Capone's Art-House Round-Up with FREEHELD, HE NAMED ME MALALA, BELTRACCHI: THE ART OF FORGERY, YAKUZA APOCALYPSE, and DEATHGASM!!!

Hey, folks. Capone in Chicago here, with a few films that are making their way into art houses or coming out in limited release around America this week (maybe even taking up one whole screen at a multiplex near you). Do your part to support these films, or at least the good ones…


FREEHELD
Fresh off her Oscar win earlier this year for Still Alice, Julianne Moore returns with yet another riveting performance trapped in a film that doesn't quite provide the best framework for a story that really deserves it. In based-on-a-true-story FREEHELD, Moore plays Laurel Hester, a revered New Jersey detective who also happens to be a lesbian with zero skills in the dating world. She has opted to keep her private life exceedingly private, even from her partner Dane Wells (Michael Shannon, playing the polar opposite character than he does in the current 99 HOMES). But one day, Laurel meets Stacie Andree (Ellen Page), and they become a fantastically compatible couple, eventually moving in to together in a lovely suburban home.

The women file for domestic partnership (still a new process at the time), but when Laurel's doctors discover she has cancer and will likely die from it, she discovers that because she and Stacie aren't legally married, her police pension will not go to her, and Stacie likely won't be able to keep the home they built together. Written by Ron Nyswaner (PHILADELPHIA), FREEHELD is absolutely a film about social justice and protests attempting to right a great wrong. But at its core, the film is about these two reluctant activists and how much they love each other. There were other ways to get Stacie that pension (Laurel could have married any man, who in turn could give Stacie the pension money), but she didn't want to skirt the system; she wanted to destroy it in its current form before she died.

Steve Carell makes an unexpected appearance as New York lawyer/activist Steven Goldstein, and goes just a couple of notches beyond where he needs to, coming dangerously close to being a stereotype. I did like the performance by Josh Charles as county official Bryan Kelder, who is one of the people who voted against the pension going to Stacie, but ultimately is the first to change his stance for reasons that aren't as good-hearted as one might like. But the real hero of the day is Shannon, playing Wells like a guy who simply believes in what is right, no matter his personal views on gay marriage or the town's tradition.

Based on the far superior, 2007 Oscar-winning documentary short of the same name, FREEHELD is directed by Peter Sollett (RAISING VICTOR VARGAS, NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST), and he has a real eye for capturing details that tell us a great deal about characters. The problem lies in his approach to the struggle; it feels designed and crafted to make us feel one way and one way only, which I suppose in another way of saying it feels manipulative. Speeches from both sides of the debate sound canned and generic. Anytime the humanity is stripped away from the story, the film suffers. Moore and Page are splendid here, playing their parts with a degree of quiet dignity that is absolutely appropriate. But their work is couched in a movie that feels forced and too impressed with its own message, making the outcome seem all the more predetermined.

FREEHELD is far from terrible; I'm sure you could watch it, cry through it, make it through to the ending and feel pretty good about the world, especially in light of the Supreme Court's decision on nationwide marriage equality. But FREEHELD is about capturing a small moment in gay history that might have otherwise been forgotten. This story absolutely deserves to be told and held in high regard, but I'm not sure this version of that story is the best one that could have been produced. Something is off. Maybe it does boil down to Carell's abysmal work (his calling everyone "honey" seems like an act of aggression more than affection), but there's something more in many of the portrayals that feels generalized and disingenuous.


HE NAMED ME MALALA
If you somehow didn't hear the story when it happened, you've probably heard it recently. Three years ago, 15-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai was targeted by the Taliban for speaking out in favor of education for girls (which the Taliban forbade) and was subsequently shot in the head on the bus on her way home from school. Somehow surviving, she and her family moved to the UK where Malala could continue her studies as well as her advocacy work for girls' education all over the world. For her work, she recently was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Shortly after her move to England, filmmaker Davis Guggenheim (AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WAITING FOR SUPERMAN) began chronicling both her advocacy work and her home life, with her parents and her two brothers. The resulting HE NAMED ME MALALA is an interesting glimpse that doesn't pretend to paint a complete portrait, but gives us both the young girl and the burgeoning woman who is attempting to campaign for this enormous mission. Subsequently, it also forces the audience to consider how we treat young girls differently than boys in our society and everyday interactions.

The title of the film comes from an ancient story about a girl named Malala who also fought for freedoms for women and was killed for her beliefs. The fact that her father, Zia, named her after this hero fills him with both pride and a certain amount of guilt for allowing her to fight for her cause when she was so young, making her a target. It's astonishing to hear Malala say that she holds not malice toward the person who shot her, because she understands that he's part of a belief system that warps the mind.

Malala has an abundance of positive energy, courage and intelligence. She's also a girl that gets caught at one point looking at shirtless images of her favorite male athletes on the internet. She's an extraordinary contradiction that HE NAMED ME MALALA captures most of the time. The film doesn't shy away from controversies surrounding her, including questions about who wrote her book about the shooting or if she is, in fact, a good influence and role model for girls (you can probably guess who says she isn't). She isn't afraid to meet world leaders and tell them succinctly and forcefully what they need to do differently to improve the world (she went after President Obama about drone strikes).

My biggest complaint about HE NAMED ME MALALA is that it feels incomplete because clearly this young woman has a lot more left to happen to her. Guggenheim probably thinks she might be worth a follow-up doc, and he's likely correct. The film is equally informative and uplifting, and while it's not exactly an example of traditional news gathering—it feels more like a motivational film at times—but it is meant to pull us out of our sofa-based activism and do something even remotely as positive as Malala.


BELTRACCHI: THE ART OF FORGERY
I've seen more than my fair share of documentaries about artists, both living and dead, but few reach the levels of fascination and intrigue than this new film from director Arne Birkenstock on the notorious forger Wolfgang Beltracchi. His specialty was not in re-creating famous works of art, but producing "lost" works by both legendary and mid-level artists of the early and mid-20th century that, according to his fiction, have been rumored to exist but have never been photographed or otherwise documented to any degree.

BELTRACCHI: THE ART OF FORGERY follows this man, and we're torn as to what impresses us most — his skills as an artist or research and work he puts into forging the lie. He selects old canvases and slightly beaten-up frames, creates the paints from hand-ground sources, and even finds ways of adding dust and dirt from the region where the painting was supposedly created or discovered. He and his charming wife Helene (a perfectly lovely couple by any definition) never sell the paintings directly but manage to find a third party to impart the work and backstory, taking it to the art-collection world and selling for millions of dollars.

As he points out early on in the film, he never commits a crime until he signs the finished painting with the name of a dead artist, and Beltracchi makes it perfectly clear that some of his forgeries are hanging in the world's great museums, with only a handful having been discovered. The implications are staggering, but the fact that these wealthy collectors are so desperate to own a lost piece of history makes them the easiest target for this long con. It probably will only make you more despondent to know that Beltracchi usually finishes his forgeries in a matter of days.

The film also spends a bit of time exploring Beltracchi as an original artist as well, although admittedly, that section is a little less interesting and probably needed to be included to get access to the rest of the far more interesting story. His ability to ape the style of some of the finest and most revered artists of the last 100 years goes beyond impressive, but his accounts of the stories behind the paintings are told with humility and a bit of shrugging about why people are so bent out of shape about his crimes.

I especially enjoyed hearing testimony from private art collectors who were swindled, but still kept the forgery as a conversation piece—naturally moving it from a high-profile living room display to a secondary bathroom. THE ART OF FORGERY pulls you gently into Beltracchi's quiet life, but holds you captive with the quality of his work and the ease at which he got away with it for 40-some years.


YAKUZA APOCALYPSE
With nearly 100 screen and television credits to his name, Japan's prolific Takashi Miike is still cranking out come of the most extreme examples of sensory overload, mash-up cinema the world has ever seen. He's capable of producing films that feel like a violent blur (ICHI THE KILLER, VISITOR Q, and the DEAD OR ALIVE series) in the name year as quieter, more haunting works (AUDITION, 13 ASSASSINS). The quality of his output is often a mixed bag, and while many of his earlier works seem to always found an outlet (and audience) in America, lately that hasn't been the case. Still, when one sneaks through customs, it's likely worth a viewing, if only to confirm that Miike hasn't lost his bloody edge.

YAKUZA APOCALYPSE will not go down as one of the master's better works, but diehards will likely still find a great deal to cheer about. In addition to its Yakuza base coat, Miike has layered on elements of Japan's kaiju fascination, vampire stories (seemingly lifted directly from Guillermo del Toro's TV series "The Strain"), dark comedy, spaghetti Westerns, and of course, a little bit of samurai swordplay. There's a great opening sequence that reveals the truth about an older yakuza boss (Lily Franky)—that he is an undead being who feeds on blood. He keeps the members of the community he rules over happy with protection and a kind word, but he also keeps a stash of prisoners in his basement as a food supply. But other than that, he seems like a good guy, except that he doesn't last long in the film, much to its detriment.

More vampires make their way into town, some are more violent and uncontrollable than others; one speaks English and dresses like a man of the cloth. It's all a bit fuzzy. And speaking of fuzzy, there's a way-too-long (both as an action sequence and comedy bit) fight sequence near the end of the film involving a velour frog mascot. Martial arts fans should keep their eyes open for an appearance by Yayan Ruhian, who played Mad Dog in the two THE RAID movies; he's largely wasted in YAKUZA APOCALYPSE, but I'm glad he's getting work outside of Indonesia. The movie is wildly inconsistent, tragically paced, often flat-out dull, with flashes of infrequent brilliance—sadly not quite enough to recommend it to anyone outside of hardcore Miike admirers, who understand that sometimes the output of a mad genius can sometimes be more maddening than genius.


DEATHGASM
For as long as recorded history, two things that have always gone together are heavy metal music and devil worship, and I think we're a better world because of that unholy alliance. In the New Zealand horror-comedy DEATHGASM, young Brodie (Milo Cawthorne) is something of a metal geek who stumbles upon mysterious sheet music with his new friend Zakk (James Blake) that's in the possession of a reclusive one-time metal hero living in a nearby town. The problem is, a death cult is also looking for this music, and is leaving a trail of bodies behind as it looks for it.

Brodie as his newly formed band (called Deathgasm, which includes Zakk) painstakingly rehearse the piece until they finally get it right and unknowingly unleash the power of an Aeloth, The Blind One, a nasty ancient demon that ends up turning a great deal of the townsfolk into possessed creatures, ripping out their own eyes and intent on killing the remaining living. But if Aeloth actually fully returns to Earth, the fabric of existence is in danger, so the band members and Brodie's crush Medina (Kimberly Crossman) set out to defend the planet.

As one might expect from a first-time feature from a visual effects expert, writer-director James Lei Howden makes DEATHGASM into a cartoonishly violent affair, which takes the edge off some truly nasty bits of largely practical gore sequences. The film is paced quite nicely and never drags as it flies through its story of outcasts battling an army of (now possessed) regular types and religious zealots that Brodie & Co. are more than willing to murder. I should also mention that the music is great, by a host of bands I've never heard of but which completely fit in and set the tone for this twisted little work of the devil.

DEATHGASM isn't a classic piece of horror cinema, but it is a fitting fantasy about the kind of revenge a victim of bullying might wish to enact upon his oppressors. It's great midnight fare, especially appropriate for the weeks leading up to Halloween.

-- Steve Prokopy
"Capone"
capone@aintitcool.com
Follow Me On Twitter