Category: Sundance Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Pretty soon, VHS tapes will be nothing more than odd curios. A group of lowlife thugs is out to steal one that is particularly collectible. Supposedly, they will know it when they see it. If that sounds ominous, it should, because they are about to stumble across some deeply disturbing found videos in the anthology horror film V/H/S, which has generated monster viral buzz at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Adam Wingard’s framing device characters are an ugly lot, who enjoy videotaping their violent crimes. Upon breaking into their target home, they find the owner long dead amid a pile of sketchy looking VHS tapes. Each one they screen tells a twisted tale.

David Bruckner’s opening Amateur Night follows a trio of unenlightened young men as they set out to bed drunk women and record their conquests through the geeky one’s spy camera. They somehow bring two women back to their hotel room, but one promptly passes out and the other is a bit twitchy. While we have a good idea where this is headed from the outset, Hannah Fierman’s penetrating eyes are spooky as all get out. As the mystery woman, she is simultaneously alluring and unnerving.

It is road trip time in Ti (House of the Devil) West’s Second Honeymoon, duly documented by a vacationing couple on their camcorder. Unfortunately, they are having trouble shaking this strange vagrant woman. While it might be the most traditional in its approach, West’s contribution arguably boasts the film’s single freakiest scene.

However, the best chapter is easily Glenn McQuaid’s Tuesday the 17th, which gives the horny teens in the woods subgenre a wicked twist. Whatever it is out there stalking them, it has a distorting power over the camera, greatly affecting our perceptions of events, which makes what goes down quite nerve-racking. Within the horror genre, it is light-years away from McQuaid’s strangely underappreciated I Sell the Dead.

Perhaps the weakest link is Joe “Mumblecore” Swanberg’s The Strange Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger, which purports to be the recorded Skype chats between a woman with a haunted apartment and her long distance boyfriend—on a moldy old VHS tape. Really? Digital to analog, how did that work exactly? Maybe similar objections could be raised regarding Amateur Night’s spy glasses, but it is not so glaringly anachronistic. Still, there is definitely some weird stuff happening in the corner of the screen.

It is back to old fashioned camcorders for the YouTube tag-team Radio Silence’s 10/31/98, a story of carousing youth looking for a Halloween party and finding a house full of evil instead. The quartet clearly understands how to milk tension out of empty hallways and unsettling knick-knacks, before letting loose complete chaos.

Regardless of the hype surrounding audience members passing out and getting nauseous during a screening at Sundance, this is a legitimately scary movie, exponentially more frightening than the Blair Witch Project. Frankly, shaky-cams work better for horror than any other genre. It is always what we don’t see that scares us, so those what-the-heck-was-that moments are quite effective (whereas they are simply annoying in action films). However, the reliance on the hand-held found footage motif levels out the filmmakers’ differences of style, providing the film with a largely consistent look, aside from Swanberg’s internet ringer.

This is easily the scariest film in years. It can be bloody and it depicts some casual cruelty in the introduction that is not a lot of fun to watch, but once Bruckner’s story builds up some steam, V/H/S really buries its hooks into viewers. Recommended for bold genre fans not suffering from altitude sickness, it screens again tonight (Saturday, 1/28) during this year’s Sundance in Park City.

SUNDANCE GRADE: B

Posted on January 28th, 2012 at 3:19pm.

By Joe Bendel. It is the story of a man and his dog, but do not expect Lassie from provocateur Quentin Dupieux, a.k.a. Mr. Oizo. He cast off all logic-based constraints and was creatively liberated for it, to judge by the distinctively strange results in Wrong (trailer here), which screens at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Dolph Springer’s dog Paul has mysteriously vanished. His neighbor is less than sympathetic, because he is too busy going mad. He is not the only one. Eventually, it seems Paul was kidnapped by Master Chang, a tripped out New Age guru, for reasons that defy conventional reason, but make perfect sense in this world. Springer’s gardener, a pizzeria girl, and a detective also careen in and out of the film, in ways that cannot be explained in a lucid thumbnail description.

In his somewhat notorious Rubber (the killer tire movie), Dupieux came up with an eccentric premise and a clever twist, but seemed too hemmed in by the circumstances he created. In contrast, throughout Wrong he allows anything to happen, whether it makes objective sense or not. The resulting absurdity is quite entertaining to behold.

Jack Plotnick is a heck of a good sport. For Wrong to work, he has to play it all relatively straight, while everyone else acts insane. In fact, he brings an earnest sincerity to Springer that is rather endearing. Prison Break’s William Fichtner clearly enjoys hamming up Master Chang’s wacked out Zen, while Alexis Dziena plays Emma from the pizza shop appropriately over-the-top, like a sweetly innocent version of Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest.

Wrong is stylistically surreal and subversive, but rather gentle in tone, which is why it works so well. Unlike David Lynch’s Lost Highway, it never leaves viewers bereft of faith or hope. Indeed, Springer is sort of an everyman model of stick-to-itiveness that is actually sort of refreshing.

Rife with postmodern gamesmanship and goofy sight gags, Wrong is definitely aimed at a hipster audience, but it goes down way easier than one might expect. It is a funny, good-natured film, recommended for the somewhat adventurous. It screened yesterday in Park City.

SUNDANCE GRADE: B

Posted on January 28th, 2012 at 3:18pm.

By Joe Bendel. Ai Weiwei’s distinctive “Bird’s Nest” design for the Beijing National Stadium was one of the defining images of the 2008 Olympics; but Ai sought to redefine the Beijing games, forcefully decrying the tremendous suffering they caused for China’s vulnerable underclass. Choosing the struggle for Chinese human rights over a life of privilege, Ai is arguably the world’s most important activist-artist, whom Alison Klayman profiles in the fascinating and infuriating Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (trailer here), which screens at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival well underway in Park City.

Considering the recurring middle finger motif in Ai’s work, it’s hardly surprising he is not a favorite of the regime. Yet, there is more to Ai than mere symbolic defiance. Klayman trenchantly traces the roots of Ai’s nonconformist spirit to the suffering his family experienced during the Cultural Revolution. While Ai made some noise when he repudiated the Olympics, few could hear it within China. However, his mastery of social media, specifically Twitter, would change all that. Indeed, Ai and the legions of everyday Chinese citizens he inspired through Tweets ought to put everyone following vacuous celebrities like Ashton Kutcher to shame.

Most Westerners should know that Ai was recently held incommunicado for a long stretch by the police, but the projects that earned the artist the Communist government’s wrath may come as a revelation. Most notable were his efforts to document each name of the thousands of school children who died during the Sichuan earthquake as a result of flimsy “tofu” school construction. In any transparent society, this information would be in the public record, but in China all such efforts were explicitly forbidden.

There are scores of lessons to be found in Sorry, including the importance of recording such tragedies for history, rather than letting the innocent victims of Sichuan fall through the Communist memory hole. At times, Ai’s public criticisms of the regime are shockingly bold. Clearly his guts are made of steel-reinforced concrete. Although Klayman largely focuses on his activism, she still conveys a vivid sense of Ai’s personality. Partly this comes out through some shrewdly edited interview segments. Yet more fundamentally, Ai just seems to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of person.

Indeed, Klayman wisely focuses squarely on her subject.  As a documentarian, she is rather blessed that Ai recorded so many of his protests and the subsequent government crackdowns for his social network followers. The word “controversial” should not really apply here. What Ai says has happened – most definitely including a notorious police assault – really did go down. He has the scars and the video to prove it. Aside from some helpful context provided by talking heads and an innocuous score, Sorry is essentially Ai’s show—and appropriately so.

We want to call a film like Sorry “inspiring.” It is a term that undeniably applies to Ai. Unfortunately, though he might be out of immediate physical danger, Ai’s relative freedoms within contemporary China remain harshly curtailed, so viewers are likely to feel several conflicting emotions when the film ends. Anger would be a good one to go with.

This documentary is important, because the international spotlight must shine with far more intensity on his situation if circumstances are ever going to change. Given the Chinese CP’s nasty habit of harassing their critics, Klayman also earns a fair amount of credit for having the guts to tackle this project in the first place. Hopefully, she will have to produce a happy postscript for Sorry sometime in the future, but surely she would not begrudge the extra work.

As it is, the efforts invested in Sorry are considerable. One of two standout documentaries at this year’s Sundance (along with The Other Dream Team), the earnestly recommended Sorry screens again this Thursday (1/26) and Saturday (1/28) in Park City, Friday (1/2/7) in Sundance Resort, and today (1/25) in Salt Lake.

SUNDANCE GRADE: A

Posted on January 25th, 2012 at 7:34pm.

By Joe Bendel. Law enforcement is a noble calling. One rookie SWAT cop will be doing a heck of a lot of enforcing. Unfortunately, he is assigned to a decidedly dodgy mission in Gareth Huw Evans’ spectacularly awesome The Raid (trailer here), which screens as part of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.

Tama the kingpin rules the Indonesia underworld from atop his high-rise fortress. He rents apartments and immunity from police harassment to any cutthroat willing to pay rent. However, Rama’s squad is supposed to change all that. They are to systematically secure the building and capture Tama. Of course, it turns out Tama has the drop on them. Since no reinforcements will be coming for their off-the-books operation, Rama and a handful of survivors will have to fight their way out in the same manner they came in—floor by machete-wielding floor. Or in other words: Hell, yes.

The Raid is the sort of film that could turn the prim and proper into martial arts fanboys. Evans maintains an absolute breakneck pace and stages some massive action sequences. Yet the film is at its absolute best during its many scenes of extended close quarters combat, choreographed by its breakout lead Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, who co-stars as Tama’s self-explanatory henchman, Mad Dog.

Indeed, The Raid should catapult Uwais to the ranks of international superstardom. As Rama, he does something stilted indie films, didactic imports, and vapid reality shows have failed to do: provide a sympathetic Muslim protagonist with broad cross-cultural appeal. By the same token Ruhian’s Mad Dog is a most satisfyingly ferocious villain.

Many action film trailers just dice up some of their best scenes and spit them out at viewers machine gun style. In contrast, The Raid’s trailer is perfectly representative of the film’s hyper-charged energy (if anything, it is toned down a notch). Evans also shrewdly capitalizes on Tama’s seedy and imposing building, further boosting the tension through the claustrophobic setting. Frankly, the film is somewhat reminiscent of early John Woo, simultaneously gritty and operatic.

The Raid is the real deal. Packed with carnage, it is an old school martial arts shootout, with genuine art-house credibility. Highly recommended, it has been a major crowd-pleaser at this year’s Sundance, where it screens again this Thursday (1/26) in Park City and Saturday (1/27) in Salt Lake.

SUNDANCE GRADE: A+

Posted on January 25th, 2012 at 11:57am.