MIFF: Wristcutters: A Love Story (Goran Dukic, 2006)

My final film of the Milwaukee International Film Festival was, unfortunately, the most disappointing. Between this and 13 Tzameti, the two films I was looking forward to the most, I was sorely disappointed. (Don't feel too bad for me, though, because I saw a lot of good films at the festival.) Wristcutters is the story of Zia (played woodenly by Patrick Fugit), a young man who kills himself because his girlfriend broke up with him (I think that's why, it's strangely never really explained) who ends up in a purgatory-like existence for those who have killed themselves. He meets Eugene (a character based exactly on Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello, strike one), a Russian whose whole family have killed themselves, and decides to go searching for the girl he lost (Leslie Bibb, cute but underused) after he hears she's killed himself. On the way, they meet Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon, whom I love) who decides to go with them on their travels to find the people in charge, because she claims she didn't really kill herself. Underused is one of the adjectives I'd use to describe most of the performances of the film. Sossamon is given little to do but look pretty (which she's good at, but still), Tom Waits is vitally underused even in a hammy part, and Will Arnett, hilarious as he is, is ridiculously underused as the leader of a cult in the afterworld (he doesn't even have one funny line - people were just laughing because his character is so much like Gob Bluth). The plot and characters have that "quirky" quality so popular in some independent films today, but to me, it just comes off forced and incredibly annoying. The black hole in the car? Funny the first time, not the tenth time. Kind of a beginner's Eternal Sunshine, the meditations on life and death are pathetically shallow, as if they were written by an angsty teenager. And the movie's attempt to make suicide funny? Doesn't work, for me at least - it was just really painful, although I was shocked at how many laughs this movie got in the packed theater I was in. Perhaps I'm just a cynic, but I'm not surprised that this movie still doesn't have distribution after showing in Sundance almost a year ago. It tries so hard to be hip, but hip's not what it should be looking to be. It could have been a meditation on what's the difference between life and death, but goes for the easy way out, especially in the ridiculously predictable second half. Oy. The only things that save this from being a complete waste of time are Sossamon, Waits, and Mikal Lazarev as a beautiful Eskimo throat singer (who is mute, and probably the reason I liked her so much). I was not impressed. 3/10

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MIFF: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple (Stanley Nelson, 2006)

I doubt I will see a better documentary in 2006 than Jonestown, Stanley Nelson's exploration of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple and the mass murder/suicide in Guyana in 1978. It started as an idealistic, socialist movement for social justice and racial equality, but soon, Jones became crazy with the power he had obtained and turned it into a cult that's eerily reminiscent of Nazi Germany, where children turned in parents for dissent and no one was safe. It all ended so tragically, but the events leading up to it are equally fascinating. Nelson got unprescedented access to archival footage and interviews with members of Peoples Temple, as well as family members of some of those that died in Guyana. The most incredibly interesting interviews are with two men, both of whom had their whole family killed at Jonestown but managed to escape themselves through the jungles of Guyana. The interviewees tell of Jim Jones' childhood as an outcast, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and eventually a young man who embraces Christianity and founds a church based on social responsiblity and integration. Jones (and his wife, about whom we hear precious little) is the first white person to adopt a black child in the state of Indiana, and his family, as described by that child, Jim Jones Jr (who is a great, revealing interview, even though he never really says anything negative about his father), was one of the first "rainbow families." In the first half of the film, I really liked Jones, who preached racial acceptance and social justice decades before these things would be accepted by the mainstream as they (sort of) have been today. Something happens to Jones, however, and he becomes increasingly power-hungry and paranoid, moving his parishoners first to San Francisco and then, the night before publication of a damning article, to Guyana, where 900+ would die. My main frustration with the film is that there is very little transition from activist Jones to crazy Jones; we find out nothing about what happened to make this change, or what those around him thought. This is mostly because Jones and those closest to him are all dead, but perhaps his son could have been informative in this way. The sinister turn of the Peoples Temple to a cult is so sudden, or perhaps, so gradual, that it's hard to believe it happened that way. But the facts are the facts, and that's what makes the story so compelling. The aftermath and details of Jones' death are also left untouched, another frustrating fact. What happened afterward? What was the public reaction, especially to the death of the congressman killed in Guyana? The ending could have been fleshed out quite a bit more. The story of Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple is a geniunely fascinating one; Nelson got his hands on audio of Jones forcing the poisoned kool-aid onto the residents of Jonestown, and it literally left me shaking from fear and indignation. The descriptions of dying babies and family members are almost too much to bear. Jonestown is an incredibly researched, very impartial (as much as you can be, there is no external narration, at least) portrait of a social experiment gone very, very wrong because of the ego and paranoia of its leader. I knew very little of Jonestown beyond the basic facts, but I feel almost like an insider after seeing this film. 8/10 RIYL: Children Underground, The Weather Underground

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MIFF: Best in Show short program

The selection committee of the Milwaukee International Film Festival saw 1400 short films and made a best in show program out of the ten they liked best. All were solid, some much better than others, and here are my two favorites. My Dad is 100 Years Old (Guy Maddin, 2005) I am a Guy Maddin devotee, I absolutely love all his work that I have seen. So I was very excited to see his latest movie, a collaboration with (and written by) Isabella Rossellini about her father, Roberto, who would have been 100 years old this year. In it, Isabella discusses the politics of her father's films, not the films themselves, but the neo-realist form that they announced to the world. She (pretty brilliantly) plays Hitchcock, Selznick, Fellini, and an angelic Chaplin, along with her mother, Ingrid Bergman, in a scene that was so incredibly moving. Rossellini talks to her mother's image, projected onto a screen 10 times as tall as Rossellini, as if talking to her mother's public persona. Roberto Rossellini is portrayed by a big belly, as Isabella said in the beginning of the film that that was the part of her father she loved most as a child. As both a love letter to her father (she describes how devastated she was when he died in 1977) and an essay on his films, it is incredibly well-written and beautiful, especially as rendered in the Maddin style. A very funny moment in the film (16 minutes long) came when Maddin pulls the camera away from Rossellini, into the sky, and Isabella commands him to pull it back, focus on her face, and stop those cinematic techniques her dad found so pretentious. All of this is lovely, but it is Isabella's last monologue, where she says, "I don't know if my dad was a genius. I do know I love him," that made me tear up. Very worth seeing. 8/10 Five Minutes, Mr. Welles (Vincent D'Onofrio, 2005) No film has had such an immediate, visceral effect on me recently as Vincent D'Onofrio's directorial debut, Five Minutes, Mr. Welles. I remembered how much I liked D'Onofrio's brief turn as Welles in Ed Wood, and Welles is one of my top directors of all time (with The Third Man probably in my top 20 films oat), so I was very excited to see this. I was definitely not disappointed. D'Onofrio plays a frustrated Welles, rehearsing his lines as Harry Lime, even though it's a part he only took to finance his production of Othello. Janine Theriault plays Catherine, his assistant whose job it is to keep him on track, an increasingly difficult one as, in one hilarious instance, Welles attempts to jump out the window when called to the set. Catherine won't lie to the studio for him, Welles is frustrated with his lines and wants to write more/new ones, even though he can't remember the ones he already has. D'Onofrio coyly refers to Welles' future eating problems, as when he gets particularly upset, he pulls out the pistachio ice cream. But apart from being a genuinely entertaining little movie about a great artist in crisis, it really speaks to the nature of trying to be an artist in the Hollywood system and of integrity versus the need for money. After seeing this, I had a greater respect for Welles, even though his behavior is downright childish at times, and after researching him a little when getting home, found the amount of things Welles, a self-described genius, had to go through to make moves he wanted to. As Catherine tells him in the film, he started from the very top and worked his way down. Welles tries to argue that what Citizen Kane lost in revenue, it gained in something much more important, but no one in the studio system was buying this at that time. The scene where Welles has a tantrum and falls on the ground and finally remembers his line (showing how brilliant he really is when he puts his mind to it), is in my top ten film moments of all time. After seeing this film, it made me really want to go home and write something, and also to reevaluate Welles' films in the context of a frustrated artist. A really entertaining, great portrayal of a great, great filmmaker. 9/10 Other good shorts included The Shovel (a brisk, taut thriller starring David Straitharn) and Bawke, a tragic tale of a refugee man and his young son.

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MIFF: 13 Tzameti (Gela Babluani, 2005)

13 Tzameti was, along with Wristcutters: A Love Story (which I'm probably not going to be able to see after all, boo), one of the films that I was most excited about seeing at MIFF this year. As with many thing I've highly anticipated, I was a bit disappointed by the empty and rather predictable story. A young (hot!) carpenter named Sebastien is employed to work on a couple's roof; when the man dies, the wife refuses to pay Sebastien, and he takes an envelope containing a train ticket and hotel reservation as if in retribution. Little does he know that he has taken an invitation to a secretive competition where rich men bet on the lives of 13 competitors. Sebastien is the titular 13. Basically nothing happens in the first half of the movie, and when Sebastien gets to the competition...more nothing happens. The movie is very, very tense, but the violence does not escalate like a good thriller should. The competition is the same, only for several rounds; for me, after the first round, the shock factor was gone. I commented in my head that it's like an artsy version of Hostel, with rich people buying the lives and deaths of others, only without the violence or terror. The black and white gives it an atmospheric touch, and the cinematography is beautiful, but I was not that impressed by the action of the film. The film's defenders would say that it is a trip into the sadism of modern life, and the depravity of the human soul; I would ask where those things are! Aside from the violence, there is no characterization of the betting men or even of the other competitors (except a little of Sebastien's main competitor). They are faceless people, which makes the terror unfamiliar and dull. Even Hostel gaves faces to its murderers! The tipping point for me, however, was the events after the competitions, which are predictable and made just to upset the audience. As a debut film, Babluani's direction and script are good, but this film is so problematic that I really can't recommend it. If you're not desensitized to violence (like I think I am), however, you might find this shocking, as many in the packed audience I was in gasped several times. I, however, was not that interested. 5.5/10

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MIFF: Boy Called Twist (Tim Greene, 2004)

For a few minutes of volunteer work at the Milwaukee International Film Festival, I also got to see Boy Called Twist, a modern South African interpretation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist. Twist is born in a rural orphanage, his name decided by a book on the shelf and because there is already an orphan named Oliver. Twist is, at age 11, sold with other children to a farm and put to hard labor, then to a man's house where he is mistreated by the other servants and runs away, and finally ends up in Cape Town, where he is befriended by other street urchins and lives in an abandoned warhouse with them and their adult master Fagin. As anyone who has seen the other movie adaptations/read the book (which does not include me) knows that his life with the other pickpockets is as hard as anything else in his life, and once he gets away, it isn't for long. Twist is played by young Jarrid Geduld, who brings a naivity and hardness to his character, often at the same time. When Twist finds himself in a real bed with a real breakfast for the first time after being taken in by Ebrahim, he embraces the maid Francine as if she was his mother he hadn't seen in years. Francine immediately understands the great meaning of the embrace, and treats it accordingly. A scene like this is hard to make touching and not just sappy, but that is the joy of Boy Called Twist; even though it is based off one of the most adapted stories in history, it brings a new understanding to it, especially because of its setting. Modern South Africa is a contradictory place, with absolute slums just blocks away from beautiful, picturesque mansions. When Twist is taken away from Ebrahim's house, he is only taken maybe a few miles away, but the two worlds are so completely different that he could never find his way back by himself. The Muslim community in Cape Town is also given a large role, and was very interesting, as I didn't know this sub-community even existed. Geduld is pitch-perfect as Twist, and exudes a very adult presence in this small child. He is both a hard pickpocket and a boy who has never known parents' love, and these roles compete for dominance in him. The adult performances are also very strong, especially Kim Englebrecht as the doomed prostitute Nancy who was taken in by Fagin at the same age as Twist and has conflicting ideas about what's right for this boy. This years old story is given new life in this contemporary world. Definitely check it out if you can, as I can't find it on Netflix yet. 7/10 RIYL: City of God (a similar portrayal of street children)

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Milwaukee International Film Festival: Candy (Neil Armfield, 2006)

Thursday marked the beginning of the Milwaukee International Film Festival, and in my unemployment, I've had some time to volunteer there. Mostly, I've been doing shifts answering the office phones ("Hello, Milwaukee International Film Festival, this is Dana, how can I help you?"), but Saturday night, I did a four-hour shift taking tickets and ballots at one of the theaters. For about twenty minutes of work, I got to see two phenomenal films (the other, A Boy Called Twist, I'll review later tonight). Candy, the utterly depressing yet oddly beautiful story of two heroin addicts in love, is definite Oscar-bait, especially with the phenomenal lead performance from Heath Ledger (so good that it rivals Gael Garcia Bernal's in The King for my favorite of the year), one that made me forget about Ledger the movie star, and just made me think of him as Dan, one of the hardest things for an actor to do. Dan and Candy (played by Abbie Cornish, who really holds her own against Ledger and Geoffrey Rush) are, respectively, a heroin addict poet and a naive art student who wants to share everything in her boyfriend's life. The beginning of the film (titled Heaven, as opposed to Earth and Hell, the second and third parts) is beautiful in every way - Dan and Candy are deliriously happy, their drug use has not yet gotten out of control, and there are colors and light everywhere in their world. Even their supplier, Casper (played amazingly by Rush, whom I have been in complete admiration of since Quills) is happy for them, but he warns, "When you can stop, you don't want to, and when you want to stop, you can't." This defines the film, as well as Dan and Candy's relationship. As Dan and Candy go from boyfriend and girlfriend to married couple, and Candy goes from young artist to escort to street sex worker who never does art anymore, their drug use goes from casual to intense, and tragedy starts striking them left and right. Even though they really brought these things upon themselves, you don't ever hate the couple; Candy was the less likeable to me, as she blames Dan for every problem in her life. Her character is flawed, both in human ways and in screenwriter ways that make it hard to believe her, but Cornish does amazingly with it. Dan, as portrayed by Ledger, is an eternal optimist who loves Candy with every fiber in his being, and wants nothing out of his life than to be with her. The withdrawal scenes are some of the most realistic, intensely painful ones I've ever seen, and the scene in the hospital, without giving anything away, is so incredibly raw that you can't help but feel punched in the chest. The story is a non-romanticized vision of drug use, but it is also non-judgemental. Dan and Candy are people just like us, people who have made bad choices and cannot go back. Unlike Requiem for a Dream, which seems to share a plot with Candy, the horrors in this film are not exaggerated (no orgies here), and instead are just intensely personal and real, making it a far more effective film than the former. The performances are also much stronger than the former film, as the audience can recognize themselves in these people, and thus empathize with them rather than hold them at arm's length and inspect them. The final scene is completely realistic and yet heartbreaking, something that is very hard in drug films. Ledger and Rush really give the performances of their careers, and I'll be mighty angry if Ledger doesn't at least get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Dan. In fact, every part of this film, from the breathtaking script to Armfield's beautiful direction, deserves recognition. I'd be hard-pressed to find a more emotionally involving film this year. Checking out the MIFF ballots, most of which were marked "excellent," I'd say the rest of the audience agrees. Definitely check it out when it hits limited release on November 17. 9/10 RIYL: Requiem for a Dream (only in theme, NOT in style)

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