No Wrench

We’ve all been inexplicably shaped by our high school experiences: rather inevitable given that we spend our most tumultuous years trapped in a building with hundreds of other people undergoing the same hormonal uproar. Stay Cool is about those people who have never really managed to get beyond their experiences in high school. Mark Polish plays a successful author who has been invited back to his high school, 18 years after his own graduation, to give the commencement address. And for him, everything has remained pretty much the same. He’s hanging out with his old friends, living with his parents, infatuated with the same girl, except everyone is an adult now. The movie is mostly a comedy, but also something of snapshot of how the pain we feel growing up never quite goes away. There is little true profundity to be found here, except for a gentle chiding that we really do need to let go of the past, even though it is probably impossible to do so. This was a clear case of a film deserving a three-and-a-half, but since such things aren’t allowed I rounded up to a four. Mostly because it was fantastic to see Mark Blucas (Riley from Buffy) playing a high school jock turned hard-drinking basketball coach and all around asshole. And because Winona Ryder is just absolutely adorable.

Turkish film about three adult children who discover that their mother has Alzheimer’s, which causes chaos in their already dysfunctional lives. Except that nothing happens. Two hours of nothing happening. Staring at a brick wall might have been more fun. The actress who played the mother was pretty good and had some moments of comedic dementia. But those felt like a wee sprinkle of rain in an arid desert of boredom. There were no lessons learned, no life changes, no real story. It gets a two out of five, since it didn’t cause me to walk out and the actors did a good job. They just had absolutely nothing to work with.

Plotwise this was an extremely bland film. Average British dude has 5 relationships which all end badly. Each of the five is different and all contain varying degrees of moderately humorous moments. But overall, there really isn’t any character arc or any dramatic tension. And that, ordinarily, would have made this a little bit of fluff. What sets this film apart are the various creative storytelling techniques that director Julian Kemp employs. Non-linear action, animated dioramas with Barbie dolls, various breaks in the fourth wall, found footage, and even a giant amusement park that serves as a metaphor for the main character’s life (similar to the demented one in Monkeybone). It is almost sad that such incredible creativity was employed to tell such a mundane story. Maybe it was inevitable, since I am not sure that a more intricate story would have held up well under the heaping serving of cinematic device. If I were to judge this solely on the quality of the story, this film would have earned a 3 (if it hadn’t been British, probably a 2, but British people are dryly humorous in a way that tickles me correctly). But I enjoyed the myriad techniques that were employed in crafting this film enough that I was willing to give it a four.

I can’t think of a better way to start off Tribeca 2009 than this charming Algerian comedy (film really has gone global. It is fantastic.). A comedy of errors in the classic sense, Masquerade follows the exploits of Mounir, a gardener for the local bigwig. More than anything, Mounir wants to be accepted and looked up to by his peers, a process that is hindered by his own social awkwardness, but also by the fact he has a narcoleptic sister. So he devises a scheme whereby he pretends he is going to marry his sister off to a wealthy Australian. His sister, when she isn’t passed out, is carrying on a secret romance with Mounir’s best friend, and seizes on this plot as a way to force her admirer to ask her brother for permission to marry her. Soon enough, the entire village is worked up to a fever pitch over the impending, though fictional, nuptials. Zany hijinks, with a healthy dollop of human frailty, ensue.

What truly makes this film is the fantastic cast, starting with the main character who radiates such an earnest desire to be thought well of that one is forced to feel empathetically towards him. Of course, he is also controlling, self-centered, and something of a dick—in the contrast between the two reactions he inspires is found the humor. His sister is played by Sarah Reguieg who is both radiantly gorgeous and imbues a role which could easily have been played solely for laughs with a quiet calm and dignity. As a woman in a Muslim society, she has as much power as she can extract from the men around her—a fact she is frequently reminded us—yet despite her random napping she manages to remain in control (mostly) of the situations around her. And the rest of the supporting cast, including Mounir’s wife, son, and best friend, are uniformly excellent. In the end this is a well crafted screwball comedy that could just as easily been set in, say, Victorian England as in North Africa. It is the execution, not the premise, that elevate this film from being mildly diverting to wholly captivating. A solid five out of five and a great start to the festival.

Another year, another Tribeca Film Festival. As in years past, each year they make it slightly harder for people like me to get tickets and move more and more of the festival out of Tribeca. The one improvement is that eighty percent of the films are now showing in a single theater, making it much easier to get around (and making it possible to pack in more movies). The theater is in the East Village, not Tribeca, but such is life (though it does make the American Express commercial featuring people extolling how much business the festival brings to Tribeca ironically funny). However the festival eliminated the discount ticket packages they offered last year, which had replaced the daytimer passes they offered the year before, leaving no worthwhile packages for individuals who wanted to see lots of films. Thankfully, they did not raise their prices, which made the sting slightly less.

The festival also moved to siphon as much money as possible out of the pockets of ticket buyers. As in years past, there is a two dollar per-ticket surcharge for tickets purchased online and over the phone. Why there is an online surcharge in general is mind-boggling to me, since it has the least overhead of any of the three methods, but I digress. In years past, tickets went on sale Saturday morning at 11am in-person and online. So as long as you showed up early to stand in the line, you could get all the tickets you wanted without paying surcharges. This year, however, tickets went on sale at 11am on a Tuesday, but the box office didn’t open until 2pm. That meant if you wanted to guarantee getting tickets, you had to get them online or on the phone, which made Tribeca an extra 2 dollars a ticket.

Since I refuse to pay the surcharges, I went to stand in line, knowing I was probably going to miss out on a lot of movies I wanted to see. Now due to some interesting circumstances, I managed to get my tickets at noon, which meant I got tickets for 23 out of the 29 films I wanted. Still, compared to years past, that is a pretty horrible hit rate. There were 3 or 4 films I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to get, because they were the headliner movies that I figured pass-holders would snap up. But still, it was obvious that being forced to wait an hour after people could get them online had an effect. All in all, I’m pretty pissed. Obviously not pissed enough, yet, that I’m going to stop attending, but it will happen eventually. I’m sure the festival won’t care if I stop attending, but it will be sad. Anyway, I’m going to try rushing for tickets for 5 of the 6 I missed out on, so we’ll see what happens.

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.