Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a couple reviews left-over from the Santa Barbara Film Festival. One’s up for an Oscar for Best Foreign film and one was a world premiere at the festival, a summer camp movie filled with kids sayin’ the darndest things… usually things with four letters.
THE COUNTERFEITERS
You know, I really hope this doesn’t win. As much as it was bullshit that THE LIVES OF OTHERS beat out PAN’S LABYRINTH at least THE LIVES OF OTHERS was a great fuckin’ movie.
THE COUNTERFEITERS isn’t bad; not at all. It’s actually a really good movie that just doesn’t live up to its really great premise.
The central focus of this movie is quite an amazing true story. During WW2 the Nazis began the largest counterfeiting operation to ever exist in recorded history. They brought together teams of Jews from their camps… artists, skilled mechanics, engravers, paper makers, bankers, etc. and tried to counterfeit the British Pound and the American Dollar… the idea being that they’d be able to flood those countries with hundreds of millions of dollars of extra money, thus driving down the value of their currency, thus the allies’ ability to outspend the struggling Nazis in building tanks, bombs, ammo and guns would be crippled. And, of course, the Axis would have a ton of pocket money of their own to keep pace with the Allies' output.
Our main character is a charismatic, but cowardly conman who knows how to work any situation to his benefit. When we first meet him he has total control. Think of him like Rick in CASABLANCA. He loans money, he runs a place of business, but he sticks his neck out for nobody. On the side he’s trying to counterfeit the American Dollar, the hardest currency in the world to forge.
He’s busted by a German buddy of his and is off to jail just in time to be transferred to a concentration camp.
This young German policeman ends up a high ranking Nazi official and remembers what he found and brings our main guy in to lead a team of counterfeiters. In return they get a luxurious life, a tall wooden fence separating them from the horrors of the rest of the concentration camp.
Great premise… throw in the morality issues… would you work with the Nazis if it meant you got a real bed, 3 square meals a day, cigarettes and a certain guarantee of life? Even if you knew you were helping the Nazis to turn the tide of the war, cutting off your only chance of rescue?
Unfortunately the way they put the movie together… the filmmaking side is lacking. Things just happen. There is no structure within the whole. Scenes lead to scenes which lead to scenes, but there’s no detail to it. Things are set up early that pay off later, so the basic film language is there, but there’s a horrible stutter when it comes to the details. There are literally cuts where you kind of shake your head and go, “What just happened? Did I miss something?” There was no build within the broad structure of the whole, no tension.
I’m usually not an advocate of this kind of thing, but this film is perfect for a star-studded remake. Great story, great characters, but just not executed all that well.
SUMMERHOOD
Kraken did a really good job summing up my thoughts on this film, so hopefully I won’t repeat too much of his own review.
This is a small, autobiographical comedy from a young group of filmmakers. There are plenty of first time mistakes and some sub-par performances, but at the end of the day you have cut them some slack for making a movie that is on the whole pretty funny and wears its heart on its sleeve.
The cast is mostly 10-14 year old kids enjoying their time at Summer Camp. One of them, nicknamed Fetus… presumably because he’s the youngest… discovers the wonder of romantic love and that causes a rift in the dynamic of the group of kids. The troublemaker and de-facto leader of the cabin turns against this kid, feeling betrayed that his priorities are now to win the heart of a girl and not in making life miserable for the authority in the camp.
What’s great about the movie is its un-tainted memory of what it was actually like to be a kid. The kids curse, they’re generally despicable to each other, but there’s not an adult malice in their actions. Usually in these kinds of movies they either paint childhood as being the best years of our lives, carefree and majestic or it’s a living hellhole that you wouldn’t want to ever revisit. The truth is somewhere in the middle and that’s the sweet-spot that is found in this film.
Kraken said that director Jacob Medjuck is a better comedic actor than a writer/director and I agree with it. I think Medjuck can hone his directing skills over time, he’s not a hopeless case by any means, but he needs someone strong to really discipline him. As an actor he’s got a ton of charisma and his comic timing is great.
There needs to be about 20 minutes taken out of SUMMERHOOD before it reaches its full potential. There were also glimpses during the end credits of some of the shenanigans the kids were doing on the set, ad-libs, outtakes and whatnot… I don’t know if they are salvageable enough to cut into the movie, but the kids are more natural when they’re just themselves, not delivering a line of dialog, that that stuff became the funniest parts of the movie.
End of the day, the movie isn’t perfect, but it deserves to be seen.
Alright… I’m almost caught up on Santa Barbara… only two more reviews to knock out for that and I can put SB to bed. And I’m only a couple of reviews away from finishing my Sundance coverage (plus 3 finished interviews that need coding) and I’ll finally be done with January and February film festivals… just in time for SXSW.
Keep an eye peeled, squirts!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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