Month: April 2014

LFM Reviews Nora Noh @ The Korean Cultural Service

By Joe Bendel. Fashion designer Nora Noh is widely credited with popularizing the mini-skirt in South Korea. Obviously, she deserves the thanks of a grateful nation, if not the entire world. Yet many younger Korean fashionistas were unaware of her trailblazing work until the opening of a special retrospective commemorating her sixty years in the business. Kim Sung-hee surveys Noh’s life and couture while chronicling the mounting of the designer’s special exhibition in Nora Noh, which screens for free this coming Tuesday in New York, courtesy of the Korean Cultural Service.

Noh could be considered the Korean Coco Chanel and Edith Head combined. She was a pioneer designing sleek, elegant “western style” business and casual wear for professional Korean women. A shrewd businesswoman, Noh launched a successful ready-to-wear line before her European colleagues. Yet, she also became the personally designer for many of Korea’s top stars, including pop idol Yoon Bok-hee, who made Korean cultural history sporting Noh’s minis.

Even viewers with little fashion sense will pick out interesting nuggets from Kim’s profile. Noh very definitely lived a feminist Horatio Alger life. Her challenges continued when she refused to kowtow to the arrogant press (likely explaining her under-representation in Korean cultural history). She had her run-ins with the secret police, yet ironically, the film indirectly suggests the liberated simplicity of Noh’s designs was rather compatible with the militarist government’s drive to industrialize (a potentially provocative point that could have been explored at greater length).

From "Nora Noh."

Perhaps the film’s greatest assets are the extensive clips from vintage Korean movies illustrating Noh’s image-making power, which will intrigue cineastes as much or perhaps more than clothes horses. While not exactly chatty, she remains a strong figure of individual stick-to-itiveness and a mostly likable screen presence.

Nora Noh is not the most dramatic film ever lensed, even though Noh’s early life was quite tumultuous. Frankly, the sentimental soundtrack does not sound very Nora Noh. Nevertheless, Kim and editor Lee Hyuk-sang keep it moving along nicely. Recommended for students of fashion as well as those fascinated by the phenomenon of global cultural modernization, Nora Noh screens (free of charge) this Tuesday (4/29) at the Tribeca Cinemas as part of the Korean Cultural Service’s regular Korean Movie Night series.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 27th, 2014 at 9:52pm.

LFM Reviews The Other One: the Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

From "The Other One: the Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir."

By Joe Bendel. Bob Weir never had an ice cream named after him. He always played second banana to Jerry Garcia, but he got a disproportionate share of the perks that come to a rock band tour, if you get the drift. The dean of the jam band scene now gets his overdue ovation in Mike Fleiss’s The Other One: the Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir, which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Weir was adopted at birth by a well-to-do San Francisco couple who were not very San Francisco. He had the city in his blood anyway. An undiagnosed dyslexic, Weir underperformed academically, but found his niche in music. A fast-friendship with the somewhat older and more established Jerry Garcia led to the establishment of what was initially a jug band. After a detour with the Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead were on their way.

The cooperative Weir revisits all the major sites of The Dead creation story, even though most are now completely unrecognizable. He granted Fleiss extensive face time, including valuable interview segments explaining his surprising musical influences, such as the great jazz artist, McCoy Tyner. He also dispels any suspicion of a rivalry with Garcia once and for all. In fact, we get a picture of a genuinely touching friendship between the band members. Frankly, third parties suggest Garcia rather regretted his exalted position with Deadheads, whereas Weir was relieved to be spared their intense devotion.

From "The Other One: the Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir."

Weir is about as laidback as fans would expect, but he has some thoughtful insights to offer viewers. However, Fleiss misses a conspicuous opportunity to push for some consistency on the subject of drug use. Weir might have fond (if hazy) memories of the drug-fueled early days, but Garcia’s sad drug-related end clearly still distresses him.

As a gentle exercise in Grateful Dead revisionism, Fleiss and his assembled talking heads argue Weir played a more active role as a songwriter and an architect of the group’s overall sound than many Garcia partisans realize. Without question, Fleiss and company are more concerned about giving Weir his just due than inviting messy soul searching—and so be it. Other One tells an interesting story, at a healthy pace, but it is not completely blinkered from reality. Recommended for all jam band listeners, The Other One screens again today (4/26) as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 26th, 2014 at 4:01pm.

LFM Reviews Zombeavers @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

From "Zombeavers."

By Joe Bendel. This year, the road to the Academy Awards surely starts in Tribeca. Leslie Nielsen also suddenly has stiff competition for the best on-screen beaver joke. The dam-builders are indeed restive in Jordan Rubin’s Zombeavers, which screens midnight tonight during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Right, so a den of beavers get zombified just before Mary and her two sorority sisters, depressed Jenn and catty Zoe, arrive at her family cabin for a weekend getaway. Do you think they get cell service up there? Dude, please. At least their respective horny significant others crash the party, making things real awkward for Jenn and her cheating dog boyfriend. However, they will not have much time for recriminations before the zombie-beavers attack.

This year, Tribeca’s midnight programmers are determined to discourage viewers from vacationing in the woods. Whether it be the work of homicidal hunters in Preservation, alien-abductors in Extraterrestrial, or zombie-beavers, bad things just seem to happen when you try to get back to nature. Their cautionary warning is duly noted.

So seriously, Zombeavers is just a thing of beauty. It is easily the funniest zombie comedy since Red Snow: Dead vs. Red, which admittedly just screened at Sundance this January, but this is still high praise. Rubin delivers plenty of comedic gore, but rest assured, the nudity is strictly gratuitous.

From "Zombeavers."

As Mary, Jenn, and Zoe, Rachel Melvin, Lexi Atkins, and Cortney Palm are impossible long legged and admirably good sports. The corresponding guys act like they are in a competition to see who can be the biggest meathead idiot, but that is about right for the zombie-beaver sub-genre. Of course, the wildly over the top furry undead creatures are the real stars and they do not disappoint. They’re resourceful little buggers. For extra random cult movie points, Zombeavers also features CSI: Miami regular Rex Linn as Smyth, the grizzled grizzly hunter.

What more could you want from a film than hordes of zombeavers attacking bikini-clad sorority sisters? When in doubt Rubin just cranks up the blood-splattered visual gags, but there are some wickedly droll bits of dialogue scattered throughout. Highly recommended good, clean movie fun, Zombeavers screens tonight (4/26) as a midnight selection of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on April 26th, 2014 at 3:56pm.

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.