Behind Enemy Lines (John Moore, 2001)

Several near-brilliant, terrifyingly suspenseful action sequences are marred by rampant, incessant jingoism of the most uncomfortable order. The Serbian people are depicted as a nation of ruthless and untrustworthy murderers who delight in the slaughter of innocents. While I will admit my knowledge of all the things going on in Bosnia during the '80s and '90s is very slim, it's been my experience that no war is as cut-and-dry as the U.S. would like to pretend it is. I guess at this point in my life I'm much more interested in demystifying war and struggles between nations rather than continuing to mythologize our involvement in said things.

There's an interesting moment partway through the film, when a NATO admiral tells a US admiral something about the US being obsessed with getting their soldiers back, but what if getting this one man back costs thousands of lives later? This is, rather obviously, a real concern and something the movie would've done well to explore. The cavalier attitude of the U.S. in its involvement in foreign policy and peacekeeping is absolutely worth examining, but soon after this line is uttered the NATO admiral is made to look weak and the US admiral, played by Gene Hackman, to look self-sacrificing, strong, and heroic. And the idea of one man's life costing thousands is averted, as suddenly main character Owen Wilson also has vital information that can SAVE thousands of lives and the insidious Serbians have already completely violated the tenuous peace treaty anyway, so GO USA! USA! and save that dude no matter what the cost!

Still, as noted above, many of the action set pieces are occasionally astounding works of spatial relations and terror. I only wish the movie could've focused on them, rather than dragging the awkward politics and hammily-handled backroom politics into it. John Moore would later go on to do another, occasionally effective if weirdly racist, remake of The Flight of the Phoenix before making Max Payne, a movie that eschews any kind of political commentary for a purity of narrative that I think is a pretty excellent and underrated movie. Here's hoping for more like that and less like this from him in the future.

Red Riding Hood (Catherine Hardwicke, 2011)

Walked into this most certainly wanting it to be Catherine Hardwicke's masterpiece -- the fullest expression of her love for teenage sexual awakening and all the sometimes messy, sometimes amazing, always pushed to the forefront, emotions that come along with it. One scene succeeds so greatly that I am willing to cut the rest of the movie, which manages to stuff itself to the gills with ideas, yet never quite completes or satisfactorily fleshes out any of them, a lot more slack than I probably otherwise would. But that one scene, or I guess sequence, is so charged with emotion and erotic tension that it makes me wonder if all the other teen movies about sex are directed by people who maybe never had sex when they were teenagers. Or, if they did, don't remember what it was actually like. But, unlike her previous Twilight, it approaches the idea of dangerous, bad boy teenage infatuation with more straightforward adoration, rather than the teeter-tottering ambivalence that made Twilight so surprising and unfairly maligned. Red Riding Hood's love for bad boys is more about the attractiveness of teenage infatuation, rather than curbing that infatuation with the knowledge that teen sexual obsession can also be weird and gross and unhealthy.

My biggest complaint is that the film's narrative structure holds back the expression of most of the ideas. The paranoia and fear-mongering of possible attack from an unknown assailant awkwardly evokes the condemnation of the Patriot Act (certainly something we can all agree with, but is handled rather poorly) and the amount of joy gained from certain mysteries about the identity of the wolf, and the fact that it could be any of the men in Amanda Seyfried's life isn't enough to make up for the fact that keeping the mystery going the entire film's length prevents many of the ideas from achieving any kind of maturation. Especially because the finale, while handled somewhat clumsily, introduces a brand new concept that is one of the most worthy of exploration, suggesting something sinister and incestuous about fatherly protectiveness over the burgeoning sexuality of teenage daughters. This slyly evoked metaphor is absolutely worthy of exploration, but by the time it comes up the mystery has been solved and the movie, therefore, feels it must end. A better movie would've been able to keep the mystery, but trim it down to the first half -- excising Gary Oldman completely would be a start, as his status as an outsider come in to straighten up the town and prepare it for attack undermines the idea of national paranoia in times of panic -- and spend the second half evolving the previous theories on teenage love and its strange, and often creepy, facets.

Paycheck (John Woo, 2003)

I haven't seen any Hong Kong John Woo movies in years and years, but every time I see one of his American ones (I also recently watched Broken Arrow), I suspect that I won't like them. Maybe America really did kill everything that was exciting about him, but these movies are so crappy and ineptly constructed and, despite all their whirling movement and sometimes-intricate choreography, so weightless and inconsequential. This movie feels like amateur-hour, which, for such a heralded and longstanding action director, is pretty much baffling.

This part might not exactly be his fault, but sorta like Unknown it goes to great lengths to squander a fairly promising set-up. Both movies have the ability to use their mystery status, with a protagonist lost in a world he doesn't quite have a grasp on and trying to make sense of it while people are possibly trying to kill him, as a way to explore tension and suspense in a "is it real or am I crazy?" way, but both move too quickly into their respective plots and spend too much time on the least interesting aspects of their narratives.

Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007)

An interesting mirror of Pegg and Wright's previous feature, Shaun of the Dead. That movie is more interesting to me, now, as it compares with Hot Fuzz than as a piece of its own. Both take similar comedy formulas, involving Pegg's growth and change over a two hour comedy away from outlandish working world extremes (listless slacker in Shaun, semi-fascistic workaholic in Hot Fuzz) and towards a happier, more psychologically healthy middle ground.

My preference for Hot Fuzz comes from two better-handled aspects that both share. While Shaun concerns itself with the city life of England, wrapping working-class life in invisibly-veiled metaphors for the walking dead and acting as though people who buy into working at their jobs and being adults are obnoxious douchebags (Peter Sarafinowicz more or less reprising his role on Spaced), Hot Fuzz treats its depiction of Pegg as a workaholic cop with a bit more interesting ambivalence. True, it doesn't shy away from his status as something of a fascist, seeing the rules as unbendable procedures that were not created by flawed human reasoning, but his ideas about these previous concretes soften without ever completely losing the dedication and ingenuity he brings to his job. Shaun, meanwhile, spends much of its energy on the titular character's status as a someone who lacks said ingenuity and uprightness, while never really suggesting that the characters were anything but absolultely correct about the previous opinion that supposedly "dead-end" jobs should be mocked and scorned.

The other aspect that Hot Fuzz handles better is the impetus for Pegg's change of character. In both films Pegg's character is dumped by his girlfriend, then dumped into a strange and discomforting new world and forced to adapt. But unlike Shaun the happy ending in Hot Fuzz does not arrive with rekindled love, nor with the other stereotype of finding a new girl who appreciates the new you. Instead Nicolas Angel gains a bromance-type friendship with Nick Frost, but also a camaraderie and working compromise with his other fellow police officers. I appreciate nearly any movie that can start off with heartbreak, but doesn't have to resort to romance as the only possible way to learn from that experience.

Also the satire of weirdo upper-class ideas of elaborately manicured neighborhoods and icy perfection is much more hilarious than the artsy classism of the aforementioned working-class snobbery Shaun evinces.

Following (Christopher Nolan, 1998)

An early indication of Nolan's greater interest in cinematic sleight-of-hand than anything resembling human interest. Begins with an actually pretty sublime premise: an out of work writer begins stalking random people he sees, getting a vicarious thrill out of following them and attempting to piece together the world that is their life. It's a premise with many thematic possibilities: obsession, voyeurism, detachment, the alienation of large cities, the tendency among people to, in a way, think of the other people on subways and in crowds, standing in lines at the store, as a kind of window dressing for the movie of their own life. It could go into the meta aspect that film as a medium has opened us up to thinking of our own lives as a kind of movie, and to regard who are the major players and who are simply extras -- then take that notion and turn it on its head a little bit. Explore that kind of narcissism. I saw Following once before (it was released on video with a big new label to capitalize on Memento's popularity), but when I read the description on Instant Watch I was shocked that I couldn't remember anything about the movie -- and that Nolan had come up with such a ripe concept.

The reason I couldn't remember is that Nolan all but abandons the concept as quickly as possible. The film opens with the main character telling his story to an unnamed other character and the actual titular "following" only takes up perhaps the first 7 minutes of a feature that runs a little over an hour. After that the main characters begin some other, more blatant forms of voyeurism (breaking into people's houses to gaze at their things -- and also steal stuff). Then it attempts to be a kind of film noir pseudo-parody, resting a hapless character as the mercy of larger machinations that unfold into a characteristic Nolan twist ending. But, while it uses these genre types knowingly, and with a slight wink, it really doesn't offer any explication of them and their relevance to our larger world, or even the world of film. They exist only to make cineastes feel smart for catching his references, and Nolan look smart for so slyly referencing them. Worse, neither the beginning following sequences, the house-breaking sequences, or anything else, really, has a feeling of genuine tension. Its low budget is obviously no excuse, as the film actually does the opposite of many low budget features, relying far too much on a diet of facial close-ups -- refusing to show us the space we're supposed to be existing in and, therefore, mostly denying its reality. So if we must exist in a fantasy of his concoction, shouldn't we then at least enjoy being in that fantasy? The amount that this can be enjoyed depends solely on how charmed one still is by time narrative jumps, by how much seeing something deliberately incongruous makes you think "Ah! I wonder how he got beat up/why he has a new haircut/why he's wearing a suit!" and how much satisfaction you gain from that wondering. For me, it is, as I have mentioned and, likely, as I will mention, practically nil.

Moon (Duncan Jones, 2009)

Moon is one hour of a pretty decent, not bad movie, and half an hour of good at all movie. That it is split up into a convenient division between the two parts is nice (the first half hour is not good, the rest is sometimes pretty decent), but it also serves to make it feel as though the movie has not even started until it's almost a third of the way over. It is, in fact, deliberately misleading -- an attempt to trick the audience into thinking it is watching one movie, only to switch to a completely different movie at that half hour mark. It begins as a movie about isolation and paranoia in a harsh, unfeeling area of desolation, ala The Thing and probably a thousand other movies (Moon is also hampered by its need to reference other films, and to make those references as immediately apparent as possible), but by the second half has shifted to an actually sometimes interesting movie about the nature of identity, and the way in which habits transcend consciousness. Which is not to say that explorations of isolation and paranoia are not interesting, just that the movie does not handle them in a very interesting way. Perhaps Jones was too excited to get to the "real" part of the movie.

Sam Rockwell is as good as advertised, despite being hampered by the fact that Jones is not entirely sure how to shoot an actor talking to himself all that confidently. Too often the movie relies on easy back and forth close-ups, which is fine to emphasize their separateness and other ideas, but eventually distracts from the emotional development of the characters, as the fact that it's one guy playing both parts is constantly being reminded to the audience. This combines with the score's tendency to be like the wretched lovechild of John Williams and James Horner to rob nearly every scene that Rockwell plays brilliantly of any emotional weight it would've had.

Man, I ended up being a lot less nice to this movie than I meant to. It's really not that bad. If it weren't for Source Code's awful trailer, I'd be interested in what Jones has to offer in the future, once his talents are more matured.

Unknown (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2011)

It seems almost too easy to compare this to Taken, given the combination of action movie + Liam Neeson + American dude in exotic European locale, and because I never shy away from doing the easy thing, that's what I'm going to do too. Taken, as it turns out, is one of my favorite action films of the new century. Neeson brings an inspired amount of gravity and seriousness to the role, without falling into a joyless and overbearing BIGNESS ala Christian Bale in Terminator: Salvation. He has a sort of natural, empathy-invoking charisma that, when mixed with Luc Besson's stripped down and streamlined script, works something close to wonderfully better than it has any right to.

Unknown is not that movie. While many of the action scenes are paced and put together well enough (once again, European filmmakers take American staples and re-invigorate them long after America has forgotten how to use them properly), the movie suffers from a burdensome, overplotted script that thinks the best way to keep action fans entertained is to also throw a fairly useless mystery into the mix. My disdain for mysteries may not be well-documented, but I am about to begin documenting it. Mysteries are boring. And, lately, they are an excuse used by entertainers in order not to say anything interesting. Well, that's probably not the real reason. The real reason is that everyone actually seems to like mysteries. They like the act of trying to figure out if they can spot the twist before the movie gives it to them. They like trying to guess whodunit. Well, I don't. The fact of the matter is that the average whodunit, it really doesn't matter whodunit. If it can be any number of red herrings, then it is thematically inconsequential which one it is. So I would much rather a filmmaker use what time he has to offer me to keep me thinking in a much less superficial way than to ask, "What's the answer to this riddle?" In Unknown, the answer is not easy to guess, mostly because there are no clues and it comes so far out of left field that, while it technically makes sense, is not really even a game between the viewer and the writer anymore. It's more like a magician's "ah-ha!" moment. Fair enough. It could be worse.

But in the mean time, it has wasted a bunch of great promise and screen time that could've been better spent with more action and/or suspense sequences. There's a moment in which Neeson is walking down a long corridor in a Metro station and a man may or may not be following him. The tension generated in this scene is so immaculate and fist-clenchingly good that it made me think "This is what The American should've felt like." But, of course, because the movie is so concerned with its mystery and plot, it turns out the guy totally is following him, because there isn't enough time to "waste" on actual paranoia. A shame, because I still think The American is a good idea. And this could've been a Total Recall meets The American type moment, except for how little interest the movie has in exploring either of those ideas.

Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997)

A haunting examination of repression, passive-aggressiveness and the police procedural genre, Cure is, for the most part, brilliantly conceived and executed in a way that makes my own meager ideas filled with envy. The plot involves the potential of hypnosis, and the idea that within everyone (or, at least, all Japanese people) there is a repressed, hungry desire to lash out at the people they feel closest to. That Japan's extreme emphasis on politeness and the shamefulness of extravagant expressions of emotion creates a building resentment that can unleash itself at any time -- and the only way to be free of it is to let all that is inside be on the outside. The film also equates the methodical actions of the, uh, killer hypnotist with the film's protagonist, a police detective, and then again with a doctor attempting to investigate symptoms. In this way the film plays on ideas of power relationships, between people who ask questions and people who must answer them, regardless of their desire not to. The film's "villain" is so frightening partly because of the way he confounds would-be investigators, displaying an emptiness that makes him impervious to being known by others. The film suggests that telling other people things gives them a power over you, but that not being able to tell people things is somehow equally frightening. Perhaps it's suggesting not so much that telling people things is bad, but that our distrust of it, and the way we have come to shape it as something that gives them power and should be avoided, is the real problem. That open dialogue is not here, and the fact that it isn't is something to be feared.

Stylistically, the film also goes to great lengths to prove to the viewer that hypnosis exists and it does so by often lulling the viewer into a state of hypnosis while watching the movie. This, I think, is what sets the film apart from almost any other that I can think of. It proves its assertions within the film so perfectly, that often viewers probably don't even realize what's being done to them.

A small thing to note, and I'm not quite sure how to feel. I always thought that, for such an ambiguous movie, the ending was too neat. That it set things up in a much too A-B-C manner. Now, having recently watched and discussed this movie for my film class, I'm not so sure that's the case. I seemed to be the only person in the class that came to the conclusion I did about what was happening at the end. Maybe I'm actually going crazy and the ending I've seen is not at all what the movie is supposed to be saying? Anyone who has seen it and would like to chime in, please do so.

The Last Circus (Alex de la Iglesia, 2010)

When I walked out of this I told the first person I talked to that it made me want to cry and throw up at the same time, but in a good way. The unexpected emotional gut punch of the film floored me. I could barely speak. While the effort towards macabre jokes actually does some work to undermine the film's powers and strengths, it's possible that going so far out on a limb as to not be able to recognize what works and what doesn't is part of what gave de la Iglesia the ability to make such a terrifying piece of filmmaking in the first place.

The film is, above all, rooted in its place as being part of the end of the Franco era in Spain. Admittedly, this is an era I don't know much about, other than what everyone knows: socialists and anarchists fought the fascists in the '30s and lost, Franco rules the country after that for something like 40 years. But something about the deconstruction/rabid demolition of fantasy taking place in this movie is obviously strongly influenced by the feelings de la Iglesia must've felt growing up around this time. In some ways, this movie is the perfect antidote to the terrible, hideous Pan's Labyrinth, which also involves both fantasy and fascism, but with a much more ickily unearned hopefulness, suggesting that in times of terrible atrocity the only option we have is to escape into fantasy. This completely dismantles that notion, using a seemingly sweet stereotypical movie dork guy, who falls in love with a beautiful woman and must find a way to woo her away from her terrible, abusive boyfriend as the starting point for a movie that gets increasingly more horrific and frightening, culminating in a fairly audacious setpiece reminiscent of Hitchcock's North by Northwest finale, though more effective (especially if, like me, you happen to be afraid of heights). Alex de la Iglesia suggests the exact opposite of Guillermo del Toro's seriously terrible "fairy tale for adults" -- that the only way to truly survive in horrific conditions is to look without flinching and not let yourself be lost in a fantasy.

Mutant Girls Squad (Noboru Iguchi, Yoshihiro Nishimura & Tak Sakaguchi, 2010)

I am not exaggerating when I say that this is, almost without doubt, the worst movie I have ever seen. Ineptly constructed, built on the theory that violence and wackiness are inherently hilarious, self-consciously nonsensical and immensely sleazy, there is literally nothing to ever recommend about this movie. If someone I knew saw it and told me they liked it I would probably stop talking to them forever. I don't want to know the kind of people who like this movie. Towards the end I could feel myself, partially inebriated and drowsy due to the fact that it was a midnight show, walking some line between being able to stay awake and falling asleep. With a little bit of effort, my body could've gone either way, but I actually chose to go to sleep as a way to just be away from this awful movie for a little bit. If I hadn't been there with friends I would've walked out after the first ten minutes, pretty convinced I'd made the right choice. And it would've been! It was completely without redeeming content. Without hyperbole, I did not laugh once. Though when I say worst, I mean mostly from a construction standpoint. It is not the worst in that watching it made me feel the dirtiest or most angry or that its being embraced felt like some weird omen of how lost in the dregs our society is, though there are inklings of that in parts. Overall, it is not so hideous and despicable that I am filled with self-righteous fury over its existence. It's close, but it does not beat out things like Piranha 3D or Punisher: War Zone or Enter the Void for ugly, hateful movies I've seen lately. But it is far worse made and more hideous to even look at than any of those movies.

The Man Next Door (Mariano Cohn & Gaston Duprat, 2009)

Wastes a few neat shots, including one with mirrors that's pretty excellent, and a house that is a ridiculously great feat of interior design, with an extremely on the nose "satire" of how rich people are jerks. An attempt to do one of those "pull the rug out" movies, in which the person you think you identify with is not the person and it turns out the other guy who was maybe scary and intimidating and boorish and a jerk at least has his heart in the right place and is a much less awful person when push comes to shove. There really isn't much to say about the movie beyond that, as the machinations it's going for are so apparent from the first few scenes that there's no surprise. I would've been just as happy and satisfied to say, "Oh, I see where this is going" and left half an hour into it.

Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994)

Fresh seems like an easy movie to dislike. It is, in fact, so easy that I would have trouble finding fault with a person who didn't like it. For one, it is written and directed by Boaz Yakin, a person who has done nothing worth note since and did almost nothing worth note before it. For another, it straddles a strange line between the lower-class America social observation of something like The Wire (clearly somewhat influenced by this movie) and a weirdo Hollywood fantasy about "The Hood." Where the fantasy element comes in is its plot and structure: young chess whiz is just trying to get by in a poor neighborhood until a horrific tragedy sparks him to take revenge; manipulates gangster thugs and the police like chess opponents.

But what differentiates it is actually part of what makes it sound awful on paper. The chess metaphor, while somewhat hackneyed and on the nose, actually functions as a higher symbol of the quote-unquote civilized life Fresh wants to escape to. And through this symbol the film implies that both worlds operate on similar levels of ruthlessness and while Fresh may have succeeded in escaping, the cost required of him to escape -- sacrificing his childhood, figuratively, and the life of a friend literally -- and the not-so-different world he is escaping raise questions about whether everything he did was worth it. The ending, which I won't discuss in much detail, is what finally separates the film from being a classic underdog formula. It somehow hits home the idea that the father figure Fresh looks up to is more deserving than he actually appeared of his isolated status and the implication early on that Fresh is not supposed to be hanging out with him. Even though the father, played by Samuel L. Jackson before he'd developed into SAMUEL L. JACKSON, makes attempts to separate himself from the drugs and gang-related affairs of their neighborhood, it's clear he is operating on a similar level of cutthroat competition and that it is only through his encouragement that Fresh becomes the kind of person that can do what he eventually ends up doing. So when we get to the end, the victory is far less sweet and far more bitter than it appears it will be. This, I guess, is what wins the movie over for me, even if I can understand how some might be put off by its occasional devolvement into what Armond White so cleverly termed "poverty porn."

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)

The most notable thing about Shaun of the Dead may be its modesty. I say this not as a slight against the movie -- to imply that modesty is all it has going for it -- but to say that in an era when genre filmmaking is at, most likely, its most hyperbolic, overextended, high-concept peak, it's gratifying and relieving to watch an unassuming horror/comedy zombie movie in which almost nothing happens.

The plot is essentially a rehash of Wright and Pegg's previous work on the TV show Spaced, in which Pegg is a loutish slacker trapped in adolescence who is eventually motivated to be a more practical approximation of an adult. Unlike the majority of my colleagues, I find Wright's stylistic flourishes towards combining this idea with horror movie tropes, notably the mirroring long-take walks to the store and back only mildly diverting. For me, the jokes about their obliviousness to the outside world's disaster, and the larger implication of our culture's retreat into an awareness-nullifying pop culture womb, go on far too long. Each one is individually okay enough, and the slight knife in the ribs to its own audience is well-appreciated, but it eventually adds up to a bit that is far too drawn out.

More successful is the eventual idea that while we may rise to adversity as it comes, we have cultivated in ourselves a natural inclination towards inaction rather than action. That we take tragedy and untimely circumstance and find a way to weave it back into our daily lives in a way that it no longer stands out or impresses us. This actually unexpectedly predicts many of the ideas Romero would address in Land of the Dead a year later, and is a cynical, but not dishonest, evaluation of the cultural landscape of 2004. Without mentioning it or even alluding to it, Shaun of the Dead seems like the flipside of Spider-Man 2's assumptions about the world post-9/11. It is mostly due to my own predilections that I find Spider-Man 2's ideas more compelling and, I hope, more accurate, but I suspect the truth is sometimes closer to Shaun's side.

Avant Garde Shorts Collection (2011)

The rest of the shorts I saw at the Film Festival are undeserving of their own entries, so irritatingly self-indulgent and mind-numbing were they.

Long Shadows (Josh Bonnett, 2009)
Mamori (Karl Lemieux, 2010)

These are indistinguishable in my memory almost a month after having seen them both back to back. Apparently I liked Mamori even less than Long Shadows, though I have no idea what prompted that small decision. Both are exercises in repetition of non-narrative black and white images with obnoxious musical scoring. Maybe I liked Mamori less because I seem to remember its soundtrack being played by a real, thoroughly hissy, 45 plugged into the speaker system. Either way, both were obnoxiously abrasive and seemed to serve no thematic or aesthetic purpose beyond annoyance of the audience.

April Snow (Lewis Klahr, 2010)

After 25 minutes of irritation, this almost seemed a promising respite. Opens to the delightful refrains of The Shangri-Las' "Out in the Street" -- a song so girl poppily perfect I was ready to hail this movie as a masterpiece just for having it (and following such languid torture exercises). Unfortunately, the sheen of pop luster wears off almost immediately, as the film fills itself with stop motion cut outs of mid-century kitsch and banal comments on the phoniness of this era. Also the song is only 2m49s and the video is 10 minutes, moving on to other stuff that was not nearly as enjoyable (or memorable, apparently)

Cry When It Happens (Laida Lertxundi, 2010)

Exactly what I was talking about in my earlier review of Me Broni Ba. A movie so bereft of aesthetic pleasure and thematic cohesion that it rests on its self-indulgent laurels of throwback '70s photography and inaccessibility. So mind-numbing I ended up skipping the movie I'd already paid to see afterwards, because it actually made me feel I needed a break from being in the cinema -- perhaps the only time I'd felt that way in my entire life. Thanks to you, Laida Lertxundi, I may never know if Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is an awesome movie. THANKS A LOT, JERK.

Atlantiques (Mati Diop, 2010)

Less diluted by its existence as an "avant garde" piece than by its low production values. A group of black men sit around a camp fire at night, mourning the unlucky fate of having to choose between emigrating to Europe to look for work, or staying in Senegal where work is scarce. The stylistic choice emphasizes the actors' dark skin, as they seem to almost barely exist in the small, flickering fire light. The only problem is its status as being shot on exceptionally cheap digital, giving the night scene an ugly, pixelated and unreal quality. If the same scenes had been shot on film (or, at least, HD video) the actors would've blended more seamlessly into the background, enhancing the power of the commentary of the African plight as something invisible and unspoken among the Western (as represented by cinema) world. It's actually a pretty brilliant visual metaphor only marred by the lack of visual quality -- strange, since the reported budget was 30k Euros. What'd he spend it on?

Me Broni Ba (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2009)

Part documentary, part non-narrative pseudo-avant garde bit of filmmaking about pressures put on African women about their hair. The problem I've found with most avant garde filmmaking I've seen is that it always feels lazy. Like the thing many of these so-called avant garde filmmakers find most compelling about it is the "freedom" from the constrictions of typical plot and narrative. But in my eyes it seems that most of what this freedom allows for is indulgence and half-formed or barely there ideas, hiding under a blanket of obtuseness and detachment in order to prevent criticism. Me Broni Ba appears to have some interesting ideas about social pressures of aesthetics as they relate to women of color (especially in Africa, obviously), but these ideas are presented in such an oblique, convoluted package as to become nearly useless due to their desire to remain "artful" and inaccessible. Occasionally offers some compelling images, and I would never exactly try to talk someone out of seeing it -- it's just disappointing given what it feels as though it could've been.

My Tehran For Sale (Granaz Moussavi, 2009)

Is it okay to like a movie more for the conditions and context in which it was made than for the movie itself? I open with this question because I'm not actually sure of the answer. Ideally, a movie's success or failure should be judged based on its attributes as a film, with the context and conditions playing a strong role in supporting this outcome. As it is, there is so much about My Tehran For Sale that pushes negative buttons in me as a filmgoer that I am not at all convinced of its merits as a piece of cinema. It flashes forward and backward in time as a way to temper all the movie's joyous moments with a hint of "but soon it will all go terribly wrong... bet you're wondering how, right?" This is one of my largest narrative pet peeves, as it comes off as nothing but the laziest way to foreshadow some impending doom. Worse, these moments are occasionally completely baffling -- leading to an ending in which I only understood what had happened after I pieced it together on my way home. And I don't mean this in a thematic, rolling over of ideas and suppositions, or even that the movie ends on a kind of cliffhanger, simply that the plotting was so poorly executed that I had to put much of the fragmented pieces together myself. To add to this, many of the emotionally revelatory moments are more like the audience being told how to feel than something that wells up naturally from the characters. This lack of emotional resonance and clarity is surprising, considering Moussavi is apparently one of Iran's most well-regarded poets. Much of the metaphorical and poetical devices of the film are the least successful parts. And, for a movie that is such a relentless downer, it's actually the happy moments that feel the most genuine.

But after all that, I am still goint to hesitantly suggest that the ideas this movie posits are ones that bear telling. Filmed in secret and completely illegal, it is the least veiled critique of the Iranian government I've seen. In many ways it feels like a check list of ways the government's oppression hurts the people, from police crackdowns on parties and inter-sex mingling to a complete dearth of options for those unfortunate enough to be infected with sexually-transmitted diseases to suppression of underground artistic expressions to to to... But many of these things, especially the frightening way STDs can be spread without anyone ever knowing it (one of the characters discovers it only because they're trying to get a Visa to be married and immigrate out of the country) and the lack of sex-related health care once it is discovered. So, I don't know, each of these moments would seem very rote, preachy and clumsily handled in an American movie. But because it was expressing these things in a place in which they are far less talked about, it seemed somehow fresh and possibly important? I don't know, the act of writing this may have talked me out of these feelings and maybe even made me feel that I am engaging in my own form of exoticism. To be somehow surprised that many of these problems that we still don't quite know how to handle in America would exist and be even more problematic in somewhere like Iran. Yeah, I don't know, maybe the movie's not even so good as to kinda recommend it.

Flamenco, Flamenco (Carlos Suara, 2010)

As someone who has a love of dance movies and a general dislike for the plot elements of most dance movies, I am not ashamed to admit I was more excited for Flamenco, Flamenco than possibly any other film at the festival. It was, as these things tend to happen sometimes, by far the biggest disappointment. The concept is a series of flamenco performances introduced without narrative pretense or introduction, strung together into 90 minutes of performance bliss. As concepts go, it's pretty fantastic. I have long been a proponent of the idea of kinetic cinematic pleasure for its own sake, stripped of ideologies so that it may revel in beautiful motion. Unfortunately, in the process of stripping down the narrative into almost nothing, the director has also stripped away the cinema. Each performance looks as though it was shot in one take, which would be fine if they did so with an elaborately conceived filmic way to present it in mind. They did not. The camera is reduced to a useless proxy of a theatre audience member, trapped in a stilted, lethargic medium shot with occasional cuts from dancers to the musical performers often seated around them. And, while I would never call myself a musical expert, these cuts seem to belong to a rhythm I cannot in any way comprehend. Many of the best dances are undone by the lack of build-up in their execution -- it seems that just as the energy is beginning to flow and we're about to be taken somewhere awesome and inspiring the movie cuts to a singer or band player, destroying whatever momentum was being developed.

I gather that most of these performers are famous in their native Spain, so the director was attempting to pay them proper tribute and not focus solely on the dancers. But compelling cinema is not about making sure everyone feels like they got enough camera time. An easy way to fix this problem would've been to introduce the band at the beginning of the sequence, with whatever kind of introductory editing and camera movement the director felt worked best, then progress from there into the dancing. This could've been a great way to showcase the fact of dance as a natural, visual expression of music. I mean, after all, we still get to hear the songs the entire dance number. Is listening to music not the best way to appreciate it? At any rate, the dullness of the movement and editing lulled me almost to sleep periodically throughout this, and I exited as quickly as possible when it was finally over.

There were a few highlights, though, including one dance number with a group of women shrouded in sheer black veils that stretched to the floor. It had a beautiful, funereal element that mingled with the ecstatic dancing to create something that was both harrowing and joyous at the same time. Too bad that even this scene the director tries to ruin with static camerawork and baffling editing choices.