Month: April 2014

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.

LFM Reviews Keep On Keepin’ On @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

From "Keep On Keepin’ On."

By Joe Bendel. Clark Terry’s distinctive personal sound has been justly hailed as the “happiest” in all jazzdom. Nobody could lift your spirits in live performance like he could, so it will be especially difficult for his fans to see Terry’s suffering the ravages of age and ill health. Yet, he doggedly continues to mentor his latest student, forging an unusually close relationship with blind Justin Kauflin. Alan Hicks follows four eventful years of their jazz lives in Keep On Keepin’ On, which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Terry is the only musician to play in the Ellington, Basie, and Tonight Show bands. Thelonius Monk’s last real studio sideman gig was for Terry, one of the trumpeter and flugelhornist’s 905 documented recording sessions. If you didn’t know already, he is the real deal, but he has always been willing to take young musicians under his wing. However, Kauflin is more than just his latest pupil.

Born with degenerative vision that failed completely during his grade school years, Kauflin replaced his enthusiasm for sports with music. Despite his obvious talent, he suffers from confidence issues. Frustratingly, he just cannot seem to find sideman gigs, for conspicuously obvious reasons. Surely, Terry must know someone who can help, right? As a matter of fact, he once gave lessons to a young cat named Quincy Jones, who happens to be one of the producers of Keep On.

At times, Hicks’ intimate access to the two musicians feels like more of a curse than a blessing. He captures moments of pain and indignity that are uncomfortable to watch, but they accurately present the messiness of reality. For jazz fans, it is also bittersweet to see the late great Mulgrew Miller briefly appearing in an interview segment. On the flip side, it should be noted Quincy Jones looks eternally fab.

Frankly, it is important to accentuate the positive in Keep On. Perhaps providentially, one of Terry’s greatest hits was “Mumbles,” featuring his sly nonsensical blues vocalizing, considering his lessons now largely depend on his scatting chops. As bad as things get, Terry keeps plugging away with and on behalf of Kauflin, because you cannot keep a great man down.

From "Keep On Keepin’ On."

Indeed, great is the right term. Jazz fans respect Bird and Dizzy, revere Duke and Armstrong, but its Clark Terry that we love. For years he would regularly headline one of the major New York clubs every other month or so, giving us a chance to recharge our spiritual batteries. It is hard to accept we probably will not be seeing him lead that familiar quintet again (featuring David Glasser on alto, Don Friedman on piano, Marcus McLaurine on bass, and Sylvia Cuenca on drums), but that appears to be the case. If you missed them, you missed out.

Clearly, Hicks understands Terry’s musical significance and appreciates the dedication of his wife Gwen. Keep On is definitely a happy-sad kind of film, instilling optimism in the next generation, while paying tribute to those who came before them. You will probably need to listen to a good dose of Terry after viewing Keep On Keepin’ On to cheer yourself up, but it is still highly recommended for jazz fans when it screens again this Friday (4/25) during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on April 24th,2014 at 10:53pm.

LFM Reviews Preservation @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

From "Preservation."

By Joe Bendel. We do not read short story writer Richard Connell very much anymore, except for his constantly anthologized “The Most Dangerous Game.” Years after the Joel McCrea-Irving Pichel adaptation, exploitation filmmakers keep “paying homage.” The latest is not the greatest, but midnight movie fans have certainly seen worse than Christopher Denham’s Preservation, which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

For reasons that escape us, Mike Neary has organized a nostalgic hunting trip with his neglected (and secretly pregnant) wife Wit and his surly brother Sean, who has just been discharged from the military under mysterious circumstances. He seems a little tense. His disposition will not improve when their gear is stolen. Wisely, brother Mike chose an abandoned state park for sentimental reasons, so with their cell phones gone, the three will be totally on their own.

Frankly, the first two acts rather try a viewers’ patience. Here is a survival tip: if a gang of psycho hunters are stalking you, give them that extra whack if you ever get the drop on one of them. Instead, the Nearys are constantly letting them pop back up, with dire consequences.

From "Preservation."

However, when the hunted finally becomes the proper hunter, Preservation starts to deliver the sort of sleazy vicarious payback we went in looking for. For a good portion of the film, the hunters have no villainous personality because of the admittedly creepy masks they wear. Yet, when we finally come to understand who they are, it is rather unsettling, offering an unexpected commentary on our increasingly desensitized nature.

Wrenn Schmidt is pretty convincing as the reluctant action heroine, while Pablo Schreiber (Liev’s half-brother) nicely skirts the line between intense and kind of crazy as Sean Neary. In contrast, Aaron Staton seems rather pale vanilla in comparison.

Preservation is mostly just standard issue survivalist fare, but it looks like Hitchcock’s Vertigo compared to the thematically similar Black Rock. Scattering a few laughs amid the bloodshed, Preservation only occasionally raises the exploitation bar above the genre minimum. If that’s good enough for you, it screens again this Friday (4/25) during the Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on April 24th, 2014 at 10:48pm.

LFM Reviews The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. In the near-ish future, hyperinflation, Gresham’s Law, and even central banking as we know it might become relics of the past. We are not there yet, but the silver bullet might already be out there in cyberspace. It is called Bitcoin and it is not just for Libertarian eggheads anymore. Nicholas Mross documents the genesis and prodigious growth of the digital currency in The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin, which screened today as part of the special Tribeca Talks series at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Presumably writing under a pseudonym, “Satoshi Nakamoto” sketched out the principles of the decentralized Bitcoin infrastructure, integrating pre-existing technologies in revolutionary ways. Finite in number, Bitcoins would be “mined” by those who lend their computing resources to process Bitcoin transactions. Mross’s brother Daniel was one such early adopter, whose Bitcoin evangelism provided the impetus for Rise.

As director and co-writer, Mross provides a lucid explanation of the Bitcoin system and an authoritative history of its formative years. However, he spends a disproportionate amount of time chronicling the Bitcoin mining experiences of his brother, who seems like a really nice guy, but will probably mostly be remembered in the Bitcoin history books for inspiring the currency’s first feature documentary.

Unfortunately, the news cycle did not do Mross any favors either. He was able to tack on an epilogue addressing several late breaking developments that bear quite directly on the Bitcoin narrative, but it is clearly a rushed job that lacks the depth of the prior segments. You cannot blame anyone, it is just a documentarian’s worst fears realized.

There is still good history and analysis in Rise, but one wishes he had gotten even more fundamental, by measuring Bitcoins against Jevons’ textbook functions of money: a medium of exchange, a measure of value, a standard of deferred payments, and a store of value. Although not universally accepted, you could probably use Bitcoins for all your daily shopping in certain New York and Bay Area neighborhoods, so yes, it increasingly serves as a medium of exchange. Bitcoins are commonly listed in most market reports, so they can technically serve as a measure of value, but the extreme volatility Mross chronicles makes this slightly problematic in practice.

Clearly, the store of value question remains the thorniest and will continue to be so long as Bitcoin holdings are vulnerable to hacking or the collapse of exchanges (as happened in the notorious Mt. Gox case, which factors prominently in the third act). Without that sense of security, it is hard to envision widespread acceptance of Bitcoins as a means of deferred payments.

According Mross’s creation story, the first recorded Bitcoin transaction was 10,000 Bitcoins in exchange for two Papa John’s pizzas. One would think Mross would have revisited the relative price of those pies to illustrate Bitcoin’s dramatic increase in value, but evidently that was too gimmicky for him. There is a great deal of food for thought in Rise, but ultimately Mross strives too hard to humanize the tale. Recommended as a primer on digital currency, The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin screens tomorrow (4/23) as part of the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca Talks programming. Given the stop-press addendum, there should be plenty discuss.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on April 22nd, 2014 at 11:27pm

LFM Reviews Ice Poison @ The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. He is not exactly a budding Walter White. His partner is more daring, but her willingness to sample their goods does not bode well. Thanks to Burma’s economic stagnation, the young protagonists are willing make some very problematic choices in Midi Z’s Ice Poison, which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

When we first meet the former farmer, he is so poor, Midi Z’s screenplay does not even grant him a proper name. With prices for their vegetables tumbling, the man and his father hock the family cow to buy a scooter. The old man seems to think there is good money to be made shuttling people home from the local bus depot, but proper cabs take most of that business. His surly son can only scuffle odd delivery jobs. However, that might be just what Sanmei needs.

Tricked into an involuntary marriage in China, Sanmei has been granted leave to bury her failing grandfather. Even though she left behind a child in Yunnan, she has no intention of returning. Determined to make some real money, she gets involved with her drug dealing cousin. Her deal with the scooter driver is simple. If he does the driving, she will handle all the exchanges, giving him a healthy cut for his efforts. They might not be Bonnie and Clyde, but we can all assume they are headed in a similar direction. Yet despite their reckless behavior, Midi Z would not have us judge them harshly. After all, they have taken some pretty drastic steps to secure legitimate work, only to be disappointed at every step.

Arguably, Ice is an unusually ambitious film, grappling with at least two and a half hot button issues. Obviously, Midi Z shines a light on Burma’s drug related social pathologies. He also directly addresses the plight of migrant workers, particularly with respects to bait-and-switch white slavery. Finally, Poison drops intriguing, if under-developed, hints regarding the extent secular modernity has challenged cultural and religious traditions. As a case in point, Sanmei’s return from China was delayed so she could retrieve her grandfather’s burial clothes, which had to be secretly buried themselves to survive the Cultural Revolution.

From "Ice Poison."

The Burma-born, Taiwan-based Midi Z is almost a one-man dynamo for the nascent Burmese film business (and they do call their nation Burma, rather than “Myanmar”). His eye for visuals has sharpened considerably since Return to Burma. However, the narrative balance is a bit out of whack. He spends considerably more time establishing the crumminess of the two protagonists’ lives than building suspense around their illicit trade. Still, the closing scene will knock the wind out of audiences, vividly reminding us just who the biggest loser is amidst this tale of woe.

Given her frequent collaborations with Midi Z, Wu Ke-xi probably qualifies as the first lady of Burmese cinema. In a chilling performance, she conveys both desperate vulnerability as well as nihilistic inclinations. In contrast, Wang Shin-hong is almost too reserved as the scooter-driver, even making it rather tricky to discern when he is stoned. Nevertheless, when he loses it down the stretch, it is something fierce to behold.

Ice Poison is not a perfect film, but it is significant, both as a symbol of Burma’s cinematic potential and a documentary like exercise in holding a mirror up to nature. It is a bit slack at times, but the stakes are about as serious as could be. Recommended who those who appreciate challenging social dramas, Ice Poison screened again tonight (4/22) during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 22nd, 2014 at 11:22pm.

LFM Reviews Sammo Hung’s Seven Warriors; Now Available on DVD

By Joe Bendel. Seven is an auspicious number. There are the Wonders of the World and Deadly Sins. It also only takes seven hardnosed mercenaries to rally a small village’s defenses. The template created by Akira Kurosawa and burnished by John Sturges’ classic western is transplanted to Republican China in Terry Tong’s Seven Warriors, notably co-directed by Sammo Hung, which releases today on DVD from Well Go USA.

Right, you know how this goes. The women of a provincial village regularly plundered by outlaws shame their men into recruiting some hired guns. They find seven volunteers: Commander Chi, five of his former comrades-in-arms, and the over-eager country bumpkin Wong Way-wu. It quickly gets personal when Chi discovers an old colleague happens to be the chief warlord in question. The stakes also increase for Wong when he secretly shelters the sister of Hung Sap Kan, the leader of an aborted rebellion in a nearby village, who meets a premature end during the prologue.

From "Seven Warriors."

Viewers should have a pretty clear idea what they are dealing with from the old school foley effects and heroic synthesizer music. Compared to its two notable predecessors, Warriors is definitely the lesser of the Trio of Seven, but it still delivers plenty of high spirited period action. Also serving as action choreographer, Master Hung stages some nifty fight scenes. The overall body count is also rather impressive. Yet, what might standout most are the frequency and severity of mistakes made by the home team. You certainly cannot accuse them of comic book invincibility.

Master Hung also shows his moves that defy the laws of physics during his cameo smackdown as his namesake. It is also rather amusing to see a young “Little” Tony Leung Chiu Wai (now so familiar to us as the mature smoothie) as the rustic Wong. Both he and Wu Ma (best known for supernatural fare, like A Chinese Ghost Story) overdo the comic relief, but there will be plenty of tragedy to offset it.

There are some surprisingly striking visuals in Warriors, as well as some genuinely earnest performances. Hung keeps the action gritty and grounded and Tong maintains a respectable pace. Altogether, it works pretty well, especially for those for whom it will appeal to a sense of nostalgia. Recommended for genre fans, Seven Warriors is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Well Go USA.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on April 22nd, 2014 at 11:15pm.