers from a mild form of asthma, who nonetheless dedicates herself every day to jump roping. The arc of her story is really special and the heart of the movie. I see Jump having a pretty bright future with audiences down the line.

Billy the Kid

My favorite film so far at the festival, Billy the Kid is an absolute joy. It’s not the best-made film—not by a long shot—and it doesn’t deal with big issues like most of the other documentaries I’ve seen. It merely focuses on a 15-year-old outcast named Billy, who lives with his mother and younger brother in a small little place in Maine. He attends high school and has very few friends. There is nothing truly dramatic to his situation, and there’s very little arc in the story from beginning to end. And yet, this one’s my favorite so far.

It’s my favorite, basically, because of Billy. He’s one of the greatest characters I’ve encountered in a movie in a long time, and the whole experience of watching Billy the Kid is made all the better knowing that he’s a real person living out his life exactly how we see it on-screen. He has opinions on everything, tries his best to fit in, loves his mother, and is starting to get interested in girls. He is one-hundred-percent open to the camera with his feelings about all these issues, and he is deliriously lovable.

The movie is funny, sad, maddening, enthralling. It’s funny to hear what Billy will say next but sad when he feels hurt by what he said. It’s maddening when he can’t seem to make an impression on anyone or find anyone to take him in as a friend, but enthralling to see him when he does succeed and does get a friend, when he does get a girl to like him. This is a special movie about a unique individual that I won’t be able to get out of my head for a long time.

I will be back later in the week with my second of two reports on the festival, where I’ll be looking at Crispin Glover in Wizard of Gore, Ethan Hawke’s new film The Hottest State, and Buffy The Musical Extravaganza!