Day: April 7, 2014

Scarlett Johansson vs. Scotland: LFM Reviews Under the Skin

By Joe Bendel. Fifty-some years after the classic Twilight Zone episode, aliens are still devising ways to serve man, with a little butter and garlic. However, viewers of Jonathan Glazer’s much anticipated new film will be forgiven if they do not realize that this is the extraterrestrials’ reason for visiting Scotland. Mood and composition take precedence over petty bourgeoisie concerns, like narrative and pacing, throughout Glazer’s Under the Skin, which opened Friday in New York.

Fortunately, Skin is ostensibly based on the novel by Michel Faber, so we can infer some exposition from the original source material. It seems aliens have a taste for human muscle, so the woman visitor has been sent to harvest some from the brawniest knuckle-draggers she can entice into the back of her van. Sometimes she appears to have a counterpart escorting her on his motorbike, but he disappears for long stretches (probably because he gets bored).

At first, she seems ruthlessly efficient, but as she encounters the less fortunate, she starts to change. Yet, becoming more “human” leaves her increasingly vulnerable to man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. Or something like that.

There is not a heck of a lot of plot in Skin, but what there is manages to be both slow and confusing. About the third or fourth time she lures another man-dog into her cosmic pool of black goo, you start to wonder how this film ever got made without Tangerine Dream on-board. There are more wide shots of cloud draped forests than both seasons of Twin Peaks combined. Frankly, it is hard to believe this is the work of Glazer, arguably the most lauded television commercial director of our time and the man who helmed the breakout hit, Sexy Beast.

It is also hard to get one’s head around the wildly unflattering wig Scarlett Johansson sports as the primary alien. Frankly, this is Johansson as we have never seen her before: naked, yet boring. There is no question Skin is more closely akin to experimental cinema than science fiction genre films, but it sounds deceptively commercial: “nude alien chick puts men through the interstellar meat-grinder.” It will surely attract a loyal band of critical champions who will defend it with terms like “hypnotic” and “trance-inducing,” which sounds seductive, but really means you will be paying fourteen dollars to fight off the head-nods.

In many ways, Skin feels like a throwback to the sort of weirdly cerebral 1970s science fiction forays (such as Robert Altman’s Quintet and Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth) that were green-lighted by clueless studio heads caught flat-footed by the Star Wars phenomenon, but Skin is more openly contemptuous of mainstream sensibilities. For a while, Daniel Landin’s gauzy cinematography is rather effectively dreary, in a way befitting Scotland’s backwoods, but the film simply becomes a chore to watch. Not recommended for anyone except Johnasson stalkers and the most pretentious hipster cineastes, Under the Skin opened Friday (4/4) in New York at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: D

Posted on April 7th, 2014 at 6:05pm.

The Family that Plays Together: LFM Reviews Brothers Hypnotic on PBS

By Joe Bendel. One would expect the sons of a Sun Ra Arkestra veteran would naturally take to music. Their somewhat unconventional upbringing is hardly surprising either. Yet, the members of the eight-brothers strong Hypnotic Brass Ensemble both honor and reject their father’s musical legacy in ways that generate real tension throughout Brothers Hypnotic, Reuben Atlas’s behind-the-scenes look at the brassy jam-band, which airs this Monday on PBS, as part of the current season of Independent Lens.

After early stints with the Jay McShann and the U.S. Navy bands, Phil Cohran signed up with the Arkestra while it was based in Chicagoland. When Sun Ra continued on his galactic journey, Cohran helped co-found the AACM. For a while, he was also the director of the Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble (which could have passed for the Arkestra’s children’s auxiliary), but as soon as one Cohran brother left the fold, the entire ensemble deflated.

In a sense, they were reborn as Hypnotic, a jazz and funk influenced jam-band somewhat in the tradition of the Hot 8 Brass Band and their New Orleans contemporaries, but utilizing a strictly brass-only instrumentation. They have a great sound (particularly when they are not incorporating just okay raps into the mix). You can hear a bit of their father in there, but there are plenty of other elements in the mix as well.

From "Brothers Hypnotic."

Atlas does an excellent job documenting the ironic realities of a jazz (or jazz-ish) musician’s life. One minute you are eating cold Spaghetti-O’s out of the can, but the very next day you might be off on a seat-of-the-pants European tour. The filmmaker caught the Ensemble at a fortuitous time, when they were still giving street performances (which are highly cinematic), but were also fielding offers from legitimate labels. Musicians who tune in might get a nasty case of heartburn when they turn down Atlantic Records, but you have to give them credit for staying true to the convictions they inherited from their father. Unfortunately, the broadcast edit of Brothers H never allows a musical performance to continue long enough to give viewers a truly vivid sense of the ensemble’s full force.

Atlas captures some intimate moments with a band that is on the way up, but shrewdly trying to avoid a harsh burn-out. The Brothers must have seen their share of music docs before appearing in their own. It is nice to know some musicians are trying to learn from others’ mistakes. While Atlas also includes enough intra-family drama to avoid accusations of PR flakery, the film never feels intrusive or gossipy. Recommended for fans of funky brass (and who isn’t?), Brothers Hypnotic debuts tonight (4/7) on PBS’s Independent Lens.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 7th, 2014 at 5:59pm.

LFM Reviews Dream Team 1935 @ MoMI’s 2014 Panorama Europe

By Joe Bendel. Evidently, they come pretty tall and well coordinated in the Baltics, considering their success in the European Basketball Championship (now known as EuroBasket). Lithuania won twice in the 1930’s and took gold again in 2003, but the very first champion was Latvia. Profoundly unheralded, the scrappy long-shots shocked the continent in 1935. It was a great Latvian triumph on the eve of great tragedy for many nations, Latvia included. With Russia once again menacing its neighbors, it is a fitting time to revisit one of the greatest moments of Latvian sporting history in Aigars Grauba’s Dream Team 1935, which screened during Panorama Europe at the Museum of the Moving Image.

It was a different game in 1930’s Europe. A jump ball followed every successful bucket and free throws were shot granny-style, but it was still handy to have an enforcer on the team. Vlademars Baumanis understands this only too well. Initially, the player-coach loses the Latvian championship because of some thuggish play. However, the victorious coach declines to take his team to the European championship, because the corrupt national sports committee has already squandered the ear-marked funds. While protesting to anyone who will listen, Baumanis accepts an instantly regretted dare to cobble together his own national team, trading in his uniform for a suit and tie.

Bitter rivals from both the Army and University Clubs will come together to represent Latvia, but it will take time to congeal as a true team. At least they will be in the best shape of the careers, thanks to relentless conditioning coach Rihards Deksenieks. Baumanis is a master strategist (at least by 1930’s standards) and the Latvia team has considerable skills, but just getting to Geneva will be an adventure thanks to the obstructionist sports committee.

Dream Team is a reliably entertaining underdogs-triumphant sport story, with some nicely rendered period details and a peppy big band soundtrack. Many basketball fanatics will probably be amused by the decidedly less glamorous style of play. Yet, Dream Team features one of the most devastating series of what-happened-to post-scripts of nearly any film. It turns out nearly every coach and player met a tragic end either as Soviet or National Socialist conscripts (sometimes both) during the war or in Soviet gulags afterward. (Nearly eighty years later, history threatens to repeat itself, as Russia once again casts a covetous eye on the Baltic Republics.)

From "Dream Team 1935."

Janis Amanis is a bit stiff as Baumanis, but he certainly looks earnest. In contrast, Vilis Daudzins plays Deksenieks with hardnosed charisma, while Marcis Manjakovs convincingly portrays the maturation of Latvia’s star player, Rudolfs Jurcins. Unfortunately, there is not much for Inga Alsina to do as Baumanis’s wife Elvira, except for sitting around, having faith in him.

As a sports film, Dream Team is more successful than most. Despite the end never being in doubt, it moves along briskly and captures the tenor of the game as it was then played. It also suddenly feels uncomfortably topical given the ultimate fate of most of the team. It would make a good narrative companion to Marius Markevicius’s uplifting documentary, The Other Dream Team, chronicling the 1992 Olympic run of newly independent Lithuania’s men’s basketball team. Recommended for basketball fans and those who closely follow political and cultural developments in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Dream Team 1935 screened Sunday at MoMI as part of Panorama Europe.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 7th, 2014 at 5:41pm.

LFM Reviews Lithuanian Shorts (including The Black Box) @ MoMI’s 2014 Panorama Europe

From "Time Passes Through the City."

By Joe Bendel. The Lithuanians did not take to Soviet domination, culturally or politically. In strange ways, they cultivated their rugged, taciturn image to help sustain their distinctive national identity. One can see this strategy at work in a series of short documentaries restored to commemorate Lithuania’s EU presidency. Collected under the title Cinematic Inclusions, these often abstract films screen together for adventurous viewers during Panorama Europe.

In observance of strict chronology, the most accessible (and longest) Inclusion is the final film of the program. Not so surprisingly given their non-conformist nature, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians were deported to Siberia during the Communist era. The exile experience was especially painful when family members passed away, because Lithuanian customs highly value burial in one’s homeland. As the rotten Communist system started to crumble, many repatriated Lithuanians returned to Siberia in hopes of smuggling loved ones’ remains back home. Algimantas Maceina followed his father on one such mission in The Black Box.

In part, Box is like a time capsule of the early days of newly independent Lithuania, but it is also an ethnographic record of Lithuanian funerary customs. However, it is not included in Inclusions merely to represent the mid 1990s. While Maceina faithfully records the trip, as well as the subsequent wake and funeral for his grandfather’s recovered remains, he plays the footage as if on an accelerated fast-forward. At least you cannot say he does not respect the audience’s time, as he documents a significant phenomenon largely particular to Lithuania.

Before going further, it is worth remembering that American experimental film icon Jonas Mekas is Lithuanian. Indeed, he would most likely appreciate the avant-garde aesthetic of the rest of the Inclusions. As much cinematic essays or visual tone poems as they are documentaries, they are remarkably consistent in tone and subject matter, despite spanning twenty-seven years of frustrating national history.

From "The Old Man and the Earth."

In the 1960s, Robertas Verba established a template with The Old Man and the Earth and The Dreams of Centenarians, celebrating the salt-of-the-earth while explicitly rejecting Socialist Realism. Poring over every wrinkle and imperfection, Verba’s films have a clear inclination towards grotesque fetishism. Not very doc-ish, they present a rather surreal perspective that becomes even more pronounced in films like Almantas Grikevičius’s Time Passes Through the City. The ambivalent attitude towards industrial “progress” reflected in Henrikas Šablevičius’s A Trip Across the Misty Meadow is also clearly out of step with Socialist propaganda. Yet, it is hard to get any less Soviet than the jazzy interludes that make their way into several of the films’ soundtracks.

Its execution might be a bit eccentric, but just about any viewer will get something out of Algimantas Maceina’s The Black Box. While the rest of the constituent films are decidedly more demanding, they represent a fascinating episode in cinematic history. It is good to know Lithuania values its heritage enough to preserve them for posterity. Recommended for hardcore fans of experimental film, Cinematic Inclusions screens free of charge this Wednesday (4/9) at Bohemia National Hall and Saturday (4/12) at the Museum of the Moving Image (free with regular admission), as part of this year’s Panorama Europe.

Posted on April 7th, 2014 at 5:40pm.

LFM Reviews Honeymoon @ MoMI’s 2014 Panorama Europe

By Joe Bendel. Usually, couples keep the wedding simple for second marriages, but not Radim Werner and his fiancée Tereza. At least when you keep a low profile, it makes it harder for unwelcomed guests from the past to crash. There will be no ex-spouses arriving uninvited, but one mystery guest will thoroughly destabilize the celebration in Jan Hrebejk’s Honeymoon, which screens during the rechristened Panorama Europe at the Museum of the Moving Image.

As fate would have it, Werner’s thirteen year-old son Dominik breaks his glasses seconds before the wedding ceremony. Fortunately, there is optometrist-in-the-box right on the church plaza. Werner does not think much of the man behind the counter, but he instantly recognizes him. Calling himself Jan Benda, the mystery man crashes the ceremony and hitches a ride to the reception in the country. He claims to be Werner’s old boarding school friend, but the groom pretends not to remember him. The kids take to Benda, but he unnerves both bride and groom.

It will become obvious the lens crafter is not really Benda, but he shares some complicated history with Werner and the real Benda. The truth is pretty ugly, especially when the newly married bride is forced to confront it. Honeymoon is considered the third installment of Hrebejk’s loosely thematic trilogy, begun with the excellent Kawasaki’s Rose, examining how the sins of the past continue to influence the present. While not explicitly political like Rose, it is worth noting Werner’s boarding school indiscretions indirectly involved his teenaged lust for Natassja Kinski during the height of her international superstardom, suggesting the 1980’s, perhaps thereby implying he was the privileged child of Party elites.

Regardless, Hrebejk successfully taps into viewers’ deep ambivalence regarding weddings and similar conventions. Somewhere deep within our inner Mr. Hydes, we resent having to dress up and be on our best behavior for people we only share an accidental relationship with. Like a Wedding Crashers from Hell, Honeymoon delivers the chaos we secretly yearn for at such times.

From "Honeymoon."

Indeed, Hrebejk deftly plays a dual game, creating suspense through not-Benda’s unsettling behavior, while dropping clear hints that he is more worthy of our sympathies. He rather risks undoing the balance act late in the third act, but he certainly keeps us on our toes. Ultimately, the messiness lends Honeymoon further credence.

As the respective nemesis-classmates, Stanislav Majer and Jirí Cerny play a dynamite cat-and-mouse game. They invest both men with sympathetic moments, as well as profound flaws, making it impossible to reflexively align with either one. Anna Geislerova initially seems to be problematically passive as the newlywed bride, but she more than holds her own during a pivotal confrontation with Cerny’s crasher.

Honeymoon is a mature film, in which karma packs a real punch. On one hand, Hrebejk challenges how well one can ever know a prospective spouse, while also questioning whether we can ever out live the moral statute of limitations for our mistakes. Good luck coming up with satisfying answers, but the resulting drama is quite compelling. Recommended for discerning adults, Honeymoon screens this Friday (4/11) at the Museum of the Moving Image, as part of Panorama Europe.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on April 7th, 2014 at 5:34pm.