I liked how simple the story was, but I left the theatre empty-handed with this (unless I win the Dunks!). I thought that the animation was beautiful, it seemed to run at a different frame rate than the 24 frames of the film, and it made it look slightly choppy, which I thought was charming given the latest pristine animation of Pixar and Dreamworks. Not as instantly appealing to goths and hipsters as The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline had the same effect on me as Nightmare minus the catchy songs. The film takes a bit of time to get going, allowing me to experience life with Coraline and her parents before the creepiness is attempted. Coraline crawls through a rabbit hole in her house that flips her world into her ideal version of her reality, except that her parents and friends have buttons for eyes (I think many will say it is Alice in Wonderland meets David Lynch). I should note that my screening, for whatever reason, didn’t show the film in 3D, so I didn’t experience any scares that occur in the film because of objects or people flying off of the screen at the audience. I’d was looking forward to the film being in 3D, as it would have been my first feature film experience with that technology. I’m skeptical and critical of the practice despite never experiencing it, especially when it is applied to films made without 3D in mind. But I think I remember hearing that this film was designed for 3D. But, as I didn’t get to see the film in 3D, I cannot speak for the audience that did, and this film wasn’t scary or creepy or unsettling, and was kind of lame during its attempts.

I do applaud the naked old women on the trapeze, though. All of the kids at my screening gasped at what could have been the largest breasts proportioned to any woman that they had ever seen in their lives, commando save for the nipples. These two women were a couple of the better characters in the film, but their dogs were even better. The women collected scottish terriers that they stuffed and gave wings when they died. The dogs were dopey and drunk on something and very cute. I laughed.

But anyway, Coraline is pretty harmless and inoffensive, and it borrows too much from Alice in Wonderland, and has a muddled final act. Coraline wasn’t a very good protagonist, and none of the supporting characters really left a lasting impression on me. I support the stop-motion animation, though. It is nice to have variety in animated features so that children don’t become too reliant on the technology as a standard for their entertainment. If the characters and story were as developed as some of Pixar’s or early Disney films, it would have been great.

When I was in the 4th grade, I lost the spelling bee because I mispelled the word ‘epic.’ I spelled it E-P-I-K. Pretty pathetic for a nine year-old. When I told my best friend, he slapped me. I knew the word because there were blockbuster films that were advertised as being epic on the TV spots, but I didn’t have any recollection of actually reading the word. In terms of filmmaking, I think that there are ‘Epic” films, and I think that there are ‘Epik’ films. ‘Epik’ films are defined by their budgets and mainstream appeal, B-movies that feature internationally recognized celebs playing dress-up in front of green screens, films that don’t earn their excessive running times. These films are films that I avoid, and when I am tricked into seeing one (most recently, The Dark Knight) it makes me crave all-the-more a seventy-five minute art film about a man in a row boat, or two people having a dinner conversation. But, then there are the ‘Epic’ films, that restore my faith in ambitious filmmaking. Fitzcarraldo is one such film. While I was watching the visual climax of this film, a memory of a making-of documentary of Titanic that I saw around late 1997 crossed my mind. The crew of that film made a pretty exact replica of the Titanic, about 1/50 of its original size, and filmed it in a large pool of water to get a lot of their effects shots. Despite all of the precision and tedium and craft that went into making that replica for those scenes, it doesn’t even come close to producing something as magical, grand, and real as what Werner Herzog pulls off in this movie.

The premise of a man trying to build an opera in a village in the jungle is as out-there as one could expect from a Herzog film, and it utilizes one of his most prominent themes of a man who is passionate about something, and the peculiar detours that are encountered in his attempt to satisfy that passion. While Kinski plays the title character well, creating the kind of ferocious madman that was called for in this role, the real protagonist of the film is the opera genre. Fitzcarraldo’s love for the opera is what drives the film, and it is the main motivation for such stunts as dragging a massive ship over a mountain. Any arrogance or madness that is present in Fitzcarraldo’s character is born through the Carusos and Wagners of the world. These men’s works have possessed this man into a kind of operatic being that is probably not even capable of doing something in a manner that isn’t grandiose and dramatic.

As Herzog calls this film his ‘greatest documentary,’ it is worth bringing up Herzog’s similarities to the character Fitzcarraldo. Any ambition and madness that consumed Fitzcarraldo to drag the ship over the mountain is equally present in Herzog. Both are doing this huge task for the sake of bringing art to the masses, or perhaps the artless. I have no doubt that the arrogance of the title character is present in the filmmaker, too, but it is also outlined with modesty. Spoiler – – – The film ends with Fitzcarraldo failing somewhat in his venture to build an opera house in Iquito, but he still is able to scrap together a performance of Bellini’s I Puritani on the boat that he dragged over the mountain for the village to watch from the lakeshore. Fitzcarraldo, earlier shunned and scolded when he played Caruso over his record player, isn’t humble in his reception of the villagers’ awe, but I got the sense that he earned his moment of glory, as he managed, in his failure, to still pull off something new and epic for these people, even relative to the normal conditions of opera, just as Herzog did with this film.

This is the final film of Kiarostami’s Koker trilogy, which began with Where is the Friend’s House? and And Life Goes On…. The films in this trilogy got progressively more ‘arty’ as it went along, and self-referential. Friend’s House is a simple film about a boy’s journey to help his friend, then And Life shows a man who represents Kiarostami searching for a boy from Friend’s House, and now Through the Olive Trees features two men who represent Kiarostami. The trilogy peels away one layer of fiction to reveal something supposedly non-fiction, and then turns around and peels back again to completely fuzz what is and isn’t reality. Kiarostami seems to compulsively create fiction about non-fiction, and doesn’t know when to quit.

This film takes two seemingly insignificant characters from And Life and creates a new fiction underneath the fiction. The film is about non-fiction, and yet it is fictitious. I feel like I’m trying to write about a Charlie Kaufman film right now, but there are some very fresh things happening in this trilogy that go beyond Kaufman’s study of art’s imitation of life (and vice versa). First, Kiarostami is playing with the memory of his past films in a way that I am crazy about. With each film, the ideas become more and more enhanced by whether or not I was paying close enough attention to the previous film. I actually had no idea who Hossein and Tahereh were until about two-thirds of the way through this film it clicked and I felt silly for not making the connection before. These are sequels that actually embellish the previous films rather than rehash or thin out the themes of the predecessors.

But beyond the mirrors and reflections involved in the trilogy, each of the three films still focuses on its own ground. Through the Olive Trees, despite being based on characters from And Life, has its own goals and ideas that are separate. Hossein is madly in love with Tahereh, but his class and illiteracy keep him from having her. Tahereh is controlled by her grandmother, and is, consequently, bitchily unresponsive to simple comments and questions from Hossein. The culture and traditions specific to this region come between them and its frustrating to watch.

One trait of Kiarostami’s filmmaking that I’ve noticed is his characters’ repetitive and persistent nature. The children ask questions up to a dozen times before they get the answer they want or are finally convinced that they aren’t going to get their desired response. The filmmaker in this film (the actual one, not the fictitious one from And Life) goes through take after take as the stubborn actors change the script, often to make some sort of point. Tahereh will not call Hossein ‘Mr Hossein’ because the women in the region do not say ‘Mister’ and Hossein says that 25 family members died in the earthquake for three or four takes before he succumbs to the inaccurate total of 65 that the filmmaker is asking him to say.

Which brings up probably my favorite theme in this film: the actors’ resistance to fictionalizing their lives. The rules of the culture are constantly interrupting and altering the fiction that the filmmaker is trying to portray. In the final scene of the film, Hossein ceaselessly begs for Tahereh’s hand in marriage, but she will not budge on what she has been told. In the last moments, Hossein has either given up, or Tahereh has finally said yes. Hossein, chasing Tahereh in a zig zag up until now, breaks the motif of the trilogy and stumbles diagonally back toward the camera.

This is the first film that I have seen by Jafar Panahi. I wanted to watch Crimson Gold first because it was written by Abbas Kiarostami, and I wanted to see how his writing was treated when it was being directed by somebody else. I don’t think I would have picked up on Kiarostami’s participation in this without already knowing about it, as the only thing that I noticed that was particularly Kiarostami-esque was that the film was somewhat structured around traveling. Hussein, the protagonist and a pizza delivery man, rides on his motor bike from the pizza shop to deliver pizzas to various fancy homes, and can’t seem to have a smooth shift. The middle act of the film is centered around a mansion that is having a dance party of some sort. Outside, though, some form of police is waiting to pick out the people entering and leaving the party, as it breaks some sort of code that restricts men and women from dancing with one another. When Hussein arrives to deliver a pizza at the mansion, he is pulled into the situation and not allowed to leave or deliver the pizzas. Later, he is delivering pizza to a lavish condo, and the man living there, who ordered pizza for himself and two women who left before the delivery, invites Hussein into his home to eat and chat with him. While the rich man blathers on and on about his disdain for the city and his general joylessness, Hussein inhales the pizzas. The antagonism of members of different classes provides the infrastructure for this film, and renders well the quiet hopelessness and hostility that builds up in this particular member of the working class.

The film has an interesting formal structure that shows Hussein’s fate in the first shot of the film, and then spends the rest of the film showing the events that built up to that moment. While the film does show a convincing portrait of a nice and innocent man being driven to crime by society, it doesn’t make excuses for Hussein’s final behavior, and doesn’t make the final scene in the jewelry store out to be some kind of inescapable fate. The logic of the events is very loose and subtle. Hussein’s time wandering through the rich man’s condo, the penultimate scene of the film, is complex because it isn’t clear whether Hussein is angered by what he sees and hears or if he is entertained by it. He falls into the swimming pool, and I couldn’t tell if it was his awkward way of diving in, or if he fainted. He stares out at the city pensively, and burps up his pizza, and I didn’t know whether to find this moment humorous or somewhat disturbing.

Hussein is acted well by Hossain Emadeddin, playing him as someone who isn’t insane and still functions in the world without being perceived as an outcast, but who can also believably go off the rails at any moment. I am unsure about the decision to show Hussein’s fate at the beginning of the film, as I think I was less engaged in his behavior than I should have been. Since I know what he will end up doing, I looked for certain things in his personality that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and probably missed out on much of the complexity that was put into Hussein’s character. It is an effective film, though, and I enjoyed watching it.

Never a fan of The Exorcist, nor Lionsgate’s trailer for this, I watched Bug with reservations. I’d been hearing all kinds of praise for Michael Shannon around the internet, but I’d never seen him star in a film before this one, though he played a weak role well in Revolutionary Road. The truth is that as great as Shannon is in this, Ashley Judd is even better, and the two of them lead an all-around extremely well acted cast. I didn’t know that this was an off-Broadway play until after I was finished watching it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much this felt like a play while I was watching it, as pretty much all of the film consists of dialogue between Judd and Shannon in a motel. The first half of this plays like an engaging, yet standard, study on relationship abuse. Judd’s Agnes is haunted by her guilt of losing her son, who was kidnapped at a grocery story under her supervision about a decade before the film takes place. Her ex, Jerry, has just been released from prison, and is anxious to get back in Agnes’ life to terrorize her simply because he is an asshole. The real meat of the film, though, is brought in after Agnes and Shannon’s Peter hook up one night. Soon after they sleep together, edited cleverly with archival footage of mating insects, Peter begins forming bite marks from tiny aphids that he finds in the motel. Agnes begins to be bitten by the bugs, too, and the two begin searching for the aphids obsessively, and researching not only how to get rid of them, but how they got into their room in the first place.

This film is one of the scariest and most tragic examinations of trust, abuse, and madness that I have seen. I was reading a few articles in the news after I watched this, and, still under a daze from the movie, I couldn’t tell if what I was reading was believable or a hoax. I’m finding it hard to write about this even now, because it affected me so viscerally. The final act was like an extension of the hungry refrigerator scene from Requiem for a Dream. The blues and the buzzing and the spastic characters were incredibly unnerving for me. The film is also very funny since it’s so over-the-top at times. But anyway, I can’t stop thinking about this, even though I can’t seem to put any of my thoughts on it into words. Its unfortunate that the horrible marketing kept me away from it so long.

I had the chance to see this at the Toronto Film Festival, but ended up passing on it because it fit awkwardly into my schedule. The synopsis grabbed my attention, and then it started getting some pretty good reviews, so I regretted missing it. Fortunately, it was picked as one of Canada’s Top Ten, which are playing right now at the Cinematheque Ontario, and I was able to see it there. It took me until the second act to get into the rhythm of the film, but once it laid back on the cliches and the mother (played weakly by Céline Bonnier) left the picture, I was more interested in what was going on, and it even ended up being pretty moving throughout its final act.

Mommy is composed of bright colors and infused with a general hokeyness that is reminiscent of an early Coca Cola commercial, and reminded me quite a bit of Haynes’ Far From Heaven (the look and the subject matter). The superficial perfection and underlying sense of something being wrong seems influenced by Blue Velvet, especially after a bird goes kamikaze on the kitchen window, and when some neighborhood teens gather in a closet to spy on one of their mothers undressing. The film feels like it could go in a couple of uninteresting directions in its first half hour (like focusing on the closeted father or the creepy deaf man) but deviated from them so much that I think that they were just MacGuffins. The real meat of the film is in the mother’s absence, and how that affects the family. Feminists will be pleased to know that the family pretty much disintegrates. The disintegration is handled well, and subtly enough. The star of the film is easily Marianne Fortier as 15 year old Élise, a Bressonian character that seems to absorb the downfall of the family singlehandedly. This film made me long for childhood more than Davies’ The Long Day Closes, even if it isn’t as obviously made by an auteur.

I was impressed by how unpretentious this film ended up being, which is probably why I was able to forgive it of its mistakes. There isn’t really anything flashy going on with the camera, editing, or music, so I was able to take it in more based on the story and the acting than the film as a piece of art. The film closes on a scene that should have been cheesy (it was a little, and had a few people in my audience burst into laughter) but felt honest. Élise races through a field with her youngest brother while the song ‘The Great Escape’ by Elie Dupuis plays over everything, creating an excessively sentimental finale that works. The cut to black after the hopeless idea suggested by Élise was a perfect and moving ending.

After I was underwhelmed and unaffected by Terrence Davies’ assured debut feature Distant Voices, Still Lives earlier in the week, I was looking forward to this follow-up and thematic sequel. I’d heard that this was a maturation of Distant Voices and I anticipated connecting with this more since it was focusing on one subject, and since that subject was representing Davies himself. Having seen it now, I agree that it shows Davies maturing and developing his style and storytelling further, but I was even less emotionally engaged in it than I was with his debut. I was even annoyed with myself and the film that I cared so little for the characters, because everything in this film is so well done that I don’t see how I could have had such an empty response to it, especially while everyone around me in the theatre was sniffling and wiping their cheeks.

The films opens similarly to Distant Voices, with the camera roaming the street and then wandering into the doorway in which the boy and his family live (which I think is the same house that the family lived in in Distant Voices; the entry and stairs look the same, anyway). From here, The Long Day Closes evolves in a similar manner as Distant Voices does. The film is mostly made up of small scenes to get prescription drugs without a prescription that sort of work on their own, but aren’t designed to progress from one to another. We see Bud, the protagonist, pensively stare out the window at shirtless workers, get bullied at school, bashfully strip to go swimming, and interact with his family. Davies limited the sing-alongs a bit more here, but there are still more than I would have liked. While I was trying to find something in the film to grab ahold of and care about, I was instead given singing. Unlike in a musical, though, the singing and lyrics don’t progress the plot, nor do they introduce ideas or develop the characters; they just took up time that I’d rather have had with Bud and his mother and brothers. Which I think is the main issue I have with Davies’ films, is that I think he is more interested in these romantic depictions of memories, portraying them beautifully, set to wonderful music than letting the viewer know what these memories mean to him. I honestly cannot tell if he is showing memories that he is fond of, memories he wishes he could forget, both, neither, or something else. For all I could tell, he was picking memories that would look the best in the film, like the closing shot of the sunset (pictured in the poster above). While gorgeous to look at, I wasn’t nearly as entranced by it as I was by a similar shot at the end of Silent Light. But it had every right to be just as good as, and better than, that shot. But like the rest of the film, it just happened, and meant nothing to me.

Abbas Kiarostami is quickly becoming one of my favorite working filmmakers. After his Where is the Friend’s Home completely blew me out of Lake Ontario, he followed it up with this, the second of his ‘Koker Trilogy,’ which is, while not quite as moving as Friend’s Home, more formally captivating, self-referential, and bizarre than anything that I was expecting from it. The film takes place almost completely in a car, as an unnamed filmmaker, who I suppose represents Kiarostami, and his son. They are on a long, ‘short cut’ filled trek to Koker, where some of Friend’s Home is set, after it is hit by a massive earthquake. Much like Friend’s Home and his short Breaktime, the film focuses on a journey that is taking place after some sort of trouble arises, and the focus is still on the children. For the first half of the film, the viewer is purposefully left unaware of the motivation for this drive. I assumed that the filmmaker and his son were either going to Koker to check on relatives who lived there, or that they were going to help with the relief effort. When the actual purpose of their trip is revealed at about the halfway point, I was admittedly shocked. The film shifted from a simple story about a car ride into a complex blend of fiction and non-fiction, and I was taken aback by how unexpected and riveting it was.

Much of the film contains Brown Bunny-esque shots out of the front windshield of the car, showing the approaching path. Where in Gallo’s film the shots are tedious and seemingly empty (until the revelatory finale, that is), I was completely engaged by the technique in Kiarostami’s film. As the film reveals itself to be a search, I greeted these shots out of the window with hope and participatory giddiness, and took advantage of them by searching the frame in the same way that the filmmaker in the car must have been. By the time the film was showing signs of winding down, I became more and more anxious that the film would close before I wanted it to, before the search ended. The final shot is gorgeous in its composition, in its relevance to Friend’s Home, and ultimately in how frustrating it ended up being. I anxiously await the conclusion of this, so far, stellar trilogy.

Like 24 City, this is a half documentary/half fictional exploration of subjects in a modernizing China. This is mostly isolated, though, to one man, painter Liu Xiao-dong. Dong (the film) is mostly tedious and only intermittently interesting. Since it was merely an ‘extra feature’ on my Still Life DVD, I’m going to store it in my memory as an inconsequential side project; it does seem, after all, to be made mostly of unused material from Still Life (very similar to how David Lynch used leftover footage from INLAND EMPIRE to create the More Things That Happened special feature on the DVD). When the film is actually showing Liu, it works pretty well. Watching him paint was like the old days on PBS with Bob Ross, very relaxing; Liu, though, has more sophisticated commentary than Ross, and doesn’t personify his background landscapes and brush strokes. Where the film falters, though, is in the other 85% of the film, in which the camera roams over the city and eavesdrops on civilians as if Jia was desperately trying to stretch this into feature length. While shots of men tearing down buildings and flooded neighborhoods enhanced Still Life on a spiritual level, they have no business in this film. Liu is a figure painter and not much more. Social and Political issues aren’t present in any of his works shown in this film, so it feels heavy-handed when Jia self-consciously tries to force it in like this.

This is an interesting failure, though. I think this film shows how ambitious Jia is, because he is always trying to elevate his work above simple portraits. Usually it works quite well, but this film should have been a short, and if he wanted it to be a feature, then he should have spent the time to get a few hours of interesting material to work with instead of probably about 20 minutes of good material.

This exercise in structure, endurance, and memory feels of the same world as Akerman’s Hotel Monterey, though this is much more engaging and successful. I love this, actually. It is incredibly minimal, featuring shots in and around New York City while Akerman interjects by reading letters that her mother sent her while Chantal was living in NYC. We never hear any of Chantal’s replies to her mother, so we have to fill in the gaps between each of her mother’s texts, which creates a loose narrative that is surprisingly fun to try and hold together. The film especially hits home for college students or anyone who has recently moved away from home. All of my contact with my mother sounds just like the letters in this film. The letters take care not to offend, but also have a sense of bitterness in them. Her mother seems to think that all Chantal should be doing while she is away is thinking about her family and writing to them daily. It isn’t enough to only hear from her once a week.

The footage of the city creates a lonely atmosphere in the film, but it has a bold presence that consumes the letters. Often, the sound of the city noise drowns out Chantal’s voice, letting us know who is in charge. Chantal was living in this beast of a city, and even her contact with her family is interrupted by the chaos of it all. Since I had to watch this film with subtitles, it added another layer to this, as the translation of the letters and the sights of New York competed for my attention. The footage was uneventful and monotonous, but I was never anything but hypnotized by every shot of the cars, subways, high rises, prostitutes, cab drivers, and hundreds of civilians. The final shot, a long, languid take from a ferry boat, is stellar. It begins in the city and tracks out until the entire downtown is visible. Birds chase the camera out of the city, and low clouds usher in to fog up what was once crystal clear. It feels like the departure that Akerman’s mother was hoping for, but it is probably just a visit to the Statue of Liberty, another distraction of the location. The letters cease to exist in the film’s final twenty minutes, which makes the closing segment eerily quiet. A sense of complete alienation settles in, and then a harsh cut to black.