By Joe Bendel. Travel is broadening – you can discover exotic new ways to get high. For an extraordinarily annoying American expat, Chile is all about one thing: San Pedro cactus. Chile is welcome to keep him. Still, he just might learn something from a hippy-dippy free spirit in Sebastián Silva’s Crystal Fairy, which screens during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Park City.
Did I mention how truly unpleasant it is to spend time with young Jamie? Well, it is. Nonetheless, three Chilean brothers befriend the self-centered, manic, immature drug-vacuum. They are about to embark on a little Fear-and-Loathing road trip in search of some of that increasingly rare cactus to boil up and ingest on the beach. However, Jamie complicates matters when he invites along wild child Crystal Fairy. He will regret the overture as soon as he comes down from his coke bender. While the brothers three try to make the best of it, Jamie acts like a complete jerkweed around his fellow American. Yet somehow, there might be a thimble-full of redemption lurking in the third act.
While Michael Cera still looks like a moppet, he is so convincingly irritating, it is rather amazing his management signed off on this Chilean escapade. Were it not for the climatic emotional pay-off Silva handles with remarkable sensitivity, Crystal might sour viewers on Cera indefinitely.
Between Crystal Fairy and his class conscious The Maid, Silva is beginning to emerge as the maestro of the awkward situation. He is also clearly willing to present his cast in a profoundly unflattering light. Indeed, Jamie dubs Gaby Hoffman’s character “Crystal Hairy” for reasons that are vividly and repeatedly established. The obvious exceptions are his three real life brothers, Agustín, José Miguel, and Juan Andrés – who all come across as decent chaps with sufficient hygiene.
Essentially, Crystal Fairy shows the dark side of the kooky, quirky characters that typically inhabit indie films. Frankly, it is sort of a corrective to many other films that will play in Park City over the coming week, reminding viewers there are often rather unfortunate reasons behind eccentric behavior. That is not nothing, but Silva forces the audience to sit through a lot of noise before it starts to get real. Only recommended for viewers with little fondness for precious-sized indies or Cera, Crystal Fairy screens today (1/18), Wednesday (1/23), and Friday (1/25) in Park City, today (1/18) in Salt Lake, and tomorrow (1/19) in Ogden, as a World Cinema Dramatic Competition selection at this year’s Sundance.
By Joe Bendel. There are plenty of fantastical happenings in this girls’ finishing school, but it certainly is no Hogwarts. Clémence Poésy’s Harry Potter fans will not know what to make of it. Part fashion show, part art installation, but entirely experimental cinema, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s The Capsule screens as part of the New Frontiers Shorts Program at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.
Six young women have arrived in mysterious ways at an ancient coastal villa for metaphysical instructions on becoming women. This naturally includes music classes and lessons on how to look elegant while walking your goat. Narrative is decidedly slippery here, but it is definitely inspired by Sisyphus, Prometheus, and Sappho, as well as the art of co-writer Aleksandra Waliszewska.
For part-time cover-waif Poésy and her co-stars, The Capsule is as much a modeling assignment as it is an acting gig. The costumes by leading designers, including the only mildly fetishistic school uniforms, are quite striking, but the faded glory of the villa and exotic surrounding environs are Capsule’s strongest asset. However, the super-imposed animation would not have cut it on MTV’s Liquid Television back in the day.
Expressly intended for adventurous viewers, the thirty-five minute Capsule is nonetheless unusually stylish by experimental standards. Cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis gives it all a cool, glossy sheen appropriate to its neo-gothic austerity. Recommended for New Frontiers track veterans and uncommonly hardy fashonistas, The Capsule screens as part the NF shorts block at this year’s Sundance.
Joe Bendel, Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo @ The 2012 Tribeca Film Festival.
By Govindini Murty. As Libertas readers know, we’ve long been advocates of film festivals, especially those that celebrate independent film. Because they empower individual filmmakers to try out new ideas, film festivals are a crucial way to inspire the spirit of freedom and innovation in the culture. And did I also mention that they’re a lot of fun? Where else can you hang out with fellow film fanatics, see great films, meet talented filmmakers, and return to your own creative work buzzing with renewed energy and ideas?
That’s why we’ve been stepping up our film festival coverage here at Libertas. Jason and I had the chance to attend the Sundance Film Festival and the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and we also just finished attending the LA Film Festival. All three festivals have been terrific experiences. And of course, Libertas’ own Joe Bendel, the Zen master of the independent film review, has already been doing a fantastic job these past two years covering pretty much every film festival on the planet (maybe even in the known universe).
As a result of our indie focus, Indiewire has added us to Criticwire, which means that you can click on our names on their Criticwire page and find letter grades and film reviews for all the independent and mainstream movies we’re seeing.
To also make it easier for Libertas readers to find our film festival reviews, we’ve created new categories in the ‘Articles’ drop down menu above for each of the major film festivals we’re covering. We’ve created a new Sundance category, a Tribeca category, and an LA Film Festival category. Click on one of those categories and you will see all the reviews we’ve posted for that festival going back to the launch of Libertas Film Magazine.
We’ll add more festival categories as we proceed – and remember to go out and support these films! If a movie isn’t playing in a theater in your area, then remember that many of these movies are also available on your cable provider’s VOD, Netflix streaming, Amazon on-demand, or iTunes.
LFM's Joe Bendel, Govindini Murty & Jason Apuzzo at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
By Govindini Murty. Sundance sets the tone for the entire film industry in North America. Its spirit of supporting creativity, talent, and scrappy innovation is one we heartily applaud here at Libertas. We also applaud the fact that in recent years Sundance has become a home to so many pro-freedom films. To name just a few, these have included Mads Brügger’s daring expose of North Korean Communism The Red Chapel (2010), Chris Morris’ brilliant satire of Islamic terrorism Four Lions (2010), and Lee Tamahori’s intense anti-Saddam Hussein thriller The Devil’s Double (2011).
The 2012 Sundance Film Festival continued this tradition. Pro-freedom films screened at the festival included: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s efforts to expose the brutality of the Communist Chinese government; The Other Dream Team, about the Lithuanian basketball team and their struggle to overcome Soviet influence; Putin’s Kiss, about the turn toward authoritarianism amongst the Nashi youth movement in Putin’s Russia; and Mads Brügger’s The Ambassador, a witty and politically-incorrect expose of corruption in central Africa. There were also a host of entertaining and well-made narrative dramas and comedies this year. A few we at Libertas enjoyed included The Raid, Grabbers, and Shadow Dancer.
LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Joseph Gordon-Levitt at Sundance 2012.
Jason and I arrived at Sundance on Monday, January 23rd. Libertas super-contributor Joe Bendel had already been at the festival since opening night on January 19th, and had managed to fit in an astounding number of films that first weekend. Because we admire the Zen warrior-monk focus Joe brings to writing movie reviews, the first thing we did when we arrived in Park City was meet up with Joe on Main Street – the central artery through which all things Sundance flow. Snow flakes were falling and the lights were twinkling on the picturesque street as we all met up in front of the famed Egyptian Theatre.
Slipping and sliding through the snow and invigorated by the air of good cheer around us, we headed with Joe down the street through the crush of festival goers and filmmakers to plan our film-going strategy. With approximately 180 films showing at Sundance, many playing simultaneously in multiple venues, careful coordination is integral to having a successful Sundance experience. As we hurried down Main Street, we ran into Paul Giamatti (looking avuncular with a fuzzy beard), and Jason spotted Kate Bosworth (there promoting her thriller Black Rock). Jason wanted to ask her whether she did her own surfing in Blue Crush, then thought better of it.
The first Sundance film we had scheduled for that night was an 11:45pm screening of Grabbers – a campy, sci-fi Irish alien-invasion movie. Sundance’s Park City at Midnight screenings are where the festival shows its genre films, and the raucous crowds that attend these screenings often provide a lively show of their own. The screening of Grabbers was great fun, with the mostly drunken crowd hooting and hollering throughout the screening, and we agreed the film had a good chance at getting distribution. In fact, Jason spotted some distribution execs he recognized walking into the theater. We would have stayed for the Q & A with the filmmakers, but it was 2:00am and we were scheduled to attend the coffee chat with Stan Lee at 9:00 the next morning. This was something we would have to get used to at Sundance: sleep deprivation.
LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty with Stan Lee at the 2012 Slamdance Film Festival.
Tuesday, January 24th’s highlights were most definitely Slamdance’s two-hour coffee chat with Stan Lee in the morning, followed by the screening of his film With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story that afternoon. Slamdance is the fun, ‘alternative’ festival to Sundance, and is really worth a visit. Jason has already described this wonderful event with Stan Lee in detail, but let me just add how charming, witty, and delightful Stan is in person. He was truly gracious when we met him, with a big smile on his face and a roguish twinkle in his eye. We bonded with him over our mutual love of classic film and all things Errol Flynn, and had fun asking him questions about his work and inspiration during the course of the two-hour master class/coffee chat. We would have loved for Joe to have attended this event with us, but Joe was scheduled to leave Sundance Tuesday morning for New York, so we bid him adieu the night before. Continue reading LFM’s Sundance Diary & Final Thoughts on the Festival
By Govindini Murty. The internecine conflict in Northern Ireland has provided potent cinematic subject matter for decades. Shadow Dancer, starring Clive Owen, Andrea Riseborough, and Gillian Anderson, is the latest film to dramatize this fraught topic. Directed by James Marsh (Man on a Wire) and currently screening at the Berlin Film Festival, Shadow Dancer tells the story of a young woman torn between loyalty to her radical IRA family and her efforts to protect her young son by becoming a spy for the British.
What is so striking about Shadow Dancer is that it portrays the British government in a positive light as it attempts to negotiate peace with the IRA – while portraying the radical IRA cadres who oppose the British as unregenerate fanatics.
Andrea Riseborough & Clive Owen at The Berlin Film Festival.
When I recently saw the film at Sundance I asked director James Marsh and actress Andrea Riseborough if they intended the film to have a pro-British message. Marsh immediately assured me that the film was non-political and was intended purely as a drama examining the predicament of one particular IRA family. Riseborough differed from him, saying that she thought the film was sympathetic to the IRA.
This discrepancy suggests how hard it is to remain neutral in depicting political subject matter in the movies; one inevitably has to make choices about what to show or not show on-screen, and these choices in turn affect the perceived politics of a film.
As for the film’s meaning, it will be viewers ultimately who will be the ones to decide.
In Shadow Dancer, Andrea Riseborough (of Madonna’s W.E.) plays Colette McVeigh, a young single mother caught up in the terrorist activities of her staunchly IRA family in Belfast during the waning years of “the Troubles” in the early 1990s. Radicalized by the death of her little brother years before, Colette has been aiding her two IRA brothers, Gerry and Conor, in a series of bombings, shootings, and assassinations against the British and their loyalists. Unbeknownst to her family, Colette has been having second thoughts about the violence she is perpetuating – especially since she is now the mother of a small boy. When she half-heartedly drops off a bomb in a London subway without setting off the detonator, British intelligence picks her up.
British MI5 agent Mac (Clive Owen) persuades Colette it’s time to renounce her IRA terrorist ways and become a secret agent for the British. It’s either that or go to jail for twenty-five years and give up hope of raising her young son herself. Colette chooses to become a British agent, but her brothers’ continued terrorist activities, combined with the paranoia of a sadistic local IRA boss, place Colette in one moral quandary after another. Does she help the British and prevent further killings – but endanger the life of her family at the hands of the suspicious IRA? Or does she keep working for the IRA and take part in more assassinations, only to be arrested and locked away in jail by the British? A budding romance with Mac – her decent, well-intentioned MI5 handler – makes things even more complicated for Colette. Continue reading LFM Reviews Shadow Dancer @ The Berlin/Sundance Film Festivals: A Timely Drama on the Dangers of Ideological Fanaticism
By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. His documentaries have been among the most provocative films featured in the Sundance Film Festival over the past several years. Bolder even than Sacha Baron Cohen, he’s punk’d both the North Korean communist government and now, in his new film The Ambassador, the Central African Republic and the corrupt diplomatic culture that supports it.
He’s one of Europe’s funniest and most controversial filmmakers, although most Americans haven’t heard of him — yet.
The name of this lanky, cerebral enfant terrible is Mads Brügger.
In Brügger’s previous film The Red Chapel (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), winner of Sundance’s 2010 World Cinema jury prize for documentaries, the filmmaker pulled off one of the most dangerous and politically provocative stunts in cinema history by infiltrating North Korea as part of a fake socialist comedy group. Operating under the watchful (and vaguely confused) gaze of the North Korean government, Brügger’s cameras proceeded to document the bizarre, Orwellian nether-world of today’s Pyongyang and its frightening cult of the ‘Dear Leader.’
In his new film The Ambassador (read the Libertas Film Magazine review of the film here), which recently screened at Sundance, Brügger now attempts an even more complex and daring stunt by purchasing a Liberian diplomatic title and infiltrating one of the most dangerous places on Earth — the Central African Republic (CAR) — as an ersatz Ambassador. His purpose? To expose the illegal blood diamond trade — and the corrupt world of CAR officials, bogus businessmen and shady European and Asian diplomats that it benefits.
Like a tragicomic version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, The Ambassador takes viewers into a rarely-seen world of European influence-peddlers who exploit the African continent — and the amoral retinue of African officials, petty businessmen and hangers-on who are complicit in the exploitation.
Along the way Brügger and his hidden cameras have close encounters with everything from an obese ex-French Legionnaire heading the CAR’s state security (who is assassinated shortly after talking to Brügger), to armed militias in the middle of Africa’s ‘Triangle of Death,’ to a diamond smuggler with a secret child bride and potential terrorist ties, to a tribe of inebriated pygmies organized by Brügger to staff a match factory.
Mads Brügger talks with Jason Apuzzo at Sundance.
It all makes for a potent, carnivalesque and politically incorrect experience — and one that exposes the mutual racism (of Europeans toward Africans, and Africans toward Europeans) that makes central Africa such a hotbed of corruption and violence.
In the midst of all this is Brügger himself — a tall, soft-spoken Danish journalist (and son of two Danish newspaper editors) with an ironic sense of humor and an uncanny ability to transform himself into the kind of diffident European grandee that African officials are accustomed to exploiting — and being exploited by — well into the 21st century.
Along with my Libertas Film Magazine co-editor Govindini Murty, I sat down with Brügger at the Sundance Film Festival to talk about his funny, horrifying and highly controversial new film. With a shaved head, and wearing a skull ring from DC Comics’ The Phantom, Brügger arrived looking very much the part of an experimental European director.
Apuzzo: What got you interested in [corruption in the Central African Republic] as subject matter for a film?
Brügger: I like doing films that divert from their own genre. I wanted to do an Africa documentary without all the usual semiotics and codes of the generic Africa documentary. You know — NGO people, child soldiers, HIV patients, and so on. But also I wanted a film where you would meet all the people you usually don’t get to see – you know, the kingpins, the players, the ministers who live a very secure and comfortable life away from the scrutiny of the media. So I thought that if I could purchase a diplomatic title, I could gain access to this very closed realm of African state affairs and politics. It’s pretty much a ‘let’s-see-what-happens’ project. Once we set off to do this, who will we meet? What kind of people will I run into?
Mads Brügger talks with Govindini Murty at Sundance.
Apuzzo: How did you prepare to become a corrupt European diplomat?
Brügger: [Laughs.] I prepared for almost three years, because I wanted to really go into detail with my persona. I would go to receptions, embassies in Copenhagen, especially the Belgian embassy because they have a lot of African diplomats coming there. I noticed all the telltale signs, the do’s and don’ts of how diplomats behave and carry themselves. For instance, when they’re having cocktails they like to fold their napkin into a triangle and then wrap it around the glass. I think it’s because they don’t want to leave fingerprints, but I don’t know for sure. [Laughs.]
By Joe Bendel. Travel is broadening – you can discover exotic new ways to get high. For an extraordinarily annoying American expat, Chile is all about one thing: San Pedro cactus. Chile is welcome to keep him. Still, he just might learn something from a hippy-dippy free spirit in Sebastián Silva’s Crystal Fairy, which screens during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Park City.
