No Wrench

Finished off Tribeca incredibly well once again. Just like last year I was somewhat skeptical of the movies I was seeing on my last day and somewhat burnt-out from having seen so many films. And just like last year, the movies I saw on the last day turned out to be amazing and were completely worth it. Fighter is a Danish movie about Aicha, a Muslim high school girl who wants nothing more than to be a martial arts fighter. Her family is very traditional and her father regards her infatuation with martial arts as unladylike and refuses to let her train with any team where boys and girls fight together. Obviously, this is unacceptable to Aicha who starts sneaking off to train with a local mixed team. The film is definitely about growing up and finding one’s identity, but it is much more about how hard it is for girls trapped in traditional families, but living in liberal countries, to try and reconcile the freedoms they see around themselves with their desires to be true to their families and their culture.
At no point in the film is a rejection of the Muslim culture something Aicha considers. Instead it is about how can she reconcile her culture with her dreams. And it is about how her parents, especially her father, cannot and will not understand that and refuse to compromise on his vision of what a Muslim daughter should be. The acting and directing are superb. The special effects and wire work in the fight scenes are as crisp and coherent as any I’ve seen in a long time (compare against the crap they had in Three Kingdoms). Five out of five.

Team Lioness was the name given to female Army soldiers who were sent out as support teams with male soldiers in Iraq. Their missions usually involved raiding houses where insurgents were suspected to be hiding. The females were needed because cultural and religious beliefs prohibit men from patting down females. So rather than have to deal with dozens of freaked out and angry Iraqi women (as well as inciting cultural hatred), Team Lioness came along to deal with the female searches. Nothing sounds so bad, so far. However the problem with fighting an insurgent war is that there is no battlefield, there is no end to combat. So while a mission might be intended to be a simple raid, it could quickly turn into an all-out firefight. Essentially, a non-combat mission becomes a combat mission. And this is exactly what happened repetitively to Team Lioness. Now American law prohibits female soldiers from engaging in combat and, in fact, none receive front-line combat training (just like male support staff). So what happened in Iraqi to these women was most likely illegal and clearly outside their mission profile.
The documentary looks at the aftermath for some of these women and how they are trying to deal with being in combat, having to kill people, losing some essential part of what they feel makes them human. It is not prescriptive or particularly ideological: there is never a moral statement on the war in Iraqi or whether these women should have been fighting. But it still manages to raise a number of very difficult questions for its viewers. Hit the jump for more.
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Boring and uninventive horror film from Australia. Wasn’t particularly scary, wasn’t particularly well made, all the characters were just annoying. It gets a two.

A sometimes funny drama, about an independent woman who makes her living as a trucker being forced to deal with the son she had years before who she now has to care for. The real strength of this film are the performances of all three of the lead actors. Michelle Monaghan is just awesome as the lead; as the director pointed out afterwards there were plenty of scenes where she never had to say anything because she could say so much with her body posture and her face. Jimmy Bennett is also great as the kid, avoiding any of the cloying overacting that is so common among precocious kids trying to pander to an adult audience (the ‘isn’t he so twee’ phenomenon). And Nathon Fillion is just the man. I’ve never seen him in a role where he wasn’t just awesome, and this film is no exception (it probably helps that all his roles are fairly similar).
I’m torn between giving this a four or a five. It didn’t strike me as being quite as good as the other dramas I gave a five (Let the Right One In, for example), but there is nothing glaring that stands out to indicate if should get a four. It is the sort of situation where I’d love to give a four and a half, but that’s not the rules of scoring films in the festival. So it gets a five.

Another sports documentary and another relatively mediocre effort. The ESPN portion of the Tribeca Film Festival has turned out to be something of a disappointment because it played host to a lot of subpar efforts. Now most of them haven’t been particularly bad; I gave both the Bobby V documentary and the Iranian soccer movie fours because they did do a decent job of addressing an interesting subject. Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot was a look at the Elite All-Star game played by the top 24 high school students in the country on a famous streetball court in Manhattan.
The first part of the film consists of profiles of eight of the players, from different backgrounds and different parts of the country, which is then followed by footage of the game. I was left wondering why I was really supposed to care about the player profiles. There wasn’t any sort of arc or narrative tying it together, so it was just a bunch of people talking about the pressures of being a high school athlete these days. And that is certainly an interesting subject, but it wasn’t really the subject of this documentary, so while it was tangentially addressed, it was not the focus. The actual game footage was amazingly shot and edited, so that was a lot of fun to watch. But overall there was little point to this film. It didn’t inform enough to be a serious doc or entertain enough to just be fun. It gets a three.

Funny movie featuring naked people, porno spoofs of famous movies, unrequited love, and lots of marijuana. Not a whole lot to complain about. There isn’t really any substance here, but I don’t think there was intended to be any. The movie set out to be a raunchy good time featuring lots of bad puns and it succeeds admirably. Seriously, the world needs more movies like Full Metal Jackoff. Four of five.

Boring, pointless period epic from China, about the Five Tiger Generals and their war against the Cao kingdom. There was no plot worth mentioning, the fight scenes were boring and often suffered from excessive camera shake rendering them incoherent, and none of the characters were likable or sympathetic. It was, pretty much, a complete waste of my time. It gets a two, because it wasn’t painful to watch, but I can’t think of a good reason to recommend that anyone see this film.

The increased trend of the executive branch of the government to label everything as top secret to hide its complicity in numerous assaults on the American democratic institutions is clearly worrying to those of us who care about the Constitution and civil liberties. This documentary is an overlong and unfocused look at some of those problems, which will probably bore people much than it will serve to motivate them. The entire film consists of talking heads discussing different points of view about national security and secrecy. To make it slightly more visually interesting, they include lots of shots of pieces of paper label SECRET and some occasional quasi-abstract animation of . . . stuff (hard to say what it is supposed to be).
But the people who are talking are usually talking past each other: I don’t think there was more than one situation where anyone directly confronted and discussed a point made by someone else, something caused by the fact that all the interviews were conducted separately and by the failing of the filmmakers to ask the right questions or at least present the answers coherently. And because the entire film is without a real plot and without narration, its focus continually wanders. There are two stories that weave in and out of the dialog which are meant to be examples: a court-case from the fifties which set the precedent for judicial respect of national secrets (preventing court cases from proceeding if the government asserted it would hurt national security) and the recent Hamadan vs. Rumsfield case over the Guantanamo Bay detainees. But these two examples are dragged out over the entire course of the film (maybe an attempt to add some narrative tension to the film?) and very few of the surrounding comments directly address the issues raised by these cases.
Secrecy gets a 3 out of 5 for presenting some interesting issues, but failing to be a coherent documentary.

A teen coming-of-age movie set in 1994, The Wackness reminded me a lot of Charlie Bartlett from last year’s festival. Both movies center around a high school senior, in a world where drugs play a major role (although not in destructive ways), trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do with the rest of their lives. But where Charlie Bartlett is soft around the edges in a happy, everything will be all right manner, The Wackness brings a little bit more rawness and reality to what being a teenager is about. Both films studiously avoid the traditional cliches that Hollywood teen movies espouse, while still delivering on the comedy and occasional tragedy of being a teen. They also both take a close look at adults, pointing out that the very people that adolescents look to as authority figures and role-models are often just as confused and screwed up as the children themselves.
The Wackness’s main character is a pot dealer in Manhattan who spends his time peddling drugs to a growing assortment of oddball figures (including Mary-Kate Olson, playing a drugged-up hippy, which might not be much an acting challenge for her). His main friend is his shrink, with whom he trades drugs to for therapy, who also happens to be the step-father of the girl he has a massive crush on. Ben Kingsley is absolutely superb as the shrink, clearly more messed-up than many of his patients, using drugs, both legal and illegal, to cope with his failing marriage and his lack of purpose in life, but who still maintains a hilariously cynical but vulnerable outlook on life. The two characters provide an odd counterpoint to each other, forcing the audience to reconsider the notion that adults have the answers or know more about life than children.
The comedic writing and timing in the film is fantastic. Human pathos can be incredibly funny if handled right and in The Wackness it is. While it never loses sight of its characters story, it also never fails to entertain the audience. The soundtrack, which is primarily early 90’s hip-hop, is also fantastic and does a great job of helping to reconstruct New York of ten years ago. Guiliani gets plenty of flack as well from the drug-buying community, a nice historic touch. You cannot ask for more than this from a coming-of-age film. It entertains and provokes its audience without ever condescending to its characters. Gets a five out of five.

Spanish language films appear to be strong this year at Tribeca, as this is the second one scoring a five out of five. Unlike Fermat’s Room, which was Spanish, this film is Latin American, set in Columbia (the country) and Jackson Heights, Queens. It tells two stories at once. One is the story of two Columbian teens who are trying to get smuggled into America, and the other is the story of what happens when they get here and get separated.
The privations that the two suffer through are intense and really make those of us who live at ease in this country realize what it is we’ve gotten by being born here. There was no suffering with being robbed and raped in the woods of Mexico, no being smuggled across the American border inside hollowed out logs, trapped for hours without light or water.
The story in NYC is simple. The boy wanders out of their hostel, gets chased by the police, gets lost, and cannot find his way back. During the course of his struggles to find Raina (his girlfriend) again, he is forced to come to terms with who he is and, amazing, find himself. He stumbles into a lucky situation where some older Columbian immigrants take pity on him and give him a job at their restaurant. But for the most part, his life is on the outskirts of society, living in shanties or shelters, stealing clothings, trying to cope with being so far from home and so alone.
In many ways it is a simple film. But like one of my college animation teachers liked to say, “Simplicity is beauty. That is, simplicity well done.” And Paraiso Travel is incredibly well done. Plus it features John Leguazamo as a stuttering fetish photographer. What more do you need?