Author: Joe Bendel

LFM Reviews Surprise

From "Surprise."
From “Surprise.”

By Joe Bendel. His name is Sun Wukong. He is better known as the Monkey King and he means business. Unfortunately, nobody else does. When he loses his powers through a wacky chain of events and his loser companions are magically trapped, Stone Ox village will have to rely on the over-confident but underachieving Wang Dachui, who always finds ways to misuse the thimble full of magical powers he possesses. Journey to the West takes a detour through Zucker Brothers territory in Surprise, which is now playing in New York.

Technically, Stone Ox village already has a mystical protector, but “Mr.” Murong has not been himself lately. The supernaturally imprisoned evil force his descendants swore to maintain watch over has really been giving him the full court temptation press. Wang Dachui, a sort of wuxia analog of the popular Chinese webisode slacker, thinks he is the man, but he is no match for the cat demon looking to plunder the village’s secret weapon. Fortunately, Murong saves his bacon, but the ensuing battle greatly weakens the guardian, leaving Stone Ox vulnerable as a result.

Feeling unappreciated, Wang decides it might be best to get out of Dodge for a while. He temporarily hooks up with the Monkey King, who has been separated from his colleagues: the monk, Tang Seng (a.k.a. Xuanzang), Zhu “Pigsy” Bajie, and Sha “Sandman” Wujing. Sun is now mostly mortal, but he still has considerable anger management issues and a wicked facility with the quarter staff. However, he is no match for the temper of Su Xiaomei, the rice cake vendor, who reluctantly employed Wang as a delivery boy. Nevertheless, the clumsy would-be-hero will return to Stone Ox to save her from the dark whatever it is that is up to no good (frankly, it is never very clear, but it is definitely bad news).

Whether as director, screenwriter, or co-star (appearing as Sandman), Yi is never intimidated by broad, over-the-top humor. This will be “Chinese humor” an audience member warned me before the screening—and she was right. Yi and rubber-faced star Ke Bai have no time for subtlety or sophisticated word play. On the other hand, few comedies can boast so many earth-shaking cataclysms, aside from Stephen Chow & Derek Kwok’s Journey to the West. Funny how that works.

Ke Bai certainly has no reservations when it comes to realizing the humiliations meted out on Wang. He takes a pasting and keeps on preening. As Su, Yang Zishan (recognizable from So Young and 20 Once Again) probably gets biggest, most exportable laughs cutting Wang down to size. Liuxun Zimo also makes a surprisingly credible action figure as the Monkey King. In fact, there are some pretty respectably choreographed action sequences, especially those involving the cat demon.

Although it is a goofball comedy, Surprise brings plenty of cosmic chaos. If there is another special effects spectacular opening this weekend, they have sure kept it quiet, so fantasy buffs really ought to consider checking out the exploits of Wang Dachui and the Monkey King. It has its charms, like watching the Three Stooges running amok through The Lord of the Rings. Recommended for fans of screwball genre films, Surprise is now playing in New York at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on December 23rd, 2015 at 11:08am.

The Glasnost Soundtrack: LFM Reviews Scorpions: Forever and a Day

By Joe Bendel. Frankly, the Scorpions were almost as skeptical as everyone else when they announced their “farewell” tour. Of course, with each extension, the question looked increasingly moot. Nevertheless, the tour finally ended, but Katja von Garnier was there to document their relentless string of stadium concerts in Scorpions: Forever and a Day, which is now available on DVD from MVD.

The Scorpions were the original road warriors, so all the current members are unsure how they will keep themselves once they retire from active touring. Right from the start, they granted themselves a loophole for special one-off gigs. They just wanted to avoid looking ridiculous by staying too long at the Headbangers’ Ball. After all, the band has recently joined the Rolling Stones in the exclusive ranks of rock band still active after their fiftieth anniversary.

Von Garnier also chronicles the creation story, growing pains, and international success of the band. Founding guitarist Rudolf Schenker has been the only constant since they formed in 1965, but for many fans, the Scorpions’ history really starts four years later when lead vocalist Klaus Meine joined. Even if you are not a metalhead, the two veteran band-members are surprisingly interesting and engaging to meet on screen. For instance, despite the decades of touring (and everything that implies) Meine remains happily married to his longtime wife (although the doc rather implies there is more to the story than they care to share).

In contrast, Schenker is sort of the bad genius guru of the band. He had the vision to drag the Scorpions to Russia in 1988 when the Communist government was still giving rock music the bureaucratic stink eye. They lost money on that initial show, but when they came back one year later, they found the seeds they had sown had sprouted a large popular following during the Glasnost thaw. Their Russian experiences inspired “Winds of Change,” which became the power ballad anthem of Glasnost and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (recorded by a German band, singing English lyrics, the band duly notes). Mikhail Gorbachev does not appear in many rock docs, but he turns up here (and he’s still a fan).

From "Scorpions: Forever and a Day."
From “Scorpions: Forever and a Day.”

You have to give any band credit when they hit the fifty year mark, no matter how many personnel changes they have had. Although following the tour is repetitive by its nature, von Garnier does her best to exploit drama when it arises. Will Meine get voice back in time for the concert at Paris’s Bercy Arena? No spoilers here.

In any event, Forever is a solidly entertaining, highly accessible rock documentary. For perspective, it is on par with The Other One: the Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir and considerably superior to Janis: Little Girl Blue. Highly recommended for Scorpions fans and worth checking if you are somewhat intrigued or baffled by the band’s longevity, Scorpions: Forever and a Day is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from MVD.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on December 18th, 2015 at 1:48pm.

LFM Reviews The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun

Lady Car Glasses GunBy Joe Bendel. Dany Dorémus could be a serious femme fatale, but she lacks the confidence. Perhaps it is because of her glasses. Her parents probably did not help, either. Apparently, in French author Sébastien Japrisot’s source novel, they were rather notorious during the German occupation, but that subtext is completely buried in Joann Sfar’s The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun, which opens today in select theaters.

Dorémus is bizarrely mousy given her movie star looks, but the audience is immediately given reason to believe she is not quite right in the head. Regardless, she will gamely agree to do a favor for Michel Caravaille, the boss she has long carried a torch for, despite his marriage to her former business school classmate, Anita. While they attend a party, Dorémus types up his urgent report and will then drive them to the airport next morning for their weekend of business and pleasure.

She was supposed to take Caravaille’s Ford Thunderbird straight home, but instead the devil on her should tempts her into taking a joyride down south to see the sea. However, Dorémus is baffled when everyone along her impulsive route insists they saw her drive through that way the day before. A black-clad Giallo man even seems to assault her in a service station restroom in order to give her a wrist injury to match her doppelganger. At least that is how it appears from Dorémus’s POV, but her grasp on reality could be somewhat problematic.

Sfar, the graphic novelist and director of the animated Rabbi’s Cat embraces the foreboding visual élan of the Giallo genre and the groovy 1970s period trappings. It is always great fun to watch, even when the film appears to be barreling off the rails. At times, it feels like a marginally more grounded Mortem or a dramatically more grounded Lost Highway, but Sfar brings it all together down the stretch. Along the way, he does his best to dazzle with split screens, flashbacks, and noir mood lighting.

From "The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun."
From “The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun.”

The Scottish Freya Mavor is terrific as Dorémus, the sexually charged naïf-waif. Similarly, Benjamin Biolay has the appropriate upper-class swagger for Caravaille. Frankly, Mavor and Biolay could easily pass for the daughter and son of Samantha Eggar and Oliver Reed, who first played the roles in Anatole Litvak’s1970 adaptation of Japrisot’s novel. As Anita the entitled trophy wife, Stacy Martin more or less picks up where she left off in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Frankly, Sfar’s cast looks almost as good as the beautifully sinister cinematography of Manuel Dacosse (who also lensed Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani’s neo-retro Giallos, Amer and The Strange Color of Your Bodies Tears). Costume designer Pascaline Chavanne’s chic threads also directly contribute to the dangerously seductive vibe.

There are definitely shades of Hitchcock in Car, but it is steamier than anything Hitch could ever get away with, except maybe the first act of Psycho. Clearly, Sfar is definitely riffing on the masters, which makes it quite a lot of fun to watch. Highly recommended for fans of psychological thrillers, The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun opens in a handful of theaters today (12/18), including the Gateway Film Center in Toronto, releasing simultaneously on VOD platforms, like iTunes.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on December 18th, 2015 at 1:47pm.

LFM Reviews Anguish

AnguishBy Joe Bendel. Tess’s father has been deployed to Middle East. At least he will be safe there from the malevolent power apparently possessing his daughter. Tess’s young mother Jessica will be the unfortunate one stuck dealing with her erratic behavior. Unfortunately, the teen’s long history of emotional problems will delay a more supernatural diagnosis until it is almost too late. There are indeed trying times ahead in screenwriter-director Sonny Mallhi’s Anguish, which opens today in select theaters.

It is easier for Jessica to deal with Tess when her husband is around to teach her how to play guitar and skateboard. The teen is more than a little socially awkward, but it is not her fault. All her life, her brain chemistry has worked against her. She has responded positively to her latest dosage, so her parents hope and pray she has turned a corner. However, things take an ominous turn for the worse when Jessica relocates them to a sleepy burg in Illinois. It seems the spirit of Lucinda, the teenager killed in the film’s prologue, might have some kind of dark hold over her.

For a horror film, Anguish is remarkably grounded and stylistically Spartan. Clearly, Mallhi understands parents and teens are often scarier to each other than anything that goes bump in the night. Of course, Tess’s painful history and awkwardly reserved demeanor make her especially vulnerable to possession. In a way, Anguish is not unlike The Babadook, but the difficult child is older and the beleaguered parent is younger. Yet, instead of kicking around fairy tales tropes, Mallhi taps into the primal fears and puritan anxieties that make classic supernatural horror so unsettling.

From "Anguish."
From “Anguish.”

Being moody and gritty is all very fine as an aesthetic choice, but it does not give the cast the sort of overblown effects and an exploitative excesses they could hide behind. Fortunately, they are all quite down-to-earth and credible as average, overwhelmed people, especially Annika Marks, whose work as Jessica is uncompromisingly honest. Granted, we sometimes want to shake Ryan Simpkins’ Tess by the shoulders, but that is sort of the whole point. Ryan O’Nan’s Father Myers is also refreshingly sympathetic and decent, even though Mallhi ultimately takes the film in a different direction than the classic Blattyesque priest-versus-evil spirit climax.

Anguish is a very good horror film that is on par with the unjustly under-appreciated The Diabolical and superior to the over-hyped Babadook. Despite some vaguely New Age elements, Mallhi has a good sense of what everyday life is like for God-fearing, military-serving working class people. He also delivers some well-timed jolts in the early going and some serious dread during the third act. Highly recommended for horror fans, Anguish opens today (12/18) in Los Angeles, at the Arena Cinema and also launches on VOD platforms.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on December 18th, 2015 at 1:47pm.

LFM Reviews Son of Saul

By Joe Bendel. In National Socialist concentration camps, Jews who served as “Sonderkommando” were afforded modest privileges and allowed comparatively free movement within the confining walls. Yet, it was undeniably hellish duty. Charged with escorting prisoners into the gas chambers and cleaning up after the mass executions, their first order of business was often to dispatch their predecessors. The new Sonderkommando’s families frequently followed soon thereafter. Consequently, they had no illusions about their ultimate fate. It is rather understandable why the most significant uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau was planned by the Sonderkommando. Saul Ausländer is part of the rebellion’s inner circle, but he will be distracted by an even more profound crisis in László Nemes’ Son of Saul, Hungary’s official foreign language Oscar submission, which opens this Friday at Film Forum.

Frankly, Son of Saul might be most effective if viewers are not fully briefed on what to expect. It is safe to confirm, this is indeed a Holocaust story, incorporating a very real event, executed with unusually personal immediacy. The resulting viewing experience is not merely bracing. It is sort of like being Tasered. However, judging from some colleagues’ reactions, it may well be that the more forewarned you are, the less potent Nemes’ approach will be, so proceed with caution.

It starts as just another day in the National Socialist death factory for Ausländer, until he sees a body that cracks his defensive shell. Like Ausländer, we see him only after his death. While not strictly adhering to Ausländer’s as-seen-through-his-eyes POV, Nemes largely limits his shots to what would easily be within his field of vision. As an experienced Sonderkommando, he is somewhat desensitized to the horrors that would have been horrific centerpieces of other Holocaust films. Instead, we get a sense of the kinetic maelstrom of death he must navigate.

To further emphasize its restrictive scope, Son of Saul was composed expressly for the pre-widescreen Academy aspect ratio. The audience is immediately aware just how much they are not seeing, necessarily feeling disoriented as a result. Nemes forces the audience to figure out Ausländer’s relationships to other Sonderkommando through the dramatic context of what follows. This is a remarkably physical film that is just as choreographed as any musical or martial arts extravaganza.

Evidently, Ausländer reluctantly agreed to help scrounge supplies for the revolt, because he understood how little he had to lose. However, when he thinks he recognizes the body in question, he starts recklessly improvising a scheme to prevent the requisite autopsy and find a Rabbi to say Kaddish. He will knowingly jeopardize the imminent uprising, but his mission is equally defiant in its way.

From "Son of Saul."
From “Son of Saul.”

For most of the cast, simply surviving the non-stop bedlam constitutes quite a performance. However, Géza Röhrig is quietly devastating as Ausländer. Essentially, he shows us the stirrings of a long dormant soul struggling to assert itself. It is a painfully honest, desperately lean performance that will shame this year’s histrionically indulgent award-seeking performances (we’re looking at you, Carol).

Son of Saul is not exactly immersive, but it gives the audience a visceral sense of the confusion and dehumanization necessary to make the gas chambers run. This is an exhausting film, but also a uniquely powerful one, unlike almost any other well-meaning holocaust narrative. Highly recommended, it opens this Friday (12/18) in New York at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on December 16th, 2015 at 7:02pm.

LFM Reviews Dreams Rewired

By Joe Bendel. If Guy Maddin set out to adapt a ten year-old Wired magazine article, the result would probably look a lot like this, but the resulting film would not be so smugly assured of its insightfulness. That must be the difference between the Canadian and Austrian temperaments. Martin Reinhart, Thomas Tode, and Manu Luksch suggest our current digital era is only one of many successive information revolutions that constantly recalibrated the speed of Twentieth Century life. They will illustrate their point through the collage of rarely seen but suitably ironic early cinema clips that constitutes Dreams Rewired, opening this Wednesday at Film Forum.

So perhaps the more things change, the more they stay the same—or rather maybe the only constant is change? One of those is the general gist of Rewired. The trio of co-directors plus their fourth co-screenwriter Mukul Patel somewhat convincingly suggest the magnitude of innovation wrought by the internet and wireless communication is not so very different than societal transformation brought about by the telegraph, telephone, radio (the original wireless), and forms of moving pictures.

They probably have a point there, but they never really take it to a deeper level. Instead, the film is really more about the cascading images of retro-futurism and technological anxiety culled from the films of Thomas Edison, Alice Guy, Dziga Vertov, Carl Dreyer, Rene Clair, and Louis Feuillade. Both Chaplin and Keaton make cameo appearances, but probably the most readily identifiable clips come from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, which turned out not to reflect the future after all.

From "Dreams Rewired."
From “Dreams Rewired.”

Throughout Rewired, the audience waits for Reinhart, Tode, Luksch, and Patel to step up their analysis, but it stays at the level of “look at how impressed people were with their televisions and switch boards.” As a result, the real reason for watching the docu-essay is the wild imagery they have assembled. If you want to see Teutonic men in tights and space helmets, this is film you have been waiting for. A game Tilda Swinton also plays along, narrating the repetitive thesis and sometimes providing archly anachronistic contemporary dialogue for some of the scenes the filmmakers incorporate.

If you enjoy retro-futuristic space opera, there are amusing bits and pieces in Rewired, but you are probably better off revisiting episodes of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet or classic films like Metropolis and Destination Moon (neither of which suited the purposes of Reinhart, etc., etc.). It sounds like brainy fun, but it really plays like an internet supercut. Problematically lightweight, Dreams Rewired is bound to leave viewers wanting more (of something, anything) when it opens this Wednesday (12/16) in New York, at Film Forum.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on December 16th, 2015 at 7:02pm.