Month: January 2015

LFM Reviews White God @ The 2015 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. It is like a cross between the Incredible Journey and Willard/Ben franchises, but carrying the baggage of the recent rise of Hungarian nationalism. The underdogs are truly underdogs, but they will have their day in Kornél Mundruczó’s allegorical fable, White God, which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Much to everyone’s consternation, Lili and her faithful mutt Hagen must spend the summer with the father she barely knows. He is not crazy about it either, especially when a neighbor tips off the authorities to the noisy Hagen. To encourage purebreds and provide an ominous symbolic parallel, the authorities have levied a punitive tax on mixed mongrels, like the gentle Hagen.

Of course, Lili’s veritably deadbeat Daniel is not about to pay Hagen’s licensing fee, so he dumps him off by the side of the road. He is not the only one to get this idea. The confused Hagen soon falls in with a pack of newly wild mix-breeds, learning to evade the animal control thugs. Lili and Hagen try their best to find each other, but unfortunately, he falls into the hands of an underground dogfighting trainer, who hopes the mold Hagen into a contender through his savage conditioning.

When you get right down to it, Hagen’s story is more eventful that a complete Noah Baumbach retrospective, but he meets his destiny when he is finally captured and sent to the pound. Rather than simply wait to be euthanized, Hagen will rise up like Spartacus and lead a massive dog revolt. In all honesty, this is what most people will be going to White God to see—and it is pretty spectacular.

Lest anyone fret, White God was filmed using American guidelines for animal handling. No animals were harmed during the process. Presumably, no humans were either, but it is harder to be so definitive on that point. Regardless, the canines are all eerily expressive, particularly Luke and Bodie, who play Hagen. Three years ago, everyone’s tail was wagging for Uggie in The Artist, but the Labrador-sharpei-hound brothers take animal performance to a higher level.

From "White God."

Cinematographer Marcell Rév captures the action from a remarkable dog’s eye level. His intimate perspective really helps anthropomorphize the canines. His wide angle shots also powerfully render the apocalyptic third act. Oh, the human beings, Zsófia Psotta and Sándor Zsótér are not bad either, but her acting-out drama with older school mates gets a bit tiresome.

The White God title is apparently a half-baked reference to caste, creed, colonialism and everything else that imposes hierarchies on people, but even when the dog-pack is rampaging, the film never feels as clumsily didactic as that would suggest. Somehow, Mundruczó just flips the allegorical anarchy switch and we accept it. It is a pretty impressive feat of direction and animal handling. Indeed, Arpad Halasz and Teressa Miller (daughter of veteran handler Karl Lewis Miller, whose credits include Cujo and White Dog) are key collaborators in realizing Mundruczó’s vision. Hard to define but absolutely worth experiencing, White Dog screens again tomorrow (1/25) and next Saturday (1/31) in Park City, during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on January 24th, 2015 at 5:59pm.

LFM Reviews Eden @ The 2015 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. An aspiring French garage DJ does not plan well for the future. That probably isn’t so shocking. Frankly, it is rather surprising just how long he can keep the party going. Nonetheless, when he crashes, he flames out hard in Maria Hansen-Løve’s Eden, which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

In 1992, the garage scene was still fresh and new. At least that is how it sounded to Paul Vallée. While attending a rave in a decommissioned submarine, he has something of a musical epiphany, as his friends partake of more hedonistic indulgences. It is a moment Hansen-Løve renders almost magically—and it will help compensate for most of Vallée’s horrendously irresponsible behavior that follows.

Together with his chum Stan, Vallée forms a DJ duo known as “Cheers” that will enjoy the curse of early success, but it pales in comparison to breakout fame achieved by their real life colleagues Daft Punk. Girl friends come and go, as Cheers evolves into a satellite radio gig and eventually a hand-to-mouth nightlife promotion business. Perversely, Vallée seems to do more drugs as the money gets scarcer, burning through his inheritance and thoroughly trying his mother’s patience.

The style of music is different, but if you have read one or two jazz biographies, you will immediately recognize the trajectory of the narrative. However, the details of the garage or “French Touch” scene are definitely legit, thanks to screenwriter Sven Hansen-Løve (the filmmaker’s brother), who based the film on his own DJ career (hopefully somewhat loosely).

There is no doubt Vallée’s self-absorbed narcissism gets old quickly. The special guest star presence of Greta Gerwig and Brady Corbet (as Vallée’s American ex and her yuppie husband) only further buttresses its nauseating hipsterness. Yet, Eden is so immersive, it simply pulls you into its world, making you feel it in a sensory, tactile way. Even if French electronic music is not your bag, you will get it during Eden.

From "Eden."

As Vallée, Félix de Givry is a bit of a cold fish, who is often hard to read. At times, he comes across like a borderline sociopath, which is rather effective in the film’s overall dramatic context. Arguably, the successive women who take him on as a project really supply the film’s soul. In a performance of great power and fragility, Pauline Etienne acutely expresses the resentment and self-doubt of Louise, the one that got away, but somehow can’t make a clean break of it. Likewise, Iranian exile Golshifteh Farahani (a one-time performer in Tehran’s underground music scene) portrays Yasmin (perhaps Vallée’s last, best chance for a healthy relationship) with tremendous warmth and sensitivity. It is also something of a bold turn for her, considering how much of Eden the current Iranian regime would object to, starting with the decadent music.

Who knew French garage DJs could carry such an epic? Probably more years pass in Eden than Doctor Zhivago, but it is still very much an in-the-moment, experiential kind of film. It is sort of exhausting, but it is worth seeing for exactly that reason. Recommended to a surprising extent, Eden screens this coming Tuesday (1/27) and Wednesday (1/28) in Park City, during this year’s Sundance.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on January 24th, 2015 at 5:58pm.

LFM Reviews Seoul Searching @ The 2015 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Suppose they threw a cultural camp and a 1980s teen comedy broke out instead. Evidently, it happened quite regularly. Not so surprisingly, the sponsoring Korean government was not too amused—hence the program for children of the Korean diaspora was eventually discontinued. However, the camp will have one big horny, heartfelt last hurrah in Benson Lee’s Seoul Searching, which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

Prepare to get your eighties on. They are the children of Korean immigrants in America, Germany, England, and Mexico, who have assimilated more completely than their parents. In many cases, they do not even speak Korean. They have been packed off to reconnect with their Korean heritage, but they are really just there to party. Grace Park, the New Jersey pastor’s daughter, has modeled her style on Madonna. Sid Park has adopted Sid Vicious as his idol. These two might be perfect for each other, but it will take them a while to overcome a really rough start.

S. Park will bunk with Sergio, the aspiring Latin lover, and the ever so German Klaus Lee. The latter is decidedly reserved, but he will come out of his shell a little when he helps American adoptee Kris Schultz track down her biological mother. Meanwhile, military academy cadet Mike Lee wages an open war with three kids who want to be the next Run DMC. Yet, the stern Mr. Kim only seems to want to bust Sid Park’s chops.

Searching is based on writer-director Lee’s fondly remembered 1980s summer at Korea’s cultural summer camp—and you can really feel the nostalgia. Honestly, if all the Clash, Go-Gos, Erasure, and Violent Femmes tunes do not bring the decade flooding back for you, you just weren’t around back then. In terms of tone, it is four parts John Hughes and one part American Pie, but the underlying themes of generational culture clashes and the need for roots gives it greater bittersweet substance.

From "Seoul Searching."

The entire cast is ridiculously charismatic, even when selling the grossest make-out session ever and plenty of manipulative melodrama involving Schultz and her birth-mother. Frankly, it seems like Justin Chon and Jessika Van are way due to breakout as major stars (he was terrific in the short film Jin, but might be better known for the Twilight franchise, while she made a strong impression in indie fare like Bang, Bang). They really have great chemistry in their punked out, material girl Moonlighting-esque sequences. However, Korean actress Byul Kang sort of steals the third act out from under everyone as the taekwondo tomboy Sue-jin.

Even if you weren’t at the Korean government sponsored summer camps, Lee and his cast will make you fondly remember something from your teen years. He juggles at least a dozen well defined characters and two or three times as many mood shifts. Yet, he holds the overstuffed film together and makes it work quite well. Slightly naughty but wholly endearing, Seoul Searching is recommended rather highly for all kids of the 1980s when it screens again next Saturday (1/31) in Park City and Sunday (2/1) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on January 24th, 2015 at 5:58pm.

LFM Reviews The Tugendhat House @ The New York Jewish Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building might be an exemplar of International style architecture, but its glass and steel basically are what they are. That is often the case with his American work, but the Villa Tugendhat in Brno is something else entirely. While it still reflects his modernist aesthetic, it also happens to a house that breathes and welcomes occupants. It is a surprisingly livable space, which is why it has been consistently repurposed by subsequent appropriating regimes. Dieter Reifarth chronicles the history of the home and its original [rightful] owners in The Tugendhat House, which screens during this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival.

Reifarth opens the documentary by opening up Tugendhat House, slowly panning through its restored rooms and open flowing spaces, as disembodied voices read the polarized reviews it originally garnered in the architectural press. The Tugendhats no longer reside here, thanks to the National Socialists and the Communists who followed them, but philosopher Ernst Tugendhat fondly remembers the years he lived there as a small boy. So does one Tugendhat sister, but the youngest was born while the family was in exile. However, the entire Tugendhat-Guggenhein-Hammer family takes an active interest in the restoration campaign, including one who happens to be a refurbishment expert.

Although they lost many extended family members to the Holocaust, the Tugendhat nucleus managed to get out while the getting was good, resettling in Switzerland and later Venezuela. Given their sensibilities, it is rather remarkable the Tugendhat House survived the Nazi and Soviet occupations. While the Germans simply used it as another piece of prime real estate to dole out as they deemed fit, the Communist authorities fashioned it into a long-term children’s spinal clinic. Frankly, the Tugendhat form seems completely ill-suited to such a function, but former patients found the natural light quite cheerful. Decades later, the final divorce decree between the Czech and Slovak Republics was ironed out there, permanently fixing the building in the Czech collective memory.

T House is an unusually balanced fusion of architectural appreciation and sweeping history. If you don’t know Ludwig Mies van der Rohe from Ludwig von Mises you might find many passages of the film rather archi-geeky. Nevertheless, Reifarth really gives you a vivid sense of the villa as a distinctive space and place. He also doggedly follows the twists of the Tugendhat family story, as well as the wider cultural context of their increasingly iconic home.

From "The Tugendhat House."

After watching T House, the Villa Tugendhat will almost assuredly become viewers’ favorite Mies van der Rohe building, which may or may not be thunderous bragging rights given their respective interest in the art and practice of architecture, but that still means it is rather smart and effective as a work of documentary filmmaking. Of course, for those who are well versed in Mies van der Rohe and the International School, it is like catnip. Yet everyone should find some meaning in the tragedies and resiliency of the Tugendhats’ exile experience. Highly recommended for those fascinated by the art and history under discussion, The Tugendhat House screens this coming Wednesday (1/28) at the Walter Reade Theater, as part of the 2015 NYJFF.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on January 24th, 2015 at 5:57pm.

LFM Reviews Netflix’s What Happened, Miss Simone? @ The 2015 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. If you ever heard Nina Simone live, you should have been on your best behavior, because she could vibe an inattentive audience member harder than Keith Jarrett. In all honesty, anyone not fully appreciating her classically trained piano chops and deep smoky vocals deserved a bit of shaming. A forceful presence on stage, Simone knew what she wanted and maintained high expectations—facts we should all respect. However, the tumult in her personal life also contributed to her uncompromising and sometimes self-sabotaging public persona. Through extensive archival recordings and interviews with her closest associates, Liz Garbus paints a complex portrait of the jazz and soul diva in What Happened, Miss Simone?, which screens during the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

You could see Simone’s classical attack in the way she deconstructed and recombined standards into something entirely new and rhapsodic. Her great ambition was to play a classical recital at Carnegie Hall, but that path was not open to an African American child of the Jim Crow Yellow Dog Democrat South. She never really forgave America for that, even though she eventually played the hallowed hall as the folk and soul influenced jazz vocalist we remember so well.

Initially, she indeed had a lot of success with standards like “I Loves You Porgy” and “My Baby Just Cares for Me” and a strong manager in her husband, Andy Stroud. Unfortunately, their union took a sinister turn, with Stroud, the ex-cop, becoming increasingly violent as Simone became more politically radicalized. Although the late Stroud’s abuse is well documented in the film, he has a chance to speak for himself through never before seen footage shot for a prior unrealized documentary project. In fact, the film is remarkably balanced for a music doc, fully exploring Simone’s own abusive behavior to her daughter, executive producer Lisa Simone Kelly. It also suggests some of Simone’s late career scuffling was partly her own fault, as well as a function of her late diagnosed bipolar disorder. To Garbus’s credit, this is definitely not the stuff of hagiography.

From "What Happened, Miss Simone?"

Garbus and her producers tracked down a lot of never before heard interviews conducted for Stephen Cleary, the “co-author” of her memoir and an earlier aborted autobiography. However, the holy cats centerpiece of the film is the 1976 Montreux Concert (wherein Simone pretty much gives everyone what-for), which has been available in full on DVD since 2006. Still, Garbus gives more context to better understand the off-stage dynamics at play.

For music fans, some of the best sequences feature Al Schackman, her longtime guitarist and musical director, who survived a baptism of fire to become her close musical collaborator. That is what the spirit of jazz is all about. After watching Miss Simone, you will also probably find “My Baby Just Cares for Me” is stuck in your head, but that’s not a bad thing. Highly recommended for fans of jazz vocals, What Happened, Miss Simone screens again next Friday (1/30) in Park City and tonight and next Saturday (1/31) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on January 23rd, 2014 at 4:12pm.

LFM Reviews Sons of Liberty on The History Channel

By Joe Bendel. It is always bad news for an oppressive government when the wealthy elites start making common cause with the drunken rabble. Such was the case at the Second Continental Congress. Bostonians Sam Adams and John Hancock had little in common, but they both loathed paying British taxes. Together with their fellow patriots, they changed history and ultimately founded our great nation. Their early skirmishes on the streets of Boston and the campaign to unify all thirteen colonies are dramatized in the History Channel’s three-night mini-series Sons of Liberty, which begins this Sunday.

Not surprisingly, Sam Adams was a terrible tax collector. When his leniency evolves into outright insurrection, Loyalist Governor Thomas Hutchinson calls for his head. For the sake of stability, the wealthy merchant John Hancock tries to play peacemaker, paying off Adams’ debts and convincing the future revolutionary leader to cool his rhetoric. However, Hutchinson soon radicalizes the moderate Hancock by clamping down on both his legitimate mercantile and smuggling operations (which were largely indistinguishable in duty-despising 1760s Massachusetts). Tensions build until blood is finally shed in 1770, concluding the first night of the series with the Boston Massacre.

At this point Dr. Joseph Warren enters the story, not just to tend to the wounded, but also as a prominent patriot in his own right. Those who know their history will understand what lies in store for him, but at least he gets the mini’s only love scene with Margaret Kemble Gage, the New Jersey-born wife of the brutal new military governor, Gen. Thomas Gage. Their affair may or may not have been true, but there is enough historical speculation to justify its inclusion here.

Meanwhile, the reluctant Sam Adams accompanies Hancock and his brother to the First Continental Congress. Although it is not very productive from his standpoint, they meet two key allies, a lecherous old eccentric named Ben Franklin and the quietly commanding George Washington. Essentially, the second part of Sons sets the scene for Lexington and Concord, as well as the vote-counting at the Second Continental Congress, which will play out in the third climatic night.

By focusing on less celebrated Founding Fathers like Hancock and Warren, screenwriters Stephen David & David C. White help distinguish Sons from HBO’s John Adams and the old 1980s Barry Bostwick George Washington miniseries, its natural comparative titles. Frankly, the best part of Sons is the way it celebrates the idiosyncrasies and unruliness of the early Patriots. Was Franklin a bit of a hedonist? You bet—and a genius too. Clearly, they had to be wired slightly differently to challenge the mighty force of the British Empire, but they were also highly intelligent (both strategically and tactically), courageous to a fault, and indeed willing to sacrifice their lives, fortune, and sacred honor.

From "Sons of Liberty."

Ben Barnes is suitably intense either brooding or raging as the mercurial Sam Adams, whereas E.T.’s Henry Thomas is stuck playing the far less cool John Adams as a bit of a worrywart. Of course, nobody has more fun than Dean Norris, who gleefully captures Franklin’s sage insight and mischievous humor. Ryan Eggold also adds a nice bit of romantic dash as the good Dr. Warren. Yet, the biggest surprise is how well the historical Hancock holds up as a central figure and how convincingly Rafe Spall portrays the steady blossoming of his leadership and integrity.

As period productions go, Sons is okay, but not exactly sumptuously detailed. Nonetheless, Canadian director Kari Skogland keeps it moving along at a brisk trot. To their credit, she and the screenwriter tandem never water down the colonials’ complaints about intrusive government and confiscatory taxation, making it rather timely for Twenty-First Century American viewers. Definitely recommended for those who enjoy historicals, especially those that come with a bit of ale-swigging, Sons of Liberty premieres this Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday evenings (1/25-1/27), on the History Channel.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on January 23rd, 2014 at 4:05pm.