Day: April 25, 2014

LFM Reviews The German Doctor

By Joe Bendel. Unfortunately, the physician in question is not Albert Schweitzer. It is the monstrous Josef Mengele who has ingratiated himself with young Lilith’s family. Living under an assumed name, the evil “Angel of Death” has resumed his eugenic research with the help of Argentina’s large German expat community. Adapting her own novel Wakolda for the screen, Lucía Puenzo offers some informed speculation about Menegele’s Argentine years in The German Doctor, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Lilith is traveling through Patagonia with her father Enzo and her very pregnant mother Eva, who happens to be carrying twins (if you know anything about Mengele, you recognize that this will become significant later). On the road, they meet a German doctor, who asks to follow them through the forbidding landscape for safety’s sake. Eva happens to be the graduate of Bariloche’s German language school, so she can converse with Mengele in his fatherland tongue. She even has old class photos generously accessorized with swastikas.

Initially, they are only too happy to have the doctor take up residency in their chalet-style hotel. Given his friendly overtures, they are also willing to allow the doctor to prescribe a growth regimen for Lilith. However, as his manipulations become more insidious, Enzo starts to suspect something is profoundly wrong about his family’s new patron. Of course, he is still a beat or two behind Nora Eldoc, a deep-cover National Socialist hunter.

While Puenzo stops short of outright conspiracy thriller territory, she paints a chilling portrait of a monolithically complicit German-Argentine community. Eldoc’s investigation also provides respectable servings of intrigue and suspense. However, the film fundamentally serves as a yin-and-yang character study of the icily fanatical Mengele and the innocent but keenly intuitive Lilith.

Catalonian actor Àlex Brendemühl is thoroughly creepy as Mengele, portraying him with quiet, precise menace. Yet, the bigger story is young Florencia Bado, whose lead performance is unusually mature and assured. Elena Roger (star of both the recent Broadway and West End revivals of Evita) also takes a smart, passionate turn as Eldoc. Unfortunately, Diego Peretti and Natalia Oreiro are standard issue dumb parents, who could have wandered in from an old John Hughes movie.

Even though Puenzo’s pacing is a bit inconsistent, she coaxes some powerful performances out of her multinational cast and convincingly indicts Argentina (and neighboring countries like Paraguay) for either knowingly sheltering war criminals like Mengele, or at least deliberately turning a blind eye to their enterprises. It is a surprisingly compelling work of docu-fiction. Recommended for those who appreciate darkly unsettling coming of age tales, The German Doctor opens Friday (4/25) in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 25th, 2014 at 11:38pm.

LFM Reviews Misconception @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Overpopulation is an issue that can turn an ostensive philanthropist into an evangelist for draconian controls on the unwashed masses. Should we be concerned about hordes of debased people waging global battles for increasingly scarce resources? Filmmaker Jessica Yu went into her latest project expecting to find a crisis but came away with the somewhat more nuanced perspective informing her self-referentially titled documentary Misconception, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

It was TED Talker Hans Rosling who first tempered Yu’s alarm and duly serves as Misconception’s guru. According to Rosling, 80% of the world’s population now live in countries with 2.5 child birthrates or less. As a result, global population growth has leveled off. The other 20% are still procreating at rates that would give Warren Buffet conniptions, but corresponding life expectancy also happens to be relatively low in those nations. That is all well and good, but if Yu really wanted to rock viewers’ worlds, she would have introduced them to the work of the late great Julian Simon.

The meat of Misconception consists of a triptych of disparate individuals whose lives have been shaped by population planning policies in some fashion. The first is by far the best. With the help of Chinese filmmaker Lixin Fan (director of Last Train Home and executive producer of China Heavyweight), Yu follows Bao Jianxin’s determined efforts to avoid becoming one of China’s “leftover men.”

The implementation has been severe, but the One Child policy has curtailed China’s birthrate dramatically. Yet, it has come at an enormous social cost. Since boys are prized above girls, many couples opt for gender-specific abortions until they have a son. Like many of his “Little Emperor” generation, Bao faces an uphill challenge in his search for a wife. The numbers are simply against him. Yet, Bao also sabotages his best chance with a quite attractive old flame, because she cannot compete with Shu Qi in his favorite film, Love.

Frankly, Yu and company only scratch the surface of the potential social instability resulting from the One Child policy. Misconception also argues part of Bao’s problem is an increasing trend amongst Chinese women to choose careers over traditional family roles, but this too might partly be a function of the entitled attitudes fostered by “Little Emperor Syndrome.”

Perhaps the most loaded segment follows Denise Mountenay, a pro-life activist, who has found her calling lobbying against legalized abortion at the UN. At least she is from Canada, because in most other respects she fits the least charitable stereotype of evangelical Christians. She is a hard charger, who has had her share of horrific experiences and undoubtedly means well, but she does not serve her cause well on-screen.

From "Misconception."

Contrasting with the ideological charge of the second segment (clearly heightened by deliberate editing choices), the third POV figure is easily the safest. Journalist Gladys Kalibbala does her best to heighten awareness of the staggering numbers of abandoned Ugandan street orphans, humanizing them in profiles and trying her best to re-connect them with extended family members. It is a noble response to a tragic situation.

There is at least one misconception in Misconception. Essentially, Rosling argues fear of a third world population explosion will increase global warming are misplaced, because it is those who live in the developed world that use the most resources. Yes, but the most precipitous increase in fossil fuel consumption is expected in India and China as they pursue aggressive electrification policies (a worthy goal), at the lowest possible cost.

In fact, you can almost feel Misconception holding back, struggling to maintain some sort of class-conscious, environmentally orthodox message. Still, it is admirable Yu was willing to re-examine her assumptions to any extent. A radically mixed bag, the inconsistent Misconception includes provocative arguments and distracting noise in nearly equal measure. For those who closely follow the work of Yu and Fan, it screens again this Saturday (4/26) during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on April 25th, 2014 at 11:32pm.

LFM Reviews Slaying the Badger @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

From "Slaying the Badger."

By Joe Bendel. This almost goes without saying, but good golly, did the American cycling establishment ever pick the wrong athlete to put all their PR chips on. It is especially frustrating considering what a great champion they had in Greg LeMond. LeMond has indeed had his issues with Sheryl Crow’s ex, but his greatest rivalry was with a member of his own team. John Dower chronicles the pitched battle between LeMond and Bernard “The Badger” Hinault in Slaying the Badger, which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LeMond was the great American hope of cycling at a time when the sport was totally off the American radar. At least the French noticed when he started dominating international competitions. Soon the American was recruited for the prestigious La Vie Claire team, headed by Hinault, the four time Tour de France winner. There was a general understanding that if LeMond would help Hinault win a coveted fifth Tour in 1985, Hinault would ride in support of LeMond in 1986. It was not just unspoken agreement, it was evidently quite well verbalized.

LeMond held up his end of the bargain in 1985, albeit under controversial circumstances. Frankly, he probably could have won, but deliberately held back on coach Paul Köchli’s instructions. After the fact, he learned Hinault’s momentary setback involved far more lost time than the coach let on. As a result, he felt rather betrayed when Köchli introduced a new policy for 1986: every man for himself.

It might sound like hyperbole, but Slaying could arguably be considered the sports documentary equivalent of Rashomon. Few docs on any subject feature such widely divergent interpretations of the same events. For what its worth, the archival interview and press conference footage consistently support LeMond’s side of the story.

From "Slaying the Badger."

Even when wearing an uncomfortable looking back brace necessitated by an auto accident, LeMond is a lively, but well spoken interview subject—and he has much to say. Scenes with his wife Kathy further humanize him, clearly suggesting they still have that old magic going on. Appropriately, Dower also scores a sit down with The Badger, who somehow comes through the film relatively unsullied. Köchli is a different matter. His dissembling and hair-splitting degenerates into a downright risible spectacle. If backpedalling were a sport in its own right, he would be its Michael Jordan.

Even if you know every stage of the 1986 Tour by heart, Dower still builds the suspense quite adroitly. By the same token, viewers who only know the sport for its unfortunate recent developments will find themselves completely caught up in the film. This is just first class documentary storytelling all the way around. Highly recommended, Slaying the Badger screens again this Saturday (4/26) as part of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on April 25th, 2014 at 11:26pm.

LFM Reviews Summer of Blood @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Honestly, Bushwick hipsters are horrifying enough. Adding a few vampires is almost redundant. They are all just life-sucking parasites. At least that is the impression one gets from Onur Tukel’s desperately unfunny comedy, Summer of Blood, which inflicts its pain on the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Erik Sparrow is a nauseatingly self-absorbed slacker who thinks the world owes him a living. After rejecting his career-oriented girlfriend’s marriage proposal out of commitment phobia, he discovers most single women are put off by his schlubby underachiever shtick. This so wounds his entitled ego, he willingly submits to a vampire, who turns him rather than killing him. Suddenly, Sparrow is doing better with the ladies, but he also has that undead need to feed.

Apparently out of a misguided sense of BKLN solidarity, some critics have likened Blood to the vastly superior work of Woody Allen and Larry David, but those comparisons are way off the mark. At their best, Allen, David, and Seinfeld knowingly undercut their neurotic pretensions, but Tukel celebrates Sparrow’s narcissism, elevating it to heroic levels. That would be fine, if the comedy clicked to any extent. Take for instance his favorite punchline—“is this because I’m Turkish”—and imagine how well it works with multiple repetitions.

From "Summer of Blood."

Similarly, about the second or third time Blood shows us Sparrow flying solo in a men’s room stall we start to realize just how much the film hates its potential audience. In fact, the smarmy vibe is well matched by the film’s dingy look, giving the impression it was shot with split pea soup smeared on the digital lens. The stilted performances do not help either, unless you dig the in-joke of indie directors such as Johnathan Coauette popping up in small cameos.

The last press screening I attended that was as stony silent as the Blood p&i was for Claude Lanzmann’s The Last of the Unjust. Obviously, the two films bear no comparison. The point is nobody could even generate a chuckle for the Brooklyn vampires. A thoroughly unpleasant failure by any rational aesthetic standard, Summer of Blood is absolutely not recommended when it screens again tomorrow (4/26) during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. If you already have a ticket, scalp it in front of the theater. Instead, try to catch Slaying the Badger, Battered Bastards of Baseball, or Black Coal, Thin Ice, three great Tribeca selections also showing on Saturday.

LFM GRADE: F

Posted on April 25th, 2014 at 11:20pm.