road-movie

The Puffy Chair

by James McNally on April 17, 2007 · 1 comment

in DVD

The Puffy Chair

The Puffy Chair (Director: Jay Duplass, USA, 2005): The Puffy Chair was the recip­ient of sig­ni­ficant buzz after it won the Audience Award at the South by Southwest film fest­ival in 2005, and the fact that a film made for $15,000 can even get released on DVD is pretty impressive, so I was curious to see what all the fuss was about.

Created by the Duplass Brothers (Jay dir­ects, while brother Mark plays the lead), the film is a road movie that traces the deteri­or­a­tion of twenty-something slacker couple Josh and Emily’s rela­tion­ship. Josh has pur­chased the tit­ular chair on eBay as a gift for his father’s upcoming birthday, and the plan is for him to drive from New York to his par­ents’ home in Atlanta, picking up the chair along the way. Circumstances con­spire such that not only does Emily end up coming along, but Josh’s even-more-aimless and psychobabble-spouting brother Rhett joins them as well. The comedy is of the Curb Your Enthusiasm variety, with situ­ations spiralling out of con­trol for no good reason except one char­acter or another’s refusal to back down or admit their mis­take. I happen to love this kind of uncom­fort­able humour, and a scene near the begin­ning where Josh tries to rent a motel room for the group while pre­tending to be just one person is hilarious.

Other reviewers have pointed to the film’s strength in doc­u­menting the dam­aged rela­tion­ship between Josh and Emily, and while I can agree intel­lec­tu­ally, I guess I’m a little too far removed from my twen­ties to really feel it so strongly. Both of them are pretty manip­u­lative and imma­ture, and it took a while for me to warm to them. As film char­ac­ters, I didn’t mind spending 90 minutes with them, but I’d really hate to have real friends like this. (Sorry, hipsters).

Technically, the film was as good as it could be based on the min­is­cule budget. I did find the incessant small zooms dis­tracting, as well as the fre­quent loss of focus. But the script wasn’t bad, and some of the situ­ations were genu­inely funny. The chem­istry between the actors was good as well, and by the end, des­pite what I said above, I was really hoping that somehow Josh and Emily could sal­vage things and maybe learn some­thing from their strange journey. The film’s abrupt ending made me realize that I cared about these screwups more than I thought.

Official site for the film

7/10(7/10)

Tagged as: DVD, independent, mumblecore, road-movie

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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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