Sundance Film Festival – Page 12 – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM Reviews Ernest and Celestine @ The 2014 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Yesterday was a happy morning for a Belgian bear and mouse. Based on Gabrielle Vincent’s children’s books, it was always considered another serious animated Oscar contender from GKIDS – and on top of its Academy nomination, Benjamin Renner, Stéphane Aubier & Vincent Patar’s Ernest and Celestine now also holds the distinction of being one of the first two films selected for the inaugural Sundance Kids section at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off Thursday night in Park City.

Bears live above ground, in a human-like state of middle class respectability. The mice live below, toiling away in a Dickensian subterranean city. Neither Ernest the busking bear nor Celestine the artistic mouse fit comfortably within their respective communities. Like most mice, Celestine is expected to scavenge coveted bear’s teeth from the surface world for the mice dentists, who sit atop the social order down below. Naturally, she is terrible at it. However, a chance encounter with Ernest leads to some rare cross-species collaboration—teeth for Celestine and food for Ernest.

Alas, word of their scandalous association leads to pariah status for them both. Yet, for a while they live happily together as outlaws in Ernest’s remote forest bungalow. Of course, neither the world of mice nor bears will be content until they are apprehended. Still, that will be the best opportunity for E&C to teach them a lesson in tolerance.

ErnestCelestine2 — From "Ernest and Celestine."

E&C’s hand-drawn animation has an elegant, old European feel that is refreshingly nostalgic. While sometimes the message is laid on with a heavy hand, the vibe is usually quite gentle and sweet. Frankly, one would never expect such a graceful and well intentioned film from Aubier and Patar, the team behind the anarchic bedlam of the Town Called Panic franchise, but here it is—and it is indeed a fine work of animation. Their figures are expressive and endearing, but not cloyingly cute. Jazz cellist Vincent Courtois’s lightly buoyant score also reinforces the sophisticated atmosphere.

While only the celebrity English version of C&E will play at Sundance (featuring Forest Whitaker as Ernest), its announced March release will also include select subtitled screenings of the original French (with Lambert Wilson gruffly giving voice to Ernest). Visually it is an absolute charmer and the characterization is strong enough to overcome the not so subtle teaching moments. Recommended for all children and fans of animation, Ernest and Celestine screens this Saturday (1/18) and next Saturday (1/25) in Park City, as well as this Sunday (1/19) in Salt Lake, as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on January 18th, 2014 4:17pm.

LFM Reviews Whiplash @ The 2014 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. The late lamented IAJE’s annual conference-jazz gathering used to be such a breath of fresh air, because you could see the enthusiasm young high school kids have for America’s great original musical art form. In the case of Andrew Neiman, there is a dark side to that passion—personified by a ruthlessly manipulative band director. There will literally be blood on the drum kit in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, an opening night selection of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

If the nebbish Neiman and the Mephistophelean Terence Fletcher sound familiar, it is because they first appeared in Chazelle’s proof-of-concept short, which won the short film jury award at last year’s Sundance and went on to screen at NYFF. Concept proved. That harrowing trial-by-fire is replayed in the feature length Whiplash with a new Neiman, but the irreplaceable J.K. Simmons returns as Fletcher.

Forget Simmons’ character in Oz—Fletcher is far scarier. He out Buddy Riches Buddy Rich. Unfortunately, as the director of a Juliard-like music college’s concert jazz big band, he holds tremendous power to help or hinder aspiring musicians. Needless to say, when Neiman gets his first supposed shot playing with Fletcher’s Studio Band, it is a disaster. Of course, the kid is set-up to fail when he is thrown head first into Hank Levy’s “Whiplash,” a chart that looks like differential equations translated into Sanskrit. However, Neiman craves Fletcher’s approval so badly, he will work his fingers to the bone practicing the twisty flag-waver.

Whiplash the short was a nifty piece of jazz-informed filmmaking, but it exceeds all expectations as a feature. Once again, Simmons is the engine making it all run. His Fletcher is a natural cinematic successor to R. Lee Ermy’s drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket and Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessup in A Few Good Men—for real. Yet, there is a reason for his abusive-borderline sociopathic behavior. Even more than in the predecessor short, Chazelle’s full length script and Simmons’ performance make it clear Fletcher is always true to the music in his fashion.

While some might be troubled by Fletcher’s homophobic taunts (actually, you’re sort of supposed to be), this is the one area jazz has not historically been a trailblazer for tolerance. Indeed, many have compared big band outfits to military units and viewers can understand how so from many scenes in Whiplash.

To his credit, Miles Teller also really digs in as Neiman. There is nothing cute or quirky about his work. In fact, it is downright painful watching him cower and cringe. He also looks convincing with the sticks. Chazelle, the former jazz drummer, probably gave him a few pointers. After all, Whiplash is based on his own experiences with a martinet bandleader (loosely so, we can only hope).

Frankly, Chazelle has done the near impossible, getting Sony to care about jazz. It is sort of a coming of age story, but it does not exactly wrap things up in a neat little bow. Regardless, it is a major statement from Chazelle. He really opens it up as a director, staging an unusually dynamic and dramatic climatic concert. By the same token, his script rings with truth and attitude, particularly for those who are in anyway familiar with jazz education. The result is a smart, stylish film that swings like mad. Highly recommended, Whiplash screens again today (1/17), Wednesday (1/22), and Thursday (1/23) in Park City and Saturday (1/18) in Salt Lake as part of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on January 18th, 2014 at 4:13pm.

LFM Reviews R100 @ The 2014 Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Even though filming is not even wrapped on the questionable movie adaptation of Shades of Grey, Hitoshi Matsumoto has already mashed-up the S&M melodrama genre beyond human recognition. From Japan, we have a cautionary, surreal meta-meta postmodern bondage conspiracy tale, while Hollywood is banking on a dude who wears grey ties. How quaint. In the mean time, Matsumoto subverts perversion throughout R100, which screens during the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Takafumi Katayama is a drab and depressed working drone who needs to unwind a little. He thinks he has found just the ticket when he joins a mysterious club for submissive men. At first, he gets the release he is seeking when the black-clad women meet him at their scheduled rendezvouses to beat him about and smash his sushi rolls (that’s not a euphemism). However, when they start showing up at his home and work, matters turn a distinctly charcoal shade of grey.

As each dominatrix escalates their encounters, Katayama starts to fear for his life and the safety of his young son and father-in-law. Then things get really weird, but not do bother complaining about logical inconsistencies. The film will provide that commentary itself.

Strictly speaking, there is no nudity or sex in R100, but it is absolutely, positively not for kids. The title is a play on the Japanese motion picture rating system that could be roughly translated as NC-100 for American audiences—and not for nothing. Yet, the film definitely seems to suggest you are begging for trouble if you go out looking for something on the deviant side of life.

Regardless, R100 careens so defiantly over the top, parsing its symbolic layers and potential take-away teachings becomes a head-spinning endeavor. If any of this film sounds problematic, then you should probably avoid R100 because there is way more of whatever it is that troubles you than we’ve covered so far. On the other hand, cult cinema connoisseurs looking for a new and distinctive head trip will find it here. Imagine Eyes Wide Shut transported to the world of Quentin Dupieux’s Rubber and you will start to get the idea.

Nao Omori perfectly anchors the film as the existentially put-upon Katayama. Just looking at him sort of makes you want to smack him alongside the head. However, he handles the character’s strange evolution with understated power. As his son Arashi, Haruki Nishimoto distinguishes himself as an unusually engaging young actor. Fortunately, his classmates will not be able to see R100 for a while and hopefully he will not have to take much taunting over it in later years.

R100 pushes the envelope, but it never skitters into irredeemably disturbing territory. Indeed, at some point the macro insanity trumps all of the dominant/submissive game-playing. Although decidedly one-sided, there is also some decent fight choreography in the first act for action fans. Recommended for exclusively adventurous viewers (but rather forcefully for them), R100 screens Sunday (1/19) and Tuesday (1/21) in Park City as well as this Monday (1/20) in Sundance Resort as part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on January 18th, 2014 at 4:05pm.

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Thirteen Years in the Making: Michèle Stephenson & Joe Brewster Talk About Their Film American Promise

[Editor’s Note: the post below appeared yesterday at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. One of the enduring hopes of the digital age is that technology can break down the barriers between peoples and races. Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson explore this idea first hand in their compelling new documentary American Promise. A film thirteen years in the making, American Promise follows two African-American boys (one of them Brewster and Stephenson’s own son) from first grade through high-school, showing the challenges and opportunities young black men face in today’s education system. Currently playing in select theaters nationwide, American Promise expands to additional cities this week and will air on PBS in February of 2014.

Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, American Promise follows Idris Brewster and his friend Seun Summers as they attend The Dalton School, an elite private school in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Despite the high hopes of their parents and teachers that Idris and Seun will succeed as part of the school’s diversity program, the boys have trouble dealing with the pressures of their environment. In part this is because Idris and Seun have learning disorders that go undiagnosed for years, and in part it’s because neither boy feels at home in the predominantly WASP culture of Dalton. Ultimately, Idris and Seun must balance their needs for self-determination with the high expectations of their successful, hard-charging parents.

Ever since the pioneering anthropological documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Merian C. Cooper in the 1920s, and Albert and David Maysles ‘direct cinema’ documentaries of the ’60s and ’70s, the cinema has played a powerful role in collapsing the distinctions between peoples and creating a sense of empathy and common humanity.

Michael Apted’s acclaimed 7-Up documentaries took this idea a step further. An inspiration to Brewster and Stephenson, the series documented the lives of a group of fourteen English children at seven-year intervals, beginning in 1964 and continuing through today. The 7-Up series (the kind of project known in sociology as a ‘longitudinal study’) took advantage of the cinema’s ability to master time, using the movie camera as an all-seeing eye to examine human lives over the course of decades.

The observational capabilities of the cinema have been further expanded by the digital revolution, with low-cost digital cameras making possible the kind of lengthy, first-person videography that comprises American Promise. A classic longitudinal study, American Promise draws on an impressive accumulation of thirteen years of footage to distill insights about families and children that otherwise would go unnoticed in the rush of day-to-day life.

As a result, American Promise elicits lessons that apply not just to African-American children, but to all children as they navigate the shoals of childhood and adolescence. As co-director Joe Brewster noted when we spoke at Sundance, “when people see the film, they get so immersed in the characters, these become their kids.”

The monumental size of the American Promise project required a special level of commitment from the filmmakers and their talented crew. As I chatted with American Promise’s editors and videographers at Sundance (in the photo below with Brewster & Stephenson), it became clear what a labor of love the film had been for them. Editors Erin Casper, Mary Manhardt, and Andrew Siwoff and cinematographers Errol Webber, Alfredo Alcantara, Margaret Byrne, and Jon Stuyvesant all deserve kudos for their work. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Thirteen Years in the Making: Michèle Stephenson & Joe Brewster Talk About Their Film American Promise

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Young Man on the Run: Catching Up with Shia LaBeouf and Charlie Countryman

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. Shia LaBeouf can’t keep still.

That’s what stands out when you meet the voluble 27 year-old star of the new indie thriller-romance Charlie Countryman, which opens in limited theatrical release and on VOD this Friday, November 15th. The hustling young man we’ve gotten to know in the Transformers and Indiana Jones movies – the fast-talking, nebbishy tough guy with a big heart, always improvising, always on the move – is very much the same guy in person.

Charlie Countryman premiered at Sundance earlier this year (back when it was called The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman), where we talked to LaBeouf, co-star Evan Rachel Wood, and director Fredrik Bond at the film’s press day.

Govindini Murty and Shia LaBoeuf Sundance 2013 — Govindini Murty and Shia LaBoeuf at Sundance 2013.

Charlie Countryman takes LaBeouf in a direction familiar to anyone who remembers him playing impulsive teenager Sam Witwicky in 2007’s Transformers: that of a sentimental hot-head on a hopeless quest for a girl, comedically improvising his way into and out of one scrape after another.

“It’s not a humongous departure from my real life,” LaBeouf said at the press day. “This is a guy who thinks with his heart, rather than his mind … and who doesn’t show a lot of caution toward consequences, which isn’t far from who I am.”

Charlie Countryman follows LaBeouf on a wild, hallucinogenic vision-quest through post-communist Bucharest as he pursues a world-weary femme fatale cellist named Gabi (Evan Rachel Wood), while battling over her with a pair of unhinged Euro-mobsters (Mads Mikkelsen and Til Schweiger). Infused with heart-on-your-sleeve sentimentality by director Fredrik Bond, the film is both a coming-of-age story for Charlie and a picaresque, ‘everyman’-style thriller reminiscent of the novels of Eric Ambler (The Mask of Dimitrios, Journey into Fear).

Rounding out the film’s impressive cast are Rupert Grint as one of Charlie’s drug-crazed buddies, Vincent D’Onofrio as Charlie’s depressive brother, and Melissa Leo as Charlie’s hippyish mother – with LaBeouf’s Indiana Jones co-star John Hurt providing narration.

Charlie Countryman‘s biggest star, however, may be Bucharest itself – which the film presents as an exotic, old world blend of high culture and low-life gangsterism, still adjusting to the post-Cold War world. LaBeouf’s nocturnal adventures in Bucharest – a darkly glamorous city that somehow seems trapped in a 1990s time warp – often feel like an MTV version of Joseph Cotton’s nighttime journeys through crime-ridden, post-War Vienna in Carol Reed’s The Third Man.

Jason Apuzzo and Shia LaBeouf Sundance 2013 — Shia LaBeouf and Jason Apuzzo at Sundance 2013.

LaBeouf lights up on the subject of Bucharest, gesticulating and going into one of his typical, animated riffs. “I arrived quite ignorant, you know – I’m an ignorant American,” he quips. “I haven’t really done much traveling beyond my work life. I never really picked up a Romanian book, or decided to study Romanian.

“But you get there, and you hear about [former Romanian communist leader Nicolae] Ceaușescu, you get to the [Revolution] Square, you see where the blood fell, talk to these people – you know, some people who still want communism, who are upset that it’s gone – and you don’t quite understand what that‘s about …

“I’ve heard people say that we have dated villains [in Charlie Countryman] – that’s because … Romania is dated – it’s 10 years behind. They’re still playing the ‘Thong Song’ in clubs,” he cracks. “It’s no joke, so this is part of the world of these dudes [the film’s gangster villains]. It’s not artificial – this is what we ran into.

“And it’s very sexy,” he smiles. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Young Man on the Run: Catching Up with Shia LaBeouf and Charlie Countryman

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: Putting Computers in Their Place: Computer Chess & The Nerd Origins of Today’s Technopoly

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Jason Apuzzo. Computers need to be put in their place. They really do.

That’s why I’ve been looking forward to the DVD release this week of Andrew Bujalski’s cult Sundance hit Computer Chess. Computer Chess finally spills the beans about where these little monsters came from in the first place.

Every time I pick up a newspaper these days – I’m one of the twelve people left who still read physical newspapers – I read about how computers are spying on us, destroying jobs, or infuriating health insurance customers. Like a hungry Rottweiler off its leash, computers are getting out of control and tearing up the neighborhood.

If you believe what you read, computers are also in the process of wrecking the book publishing and music industries, eliminating celluloid photography – and just this week computers claimed their latest victim, one near and dear to my heart: the local video store, as Blockbuster finally succumbed to laptops, smartphones and tablets as the preferred ways of renting all those movies you couldn’t afford to see (or were too embarrassed to see) when they were in theaters.

No more video stores – who would’ve believed it, even just ten years ago? That means no more pimply teenagers to recommend midnight horror movies to me (“Sir, I definitely recommend C.H.U.D. over TerrorVision“), no more aimless browsing or listening to neighbors argue over which Steven Seagal movie to rent, no more cheap licorice sticks at the checkout counter.

I never thought I’d miss those things so much – but suddenly I do. And it’s all because of our ‘friend’ the computer. Computers are becoming like the Yankees during the ’90s: gobbling up everybody else’s talent, then telling us how good it is for baseball.

The propaganda over the wonders that computers supposedly bring to our lives is getting out of hand. In the very least, it’s out of proportion to the destruction computers are simultaneously causing – that ‘disruptive’ effect Silicon Valley gurus salivate over, like vampires at a blood drive.

So as Twitter – the company currently reducing our public discourse to snarky, 140-character outbursts – celebrates its gaudy IPO right now, I’d like to recommend a new movie out on DVD this week that casts digital technology in a very different light: Computer Chess. Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo at The Huffington Post: Putting Computers in Their Place: Computer Chess & The Nerd Origins of Today’s Technopoly