Movie Make-out

Vantage Point

Directed by Pete Travis.
Starring Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt, Edgar Ramirez, and Saïd Taghmaoui. 

Other reviewers keep comparing the new thriller Vantage Point to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and it’s bugging the shit out of me. Where Vantage Point backs up its storyline five times in order to cover the same 23 minute span in a different location, or from a different place in the crowd, Rashomon is four different versions of the same events. Each iteration in Vantage Point is not showing a different, subjective version, but a different aspect of a single, objective event: that’s not at all the same thing. This is not to say that Vantage Point is original, or intelligent, or good, however. Because it’s not.

The gimmick, while not inherently a bad idea, got on my nerves because the first couple of times the filmmakers employed it, because it didn’t really reveal anything new. The last two back-ups, however, at least took the action across the street or a few blocks away, and you finally felt that the story was moving forward — except that, ultimately, where it moved to was either so obvious or so stupid that it didn’t matter. (Hey, guess what? There’s a traitor on the Secret Service — and you can tell who it is from his second line, over an hour before the film finally reveals it to the audience. Can fictional spy movies stop having double agents in, like, every single movie? It’s annoying.)

The disappointing thing about Vantage Point is that even though the film is kind of brain dead, it had a brisk pace (in spite of the two early, extraneous back-ups), the actors were all very good, and the actiony bits were done well enough that I was enjoying the movie in spite of it all — not a lot, but a little — but the entire story comes to a head at one particular moment so unbelievable, so amazingly idiotic, that it completely undermines any of the enjoyment I had taken from the preceding 80-something-odd minutes. I have to venture into spoiler territory to properly comment on this much of the film, so consider yourself warned: when a little girl wanders out into traffic, the terrorist — who has just bombed a plaza filled with scores of people, personally shot one hostage, and killed another dozen or so by sending a suicide bomber off to his death as a diversion — is so concerned about this girl’s safety that he jerks the wheel of the ambulance he’s driving so hard that it causes it to roll. Perhaps my understanding of how terrorists’ minds work is not as strong as screenwriter Barry Levy’s, but I would think someone who’s already killed any number of innocent children to just turn her into a little red smear on the road, rather than jeopardize his entire plan.

There is an extent to which films like this can coast by on a good cast and well-done chases (the film equivalent of looks and charm), but when the resolution of a film hinges entirely upon a mass murderer giving even the slightest shit about a child who can only be described as Movie Stupid, there’s just no getting past that.

Vantage Point is rated PG-13 and opened on Friday, February 23, 2008. After seeing the trailer for the past six months, I’m happier about the idea that I won’t need to see it in front of half the movies I watch than about having seen the movie.

The Counterfeiters

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky.
Starring Karl Markovics, August Diehl
and Devid Striesow.

Unless you paid attention to the Best Foreign Language Feature Oscar nominations, you probably haven’t heard of The Counterfeiters; I hadn’t heard of it until then, myself, but after seeing the trailer (at Apple), I made sure to keep it on my radar. When I saw that the Gene Siskel Film Center had an advanced screening of it a couple of weeks back (at Landmark’s Century Centre), I leaped at the opportunity — and I was not disappointed.

The Counterfeiters is a tight, thrilling, true-life drama anchored its amazing lead, Karl Markovics, who plays Salomon Sorowitsch, a Polish Jew known as “The King of the Counterfeiters.” Arrested in the lead-up to WW2 and subsequently sent to a concentration camp, Sorowitsch survives on his artistic skills before being transferred to the Sachsenhausen camp. There, he learns the officer who arrested him is heading up “Operation Bernhard,” a Nazi plan to destabilize the British economy by flooding it with counterfeit pound notes — and they need his help to perfect their forgeries.

Sorowitsch and his fellow counterfeiters — comprised mainly of bankers, printers, and other artisans — are treated surprisingly well, compared to the other prisoners at the camp (from whom they are kept apart), which keeps The Counterfeiters from being quite as depressing as many Holocaust films, but they’re constantly reminded of the killings going on outside their isolated corner; certainly, the Nazis don’t think of them any different than the rest of the Jews and only treat them differently because their commanding officer, Sturmbannführer Herzog (Devid Striesow), orders them to — more because he recognizes that these artists need to be in good health to do their best work than because he thinks well of them.

The director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, occasionally goes out of his way not to paint the Jewish characters in black and white; some older Jews at the camp complain about a few others singing “that nigger music,” for instance. But he needn’t have bothered: Sorowitsch is hardly a picture of morality; the true moral “hero” of the story, if he can be called one, is a fellow named Adolf Burger (played by August Diehl), a collotype expert who singlehandedly — and against his fellow counterfeiters’ wishes — sabotages the plan to counterfeit the US dollar for months.

But this is not a story of heroes; it’s a story of survival. And it’s one hell of a story.

The Counterfeiters is rated R. It begins a limited release run stateside on February 22, 2008.

Once again, Magnolia Pictures has done film buffs the favor of releasing programs with the live action and animated Oscar-nominated short films (one program for each category). I caught them both at the Landmark’s Century Centre Cinemas in Chicago over the past weekend; you can read my reviews of the animated short films here.

The live action program is comprised of all five nominated shorts and runs 137 minutes total.

Tanghi Argentini

Directed by Guido Thys. Produced by Anja Daelemans.
13 minutes.

Tanghi Argentini centers around a man who has wooed a woman on the internet by pretending to know how to tango and enlists a co-worker to give him a two-week crash course in the dance before he meets her. Some of the early humor reminded me a bit too strongly of the wonderful Japanese film, Shall We Dance? Even so, a couple of hilariously heart-warming twists at the end provide all the originality the film needs. As with the animated shorts, I’m torn between two of the films: certainly The Mozart of Pickpockets and Tanghi Argentini both deserve to be discovered by audiences, but for me, I think Tanghi wins out overall.

Tanghi Argentini is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Om natten (At Night) 

Directed by Christian E. Christiansen. Produced by Louise Vesth.
40 minutes.

At Night, or In the Night, according to the film’s subtitles, starts off incredibly strong, contrasting a powerfully sober, warm introduction to three women spending their holidays in a cancer ward with the film’s cold, muted palette and an entrancing ambient score. Unfortunately, the film begins to wear out its welcome quickly as it broadcasts where every character arc is going very early on and, disappointingly, offers no real surprises along the way, ultimately degrading to a fairly standard, if technically well-made, would-be tearjerker.

At Night is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Il Supplente (The Substitute)

Directed by Andrea Jublin. 
17 minutes.

Before seeing The Substitute, I had yet to see an Italian comedy that I didn’t find incredibly annoying and, unfortunately, that’s still the case. While the story itself is a joke that I enjoyed just enough to not want to spoil, it’s too drawn out for its smile-inducing payoff, and the cast — especially the title character, a bizarre substitute teacher in a junior high classroom (or the Italian equivalent, anyway) — all play everything incredibly broadly, mugging and overacting almost as bad as a dozen Roberto Benignis.

The Substitute is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
  

The Tonto Woman

Directed by Daniel Barber. Produced by Matthew Brown.
36 minutes.

The Tonto Woman centers around a cattle thief who happens upon a woman who had been held captive by Mojave Indians for eleven years and is now kept by her rancher husband as if she were a cow herself! And the cattle rustler decides he wants to steal her, too, not just her husband’s cows! As you could probably guess from that description, it’s all very obvious and heavy-handed, and we’re not given any compelling reason why the cattle thief would fall in love with the woman, save that she’s the film’s other main character and that he’s seen her breasts. The stiff acting and rote execution make me wonder how this film got a nomination in the first place, but I suspect the fact that it’s an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard short story had a lot to do with that.

The Tonto Woman is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
  

Le Mozart des Pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets)

Directed by Philippe Pollet-Villard.
31 minutes.

At this point in the program, each short had gotten progressively less and less enjoyable, overall, so The Mozart of Pickpockets was a welcome turnaround. This French short centers on two petty thieves — accomplices in a pickpocketing gang of sorts — who hit a bit of hard luck, until they take in a deaf, homeless boy who turns out to be (you guessed it) The Mozart of Pickpockets. Very funny, endearing, and briskly paced, this story could easily be expanded into an effective crowd-pleasing comedy feature, but perhaps the short’s smaller scope serves the premise better.

The Mozart of Pickpockets is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Magnolia Pictures’ 2008 Oscar-nominated Short Films programs hit limited release on February 15, 2008. Check the Magnolia site for release dates/theaters in your area.

Once again, Magnolia Pictures has done film buffs the favor of releasing programs with the live action and animated Oscar-nominated short films (one program for each category). I caught them both at the Landmark’s Century Centre Cinemas in Chicago over the past weekend; you can read my reviews of the live action short films here.

The animated program is comprised of all five nominated shorts and runs 90 minutes total.

Meme les Pigeons Vont au Paradis (Even Pigeons Go to Heaven)

Directed by Samuel Tourneux and Simon Vanesse.
9 minutes. CGI.

Essentially a 9 minute long joke that nearly botches its punchline by drawing it out several seconds too long, this French short centers around a charlatan selling a device that promises guaranteed entry into Heaven to a poor miserly gentleman. The blobby character designs just look like a low-budget CGI attempt to simulate claymation, when real claymation (or a bigger budget) would have looked better — and while the well-rendered textures and backgrounds look considerably better, they do not manage to save the film’s overally aesthetic, particularly when blown up to a large screen. This one may actually play better in a smaller format.

Even Pigeons Go to Heaven is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Moya lyubov (My Love)

Directed by Alexander Petrov.
27 minutes. Paint on glass.

If My Love’s story were rendered as an effects-free live action film (which it very easily could have been), the melodrama would have probably been obnoxious, but the visuals in this short are absolutely stunning: each frame looks like an oil painting, like the kind you’d see on the cover of a Russian romance novel. A sequence where the protagonist ____ has a fever shows him alternating between literally burning up and being covered by a bed of snow, for instance, and the films many similar flights of visual fancy elevate its otherwise tedious story greatly. Romance lovers may care more than I did, but this tale of a young man torn between his lust for two women — one a bit of a whore, the other a bit of a saint — just didn’t grab me on an emotional level.

My Love is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Madame Tutli-Putli

Directed by Crhis Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski.
17 minutes. Claymation/CGI.

Madame Tutli-Putli is a beautifully rendered short about a woman who boards a train, and then weird shit happens… and that’s it. When the credits came after an overlong (and uninteresting) shot of fog over trees, I simply winced and said, "What?" Fans of weird for weird’s sake films most of David Lynch’s oeuvre or Donnie Darko may love it for its atmospherics, which are certainly impressive, but the complete lack of any coherent point or resolution makes it a disappointment for me. It simply felt like the first 17 minutes of a longer film that doesn’t yet exist. Visually, it’s one of the best shorts in the program, though, which redeems it somewhat; the blend of claymation with CGI is particularly clever. The eyes on the humans are real eyes, digitally superimposed onto the claymation, which makes them creepy as hell.

Madame Tutli-Putli is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

I Met the Walrus

Directed by Josh Raskin.
5 minutes. 2D animation.

Here’s Magnolia’s description: "In 1969, fourteen-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room with his tape recorder and persuaded him to do an interview." What Josh Raskin did is take this tape and create an ingenious 2D animated film around it, created from a clever blend of photography, hand-drawn and digital illustration. Not a frame of the film can be considered representational: each phrase from Lennon or Levitan’s mouth is translated into some sort of symbolic imagery, sometimes humorously, sometimes less so, but the result is a beautiful illustration of and expansion on the content of the interview itself. In short, it’s a terrific concept, impeccably well executed; even though it is very short, I had a grin on my face the whole time. I’ll be rooting for this one on Oscar night. (The only thing that doesn’t work is the title: because as any Beatles fan knows, the Walrus was Paul — not John. [EDIT: Oops; this is apparently not the case, despite the lyric from "Glass Onion."])

UPDATE (2/19 8:50 AM): An interview with Jerry Levitan has been posted at Newsarama. Among its revelations is that the 5 1/2 minute film was actually composed of excerpts from Levitan’s full 40 minute long interview, and that Mr. Levitan is now known as "Sir Jerry," a Canadian children’s entertainer. His website is pretty kickin’.

I Met the Walrus is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Peter and the Wolf

Directed by Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman.
27 minutes. Stop motion.  

This short is set to Prokofiev’s "Peter and the Wolf," and is mostly a fairly straight-forward (if dialogue-free) rendering of the famous story — but it takes a few clever liberties with the tale, mainly in the lead-in to the musical piece and a coda at the end, and with the addition of a second bird to the cast of characters, a flightless crow whom Peter ties a helium balloon to (in hopes of giving it back its lost gift). The characters are impressively defined for not having any dialogue; the stop motion animation is incredibly well designed and fluid; it’s simply a beauty to behold. It’s a tough call between this and "I Met the Walrus," and I would hardly be disappointed if "Peter" wins instead, but "Walrus" gets a slight edge from me just for originality.

Peter and the Wolf is available for purchase from iTunes for $1.99.
 

Magnolia Pictures’ 2008 Oscar-nominated Short Films programs hit limited release on February 15, 2008. Check the Magnolia site for release dates/theaters in your area.

In Bruges

Written and directed by Martin McDonagh.
Starring Colin Farrell, Ralph Fiennes, Brendan Gleeson, and Clémence Poésy.

Gangster films are played out. I’ll give the genre its masterpieces, but "serious" gangster films where preening pretty-boys try desperately to act as cool as humanly possible and jerk off their symbolic dicks just annoy the hell out of me. It doesn’t help that in real life, gangsters are predominantly fashion-sense-deprived morons with waaay too much testosterone, and as such, seeing men of that ilk portrayed as hip and cool in serious films just turns my stomach. So it’s refreshing that in Martin McDonagh’s fantastic first feature, In Bruges, allows its Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes to act like thugs (albeit relatively articulate thugs): short-tempered cunts with few redeeming qualities save maybe a bit of looks and charm.

So divorced from reality as they are, gangster films are fantasy films, of a sort, which makes the use of Bruges — "the most well-preserved Medieval town in Belgium," according to one character — as the setting to this film so unexpectedly appropriate. It sets the characters apart from reality that much more, contrasting the bleaker elements of the film, and feeding into the genre’s absurdities cleverly.

Farrell absolutely shines as Ray, an uncultured dumbass and would-be hitman sent with Ken (Brendan Gleeson, the star of McDonagh’s brilliant Oscar-winning short, Six Shooter) to hide out in Bruges after botching his first job. While Ken makes the most of the situation, taking in the sights and culture of the city, Ray could not be less interested. It’s not until he meets the ridiculously hot Clémence Poésy (Fleur Delacour in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) that he gains even the slightest bit of interest in the "fairy tale town"… and even then, not really.

If you’ve seen the trailer (here it is over at Apple), it’s no surprise that Ray and Ken’s boss, Harry (Fiennes), is eventually comes to town to settle a matter of honor, with Ray on the wrong end of his gun, but the reason why is one of the film’s highlights: a surprisingly weighty dramatic thread that bolster the film greatly. It’s a testament to the film’s superb cast and director, that (as in Six Shooter), In Bruges can so effectively balance a deadly serious emotional story, and yet keep the dark, dark humor coming throughout the film, up to the very end.

In Bruges opened in limited release on Friday, February 8. We’ll be discussing In Bruges Monday night (February 11) on The Triple Feature, so tune in at 9PM Central!