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.

I want to like this more than I do. What started out as a mesmerizing, beautiful arrangement of memories that flowed onto the screen in the same manner that memories cycle through one’s brain dissolved into a tedious sequence of sing-alongs that frustrated me and pulled me out of the film’s spell. It is the best Davies film that I have seen, though (I like it more than his Trilogy and his recent Of Time and the City), but I’m starting to think that he isn’t for me. His work is undeniably well crafted, and his use of pop music is first class. But it wears thin, and it hasn’t kept my attention for an entire feature yet. The filmmaking, though, is poetic, nostalgic, and occasionally very moving. One of the most powerful moments of this film for me was in the transition from Distant Voices into the Still Lives half. A scene at a fireplace fades to black, and then, a phenomenon that can only be experienced when watching this projected on film, the dust on the negative mixes, and is absorbed by, the reflections in a pitch black body of water, all while the sound of a woman giving birth fades in to interrupt the beauty of the image. It’s a brilliant transition, but it also mirrors the formal construction of the film, in which the crooning women never stop singing, interrupting the stunning everything that was Distant Voices. But I look at the poster now, and I see the tagline “In memory, everything happens to music.” Its a tacky way to try to sell this film; I think it preps audiences for something more in line with Meryl Streep’s Music of the Heart. It does make me reconsider Davies’ intentions, though. While I felt the influence of musicals on this film, I wonder if he was trying to make a musical. The film certainly evolves that way. Its interesting to know that the film is a parade of his own memories, and it is telling about him as a person and the circumstances in which he grew up in that these sing-alongs are what he remembers most, rather than all of the misery. There is a lot of misery in this film, but I wouldn’t call it miserable. I felt a lot of joy in watching it, and I got the impression that everyone in this family, despite how rocky things were, could keep loving each other no matter what, and could always see optimism in the future. The film has tons of good ideas and huge emotion, I just wish it all gelled a bit better for me.

This Toronto based documentary filmmaker picked a fascinating subject for this first part of his narcissism trilogy. Zweig goes around to a few dozen vinyl collectors around Ontario and interviews them about their collections, their motivations for collecting, what their collecting is allowing them to do in their life/keeping them away from, and everything in between. I was more interested in the material when Zweig was strictly interviewing other people and asking them blunt questions like ‘do you ever feel like you’re a sad guy who hates himself and that’s why you have to have all of these records?’ than when Zweig has putting his own personal life into the film (not that I didn’t like that he was doing it at all, but he did it too often, especially toward the end). A dense man who claims that his goal in record collecting is to obtain every song ever made is hilariously inane, smug, and, of course, narcissistic. When asked if he is only collecting all of the songs written in English or if he wants every song in any language, he replies ‘all of them, I’ve got the French and the Italians right over there.’ He insists on projecting his knowledge and it is repeatedly shown to be incorrect (surprise! there are more than four bands in the world whose band names start with the letter ‘Q’), and he is one of the clearer examples of the narcissism that goes into collecting something. There is a sense of ownership that comes from buying something when you are aware that you are collecting it, like you have conquered that part of that world and you can now move on to the bigger fish. But a huge point in this film is that the obsession removes the original point of it. Most of these men don’t listen to what they are buying, they haven’t even heard of much of it, and are instead just collecting the vinyl as a material instead of the music. I’ve collected a few things in my life; I was a player in the beanie babie boom, and I currently collect DVDs and shoes. In the former, I can look back at it and acknowledge that I bought many of the babies that I bought because I knew that other people wanted them instead of me wanting it. I had this fantasy that another huge collector would come into my house one day, see my collection, and fall on his knees and bow to my superior stash of bears. But luckily I moved on (helped by the decline in quality and the selling out of that company). I caught myself a couple of years ago falling into a similar trap with my DVD and shoe collections, and so I’ve developed stricter rules for myself for when I decide to purchase a film or a pair of shoes. The characters in this film have no such standards, and based on a few of their behaviors, the obsession of having everything is pushing them closer into reclusion from society. One frail looking man won’t even invite anyone to his home anymore, partly because there is little of the floor that is not covered in records, but also because he is ashamed of himself.

Zweig turns the camera on himself throughout the film to relate his own vinyl collecting to his interviewees. He believes that his love life is the primary victim to his obsession, and he shows an existential yearning for reproducing that is sad and pathetic, though he oftens reaffrims to himself that he is not. This doc is funny, moving, and incredibly interesting, but it does overstay its welcome by about twenty minutes, mostly because Zweig puts a little too much time into himself toward the end (perhaps this is where he sees the narcissism theme come in). I’m trying to get my hands on the other two parts in the trilogy, I’m having some trouble, though.

While this is the best of any of the Academy’s ‘Best Picture’ nominees that I have seen so far (until now, I’ve also seen Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), it still leaves a lot to be desired. The first third of the film is drastically different than the concluding hour and fifteen minutes. I thought a lot about Breillat’s Brief Crossing during this first act, a film that addresses an older woman’s interest and sexual encounter with a minor with more depth, grace, and maturity than anything that culminates in Daldry’s film. While Breillat builds her film and her characters’ relationship slowly and believably, Kate Winslet’s Hanna is fucking Michael for days before they even know each other’s names. Their relationship is not only rushed, but it seems to be unmotivated, too. Obviously Michael’s participation makes sense because he is a teenage virgin, and of course he’s horny, but Winslet is bitchy and cold toward Michael, and their isn’t any sense of attraction between the two before they are going at it all day every day. If this had evolved throughout the film, it could have led to something sexually revelatory for a Hollywood film. Instead, their relationship is dropped and never returned to. In fact, given the treatment of their relationship during the rest of the film, you could replace that first act with one in which Hanna is Michael’s nanny, with Michael reading to her while she does her chores, and the final two acts of the film, left alone, would have made just as much sense and gotten the same emotional response from me.

Winslet is mediocre in her role, as is Fiennes as older Michael; the only exception is David Kross as young Michael, who is good. Winslet somehow felt like she was doing a Streep impersonation in this, even though I cannot think of any particular film that Streep acts like this. I’m probably just projecting my assumptions of how Kate perceives her own acting skills onto her, but, either way, she is just as undeserving of awards recognition in her role here as she is in Revolutionary Road. She ages so unbelievably that its embarrassing, and her German accent was just as bad as Jeff Goldblum’s in the putrid Adam Resurrected. Fiennes is lost and bored (and boring) as the older Michael, and his conversation with a victim from Hanna’s Nazi camp toward the end of the film is one of the worst acted scenes in movies last year. The entire Holocaust twist on this film felt contrived given that it’s not mentioned or developed at all in the first act of the film, and I’m sure it’s the only reason the film got funded, since everyone in Hollywood loves honoring Holocaust victims, at least every other year. This film was too long, mildly interesting, and melodramatic; its message, ‘Learn how to read when you’re young so that your life doesn’t suck,’ was lame. The potential it had in its first 45 minutes, though, makes it better than Slumdog, and it’s lack of plagiarism makes it better than Benjamin Button.