November 2009

Objectified

by James McNally on November 26, 2009

in Documentaries,DVD,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Objectified
This is a very late leftover from Hot Docs but I’m posting it now because I want to give people access to the recorded Q&A as well as to let you know that you can buy the film on DVD and Blu-ray from the offi­cial site.

Objectified (Director: Gary Hustwit): Gary Hustwit was always going to have a hard time fol­lowing up Helvetica. The sheer nov­elty of a doc­u­mentary exam­in­a­tion of a typeface would be hard to top. Instead, Objectified simply takes the first film’s approach and broadens the view­finder. Instead of looking at pieces of text, Hustwit aims his camera at the everyday objects around us. Who designs them, and what goes into the process?

As in the first film, the cam­er­a­work is fant­astic, teasing out gor­geous details in objects we often take for granted. And the inter­views are just as solid and cover a fair spec­trum of design philo­sophies. It’s no longer a nov­elty, but the film is solid and enjoy­able. And it hints at the larger issues that trouble the best designers. That is, do we really need more stuff? What good is a beautifully-designed object that just ends up in a land­fill some­where? I would have liked to dig even deeper into these issues but I do think Hustwit makes a real effort to address the run­away con­sumerism that is the under­lying problem with design fetishism.

I have to draw par­tic­ular atten­tion to the exem­plary job Hustwit does of building a com­munity around his films. His use of the web to pro­mote and sell his work is nothing short of amazing, and if he ever decides to stop making films him­self, I think he has another career teaching film­makers how to con­nect with their audiences.

That being said, I have no desire for him to stop making such beau­tiful and thought-provoking films. He’s prom­ised to wrap up his design tri­logy with his next film, though he’s given no hints yet about the film’s sub­ject. But I can say with con­fid­ence that if you liked the first two, you’re sure to enjoy the next one.

Official site of the film

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Gary Hustwit from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 19:20

9/10(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, design

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Un prophète

by James McNally on November 23, 2009 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals

Un prophète

Un prophète (Director: Jacques Audiard): Essentially a coming-of-age story set in a violent and cor­rupt prison, Un prophète sprawls over 150 minutes and yet doesn’t really let you get to know prot­ag­onist Malik all that deeply. When we first meet him, he’s an illit­erate and anti-social teen­ager, entering prison to begin a six-year sen­tence. Although of North African des­cent, he’s not a reli­gious Muslim, and so doesn’t fall in with the prison’s Muslim gang. Instead, he’s taken under the wing of the Corsicans, under the lead­er­ship of Cesar Luciani, after being forced into com­mit­ting the grue­some murder of an informant.

As time goes by, he learns to read and write, and is given more respons­ib­ility within the Corsican gang. He also secretly begins studying the Corsican lan­guage in order to know what’s being said behind his back. After a number of the Corsicans are trans­ferred to prisons closer to home, Malik finds him­self becoming Cesar’s trusted lieu­tenant. Even so, Cesar and the other Corsicans berate him as a “dirty Arab” and the Muslims con­sider him a Corsican. Gradually he is able to form rela­tion­ships with the Muslims, too, and he makes a good friend in Ryed, who is soon released.

Once Ryed is on the out­side, the two team up to estab­lish a drug smug­gling oper­a­tion to get drugs into the prison. He does this without informing Cesar, for whom he con­tinues to do errands. When Malik’s nearing parole, he is able to obtain “leave” days and so begins run­ning more dan­gerous errands for Cesar as well as meeting with Ryed. Without giving away any more plot, I can tell you that by the end of the film, the stu­dent has sur­passed his master, and young Tahar Rahim does a great job of showing Malik’s trans­form­a­tion over a period of sev­eral years. He is able to convey a child­like sense of wonder when Malik exper­i­ences things for the first time, like flying in a plane or walking on a beach. And the film is slickly dir­ected, por­traying the viol­ence and para­noia of prison life in gritty detail. There are even some arty flour­ishes: the man Malik kills at the begin­ning of the film returns to haunt him in his cell, another scene which gives the film its title, and the numerous titles that appear on screen, announ­cing a character’s name or a chapter theme.

But as I said at the begin­ning, I still felt the film lacked a beating heart. Malik’s trans­form­a­tion is from petty crim­inal to crime boss, a matter of learning skills and building rela­tion­ships. Any inner change is barely hinted at, and we don’t know any­thing about how he feels about the mor­ality of what he does. The film is pretty fatal­istic, and Malik’s ascent doesn’t dis­guise his lack of choices. I would have liked to see his char­acter struggle a bit more with his con­science, though.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #euff09, crime, europeanfilmfestival, france, prison

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Woodpecker

by James McNally on November 19, 2009

in DVD

Woodpecker
Woodpecker is avail­able on DVD from Carnivalesque Films. You can buy the film dir­ectly from their web site.

Woodpecker (Director: Alex Karpovsky): Hope, Emily Dickinson taught us, is the thing with feathers:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chil­liest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Perhaps it’s fit­ting, then, that the sub­ject of Johnny Neander’s quest is a bird: the legendary Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, last spotted in the 1940s. A rash of recent sight­ings near the town of Brinkley, Arkansas bring part-time house painter and ama­teur poet Johnny and his silent pal Wesley to town, where they will attempt to be the first people to obtain doc­u­mentary proof of the woodpecker’s return. Making a comeback when you seem to be gone forever turns out to be a central theme of this unusual film. Shooting in a documentary-fiction hybrid, Karpovsky gradu­ally moves from one to the other as we learn more about our central char­acter. When the film begins, Johnny is just one among a number of bird­watchers and locals talking about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. We hear from local people, many of whom are delighted that the atten­tion has brought tour­ists and busi­ness back to their dying town, but a few who resent the res­ulting pro­tec­tion of the bird’s hab­itat, denying them the right to hunt ducks there. Within a few weeks, how­ever, it seems like most of the searchers have given up and gone home. Well, except for Johnny and Wes.

We soon learn that this is much more than a bird­watching exped­i­tion for Johnny. It becomes a quest for per­sonal redemp­tion, and as he trudges through the bayou with the hap­less Wes in tow, we are treated to his incessant philo­soph­ical chat­tering and poetry read­ings. While they are indeed hil­arious, as the days go by, we begin to sense the des­per­a­tion and sad­ness in the men’s quest. Though Wes is strictly a sidekick, we learn that he’s there due to his own per­sonal tragedy. Johnny just doesn’t want to be a loser any­more, and his dis­com­fort with his own life makes him yearn for the freedom that birds seem to enjoy.

The clever thing is that the wood­pecker can so easily stand in for almost any other elu­sive thing that humans search for. Karpovsky could easily have set the film in, say, Roswell, New Mexico and had his prot­ag­onist searching for aliens. But that would have been going for easy laughs at his character’s expense. Instead, the film offers many poignant moments that allow us to identify with Johnny. By the second half of the film, we’re almost in Waiting for Godot ter­ritory, where the absurdity is tightly wrapped up with the over­whelming longing for tran­scend­ence that many of us feel. In fact, it’s no sur­prise at all that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker’s nick­name is “Lord God Bird.” The mix­ture of comedy and mel­an­choly works better in my mind, in fact, than the hybrid of doc­u­mentary and fic­tion, which begins to feel a bit unwieldy as soon as we’ve formed an emo­tional attach­ment to Johnny and Wes.

Perhaps fit­tingly, Johnny is played by an actor (Jon e. Hyrns) whom Karpovsky dis­covered in a doc­u­mentary (Johnny Berlin) made about his career as a porter on a 1930s Pullman railway car. Hyrns, who co-wrote the script, is not sur­pris­ingly also a nov­elist, and his storytelling gifts serve the film well.

One of the script’s greatest achieve­ments, in my mind, is in the pitch-perfect poetry that Johnny writes about birds. Of course, the poems are hil­arious, but at the same time they pos­sess a heart­felt hon­esty that, while not on a level with Emily Dickinson, man­ages to convey the pain that Johnny is so des­perate to escape. The entire film is a suc­cessful blending of comedy and pathos that lets us cel­eb­rate hope, no matter how crazy.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: birdwatching, hope, independent, obsession

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In The Loop

by James McNally on November 19, 2009 · 1 comment

in DVD

In The Loop
In The Loop was released on DVD in Canada on November 10 by Alliance Films and will come out January 10, 2010 in the US. You can help Toronto Screen Shots by buying it from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

In The Loop (Director: Armando Iannucci): On this side of the pond, the name Armando Iannucci likely doesn’t ring a bell, but for fans of British comedy, the man is con­sidered a genius. His col­lab­or­a­tions with Steve Coogan include the classic Alan Partridge shows (The Day Today, Knowing Me, Knowing You, I’m Alan Partridge). Most recently, he’s been writing and dir­ecting a blaz­ingly fast and funny series called The Thick of It, which mines the comedic ter­ritory of polit­ical media hand­lers working for the British government.

In The Loop takes almost all the actors from that show, mixes up the char­ac­ters a bit, and places them in the midst of the run up to the (unnamed but blind­ingly obvious) Iraq war in 2003. Peter Capaldi returns as Malcolm Tucker, the whipsmart press sec­retary with a mean streak. I’ve never heard more cre­ative swearing in my life, and if you’re offended by “f-bombs” then this film is def­in­itely not for you. But it’s my firm belief that no one can curse more cre­at­ively than our friends from the British Isles, and every char­acter reaches for the stars in this very funny movie.

Simon Foster is the min­ister for inter­na­tional devel­op­ment who puts his foot in his mouth by making off-the-cuff remarks about the pos­sib­ility of a war. The press runs riot and Malcolm Tucker tears young Foster a new back­side. The rest of the film fol­lows the boun­cing min­ister as he’s used by pro– and anti-war fac­tions in both the UK and the US. He con­tinues to fudge his “lines” and the res­ulting mess makes for some very funny situ­ations. While The Thick of It con­fines itself to English politics, In The Loop cre­ates sim­ilar char­ac­ters on the American side, with James Gandolfini clearly enjoying him­self as a peace-loving gen­eral who nev­er­the­less threatens to kill sev­eral of his polit­ical oppon­ents. It’s nice, too, to see Anna Chlumsky (best known for 1991’s My Girl) return in the role of a young aide to an anti-war assistant sec­retary of state.

In The Loop

Overall, though, the Brits get the best lines (as might be expected) and one of the fun­niest scenes is when Malcolm Tucker the angry Scot actu­ally brings in an even angrier Scot to handle yet another press leak. Steve Coogan has a small cameo as an irate local man trying to get his mother’s garden wall fixed in the midst of an inter­na­tional crisis. Though I would have loved to see more of him, giving him a bigger role might have unbal­anced the mostly star-free cast. In The Loop will be riot­ously funny to anyone with even a passing interest in the work­ings of politics. Though it’s not any­thing spe­cial cine­mat­ic­ally (think a longer episode of The West Wing), there’s enough crack­ling dia­logue to keep you laughing all the way through. In fact, it’s a per­fect film for DVD since you may find your­self having to rewatch cer­tain scenes, either because the accents are slightly unin­tel­li­gible, or because you were laughing so hard you missed the next piece of dialogue.

This was a film whose trailer let it down because it had to cut out all the swearing. So I’ve included instead an actual clip. Be fore­warned, though, that this con­tains some many naughty words.

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: politics, satire, uk, war

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October Country

by James McNally on November 19, 2009 · 1 comment

in Doc Soup,Documentaries,Film Festivals

October Country
Editor’s Note: Doc Soup is a monthly doc­u­mentary screening pro­gramme run by the good folks at Hot Docs. It gives audi­ences in Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver their reg­ular doc fix each year from the fall through to the spring, leading up to the Hot Docs fest­ival itself.

October Country (Directors: Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri): Photographer Donal Mosher has been cre­ating photo-essays of his family for many years. When cine­ma­to­grapher Palmieri saw them, he sug­gested they make a film. From that simple idea came this lovely, haunting por­trait of a troubled American family. Mosher’s family live in Ilion, a small town in upstate New York, and the film covers a period of one year, begin­ning and ending with Hallowe’en. The title and Hallowe’en theme fit per­fectly, since this is a family that seems haunted by the ghosts of the past.

Patriarch Don is an emo­tion­ally remote Vietnam vet, strug­gling with what he wit­nessed (and per­haps par­ti­cip­ated in). He’s com­pletely estranged from his sister Denise, a lonely Wiccan who has always found solace in other worlds. Don’s wife Dottie seems to be the centre and the rock of the clan, loving everyone even when her hard-bitten wisdom is ignored, which is pretty much all the time. Her daughter Donna, who has become a grand­mother in her thirties, sees her own daughter Danael making exactly the same mis­takes that she once made. Then there’s Desiree, just entering her tur­bu­lent teens and won­dering if she can escape the cycles of des­pair that the rest of the family seem doomed to repeat. Making occa­sional appear­ances (when he’s not in jail or partying with his friends) is Chris, Don and Dottie’s foster son, who has returned their patient love by rob­bing them on more than one occasion.

In this remark­ably intimate film, each family member speaks openly about their troubles, and their efforts to break out of their destructive pat­terns, but some­thing always stops them. It doesn’t help that their town is eco­nom­ic­ally depressed, with the only steady jobs avail­able at the local gun plant. Wal-mart is not only their only place to shop; its parking lot has become some­thing of a town square, where everyone gathers to watch fire­works. Danael escapes one violent rela­tion­ship with her baby’s father only to fall into another one. Her choice of men is as lim­ited as her choice of career. The older mem­bers of the family smoke rue­fully and shake their heads.

And yet. For all the gloom in the film, we can’t help caring deeply for each member of this admit­tedly dam­aged family. They are artic­u­late, honest, and often funny, and we root for them, even when we know that nothing much can really change. Palmieri’s camera catches numerous moments of beauty in the Moshers’ lives, and Dottie admits that even with all the town’s liab­il­ities, it’s still her favourite place to be.

Mosher and Palmieri have allowed us into the lives of people who make up a much larger pro­por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion than movies and tele­vi­sion would ever lead us to believe. Their lives are hard, but not without meaning. The one curious omis­sion in the film is Donal Mosher him­self. It would have been much more inter­esting to see his inter­ac­tions with his family, espe­cially con­sid­ering that he’s one who did “get out” and make his way in the larger world. You’ll hear some of his reas­oning for not appearing in the film in the audio Q&A, but for some­thing that started out so per­sonal, he seemed determ­ined not to impose his own feel­ings onto the film.

October Country is brave and unflinching. It’s inter­esting to note that the film­makers gave the family mem­bers final cut of the film. Their hon­esty and elo­quence in the midst of their troubles dis­play some of the best qual­ities that human beings can embody, and the film is a beau­tiful por­trait of these imper­fect lives.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ectors Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri from after the screening:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (ver­sion 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest ver­sion here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Duration: 14:31

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: family, smalltown

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