Category: 4. Joe Bendel

Midnight Madness: LFM Reviews Asylum Blackout

By Joe Bendel. If the Beatles had worked as cooks in a maximum security mental hospital, they still would have been vastly more talented than George and his slacker bandmates. Yet, for a day job, the pay is pretty good and supposedly they are completely out of harm’s way. Of course, when the power goes out, all bets are off in Alexandre Courtès’ Asylum Blackout, which opened a week of midnight screenings last week at the IFC Center in New York and is also now available on IFC Film’s VOD platforms.

It is 1989, so nobody will spoil the fun by calling for help on their cell-phones. We will be rooting for George to live, because he is a nice enough guy to care how the patient-inmates’ food tastes. He also has a hot girlfriend, so he has something to live for. Regardless, it is going to be a long night when the blackout hits.

The chief guard, J.B., sounds totally cool, but he is actually an abusive hardnose, which makes the opportunity for some score-settling even more attractive. In something of a perfect storm for loony bins, George suspects the scariest prisoner, Harry Green, has convinced the rest of the inmates to stop taking their meds. From there, things descend into bedlam, so to speak, with hints of further eeriness lurking in the margins.

From "Asylum Breakout."

Just to recap, the descriptively titled Asylum Blackout (a.k.a. The Incident) combines a fully stocked nuthouse with a power outage. As long as the execution is serviceable, this is a bullet-proof concept. As it happens, Courtès’ work easily surpasses competent, approaching the outright stylish. The audience never gets any backstory on the loonies, but many at least have weird distinguishing tics. While Courtès eventually meets the gore quota for midnight movies, he takes his time setting the scene and building the tension—what might be considered horror movie foreplay.

Okay, Asylum Blackout is not The Shining, but it will still creep you out from time to time. Paul Rouschop’s design team makes the sanitarium feel like a very real and very ominous place to be, even with the lights on. Rupert Evans is a decent lead and Richard Brake is all kinds of sinister looking as the nefarious Green. Not nearly the gross-out fest you might expect, Asylum Blackout is a pretty good time at the midnight movies. It screens late nights this week at the IFC Center and is also available nationwide through IFC’s VOD services.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on May 8th, 2012 at 11:04am.

Tribeca 2012: LFM Reviews Wagner’s Dream; Film Screens Nationwide on Tuesday (5/8)

By Joe Bendel. It is the epic tale of a powerful ring that brings misfortune to all who seek it. Sound familiar? After technology advanced to the point that Peter Jackson could finally do justice to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it is not surprising that the opera world might hatch some new ideas for Wagner’s Ring cycle. However, mounting a production on stage is a totally different proposition than making a film with extensive post-production effects, as renowned director Robert Lepage demonstrates with the Metropolitan Opera’s ambitious new production of the Ring. Director Susan Froemke (with editor Bob Eisenhardt) captures the ensuing flirting-with-disaster exhilaration of live opera in Wagner’s Dream, which had its world premiere at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, in advance of a special-event nationwide screening this coming Tuesday.

Reportedly, Wagner was not at all satisfied with the initial 1876 staging of his Ring cycle, but he died before he could implement any of the mysterious changes he promised. As a result, the questions of what Wagner would do and what is feasible have bedeviled opera companies ever since. Charged with developing something bold, Lepage did just that.

His radical concept centers on what will be referred to as “the Machine.” A series of interlocked, swiveling planks, sort of but not really resembling a double helix, the Machine will serve as the minimalist set for all four constituent productions of the Ring cycle. When it works, it facilitates some truly epic grandeur. Unfortunately, it is decidedly buggy.

Frankly, it is quite cool and surprising that the Met is so enthusiastically behind Dream, because it documents some embarrassing moments for the storied company. Complications with the machine put a damper on more than one opening night, which is awkward for the professionals bluffing their way through on-stage – but it makes for dramatic documentary cinema.

Traversing "the Machine."

Arguably, Lepage’s Ring cycle production might be thought of as the Met’s Apocalypse Now, with Wagner’s Dream corresponding to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Like screenwriter John Milius sent to retrieve Francis Ford Coppola from the jungle only to be convinced “this would be the first film to win the Nobel Prize,” every cast-member and tech-hand approaching Lepage or Met General Manager Peter Gelb with logistical concerns winds up doubling down on the Machine. Again, just like Coppola’s film, the result is a sometimes flawed, but towering work of genius.

Dream is one of the few behind-the-scenes documentaries completely warranting the big screen treatment. A sense of scale is important here. Yet, it does not ignore the human element, following the challenges faced by the featured performers and sampling the reactions of loyal patrons. Having helmed two previous docs about the Met, including the profile of Maestro James Levine relatively recently broadcast on American Masters, Froemke clearly had the trust and confidence of the opera company. By now, many probably assume she is on staff there.

Even for opera neophytes, Wagner’s Dream is a fascinating film. It is also a highly effective teaser for its special encore screenings of Lepage’s Ring cycle productions. One cannot help wondering whether audiences will see the Machine cooperate or not. Highly recommended beyond the obvious opera and theater audiences, it screens across the country via Fathom Events this coming Tuesday (5/7) and will also be shown at the BAM Cinematek the following Saturday (5/12).

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on May 2nd, 2012 at 10:10pm.

Shorts Sampler @ The Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival 2012

By Joe Bendel. Is it possible to lead a normal life after witnessing the horrors of war? During the upcoming 2012 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival, at least two short films will directly grapple with that question – while one suggests that it is indeed possible, through its very example.

One of the best shorts just hitting the festival circuit, Jons Vukorep’s outstanding Short for Vernesa B. is a lamenting tribute to Bosnian actress-vocalist Vernesa Berbo, starring Vernesa Berbo. Through a complicated narrative structure, it depicts the challenges of her life after seeking asylum in Germany. It is hard to analyze the film in-depth without comprising the initial viewing experience, but it is safe to say Berbo is a very compelling screen presence.

Sadly, many viewers will have a good idea where Elvir Muminović’s Neverending Story is headed, but it is still a powerful trip. Emir was also an asylum seeker in Germany who eventually met and married Kirsten. When a miscarriage ends their hopes of having their own children, they turn to his native Bosnia with the intention of adopting. They find the perfect girl, but the revelation that she is in fact Serbian causes a deep fissure between the couple. Muminović eschews neat and tidy Oprah lessons, forcing the audience to face up to some hard facts about human nature.

In marked contrast, Al Mehičević’s English language Gold Diggers is a humorous anecdotal film in the tradition of O. Henry. As it opens, three miners trapped by a cave-in are eagerly anticipating their thirty minutes of fame as they await their imminent rescue. However, when their mistresses confront their wives at the disaster site, the media gets wind of a bigger story. Gold Diggers is amusing but rather light weight. Frankly, it is the sort of short that plays well at festivals, but its appearance here is somewhat significant. Never referencing the war (which would be out of place in this context), it has none of the terrible weight of history distinguishing many Bosnian films in recent years. Rather, it takes a potential tragedy and turns it into a vehicle for comedy.

Indeed, the paradox of the annual Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival is that it is one of the friendliest and most welcoming festivals in New York, screening some of the deepest, most elegiac films. (Of course there are always notable exceptions, like last year’s drolly entertaining music documentary White Button.) A now well-established tradition coming hard on the heels of Tribeca, the BHFF is once again highly recommended, featuring many excellent short films making their American debuts. It opens tomorrow (5/3) with Danis Tanović’s sensitively rendered Cirkus Columbia, featuring the great Miki Manojlović, and ends this Saturday (5/5) with Angelina Jolie’s In the Land of Blood and Honey.

Posted on May 2nd, 2012 at 10:07pm.

Tribeca 2012: LFM Reviews Freaky Deaky

By Joe Bendel. Starting out as a western writer but eventually hitting his stride with crime novels, Elmore Leonard has a reputation for his sharp dialogue and lethal characters. Notable adaptations of his work include Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty, and 3:10 to Yuma. Indeed, the bard of badaassery’s support for a new big screen treatment of his work factored prominently in the Tribeca Talks panel discussion following the special screening of Charles Matthau’s Freaky Deaky (trailer here) during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

Originally set in the 1980’s, Matthau shifted Freaky to the groovy 1970’s at Leonard’s suggestion. About to be transferred out of the bomb squad, Det. Chris Mankowski does not exactly kill himself trying to save a booby-trapped gangster. Still, it looks rather bad. Relegated to vice as a result, Mankowski takes the call when failed starlet Greta Wyatt files a rape report against wealthy creep Woody Ricks. Talk about a discordant way to kick off a supposedly madcap romp.

Initially, Mankowski downplays the legal recourse available to Wyatt, but he decides to rattle the nutter’s cage anyway. He is not the only one with his sights on the antisocial weirdo. Demolitions expert Skip Gibbs and his friend-with-benefits Robin Abbot blame Ricks for their own scrape with the law, for reasons that are hazily glossed over. To get to him, they will use his brother Mark as the tool he so obviously is. Meanwhile, Mankowski develops a personal interest in Wyatt and a sort of-kind of professional rivalry with Ricks’ bodyguard-fixer, Donnell Lewis.

From "Freaky Deaky."

Once you get past the unseemliness of the film’s catalyst, it is a breezy enough distraction. However, despite the vintage cars and occasional file footage of Vietnam or Watergate, the film never really gets inside the 70’s mindset. This was a bizarre period of time, when millions of Americans were joining Est cults and taking Erica Jong seriously. By comparison, though not exactly a classic, the film version of Serial (released in 1980) is far more successful capturing the vocabulary and attitudes of the era. (It also offers the opportunity to see Martin Mull playing off Sir Christopher Lee). Still, there is one appealing era-appropriate in-joke. In a nod to the director’s father, every movie theater seen in Freaky is showing a Walter Matthau film, which might well have been possible in 1974.

Frankly, what distinguishes Freaky is the unusually eccentric cast it assembles, including Crispin Glover, Andy Dick, and Christian Slater. It begs two questions: how did they manage to insure this production, and where was Tom Sizemore? Perhaps he was already locked-in somewhere else. While it is nice to see blaxploitation veteran and former Bond girl Gloria Hendry, even in a small bone-thrown-to-genre-fans role, and Michael Jai “Black Dynamite” White doing his thing as Lewis, it is relative newcomer Breanne Racano who shines the brightest as femme fatale Abbot, clearly understanding villainesses should enjoy being devious.

According to the post-screening discussion, there may in fact be a Black Dynamite sequel in the works. Freaky Deaky actually compares reasonably favorably to White’s prospective franchise, but hardly so in the case of the senior Matthau’s gritty classics, like The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Flawed but somewhat diverting, largely thanks to Racano’s head-turning work, Freaky Deaky has already had some rights announcements following its Tribeca Talks screening at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: C+

Posted on May 1st, 2012 at 7:46pm.

San Francisco International Film Festival 2012: LFM Reviews Policeman

By Joe Bendel. As if Palestinian terrorism were not enough to worry about, Israel also must contend with old fashioned violent leftist extremism. Fortunately, the anti-terror cops are confident they can handle any threat in Nadav Lapid’s anti-procedural Policeman (trailer here), which screens during the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Yaron is your basic red-blooded Israeli man with a very pregnant wife. He is the leader of his squad not necessarily by rank, but by force of personality. Regrettably, a rather messy mission has created lingering legal problems for his unit. However, Yaron should be able to fix it, if he can convince a colleague with a convenient but all too real brain tumor to take the heat for them.

About halfway through the film, Lapid switches gears, introducing viewers to the next crisis the SWAT cops will face. The charismatic Shira and the manipulative Natanel lead an extreme left wing terror cell planning to crash a billionaire’s wedding. Their manifesto states: “it is time for the poor to get rich and the rich to start dying,” which ultimately would not leave anyone left alive. At least total equality would be achieved. The jig is nearly up when the father of Shira’s newest dupe discovers their plan. Yet, rather than save his son by informing, the old school radical invites himself along to serve as his protector. Before long, Yaron and his comrades reappear with an obvious job to do.

Policeman is an unusually detached film, highly charged politically, yet scrupulously avoiding the central issue of Israeli life. In fact, Natanel vetoes every reference to the so-called “Palestinian” issue in Shira’s proclamation, lest it muddy the waters. What emerges is a portrait of extremes. On one hand, we see the hyper-masculinity of Yaron and his colleagues. Lapid repeatedly shows viewers the back-slapping and chest-bumping rituals they go through every time they greet each other. On the flip side, Shira and her co-conspirators are an emotionless lot, who are all more than willing to kill and die as part of the violence—all except Natanel that is. He seems to prefer that someone else stand in the line of fire.

Lapid’s clinical tone is not that far removed from Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, but it is even less judgmental. Whereas many people will be horrified by the actions of Shira and company during the final act, it is quite possible some immature viewers might be stirred up by it all. Granted, that ambiguity is largely the point, but it leaves the film in a precariously half-pregnant state.

Whether it was her intention or not, Yaara Pelzig’s performance as Shira is absolutely terrifying. Like a cobra, she expresses the hypnotic power extremists hold over their followers. Frankly, the lack of a correspondingly compelling character among the police, good or bad, somewhat unbalances the film.

Lapid’s distinctly bifurcated narrative structure leads to a conspicuous stop-and-start-over effect that is arguably not in the film’s best interests. Still, it quickly builds up more steam in the second part than first segment ever had. Indeed, Policeman lays claim to one of the more intense and disturbing hostage stand-offs dramatized on film in recent years. Wildly uneven but powerful down the stretch, Policeman should intrigue and scare viewers.  It screens tomorrow (5/2) and Thursday (5/3) as part of the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on May 1st, 2012 at 7:45pm.

Tribeca/San Francisco International Film Festival 2012: LFM Reviews Chicken with Plums

By Joe Bendel. Over an eight day period, Nasser-Ali Khan will become the anti-Scherezade. As he wills himself to die, stories from his past, narrated by the Angel of Death, will explain how the musician reached such a state of profound melancholy. Love and death become intimately intertwined in Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud’s Chicken with Plums (trailer here), their fantastical but sophisticated live-action follow-up to the rightly acclaimed Persepolis, which screened at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and also unspooled yesterday at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival.

Khan is widely regarded as the greatest Iranian violinist of his generation, but he has stopped playing. On the surface, his silence appears to be the fault of his wife Faringuisse, who destroyed his prized violin in one of their frequent squabbles. However, his depression is rooted in an elegantly tragic tale of love denied.

Technically proficient but never impassioned, Khan’s music took on uncommon richness after he was forbidden from seeing his true love Irâne, the traditional clockmaker’s daughter. Music never has been considered a stable profession by protective fathers. As Khan’s reputation rises, he acquiesces to his controlling mother’s wishes and marries Faringuisse. For him, it is a loveless union. For her, it is a marriage based on unrequited love.

Frankly, Khan is a crummy husband and a negligent father, but it is difficult to condemn him after witnessing his compounded heartache. Mathieu Amalric, with his big sad eyes, is perfectly cast as the exquisitely sensitive jerkweed. Viewers will sympathize with him, even as they shake their heads at his casual cruelty to Faringuisse. Likewise only more so, Maria de Medeiros (Bruce Willis’s girlfriend in Pulp Fiction) explodes the harpy exterior of his nagging wife, revealing the pain and vulnerability of Faringuisse.

Set in the late 1950’s pre-Shah, Western-leaning Iran, Satrapi and Paronnaud’s fable of star-crossed love would seem to hold limited political ramifications. However, it is not an accident that Khan’s forbidden love is named Irâne (as they confirmed in a post-screening Q&A). That she is played by Golshifteh Farahani is also clearly significant. The internationally acclaimed actress was barred from returning to Iran after (tastefully) posing nude in a French magazine to protest the Islamist regime’s misogynist policies. A radiantly beautiful woman, she also invests her character (and the film) with a graceful sadness.

Visually, Plums is also quite arresting, incorporating brief animated interludes, expressionistic sets, and highly stylized design elements. The inspired technical team definitely creates a seductive atmosphere of magical realism that is a pleasure to get caught up in. Highly recommended, Chicken with Plums was enthusiastically received by audiences at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. For those in the Bay Area, it also screens Wednesday (5/2)  as part of the 2012 San Francisco International Film Festival, concluding this week.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on May 1st, 2012 at 6:37pm.