Cedar Rapids (2011) (Wednesday, February 29, 2012) (156)

I had missed Cedar Rapids when it came out in theaters, but then it showed up on a handful of best of the year lists by several critics, so I decided to give it a chance. It is a funny gross-out comedy, but less than overwhelming.

You say that insurance sales is a prime subject for juvenile comedy? Well, you're in luck!

Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is an insurance salesman at a small company in rural Wisconsin. After the death of his colleague (by auto-erotic asphyxiation, of course) he's sent to a regional insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, an annual event of drunken debauchery. Tim is a grown nerd and a manchild who is having a relationship with his former junior high teacher (Sigourney Weaver). He has never done anything substantial in his life and the puddle-jumper flight to Cedar Rapids is his first time on an airplane.

When he gets to the conference he finds he'll be sharing a room with Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) a wild man who loves to drink and party more than he loves selling insurance policies. Tim has to concentrate on the task of getting a top rating from this regional group while Ziegler pushes him in all the wrong directions, including into bed with Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), a married red-head from Omaha.

There is a lot of funny and silly stuff here, and a lot of surprises including one of the strangest and most straightforward crack-pipe-smoking sequences I've ever seen (because that's funny!). There's also a lot of rather dumb, preachy sentimentality that really has no place in the story.

The third act is typically dull here -- I say typically because it's rare for a comedy like this to be solid for three-straight acts. I don't really care that Tim is a moralist or that he loves being a goody-two-shoes. This movie is not about good people - it's about bad and dirty people. Stop trying to force me to feel something deep for these cartoonish characters.

This is an OK movie. It's not brilliant, but much better than a lot of stuff out there (30 Minutes or Less, Bridesmaids). I don't know why people would say it's one of the best of 2011... but some people thought that about The Help, which is much more offensive.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Forgiveness of Blood (Saturday, February 25, 2012) (19)

American filmmaker Joshua Marston really likes making movies not set in America. His last and most major film to this point was Maria Full of Grace from 2004, about a girl who becomes a drug mule to get cocaine from Columbia into the U.S. In his new film, The Forgiveness of Blood, Marston looks East at Albania and the curious tradition of family blood feuds there.

Nik and Rudina are two teenagers living in a rural part of Albania. When their father and uncle get in a fight with a neighbor and accidentally kill him, their lives change dramatically. In Albania, there are hard and fast rules concerning blood feuds. All men of age (or near it) are legitimate targets for retribution attacks, which means they must not leave their houses in order to stay safe. The problem is that the family who is feuding with them bends the rules of the tradition, so they intimidate and threaten Rudina, who should be off-limits as a girl, and Nik's younger brother, who should be too young to be involved.

With their father goes into hiding in the countryside to avoid getting hurt or put in jail, Rudina has to pick up the slack he leaves, stepping away from school to run his daily bread cart route. Nik, also not able to be in school, is a typical 17-year-old, interested in video games, his friends and girls, although those things become less interesting when he's trapped in his house for weeks on end.

This is a very interesting film about a subject that I didn't know much about going in. I particularly like the frankness of the situations and how the tradition of the feud is not judged, despite our Western ideas of it's madness. There is something particularly compelling and upsetting about the film being set in such a remote and seemingly poor location, where the family has a horse and cart as their main transportation, but where the kids play video games, record videos on their phones and post stuff on Facebook. It's an unexpected and beautiful clash of cultures that is happening in Albania, where shedding "less civilized" traditions of blood feuds is necessary and difficult as the digital world races in the door.

As with Maria Full of Grace, Marston has an elegant, straightforward style, very sympathetic to the young people who are caught in situations outside of their control. There is an unsentimental view of the impossible dilemma that Nik and Rudina find themselves in, a mere microcosm of the greater problem such blood feuds could cause the country going forward.

I should note also that despite the fact that Marston has no particular connection to Albania, he spent time there before co-writing the script and shooting the film. The Albanian Academy of Film actually submitted this film to the Oscars for consideration for a Best Foreign Language Film nomination, but there were some political objections raised about Marston's Americanness and it was rejected. This is still a very good film and it's a shame the Oscars couldn't have kept it in the running.

Stars: 3 of 4

Attenberg (Friday, February 24, 2012) (18)

When watching Athina Rachel Tsangari's film Attenberg, it is important to keep in mind that the writer-director got a masters in Performance Studies. Her film is as much a study of motion, dance and performance as it is a narrative. Considering this fact is also central in understanding that this is not a typical film with a standard "A to B" structure, nor is it an "easy" movie where you walk out feeling happy that you just saw some nice storytelling.

It is a challenging and a strangely cold film, though a totally beautiful one. It is one of the most interesting movies I've seen in a long time. It feels very much like Giorgos Lanthimos' brilliant 2010 film Dogtooth (for which Tsangari was an Associate Producer), though much more human and relatable.

The film centers on Marina (Ariane Labed), a 23-year-old woman who takes care of her father Spyros (Vangelis Mourikis) in the last stages of cancer treatment. They live in a small mining town on the water that Spyros designed at some point in the past 30 years, now seeming to have nearly no inhabitants in it. It's a typical Modernist village, with rectilinear streets and buildings, awkward public spaces and difficult, cold interiors.

When she's not taking her father to the hospital for his tests, Marina spends much of her time driving visiting scientists around for the local mining firm. As the story goes on, her main rider is an engineer (Lanthimos... yes, the same guy who directed Dogtooth) who she finds theoretically attractive, despite the fact that she's generally not interested in sex and has no experience with it.

One of her main interests is hanging out with her best friend Bella (Evangelia Randou). The two almost exclusively talk about sex; Bella is a normal 23-year-old who likes sex, has a boyfriend and likes talking about it and she's rather obsessed with teaching Marina all she knows. Marina, meanwhile, seems reticent about her sexuality or any erotic emotions.

All of this is rather simple and straightforward and makes up most of the plot ... which is to say very little happens in this story. What keeps it interesting the whole time, though, is that Tsangari formally tells a separate story, different from the general narrative. The film is a master class in the differences and effects of static and moving camera work. Almost all of the standard narrative elements are shot with static shots. Tsangari has a keen eye for composition and these shots are almost all interesting, contrasting deep shots with shallow ones and characters at different points in space .

In the middle of all these static story-telling scenes, Tsangari intercuts sequences of uncanny dance and movement performed by Marina and Bella. At first glance these seem a bit out of place and disconnected, and they all use moving cameras. Why this stark change in style all of a sudden? Well, these near-nondiegetic moments seem to function as some sort of dream-space, or at least non-chronological pieces of the story. Both characters intently look at the camera as they do these actions, reminding us that we are watching two performers, who might be the characters we know them as, but might just be two random people dancing. Certainly these dynamic shots are more liberating than the rest of the static ones.

There's a wonderful long dolly shot following Marina pushing Spyros down a long hall in the hospital. Here is where the dream world crosses over for a moment with the earthly, Modernist world. In fact, the whole film functions as a long and effective criticism of Modernist ideals. For one thing, Spyros himself criticizes his own design, saying he built this unnatural space on the top of sheep meadows. He gets into the concept that there was not a natural evolution in this town (or perhaps in Greece in general) from one era to another (from agriculture to industry), but that the Modernist era came along and sat on history, forcing its emotionless will on everything. He's ashamed of his greatest accomplishment as he gets ready to face the unknown. (There's an interesting analysis of the current Greek debt crisis here, more incisive than many news reports.)

This leads Marina's other main hobby, which is watching the nature films of Sir David Attenborough. Both Spyros and Marina (when he's at home and not in the hospital) love to watch the scientist talk about monkeys and other jungle creatures and sometimes re-enact their strange movements and screams. She seems to have a connection with natural, evolutionary things more than she does with other people. She is the product of Modernism, devoid of deep sentiment and disconnected from other things. The title of the film, at this point, becomes a Modernist respelling of Attenborough's name.

Tsangari has all the actors speaking their lines in particularly monotone, dispassionate style, possibly inspired by Richard Maxwell or other Post-Modern theater or performance creators. Again, this underlines the strangeness and non-humanness of the setting and the people in the film. All of the actors are wonderful, but particularly Labed and Mourikis, who seem to have a fun time as they do mundane things (and also seem to interact in a wonderful and intimate way that fathers and daughters who love one another really do).

This is a deeply interesting and thematically difficult film. Whereas Lanthimos' Dogtooth was a bit of joke, playing mostly with semiotics in a bizarro non-place, Attenberg seems to take the argument one step farther. Tsangari shows how the Modernist legacy in every-day life has magnified certain behaviors and alienated us from our natural states of being. She raises simple bathos to near holy, fetishistic levels, mixing weirdness and beauty in connected (and disconnected) moments. This is what modernity is. She does this all in a gorgeous and elegant way with techniques far beyond her years.

Stars: 4 of 4

Miss Bala (Friday, February 24, 2012) (17)

The title to the Mexican drug gangster film Miss Bala is rather clever. "Bala," of course, means "bullet," and, furthermore, the main character in the film is a contestant in the Miss Baja beauty pageant. This near-homonym is the core of the story, although it might also be as interesting as the film itself.

Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) and her best friend enter themselves in the Miss Baja California competition, rather on a lark. The night before the event, the friend, who is dating a drug dealer, takes her to a nightclub just as the Federales get there to arrest everyone. Laura gets away, but her friend does not. As a witness to the events, and knowing what she knows about the identities of the leaders of the gang, she becomes an important witness in an elaborate game of back-and-forth between the police and the cartel. The drug lord insists that she remain in the pageant as a way of keeping an eye on her and not drawing too much attention to them, but it also puts her in a gray position of appearing to work with them... which is the wrong place to be when the cops are rounding up all the associates of the gang.

This is a fun movie, but not really particularly emotional or gripping. As much as Sigman is gorgeous, I never really found it easy to connect to her, either because of her acting or the script. She's mostly a weak pawn through the film, which is particularly frustrating because she seems to be a smart cookie. She's so unaware of her situation in the greater game that the only makes one bold move through the whole event.

Still, it's an entertaining story and has a nice gritty look. It was only a matter of time before the ever-increasing Mexican drug war would hit the big screen, and I'm happy enough with this. Still, I hope that the next effort would look more at the corruption on both sides of the battlefield and how the cops and the system are dirty as the cartels (in fairness, we get a certain amount of that here, but it's a bit secondary to the action and the gunfights).

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Grey (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (16)

A movie about the survivors of a plane crash in the remote icy wilderness with bleak hopes for rescue sounds like something you've seen before? Well, yes and no. The Grey gets its name from a pack of wolves (I guess they're grey wolves... I'll have to check with Sarah Palin to know exactly) who live in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. So aside from all the other stuff about starvation, frigid temperatures and random cuts and bruises, the lucky men who don't die on impact have to figure out how to get rescued without being eaten by an angry bunch of wolves. Sounds tough.

Liam Neeson plays Ottway, an Irish gun-for-hire who is employed by an oil company to shoot the wolves that live near the oil drilling operation in northern Alaska. He's upset that he's lost his wife months before and is about to shoot himself in the face (happy story!), when he decides not to, but rather to to fly home instead. That ill-fated flight then crashes leaving only seven men alive (including Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts). They soon realize that a pack of wolves is hunting them so they have to move from the wreckage to have a chance at not being eaten. As the trek along the Alaskan backwoods their odds get slimmer as they realize they are very well outnumbered by the animals.

This is a fun movie, though not a particularly brilliant one. It certainly plays some of the Val Lewton games where you hear noises but don't know if they're wind or wolf howls. It's all very unsettling and a bit eerie, even though there's nothing really magical about the wolves... they're just hungry.

I always appreciate a movie with a good elliptical ending, and this has one. It's a bleak story that is told efficiently, if sentimentally (I really don't care about Ottway's back-story; when we find out what it is, it doesn't change anything because he's still being hunted by wild animals), and has a cool look to it with lots of sequences set at night and in blizzard conditions. Writer/director Joe Carnahan has done better work in the past (like Narc, which is great), but this is still solid and fun.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Woman with the Five Elephants (2011) (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (155)

The so-called "five elephants" in the title of the German documentary The Woman with the Five Elephants are the five major novels by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the eponymous woman is Svetlana Geier, one of the most important translators of Russian literature into German who has spent the past 25 years working on those paper pachyderms.

This documentary starts out as a profile of Geier showing her method for translation, involving two rounds, one where she dictates to a lady who types (on a typewriter) what she says, and a second where she rereads what she put down with another linguistic and literary scholar. We see that she is a grandmother in Freiburg with a big family, she works for several hours a day and also takes care of cooking family meals for celebrations.

At some point one of her sons gets injured in an accident and she stops her translation work to take care of him, cooking for him and visiting him in the hospital. In this period she is asked by her alma mater in Kiev, Ukraine to visit and speak to students about her methods and her work. She sets off on a train trip, with one of her granddaughters, back to her hometown that she left during the war.

We then see her back story. In the Ukraine, she was a star German student and when the Nazis took control of Kiev, she got a few lucky breaks thanks to some of the officers who lived with her mother and her. At some point she was offered a scholarship to study at the University of Freiburg, where she moved with her mother before the end of the war.

There is an interesting passage where Geier reflects on her own luck and on "freedom" as described and written about by Dostoyevsky. Although she doesn't say it, it is clear she is thinking about how her own personal success and life was a result of Nazis, the archetypal group who would deny other such freedom, being kind to her.

This is a nice movie, although I feel like it's various threads don't totally connect (outside of this one sequence). I feel like there are really two stories here, one about the world's greatest Russian-to-German translator and another one about a young Ukrainian woman who got lucky early in life thanks to the Nazis. Perhaps this is very contemporary and young of me to feel, but it all doesn't really matter that much to me.

She's a wonderful woman, a loving grandmother, and has an intricate past but not all that interesting as a human. This is another case where I feel a 40-minute short would have been more compelling, showing one part of her story or another.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Fairy (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (15)

In their last film, L'Iceberg, Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy created a wonderful film based on dance, movement and physical comedy. It is a film reminiscent of the best of Jacques Tati, but a bit more gonzo, a bit off. In their newest film, The Fairy, they bring the same brightness and exuberance back for another tale of love and janky magic.

Dom (Abel) is a night clerk in a hotel in Le Havre, France. One night, as he's working, a woman shows up (Gordon) saying her name is Fiona and that she is a fairy who can give him three wishes. A bit surprised, Dom asks for a motor scooter as his first wish and unlimited gas as his second wish. Before he can come up with his third wish, the two begin making out and have sex.

It seems Fiona is the worst fairy ever, as her idea for unlimited gas for the scooter is to buy an oil container at the port that Dom can re-fill his small tank out of. She doesn't seem to have any really strong magic skills (though she does make one man fly) and her powers are mostly based on misdirection and cunning (like when she steals an outfit and shoes to wear on a date with Dom). As frequently happens, she gets pregnant and gives birth in a few minutes, and Dom and her have to care for their baby and avoid the people who get more and more frustrated with their clumsy, goofy behavior around the port city.

For me physical comedy is a really difficult thing. When done well (by masters like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or Tati) it is some of the most wonderful stuff on film; when done badly it's painful and forgettable. Gordon and Abel are new masters of physical comedy and add their own hilarious and off-beat twist to the gags. Certainly part of what makes them so appealing is that they're both individually rather strange looking (she's a bit like a more voluptuous Tilda Swinton, he looks like a drag queen out of makeup) and they play a lot with this.

They also run around Le Havre, which is a bit like a movie being set in Jersey City or downtown Miami (not the beachy part), it's ugly and is a failed Modernist concrete hellscape. They're laughing at the averageness of this world, and the idea that such a simpleton as Dom would want a scooter as one of his three wishes (when another man asks to be able to fly).

This is one of the most fun films I've seen in a long time. It's weird and hilarious, silly and wonderful.

Starts: 3.5 of 4