AFI Fest 2008: Day Seven

I approached Day Seven of AFI Fest feeling fresh and ready to go after having skipped two days to watch the election unfold. What a fitting way, I thought, to see two films that received solid reputations and strong buzz out of other festivals. The result, once again, was that one fell short of expectations and one lived up to them.

Ji-woon Kim’s The Good, the Bad, and the Weird is a lively throwback to Sergio Leone Westerns—hence the title spin-off—and early martial-arts films. The movie is beautifully photographed and boasts an invigorating sense of adrenaline, but it’s also totally disposable. Given its outrageous-seeming 130 minute-running-time, I am tempted to say that many of The Good, the Bad, and the Weird’s problems that stem from a lack of substance could have been solved had director Kim and editor Nam Na-Young chopped it down by 45 minutes. But never once during the film did I feel as though I was bored—in fact, my senses were challenged with incredible “how did they do that?” imagery every step of the way—so I can’t say that the length was an issue. Instead, I think Kim has attempted to make the type of pulpy, substance-less action-film that only works when the director’s name starts with Quen- and ends with –tin Tarantino.

The premise is even simpler than that of the usual Tarantino film: a mysterious map is being carried and dozens of assassins are vying to steal it because of the treasure it may lead to. The competition is eventually whittled down to three, as you may have guessed: the good guy, the bad guy, and the weird guy. Lots of sweeping shots ensue. There’s a breathtaking sequence early on in which map-hunters are violently knocked off by each other, one at a time. There’s another particularly striking scene that results from a prominent character being kidnapped. Notice that I’m trying to keep the details to a minimum. Truth is: if I were to describe the best scenes in The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, then I would be robbing potential viewers of most of the movie’s charms, which are purely visual in nature. Without its images and its energy, the movie would be nothing. Whereas Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction achieved substantial heft through well-written dialogue and cultural-commentary, Kim’s effort can only boast pretty pictures. Ultimately, The Good, the Bad, and the Weird, while not without its charms and entertainment-value, is only a motion picture in that indeed consists of moving pictures. 2 Buckets out of 4.

Next up was something much better.

While writer/director James Gray’s knack for crafting distinct moods and tones was readily apparent in last year’s We Own the Night, I would’ve never guessed from watching that dirty-cop flick that Two Lovers would be the poignant experience that it is. Told from the distant, yet still intimate perspective of the introverted, yet still charismatic Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), who rebounds from a failed engagement by falling in love with two different women (Gwyneth Paltrow and Vinessa Shaw), the movie is erotic and unpredictable—often at the same time.

The titular lovers that Leonard finds himself almost uncontrollably pursuing couldn’t be more different: Sandra (Shaw) is the daughter of a Jewish businessman working to merge his dry-cleaning company with Leonard’s father’s and Michelle (Paltrow) is the drug-addled upstairs-neighbor who’s dating a married corporate-hack but has a subconscious need for chaos that drives her to Leonard. Leonard is trapped in the middle of the two, still not fully recovered from his failed previous relationship and thus allowing the whims of the two women—Sandra is obsessed with him and Michelle texts him late at night when she feels lustful—to influence his own. And despite the fact that Leonard is rather reserved through it all, the viewer feels a deep bond with him – his frustration, his passion, his confusion, his regret, his longing. All the while, he experiences a quietly complex relationship with his parents (Moni Moshonov and Isabella Rossellini), who are the ones who first introduce him to Sandra and would like to see him marry her but silently realize that Michelle is electrifying his existence.

Much of the movie’s poignancy rests in the performances of Phoenix, who crafts a multi-dimensional man out of a sparingly written character, and Paltrow and Shaw, both of whom lure the viewer in just as they do Leonard. But all of the emotions are anchored by Gray’s deft direction. Structurally, Two Lovers is more complex than its simple love-triangle might let on; each time Leonard shifts back and forth between the two women, substantive character-development is achieved. The structure also maintains a sense of suspense that enhances the story: because the viewer doesn’t know which of the two Leonard will ultimately be with—if he ends up with anyone at all—they are able to feel the frustration and passion involved in his constantly switching mindset. Gray also deserves credit for co-writing the movie’s screenplay with Ric Menello, but it’s the way that Two Lovers is assembled that makes it the stirring picture it is. Great acting and filmmaking make this one a must-see. 3-1/2 Buckets out of 4.

AFI Fest 2008: Day Nine, Part 1

I'm almost caught up on festival coverage--only Days Seven and Eight to go--but before I do that, I'd like to highlight yet another film I saw in advance of the festival that has its premiere tonight. What makes this one different from the pack? It's free to attend.

Rest assured: that The World We Want is showing for free is not a reflection of its quality. This is a cleverly-structured and eye-opening (if not enlightening) documentary on the various problems the world faces, always involving and never preachy.

The movie works well because it's told from the perspective of teenagers trying to tackle world-problems through a universal school project. In the project, 14-to-16-year-old students work to enact solutions for problems plaguing their local communities. Director Patrick Davidson and crew follow the finalists of the project, who will share their work in Washington D.C. and be judged for a winning-prize. Some particularly memorable examples include Americans who try to rid school lunches of saturated fats, Russians who talk to government officials to ban casinos in Samara, Indians who work to preserve and light tourist-attraction landmarks near their school, and Indonesians who protest the harsh taxation of local silversmiths.

From the teenager's point of view, all of these issues are boiled down to the essentials and, as a result, earn the viewer's sympathies easily. And to see young people attempting to enact reform on, say, mob-controlled casinos or taxation of silversmiths, is something remarkable. The audience learns about some little-known local problems and becomes involved in the cast of characters working to solve them in the process.

The picture also functions as a nice travelogue, with the filmmakers not only visiting finalists in the aforementioned countries, but also those in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, Jordan, and Senegal. The photography is surpisingly aesthetically-pleasing given that the movie was shot on an HD-camera for what was presumably a shoestring budget. And it's all well-assmbled by director Davidson, who brings both heart and awareness to the issues. 3 Buckets out of 4; screens tonight, Sat., Nov. 8 at the Mann Chinese 6 at 7 p.m.

AFI Fest 2008: Day Four, Part 2

Day Five of AFI Fest 2008 represented a new opportunity at the festival for me: the ability to see films on weekdays. Last year, I was still going to school full-time in San Diego, so I was only able to catch weekend programming. While I would not take advantage of Tuesday or Wednesday’s line-ups due to my fixation on the presidential election, it was nice to be able to see a few selections on Monday and Thursday.

The day before a black man would become the President elect of the United States, I saw Anthony Fabian’s Skin, the true story of a South African woman named Sandra Liang (Sophie Okonedo) who was denied the rights her white parents and brother enjoyed because she was born with brown skin acquired from generations-old genes. Think of the opposite of the Anthony Hopkins character in The Human Stain, only living in a culture where being black meant being oppressed.

The most interesting part of Skin is not the rare genetic inheritance that long pained the life of its protagonist. Instead, it’s how the people around Sandra respond to her skin color. After a short flash-forward in time, the viewer is first introduced to Sandra when she is a young girl (played by Ella Ramangwane). Her parents are enrolling her in the same whites-only school as her older brother. Sandra is allowed to attend despite an apprehensive administration, but she is soon kicked out when a racist teacher makes up a reason to beat and boot her, causing her father (Sam Neill) to engage in battle with the government over her official race. One would think he’d become a tolerant guy because of the ensuing hardships, but he doesn’t at all. When Sandra begins to date his general store’s black supplier, her father immediately tries to end it because of the man’s race. In other words: he thinks it’s a-OK to persecute blacks, just not his black-appearing daughter because she has white parents. And the chaos doesn’t stop there. After Sandra marries the man and shuns her family as a result, he turns out to be abusive, suggesting that she was subconsciously attracted to him because he possessed the very same tragically violent qualities embodied by her father.

While Skin tells a remarkable story drenched in painstaking themes about fate, it isn’t a remarkable film. This is primarily because storywriter/director Anthony Fabian sticks to a rote approach to his narrative. He embraces Hollywood Style to an unhealthy extent in that the film becomes stuck in the standard “true-story” mold and the characters are never explored in detail on stylistic or thematic levels. Fabian clearly chose a simple structure so that he could convey the true story factually—when introducing the film, he made sure to point out everything onscreen was true—but in doing so he robbed Skin of its emotional authenticity. In other words, Fabian invested so much of his attention in sticking to the facts that he didn’t have any time to flesh out his characters emotionally, meaning that they are not in fact entirely honest representations of real people because they do not reflect many of the emotions essential to the story. Had Fabian allowed his actors to reach a little bit more in their work—perhaps embellishing a bit, but discovering greater truths in the process—Skin would’ve been a better movie. (Given Sophie Okenedo’s previous performances, we all know that she especially could’ve turned a good lead performance into a tour-de-force had the movie’s style and structure provided her more room to roam.)

Alas, Skin is a lot like many of the other films that have been made about the human tragedies committed in Africa’s recent history, certainly not as inspired as the memorable ones. Viewers interested in the general subject-matter will do far better renting the Okonedo-starrer Hotel Rwanda or the also-South Africa-based Tsotsi instead.

2-1/2 Buckets out of 4.

AFI Fest 2008: Day Three

After enduring a pretty mediocre session of movie-going for Day Two of this year's AFI Fest, I hoped the festival would redeem itself on Day Three. After the first of two movies I saw, I thought it would. After the second, I was not as enthusiastic about the notion.

I'll start with the good...

Last year, I saw the Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days at AFI Fest and it ended up as my favorite film of 2007. That experience alone boosted my expectations for The Class, this year's recipient of the prestigious award, to insurmountable heights.

The Class certainly isn't as good as its Romanian abortion-drama predecessor, but few films are. Rest assured: this picture is an intense, involving exercise in cinema verite with terrific performances and thought-provoking social commentary. It is deserving of its already-stellar reputation.

The premise is simple: François (François Bégaudeau, playing himself in a screenplay he co-adapted from a book he wrote) is a teacher at a public high-school outside Paris that is full of troubled students, nearly all of whom are the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. The film takes place over a year and chronicles the daily problems of his François' French class, which is so rowdy and unfocused due to its members' conflicting ethnicities and hardship-filled home-lives that it rarely proves able of cracking a book for more than 10 minutes at a time.

While the story may seem dull on paper, it is riveting on film. In the vein of the nouvelle vague filmmakers that put his country on the map in the 1950s and '60s, director Laurent Cantet employs a minimalistic fly-on-the-wall approach, capturing the raw intensity of the situations that arise with bare finesse. François' class is tested repeatedly: one boy misbehaves repeatedly but the school is afraid to punish him because his father will send him back to his African homeland if he is expelled, two girls sit in on the grading-process as student representatives (common in France) and then inappropriately gossip about the dismissive things teachers say about certain students, François gets so flustered he calls said girls "skanks," et cetera. All the while, Cantet never tries to provide easy relief for his audience; he is committed to making viewers feel the conflict in plot-points.

Cantet's approach does particular justice to two of the film's main goals. Firstly, it serves as a testament to just how enormous the problem that François and the other teachers in the school face is. This is a big issue in France's political decisions right now, especially with a record-high immigrant-population, and the film's intense depiction of its severity very well may impact future legislative decisions made. Secondly, said intensity highlights how good Bégaudeau is his (apparently very personal) role. There's a moment in which he merely sits and thinks after a stubborn and frustrating after-class conversation with a student who isn't applying herself like she used to that is one of the most powerful silent-scenes I've seen in any film all year.

The Class will not only be of interest to the French; adventurous American moviegoers will find plenty to latch onto as well. The movie doesn't lack anything that a good domestic inspirational-teacher movie like Freedom Writers boasts; the themes about the uniqueness of teacher-student relationships, finding one's identity in adolescence, and using education to escape from real-world problems are all present, just not as obvious or as preachy. (This is a good thing, in my view.) The Class essentially tells a familiar story, but it does so exceptionally by stripping style down to the essentials and crating thoughtful socio-political messages. Cheers to Cantet, Bégaudeau, and co-writer Robin Campillo for making a movie that is both intelligent and entertaining. 3-1/2 Buckets out of four; screens again Sat., Nov. 8 at 10 p.m.

I'm unwilling to spend nearly as much time talking about Hunger, British videographer Steve McQueen's film debut about imprisoned Irish Republican Bobby Sands' (Michael Fassbender) fatal will-power during the 1981 IRA Hunger Strike.

Hunger isn't too concerned with the historical details of the strike: Sands is provided four long takes (two of which go on for so long they'll undoubtedly be praised by film-school students even though McQueen merely employs a stationary camera) to explain the cause and his passion for it to a priest. These aren't really involving on a content-level; they are only engrossing in that they prove actor Fassbender is a more skilled thespian than his performance in 300 led us to believe. Fassbender is able to command the screen for long stretches of time, meaning he was probably once a stage actor. Keep an eye out for his name in the future.

But the rest of the movie consists almost exclusively of a bunch of shots of Sands' body as he grows progressively weaker from not eating. It's a painful and tedious experience... and not in the way McQueen wants it to be. The fact that he puts the viewer through hell proves nothing because it doesn't lend to an enhancement of the narrative. In fact, more times than not, it feels like McQueen is indulging in brutal imagery because it looks cool--he sure likes extreme close-ups of flesh--not because it portrays a hunger-strike experience in a painfully authentic manner. I tired of the experience very early on because it didn't teach me anything valuable and there was no reason for me to be taking part in it. 1 Bucket out of 4.

AFI Fest 2008: Fast Forward--Day Six

I'm zoomin' back and forth in time on these festival-posts to a near-incomprehensible extent, aren't I? Such is the problem I face in trying to cover current programming that I saw early before I fully catch up with past reviews.

So for those of you who haven't done the math: I've posted all of Day One and Day Two, none of Day Three, some of Day Four, and now Day Six. (I didn't attend Day Five because my eyes were fixed on the election and because only a few low-profile features were scheduled because programmers knew there would be quite a few in my position.)

But I digress. I wanted to cover a film playing tonight before it screens. It's called A Good Day to be Black & Sexy and, no, it has nothing to do with Barack Obama.

The film was written and directed by first-timer Dennis Dortch and consists of five short segments, linked by common themes about African-American sexual relationships in modern America. There's a woman who refuses to reciprocate oral sex when her husband gives it to her, another who is frustrated by her married boyfriend's lack of commitment, a first-generation Asian-American who's scared to tell her family she has a black partner, et cetera et cetera.

A Good Day to be Black & Sexy is effective for about a half an hour--around two segments worth--but it wears out its welcome quickly and becomes episodic. African-American audiences may enjoy the movie more than I did because it was made with them in mind--think Tyler Perry with less religion and more sex--but that doesn't excuse the fact that it's a decidedly mediocre effort. Dortch may be on to something --the multi-story structure admittedly suits his style well--but it's not hugely apparent in the final cut. And not a single performance in the picture stands out as being particularly inspired. Count it a missed opportunity. 2 Buckets out of 4.

A Good Day to be Black & Sexy screens tonight, Weds., Nov 5. at 7 p.m. and Fri., Nov. 7 at 12:45 p.m.