Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Everything Is Illuminated

by James McNally on September 13, 2005 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated (USA, dir­ector Liev Schreiber): Based upon the acclaimed novel by Jonathan Safron Foer, Everything Is Illuminated is the dir­ect­orial debut of actor Liev Schreiber. An auda­cious choice, since the novel is multi-layered and very “meta”, but Schreiber, who also wrote the screen­play, handles the material with ease, for the most part.

Elijah Wood (looking as doll-like as ever, and wearing glasses that mag­nify his already-huge eyes to make the not-so-subtle point that he is an observer) plays Jonathan, a man obsessed with col­lecting things from his family’s his­tory. When his grand­mother hands him a pho­to­graph from 1940 saying, “Your grand­father wanted you to have this,” it sends Jonathan off on a voyage of dis­covery. The pic­ture is of his grand­father in Ukraine, standing with an unknown woman who, according to his grand­mother, saved him from the Nazis, allowing him to escape to America.

Jonathan duly turns up in Ukraine, where he hopes to unravel the mys­tery of the woman in the pho­to­graph. His tour guides turn out to be a little unnerving to the fussy and obsessive veget­arian. His trans­lator Alex is like a Ukrainian ver­sion of Sasha Baron-Cohen’s Ali G and Borat char­ac­ters rolled into one, and is played by new­comer Eugene Hutz, the frontman for the “gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello, who con­tribute sev­eral songs to the soundtrack. While I thought his accent in the film was just an out­rageous parody, during the Q & A, I real­ized it was actu­ally his real voice (or maybe not. It could be part of the shtick.). Alex’s grand­father, the driver, thinks he is blind and is accom­panied every­where by Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., his “seeing-eye bitch.” Alex’s mangled English leads to many laughs, and the middle sec­tion of this road movie is easily the most enjoyable.

Things get a bit more ser­ious when they find the woman in the pho­to­graph, but here, in a sec­tion of the film called “The Illumination,” I found myself still a little in the dark. Perhaps in ironing out a few of the book’s twists, some­thing was lost, but I found the “mys­tery” either con­fusing or not so mys­ter­ious, and actu­ally felt a little unsat­is­fied by the end.

However, the film is shot and edited beau­ti­fully, the acting is fine, and the dir­ecting sure-handed. Schreiber admitted that the stuff in the book that he left out of the film was the stuff that attracted him to the idea in the first place. Which is an odd thing to say, really. The book con­tains an ima­gined his­tory of the shtetl where Jonathan’s grand­father was raised, a place with hun­dreds of years of his­tory which is wiped out by the Nazis in a few hours. I think this back­ground would have given the film the weight it needed at the end of the journey. Without that bal­last, the film floats away a bit.

Nevertheless, this is an assured debut from Schreiber, and I look for­ward to seeing what he chooses for his next project.

Gogol Bordello Web Site: http://www.gogolbordello.com

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: road-movie, TIFF

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The Heart Of The Game

by James McNally on September 13, 2005

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,TIFF

The Heart Of The Game

The Heart Of The Game (USA, dir­ector Ward Serrill): A doc­u­mentary about high-school bas­ket­ball that took seven years to make, this film will be com­pared to Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, which is a high com­pli­ment indeed. But the films are different.

Serrill began fol­lowing the girls’ bas­ket­ball team at Seattle’s Roosevelt High School when they hired a new coach, tax law pro­fessor Bill Resler. Not expected to make much of an impact, Resler pro­ceeded to build a power­house in his first year at the job. An eccentric but effective motiv­ator, he chose a dif­ferent “theme” for his team each year: Pack of Wolves, Pride of Lions, Tropical Storm, and then whipped his players into a frenzy. His motiv­a­tional skills and his ruth­less phys­ical workouts gave the team the con­fid­ence and endur­ance to beat their oppon­ents, even when they were bigger, taller, or more talented.

In his second year at the job, he noticed a young freshman by the name of Darnelia Russell. She stood out for a number of reasons. She had been an out­standing bas­ket­ball player at her middle school. And she was black. At Roosevelt, in a priv­ileged suburb of Seattle, black stu­dents were a minority, unlike at inner-city schools like arch-rival Garfield. In fact, when he tried to recruit her for his team, she rebuffed him at first, admit­ting to her friends that she wasn’t used to being around so many white people. Her pres­ence at Roosevelt was the com­bined idea of her middle school coach and her mother, who wanted to keep her out of trouble and make sure she got an excel­lent education.

Her arrival helps Resler build Roosevelt into a city dyn­asty and a threat at the state cham­pi­on­ships. But there are ups and downs. And if you wonder why the film took seven years to make, Serrill admitted that he just filmed everything and waited for the story to emerge.

Although the film touches on a few issues of race and class, Serrill says he wanted to make it more about the bas­ket­ball, and there are gen­erous clips of games, even from major net­work cov­erage. Although it give the film much of its energy, I felt myself wishing there were a few more inter­views with players, espe­cially Darnelia, who emerges as a central char­acter in the story. We never really get to know her as any­thing other than a great bas­ket­ball player.

That being said, it’s a doc­u­mentary about sports, so I’m pre­dis­posed to like it. There is real drama and excite­ment, both on and off the court, and it’s also good to see the con­tri­bu­tion of people like Bill Resler recog­nized, a good man who is instilling not just a love of win­ning, but of playing, and living. As the credits rolled, it was endearing to see that a few of the songs were actu­ally com­posed and played by Resler, on guitar and vocals, with dir­ector Serrill on har­monica. I’m giving this 8.5, even though my graphic doesn’t show half-points.

Film’s Web Site: http://www.heartofthegame.org

8.5/10(8.5/10)

Tagged as: basketball, Documentaries, sports, TIFF

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