Category: 4. Joe Bendel

LFM Review: The Neighbor

From "The Neighbor."

By Joe Bendel. The tragic events still unfolding in Japan even had repercussions at a screening of a Farsi-language feature at a Canadian film festival here in New York City. The producer Amir Naderi, who emigrated from Iran after several of his films were banned by the Islamist government, was in Japan working on his next project when the earthquake and tsunami hit. Clearly he was on the mind of his former editor Naghmeh Shirkhan this past weekend, despite the justly enthusiast reception for her directorial debut, The Neighbor (see the trailer below), at MoMA’s 2011 Canadian Front.

Though of somewhat middle-aged years, Shirin is still a strikingly beautiful woman. She is not particularly interested in men though, particularly the one she has been reluctantly seeing. In truth, there are not a lot of eligible men in Vancouver’s Iranian community. There are not a lot of men, period, and there is a very real phenomenon causing this demographic state. Frequently Iranian men working abroad who are called back on business or personal matters have trouble returning—or so they say. Such is the case for Leila, the attractive young woman who just moved in across the hall from Shirin with her little girl Parisa.

At first, Leila wants nothing to do with the older woman. In time though, she starts exploiting Shirin as an emergency babysitter, much to her concern. It is not that Shirin does not enjoy spending time with Parisa—quite the contrary—but Leila’s erratic parenting is obviously not healthy for her little girl. Continue reading LFM Review: The Neighbor

LFM Review: Limitless, Produced with 20% Brain Functionality

By Joe Bendel. What happened to Obama? So ruthlessly effective on the campaign trail, these days he can hardly chose an iron for his approach shots. Maybe he ran out of NZT. A designer drug formulated to tap into the supposed 80% of the brain lying dormant in mere mortals (a myth says Snopes), NZT offers life changing opportunities to one sad sack would-be writer, but it also comes with a mess of trouble in Neil Burger’s Limitless, which took the top spot in this weekend’s box office.

Eddie Morra is a listless under-achiever. His girlfriend Lindy has finally given him the dumping he so richly deserved. Despondent, he mopes around the City until he bumps into his ex-brother-in-law Vernon (no, Lindy is not the first woman to issue Morra his walking papers.). Recognizing his former whatever is a bit glum, Vernon gives him a blue Matrix pill, which the big dummy takes for no good reason. Suddenly, Morra can talk his landlord’s wife into bed, dash off her law school paper on Oliver Wendell Holmes, and then churn out his own novel before calling it a night.

Unfortunately, he wakes up as the same old idiot in the morning, which prompts an emergency visit to his dear old ex-brother-in-law. For some reason, the shadowy cabal developing NZT has entrusted its distribution to a pusher leftover from the glory days of Studio 54. Of course, Vernon’s carelessness gets him killed, but Morra gets his stash. Fueled by smarty-pants pills, Morra takes Wall Street by storm, even attracting the attention of Robert De Niro’s shadowy financier, Thurston W. Focker-Gekko, III, or some such.

Morra might be amped on brainiac drugs, but in Limitless’s world any IQ cracking 100 constitutes genius levels. You would think anyone borrowing money from a loan shark for a quick succession of day trades would make a point of paying that off as soon as possible. Not if you’re a genius, evidently. It would have saved so much trouble, though. Continue reading LFM Review: Limitless, Produced with 20% Brain Functionality

LFM Review: Gift to Stalin

By Joe Bendel. One of the scarier aspects of Stalin’s reign of terror was the effectiveness of his cult of personality. His image was omnipresent, investing his iron-fisted rule with a secular idolatry which brooked no criticism. In fact, reverence for the dictator was so deeply ingrained in the Soviet people, many of those who suffered personal persecution under his regime reportedly still wept when news of Stalin’s death was released to the public. That emotional dichotomy is sensitively dramatized in Rustem Abdrashev’s The Gift to Stalin, which finally opens theatrically in New York after an extended festival run. Continue reading LFM Review: Gift to Stalin

North Korean Double Feature: LFM Reviews Centre Forward & Red Chapel

By Joe Bendel. The “Fatherly Leader” loved the sight of young comrades physically exerting themselves in the open arena. Of course, the consequences of losing were rather permanent in “Juche” sports. Fortunately, Kim Il-sung also had ideas on cinema that prohibited any inconvenient realism. As a result, North Koreans had a steady diet of propaganda films, including Pak Chong-song’s oddly watchable Centre Forward, which screens at the 2011 Korean American Film Festival on a double bill with Mads Brügger’s reality check Red Chapel.

After several frustrating years as a scrub, Cha In-son finally gets a chance to start for the Taesongsan football team. Unfortunately, he is so keyed-up, he pretty much stinks up the field. Shortly thereafter, he and his entire family are consigned to a prison camp. The end. Actually, not in this sanitized portrayal of DPRK. Instead, Cha’s awful performance sets of a round of recriminations and self-criticism that would be out of place in any healthy society.

From North Korea's "Centre Forward."

Basically, the Taesongsan coach decides his team lost because everyone got too fat and complacent, so he institutes a bone-crushing new training program, making Cha one popular fellow. He does not get much sympathy from his sister Myong-suk either, because as dancer in the elaborate propaganda productions staged on behalf of the Kim personality cult, she works harder than any of the football slackers.

Anyone waiting for a romance to blossom between Cha’s superstar roommate Chol-gyu and his sister Myong-suk better forget it. Centre is not merely chaste, it is neutered. There is only one person getting any love in this film, but he never appears directly. However, plenty of rousing songs are sung in Kim’s honor.

There is no question Centre is propaganda bearing little or no resemblance to the truth. Everyone is robustly vital and all the shops are amply stocked. Yet, it is bizarrely fascinating to watch this Rocky unfold with all its idiosyncrasies, while knowing it all takes place in one of the most isolated, repressive regimes in the world. At times, it is downright surreal, like the cut-away shots of the Taesongsan team suddenly riding a roller coaster in their Sunday best amidst their final training montage. (Aren’t they supposed to win the big game before going to Kim Il-sung-Land?) Still, the young actress playing Myong-suk is quite good, coming across as endearingly sweetly as she busts Cha’s chops for his insufficient zeal. Continue reading North Korean Double Feature: LFM Reviews Centre Forward & Red Chapel

LFM Review: Deface Dramatizes North Korean Oppression

By Joe Bendel. People cannot eat slogans, yet that is all Kim Jong-il’s North Korean regime provides a steady diet of. Blunt instruments of social control, the omnipresent propaganda posters are especially painful for one grieving father to behold in John Arlotto’s Deface, a devastating rejoinder to DPRK propaganda films (like Centre Forward), which screens as part of the Shorts 1 program at this year’s Korean American Film Festival (New York).

A widowed father obediently labors for the Communist authorities, undergoing public self-criticism sessions as required, solely for the sake of his sweet-tempered daughter, Kyung-ha. When she also dies of starvation, Sooyoung has nothing left to live for. Ironically, this makes him dangerous in a police state that rules through fear. Using his late daughter’s school paints, Sooyoung defaces Party propaganda, becoming a graffiti truth-teller. It is a small but meaningful rebellion that naturally provokes harsh counter-measures.

Though filmed entirely in America, the Korean language Deface viscerally captures the look and feel of a hopeless corner of the DPRK. Indeed, the film packs a powerful emotional punch, thanks in good measure to deeply affecting work of Joseph Steven Yang as Sooyoung and young Aira H. Kim as his ill-fated daughter. Deface also boasts a notable supporting cast, including Alexis Rhee (whose credits include Blade Runner’s “Billboard Geisha”) as Sooyoung’s fellow slave (that is the right term), Jeung-un.

Well conceived and executed, Deface ends as it must, given the realities of the gulag nation. Yet, it still manages to hit an inspirational note, without breaking from its established tone or becoming jarringly manipulative. Far more engrossing than most full length features, it is an excellent short. Highly recommended to any and all viewers (especially those who also check out Centre and Red Chapel), the genuinely moving Deface screens twice this Friday (3/18) as part of the Shorts 1 program at the 2011 KAFFNY.

Posted on March 15th, 2011 at 10:46am.

Suppressed Soviet Art: LFM Reviews The Desert of Forbidden Art, Narrated by Ben Kingsley

By Joe Bendel. Nearly any art the Soviets would suppress, Igor Savitsky collected—using their money. In a remote corner of Central Asia, Savitsky built the Nukus Museum to house an extraordinary collection of Soviet modernist and Uzbekistani folk art. This unlikely institution and its visionary founder are introduced to the world at-large in Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev’s fascinating documentary, The Desert of Forbidden Art, which opens today in New York and next week in Los Angeles. Continue reading Suppressed Soviet Art: LFM Reviews The Desert of Forbidden Art, Narrated by Ben Kingsley