Category: Movie Reviews

New Voices in Russian Cinema: The 2010 CEC Short Film Program

By Joe Bendel. Nearly every great Russian writer, including the likes of Chekhov, Bunin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Babel, excelled under the rigorous self-imposed discipline of the short story format. Decades later, short forms seem to hold a similar appeal for emerging Russian directors. In cooperation with the Telluride Film Festival, CEC Artslink presents an evening of four short films by their independent filmmakers-in-residence tonight at the Tribeca Cinemas in lower Manhattan.

The first selection is also the longest and happily the best of the program. In many ways, Mikhail Zheleznikov’s For Home Viewing is an antidote to ideology. An autobiographical video essay, Zheleznikov tells his story of coming of age during the Brezhnev era and starting a family under Perestroika.  In the process, he largely eschews the macro-ideological clashes of time, aside from a gently cynical skepticism of all things political, which seems distinctly Russian.

Throughout Viewing, Zheleznikov demonstrates a keen visual sense. In addition to memorable vintage film and stills, he incorporates some clever animation techniques, but never to the point of distraction. His imagery is often simple but evocative, like a sequence involving an old scrapbook he assembled with his high school friends’ leftover passport photos.

From Tatiana Kevorkova’s "Spring."

For Polina and her boyfriend Klim, life is too beautiful to worry about current events in Tatiana Kevorkova’s Spring. Having stretched their date into the early spring morning, they appear ready to break into song. Once she returns to her flat, the film evolves into a pleasant enough situation comedy. However, the light and frothy Spring is quite well crafted.  Kevorkova has a fine eye for composition, particularly during her early street scenes, where cinematographer Sergey Komarov makes their picturesque neighborhood sparkle.

While Viewing and Spring suggest life and love continue more or less oblivious to outside forces, Konstantin Smirnov’s Kolyan is far less sanguine. The title character might euphemistically be called a disaffected youth. With his troubled home life and menial employment, he is ripe for recruitment by the local hate group. Yet he still feels more than just the stirrings of attraction for the Chechen girl in his neighborhood. At approximately fifteen minutes, Kolyan makes its point quite effectively, without getting melodramatic. It is also features some sensitive chemistry between its would-be romantic interests, which is really why the film works so well.

A Russian film titled Seagulls might be expected to evoke Chekhov, but Irina Volkova’s concluding short initially suggests more the spirit of Beckett. As two newlyweds stroll across a bleak winter beach, he supposedly decides to stay there permanently. After some absurdist back-and-forth, she more-or-less calls his bluff.  Frankly, who would blame her for leaving him there? Still, Maria Shalaeva has some strong moments as the woman, most notably when she double-dares her hubby to tuck into one of the dead gulls littering the beach.

Quite a strong program overall, CEC’s 2010 short film evening boasts one of the best short documentaries of the year in Zheleznikov’s Viewing. A perfect (though arguably superior) companion film to Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika (see the LFM review of My Perestroika here), it should thoroughly charm Russophiles and provoke nostalgia for Russian expatriates. By contrast, Kolyan will probably make the latter happy to have left, but it remains a strong short nonetheless.  The CEC Russian short film program has two screenings tonight (9/9) in New York at the Tribeca Cinemas, continuing on to DC for a special screening at the Russian Federation embassy the following Monday (9/13).

Posted on September 9th, 2010 at 12:24pm.

Mad Men Season Four, Episode 7: “The Suitcase”

Peggy.

By Jennifer Baldwin. “Somebody very important to me died … the only person in the world who really knew me.” — Don Draper

This is it. The best episode of the season. Perhaps the best episode in two seasons. Certainly the best hour of television I’ve seen in awhile. Everybody is talking about this week’s episode of Mad Men and throwing superlatives at it like so much confetti at an office New Year’s party, and who am I to disagree? It was brilliant. It was the greatest. All the praise, all the accolades, the Emmy wins, everything: if you need a reason to explain the Mad Men phenomenon, this episode is it.

Which is funny, because I was all prepared to suffer for forty-two minutes when I realized this episode was focusing on a character I’ve never really grooved to: Peggy Olson. I know that she’s a fan favorite, but her career woman ambitions, her sexual escapades, her seeming rejection of religion, her experimentation with drugs, her bohemian friends – it always struck me as nothing more than immature adolescent rebellion. And worst of all, the show seems to hold her up at times as the height of enlightenment, putting the sexist, repressed men in their places, and showing the stodgy world of middle class morality and religion that she’s not gonna play by their rules and don’t you try and make her! Woo hoo, feminism! Ugh. Peggy has a tendency to be smug, but the writers expect us to be a chorus of “You go girl!” in her favor. No thanks.

Don.

But then what does Matt Weiner do? What does this wizard of complex characterizations and masterful storytelling achieve in this week’s episode of Mad Men? I’ll tell you what: Peggy Olson is my new favorite character. I realized with mixes of horror and heartbreak and strange consolation that I am, in so many ways, Peggy Olson. Her crises and confusions this episode are mine as well at this moment in my life. Suddenly, I knew her. I knew Peggy Olson and I understood.

This is an episode about knowing, about what it means to really know someone. It’s about whether people are capable of knowing each other, deep down inside. It’s about what it means to truly understand someone, about knowing the secret yearnings and the secret pains and the secret flaws. It’s about how the people who should know us – our family, our significant others, our friends – don’t always really know us at all.

This episode hit close to home for me. I think this idea of “knowing” and being “known” is something that hits close to home for a lot of us – for anybody who has ever felt like the proverbial square peg. I think that’s why the episode is garnering such praise. Mad Men can always be counted on to deliver sharp, witty writing and strong, multi-layered themes. But this episode struck a nerve because it was about something that so many of us struggle with and worry about in our own lives: Do the people in my life, the people close to me, do they really know me? Who can I open myself up to, who will get me on a deep-down level? Is there anyone who can really know me? These are troubling questions and they’re questions that both Don and Peggy face in this episode.

And the beauty of it is, the strange, sad cosmic beauty, is that Peggy and Don answer those questions for each other, in the middle of the night, working late at the office. They don’t have to be alone — they know each other.

Peggy & Don.

When Don tells Peggy that recently deceased Anna was “the only person who really knew me,” Peggy’s response is the response we all hope to hear someday: “That’s not true.” Peggy knows Don, even if she doesn’t know all the secrets and the history that Anna knew about him. What Peggy knows are the things that even a friend or a wife or a relative might not know; she knows a little bit of Don’s soul.

The suitcase is the perfect metaphor: The hard shell that no one can crack, but what’s inside? We can drop it off a building, we can have an elephant stomp it, but the casing around our inner selves won’t bust. We want someone to bust it open, to see inside us and know us, but we’re like a Samsonite – our outer shells are tough.

The obvious parallel being set up at the beginning is that Don and Peggy are like Clay and Liston. Like two pugilists trading punches, Don and Peggy go at each other over the Samsonite account and Don’s ruthless work demands. They start off fighting just like Clay and Liston, but the difference is that in the case of Don and Peggy, they both end up knocked out.

I love when Mad Men gets subjective and we enter the memory/dreamspace inside Don’s head (or is it just a drunken stupor? Does it matter?). That last ethereal vision of Anna that Don sees– a spirit or a dream or a desperate wish – is one of the most haunting images from the show. It transcends the narrative and the characters and becomes a piece of pure cinema:  movement and light, human beauty in motion, glimpsed for one sustained moment before fading into nothing. And she’s holding a suitcase.

Anna.

Other notes from the episode:

• I love that Joan gave Don “exactly what he needed,” by assigning Miss Blankenship as his secretary. Also: Miss Blankenship, Queen of Perversions!

• Speaking of which, Roger’s recording of his memoirs is just about the funniest thing this show has ever done. From Bert Cooper’s testicle removal, to the Blankenship revelations, to the secret of Dr. Lyle Evans, I was screaming with laughter. John Slattery’s delivery in the recording is pitch-perfect.

• Cassius Clay was – as the show mentions – by this time now calling himself Mohammad Ali. I’m always fascinated by the way Don seems to be on the wrong side of history when it comes to these famous personages. First he was a Nixon man in the 1960 election, suspicious of Kennedy’s pedigree and wealth. Now he’s all in for Liston at the fight, calling Ali/Clay out as an arrogant loudmouth who hasn’t proven himself. And he doesn’t like Joe Namath! As much as Don is a creative genius in advertising, he’s paradoxically suspicious of “The New” when it comes to stuff like politics and pop culture.

• Also interesting: Don bet on Liston, Roger bet on Clay. Hmm…

• I appreciated Peggy’s “Queen for a Day” paper crown for her birthday.

• Also: Pete said, “Pray tell.” I love Pete.

Finally, the closing credits song? “Bleecker Street” by Simon and Garfunkel.

Posted on September 9th, 2010 at 9:45am.

LFM Mini-Review: Machete

By Jason Apuzzo. THE PITCH: Bad-ass ex-Federale ‘Machete’ (Danny Trejo) turns renegade in order to exact revenge on a Mexican druglord named Torrez (Steven Seagal) – and the corrupt, right-wing political machine in Texas that he secretly controls. Along the way, Machete gets help from some angry chicas played by Jessica Alba (a conflicted ICE agent) and Michelle Rodriguez (a kind of female Che Guevara who runs a taco truck).

THE SKINNY: I never thought I’d see a boring Robert Rodriguez film, but this one is. Rodriguez apparently decided to flesh out the Machete story from the original trailer with endless plot twists, political sloganeering and exposition. Do you think Inception was hard to follow? Or Salt? Try following Machete – it’s basically impossible. At 1 hr. 45 minutes the film is at least 30 minutes too long; it’s a kind of Roger Corman version of Traffic. And the politics? Off-the-charts left wing, and trite in the extreme.

WHAT DOESN’T WORK:

• Much like Planet Terror, Machete isn’t so much a film as a series of gags or skits that Rodriguez jammed together with the idea that somehow, some way, it would all fit together in the editing. You can just imagine him and his buddies swigging Patron Silver and thinking: “Let’s have a scene where Lindsay Lohan shows up in a nun’s outfit and starts blowing people away! … or a scene where Michelle Rodriguez shows up dressed like Snake Plissken and starts blowing people away! … or a scene where Machete tokes-up with a priest!,” etc. The film is a bloated, episodic mess that never gains any momentum – and is still ‘explaining’ its impossibly convoluted plot even in the midst of the final fight scene between Trejo and Seagal.

• Rarely have I seen a filmmaker show such complete contempt for anyone in his audience who might be politically to the right of, say, Pol Pot. Eisenstein and Pudovkin were really warm, cuddly, humanistic filmmakers compared to Robert Rodriguez. [They were also more talented.] Here are a few things you will be treated to in the film: a scene of a right-wing Texas senator (Robert De Niro) and his Minute Man-style henchman (Don Johnson) murdering a pregnant Mexican woman and her husband in cold blood along the border, and topping the moment off by shouting “Welcome to America!”; a right-wing Texas businessman (Jeff Fahey) crucifying a priest (Cheech Marin) on the altar cross in his own church, even driving the final nail into his wrist. This sort of stuff didn’t exactly put me in a great mood for the rest of what Rodriguez was dolling out, which wasn’t much to begin with.

Insane nurse twins.

• Robert De Niro is apparently under the impression that he has a gift for comedy. He seems to have believed this for many years, actually – despite ample evidence to the contrary. Every scene he appears in in Machete is a disaster. His mugging and grimacing as a nasty, demagogic, murderous right-wing Texas politician is so awful and inane as to be almost indescribable. Hey Bobby, do us all a favor and retire to New York and the cannoli – so we can live off memories of Godfather II, OK? You’re currently ranking below Snooki on my Italo-meter, both in personality and talent.

WHAT DOES WORK:

• Danny Trejo and Steven Seagal, more or less, to the extent that I care. Trejo’s face is like some kind of leathery Picasso painting. I’ve never seen anything like it on screen, actually; he makes Mickey Rourke look like Max Headroom. Otherwise, there wasn’t nearly enough of Steven Seagal in the film. Seagal is who Stallone should’ve had as the villain in The Expendables but didn’t.

• Every character in a Rodriguez film is vivid, whatever else one might say about them. Even Lindsay Lohan manages to pull it together here – although she isn’t exactly stretching herself by playing a drug-addled, rich-girl/internet porn queen.

• There are a few decent, pseudo-iconic cult moments in the film that almost redeem the tedium and the obnoxious politics: Trejo’s gory escape from a hospital; vengeful Michelle Rodriguez showing up in black leather and eyepatch at the end; the final Trejo-Seagal confrontation. But that’s about it.

The final showdown.

Robert Rodriguez must be a strange, angry hombre. Most guys who start in the world of cult filmmaking – Lucas, Coppola, Scorsese, Cameron, etc. – don’t want to stay there. They want to move up and out to a bigger audience. They want to deal with bigger themes, create larger myths. Another way of putting it is that they have old-fashioned middle class aspirations, they want to rise.

Rodriguez is the rare filmmaker who seems intent on remaining in the cult ghetto – peddling angry niche politics – no matter how well funded he is. That’s part of the political posturing of Machete – this idea that Rodriguez is himself part of a persecuted minority here in America, when in actuality he’s a rather well-funded filmmaker with swanky friends. Nobody’s really persecuting Robert Rodriguez, so far as I’m aware. It’s just a pose on his part.

I actually think Rodriguez stays in the world of niche films with niche politics because he’s afraid of trying anything really ambitious … because he might fail. So long as he sticks to ‘cult’ filmmaking, to making expensive shlock films with leftist messages, he gets to cruise.

This is precisely the reason, ironically, that he’s never going to reach the level of the filmmakers he obviously so admires – one thinks here of Sergio Leone, in particular, whom Rodriguez compulsively copies in film after film, Machete included. [Check out the opening title sequence of Machete – it’s right out of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.] At Rodriguez’s age, Leone himself was doing everything he could to break out of the Italian sword-and-sandals ghetto to which his career had been confined. He was a striver, an achiever, who longed for the type of career that big American directors like Howard Hawks had. Leone re-charged his career by creating big, mythic landscapes populated with timeless characters like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, or Eli Wallach’s Tuco. It’s becoming quite clear that Robert Rodriguez does not have it in him to do anything that. Rodriguez is essentially becoming a kind of well-funded, Latino Roger Corman – although he doesn’t have Corman’s warmth or intelligence.

Rodriguez comes across to me these days as a kind of spoiled rich kid who doesn’t want to grow up. And his act is wearing thin – microscopically thin, actually, given Machete’s incendiary politics. I’m awfully tempted to tell Mr. Rodriguez to go screw himself, but then he would claim he’s being persecuted. Which is a joke, like his film.

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 at 8:12pm.

Review: Mesrine Part 2: Public Enemy #1

By Joe Bendel. Gangster and self-styled revolutionary Jacques Mesrine never lacked for nerve, but he might have started to believe his own hype. That never turns out well. At least we have good reason to believe he will not go quietly at the conclusion of Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, the second part of Jean-François Richet’s two-film bio-epic, which opens today in select theaters nationwide.

After his notorious detour through Quebec, Mesrine is back in France, plying his chosen trade.  A celebrity criminal who assiduously cultivates the media, his capture becomes the top priority of Police Commissaire Broussard. Actually, catching the flamboyant Mesrine seems relatively easy – keeping him behind bars was the tricky part. When he teams up with François Besse, an unassuming but equally slippery fellow inmate, all bets are off.

Largely eschewing the personal drama of Killer Instinct, Public features two shoot ‘em up escape sequences, a number of mostly disastrous capers, some cold-blooded killing, and the brilliantly edited conclusion. Essentially, Public delivers the pay-off on Instinct’s emotional investment. Yet all the really juicy supporting turns come in the second, action-driven film. As Besse, the perfectly cast Mathieu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is an intense counterpoint to blustery Mesrine. Likewise, Dardenne Brothers regular Olivier Gourmet brings some heft to Broussard, making him a worthy antagonist for Mesrine. Instinct standout Michel Duchaussoy also makes a brief but touching return appearance as the gangster’s meekly loving father.

Of course, it’s problematic using terms like “hero” or even “anti-hero” with regard to the Mesrine films. While most of his outright misogynistic episodes come in the first installment, he is consistently presented as a problematic figure, albeit one not without charm. Arguably, though, it is his effort to preserve his good press that contributes to his undoing. Vanity—it’s a killer.

While Instinct had the occasional slow patch, Enemy speeds along like an escaped fugitive. It is all held together by Vincent Cassel’s dynamic lead performance and the film’s cool, retro-70’s look. Of course, the Mesrine films are best seen as a whole, but of the duology Enemy is definitely the superior film.  It opens today in select theaters nationwide.

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 at 10:21am.

Mad Men Season Four, Episode 6: “Waldorf Stories”

Wallace & Don.

By Jennifer Baldwin. This week, Don wins a Clio award (on the same night Mad Men is up for Best Drama at the Emmys … Hey! I see what you did there, Matt Weiner!)

• Peggy and the new guy in creative (Stan Rizzo, played by actor Jay R. Ferguson) turn nudists for the night so they can finally get some work done on the Vicks cough drop account.

• Roger’s wife, Jane, sends her inept cousin, Danny, to SCDP to try to get a job using a portfolio filled with other people’s ads – and one lame-brained original idea he recycles over and over and over (and over) again.

• Ken Cosgrove gets hired by SCDP, but Pete’s withering stare and boss-man attitude turn poor Ken from cocksure account man to chastened puppy dog.

• And Roger writes his memoirs.

And, oh yeah: Don has finally lost it. No matter his personal problems in the past three seasons, Don has always been a star when it comes to advertising. When he’s in the room with a client, he’s golden. He’s always got a clever slogan or a winning ad campaign, and even when the clients don’t go for Don’s ideas, we the audience can tell that Don is an advertising genius. But in this episode, Don’s drinking, his depression, his out of control behavior — it all catches up to him and he flounders and embarrasses himself in the boardroom with the clients. It was painful.

Don — drunk as a skunk — pitches his idea to the Life cereal execs, but they find the idea too ironic, too clever and worry that their Middle America customers won’t get the joke. Don’s horrible attempts to come up with a new slogan on the fly are so excruciating to watch, I almost had to avert my eyes. When he finally steals a lame-brained idea from poor Danny Siegel (“The cure for the common … breakfast”), of course the Life execs love it. Weiner really is trying to destroy the Don Draper mystique, isn’t he?

Don’s drinking and self-destruction have gotten so out of control that he wakes up on Sunday morning thinking it’s Saturday — he missed an entire day thanks to drink — and forgets to pick up his kids from Betty. He got wasted at the Clio awards after-party on Friday night, met a brunette there, and took her back to his apartment.

Don & Roger.

In a beautifully done bit of filmmaking and cinematic screenwriting, we close-up on Don’s face as he lies in bed and the brunette from the Clios makes her way down his torso and out of view. The lighting of the scene is dark; it’s night. Don closes his eyes and falls asleep. Slowly a bright light glides in — the light from the sun that we think indicates the next morning.

But Betty’s phone call awakens Don, her furious anger is as disorienting for us as it is for Don, until the camera cuts to another shot and we get an ever-so-slight glimpse at the woman in bed with him — a blonde! Not the woman from the Clios! The way the scene plays out, we are as confused and distraught as Don. The moment we realize just what has happened, we feel that same punch to the gut that Don must feel. He’s lost an entire day. He’s slept with a woman and doesn’t even remember meeting her. He’s missed his day with the kids thanks to his out of control drinking. I know I’ve said this before for other moments in season four, but this moment is rock bottom for Don.

Don & Faye.

“Waldorf Stories” is an episode of parallels and pairs, opposites and foils. A young Don (from Roger’s flashbacks) and Danny Siegel as the eager, pushy newbies trying to break into the ad game. A younger Roger (in his flashbacks) and present-day Don are the older, established execs; functioning (and not always functioning) alcoholics who end up giving the young neophytes jobs thanks to the influence of booze. Peggy, the girl who seems old fashioned and prudish but is really liberated, and Stan, the guy who claims to be liberated but can’t really handle it when Peggy calls his bluff. Pete and Ken, opposites in almost every way, rivals since the first season, with Pete usually on the losing end — only this time, Pete, in almost Michael Corleone-style fashion, brings Ken to heel.

And then there’s Faye Miller and the brunette from the Clio awards after-party. Again, Don tries to put the moves on Faye and she wisely resists. But the brunette throws herself at Don. She’s caught up in his success and new-found fame, and, of course, his good looks. She sleeps with him right away and she is a symbol of everything that is destructive in Don’s life: the drunkenness; the pursuit of prestige and acclaim; the selfishness; the meaninglessness; the empty nothingness. Don has just won his industry’s highest award and in the end, he has nothing. He’s so drunk, he forgets his Clio at the bar. He’s so drunk, he forgets his kids.

In a nice touch, we find out that Roger made sure to hold onto the Clio at the bar and he gives it to Don later. The friendship between Roger and Don is one of the few real relationships Don has left. But as it is right now, I doubt that their relationship will be enough to save Don from self-destruction.

Is Faye Miller Don’s last hope?

Posted on September 3rd, 2010 at 10:03am.

Michelle Rodriguez on Machete: “a symbol of hope … kind of the way we felt about Obama.”

Michelle Rodriguez in "Machete."

By Jason Apuzzo. Here’s Machete’s Michelle Rodriguez today, speaking to the LA Times:

“I was nervous about doing a movie about Latinos. I’ve usually stayed away from it,” she told 24 Frames, saying she found most depictions of Latino culture on the big screen to be one-note and marginal. “But after I read the script, I realized this is about a symbol of hope. It was kind of the way we felt about Obama when he was first elected …”

The depiction of Machete as a symbol of hope for a Latino community, at a time when, as the movie noted satirically, immigration fears were running riot, heartened Rodriguez. And to the extent it shows Latinos and whites working together, she says, it felt even more ideological.

“It was like seeing Run DMC and Aerosmith doing that video together,” she said, referring to “Walk This Way.” “It was like, ‘Yeah, man, we can all do this together and laugh about it.’ “

All do what together? Incite a race war?

Robert Rodriguez, by the way, apparently wants to do a trilogy of these films. I’ll be telling you what I think of the first one tomorrow.

Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 12:00pm.