20,000 Days on Earth (2014) New Directors New Films 2014

I may be one of the few Nick Cave fans who doesn't particularly enjoy 20,000 Days on Earth. On its surface, I should enjoy this film by directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard since it's beautifully lensed and combines a number of elements I like: it's about music, it's about myth-making, it's about creative impulses, it's about its own construction, it's about the persona/person split, it's about songwriting and prose writing, it's about Nick Cave. And yet watching it, I felt alternating moments of hot and cold, getting hooked by some scenes while feeling distanced by others; in other words, I don't like the album 20,000 Days on Earth, but boy does it have some great tracks on it.

The film blends fiction and reality as it chronicles the 20,000th day in the life of Nick Cave, the legendary frontman of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and the earlier spastic post-punk outfit The Birthday Party. (It's multiple days on earth, not just in-real-life given the time required for production, but even in the-reality-of-the-film since Forsyth and Pollard use concert footage, studio footage, and rehearsal footage as flashbacks.) Nick Cave is both character and caricature; this is a profile about Nick Cave and the idea of Nick Cave. As David Foster Wallace wrote about John McCain in the piece “Up, Simba” (aka the book McCain's Promise), “profile” is a pretty good word for this: “one side, exterior, split and diffracted by so many lenses there's way more than one man to see.” There's the idea of the rock star life and also the guy in the studio who has to record the music, there's the serious writer at his typewriter and the pizza-lovin' family man with his pizza-lovin' kids, there's the thoughtful artist engaged in essential solitude and the demigod who pulls all attention to his being on the stage; and there's the interior life of Nick Cave (both person and persona) expressed in voiceover, covering his thoughts on the writing process, counterpoints in songcraft and lyrics, and the creation of fictional worlds and fictional people to populate them. The second shot in the entire film seems to encapsulate this notion of the multi-faceted individual: it's a recreation of a shot from The Man Who Fell to Earth in which David Bowie (on the note of the person/persona split) looks at himself in various bathroom mirrors.

When a song hits you, it hits you in ways that sometimes go beyond language, which is what happened at times with 20,000 Days on Earth. Seeing Nick Cave on stage commanding a crowd is great, with his little pomp and little strut, the badass persona in full effect. The same goes for a performance of “Higgs Boson Blues” with the rest of the Bad Seeds, in which something that feels organic and intuitive unfolds on screen as Cave prompts sudden surges in volume and intensity from his fellow musicians. Even chunks of Cave's narration early on when he's talking about his creative process hold an intriguing power to them, like when he's punching away at his typewriter and describing his method of storytelling, which serves as a kind of meta-commentary on the way the film presents its material.

The coldest parts of 20,000 Days on Earth are the ones that feel the most calculated. On his 20,000th day, Nick Cave drives to his therapist, who's actually a music journalist rather than a therapist. What Cave talks about is fascinating (an enduring early sexual memory, his dad), yet the presentation is less like therapy and more like an interview. Add to that the adoring smile on therapist's face, as if he's less a helper and more of a fan or hanger-on, and that whole section of the film feels like unintentional hagiography. The same goes for a trip to the fictional Nick Cave Archive, which is like a library special collection for the oddments of his career. It's a funny idea for a bit, but then it becomes hagiographic in a way I found grating, self-satisfied, and even self-absorbed (i.e., the Malkovich-in-his-own-head moment from Being John Malkovich). I'm pretty sure it was meant to be more amusing and playful. And then Nick Cave's voiceover becomes overbearing, stating the obvious or pretentious or overwrought rather than the profound; worse, it often states too much when the film says far more and says it much better without the text. This is particularly true of a sequence that closes the film. The experience of the music and the imagery is far more meaningful than the closing words (or any closing words).

I think my aversion to part of the film has a lot to do with what feels intuitive vs. what feels calculated. In her review of Carlos Saura's The Garden of Delights, Pauline Kael noted a distinction between “instinctive Surrealists” and “academic Surrealists.” Instinctive Surrealists present images from “the hidden and unadmitted” whereas academic Surrealists present images that are “impeccably planned to be 'surreal.'” Kael adds: “When [Saura] brings a pig into a house, it's not something dirty being released from the unconscious, it's an emblem and an homage. We are not shocked by Saura's academic surrealism, we 'appreciate' it.” In 20,000 Days on Earth, there seems to be an intuitive hybridity and an academic hybridity. I'm on fire for the intuitive hybridity (i.e., the scenes that are artificial but feel real) and icy about the academic hybridity (i.e., the scenes that are calculated and feel calculated through and through).

There are two sequences that exemplify this intuitive/academic split, and they're both about the same topic: Nina Simone's stage persona/stage presence. On the academic side, Nick Cave tells his fawning therapist about Nina Simone on stage. What he says is interesting, but how it's presented made me less intrigued. On the intuitive side, Nick Cave is having lunch with bandmate Warren Ellis, and Ellis describes exactly what Cave talked about. This scene with Ellis comes after the scene with the therapist, but even knowing the story, it feels more alive here, more organic, more like an intuitive bit of hybridity that reveals some essential and as-yet unseen facet of Nick Cave via Warren Ellis via a story about Nina Simone. Ellis then goes on to talk about Jerry Lee Lewis taking the stage, and the enthusiasm by both Ellis and Cave are barely contained. We watch them not like a studio audience, not like obvious cinematic voyeurs, but like flies on the wall or people who happened to pass by the kitchen and hung around the doorway because what we heard was fascinating. This is all such a jarring counterpoint to the staid and prim nature of the therapy scene.

I can appreciate what was attempted in those scenes of carefully planned artifice, and yet appreciation is not necessarily the same as enjoyment. It's me comprehending the thought process behind a conscious decision. But in lots of art, especially music and writing and film, it's the intuitive, spontaneous moments that grab me most--and which 20,000 Days on Earth does have--because they exist outside of being merely comprehended.

A few words on She's Lost Control (2014) New Directors New Films 2014

It's all about Brooke Bloom who plays Ronah, a sex surrogate working and living in New York. Bloom who is on screen the whole time gives a really good performance as young woman navigating through her life and becoming undone by one of her patients who is both a puzzle and asks pointed questions that make her rethink everything.

How you react to the film is going to depend on how you feel about the pace of the film which is very slow. We are in Ronah's head space and we see things through her eyes and her perceptions. We watch as she interacts with her clients, her boss, the people in her building and her brother. Things meander along until things begin to really (kind of) come apart  in the last third or so.

I'm going to be completely honest and say some where around the 45 minute mark I stopped caring. I loved Brooke Bloom's performance but I wasn't getting anything out of the film as a whole. The film is largely a chamber portrait of a young woman in NYC but the drama of a lot of it seems artificial, espically as it goes on. Her client John who begins to spiral her seems out of place with everyone else in the film and on a certain level the pair should have met in another film. Additionally the whole thing about the leaking pipes goes from a nice piece of NYC life to something amped up to just help turn the screws late in the game. I would have loved to have seen the film just go to the end as a slice of life with all the drama.

Probably the best way to describe it is to say despite having a great performance from Brooke Bloom that hopefully can act as a calling card, after a certain point I got bored and wanted to stop watching. Actually I tuned out and started to write about other things in my notebook.

If you want to see a great performance or like Inde chamber pieces that are forcibly about something give it ago otherwise stay away.

The film plays March 29 at Lincoln Center and March 30 at MoMA. For more information go here.

(And apropos of nothing- for some reason the film had me very aware that it meets the Bechdel test)

The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

There was a strange thing that happened while watching Jessica Oreck's The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga. I was initially resistant to what Oreck was attempting. The film is something of a hybrid documentary, weaving images of contemporary life in Eastern Europe with a semi-animated retelling of the Baba Yaga folktale (which I first heard as a child as Joanna Cole's Bony-Legs). While filled with immaculately lensed images of the wilderness--there are some remarkable shots where reflections of trees in water and the reflected verdure are indistinguishable; or where the woods seem both majestic and menacing--Baba Yaga initially kept me at a distance even as it made its initial thesis about nature and society. The film first seemed like a formal exercise, and I was as discomfited by it as those peasants in folktales who get lost while picking mushrooms for supper.

But slowly as the film's shape emerged, I found myself wrapped up in what Oreck was doing with narrative and image. I was fine getting lost where she was going because along this ramble was a rich panoply of ideas. Baba Yaga is a wander through the woods of history, making observations on contemporary Eastern Europe and then bleeding those observations into the folktale of Baba Yaga. (The reverse is true as well, but more on that in a bit.) It's a work of cultural briolage, mixing ethnographic concerns, different narrators, different narratives, different texts, and finding in these disparate elements a broad notion of Eastern Europe in contradiction, in agreement, in collusion, in flux.

Baba Yaga starts with ideas of nature vs. society, namely how man tries to tame the fear of the unknown in nature by creating communities and towns--it's told to us in text, and then it's shown to us in these idyllic visions of agrarian life. The documentary makes an intellectual inversion partway through, revisiting the initial nature/society split. Now the reverse is true, or at least has become true--in taming nature, mankind has made a new alienating wilderness in the city, and it is here that humanity is increasingly isolated and unknowable to himself/herself. And so we go back to nature (which is history, culture, folktales, family, rituals, the past and the foundations of society) to reconnect with what is ultimately human. Later as we linger through the ruins of Pripyat (an abandoned town outside of Chernobyl), the whole notion of nature/society seems apocalyptic and yet reassuring. Humanity may ruin the world, but nature will win out in the end. But even that is too easy a read of the images, and the collision of so many ideas results in multiple meanings that can be read into sequences such as this scene in Pripyat, or another in a cemetery in the forest where all the headstones have been grown over as if they were just rocks.

This brings me back to the Baba Yagga folktale itself, which Oreck uses as a kind of central framework for the larger shape of the film. The animation is more like moving storybook illustrations, with shifting foregrounds and backgrounds to create an illusion of depth. The tale is told in sections with breaks, and each break in the story designates a return to modern day Eastern Europe to explore a different sort of cultural practice or ritual. We begin to notice how cultural history works in both ways--the past creeping up in the present, the present causing reconsideration of the past. In retelling the Baba Yaga tale, Oreck riffs on the legend, adding a mysterious military conflict to the mix as a way to acknowledge the concerns of the 20th century. And yet this oppressive government and militaristic element is shadowy and supernatural in a way akin to the witches of the distant past (the government is referred to only as They, some kind of iniquitous other, some kind of man as unknown, an invention of society that's become as malevolent as a force of nature).

The whole of the documentary is concerned with these sorts of tensions of modernity and the past and how their relationship is never fixed. All the while, the present finds bits of its own past always in the moment, and conversely the past traditions themselves are adapting in a way to remain relevant to future generations. The past seems to continually return in some way. History is a wood from which humanity cannot help but be confined, but the woods are not necessarily bad places.

So just when I felt that The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga would be merely interesting, it became this unresolvable and intellectually and formally fascinating work about history and ritual and story. It's more like an essay than a documentary per se, and Oreck never makes any of the larger points too overtly, or at least the film doesn't seem so overstated. There's a fine sleight of hand in the documentary's construction that allows the audience to find the meaning in the associations and connections of these ideas and images. It's not a documentary for all audiences, but I think patient filmgoers with a taste for W.G. Sebald and other writers who ruminate on history in a unique fashion will find a lot to consider in The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga.

Also please note: I have had a lot of coffee today.

A few words on Fish & Cat (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

Experimental film telling a time fragmented story concerning several going to a kite flying festival and colliding with a backwoods restaurant that served human flesh.

I'm going to be honest here and say I don't know what I make of the film. I think the most honest description of the film is that it's an interesting attempt at doing something different.  The trouble is that  the dialog is not natural and very much theatrical with some bits full of formal dialog and other bits having characters commenting on what we are seeing with a voice over.

It doesn't help that the film was done in one long  take which results in long periods where people are simply walking through the woods and an odd framing of action and characters. Events that should be taking place elsewhere are played out in the forest or by the lake.its not bad as such, rather it comes off as stage play that they've tried to open up but somehow misstepped.

The real sin is that this film is way too long. Running around two and a quarter hours the film seems to go on and on, with a large portion of the trouble coming from the single take requiring that we wander around until we get to the next place where something happens.  I turned off and stopped caring.

Unless you like interesting attempts you can try it, I'd take a pass.

The film plays March 27 and 28

Salvation Army (2013) New Director New Films 2014

Based on director Abdellah Tal's own novel, Salvation Army tells the story of Abdellah,  a young man who leaves his family home to engage in random trysts with various men. The trysts are a means of escape from the unhappiness of his home life. The film then jumps ahead ten years...

I wish I hadn't read anything about the film since doing so set up a  false expectation that got knocked down pretty quick. The material on the film talks about it being about a young gay man's awakening. It is, but the film actually speaks to a larger audience. This isn't a gay film, its a film about a person who feels like an outsider. The feelings are universal. Watching the film I could to relate to the feelings of needing an escape.

The early part of the film is a wonderful look at Abdellah's life. There is a tactile nature to it where we feel not only the emotion but other things. We're in his house, and on the trip. We can almost smell and taste and feel it all physically. The e is the often repeated motif of washing that runs through the film. People wash themselves and each other. The sequences are extremely intense and frankly almost sexual in nature. Its rare that any film makes one feel as this one does...

Or does for the first hour or so.

At the point the film hits say the 55 minute mark it all implodes. Leaping a head to 10 years the film loses focus. Now we are with an older Abdellah. He is involved with a professor, but something has happened between them things aren't right. The film jumps through time and place and is extremely disorienting as the film rushes to a conclusion as if the director ripped out whole chapters from his novel and tossed them aside. We are thrown into the relationship between the two men with no explanation. Things happen then there is a shift to Geneva after more months have passed.  He's too early for classes, he meets the professor and there is a confrontation that means what exactly?

The real head scratcher of the final 25 minutes is the singing of the song that ends the film, what is it and what is it suppose to mean? The print I saw did not subtitle the lyrics so that the words, which clearly meant something to out hero, are lost. What is in them that provokes his reaction?

For me this odd choice not to reveal the lyrics completely sank the film.

To be honest I loved the first hour of the film. I thought it was great, and I was ready to hail it as one of my finds of the year. However as soon as the film lept ahead it became the wrong sort of obtuse, not explaining how we got here, nor giving us enough to work out what its suppose to mean (and I mean that on a level more than just missing lyrics)

Talk about crash and burn.

The film plays March 27th at Lincoln Center and March 28th at MoMA. Details and tickets can be found here.

Story of My Death (2014) New Directors New Films 2014

From my notes on seeing The Story of my Death

The film opens with a bunch of people sitting around a table eating. There is talk about writing and this trails off to a several minue long seqence of a woman dealing with a drunk man. No words are spoken it just goes on and on before she gets up and walks off. I should have done likewise.

(What followed in) the next 30 minutes was Casanova sitting and eating and philosophizing in a series of long  takes. We listen as he eats nuts or berries and crunches as he talks.Some of it has to do with women, some on other subjects. What is the point?

Things get worse (as we watch for) several minutes as Casanova tries to take a dump and laughs about his constipation. When he's done, he eats and contemplates his poo which makes him laugh.

After lots of talk and inaction, (and scribbles in my notes about wishing someone would come in and kill me) Casanova and his man servant end up in Carpathia with Dracula.

Whats it all mean? It means I wasted an evening seeing this slow and painfully dull film that runs close to two and a half hours.. If I had any sense I would have left the theater after the first ten minutes but I soldiered on in some mock slow suicide hoping against hope that something would happen or that some one would say something meaningful.

It never happened.

I'm told that the film won the top award at the Locarno Film Festival but I can't imagine how that could have happened short of the director holding the voters hostage and threatening to make them watch the film a second time.

The film plays on March 26 at MOMA and March 29th at Lincoln Center and if you're smart you'll make plans for a root canal at the same time. On the other hand if you like slow dull psuedo-philosophical pretentious art films give this a try- though be warned there is no reward if you make to the end, only the worried look of the theater staffs concerning your sanity.

The strange Strange Little Cat (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

In and around a family gathering in  a flat in Germany. As family members come and go a cat wanders through it all

Artfully and artificially constructed film is mannered to the nth degree the film. People stand in doorways, the mother forever standing looking out on the world, everyone going in and out of the kitchen cabinets. There are absurd moments, a bottle rocks around in pot, stories go odd, there are odd shots, dialog is arch. Its all aches to mean something or get a knowing laugh.

I'm not sure what I make of the film.  I knew early on that I wasn't going to connect with the film. The film is too perfectly constructed and intently about something (even if its about nothing) to be fully alive. It the sort of film that I can intellectually admire but I can't really warm to. Its like a performance piece that wants more to challenge its audience instead of fully engaging them emotionally.

I understand that the point of the film on some level is to reduce the world down to one flat and one group of people -for the most part we only see out side of the apartment in stories- reduce it down and there by create a commentary, but at the same time I don't know if it fully succeeds. I admire the parts. I liked the clever turns of phrase, the performances, and the occasional chuckle... unfortunately the over riding feeling I was left with "...and...?" And you're telling me this because? I haven't worked that out.

If you like your films with a bit more thought than heart give it a shot.

The film plays March 25th and 26th. For details go to the New Directors website here.

A few words on Youth (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

One of the better films I've seen from this year's New Directors New Films, Youth is a kick in the pants. A taut thriller/drama about the steps two sons take to correct their families financial problems, the film grabs you early on and holds on to you to the very end thanks to it's insistence not to take the typical way through the story.

The film is set in motion when after their father becomes unemployed two brothers decide that the best way to get the money the family needs is simply to kidnap the daughter of a rich family and hold her for ransom. The trouble is nothing goes quite as expected and there are forces outside of their control at work as well.

I don't want to say too much since this is just a really good little story. I like it for being a good little thriller/drama on it's own terms and I don't need to know how the film is supposed to mirror the plight of the Israeli middle class. Reading the press notes after the fact I simply wanted to scream "No No No" because they add a level of complexity that isn't needed. Yea this is New Directors and is connected to the Museum of Modern Art, but this is just a good thriller and doesn't need to be inflated with deeper meaning out of the box.

Heartily recommended because its gonna grab you and not let you go.

The film plays March 25 at Lincoln Center and MoMA on the 26th. Details and tickets can be had by following this link.

Kill this BUZZARD (2014) New Directors New Films 2014 SXSW 2014 (Also the short PERSON TO PERSON)

World premiering at SXSW and then depositing its dead carcass at this year's New Directors New Films, Buzzard is a film that you'll either love or hate depending upon how you react to its central character Marty. If you click with him, you're golden, if not you'll be like me and head for the exits.

The plot of the film has to do with Marty, an obnoxious slacker jerk, who would rather goof off and run scams for peanuts than do anything that will make him real money. What does he do? He opens and closes checking accounts for cash bonuses, returns office supplies for cash and, setting things in motion, scams refund checks. When things go banana-shaped, he's hiding out and on the run.

I hated Marty a great deal. Not to put too fine a point on it: he's a dick and I didn't want to be around him. What's worse, the film is populated with people who exist only to allow him to be a dick; bosses allow him to wander off for three hours, bank tellers willingly cash a stack of checks not in his name, and store clerks give cash refunds without a receipt (not in any office supply store I know of). These are all bad sitcom people, not good movie people.

What's worse is I never laughed,. Never. The jokes were obvious and telegraphed. I do know that a couple of things got laughs in the screening I attended, but largely everyone just watched.

I freely admit that I left about halfway. I couldn't see wasting my time with an unfunny character and a movie that wasn't making me laugh.

Put it on the worst of the year list.

---

Buzzard is screening with a short called Person to Person. It's not very good. It's a shaggy dog story involving a record store clerk telling about the aftermath of a party he had where he found a woman passed out on his floor the next morning and how she wouldn't leave.

Running a scant 18 minutes, it's badly acted and and very affected. Worse when you get to the end, you wonder not so much why the story was being told by the store clerk (I could see him telling the story), more why anyone would make a film illustrating it.

One of the least necessary films I've run across in a long time.

Stop the Pounding Heart (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

In Texas a young Christian woman named Sara goes through her daily life with her family and their business. At the same time we see Colby a young man about Sara's age who wants to ride bulls.

Slice of life film is an interesting examination of  life and faith seems to be a documentary thanks to the cast all being non-actors essentially playing themselves. Its a film that you kind of fall into and get dragged along with. I say this as a person who really didn't want to see this film and only did so when one of the films at a press screening I attended got switched. I was largely pleasantly surprised.

I really can't say anything bad about the film other than I don't know why we get the dual stories. While Sara and Colby cross each other's paths with in the story I don't know why we focus on both. I would have just been happy to follow one. The speculation in the post screening discussion between writers was that perhaps it was a compare and contrast between the flavors of Christianity, but I don't really buy it since Colby is much to secular for a comparison.

Worth a look.

Strange Color of Your Body's Tears (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears will exhaust you.

I’m being serious here watching the film there will come a point where the film will simply overwhelm you and leave you by the wayside unable to keep up. This film is a case of too much of a good thing being way too much, and you’ll feel like you’ve just eaten the entire Godiva chocolate factory and you’re moving on to Hershey’s with Dove following right after that.

Half way into the film I was broken and done. I wanted to throw up my hands and ask for the film to be paused so that I could pick it up later. There was simply too much going on, too much to take in and process and my brain exploded.

I say all of that in the best possible way.

The plot of the film has a man returning home from a business trip to find his door locked and chained and his wife missing. After calling the police and finding that they won’t help him, he begins to search the building for her, and thus running into the various residents some of whom have strange stories to tell.

Taking all of the tropes of the 1970’s giallo films, even to the point of lifting bits of the scores from several of them, the film takes the notions of amped up visuals, manipulated soundtracks, and dream like logic to the nth degree to play out a film that is disorienting, overwhelming and amazing in equal parts. There are psychological impressions, digressions, split screen, a killer who isn’t seen except for his or her hands, and a lots of equating sex with death.

Most of it doesn’t make a lick of sense except in the moment- but so long as you’re in that moment with the film it’s a glorious magical moment.

I feel I should mention something that I ran across after I saw the film and that is a kind of negative feeling toward the film in some quarters. People don’t like the fact that the film is very much form over substance. There is a feeling that the story doesn’t make enough sense and people feel disappointed at the end. To be honest I completely understand the feeling, but at the same time that’s what many films in the genre are, they are form over substance- just less so than this homage.

I really did love this film. It’s a funny scary thriller that just pulls you along. I also freely admit that I was largely done by the half-way point. As I said its too much of a good thing. I found I started to close my eyes simply to end the sense of drowning.

If you like giallo films. If you like films that do wondrous things that only film can do and if you don’t mind things being more about the form, I highly recommend this film.

Put it on my lists of finds of the year

Mouton (2013) New Directors New Films 2014

Mouton or Sheep is the nick name of a 17 year old who as the film opens is given his independence from his parents. He then goes off to a seaside town where he gets a job as a chef's assistant. All is good until an event occurs which changes the lives of everyone.

For much of the film's running time it is a wonderful slice of Mouton's life. We watch as he works, plays and generally goes about his life. Its been described as a almost a cinema verite study, and in many ways it is. If you didn't know that it was fiction you would swear that much of the film is a documentary.

The trouble is that just past the half way point the film changes. Mouton who had been the center of the film effectively disappears when a man randomly cuts off his arm with a chainsaw. Its an odd random act that alters things and changes the film's focus to everyone Mouton left behind in his circle of friends. How you react to the change in the film will determine how you react to the film as a whole.

The point of it all is to illustrate the randomness of life, but for me the shift is too radical, too extreme. Life is random yes but a chainsaw attack is just freaking strange especially in the circumstances here. Had Mouton been stabbed or beaten I would have accepted it more readily. The bits that follow also seem a tad too random as well.

For me its a matter of the first half being great, but the second half just being okay.

The film  plays March 20 and 22

IIt maybe a SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS (2014) but who's going to ward off this film? New Directors New Films 2014

This is one of  three films at New Directors that will reappear on my worst of the year list. In a lot of ways this maybe the worst.

I have no idea what to say.... I wanted to see this film. I bought into what the write up said:

...one of the most bewitching cinematic experiences to come along in a great while. In A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, Robert A.A. Lowe, the celebrated musician behind Lichens and Om, gives a strangely affecting, perhaps even trance-inducing performance as the film’s Parsifal figure, a quixotic man who embarks on a quest for utopia—the holy grail of infinite truth, self-knowledge, and spiritual connectedness. ... for us, it is purely magical

But that isn't made clear or even suggested in the film.

What is in the film are long, I mean freaking long takes, sequences that begin and end nowhere, and no clue as to what the point of it all is.

If you walk into the film blind, you'll find the film's first section, is set in some sort of commune or country house. People come and go, sauna, eat and hang out. Who are these people? we don't know. What are they doing? no clue. It looks like you're watching someone's home video. The effect is to leave you to ask what the fuck is going on?

The second part of the film follows one of the people in the first part as he rows a boat, wanders the wilderness, fishes and generally takes the center of the frame in long long, I mean really freaking long shots/takes where nothing happens. One interminable shot has the man sitting in a boat fishing- holding a fishing pole. As the shot goes on it begins to rain. He never moves. More shots of him in the wilderness follow before the image fades to black.

The third part of the film is what appears to be a single half hour minute take of a black metal concert. The camera moves round the band. (The jump from dead silence to loud music made the few remaining critics in the screening laugh at the directors audacity at waking up their sleeping audience). After about 25 minutes of music (which genuinely isn't bad if you like metal) the man we've been "following" all along, and had been playing with the band, wander out of the club into the night.

The end.

What's it all mean? No clue.

And to be perfectly honest without the guide of the write up it's all random bits.

Yes the bits look lovely.

Yes the music is pretty good

Yes some of the talk is interesting.

But none of it hangs together. To be perfectly honest until Robert A A Lowe takes center stage in the second part of the film he's a non-entity. He's also a non- entity is the third so the chatter it being about him is a crock of BS.

Yes I will argue this is pointless. I'll even argue with the directors because quite frankly what they are saying outside of the film is NOT whats going on inside it. They've made a film that's all in their heads and not on the screen.

I know you're asking- why does the film suck?

A couple of reasons.

First none of it hangs together. Even allowing this is an experimental film, nothing hangs together. There is no reason for all of these things to be together in anyway.

Secondly  its pretentious. This is the work of a bunch of guys who are way too inside their heads for their own good. Its supposed to be about something. Yea and if I had wings I'd be able to fly.

Thirdly it drones on and on and on and on with no indication of the point. There are just long sequences that go on for no discernible reason. If it's about Lowe finding a place it's hard to tell if he does since his expression almost never changes.

You'll forgive me if that wasn't entertaining, but frankly the truly snarky comments were bled out of me when I trashed this after the press screening. Now all that remain is rage at the thought that people are being asked to pay to see this.

Unless you need an hour of sleep (the music will wake you up) skip this.

To Kill a Man (2014) New Directors New Films 2014

Word to all filmmakers- just because you've got a script that can be touted as based on a true story, it doesn't mean that you should take the time to make the movie. I say this because To Kill a Man closes with the statement that this is based on a true story, and all I wanted to know was why we were being told this story this way.

The film follows tells the story of a man whose family is tormented by a big mountain of a man who is also a bully. Stealing the man's insulin and cellphone one night , the man's son goes to buy it back and is shot for his trouble. The father witnesses the shooting and is horrified. The bully then shoots himself so he can claim self defense. A year and a half later the bully is out of jail and tormenting the family. Unfortunately the police and prosecutors don't do anything to help them. When his daughter in molested our hero can no longer stand by and let things go.

A simple story blandly handled. There is nothing really wrong with the film other than its all a foregone conclusion, the title tells us what happened. Yea the last 20 minutes play out notquite as we expect, the rest of it does with the good people good, the bad people bad and the officials useless. I get that. I get what it's getting at, hell I work in the criminal justice system so I see how things can play out, but did everything have to be so clear cut? I mean things are so clear cut that I walked out of the film for about ten minutes to go to the bathroom and the refreshment stand and when I came back I hadn't missed a thing.

Its not bad film, nor is it a story that doesn't need to be told, rather its an okay film with a story that needs to be  told better.

(And one thing that really bothered me is that our hero is supposed to be a woodsman and yet the way he handles an ax and moves through the forest says its not a natural thing for him to be doing)

Nightcap 3/16/14: New Directors New FIlms starts Wednesday, A Raid 2 comment and links

This year’s New Directors New Films starts Wednesday at the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. In honor of that the next twelve days are going to be reviews of a good chunk of the films showing. The series has is one of highlights of any film year with tons of interesting films showing before they appear anywhere else. Last year for example the kick ass The Act of Killing screened in both the regular theatrical cut but also the preferred directors cut and  The Raid who's sequel I reviewed last night and .

As I write this we’ve seen 14 films, I’ve a ticket for one more and I’m trying to see a couple of more. So far the films run the gamut from among the best of the year to the very worst of the year with most falling inbetween. I’ll have reviews going up over the next two weeks but if you like thrilling cinematic experiences and don’t mind a bit of form over content see The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears a mediation on the Giallo genre. It’s a film that is in love with the cinema and pushes the limits of what it can do, and the genre can do to the limits. It will exhaust you in a good way. Another one to see is the taut thriller Youth. I’d take a pass on The Story of my Death which had me almost destroying my laptop when it fell off my lap when I fell asleep, and A Spell to Ward off Darkness which looks like a dull home movie with a black metal concert grafted on to the end (it had one of the highest percentages of walkout I’ve seen at a screening).

If you want to start reading on films in the series begin with Mondocurry’s piece on Of Horses and Men which ran back in December when the film played acouple of dates since it was Iceland's entry for the Oscars. The piece can be found here. Related to that look for an interview with the director to appear sometime soon since Mondo is scheduled to have sit down with him when he appears at the festival.

As I said above reviews will be running every day for most of the next two weeks so keep checking back.
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This past Monday night I saw The Raid 2. Despite what some of my colleagues may think of the film I’m not a huge fan of it. I have issues some of which I laid out in the review which ran last night. However Tuesday after tweeting my disappointment with the film I got an anonymous comment on a random post on the website taking me to task for not loving the film. How could I not love the film? Raid 2 is a great film. One of the best films ever, topping the first film…this person told me and  they added that once they actually saw the film they would be back to explain why the film was so great.

I was amused.

And apparently my review got picked up on an Indonesian message board leading to a large number of hits, with some people questioning my motivation for writing a bad review. Let me set the record straight I was expressing my feeling for the film.

I’ll be curious what everyone’s reaction will be once the film hits theaters on the 28th. Expect reactions from the other members of Unseen who saw the film last night at the Museum of the Moving Image.

I should say that I’m considering do a second piece on the film once I get to see it again. I freely admit being incredibly disappointed in the film and I want to shake the specter that some have saddled me with of being negative because I expected too much. I’m not sure that’s going to happen since my first review ran about three times the length of what I posted and largely dismantled all the problems I had with the story. That many story problems don’t usually go away with a second viewing.

I do like the action, but I’m not a fan of the movie as a whole (as I’ve said like Jay Chou’s Virtual Factor bad story, great action)

I’m also toying with doing a piece on sequences in other films that are echoed in this film (Old Boy, Gantz, ect), but with Tribeca press screenings starting in a week I don’t think it’s going to happen.

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And now Randi's Links

Special subway cars
Kevin Bacon explains the 80's
Honest Trailers-Frozen
Proving people are loopy The Frozen conspiracy
Greatest movie never made?
Blockbusters with hidden agendas