Month: May 2014

Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army is a soulful humanistic doc about Russian hockey, struggle, destiny, love of country, recent Russian history and the things that matter deep down, which is to say the things that last. In a marginal or tangential sense you could also call Red Army the flip side of Gavin O’Connor‘s Miracle, the 2004 sleeper about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s victory over the Russians at Lake Placid in 1980. In that film Russia’s Olympic hockey team was depicted as a gang of formidable ogres — here they’re revealed as men struggling with loves and longings like anyone else. The central figure is Vyacheslav Fetisov, the Russian hockey superstar who reigned from the mid ’60s to late ’90s, initially as a Russian player and then with the New Jersey Devils and the Detroit Red Wings. His story is the story of Russia from the bad old Soviet days of the ’70s to the present. The film is crisply shot and tightly cut — it moves right along with efficiency and pizazz, and is augmented by Polsky’s dry sense of humor and a general undercurrent of feeling. Cheers to Polsky, Fetisov, producers Werner Herzog and Jerry Weintraub and the two dps — Herzog collaborator Peter Zeitlinger and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko.

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Kidnapping thrillers don’t — can’t — get much dumber or cheaply teasing in a foggy smoke-and-mirrors sense than Atom Egoyan‘s Captives (aka The Captive), which screened this morning at the Cannes Film Festival. Intentionally confusing by way of coy misdirection, this is one of those “can you guess what’s really happening here?” melodramas that use time-shift games to throw you off the scent. I only know that Captives, a wildly ineffective stinker with some of the worst over-acting in a film of this type that I’ve ever seen, was making me groan less than five minutes in. Then I began to flinch, throw up my hands, pitch forward in my seat, cover my face with my hands, etc. Then I settled into a state of numb resignation. “Go on, pour it on, poison me,” I told the movie. “Inject your awfulness into my veins.”

It’s only the third day of the Cannes Film Festival, but I’m willing to say at this point that Captives is the winner of the Only God Forgives Cote d’Azur Wipeout Award of 2014. Stab me in the chest with a pencil…please!

Ryan Reynolds and Mireille Enos (the not-hot-enough wife of Brad Pitt in World War Z) are Canadian working-class parents of ginger-haired Cass (Peyton Kennedy as a child, Alexia Fast as an eight-years-older version), who abruptly disappears from the back seat of Reynolds’ truck as he’s picking up food in a diner. For help the couple turns to Rosario Dawson and Scott Speedman, independent investigators (or possibly legit cops — I wasn’t sure) who specialize in child predators and kidnappers. Most of the action happens eight years after the kidnapping but the movie shifts back and forth in order to keep things fuzzy and inconclusive.

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Today Criterion announced an upcoming Bluray of Bob Fosse‘s All That Jazz (’79) on 8.26. It impressed me the first time (the Manhattan press screening was at Cinema 1) but irritated me the second time. Parts are hammy or ham-fisted and not very hip, but it was quite the film of its day. Roy Scheider gave a career-peak performance as Broadway musical director Joe Gideon, whose story was modelled on Fosse’s own in the early ’70s. “Almost every scene is excruciating (and a few are appalling), yet the film stirs an obscene fascination with its rapid, speed-freak cutting and passionate psychological striptease,” wrote critic Dave Kehr. “This is the feverish, painful expression of a man who lives in mortal fear of his own mediocrity.” Time‘s then-critic Frank Rich wrote that “as a showman, [Fosse] has no equal. Music, performers, movement, lighting, costumes and sets all blend together in Fosse productions to create brilliant flashes of exhilarating razzle-dazzle. Yet the man just does not know when to leave well enough alone.”

I’m slated to see four films today (i.e., Friday, 5.16), which will allow for very little time for postings. Atom Egoyan‘s 113-minute The Captive begins the day at 8:30 am inside the Grand Lumiere. I’ll have two and a half hours to file before the 1 pm press screening of Gabe Polsky‘s Red Army (80-something minutes) at the Salle Bazin. (This means skipping the Mr. Turner lunch from 12:45 to 2:30 pm.) At 3 pm comes the mother of long-runnning-time Cannes competition films — Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s Winter Sleep at 196 minutes. Then I stay to the end or blow off the last hour to attend a Weinstein Co. preview event at the Majestic starting at 5:30 pm. Then comes the 8pm screening of Hilla Medalia‘s The Go-Go Boys, a doc about Cannon Films’ Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. After which there’s a Red Army premiere after-party starting around 10:30 pm.

All this stuff jammed in today, and they couldn’t program one of these films or events to happen yesterday or particularly the day before, which was all but dead?

Keren Yedaya‘s That Lovely Girl (a.k.a., Loin De Mon Pere or Far From My Father) is a dull, dreary, self-indulgent film about a longterm father-daughter incestuous relationship. The film proves how the mere presentation of shocking or uncomfortable situational subject matter is not enough. You need to deliver a story of some kind, and a resolution that offers some sense of completion and/or just desserts. The monster is Moshe (Tzahi Grad), a 60 year-old father, and the victim is Tami (Maayan Turgeman), his 22 year-old daughter. It’s an acrimonious, highly sexual relationship that’s probably been going on for a decade. Cruel, horrific. All the more so given Tami’s compliance and emotional neediness and self-abuse (over-eating, cutting herself). In basic payoff terms Girl delivers far too little. No tension, no intrigue, no gathering of forces. The film is flat and odious. Sasha Stone hated it so that makes two of us. You can also add the five or six people who walked out of my corner of the Salle Debussy within the first 25 or 30 minutes.

Maayan Turgeman, Tzahi Grad in Keren Yedaya’s That Lovely Girl.

Sasha says That Lovely Girl is as icky and debilitating as Markus Schleinzer‘s Michael, an Austrian film about a child molester that played at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Wrong. Michael “isn’t pleasant to watch,” I wrote, “but it’s brilliant — emotionally suppressed in a correct way that blends with the protagonist, and aesthetically disciplined and close to spellbinding.”

Indiewire‘s Eric Kohn is reporting that “a number of whispers [are suggesting] that the Argentinean ensemble drama Wild Tales — from director Damian Szifron, whose other features have rarely screened outside of South America — would blow people away with its premiere this weekend, making it an early contender for the Palme D’Or.” A Guy Lodge Hitfix summary says that Wild Tales “is apparently bringing the comedy — and in quite a dark, unconventional fashion. Festival director Thierry Fremaux [has] said the film was chosen to ‘wake up’ festivalgoers and provoke strong reactions, which could mean any number of things. [Pic is] a compilation of six independent stories apparently hinging on the quest for success in the modern world and the heated emotions it inspires. “Many people get stressed out or depressed,” reads the synopsis. “Some burst. This is a film about them.”

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Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner (Sony Pictures Classics, 12.19) is a masterfully captured, atmospherically captivating period biopic of J.M.W. Turner (Timothy Spall), the 19th Century genius painter of impressionistic landscapes. Like his 1999 Gilbert and Sullivan film Topsy Turvy, this is another of Leigh’s “portrait of an artist, warts, whims, peculiarities, obsessions and all” films. I was alert and attuned start to finish, but I can’t honestly say I was riveted. Leigh’s basic observation about Turner being a bit of a compulsive, anti-social creep is not exactly novel or startling — I think we all know that gifted types tend to be difficult in various ways. A journalist friend found the film beautiful but flat, “like watching paint dry.” And I frankly couldn’t hear half the dialogue. (Thank God for the French subtitles.) When Spall began speaking at the press conference I said to myself, “Wow, I can understand him so clearly!”

But the performances (particularly Spall’s) are uniformly delicious and Dick Pope‘s cinematography reflects the colors and framings of Turner’s paintings, and the historical details (production design, costumes, etc.) are mesmerizing. You feel you’re really there. Leigh’s orchestration of time-trip authority is immaculate.

Sony Pictures Classics is opening Mr. Turner stateside on December 19th. Cultivated 35-and-olders will come out in strength for the first couple of weekends, but Mr. Turner is more of an exacting study than a compelling drama. It’s essential to see as there’s no such thing as a bad or under-nourishing Mike Leigh film, but it’s much more cerebral than emotional. It impresses but doesn’t really get you deep down.

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On my way to an 8:30 am screening of Mike Leigh‘s Mr. Turner. Then a little filing time (10:30 to 11:30) followed by a Mr. Turner press conference. Followed by “I haven’t decided just yet but I guess I’ll figure it out before long.” You have to be organized but semi-loose at the same time. “Everything’s everything, baby.” — stoolie to Gene Hackman‘s Popeye Doyle in The French Connection.

Groundhog Day in a sci-fi, high-tech action mode in which Tom Cruise dies, like, 200 times. Groundhog Day in a sci-fi, high-tech action mode in which Tom Cruise squeals and dies, like, 200 times. Groundhog Day in a sci-fi, high-tech action mode in which Tom Cruise squeals and dies, like, 200 times. Groundhog Day in a sci-fi, high-tech action mode in which Tom Cruise squeals and dies, like, 200 times. I get it, I get it… I get it.