TIFF 2016 Review: “Loving”

B/A-/B+ (muting the drama and an emphatic outlook makes the biopic story both deeper and wider in its scope)

Country: USA; Director: Jeff Nichols; Starring: Ruth N, Joel Edgerton

Richard Loving decides to marry Mildred, running afoul of local laws against people of different races living together. They try to make a life for themselves and their children, while getting involved in a case to mske such laws unconstitutional

Jeff Nichols should be the first one to call for every upcoming biopic movie Hollywood decides to churn out. And it’s not just because of his efforts on filming “Loving” work so well, but the directorial choices shown throughout his career provide the best antidote to the biopic’s worst tendencies.

Review: “Hell or High Water”

B+/B/A-/A+/A (Entertaining crime drama with a great humanity under a deep, dark outlook)

Director: David Mackenzie; Starring: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Jeff Bridges

Synopsis: Two brothers go on a bank-robbing spree in Texas, which brings a grizzled Texas Ranger in pursuit of them.

“What’ll you not be having?”

That’s asked by a waitress in “Hell or High Water” to her customers, and it’s a very appropriate question, as its implications hang over every character and action in this story. Rarely has any movie, much less a cops-and-robbers tale, been so sharply defined by things that are lacking, and tied it so well to a abscence felt in society today. The movie starts off with this impression in mind, taking a slow turn around a bleak townscape before showing a robbery in progress. The robbery is driven by the need of the two robbers to settle a debt, something that will give solace, not triumph, if they’re successful. And in the first of the movie’s surprising turns, the robbers are not only pessimistic about the law catching them, they nearly take it as a given. It may look like a Western, but it has the sensibility of a noir.

Review: “Kaili Blues”

Director: Gan Bi; Starring: Yongzhong Chen, Shixue Yu, Yue Guo; Country: China

Synopsis: Chen Shen, a worker at a small country clinic, heads to his fomer home town to find his nephew, where he goes through his past in a unique way.

C/A-/A+ (Initially obscure storytelling leads to a rewarding, meditative, and singular movie experience)

Like seeing Apichatpong “Uncle Joe” Weerasethakul direct “Birdman”. “Uncle Joe” specializes in a type of “contemplative cinema” – movies with a calmer, deliberate pace and a slightly removed perspective. In these films, an audience isn’t propelled from scene to scene in a race to see what happens next, but gets shown a situation (usually for an extended moment of time), and by observing picks up meaning from the details they see. This can lead to some distinct rewards, such as precisely human interactions between characters, and a much more involved presence of the world the movie is showing.

“Kaili Blues” presents two worlds, and the switch between them makes for one of the most extraordinary experiences a movie has provided.

Review: “The Neon Demon”

 

Director:  Nicholas Refn; Starring: Elle Fanning, Karl Glusman, Jena Malone

Synopsis:  A young girl becomes a success in the fashion world, which puts her (and the audience) into some nightmarish and strange places.

D-/A-/F/D  (Dumb plot and tone changes render it much less than the sum of its amazing images)

The Neon Demon” is a movie partly about high-end fashion shows, but ends up being the best movie to be playing behind one.

Too hideous, yet can’t look away…..

In fact, the movie operates at the level of a fashion show runway – not so much a ‘story’ as a collection of individually-designed scenes that appear in front of you one after the other.  Each scene is given enough time to soak in and observe its effect, only to depart and then another arrive, and the best way to appreciate the whole thing is to wipe your mind clean of what you saw last and take the next scene on its own terms.   And also like a runway show, some scenes will get you thinking, “Hey, that’s an interesting twist on things….” while others will leave you yelling, “What the Hell is Going Into My Eyes?!?”.

Review: “Streets of Fire”

“Streets of Fire”

C-/D-  (multi-genre mood exercise degraded by misguided cast and direction)

Potentially captivating in how it uses a very 80s style to evoke a 50s setting (and with a villain donning some black suspendered overalls out of “Metropolis”, the 1920s as well).  At its best (the musical numbers at the beginning and end) the colors, smoke, bright backlights, swirling camera, and rousing music provide a moment exalting both eras at once (it’s as if Dario Argento directed the “Take On Me” video from A-Ha).

Unfortunately, the effect doesn’t last, and the different sensibilities fall out of alignment, with the fantasy elements of a music video world competing with those from a biker vs. small town movie, a Chuck Norris machonathon, and a even a western.   What really drags it down is the bizarre combinations of cast and direction.  Michael Pare is a piece of meat with eyes who spouts rapid-fire dialogue – it’s like watching the T-1000 programmed by Sam Spade.  Amy Madigan’s performance apparently involves playing Peppermint Patty imitating Clint Eastwood while dressed like David Crosby.  But Rick Moranis’ smart-talking band manager and romantic rival is the most wrongheaded performance of all time.  It’s even more ludicrously unbelievable than Sophia Loren romancing Anthony Perkins (!) and Burl Ives (!!!!) in “Desire Under the Elms”, and it acts like a trapdoor, dropping the audience out of any investment of belief in the story.

(Nice Flock of Seagulls hairdo on a ‘young’ Willem Defoe, though.)

Review: “Leviathan”

Country: Russia; Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev

B+/A/A+/A+ (Very solid main story leading to epic deeper and darker profundities upon further examination)

Noir films commonly base their plots on a person looking for the solution to a mystery, and having his tragic fate become finding it. Leave it to the Russians, then, to make the greatest existential noir film ever in “Leviathan”: a film that starts with the premise of “You Can’t Fight City Hall” and ends up devastatingly revealing to the audience just what “City Hall” really ends up meaning.

The film hints at its ultimate subject before showing what looks like a small-time conflict between a local man whose hand-built house by the water is threatened by a corrupt mayor. The situation and characters participating in it are first given a dark comic spin, from a judge who reads out a decision like it’s a farm auction to the jaw-dropping amounts of vodka consumed for nearly every occasion. And the film’s screenplay has a great confidence in leaving details and scenes out of the story, both trusting us to infer the connecting details, and several times delivering some insightful misdirections (in one scene, a character looks like he’s about to make a terrible decision – nope, it’s more vodka instead!)

But like ripples emanating from a tar pit, it soon becomes apparent that much more than a local conflict is going on. Both our main character’s side and the Mayor’s are shown as tied to larger, darker forces outside the main story, while limited in their outlook and resolve themselves. And the film’s worldview expands in response, showing how the conflict is a wave reflected in the community, local government, Russian society, and even tied to religion itself.

This is aided by some potent if somewhat direct symbolism in the film, including amazing uses of the Russian landscape. And if the indicators of the message are a little obvious, the message getting sent is incredibly powerful. Maybe the key to the movie is an otherwise throwaway moment in the middle where a character carries a large sack of food he’s thinking is going for charity but is used for feeding pigs instead. Because by the end of “Leviathan”, the audience experiences an ironic reversal of the ending of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”- now it’s the men looking into the window, seeing pigs and men together and becoming increasingly unable to tell the difference.

Review: “Heart of a Dog”

Country: USA; Director: Laurie Anderson; Starring: Laurie Anderson, Lollabelle

B+/B+/B/B+  (A lot of fascinating ideas and cinematic technique that keeps inspiring)

Laurie Anderson mediates on time, stories, memory, art, and the last moments of her dog.

For those who haven’t been able to experience a live show by the filmmaker / musician / performance artist / Sprite of Genius that is Laurie Anderson, this movie is a great way to get a glimpse of what’s going on in her head.  It’s a marvelous place – inventive, whimsical, insightful, and full of fascinating connections and tangents.

Here it starts its focus on her dog Lolabelle, but soon branches out to include paintings, philosophy, ambient and symphonic musical pieces, early 8mm footage from Anderson’s childhood, and thoughts on the United States of Surveillance.  There are leaps in thought from subject to subject that are wondrous to ponder (like how the NSA data center in the Utah desert is a massive structure holding important information in perpetuity, making it the Pyramids of our day), delivered without a hint of condescension or pretension.  Such creativity not only shows up in the ideas, but how they’re presented, such as showing the idea of the data “cloud” as a set of constantly changing ASCII letters that show a coded picture of a literal cloud moving across the sky.

But it’s very much a rollercoaster ride of ideas, and while you will leave the movie in a  more thoughtful and curious state, there’s not a lot of structure to take all these parts and have them fit in a single framework.  Ultimately, the main themes of “Heart of a Dog” are how Lollabelle’s health issues cause Laurie Anderson to go through a reckoning of her past and a primer on how to deal with loss (one Buddhist concept mentioned is, “how to feel sad, without being sad”).  This leads to a trek through the Tibetan Book of the Dead on one side, and a look back on Andersons part about the stories she tells on the other.  It culminates in a masterful sequence where Anderson runs a poetic monologue about events in her life, using the phrase, “Recognize This?” as both a mantra and as punctuation.

Review: “11 Minutes”

Review:  “11 Minutes”

Country: Poland; Director: Jerzy Skolimowski

B/C/A+/A+  (Surface story okay – central concept and presentation is outstanding)

Several people in Warsaw have their stories interact and coalesce in strange ways during an 11 minute time frame.

Wow.  Just….wow.  Imagine watching a later Universal Frankenstein movie, only to experience the ending of “Seven” instead.  That’s a poor attempt at capturing the effect of “11 Minutes”, an okay starting idea that turns into an epochal cinematic triumph.

Review: “Our Brand Is Crisis”

Director:  David Gordon Green; Starring: Sandra Bullock; Billy Bob Thornton

B-/C-  (Enjoyable while watching, but could have been made to deeper, better effect)

A Bolivian candidate for president hires an American media firm to help run his campaign, and they bring in an brilliant, unconventional consultant to vault him to the top of the polls.

Funny title, seeing as how Sandra Bullock is quite the brand herself.  Want a heroine who’s plucky yet clumsy, single-minded yet frazzled, dedicated yet deprecating as she engages with problems in a high-stakes occupation?  Bullock’s the Coca-Cola of that casting choice.

But can a diet of Coke sustain a movie where media manipulation meets social upheaval?  It’s better at energizing the former than the latter.  The dynamic events of the campaign deliver a rush of details:  whiplash momentum changes, sly political judo, and quotes on strategy from Sun Tzu to Lyndon Johnson.  Bullock does well in getting the audience to follow her along and pick up on the basic tools of media chicanery. (Speaking of tools, she gets no help from the many other members of her team, who are soon reduced to simply reacting aghast at whatever she comes up with.  If this was a cop movie it would be like there’s five loudmouth captains all asking for her badge.)  She’s better served when she faces off against Billy Bob Thornton’s rival consultant; her reactions to his smug sliminess are quite funny and satisfying.

The movie becomes less satisfying, however, the more it looks at the country’s social situation.  There’s an earnestness towards its sympathies of the populace’s plights that doesn’t mix at all with the frothy cynicism of its campaign gamesmanship.  Worse, the way the movie tries to pivot to this earnest viewpoint goes all sorts of wrong: it’s a jarring, contrived, and ultimately dishonest change of outlook.  In a country that was facing such struggles for jobs and food, it’s not that fulfilling or enjoyable to see Bullock having her cake and eating it too.

Review: “Anomalisa”

Directors:  Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson; Starring: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan

B/A+/A/B/B  (Very good effort spanning many moods, themes, and ideas, with an insightful animation method)

By going one mental issue too far, Charlie Kaufman may have found himself cut with Occam’s Razor.

Never before has a Kaufman film proved so reducible. For all the craft put on screen and fascinating details put in the script, this is the first film of his where a pat, simple answer can resolve all that happens in the film. His previous work had led audiences through these encompassing complex environments, and it was in trying to figure things out how things fit that led to all sorts of insights and ideas. Here none of that is necessary to explain what’s going on. (It’s like reading a murder mystery where it turns out the culprit was a double murder convict who just escaped from prison. Sure it’s a valid answer, but would an audience be satisfied from experiencing it?)