Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. On top of the three films listed in the headline, you also get a few mini-reviews of a few of the other flicks Gwai Lo caught during his recent Vancouver Film Festing. I know our own Midol Girl saw GO GO TALES as well and has a radically different opinion on it than Mr. Lo does, so keep an eye out for that report soon. Thanks to Gwai Lo for doing such a good job sending in his thoughts on the fest. We appreciate it!
I originally planned to write six reviews, but by the time you read this it will be Tuesday and I can’t finish another three in time to make these relevant. The festival ended on Friday for cripes sakes. So my apologies, I may get around to them eventually but for the moment I am just watching stuff like “Jason X” to decompress my brain. I will give you a brief synopsis of the stuff I didn’t have time for. “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” was an affecting look at a man with “locked-in syndrome”, a condition whereby you are able to think and feel with perfect clarity, but you are utterly unable to move or speak. The film is remarkably visually dynamic considering it’s mostly shot from perspective of the protagonist, and it’s also surprisingly funny and predictably touching. “Euphoria” was like a Russian low rent version of Days of Heaven, replacing Ennio Morricone’s score with sweeping over the top symphonies and klezmer music. The plot is paper thin, and it doesn’t pack the emotional oomph that it thinks it does. There are some interesting visuals and it strains to be a deep pastoral elegy but at just over seventy minutes it is stretched way too thin. “The Unforeseen” is a documentary about land development in Austin Texas, produced by Terrence Malick and Robert Redford. It reminded me a bit of “The Corporation” in that it was preaching to the choir a bit, taking a safe stance on a current issue and letting a bunch of talking heads tell the audience what to think. There are a few traces of Malick’s visual poetry in this film, but most of them feel arbitrary. I guess this as good a time as any to call what I saw as I sees em.. TOP 5 1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days 2. Redacted 3. Paranoid Park 4. 4 Elements 5. My Winnipeg Honorable mention goes to the Man From London. Other highlights include seeing Kristin Kreuk at two films (she sat by herself both times, and even stayed for all of Redacted) and seeing Pauly Shore walking past one of my lineups. That wasn’t really a highlight at all actually. The worst of the fest was “Go Go Tales”, so keep reading. This was a very strong year, and I enjoyed writing these reviews. If any of you good folks at AICN get some press passes for stuff out this way just give me a word count and deadline. THE EDGE OF HEAVEN “The Edge of Heaven” would have been a groundbreaking film less than a decade ago, but it uses a template that is starting to feel shopworn in the hands of anyone that is not Alejandro González Iñárritu or Guillermo Arriaga. Director Fatih Akin won a best screenplay award for this German/Turkish production at Cannes, and it’s not hard to discern why. The story unfolds in disjointed chapters and punctuates most of them with tragedies that bring obtusely connected characters into orbit with each other. This is a well made film and I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t quite pack the punch in the gut that similar films possess. That being said, if you find stuff like “Amores Perros” and “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada” to be a bit heavy and overwrought, this might be refreshingly light on its feet in comparison. The performances are the strongest aspect of this film. Nurgül Yesilçay is one of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen, and I hope she knows or learns English so I can see her in more films. Here she plays a restless young revolutionary drifting through life on self reliance and the good will of others. She has a commanding screen presence and is more believable as a street smart vagabond than most Hollywood starlets could ever be. The other standout performances in the film were from Nursel Köse and Tuncel Kurtiz. Köse plays an aging prostitute and Kurtiz plays a doddering john who offers to buy her permanently with a salary, intending to take her off the market. This was the first and most interesting segment in the film, but it shifts abruptly at a crucial point in the narrative and leaves most of its threads frayed and dangling. Jarring interposed tragedies connect these characters in sometimes arbitrary ways, but no real cohesive theme emerges from the collision of people and sudden violence. In one respect I’m glad we don’t have a ham-fisted “racism is bad” after school special like “Crash”, in another I’m a bit disappointed that it’s not a measured look at a theme like isolation in “Babel”. “The Edge of Heaven” relies on coincidence a bit too much, and that’s the main reason I’m putting it a notch below others of its ilk. There are a few cruxes to its plot, and they all aim to make the audience gawk at how oblivious the characters are to some major life-changing information that they aren’t aware of. It’s the same thing that horror films do when you know the killer is in the room, except here it’s elevated because it’s high tragedy. The three main acts of the film feel slightly incongruous, and structurally they proceed strongest to weakest. In the interest of balance, I do have a lot of good things to say about the film as well. “The Edge of Heaven” is a beautiful movie to look at, making good use of Turkey’s beautiful vistas. The acting was excellent, and despite my criticisms the plot was a lot more subtle than the Hollywood version would have been. “The Edge of Heaven” was good, but ultimately not the best we’ve seen of this type of cinema. GO GO TALES I was beginning to think my crap detector was broken. I saw fifteen films in two weeks and the weakest of the bunch was an insightful but heavy handed environmental documentary produced and influenced by Terrence Malick. Something was wrong. I was enjoying everything, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that. Along came Abel Ferrara. The one Abel Ferrara film I like is “King of New York”, and that has more to do with Christopher Walken and Schooly D than anything else. “Driller Killer” is like the cinematic equivalent of headache inducing death metal. I acknowledge the reputation of “The Bad Lieutenant” and “Angel Heart” but personally didn’t find either of them very interesting or entertaining. Ferrara is often unfavorably compared to Scorcese, and I think that comparison is fair. Ferrara is Scorcese without the verve, charisma, substance, or technical aptitude. Despite all of this, I was cautiously optimistic about “Go Go Tales”. That optimism peaked in the opening credits as Archie Bell and the Drells played on the soundtrack, and everything was downhill from there. “Go Go Tales” is an annoying mess, with very few redeeming qualities. This film is being compared to “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”, one of those films that remains, inexplicably, on my mile long checklist of stuff to watch. The plotlines are definitely comparable, but as I browse through IMDB reviews the Cassavetes film sounds infinitely more appealing. A large chunk of the audience walked out of this film, and I chuckled when some guy declared indignantly that it was an “insult to Cassavetes!” on his way out. I downloaded “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”, I’ll have an opinion on the matter shortly. Willem Dafoe plays Ray Ruby, manager of a go-go dancing club neck deep in a hair brained scheme to win the lottery. The film takes place over one night at the club, as a variety of screwball characters pass through the establishment and skeezy looking girls cavort around on the stage. Dafoe is in his most painfully manic and over the top form here, mincing around the club in a frenzied attempt to outdo his performances in “Boondock Saints” and “Spider-man” at the same time. The rest of a decent cast is sadly wasted, as Bob Hoskins, Matthew Modine, Asia Argento, Roy Dotrice and others are given pointless roles with little consequence. It’s hard to like much of anything about this film, and most of the time it’s like nails on chalkboard. The film is well shot but garish to look at, like the bar scenes from “Mean Streets” stretched into an entire film. Ferrara’s statement on cinema is to present something ugly and common, kind of like the modern version of Marcel Duchamps “Fountain”, a toilet as modern art. Whether it’s Asia Argento making out with a Rottweiler or the screeching profanity of Ray Ruby’s wraith-like landlord this film is just crass and unpleasant to watch. The plot is vague and meanders towards a dull conclusion. The last scene is an absurd punch-line that reeks of bad taste; the camera focuses in on Dafoe’s face as a voiceover from another character set to a peppy drum beat makes the entire plot of the movie pointless. It was like a bad 80’s teen comedy took over for the last 30 seconds. It’s going to take a particular taste to appreciate this film, and I imagine that it will have a cult following at some point. But I know what I like, and this ain’t it. PARANOID PARK “Paranoid Park” is a worthy challenger to “Drugstore Cowboy” as Gus Van Sant’s best film, a more focused return to the style he’s been crafting since “Elephant”. This film may turn out to be what “Kids” was to my generation, capturing the zeitgeist of modern adolescence with depressing poignancy. “Paranoid Park” is about teenage skater Alex, a shy boy of roughly sixteen who spends most of his time skateboarding with his friends. To describe the central murder mystery plot would give away too much. Never afraid to take chances, Van Sant gives Gabe Nevins a lot of weight to carry for his first feature film performance. It’s impossible to tell if Nevins is playing himself here, but his directionless teenage confusion is remarkably close to the mark. Unlike most teens, Alex has a reason for his angst, but Nevins disguises his involvement in a crime like many teenagers conceal stuff like sexual orientation or unwanted virginity. At first it seems like Alex is the blank face of juvenile nihilism, but as more pieces of the puzzle are revealed we see that his tangled emotions have rendered him numb. Alex is unable to communicate with his estranged parents, and as authority figures they barely even register. His girlfriend is a nuisance that seems oblivious to the fact that he only speaks to her in monosyllabic mumbles. The only time he seems to feel anything is at Paranoid Park, a skate park on the bad side of town. Alex narrates the film, reading from a letter that he writes to a friend. The writing is crude and typical of someone in remedial English, but it gives the emotionless face we see on screen subtle nuances that couldn’t be communicated any other way. “Paranoid Park” unfolds in a disjointed sequence similar to “Elephant”. Rather than feeling gimmicky, however, the scattered structure seems like a convincing translation of a confused teenager’s troubled thoughts. The film inhabits the same spaced-out dreamy mood of its protagonist, languishing in long takes and hazy slow motion footage. Most of the photography has the same vibrant digital quality that “Elephant” and “Last Days” have, but here Van Sant experiments with different film stocks/formats and camera tricks that give the movie a mix-tape quality. There are several extended sequences of skateboarding footage set to music. The soundtrack is uniformly excellent, particularly the few pieces of hypnotic original score. There are long scenes where a song plays with no diegetic noise on the audio track, and the effect is similar to watching the scenes unfold with headphones on. Van Sant films the Pacific Northwest with an obvious affection for our overcast skies and our rain slick streets; this is a film about hoodie weather and the element of sleaze in every port city. “Paranoid Park” is set in Portland, but it would fit just as well in Vancouver and as a result it felt like an appropriate closing show to the festival. Gus Van Sant has perfected a certain style with this film, and I have found it incredibly interesting to watch how that style has progressed over the years. Sparse and unnervingly real, “Paranoid Park” is a highly successful experiment. This is one of the strongest films of the festival, and may turn out to be one of the best films of this year.
