Catching Up, Redux: Or How to Stop Worrying and Review Non-Film Festival Movies as Well

Comrades: Almost a Love Story ( Hong Kong,1996, Peter Chan)


A UCLA film school grad, Peter Chan was at one time John Woo’s assistant director, but Comrades: Almost a Love Story is just about as far from Woo as you can go. This romantic melodrama has a great sense of time and place, using a Wong Kar Wai-like appreciation of music, sound, architecture and dress to capture well the capitalist fervor of late 80s Hong Kong, a city filling up w/ mainland Chinese émigrés. Both leads fit that description, and for different reasons (she: to build her mother in the mainland a home of her own. He to bring his girlfriend to the city and marry) seek to make their fortune in the sometimes hostile environs. The elegant and always engaging Maggie Cheung is the she, Quai Li, the more determined and mercurial of the pair, Leon Lai plays the he, XiaoJun Li, the partnership’s more stolid and dependable member. These are two lonely and determined people in a city that treats them like second class citizens. It is understandable then that they naturally fall into each other’s arms for comfort and succor, and complicate matters terribly, mostly by confusing themselves. What do they really want out of life? And who do they want it with? And where will they find it? After all, discontent seems to be their milieu. Mainlanders dream of nothing but getting to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong residents dream of nothing but escaping to other places. Will happiness be found in Canada? America? With a Sirkian swelling of the strings-based soundtrack to sweep us from heartache to heartbreak, our heroes are caught in a tide of economic and emotional forces too great to control, and it seems that they are doomed to be inevitably and eternally drowned by their differences. But Chan has a romantic’s heart, and unlike Wong, whose In the Mood for Love may be the ultimate in unrealized romanticism, he finds a way to keep us hoping and guessing right up until the final shots. Equal parts In the Mood for Love, Love is a Many-Splendored Thing and There’s Always Tomorrow, this is a movie made for the hopelessly romantic. Hardboiled cynics need not apply.

Score: 79/100

VIFVF Day 6: The Night They Drove old Hunter Down



Breakfast With Hunter (USA, 2002, Wayne Ewing)

As an homage to the subject matter of this documentary, Hunter S. Thompson, a writer who gave me some of my most potent and lasting teenage memories of literate and visceral counter-cultural rage while himself apparently under the influence, I considered filling my body with mind-altering substances first. But, y'know, these things aren't cheap, after all these years I have NO idea where to go or who to see, and what if, like, I got busted? Shee-it. Instead, I somewhat ashamedly chose the well-trod path of middle-class responsibility. Well, turns out I may have been the only one, cuz while I kept my head, all around me were a legion of HST fans who were, while not exactly LOSING theirs, at the very least lending them out for chemical research. The audience may have been the most entertaining thing about this far too-safe documentary, screaming their approval of every HST assault on respectability, and hooting in derision at every square-heads scraping, toadying and favour-currying ass-lick of middle brow authority. In a bit of cognitive dissonance that I’m still trying to sort out, documentarian Wayne Ewing, takes a peculiarly predictable and conventional approach to his subject matter, the godfather of gonzo journalism. The man who wrote some of the greatest eulogies to the 60s spirit ever put to print—indeed, the celebrations surrounding the 25th anniversary of his seminal Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas inspired this documentary-- and who has filled our lexicon with such memorable phrases as "Fear and Loathing" not to mention "ether bender", seems worthy of a more edgy and aggressive treatment. Still, despite the inclusion of the series of predictable monologues cum tributes by friends, family and movie stars, and the largely banal staged events (f’rinstance, the "raid" on Rolling Stones NY HQs is just so limp and uninspired), Ewing, a friend and neighbour of Thompson’s for years, does manage to include a few moments that capture the complex brilliance and azure disturbance that is the mind of Hunter S. Thompson. One in particular, his confrontation with director Alex Cox and his screenwriter, who are pitching their adaptation of Fear and Loathing, shows us the multi-foliate and thorny rose that is HST. Watching Thompson move from gracious host and interested audience to seething maniac who’ll be damned if he lets a couple of twerps tarnish his sapphire prose is far more revealing of his genius and madness, courtesy and cruelty, geniality and rabidity than any or all of the John Cusack/Johnny Depp/P.J. O’Rourke-like testimonials. Too bad the film didn’t have a handful more of such scenes: Then we might have had a documentary worthy of The Man it was covering.

Score: 64/100

VIFVF Day 5: A Grand Night Out

The Naked Proof (USA, 2003, Jamie Hook)

Well, now, THAT was fun! Clever as hell, insightful, ruminative, playful, sweet, smart, tender, honest. Henry, who's played with good-humoured bafflement by Michael Chick and looks a little like John C. Reilly’s befuddled little brother, is at one of the check points in life that crop up often when we're least prepared. After having his third extension denied by the Dean, played by Matt Smith-- great performance, bud--who’s got more enthusiasm and false cheer than the captain of the cheerleading squad, and watching a more youthful, keen and intellectually shallow rival launch his career right on past him, Henry learns that he’s got two weeks to get together his doctoral dissertation, which aims to prove epistemologically that other people are not simply products of our imagination but that they actually exist in an objective, verifiable way. This, to borrow from Barton Fink, is the life of the mind. In response to the pressure, Henry’s drinking too much, sleeping too little, ignoring his girlfriend as she drifts away from him, and beginning to have trouble remembering the waitress’s name at his favourite café. So, Henry does what all good men do when dropped into a crisis: He makes matter worse. He spends all his time with a very pregnant woman named Miriam (Arlette del Toro, who reminds me of Janeane Garofalo, which is definitely a very good thing) who (a) tries to break into his apartment (b) gives him a wall full of oddly-appealing impressionistic art work (c ) repaints his apartment (d) steals his dissertation, oh and (e) may or may not exist. Yes, the film touches on the nature of existence and the blind faith that believing in others requires of us, but does so in a way that is not self-consciously "look how smart I am" clever, yet a little more stimulating than yer standard first year university philosophy lecture. There is a light-handed Lynchian surrealism at work in some of the film’s best moments (the bartender/karoake scene, the scene where Miriam checks into a hotel could have been lifted right out of Twin Peaks) that hints at some darker shadings in Hooks’ mind, and I am eager to see what else he’s got in the bag. In the end, the film posits, we cannot affirm our own existence, never mind anyone else’s, yet since the world is full of cake, why not have a piece?

This is what good indie filmmaking is all about. Good on ya, Jamie.

Score: 84/100

Love, Sex and Eating the Bones (Canada, 2003, Sudz Sutherland)

As in, sucking the marrow out of life, which is certainly where the tasty bits are, but which also requires risking social scorn, as cracking into the bones is not something one generally does in polite company. Like watching porn, which our hero Michael Joseph (Hill Harper) does religiously and incessantly. He becomes so involved with his obsession that he finds himself unable to "perform" with a woman (and not just ANY woman, but, in fact, THE woman, as in the love of his life) unless he’s got some plugged into the VCR. Jasmine, played by Marlyne Afflack, is the woman Michael wants so badly to be with, and due to a particularly bad break-up she’s been 2 years celibate, is quite conservative, and wants to be treated like, you know, a human being and not an object of purely sensual gratification. Harper’s performance stands out here, as he is both very attractive and palpably charismatic, while Afflack, who is certainly a strikingly beautiful woman, sometimes seems to be playing her character as if there is a thin veil between her and the audience—I was never quite able to touch or be truly touched by her. Still and all, there are some pretty interesting ideas at play here, and most of the time the film and its characters do them justice. Michael, for instance, is a photographer who seems to have lost his "eye", perhaps because of the criticism of the local snoots in the artistic establishment, but more likely due to his inability to overcome his immersion in the world of pornography, which seems to be damaging his ability to see the world with an artist’s eye. However, at other times, the film falls back on the puerile and borders on the juvenile, the phone sex scene the most glaring example, and these tonal shifts do harm to the work’s overall integrity and intelligence. Despite this, director David "Sudz" Sutherland certainly has an interesting way with the camera, doing some interesting work with split screen, and often using the camera with great amusement, as in the parking garage where Michael works as a security guard; while the boys are talking about girls, we can also see a spree of violence taking place on the security surveillance cameras. The film is often very sexy, as the two leads are not only obviously attractive, but they also have real on screen chemistry. While it lags a bit at the 2/3 mark, in the end Love, Sex and Eating the Bones redeems itself with an honesty that is a welcome feature in the genre of romantic comedy.

Score: 75/100

VIFVF Day 4: Half way home

Lovers and Leavers (Finland, 2002, Aku Louhimies)

Aku Louhimies takes a gander at the falsehoods of romantic fiction that hold that for every person there is a perfect other "out there" and that all we hafta do is keep our eyes peeled and we too will wind up living blissfully, trouble-free lives, happily ever after. As the film’s tattoo artist puts it, this sorta blind idealization of romantic love is akin to living in a greenhouse—perfect, but artificial. These delusions are, of course, reinforced by the movie nonsense that is the romantic comedy genre, and it is Louhimies’ intent to examine the harmful effect that leading one’s life according to these silly precepts can prove detrimental to the development of mature, meaningful, long-lasting romantic relationships. Of course, making a movie about movie lovers guarantees an easy allegiance w/ the audience, which theoretically at least is made up of people who like ‘em, but Louhimies isn’t (initially at least) interested in simply pandering to or indulging our fetishes. Lovers and Leaver’s romantic lead is Liris, and she’s a 30 year-old movie lover and dreamer who cannot find a man to match the ideal that the films tell her is out there, somewhere. Liris is played by Minna Happkyla, and her looks and performance are reminiscent of a cross between Emily Watson and Martha Plimpton. Unafraid to embarrass herself in half a dozen different ways, yet always remaining engagingly vulnerable, Minna gives a very good performance. Liris’s best oh so cynical best friend, who does her best to keep Liris grounded in the real world, gets off most of the film’s best lines ("People are only happy when something is going in or coming out of their bodies."), while Liris’s romantic ideal, Marko (Peter Franzen), appears to be something of a surrogate for Louhimies. Franzen, who looks eerily like David Bowie’s younger matinee idol brother, gives a solid, self-deferential performance as the attractive but self-involved filmmaker who can’t possibly live up to the Liris’s idealization of him.

Unfortunately, as often happens in these anti-romantic comedy films whose stated purpose is to provide the antidote to the genre’s saccharine overdose, Louhimies falls back on the available conventions and resorts to the unnecessarily happy and slightly too-tidy ending. But other than this misstep, Lovers and Leavers plays intelligently w/ the chick flick romantic comedy genre conventions in order to debunk the tenets of this brand of modern movie mythology. Still, Aku Louhimies is an established Finnish director whose works I confess to being unfamiliar with (he’s worked extensively in both tv and feature films), but based on his effort here, I may just hafta take the time to check him out further to see if the cop out here was an aberration or a sign of some deeper flaw in his resolve.

Score: 74/100

Imitations of Life (Canada, 2003, Mike Hoolboom)

A fascinating and challenging, if sometimes incomprehensible,
(Our lives are a full time occupation)
collection of pop imagery,
(Your face is the border guard of your soul)
grainy home movies, found footage
(We are what we forget)
and movie clips --some iconic, some obscure—
(Nature has no opinion of us)
accompanied by Hoolboom’s own Stephen Wright-like voice over narration,
(There are two terrors: annihilation and remembering)
Imitations of Life is not really a film
(Can politics be an expression of love?)
in the surrealist school, like Bunuel and Dali,
(Stories have no point if they can’t absorb our terrors)
but more of a piece of super-realism.
(My friends have become fridges and lawnmowers)
Hovering somewhere up above and beyond reality,
(I am a car)
Hoolboom uses the video and film footage
(Be careful what you think)
including a prolonged study of his nephew Jack
(It becomes the world you grow up in)
to make sense of the role that film
(There are two tragedies: not getting what you want, and getting it)
and filmmaking plays in our understanding of life,
(Filmmakers may be taking pictures of others)
and our quest for identity and pursuit of immortality.
(But in the end they are making portraits of themselves)

Score: 78/100

VIVFV Day 3

Slaptastic (various shorts)

This collection of short films spans eras and genres, and includes two abridged classics (The Marx Brothers Duck Soup is whittled down to ten minutes of maniacal mayhem, while Buster Keaton’s The General is condensed to 27 minutes of cunning stunt craft) as well as two one-reel shorts (Charlie Chaplin’s One A.M. and Norm McLaren’s Chairy Tale). Keaton’s The General may indeed be the most expensive silent film ever made, but it is also among the very best films of all time, so what churl is gonna count nickels and dimes at a time like this? Likewise, Duck Soup may mark the Marx Bros. at the apex of their talents, so it is unsurprising that folks may wonder if doing a Reader’s Digest on a pair of critically acclaimed greats is cinematic blasphemy; excerpting the best of the brilliant bits must by definition operate at the expense of the greatness of the whole, and each of these "mini me’s" naturally suffers some for the sake of brevity. Still, and all, I’m reminded here of the Ray Bradbury short story "The Smile" wherein all that remains of beauty in a book and art roasting futuristic society is a small nominal fragment of daVinci’s Mona Lisa. The story posits that a tiny fraction of a great piece of art is still something worth rhapsodizing, something that can touch the better part of us and inspire us to do great things. And, of course, since--unlike Bradbury's tale--we haven’t destroyed the originals, mebbe folks’ll be inspired by these abridgements to see ‘em in their whole after checking out these shortened versions, roight?

As for the two shorts, Chaplin’s 17 minute flick, One A.M. and Norm McLaren’s "Chairy Tale" are at once very different and remarkably similar. Chaplin’s silent short depicts a drunken Charlie trying to navigate his way through a house full of hostile props (sadistic stuffed animals, slippery rugs, killer cuckoo clocks, floppy murphy bed) on his comic quest to get a good night’s sleep, while McLaren’s ("Neighbors") stop animation effort shows one man’s frustrating attempts to plant his keister in an unco-operative chair. They are sorta photo negative versions of Toy Story, as they touch on a similar nerve. Who among us hasn’t suspected that our "things" have it in for us? To paraphrase Tyler Durden, you may start off owning yer possessions, but they wind up owning you. Both feature great artists at the top of their proverbial game, as we get yer blend of big laughs and thought-provoking commentary on man’s relationships to his things.

Score: Exceeds the metric. Breaks the scale. Beyond the pale. I’m giddy as a schoolgirl.

Rage in Placid Lake (Australia, 2003, Tony McNamara)

Rage in Placid Lake has an intriguing and timely premise, as it asks us to consider this: How do the children of hippies, that generation of rebels, themselves rebel? One option, become the nightmare of every child of the 60s by embracing da Man and becoming another cog in the machine of the Establishment. Musician Ben Lee gives a credible perf as the titular character of Placid Lake, a bright but directionless child of two New Age-y ex-flower power parents. Rage aims to be The Graduate for the 21st century, it even includes a newly-graduated Ben at the bottom of the Pool moment, but where Nicholls’ film was smart and insightful about its targets ("Plastics"), Rage is too broad and inefficient in the methods it uses to attack its targets (insurance companies?). This feature film directorial debut by McNamara aims at being a pointed satire, but rather than wielding a 2 by 4, he’s swinging a sheet of plywood. Sure, they're easy to hit, but the consequent impact on the target is awfully ineffective.

The audience seemed to be having a good time as the movie poked fun at the wallowing, self-indulgent psycho-babble of New Age-ism, especially in the caricatures of Placid’s parents (in particular, Miranda Richardson, easily the best thing about Cronenberg’s Spider, has a lotta fun playing the self-involved documentary filmmaker mom). However, while the movie does have its share of bon mots—"The past is a place where only bitterness lives." "I can’t imagine what that does to property values, Mom."—the film never quite creates a world that we can believe in, as the situations become increasingly ridiculous, and characters begin to behave in ways that only characters in a broad Australian satire would behave, with unearned jokes coming too cheaply to make the criticism meaningful or resonant. Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Rose Byrne. She plays Placid’s love interest, a virginal Doris Day nerd, who is not only criminally cute, but very good as well, and she steals the show here. Her character is sketchily written and yet she fills in the gaps in her character’s development with a empathetic performance that hints at some very good things to come (she’s appearing in Wolfgang Peterson’s epic Troy this summer. Pray for her!).

Score: 61/100

VIVFV Day 2

Hey, I missed what was by all accounts one of the greatest Super Bowls in history, not to mention Janet Jackson’s fake but bare bubbies, in order to see these films. Thankfully, one of them* promises to perhaps sneak into my top ten list this year, so mebbe it was all worth it. Ah, the sacrifices we make for our art.

*the movies, not Janet's bare bubbies. Although, as I'm inclined to say, why not both?

The Delicate Art of Parking (2003, Canada, Trent Carlson)

AKA Zen and the Art of Finding and Following Your Bliss in an Determinedly Antagonistic World. As with reality TV, it’s been popular to speculate on the gradual decline and eventual demise of fake documentary filmmaking (made popular by contemporary practitioners like Christopher Guest) due at least partially to the sudden explosion of participants in the genre. However, while the Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire Average Joe Obnoxious Fat Guys are spinning quietly down the televisual toilet bowl, Survivor seems immune to the slings and arrows of outraged and bored viewership, and clings tenaciously to its ratings success. And so it is with the school of meta-filmmaking coined the mockumentary. And even moreso, it is happily that I report that this surprisingly affecting and perceptive comic doc by fellow left coast Canuck Trent Carlson is yet more proof that we oughta put away the shovels. Rather than bury the beast, we must praise her, cuz it looks like there’s still life in this old dog.

This is a very Canadian story. But don’t let that put you off, you south of 49ers, cuz it’s meant as a compliment. Where else would you see a film made about commissionaires, the Canuck version of what Americans once called "meter maids"? That’s right, up here in Canada, we send unarmed civilians out in the streets to hand out parking tickets! Like good Canadians, the resultant violence heaped upon the parking enforcement agents is almost exclusively emotional. However, it would be a tad misleading to suggest that this is solely a film about holding a job that is the object of massive public scorn. Being an apt pupil of post-modernism, Carlson’s film also examines the effect that documenting humans at work has upon those humans, and even more interesting, the effect that the humans have on the filmmakers themselves. The film undergoes a subtle but substantial shift part way through when the documentarian Lonny, who began the film in order to ravage the whole "tax collector" gig that is the parking enforcement industry, becomes affected by their plight in an angry, impatient and increasingly automated world. Indeed, this is a perverse sorta meta-meta-moviemaking experience that is not only very funny, but at times poignant and even (gasp!) thought provoking.

Though TDAP is not really in the same laugh out loud funny league as This is Spinal Tap or Waiting for Guffman, TDAP boasts a quiet humanism and insightfully observant humour that mark the best in this field.

Score: 82/100


At Five in the Afternoon (2003, Iran/France, Samira Makhmalbaf)

This joint production, set in a post-Taliban Afghanistan, is reminiscent of 2001’s Kandahar in that it (a)is a brutally honest portrayal of a people in social/economic/political/religious crisis, (b) features a largely inexperienced cast (c ) is gorgeously photographed (d) has a thin and sketchy plotline (e) features a stunning actress in the lead role. In this world in flux, where the dispossessed roam the country in order to inhabit ruins and chase others out of their homes, At Five in the Afternoon looks at one young, hopeful, aspiring woman named Nogreh (Agheleh Rezaie) who naively dreams of becoming her nation’s first woman president and follows her journey with her father and sister-in-law as they plunge forward into the dying Afghan desert.

The film grows in my estimation the further away from it I move, as the narrative problems that bothered me while I was in the experience of watching it seem less important than the overall impact that the film had on me. At 24, Makhmalfaf is a first time director to take note of, for she has delivered here a movie of amazing visual poetry and while the didacticism of the storytelling can be occasionally wearing, she is able to put us back into these character’s lives with one or two movements of her camera across the face of the forbidding Afghan landscape, whether human or terrestrial. She is also wise enough to recognize that incessant misery will prove hard to sustain over a feature length film, so the second act is riddled with moments of understated humour and sweet romanticism that carry us well into the bleak and despairing final act. While the film’s middle seems, upon reflection, little more than a collage of hopeful mirages, the lightening before the storm provides the sorta illusiory playfulness that marks the ray of hope that is Nogreh’s life.

Score: 76/100

Saints and Soldiers (2002, USA, Ryan Little)

The deification of a generation continues. Not gonna spend a lotta time on this one, beyond overstating the obvious, which seems to be my ouevre. Great looking film, well-acted and capably directed (Little most intelligently borrows some of his battle filming techniques from fellas like Spielberg and Scott). However, this is a movie that anyone who’s spent anytime at all with WW II films has seen before. And if you haven’t seen sed films, you probably aren’t particularly interested in the genre, and won’t get much enjoyment outta this one. You’ve got all yer Naked and the Dead soldier-types here, from the religious sniper to the hard-boiled heart of gold Sgt, the David Niven witty Brit to the cynical medic. The film exploits familiar conflicts—the spiritual man who has done some awful things for which he seeks redemption, the doubter who must be lead to find some faith—and resolves in predictable bitter-sweetness. While there are some welcome shadings to the depiction of soldier’s wartime morality, the movie doesn’t amount to much more than a professionally produced melange of warmed-over Norman Mailer war stories.

Score: 54/100