Raju

Movie Review: Raju.

Director: Max Zahle

Reviewed: 18 February 2012

jamesintexas rating--*** 1/2 (4 Stars = Highest Rating)

A nominee and the frontrunner (in my opinion) for the 2012 Best Short Film Oscar, Raju dives into the chaos of Calcutta and its inner workings as he chronicles a loving German couple's decision to adopt a young boy. Sarah and Jan Fischer (Julia Richter and Wotan Wilke Mohring) undertake a sojourn into an orphanage to adopt a young Indian child Raju (Krish Gupta), and by all accounts, they are a loving, dedicated couple. During the several days spent in Kolkata before traveling back to Germany, Raju disappears, the couple are pushed to the breaking point, and the underpinnings of international adoption, poverty, and bureaucracy are all explored.

Things that stuck with me:

Tracking shots of the streets of Kolkata as seen through the cab.

Raju's head dangling out of the window of the cab taking it all in.

Pain registering in Mohring's face as Jan contemplates titanic questions.

The brushing of teeth in a hotel bathroom.

The knockout final shots.

One reviewer noted that this film feels like one third of a greater feature film, and I'm not sure if that is something that should be taken as a criticism. Yes, there is a more structured, narratively dense, and backstory rich story here, but I'm not sure that should be the way to approach it. The length (24 minutes) involves the audience quickly, shows us a shorthand between the couple that speaks volumes, and ultimately filled me with dread because I knew that decisions must be made. And made quickly.

There is a distancing from the couple since the structure of the short film is to keep us light on backstory. Additionally, the score at times feels Babel-like, which is not necessarily a pejorative, but it just feels familiar.

In focusing on this relationship, Zahle opens up questions of identity, poverty, and morality. What is the right thing to do? And, what does doing the right thing mean if you destroy yourself or your loving relationship in the process?

The Shore

Movie Review: The Shore.

Director: Terry George

Reviewed: 18 February 2012

jamesintexas rating--*** (4 Stars = Highest Rating)

Terry George has written and directed some of the most striking films of the past twenty years dealing with reconciliation and remorse (Hotel Rwanda, In The Name of the Father, The Boxer), and his latest feature is a thirty minute short film about reconciliation and homecoming. Thematically, and in part due to its stunning Irish setting, I found myself drawing quiet parallels to Joyce's "The Dead" with its focus on the inner worlds of people around us, people that we think we know. The Shore is currently nominated for Best Live Action Short Film.

An understated Ciaran Hinds delivers a solid, respectable performance as Joe, a man who returns to his homeland of Northern Ireland with his adult daughter, confronting a past relationship and a past friendship that has deteriorated. Conleth Hill (unrecognizable from his role in Game of Thrones) delivers an equally solid, lived-in performance as Paddy, the one who stayed behind. There's a woman involved and some winning banter among Paddy and his unemployed friends who spend time at the nearby shore, supplementing their unemployment checks with whatever they can scrounge.

The film feels like a labor of love, and the performances onscreen register as true. The film deftly handles the transition between comedy and drama, and there is a great reversal late in the film. I feel like the Irish landscape has never looked better (Joe states, "I forgot how green it was here!"), and George captures the painful nostalgia of looking at photo albums, confronting regret and pain, articulating hidden stories to family members and friends.

However, George clumsily handles the ending; it seems unsure of itself which contrasts with the assured hand displayed in the rest of the film. The character of Mary (Maggie Cronin) is the linchpin of the cast and the story, yet there seems to be a missing speech from her to tie the strands together. For her character to be so central to the epiphany and to not have screen time to articulate her choice is regrettable; George lessens the power of his conclusion. And the singing conclusion around the fire, though telegraphed really early in the film, does not have the emotional power that I wanted it to have.

Still, The Shore has a quality that I really do not see in film consistently: reflection. It's length and quiet and stillness all build into a well-made short story of a film with a central piece missing, yet it is the kind of film that sticks with you. Hinds does a terrific job, and I would be happy to see Terry George and daughter Oorlagh (a fellow graduate of Kenyon College) on the stage accepting the Academy Award for this film.

Miss Bala

Movie Review: Miss Bala

Director:

Reviewed: 4 February 2012

jamesintexas rating--*** 1/2 (4 Stars = Highest Rating)

Stephanie Sigman plays Laura Guerrero in the haunting Miss Bala, a film that could stand along with Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark, Osama, and Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles as a shocking, damning indictment of a male-dominated society that objectifies and punishes women, this time against the backdrop of the violent world of the Tijuana-California border. Things go from bad to worse for Laura as she finds herself at a party in the city that turns into a bloody massacre; her care for her missing friend causes her to stumble into the hands of the cartel responsible, and things continue to fall apart.

Overwhelmingly, the film addresses smuggling money across the border, smuggling bullets, the use of cell phones and communication among the cartel, the way anyone and anything can be bought, as well as direct street clashes, home invasion, accepting cash, losing one's soul, and protecting one's family through self-sacrifice. Impressively, I felt that at no point was direct Gerardo Naranjo cramming this film full of issues or events; things spiraled out of control in a logical and devastating way. The violence is scary; the moments of silence between captive and captor, terrifying.

Opening shots obscure Laura's face, and the director intentionally plays with shadow and light, spatial arrangement with items that block characters from view. A central idea that director Gerardo Naranjo addresses is the pageantry and artificiality of both the beauty contest world (Laura, early on, applies to be Miss Baja) and the drug vs. police world (a kingpin strings up a body after filming a DEA agent's last words and running him down with his truck with stolid theatricality; press conferences are staged with an attention to lighting, make-up, and body language). Naranjo is wrestling with big ideas in a very challenging way: Do we expect a certain performance from the players in the drug war, the same way that we expect certain aspects in a beauty pageant? Are both sides playing a part, providing different illusions? In Naranjo's Mexico as it seems to be ripped from the headlines, violence and exploitation are rampant; there is no way for Laura to escape when police are corrupt, family are poor, her beauty seems to be her only commodity. The final shot could be seen as hopeful (sun is rising), yet it is difficult to see how Laura moves on from all that she's been through. At times, the camera movement and proximity to violence reminded me of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men; it held the same apocalyptic, dangerous feel. Miss Bala is a challenging, fierce film from a director that I'd like to see more from.

A few false notes: the title. I didn't know what it meant and had to ask: Miss Bullet, which is another reminder of the juxtaposition of the pageants and the drug wars. Also, the final title card in the film is supposed to jolt the audience with an awareness of the number of dead in the drug wars since 2004. Such a card is superfluous for anyone who has been paying attention to this film. Clearly, the horrors of the past two hours have underscored all that has been lost and continues to be lost due to a rapacious thirst for drugs north of the border and the furious movement south of it to provide them. No card is needed.

Attack The Block

Movie Review: Attack The Block

Director: Joe Cornish

Reviewed: 29 January 2012

jamesintexas rating--*** (4 Stars = Highest Rating)

Attack The Block moves along with a steady clip: fast dialogue, pulsating soundtrack, lots of camera movement, and no waste of time at getting to the heart of the matter. Aliens. Dark, shadowy ones. Eyes that end up glowing in the dark and turn out to be teeth. Within five minutes, Moses (John Boyega), a 15 year old roaming the streets with his mates, mugs a lady Sam (Jodie Whittaker) in their building, nearly dies fighting an alien that crash lands on a car next to him, and, after smashing it to death with a baseball bat, proudly carries its carcass back to show everyone on the block. That's five minutes in.

Chaos follows.

Essential subtitles make the dialogue fun and easy to comprehend (the teens call the alien a "Dobie" or a "Gollum," at times), and the plot involves an alien invasion in one neighborhood of London with a punchy crew of kids who are determined to fight back. The relationship with the woman they mugged in the first five minutes evolves into an eventual friendship, Nick Frost's pot-dealer views everything going with a distinct level of insouciance, and the aliens follow the boys, kill some of them, and somehow manage to get Moses in trouble with a local gangster.

Special effects are well-done, and there are moments that are quite scary. The kids are fun and there are stakes once a few of them start getting bloodied. Two smaller kids in the neighborhood provide comic relief. There are some awkward attempts at social commentary (Moses raises himself because his uncle isn't around; kids shout at the cops at the end, "You always arrest the wrong guy!" and one speech which mentions guns and drugs being used to kill black males rings especially false at the moment of its delivery), but I liked seeing the kids race around the neighborhoods with samurai swords and baseball bats, in a twisted version of E.T. where Elliot and the neighborhood kids go to war with the invaders. This could have been kids with uzis and automatic weapons, and I really liked that they didn't go that way because the kids simply wouldn't have had access to those weapons. One kid spends most of the film in a dumpster, unable to escape from a disgruntled alien.

It feels about right.

Pina

Movie Review: Pina

Director: Wim Wenders

Reviewed: 25 January 2012

jamesintexas rating--**** (4 Stars = Highest Rating)

Simply astonishing. My first Wim Wenders film, and my first foray into a 3-D documentary about dancing. Lush and filled with juxtaposed images of dancers on monorails floating over rivers in presumably German cities, Pina is a stunning achievement of form. A tribute of sorts from a dance company to their beloved and departed director Pina Bausch, Wenders embraces the dancing in a variety of contexts: sets, stages with audience members visible, gigantic cliffs, alongside busy streets.

It was stunning. Colorful, passionate, driven by the dancing and the dancers, Wenders nevertheless adds layers upon layers to each shot with sometimes 2 or 3 other lines of movement competing, complementing, or contrasting with the action. A dancer moves alongside a busy street where cars, buses, and monorail trains all float by, dancing in their own inimical ways. A film that reminds me of the beauty and intensity of what the human body can do as well as the endless creativity of self-expression and movement.

I loved this movie.

Currently nominated for Best Documentary at the Oscars.

Should be up for Best Picture.

The Artist

Movie Review: The Artist.

Director: Michel Hazanavicius

Reviewed: 22 January 2012

jamesintexas rating--*** (4 Stars = Highest Rating)

I should preface this review by stating that I have been very tardy in posting film reviews, and since it is something that I love to do, I need to recommitment myself to writing about the amazing films I see. Additionally, The Artist is a silent film, an artifact of an era that I am woefully ignorant with regards to seeing and appreciating. I have never seen a true silent film, and to a certain extent, I appreciated Hazanavicius's work here, but I am not capable (yet) of fully understanding or appreciating the genre. I haven't even seen Singing in the Rain.

Shot in gorgeous black and white, The Artist depicts an aging silent film star George Valentin (Golden Globe winner Jean Dujardin with a pencil-thin mustache, great hair, and a classic leading man's style, I think meant to evoke Errol Flynn or Clark Gable, but I've sadly never seen a film with either of those actors) who symbolically ( and literally in multiple scenes) finds his career descending while the talkies emerge, represented by a plucky young ingenue Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) whom he meets cute on the set of one of his silent films.

The experience of being in a theater with an audience and only hearing music and at times silence is quite arresting. It takes getting used to, though amazingly, the little dialogue that is carded out does not keep us from comprehending what is going on and even lip-reading the actors. There's a wonderful hammy little dog that steals scenes with his fun tricks, John Goodman as a producer concerned with the next big thing, as well as James Cromwell as Valentin's loyal driver. The plot is little to speak of; Valentin wanders around late 1920's, early 1930's Hollywood, owning and then losing his position on the movie set, fighting against and ultimately losing to the wave of talking films that replaces the silent era. He keeps bumping into Peppy, and cute montages depict Valentin's deteriorating relationship with his wife (Penelope Ann Miller), Peppy's rise to stardom, and his hubris in directing himself in his own feature which flops.

I loved the musical score of this film until the very end, when Hazanavicius employs the classic Vertigo score from Bernard Hermann for a very specific scene, and sadly, it took me out of the film entirely. Vertigo is one of my favorite films of all time, and the obsessiveness of Jimmy Stewart stalking the streets of San Francisco for Kim Novak is not parallel in any way to the fall of Valentin and his own obsession. It is a wrong note in a film that balances precariously at times between comedy and darkness, manic energy and lethargy. At one point, I started to nod off in the latter third of the film, maybe a sign of my tiredness, maybe a reaction to not hearing human voices in a film for an extended period of time. There is a curious jumping of tones and seriousness into silliness that at times did not work for me.

I found myself comparing this film, strangely, to Rob Marshall's Chicago, a dazzling blending of the internal fantasies of Roxie Hart and the real world around her. Yet that film succeeds gloriously with a show-stopping finale while The Artist seems to be trying really, really hard to send us off with smiles. The final scene is aiming at great profundity, but I'm not sure it ever reaches it.

Is it the form of the film that makes it inevitably a little cold, a little distant, and a little difficult to crack? I have too many questions: Why does Valentin's wife despise him?, Why does he read Peppy's assistance as degrading to his pride instead of the adoration that it seems clearly to be?, and most importantly, Why won't Valentin swallow his pride and adapt with the times and talk in his films? Is there a problem with his voice?

This film is enjoyable, a curiosity, a relic of a time that I don't even have the appreciation for. I'm intrigued to see what the director does next, and I'm glad I saw this film. However, I don't know if it is deserving of the mountains of accolades that seem to be coming its way. Nominations come out this week, and I expect them for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Score, but this can't really be the best film of the year, can it?

A Single Man

Movie Review: A Single Man

Director: Tom Ford

Reviewed: 31 July 2010

jamesintexas rating--***1/2

Tom Ford's A Single Man is a luscious, color-infused or color-deprived marvel with a phenomenal lead performance from Colin Firth, who was rightfully nominated for Best Actor. Firth stars as Professor Falconer, a closeted gay man in the early 1960's (Cuban Missile Crisis looms on the televisions and radios, bomb shelters are discussed seriously) who experiences, suffers the loss of his long time partner of sixteen years, Jim, to a fatal car crash. As the film progresses, it becomes more and more apparent what Tom is experiencing without it being spelled out or a needless narration or obvious exposition characters.

Falconer's movements, studied and careful, are as precise as his words. He studies his neighbors from his bathroom; he selects his clothing with thought and care. As he journeys through his day, Ford flashes back to important moments in Falconer's relationship history, ripping him away from the day-to-day tedium of a classroom discussion or conversation.

Ford's work builds over the course of the film, as light and intensity vary depending on the emotions of a scene. In a conversation between Falconer and, say, a student, both will be shot in medium or tight close-ups, but in the interplay between both, the light and color will be dramatically different, emphasizing Falconer's detachment and the student's vibrancy.

There's much, much more to say about this film, but I will end with being incredibly moved and compelled. I could not take my eyes off of this film, and I feel that it will reward a second viewing. Powerful filmmaking and a director to watch.