Steady Diet of Film

Review: The Order of Myths

The Order of Myths

Rating (out of 5): ****½

Margaret Brown's documentary The Order of Myths examines the social labyrinth of Mardi Gras carnivals in Mobile, Alabama. The oldest celebration of its kind in the country is dominated by two racially segregated organizations that have held separate coronations and parades for over 300 years. To an outsider, the divide, so rigidly defended yet cloaked in hospitality, is an incredibly costumed prism to look at race relations as a whole in America. Brown follows the white queen Helen, an inarticulate but gracious debutante that the film tacitly acknowledges has been elected more due to bloodlines than royal qualities; and the black queen Stephanie, a schoolteacher who is scraping to pay for the elaborate dress and festivities (upwards of $20,000) but holds the tradition in equally high esteem.

Adding a layer of unease to the proceedings, both queens know off hand that Helen's direct ancestors were involved with one of the final slave transactions in Mobile, which brought Stephanie's family to this country. Explaining how a black neighborhood now known as "Africatown" was formed, a white woman cautiously recounts the story of a shipful of captured Africans who were forced to flee into the woods while the boat was torched in an effort to destroy evidence.

Read the rest of this review at Greencine.

Documentary festivals in the News

• AJ Schnack has a great interview with True/False festival co-director, David Wilson. My favorite excerpt:

Most important advice I find myself giving filmmakers coming into T/F is to relax. They're not going to make a sale (though they may make some good friends). They don't need to stand out on the street corner and hand out postcards (their screening will be full already). They don't need to constantly be texting people from a party to see what else is going on - that's it. That party. It'll probably be a good one, so just enjoy.

• Big Sky just wrapped up their 2009 festival, New West Missoula has a piece up about local outreach the festival is doing for area students. Wherein producer Mike Bonfiglio (Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Crude) advises kids to drop out of school.

• Documentary stalwart Frederick Wiseman discusses his foray into the dvd market with the Chicago Tribune. Wiseman will be screening and discussing his films at DePaul University this week.

•Hot Docs programmer Sean Farnel catalogs the death of the American Documentary New Wave (1999-2007) and provides a glimpse into what the present and future hold.

Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 2

Katyn

The most recent film from Poland's legendary Andrzej Wajda depicts the systematic detention and execution of 20,000 Polish military officers, engineers, scientists and intellectuals. This brutality was part of Soviet Russia’s efforts to undermine Polish attempts at order, progress or independence at the beginning of World War II. The Katyn forest massacres (only acknowledged by the Russian government in 1990) offer a glimpse of the Polish experience during the war. First invaded by Germany in 1939, Poland was then re-annexed by the Soviets, who essentially turned the entire country into a workcamp for their war effort.  In 1943, the country was re-invaded by the Nazis who, discovering discovering the mass graves, used them in an enormous propaganda effort to convince Poles to join the German military effort to defeat the Soviets. All the while, the Nazis continued to bury slaughtered Poles in mass graves of their own creation, knowing they could be blamed on the Soviets. Poland remained occupied until 1989, Katyn has become a catch-all term to describe the ruthlessness and criminality of the Soviets.

Structured similarly to his masterpiece 1957 Kanal, the first two thirds of the film focus on how the beginning of a seemingly endless war (the notion of victory or any kind of cessation of violence is never even mentioned) affect a half dozen loosely connected people. Their situations are almost mundane save for the circumstances in which they transpire. A woman argues with her mother-in-law about whether her stern personality prevented her husband from fleeing a workcamp. A Soviet military officer tries to convince a Polish childhood friend to marry him as German soldiers bang on doors looking for Polish military wives. A young man who defected to the other side attempts to reconcile with a respected professor who will have nothing to do with him. A woman demanding the authentic date of her husband's murder be on his gravestone, is killed for insubordination. An academic steals a diary from military archives so a woman can understand the true nature of her husband's death. All of which leads to the final 20 minutes of the film, an unrelenting reenactment of the actual Katyn massacres.

One quibble could be just American narcissism. A scene where a German officer confronts a room full of erudite Polish academics has vague parallels to the Bush administration's combative relationship with institutions of higher learning. At one point the officer, informing the chancellor the school is being shut down and all who previously criticized Nazi science will soon be in prison, shouts "I have decided! It is final!" practically stomping his feet and giving a yeehaw on his way out the door. It's a moment that feels cheap. Audiences have come to expect more graphic violence from Nazi confrontation scenes. Here it's played almost as a jump scare.

All in all, this was a wonderful film to watch just days after seeing the Bosnian film Snow. Both films are worthy tributes and testaments to the enduring dignity of a people who have been continually stripped of it.

Nominated for an Academy award in 2008 for Best Foreign Language film, Katyn opened the NW Film Center's tribute to Wajda which will be running through March 29th. The film is also now playing in limited release.

Oscar Live blog this Sunday!

 

I'm delighted to inform you all I'll be liveblogging the Academy Awards this weekend with Greencine's Craig Phillips and Aaron Hillis along with Lisa Rosman (US Magazine and Flavorpill) and Kathy Fennessy (Seattle International film festival).

We'll be discussing the gowns, the gossip, Hugh Jackman's magnificent biceps and maybe even a couple of the films if there's time.

I hope you'll join us at Greencine's Oscar Live Blog this Sunday at 4:30 PST.

Review: Confessions of a Shopaholic

Confessions of a Shopaholic follows the tribulations of Rebecca Bloomwood, a writer for a gardening magazine massively in debt due to her shopping habits (that the film takes great pains to pathologize). When her magazine goes under and the management stiffs everyone out of any kind of notification or severance package it creates an emergency situation the enterprising Bloomfield turns into opportunity. Rather than part with any of the thousands of dollars of designer clothing that insulate her (rent-free!) Manhattan apartment, she smooth talks her way into a new gig at a financial planning magazine. She surmises she can cash a paycheck while getting a toehold into the parent company's fashion magazine Alette, where she's always dreamed of working. Romances blossom, backs are stabbed and fancy balls are ruined when trays of food are dropped at comic intervals.

Despite being based on a series of popular novels by Sophie Kinsella (and having the full force of the Sex and the City marketing campaign behind it) Confessions feels like a disappointing series of squandered opportunities. It could have been a populist (if even refreshingly silly) examination of one person dealing with economic uncertainty. An even bolder production might have used Fischer's chronically-flippant character as a stand-in for the greed and lack of accountability that created the larger economic crisis. But seeing Isla Fischer dodge debt collectors and blow a big job interview has a new resonance that the film feels cruelly tone deaf towards at times.

Another collection of failed possibilities is the jaw-dropping ratio of star power to results the Confessions cast boasts. Julie Hagerty, Kristin Scott Thomas (blowing all the awards cred she accumulated this year with I've Loved You So Long and Tell No One), John Goodman, Joan Cusack, Lynn Redgrave, John Lithgow and SNL's Fred Armisen give performances that run the gamut from perfunctory line-readings to outright sleepwalking.

The film is also being heralded as a return for Patricia Field (the most well-known costume designer since Edith Head), who is responsible for bringing so much of the personality to the Sex and the City franchise. But the clothes here fall way short of their near special effects status they had in The Devil Wears Prada or the whimsical comedy they bring to the television series "Ugly Betty". Though for the record, my favorite work of Field's remains what she did for Lucy Liu in the recently canceled "Cashmere Mafia".

It also cannot escape mention that despite being set in New York City this entirely white cast is punctuated with exactly one black man, one Asian man, one French woman and one gay man. I'll just list the stereotypes they're playing at and see if you can match them up: a former NBA player with a penchant for bling and jive talk, an uncomfortably enthusiastic Engrish speaker, a borderline anorexic Pepe le Pew and a flaming queen who speaks entirely in Wizard of Oz metaphors. Despite my ludicrously off-base expectations that Confessions of a Shopaholic was going to be a rallying cry for uncertain times this film was under no mandate to change the world or apparently even be marginally funny. But it didn't need to be so utterly hateful and empty towards its bit players.

Leads Isla Fischer (The Lookout, Wedding Crashers) and Hugh Dancy (Black Hawk Down, Jane Austen Book Club) stand out here for their complete and total commitment to both the physical and verbal slapstick their roles require as well as their seeming obliviousness to the story's plotholes. Wendie Malick is also having a lot of fun updating her role from "Just Shoot Me" as the austere and unforgiving Shopaholics' Anonymous group leader.

Confessions of a Shopaholic opens nationwide February 13th.

See also:

• Vadim Rizov on The New Depression Cinema for Greencine.

Portland International Film Festival 32, pt. 1

Of Time and the City

"We love the place we hate, then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love then spend a lifetime trying to regain it. Between loving and hating the real journey starts."

Similar in spirit to Guy Maddin's recent My Winnipeg, Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; House of Mirth) presents a visual poem. Dedicated to his hometown of Liverpool, he explores and the complicated feelings he has about loathing it in his youth and developing some resigned affection for it as a grown man. Composed primarily of archive footage of the once fair city, that is now home to incessant industrial blight, the with some recent footage it includes that's been degraded so to match the film quality of the different films match. The narration is provided by Davies himself with a selection of classical poetry and personal observations and confessions.

Of Time and the City's collage approach plays at times like one of the travelogue films of the French New Wave movement but with a great deal more personal catharsis. Described by critic Shawn Levy as "Bela Tarr in triple time" the this film might be difficult viewing for people who don't share Davies' tortured feelings about their own places of origin.

Two sets of images have remained with me weeks after seeing the film. The first set reflects the grandeur of Liverpool: an old piece of footage of dockworkers wearing heavy duty gloves, and unloading enormous steel cables from a boat into a factory juxtaposed with the newer image of the city with its sprawling high-density, low-income housing projects. It's an image reminiscent of Andrea Arnold's gritty 2007 film Red Road, this time with some reverence and wry affection. Second, Davies then mines the mundane, we see an image of a woman from the 1940s on her hands and knees, scrubbing the doorstep to a house. This is set against the modern image of a broken street lamp, reflecting a loss of spirit as Liverpool becomes more modern.

RIYL: Persepolis, the Namesake, True Meaning of Pictures.

Of Time and the City screens February 8th and 12th at the Portland International Film Festival. 

Black Balloon

Black Balloon centers on Thomas (played by Rhys Wakefield), a teenage boy whose family has just moved to a new town. Despite being a military brat, (and one can assume, moved around quite a bit) he seems frustrated by his new surroundings and unable to make new friends. Like a lot of teenage boys, he takes his frustration out in an unproductive, cruel ways and focuses on how much he resents his autistic older brother Charlie. Charlie demands all of his parents' (played by the wonderful team of Toni Collette and Erik Thomson) time while attracting too much the scrutiny from of a group of bullies at school. He befriends a beautiful classmate (Gemma Ward, a model-actress putting together a very interesting resume after last year's great slasher flick The Strangers) and becomes smitten with her. After a violent confrontation at a birthday party gone awry there are tears, allocutions and eventually even a group sing-a-long (would that I could say I was joking). It all that serves to tell us that everything will be turn out just fine for this whacky family.

There are effective scenes in the first act showing us the day day-to to-day struggles for of a family with an Autistic child, but the film waffles a bit in setting up its own premise. We see Thomas do terrible things to his brother (and by proxy his 8-month pregnant mother) but the director tempers this with ridiculously sentimental scenes of Thomas gazing lovingly at Charlie while the emo soundtrack swells. These softer scenes are just not believable, what makes teenagers compelling protagonists is their all-consuming self-centeredness. Without some recognition of that, Thomas's eventual emotional growth feels unearned.

Like its American counterparts, Black Balloon is a film that will elicit one of two reactions from viewers: sniffles and snickers. The audience I saw it with seemed evenly divided down the middle. Which by my count means this film will have great word of mouth and I will probably wind up watching it again on DVD with my mom.

RIYL: Little Miss Sunshine, Sweetie, Juno.

Black Balloon screens February 6th and 9th at the Portland International Film Festival.

Short Films: Floris Kaayk's The Order Electrus

Floris Kaayk's animated film The Order Electrus looks at what might happen if nature adopted some of humans beings' destructive habits.