independent film reviews

USA 2007, 98 minutes, 35mm

Hal Hefner, our teenage hero in Rocket Science, is the stuttering kid. He stammers through simple sentences. He looks at his feet while he talks to people. He sits in the back of class, fearful that his voice might accidentally escape and run away. And for the last odd-decade or so, that’s all he’s been. Other than being a quiet underachiever with a speech impediment, he’s a blank slate. It’s through the intervention of an overachieving, fast-talking, and, most importantly, female classmate that Hal attempts to break out of his shell.

Ginny Ryerson, an all-star on the debate team and stone-cold ice-queen, bewitches the spineless Hal into joining the debate team to avenge her embarrassing loss at last year’s state competition. At first the idea of public speaking for fun is completely ridiculous to Hal, but thanks to some additional prodding from Ginny and his own restless hormones, Hal decides to give it a shot. But this isn’t a Disney find-your-hidden-talent feel-good story; Hal is a complete failure when it comes to speaking. His teammates can barely watch as Hal struggles with the opening comments to his arguments. Eventually he is completely abandoned, by his friends, family and by Ginny. Hal is then forced to make a choice: to give it all up and regress back into the bit player he once was, or to become something more, something unexpected.

Reece Thompson’s standout performance as Hal alone makes Rocket Science worth watching. Whereas other teen coming of age comedies are typically dominated by a veteran actor as a side character (think Vince Vaughn in Thumbsucker), Hal truly outshines the rest of the cast. His portrayal of the fumbling, socially awkward teen filled with equal parts anxiety and frustration is charming and honest.

Unfortunately, like many quirky indie comedies, Rocket Science relies on some shallow caricatures to fill space. Comedy it-guy Jonah Hill makes an unexpected appearance as a library patron and an amateur philosopher, but that’s all it is, an appearance. He rattles off a couple lines then fades into the background. Ginny’s neighbors play Violent Femmes covers to cope with marital stress. Is this important to the film? No. Is it absurd? Sure. But it’s also a tired trend (it was tired when it got here) that seems to be cropping up more and more in comedies such as this. From the kid who writes death threats on his notebook to his off-kilter Asian neighbor (see next paragraph), there are dozens of ultimately throw-away characters taking up space in this movie. It’s a cheap way to get laughs, and smacks of laziness.

Just a side note: Wow, Hollywood. You put another Asian freak in a movie full of white people. I don’t understand what the writers were thinking when they made this comedic sidekick oriental. Seriously, what the fuck is a Korean kid with a comically exaggerated bowl haircut doing in this movie? Is this the kind of shit that gets laughs these days? Why not get Mickey Rooney to do a guest appearance in yellowface and have him exclaim “mee rikey verry maach”? I’m not saying every movie should be Better Luck Tomorrow (because that movie sucked), but seriously, if you’re going to put Asian people in your movies, at least try to hide your incredible bigotry a little. This is some railroad builder/“flied lice” level shit. Makes me sick. And I don’t care if you throw him a bone by making him good friend of Hal. It’s still a ridiculous caricature and it needs to stop.

At the very least we have good old Hal to rely on. Rocket Science isn’t a profound coming-of-age tale. It’s simply an excellently developed character surrounded by some not so developed sidekicks and situations. Reece Thompson saves this movie, giving us a protagonist that we can’t help but root for, no matter how slim his odds are.

Director:
Jeffrey Blitz

Producers:
Effie Brown, Sean Welch

Music:
Eef Barzelay

Film Website:
rocketsciencemovie.com

Phillippines, 2006, 35mm, Tagalog (with subtitles)

Jeffrey Jeturian’s film revolves around luck. Amy, a middle-aged woman who endlessly roams the winding streets of her Manila neighborhood relies entirely on it. Searching for people to place bets on jueteng, a popular gambling game in the Philippines, her livelihood is based on chance. From random street encounters, to evading the police (the game is officially outlawed), all the way down to the very luck of the draw in a round of jueteng, the Bet Collector creates a dizzying clash of chaos and coincidence. Nothing is planned in Amy’s traversal of the city streets. She walks around, seemingly bumping into friends or acquaintances at random trying to solicit bets from them. The camera is there merely to capture her journey. No plot is constructed, no conflict is introduced. When something begins to go awry the film simply changes trajectories, or ignores any attempt at a resolution, as in the last scene which completely comes out of nowhere and ends as fleetingly as it came.

In an exemplary scene, Amy is going through her usual navigation of the city streets when she happens upon her goddaughter’s honeymoon send-off with her new white American husband. It’s not made clear if Amy’s incorporation into the scene is premeditated in any way or merely circumstantial. Either way, it becomes clear that little is thoroughly planned in daily life (perhaps except for the upcoming All Saint’s Day which is the talk of the town) and from small moments like bumping into an old friend to bigger moments like a honeymoon send off, it is either out of economic necessity, historical circumstance, cultural particularity or all three that create the dense mesh of urban life.

While all of these elements give the Bet Collector a detached, documentary-like feel, Jeturian repeatedly breaks up the incessant rhythm of Amy’s daily grind with an apparition of her dead son, dressed in military uniform. While this countermeasure to the rest of the film’s rapid pacing may feel a little self-conscious at times, it successfully introduces a spectral element to Amy’s chaotic reality, constantly haunting her as she roams the streets while stripping away the appearance of banality to her daily struggle. Moreover, the recurrence of her son underscores a constant current of melancholia pervading the film and the city more generally, as if through the incessant movement captured by Jeturian there exists a deeper feeling of absence not readily apparent, but always below the surface. In all, the Bet Collector is most effective at capturing this interplay between the dizzying rhythm of daily life in a dense third world metropolis and the creeping uneasiness constantly lurking in the background.

Director:
Jeffrey Jeturian

Producers:
Josabeth V. Alonso
Rogelio I. Rayala

Music:
Jerrold Tarog

Cast:
Gina Pareno
Fonz Deza
Soliman Cruz
Nanding Josef
Johnny Manahan

Film Website:
kubrador.mlrfilms.com

Denmark/USA 2006, 88 minutes, 35mm
English, Crole, French (w/ English subtitles)

Most of us have heard about the political turmoil in Haiti, but news reports are always very disconnected from reality. They are incapable of ushering forth a realistic view of the people they talk about, for there just isn’t enough time to get to know everyone personally.

Haiti’s chimére, loosely is translated as “ghosts,” were put into rule during the presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who utilized them as a secret army to crush opposing parties and demonstrators. A documentary that at times seems to real to be a real documentary, Ghosts Of Cité Soleil is a remarkable look into the daily lives of two chimére leaders who were brothers — 2pac and Bily. Cité Soleil is a slum that was known by the UN to be the “most dangerous place on Earth,” and it is remarkable that this rundown slum is only a two hour flight away from Miami.

Ghosts Of Cité Soleil switches between news clips and documentary footage, capturing the micro and macro of 2pac and Bily’s lives. One sees how they deal with losing electricity, taking showers, visiting to the hospital, raising families, and the whole shebang. The film has guts; it goes places where few films dare to go. At certain points in the movie, you legitimately fear that the cameraman will get shot.

Much of the criticism against this movie is that it is biased and untruthful. I wish that I could comment on this point, but I’m not as brushed up on as I can be on Haitian politics. What strikes me personally as most interesting, however, is not the political situation, but the inner turmoil Bily and 2pac experience. One fine example is when 2pac states that, “all we need is peace,” yet later goes on to say that, “there will never be peace.” Viewers also see the pervasiveness of American hip-hop in the lives of the Haitian leaders, who rap incessantly, aspire to be rappers, and even name themselves accordingly. Wyclef Jean even makes an appearance, although in all honesty, his appearance seems too staged to make any impact on the movie at all. If anything, Wyclef’s appearance influences the film negatively.

What Cité Soleil should be praised for is not its political message, since all politically-oriented documentaries can be fuzzy and one-sided. It should be praised for showing us moments that we would never see otherwise in the lives of chimére leaders; what cannot be faked are the real testimonies and reactions of gang leaders who are capable of killing at the drop of a dime but on the flipside, love their families and yearn for safety.

By the time the film ends, it leaves many unanswered questions, but the important part is that it makes you want to find out more about Haiti. Form your own opinions on the politics behind this film, but don’t overlook the fact that the situation in Haiti is a bleak one.

Director:
Asger Leth

Film Website:
ghostsofcitesoleil.com

Hong Kong/China, 2006, 131 minutes, 35mm
Mandarin Chinese (with English subtitles)

Why do the Chinese like to title their movies The Banquet so often? A quick search on IMDB pulled up three entries… out of four total. I know Chinese people love eating and all (I can legitimately say that since I’m Chinese), but still… no one else has had so many films named after a dinner party.

The Banquet is one of the latest Chinese martial arts epics to hit American screens, and it is bountiful in both its strengths and its weaknesses. Loosely based off Hamlet, The Banquet is primarily a story of betrayal and unrequited love.

To start off, the film looked beautiful during the scenes within the palace. Director Xiaogang Feng utilized flowing robes, an amazing color palette, and excellent costume design to the best of his ability, and artistically extended action scenes with slow motion camera shots. At times, however, the extended shots could have been cut short. By a lot. They seemed to drag on and occasionally made me forget I was watching a “martial arts epic.” It seemed more like I was watching the “Planet Earth” series on the Discovery Channel (or BBC). The only difference was that this time, the chimpanzees were human beings.

On the flipside, however, the outdoor scenes were pathetic and lacked charm. They could not live up with the beautiful shots within the palace, and the dichotomy was great since the film switched back and forth between the two locations numerous times. It was almost as if two separate cameras or two separate people were used to shoot the outside versus the inside.

The storyline for The Banquet was tragic yet somewhat believable, but it failed to incite emotion. Great Shakespearean tragedies are great because they invoke a sense of injustice and of tragedy that could have been avoided. Although The Banquet did have these elements, the film’s extreme theatrics took the reality right out of it, dulling down the emotion and failing to stir the senses, despite the fact that lovers and ex-lovers were dying left and right. On screen, there was a hefty amount of crying, but in the theatre, crying was nearly non-existent.

Probably the best compliment that I can give this movie is that the acting was for once pretty decent. In the recent slew of Chinese martial arts movies, particularly in The Curse Of The Golden Flower, the acting has been absolutely horrendous. I think in Golden Flower, I had a hard time even giving the storyline a chance because the acting was so bad. As a native Chinese speaker, I think that I can probably pick up on bad acting in Chinese films better than the general American audience. It was a relief that the acting in The Banquet was convincing, even if the overall execution of the film was quite poor.

All in all, The Banquet is not a bad movie to watch once, simply for the art… and perhaps for one extremely captivating scene towards the end where everyone befalls tragedy at once.
Director:
Feng XiaoGang

Film Website:
thebanquetthemovie.com

Norway, 2006, 90 minutes, DigiBeta
Norweigan (with English subtitles)

The reason the synopsis for The Bothersome Man sounds ambiguous is because the film is. A Norweigan surrealist flick directed by Jens Lien and written by Per Schreiner, The Bothersome Man has won 8 awards at film festivals around the world, as well as been nominated for two others. I can legitimately say I think it deserves it, as it was one of the best films I saw at the Seattle International Film Festival this year.

The movie starts off with the main character, Andreas, in a desolate area in the middle of nowhere. He is picked up by a car and transported to a city, where he is immediately and abruptly given a job and an apartment without much explanation. He does not seem to question it.

On his first day of work, Andreas sees a suicide victim who is impaled on a metal spiked fence outside of his office building. The next day, he meets the same individual, healthy and unscathed. Similarly, Andreas slices off his finger in the copy machine and finds that no one is alarmed, despite his cries. His finger regenerates the next day.

Many things can be said about this movie, but the more I say, the less the movie’s impact will have on you, the viewer. Thus, I will stray away from other concrete examples.

The film is one of mental horror, when an individual with free thought is placed into a world which lacks it. Andreas struggles with this throughout the movie, and seeks to find a way to end his unhappiness. Numerous suicide attempts do not help, so he resorts to more drastic measures. Lien does a great job of using drab colored and prolonged shots to convey the feeling of monotony.

The Bothersome Man is not for those who do not like movies that are relatively slow-paced and minimalistic. It is also not for people who like movies that necessarily linearly connect the dots realistically, because it doesn’t.

For individuals who enjoy human interactions, The Bothersome Man is a good fit; the film does not pay much attention to the larger picture. The focus here is on the exacting life of Andreas and his associations with others. The film shifts between the highly plausible and the highly implausible at the drop of a hat.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is that individuals can wholeheartedly disagree about the film’s meaning, yet respect each other’s opinions on it because the possible conclusion is so open to interpretation. It is possible that The Bothersome Man strikes amazing parallels with our current life on Earth. It is also possible that the film symbolizes the afterlife. Beneath the black comedy exterior, the film speaks to a deeper message that may be amazing to some, but absolutely lost on others.

Director:
Jans Lien

Film Website:
www.brysom.no

United Kingdom/Austria/Netherlands, 2006, 150 minutes, HDcam
English

Slavoj Zizek is one of the few philosophers I can think of who can so easily slide between schizophrenia and didacticism, two characteristic which basically sum up his new film, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. Unlike his last documentary, simply entitled ‘Zizek!,’ it becomes painfully obvious that he had full editorial control over this one. It skips around so furiously and incoherently that the viewer is left completely baffled. Surely incoherence can be a refreshing quality in the often sterile world of academia, but in this case, Zizek’s indulgence in complete freedom of thought works against the viewer’s reception of the film not to mention any overall point whatsoever. Though I don’t think it’s for lack of trying. Clearly, Zizek has attempted to make the film as a sort of pedagogical tool, kind of like Psychoanalysis 101.

Essentially, the main idea of the film is Zizek jumps around from scene to scene of various movies mixed with some clever editing wherein Zizek is inserted into the scene itself whilst discussing its significance. He goes from Blue Velvet to Psycho to Dogville and back again, offering us his psychoanalytic insights. Aside from its laboriousness, the didacticism in the end achieves next to nothing since it is so poorly planned. There is very little prompt or rationale for why Zizek transitions from one movie to the next, frustrating the viewer’s attempt to follow his train of thought. It’s as if he wants to have it both ways, full freedom of thought and accessibility. Unfortunately for him the two clash more often than not. If you want a wide audience to understand Freud, you’re going to have to create actual continuity and coherence throughout the course of the film. Moreover, this fast and loose commentary employed by Zizek does more to hamstring his theoretical insights than anything else. Sure, there are flashes of brilliance in the film, points where I shifted in my seat in excitement over what he was saying. But overall, the film was bogged down in such confusion that the overall impact of these moments was largely muted.

Another frustrating aspect of the film was how closely Zizek stuck to Freud as his main theoretical resource. I found it especially bizarre being that Zizek is a self-proclaimed ‘card-carrying Lacanian’ (that would be Jaques Lacan, a crazy French psychoanalytic dude from the early 20^th century). Again, it seems as though he was attempting to focus on the most well-known theorist to service the widest audience at the expense of any deeper theoretical inquiry. When he compares the three levels of the Bates’ motel to the superego, ego, and id, his pedagogy has gone too far, reverting into lame and overly obvious diagrammatic theoretical models.

In addition, I found myself constantly frustrated by the film’s utter redundancy. Zizek is the only philosopher I know who can repeat himself over and over again and still not make any sense. He constantly touched on the same themes; film’s projection of the psychological relationship between fantasy and reality, how film conditions us to desire, and so forth. While these are all salient points, the reason his redundancy lacks consistency is its inability to unearth any broader context. For me, this broader context is certainly a political one. What surprised me about the film was how apolitical it was. Anyone familiar with Zizek knows he is not one to shy away from politicization, which made its silence throughout the film deafening and moreover, hindering of any coherence to what he was trying to convey in the first place.

Overall, I think the lesson of the film is this: Zizek is often credited with being this kind of pop star theorist. Supposedly, his off the cuff humor and willingness to take on popular culture makes him a more accessible philosopher for the public at large. I hope the Pervert’s Guide to Cinema will finally lay that idea to rest. While Zizek can certainly be entertaining, his philosophy is by no means accessible and even worse, his attempts at accessibility make his ideas that much more illegible. This I found to be the greatest irony and obstacle of the film.

Director:
Sophie Fiennes

Film Website:
thepervertsguide.com

New Zealand, 2006, 87 minutes, 35mm
English

There is a new wave of horror spreading across the land, terrorizing and delighting film patrons everywhere. Catering to gorehounds and fans of cult-cinema, these gory-yet-witty movies have begun a movement in mainstream cinema towards a less slasher-centric idea of blockbuster screamfests. Movies like Shawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, and the Descent have found loads of critical praise and ample mainstream success for their efforts.

Enter former music video director Jonathan King, whose feature debut, Black Sheep, could be the best yet to come from this new movement. The film gives the standard zombie movie a uniquely down-under twist, replacing the hordes of walking dead with herds of violent, man-eating sheep. King takes a great premise and runs with it, crafting clever visual gags and incredibly nauseating effects, all the while having an absolute blast doing it.

The story is your standard horror movie fare. A young man returns home to sell his stake in the family farm, the site of his sheep-related childhood trauma, to his big brother, now headmaster of the farm. His brother has big plans, exploiting science to change his quaint little farm into the new paradigm for genetics-enhanced farming. However, everything goes horribly wrong when a couple of liberation-minded eco-warriors break into the compound and make off with a canister of hazardous waste.

It’s when the “hazardous waste” gets loose that the fun begins. The sheep become unstoppable juggernauts, surprisingly strong and hungry for human flesh. The people who get bitten/dismembered by the sheep become weresheep, transforming in an ode to An American Werewolf, their faces contorting into snouts, their hands twisting into hooves, their hair growing thick and white. The younger brother and the hippie girl desperately fight against this horde. Shotguns are fired, shears are wielded, mint sauces are flung. Some could make the argument that man is the true monster, but more likely the sheep were just waiting for the chance to strike.

Weta Workshops, who provided the effects in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, did an amazing job with the frightening villains of this movie. The CG is kept to a bare minimum, and it gives the movie a charming, old school feel. It’s all very impressive, considering their low budget. The acting is more than serviceable, and Black Sheep avoids the pitfall of the “annoying comic relief.” The main characters play their situation straight, never stooping to silly reactions to get laughs (other than some groan-worthy dialogue from the female hippy).

Jonathan King proves to be one of those few filmmakers who can both conceive great ideas as well as execute them. Many times we’ve seen brilliant ideas fall flat on their faces, simply because the ideas sounded much better on paper than they look on film. What you expect from Black Sheep, like any other gore-fest, is a slick movie with a handful of scenes that might stick in your mind for the next few hours. What you get is an unexpectedly solid film that consistently delivers thrills and avoids most of the regular pitfalls. This is the horror event of the summer; don’t miss it.

Director:
Jonathan King

Film Website:
blacksheep-themovie.com

Canada, 2006, 90 minutes, 35mm
English

Manufactured Landscapes is an unusual treat for anyone who is interested in the world at large, and in man’s involvement with the world. Although clearly a film that makes you contemplate your connection with the environment, the film is not outwardly politically-motivated or explicit about its stances on environmental issues. Featuring the large format photography of Edward Burtynsky and sweeping overhead camera work, Manufactured Landscapes takes the viewer through a visual journey through the world of strip mines, recycled computer mountains, dilapidated housing, and much more.

In a Q&A session with director Jennifer Baichwal, she mentioned that the ambiguity of Burtynsky’s work made it something that both the management of environmentally-destructive offices and the environmentalists fighting those offices would have hanging on their walls. I’d agree with that sentiment. What makes his photography so compelling is the fact that you’re not sure what you think when you first see the images. They’re beautiful, but clearly disturbing. The controversy within oneself that this film stirs up is the internal struggle between loving one’s excess goods and loving one’s environment. There are no easy answers, and this movie is not political in the sense that it provides no solutions.

From the film’s 8 minute introduction in which a camera is mounted on a golf cart and driven the entire length a giant iron assembly factory in China, the viewer immediately notices the individuals who stand out amongst the mass of similarly dressed workers. Noticing the individual amongst the mass is largely what this film is about, and one leaves the film with a degree of self-consciousness.

The majority of the film was shot in China, and the crew was followed from place to place by foreign affairs officials. The purpose was to monitor what the crew was filming, to make sure that they did not film material that was especially sensitive to the Chinese government. The Chinese government has been known to review some footage prior to allowing filmmakers to leave the country, but because Manufactured Landscapes was shot on film reels as opposed to video tapes, the officials did not have a chance to view theirs.

Amongst the sensitive material was a portion where the filmmakers about residential displacement of over a million individuals due to the creation of the Three Gorge Dam. This is a story that has been covered by other news crews before, but Manufactured Landscapes takes a first-hand glimpse on not only the lives of the displaced individuals after displacement, but of the aftermath of the locations where those individuals had once lived. Viewers see and learn that the individuals who lived in small communities displaced by the Three Gorge Dam were paid to remove their old homes, brick by brick. And they did it.

Another sensitive subject was the portion of the movie on “e-waste,” the recycling of computer parts. E-waste is an especially sensitive case in China, which recycles 50% of the world’s computer parts. Recycling of these parts is technically illegal due to high toxicity levels and dangerous fumes, but in practice, the Chinese government turns a blind eye.

Jennifer Baichwal is careful to say that Manufactured Landscapes is not a film solely on China, but about human’s impact on the world in general. The reason China is focused on so often is simply because that China is now undergoing an industrial revolution of a proportion yet to be seen in history. Watching China’s path of growth mirrors back to the growth of our own societies, and although shot primarily out of the United States, Manufactured Landscapes hits closer to home than the film makes you initially think.

Director:
Jennifer Baichwal

Producers:
Nick de Pencier
Daniel Iron
Jennifer Baichwal

Music:
Dan Deiscoll

Film Website:
mercuryfilms.ca

Spain, 2007, 114 minutes, 35mm
English

I wanted to like Goya’s Ghosts. The previews had made it out to look like the film was centrally focused on controversy about Goya’s work and life, when in fact Goya’s presence was merely a fleeting tangent. That was the first noticeable turnoff of the movie, and the first of many to come.

The film opened with a painting that had a blurred out face. Francisco Goya, played by Stellan Skarsgard, casually revealed that the face of the man was blurred because “the man was a ghost.” Ooh, you think, this little anecdote must come into play somewhere down this road, since this movie is called Goya’s Ghosts, right? Wrong! The point never really is solidly addressed although one can vaguely speculate, I suppose, but the general gist is that Goya’s Ghost never fully realizes the meaning behind the weight of its title. In fact, very few things seem to realize their true potential in this movie; all of the main characters don’t seem to know who they are or what they are doing, with the exception of maybe Brother Lorenzo, played by Javier Bardem, who seems to be the only real legitimately well-developed character in the movie. He also happens to be the one you’re supposed to hate.

The film is primarily about the Spanish Inquisition, the time in Spain when the church persecuted and tortured innocent people based merely on suspicion that they were heretics, Judaists, or other forms of “sinners.” Natalie Portman’s character, Ines, is one of the innocent girls who is persecuted and locked away from the world, while her caring family fights desperately for her release.

It is a fascinating enough plot, and due to decent art direction, this movie very well could have been good, if not great. But in the end, the biggest problem with this movie is its extreme lack of focus. It was as though no one could decide whether the movie was a comedy, love story, or drama. The events around the story – those of torture and loss – were serious and emotionally draining, but the attempts by the script to make certain points of the movie comical were badly timed. These attempts were pathetic at best and stupid humor at worst. Adding to this was the inappropriately joyful music used in times which should have been serious, and the lack of dichotomy between comedy and drama makes this movie seem to lack soul.

Director:
Milos Forman

Cast:
Javier Bardem
Natalie Portman
Stellan Skarsgard
Randy Quaid
Michael Lonsdale

The Seattle International Film Festival is in town for 2007, and what better way to start off the REDEFINE Film Blog? I can think of no better reason!  Go to http://www.seattlefilm.org to find out what movies are playing this year

SIFF aside, be prepared to read up on film reviews — foreign, domestic, drama, comedy, out on DVD, whatever… it’s all game.