Oh how time flies when one's life is full of schoolwork and screenings. I may have gotten to writing two early reviews during this past week, but I never posted on my second and final day at this year's San Diego Film Festival. As I had predicted, it was indeed a better one than the first. Unfortunately, the selections I caught were still far from what would desire out of a semi-large film-festival.
The best movie of the day I saw was, as expected, The Brothers Bloom. Just take a look at the picture's pedigree and strong festival-buzz and you'll see why I knew it would turn out that way. The Brothers Bloom isn't a mastepiece, but it's a solid piece of filmmaking from budding young director Rian Johnson. Johnson made 2007's high-school-set neo-noir Brick, which wasn't a very good film but it definitely showed promise. In this follow-up, Johnson has taken to less dark and less complicated material, although The Brothers Bloom is similar to the former work in that its success mainly rests in its ability to keep the audience guessing about plot-twists. These are aplenty here, and for the most part they succeed in captivating the viewer admist the film's terrifically fast pace. And the cast is excellent, too: not only are Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo engaging as the titular con-artists siblings, but Rachel Weisz is downright show-stealing and mezmerizing as the rich Jersey girl they try to pull one of their cons on. I wholeheartedly recommend The Brothers Bloom; a full review will be published on Bucket Reviews prior to the film's December release.
I was not so fortunate in my selection of Remarkable Power, which I based entirely upon the presence of actors Kevin Nealon and Tom Arnold (why I saw Arnold as an enticing factor I'll never know). The movie is a broad farce about a late-night talk show host's elaborate plan to stay on the air after his show is cancelled and involves a slew of unmemorable characters. The most prominent among them is Ross (Evan Peters), an obnoxious teenager living in LA's Koreatown who becomes obsessed with the phony impowerment he is provided by a series of self-help tapes he discovers on a 1AM informercial. Much of the film's plot concerns Ross' self-defense murder of the star of said infomercial. Don't ask. Don't care. Remarkable Power isn't funny, suspenseful, or entertaining. And it won't be coming to a theatre near you anytime soon. Even when the thing fatefully goes straight-to-video, it won't be worth seeing.
Last up for me at this year's festival was the Closing Night Presentation of the new documentary Morning Light, which follows a team of young sailors assembled by sailing-enthusiast and film-financier Roy Disney. They sail from California to Hawaii in the 2007 TransPac Yacht race. The doc plays more like an MTV-special than a family-friendly documentary--it's full of artificial-feeling drama and hokey empowerment of its college-aged subjects--but proves moderately entertaining and does justice to the considerable skill exhibited by said subjects. Morning Light isn't a film one should actively seek out during its upcoming limited run, but it makes for an enjoyable sit. My best advice is to wait for the DVD. A full review will be posted to Bucket Reviews within the next ten days.
And that concludes my coverage of this year's San Diego Film Festival, which was rather abysmal on the whole despite my condensed-schedule designed to avoid such a result. Out of the six pictures I saw, I only rated one above 2-1/2 Buckets (The Brothers Bloom). Much as I hate to say it, I may not return to SDFF next year, marking the first time I've skipped the festival since 2005. Hopefully the SDFF programmers will give me a reason to attend (ahem -- better bookings please, guys).
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