funkfox Reviews

57000 km entre nous (2008)

qu'est-ce que c'est?

[2/10 · 4 May 2008]

(from the Tribeca Film Festival screening)

"57,000 Kilometers Between Us" is definitely a French film. This is evident 2 minutes in when a family going to visit Grandma is met at the door by the svelte septuagenarian in full chorus line costume, and she serenades her son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren with an impromptu song she's been rehearsing.

But unfortunately, that's the highlight of the film. The plot, in brief – a man videotapes his normal family life and puts the clips on line so people watch them and comment about how normal they are. But of his three daughters, the eldest is his wife's from a former marriage with a (now post-op) transsexual who we meet along with his/her friends, also transvestites. And the other two are Asian girls who must be adopted, but this is never mentioned. The transsexual lives with a French/German Muslim who seems to like the lady boy thing. And the young girl, the child of the video-obsessed man's wife and the transvestite, spends most of her days online playing something resembling a World of Warcraft interactive game, primarily with a boy of her approximate age who does not reveal to her that he is communicating with her from a hyperbaric chamber of a hospital room where he is sequestered and dying of cancer.

Oh, French cinema! Vous êtes très ésotérique! It's great when your stereotypes prove to be 100% true – it makes it so much less of an effort to think.

But there is very little emotion in the movie anyone can relate to. There's a lot of passion, but no empathy. There's a lot of warped sexuality, but it doesn't amount to anything. There's precious little by means of music on the soundtrack, which just has the effect of making the film seem hollow (or, perhaps, in its defense, just not American). Literally 80% of the crowd leaves before the lights come up, even though the director is there for a Q & A – if you offered me $50 to ask a question to her, I wouldn't even be able to come up with one – that's how unimpressive this film was. Not even a smattering of applause at the film's end, very rare for a festival screening.

Idiots and Angels (2008)

A Lot to Look At

[6/10 · 4 May 2008]

In the unit on Self in the Intro Philosophy course that I teach, we talk about the difficulties of imagining the cognition of lesser species, because all animals besides humans don't think in words. This is loosely analogous to seeing a Bill Plympton film, devoid of dialogue as all his works are. For the first 20 minutes, I am enthralled, but by a half an hour in, the continually morphing figures and the animated viscera blur into a soupy blend it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain focus on. I spend the last half of the film slipping in and out of consciousness, enjoying what I see and not all that fussed about missing out on the continuity, because what there is tying the various scenes together is almost entirely subjective anyway.

In a way, Plympton's works are immensely impressive, giving one an effect akin to witnessing a 90-minute Salvador Dali painting continually in flux before your eyes. The man undoubtedly has a fertile imagination. Limiting yourself to images only, how do you even plan out a storyline? Does he write out the stories in words and then draw pictures to match the ideas? Or does he just block them out in image-form only? Does he say to himself: "Ok, then the guy morphs into an ant and the ant envisions himself dancing with the lady in the bar, and then the bar turns into a skip being tossed about on the ocean, and then we pan back and we see that the ocean is just inside the man's head"? Or does he just draw it without any explanation and see where it takes him? Perhaps, though, to paraphrase Kierkegaard (or was it Dick Van Patten?), "to define him is to negate him". Just enjoy the visuals - it's a fun ride.

The Auteur (2008)

Mildly Arousing, But I Didn't Climax

[7/10 · 4 May 2008]

I just saw this at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, and here are my two cents...

The Auteur is a decent film. It starts off strongly, a cinema verite look into the life of a raffish, pot-bellied Italian director going to Portland, Oregon, to put in an appearance at a retrospective film festival being held in his honor. (And no, the meta-riffic irony is not lost on me about making a film which revolves around the protagonist, who is a director, going to attend a film festival, and then showing it at a film festival). It's kind of like Wes Anderson decided to shoot a softcore porn film. There are moments of humor both subtle and overt, and the protagonist, Arturo Domingo, played well by Melik Malkasian, a guy who, judging from his surname, is definitely not Italian, manages the accent of an Italian speaking English handsomely, complete with soft "H's" and missing articles. The scenes where he is directing his stars are wildly entertaining, and the crowd roars with approval.

This movie is good enough to be picked up by a studio, but there are too many dangling penii ('penises' sounds weird) and there's a fairly drawn out and sticky money shot involving a circle jerk at the end of Domingo's career-destroying "Full Metal Jackoff", and these will probably prevent the film from getting a wide release, or a release at all, because what rating do you really expect after all that? To his credit, in the Q & A which followed the movie, the director addresses this and says he didn't really care about ratings when making the pic - now THAT'S the spirit of independent film-making! Still, though, an admirable effort all around, with some strong performances and funny set pieces.

Sieben Tage Sonntag (2007)

Amazing Achievement Considering the Budget and the Time Frame

[9/10 · 4 May 2008]

(from the Tribeca Film Festival screening I attended)

The director, Niels Laupert, is ushered down the aisle by a polite smattering of applause. He is tall, blond, and angular, and is clearly more comfortable behind the camera than at the front of a stage. He explains to the sparse crowd that the film, was his graduate thesis at the Munich Film School. That he shot it with almost no money at all, because the school only funds shorts and not feature films. That it was shot in 16 days, and that none of the actors got paid. A no-budget grad school project made in a fort night. How much should we be hoping for? But Seven Days Sunday is, hands-down, the best film I saw at the festival this year. In 1996, two 16-year old boys in a small, tired Polish town got drunk one night and decided, literally on a whim, to kill somebody. So they did. They attacked one pensioner in a train station, and another on the street near one of their homes. Having no motives, but also no means to hide their crimes (nor really any understanding of what they themselves had done), they were both apprehended by the authorities by the next day. They had boasted to friends at a party that they were going to do it beforehand, completely unprovoked and apropos of nothing.

The film is dark, minimal, sublime, and haunting. The actors, largely unknowns, play their parts with effective disaffection. The cinematography captures the bleakness of mid-nineties small-town Poland completely. When the lights come up, the director comes to the front of the theatre again. His English is the quaint, grammatically-challenged English of a kid who probably didn't study the language well but has seen every seminal American film in the canon multiple times. He explains that he didn't want to make a Hollywood film, because Hollywood films always need to 'tidy things up', explain everything, make it digestible. But this film gives no easy answers, because there are none. A thoroughly sensible treatment of a thoroughly senseless crime.

The Cottage (2008)

Thoroughly Ordinary

[5/10 · 4 May 2008]

An offhand observation: the British are getting very good at making American films. If not for the accent, this film would have "U-S-A" written all over it. But, British films, regardless of genre, have to have at least one touching, poignant moment that would be corny if the film were American, but somehow works, because they are not. Ten minutes from the end, bloodied and battered, the two filial protagonists lie on the ground outside the eponymous cottage and try to make amends for the bitter dispute they'd had over the ownership of their recently-departed mother's house at the beginning of the film (got that?). "We'll both be dead within the hour," laments one, as they hold the deed in the air between them in a scene shot mid-range from above. He is not wrong, though the moment doesn't arouse the sympathy the director commands of it.

As for the film itself, it's not bad – pretty stock. If we were in England, this would be a regular release film, and not a film festival film (I saw it at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York). A kidnapping plot goes wrong and people get dismembered by a mutant farmer. The gore is comical, but creative at times. I've seen worse, but have come to expect better in the genre from the UK.

Jennifer Ellison is a welcome presence - a nice bit of eye candy with an attitude and a delightfully common accent. It made me long for the days of slasher films where all girls in the movie had to get naked before receiving their comeuppance. Oh well, that's what google is for...after the top of her head parted ways with the rest of her body, I admit I kind of lost interest.

The 27 Club (2008)

One Club You Don't Want to Be a Member Of

[2/10 · 3 May 2008]

Just saw this at the Tribeca Film Festival - yipes.

It felt like the people at MTV wanted to make a film mythologizing the 'live fast, die young' rocker, but without any connection to reality or plausibility. A clichéd piece about the cliché of dying at 27, though really it's not like hundreds, or even dozens, of rock stars died at that age – it's only 5, really – Morrison, Hendrix, Cobain, Joplin, Carpenter. You might as well make a movie about a fictional rock star who dies in a plane, and try to tie it into some larger narrative.

Instead of simply reviewing the plot, which you can read on this page already, here's a PARTIAL list of glaring implausibilities and ridiculous plot occurrences that I worked up over drinks after the movie. By all means, feel free to see it for yourself and email me a few more of your own:

1) At the beginning of the movie, when Eliot needs someone to drive him across the country, he asks a kid in a very small-town grocery store to do it, offering him $10,000 cash (which he pulls out of his shirt pocket). The kid then goes back inside, deliberates over this with his parents for about 10 seconds, and the next scene is the family saying goodbye to him. They let their 16-year old son drive off with a completely drugged out junkie on a cross-country ride for $10,000. They live in the Heartland – surely they've seen America's Most Wanted before, no?

2) The guys pick up a hitchhiker, a 16-year old girl introduced to us in a scene which takes place in a cafeteria, where she sits at the counter and watches a wall-mounted television playing a pseudo-MTV which is showing a tribute to the recently fallen rocker. She mentions to the counter boy how sad it is. In the next scene, she is on the side of the road hitching a ride, and the car that stops has the other guy in the band SHE JUST SAW ON TV sleeping in the back seat. And when she gets in and sees this, she takes it in with complete equanimity. She doesn't mention to the kid driving that she knows who he is, she doesn't SMS any of her friends, and, in fact, she makes no comment regarding the fact that she's aware of the situation she's in until five minutes from the end of the movie, when she says, smugly, "I guess you know the words to this one" as she and Eliot share her headphones and listen to the group's song on her IPod.

3) The boy's militant father (in one of innumerable flashbacks) makes his son shoot his own dog after it gets hit by a car and breaks a leg, because he won't take it to the vet. The other boy has to dig the hole to bury it in while this is happening. Dad makes some comment about 'being a man' and 'killing to live'.

4) The boys, as teenagers, are running away from home to go to LA and 'make it big'and while they are waiting for a ride at the side of the road, Mom pulls up to give them a bag of money she's managed to sneak out of their father's bank account. This is not that implausible. But as they are standing talking with her, another car pulls up and waves them over to give them a ride – a car pulls up to two hitchhikers who are already talking to a driver and asks them if they need another ride. How hitch-friendly is this town?

5) Eliot gets knocked out by a gang of Nazi skinheads while symbolically throwing away his bag of prescription (and non-) narcotics and is then taken in for the night by a haggard homeless man casually toting a rifle. Eliot notices the man has no shoes, so he offers him his own boots, and then spends the rest of the film barefoot, even walking across cities and towns this way.

6) In the subsequent scene, the homeless guy invites Eliot to join his choir, where he goes to 'get spiritualized', but the two of them are 1) the only two white people in the choir and 2) the only two who look homeless, as everyone else is dressed quite decently. Add to this the fact that 3), Eliot's face is still covered in blood from the previous night's attack when he walks into the choir room, and no one in the choir expresses the slightest alarm at this.

7) The band has only one song. It is used at every key, emotive moment in the film. It is so stock that it seems as though it could have been made by computer program, like the 'hitmaker' they purported to have designed in Josie and the Pussycats (which I admit, unashamedly, I kind of liked). It may well have been.

and finally…

8) not an implausibility, but yet another ridiculous inanity: When Eliot goes to Tom's dad's house to visit the old man (Mom died while the boys were in LA), they have a kitchen conversation during which the old man is framed by the camera standing in front of a canvas of the 'Our Father', and Eliot is framed in front of a canvas of Jesus on the opposite wall. Get the message, everyone? We thought you would. (But actually, Eliot's reason for visiting Tom's dad is to give him a note Tom left, which turns out to be a red Post-It which simply says "We are all a**holes" – the fact that Eliot would want to deliver a Post-It, and the fact that he would deliver one as utterly devoid of meaning as this one, counts as an implausibility, I guess).