Two second-rate TV ‘specials’ covering the upper and lower halves of the river, but nothing distinguished one part of the river from another, or this river from any other. Shots of animals often had no connection to the river, in any case, and were nothing we didn’t see in better films 20 years ago. A pointless, repetitive, uninformative nature documentary.
This was such an annoying film I’d give it a negative score if I could. Different rock eras were conflated and confused, and no legitimate story line emerged. The filmmaker took his access to the James Taylor/Carole King Reunion Tour and purported to base the story of the Troubadour nightclub in L.A. on it, but he wound up making a movie about Taylor and King. Greater talents like Elton John, Jackson Browne and the Eagles were reduced to subservient cameos, and telling a story of “singer-songwriters” without Bob Dylan is as misguided as basing a movie about the L.A. scene on a mildly boring singer from Massachusetts.
If there was a connection between Chilean astronomers searching out celestial bodies and Chilean widows digging nearby in the Atacama Desert for bones of the “disappeared,” I slept through it, one story being told as slowly and undramatically as the other. The widows’ quest struck me as particularly pointless, but that may just be me.
This is the kiond of film a film festival is for: totally uncommercial, produced on a used shoestring, aimed at a mini-market – but made with such singleness of purpose that its message comes through pure and clear (unlike Nostalgia, Zambezi and Troubadours, below). The message: surfing is about oneness with nature, with commitment and abandonment producing, if lucky, “the still moment.” The medium: scratchy, backlit interviews with surf pioneers, filmed in washout that matched the vintage ’60s clips of the surf world. Someone in the audience called it “Zen,” and it was.
A dream cast of diverse individuals, who came alive in turn with each rationalizing monologue. Although se in an alternate resolution proceeding, rather than a jury room, the program’s description of “an Australian 12 Angry Men” rang true. Our perception of the characters developed and changed as we learned more about them, and the act of senseless violence that brought them all together became both more comprehensible and less important as the story wore on. The one drawback: each character’s role was so neatly developed and coherently explained, and things dovetailed so well in only 90 minutes that the movie’s origin in a stage play was a bit transparent; and while a live performance causes us to suspend disbelief, a movie requires rather more realism to be convincing. Still, there were very funny moments, producing the most laughs of the week for me.
A five-person roundelay of marital infidelity, Zagreb-style. The plainness, and in one case plumpness, of the actors augmented the realism, even if the lead’s pickup line – “I’d like to cum on your tits” – didn’t. I’m not sure if the story had a moral – eyes will rove but with compromise and understanding, marriage can endure – but neither does the typical Woody Allen movie. Instead, it is the pleasure of present company and the recognition of common human foibles and frustrations that carry us along.
A Swedish Black Swan, with a Natalie Portmanesque performance by a young woman who reminded me of Emily Primps. There were other echoes of Carey Mulligan in An Education, a girl emerging from the teenage world into an adult milieu that simultaneously matures and devastates her. The other characters were stock, but fine; they, however, were mainly the canvas on which Lisa Langveth’s heroine painted her portrait. [In my census of movies with smokers, which includes almost everything I’ve seen in the last year, this one vaults near the top.]
A cleverly plottd, Christopher-Nolan-like romantic thriller, this rare Italian entry also featured two of the most appealing actors of the SBIFFestival. I knew NAME TK must be a major star when she was shown having explicit sex with her bra on, but I was not prepared for the haunting quality of her face, which, post-festival, is the lingering image in my mind’s eye. One wondered how someone so attractive, even an immigrant from Serbia, could be a hotel chambermaid, but by the movie’s final twist all was explained. And unlike Inception, say, the flights of cinematic fancy seemed to make sense. (Other echoes: the male lead was a soft-edged Javier Bardem, and the mood conjured The American.)
A little Vince Vaughan goes a long way, and this film gives us a lot. The female leads – Jennifer Connelly and Winona Ryder – are quite restrained and wonderful, and the story is, surprise, full of surprises, but the Vaughan-Kevin James bromance is rather more than the other elements can handle. It’s more serious than a silly film, but sillier than a serious film, an honorable piece of fluff.
I would coin the term “reality film” for movies like this, except that, fictional as it is, it is so much more real than anything you see on “reality TV.” Peter Stormare’s psychologically chinless small town police chief is as far from a “movie star” as you would want to see on the big screen, yet he holds our attention with his authenticity and how he plays the hand that fate deals him. We are given the back story in dribs and drabs, sort of the way you learn things in real life, so that by film’s end we may not know, or agree on, everything that has happened, but we feel we know the people. And all the other characters are just as real, low-key, and convincing, down to the deputy’s 12-year-old daughter who finds her parents “impossible!”
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