Category: Narrative

By Joe Bendel. Miles Davis was like Picasso. He had highly influential, readily identifiable periods. Each of Davis’s stylistic shifts usually heralded the birth of a new trend in jazz. However, in the late 1970s, Davis was in the midst of his “silent” period. Withdrawing from public performances and recordings, his reclusive hedonistic lifestyle further fueled fans’ obsession with the Miles Davis mystique. An aspiring music writer tries to snag the interview everyone wanted, but gets pulled head-first into the chaos of the Miles Davis experience in Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead, which premiered as the closing night selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival.

If you can’t tell it is the late 1970s from Davis’s wardrobe, you’re never going to figure it out. Earlier in the decade, Davis released some of his most commercial recordings ever with Bitches Brew and Jack Johnson (heard prominently early on), but everyone still prefers his classic stuff, like Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. After several years away from the studio, Davis has finally cut a new session, but he refuses to relinquish the tapes. This rather irks Columbia Records, since they paid for it, but considering how much they make off his back catalog, Davis does not feel he owes them anything.

Due in part to his heavy cocaine use, as well as his self-imposed state of isolation, Davis might be losing his grip on reality. He frequently experiences visions from his earlier life, particularly his marriage to first wife Frances Taylor (that’s her on the cover of Someday My Prince Will Come). Yet, his erratic behavior will make him even more formidable when an unscrupulous agent steals the master he has been so closely guarding. Pressing would-be journalist Dave Braden into his service, Davis lights out after the ambiguously mobbed up talent manager—and Hell follows after them.

As an actor, Cheadle channels the mannerisms, voice, and most importantly the attitude of Davis so well, it is truly eerie. In contrast to the secluded years of the 1970s, Davis was a true media presence in the 1980s, even appearing in an episode of Miami Vice and a commercial for Honda Scooters. We know exactly what he looked and sounded like around this time—and Cheadle nails it completely.

As a director and screenwriter, Cheadle’s choices will be more controversial, but they are mostly defensible. Everyone can probably agree the traditional short pants to long teeth bio-picture approach really does not fit a Miles Davis. Sort of like Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, Cheadle uses the flashback structure to hopscotch back and forth in order to get at the essence of the musician’s life. It works for the most part, but the central fictional narrative following madcap scramble for his mystery master tape is pretty bogus.

Frankly, it is impressive how well Cheadle and his co-screenwriters understand his music, yet it is somewhat frustrating how much they cover through cinematic shorthand. Most Miles fans well understand what a substantial role producer Teo Macero played in shaping his fusion sessions, but he only gets name-checked. Likewise, you just have to know Cannonball Addderley and John Coltrane are the saxophone players on the sextet sessions, but Davis’ relationship with Trane was one of the most significant associations of his career. Still, Cheadle earns major credit for a scene showing the close collaboration Davis and arranger Gil Evans (nicely played by Jeffrey Grover) on the Miles Ahead sessions. To this day, many fans do not realize the uncredited work Evans did on innumerable Miles Davis albums as an unclassifiable musical fixer.

The choice of Robert Glasper to adapt the classic Davis music to fit within the film’s dramatic framework and to compose original tribute-ish themes with Cheadle was also inspired. Not only is Glasper comfortable with modal, fusionistic, and bop-based forms of jazz, he also has an ear open to contemporary forms of music. He is precisely the sort of musician Davis would be working with today if he were still with us.

Cheadle’s work as Davis is genuinely award-caliber and Emayatzy Corinealdi gives a strong, forceful performance as Taylor (one wonders what Cicely Tyson will make of the film, but you can’t please everyone). However, Ewan McGregor is basically dead weight as Braden, while Michael Stulhbarg makes an embarrassingly lame villain as the exploitative agent (is there any other kind?).

Regardless, Cheadle’s go-for-broke ethos is definitely cool and he shows unerring good judgment with respects to music placement. You will get the essence of Davis from the film, which is saying something. It might take fans a bit of time to chew on what is and is not incorporated into the film (no Charlie Parker, but the scandalous police assault outside the Vanguard is dramatized, with surprising restraint), but it is worth wrestling with. Recommended with largely good feelings, Miles Ahead is scheduled to open in spring 2016, following its closing night screenings at the 2015 NYFF.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:56pm.

By Joe Bendel. Dr. Stanley Miligram was not a one-hit wonder in the field of social psychology, but his career arguably peaked in 1961. Yes, he continue to produce original and even groundbreaking research throughout his professional life, but he would always work under the shadow of the Yale experiments that bear his name. Miligram’s life and work are dramatized in an aptly psychologically expressive fashion in Michael Almereyda’s Experimenter, which opens this Friday in New York.

You have heard of Miligram’s work whether you know it or not, but in the early 1960s, plenty of unsuspecting subjects volunteered for his study on obedience and authority. Each participant agreed to serve as the “Teacher,” whose role is to administer electric shocks of increasing and potentially lethal power to the “Learner” for every wrong answer. Despite the pre-recorded screams of pain, they continued to mete out the punishment, because a man in a lab coat told them to.

The high percentage of subjects administering he maximum voltage startle even Miligram himself. For years, the implications of the test and the underlying deception are hotly debated. They make Miligram’s name and establish him as an expert, but he regularly finds himself re-debating his techniques and assumptions. Of course, his critics did their best to ignore the elephant in the room, which Almereyda boldly represents with a real elephant trailing Miligram down hallways. He was after all, the American-born son of Eastern European Jews, who was understandably fascinated by the Eichmann trial roughly coinciding with his [in]famous experiments.

Experimenter is a relentlessly stylized film that deliberately eschews any pretense of verisimilitude. Yet, it almost has to reject the trappings of conventional drama too accommodate Almereyda’s comprehensive survey of Miligram’s work and the criticisms he faced. He is a decidedly cold fish, but his constant fourth wall breaking commentary is fascinating stuff. Ranging freely between arrogance and defensiveness, Peter Sarsgaard gives one of the strangest, but still unconventionally effective performances you will see this year.

Throughout it all, we still get a sense of his personality and watch him develop relatively convincing chemistry with Winona Ryder’s Sasha Menkin Miligram. We get a sense of him as a husband and family man, who went to work to warn Americans they could easily carry out any number of atrocities, if they were duly ordered to while in a compliant “agentic state.”

Frankly, it takes a while for viewers to banish their reservations and buy into Almereyda’s rear-screen projections and self-consciously artificial backdrops. However, the artistry of Ryan Samul’s cinematography and the wonderfully exaggerated but not quite over period look crafted by production designer Deana Sidney and art director Andy Eklund is immediately impressive. It is also hard to beat the surreal eccentricity of Miligram meeting William Shatner and Ossie Davis (played with fitting attitude by Kellan Lutz and Dennis Haysbert) on the set of a TV movie based on his experiments.

It is rather encouraging to see a film as ambitiously cerebral as Experimenter let loose in theaters. Yet, it comes at an opportune time, when fewer people seem to have the skills to rigorously question and dissect what the media tells them. Intellectually challenging and visually playful, Experimenter is a film that engages on multiple levels. Recommended unruly freethinkers, it opens this Friday (10/16) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:56pm.

By Joe Bendel. You have to assume any New England building dating back to the seventeenth century must have been involved in witchcraft in some way. The historic Noyes-Parris House, former home of Rev. Samuel Parris of Salem Witch Trial infamy, is a good example. Fittingly, the early Colonial house serves as the central location of brothers Michael & Shawn Rasmussen’s old school The Inhabitants, which releases today on iTunes.

Despite the freakiness of Rose Stanton, the somewhat age-addled retiring proprietor, a married couple is delighted to buy the March Carriage bed & breakfast—and for such a reasonable price. Dan and Jessica Coffey believe it is an investment in their future, but they really did not poke around enough. If they had, they might have noticed the weird witchcraft paraphernalia in the cellar and the video surveillance monitors still functioning in the attic. They also might have been curious to learn Lydia March, a midwife accused of witchcraft, met her grisly end while living there.

The first few days are filled with rustic charm, but when Dan is suddenly called away on business, he returns to find a radically different vibe. If only their dog Wiley could talk. Instead, he will have to look for answers in the surveillance tapes and the local witchcraft museum.

There is no question the Noyes-Parris/March Carriage is an absolutely terrific location for a horror film. The Rasmussen Brothers fully exploit it, taking viewers into all sorts of dark rooms and passageways. The Inhabitants bears obvious comparison to Ti West’s The Innkeepers (some of his fans were down on it, but we were bullish on it here), with good reason. Both films seem to absorb and project the eerie energy of their backdrops, creating claustrophobic terror. However, The Inhabitants also brings to mind films like Ted Geoghegan’s We Are Still Here and, believe it or not, the first V/H/S film (they both make grainy video tape pretty damn blood-chilling).

Of course, you can also see stylistic hat-tips to the ambitious low budget horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Everything feels real and hand-crafted. Presumably, any computer generated effects were used sparingly. Fortunately, the Brothers Rasmussen intuitively understand what we do not see is always scarier than what we clearly can (especially if it is cheesy looking). They also created an intriguingly eerie backstory that rings true to local lore. While we’re at it, let’s give Wiley (a.k.a. Bailey) some credit. He’s very well trained and rather expressive for a canine performer.

The humans are not bad either, particularly Michael Reed as Coffey, the out his depth everyman. He seems reasonably proactive and intuitive for a horror movie husband, while Judith Chaffee is suitably unsettling as Stanton. Elise Couture-Stone holds up her end well enough, but Jessica Coffey is just the sort of role that demands disciplined consistency rather than method emoting.

Perhaps most impressively, the Brothers Rasmussen demonstrate a really strong eye for visual composition. You can tell throughout The Inhabitants that they have carefully determined who and what should be in the foreground and background of each shot. It is a surprisingly well-crafted and satisfying ultra-indie film that deserves a wide genre audience. Highly recommended for horror fans, The Inhabitants is now available on most major VOD platforms.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:54pm.

By Joe Bendel. Oddly enough, the Federal government is actually popular in this dystopian future. It is just ridiculously ineffectual. Combat 21 and his storm-trooper cult basically terrorize the futuristic capitol city with impunity. Only a group of genetically-enhanced twenty-something looking teenagers can stop them in Andrew Lau & Corey Yuen’s wildly over the top The Avenging Fist, which releases today on DVD from Well Go USA.

Sadly, Mega Nova and Belle never knew their father Thunder, an elite policeman killed in the line of duty—except not really. Thunder and their mother Wing were part of the Power Glove pilot program, one of the unpleasant secrets of the former government. Nova and Belle were tests cases in the next phase of the government’s efforts to harness the supposed unused 80% of the human brain (which implies mankind is devolving).

Rather than consign them to a guinea pig’s life, Wing spirited them away. Now they live an underground existence, if by underground you mean constant clubbing and jet-scooter drag racing. However, when Combat 21 gets wind of their X-Men like abilities, he unleashes his brainwashed army in their National Socialist uniforms, which tragically enough includes Thunder. At least they might have an ally in Inspector Dark, Thunder’s former colleague—the one who supposedly killed him, but he clearly didn’t do it decisively enough.

Everything about this film is totally nuts, in both good and bad ways. It started out as a rip-off of the Tekken video game franchise so blatant it led to billable hours, but apparently screenwriter Sap Sam (Thirteen) Chan resorted to time-tested strategy of convoluting the plot into such a nonsensical rat’s nest, nobody would want to claim it resembled their I.P. Seriously, this is a film in which a glove is used to access unused portions of the brain. If you are waiting for logic to show up, you will see the closing credits first.

On the other hand, The Avenging Fist also features Master Sammo Hung sporting a shiny silver fedora and Gigi Leung rocking an Afro-cut. Indeed, there is something reassuring about his presence and Cecilia Yip adds some class as “Aunt” Wing. Frustratingly, the cosmic fireballs and psychic force fields water down Yuen’s action choreography, but Biao Yuen still has his moments as Thunder. As for the special effects, they might have been considered state of the art in 2001, but they have not aged well. Gee, the cast is cute though, especially Leung as Erika, the supermodel.

Frankly, it is hard to fathom how Avenging Fist managed to miss becoming a midnight tradition at the Alamo Drafthouse. It is absolutely impossible to explain the film’s bizarre chain of events or how any of its internal systems supposedly work, but it is kind of fun to stare at it in utter disbelief. Recommended for fans of cult film lunacy, The Avenging Fist is now available on DVD from Well Go USA.

Posted on October 13th, 2015 at 9:54pm.

By Joe Bendel. The cinematic tradition of the butt-kicking woman wuxia warrior can be traced directly to Red Heroine from 1929. It might date back even further, but sadly few Chinese silent films survived Mao’s many destructive mass campaigns. In the succeeding years, Michelle Yeoh and Cheng Pei-pei made their legendary careers playing such characters. However, they never had the sort of exquisitely lush backdrops afforded to Nie Yinniang, the titular anti-heroine of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s long-anticipated first wuxia film (and Taiwan’s official Academy submission), The Assassin, which screened as a Main Slate selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival.

As child, Nie Yinniang was promised in marriage to her cousin Tian Ji’an but scandal tore those plans asunder. After an ill-fated episode trespassing in a rival family’s palace, Nie is trundled off to Jiaxin, a martial arts nun, who trains her to be the perfect assassin. At twenty-three, her education is complete, but she still shows traces of a conscience. After sparing her most recent target out of sympathy for his young son, Nie is sent home, ostensibly to visit her parents. However, her next assignment will be the very same Tian Ji’an, who is now the headstrong military governor of Hebei Province.

To further complicate matters, Tian Ji’an is openly plotting against Tian Xing, one of his military commanders, who also happens to be a distant relative. Nie Yinniang might just be inclined to intercede on Tian Xing’s behalf, but that is decidedly not what Jiaxin had in mind.

Frankly, Hou’s narrative (also credited to three co-screenwriters) is rather murky and elliptical. Wuxia fans simply have to be content knowing some kind of intrigue is going on, even if the who’s and why’s are a tad tricky to follow. Instead, this is a film meant to wash over viewers. Even at the deliberately confined Academy ratio, The Assassin is a staggering sight, often resembling traditional Chinese watercolor scrolls, with one lone figure (usually Nie) tucked away in the corner of a sprawling landscape. Mark Lee Ping-bin has been one of the best cinematographers not named Christopher Doyle for years, but The Assassin is his finest work yet. Not to belabor the point, but the film is gorgeous.

Having Shu Qi as the lead does not hurt either. In fact, the film would not have worked without her. As a standout in previous Hou films (remember the opening tunnel scene in Millennium Mambo), she can withstand his close scrutiny, quietly projecting a host of emotions with power and economy. Yet, she also has legit action chops forged in films like Journey to the West. In contrast, Chang Cheng looks ill at ease as Tian Ji’an, even though he certainly knows his way around a wuxia film. However, as Jiaxin, Sheu Fang-yi (also excellent as a very different teacher in Touch of the Light) is a wonderfully ambiguous antagonist and a fitting equal to Shu Qi’s Nie.

Martial arts fans might well be put off by Hou’s approach to the fight scenes. For the most part they are executed spectacularly quickly, but that is how an assassin like Nie Yinniang would want to take care of business. It will likely prove divisive among genre diehards, but it is worth experiencing just to see how Hou’s aesthetic translates in a wuxia setting. Recommended for its remarkably accomplished artistry and what may very well prove to be an iconic turn from Shu Qi, The Assassin screened this past weekend at the Walter Reade, as part of this year’s NYFF, in advance of its October 16th New York opening at the IFC Center and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on October 12th, 2015 at 12:55pm.

By Joe Bendel. Ham Chun-su is definitely the sort of director who needs more than one take. That is just as true of his own life as it is with his films. Strictly speaking, he will not know he is replaying his visit to a modestly prestigious film festival. The ultimate results will not vary so drastically either, but sweet regrets are much nicer than sour ones in Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then, which screened as a Main Slate selection of the 53rd New York Film Festival.

Through miscommunication, Ham has come to Suwon one day before his film screens, but we doubt he had anything better to do. While killing time, he finds himself drawn to the shrine at Hwaseong Haeng-gung palace, possibly because Yoon Hee-jung is also a frequent visitor there. Despite his awkwardness, Ham strikes up a conversation, learning she is a former model who has forsaken her former life to become a fulltime painter. She is therefore impressed to learn he is an art-house film director transparently based on Hong.

Ham manages to spend the rest of the day and most of the night with her, but the drunker he gets, the more he sabotages himself. What was once a reasonably pleasant ships-passing encounter turns out to be rather disappointing and uncomfortable for all parties. Take two. Everything happens more or less the same, yet it is different. Yoon initially seems sadder, but Ham is more honest. Of course, since this is a Hong Sang-soo film, he gets just as drunk.

If you enjoy Hong’s films, you will flip for RNWT, because it represents the filmmaker at his Hong Sang-soo-iest. On the other hand, those who are not so into him might still give it a shot, because it is much less mannered and considerably more resonant than many of his prior films. Still, all his hallmarks are present and accounted for. It is a defiantly talky film, featuring a filmmaker protagonist and a bountiful stream of booze—so what’s not to like?

As the smitten Ham, Jang Jin-regular Jung Jae-young shows he also has the stuff to hang in Hong’s neurotic world. It is fascinating to see how dramatically he alters the colors and shadings of his performance with one small twist of the dial. While Kim Min-hee is just as understated, she lights up the screen with her sensitive, luminous presence. It is a wonderfully wise and sad performance that gets richer the second time through, even though her character remains in essentially the same headspace.

In RNWT, Hong captures the impressionistic sense of a late night spent with an almost complete stranger that you wish would never end almost as vividly as Zhang Lu’s Gyeongju (which is an absolutely terrific film). As with his previous film Hill of Freedom, Hong engages on an emotional level in RNWT, rather than just playing narrative games and reveling in clever banter. Bittersweet and subtle (two qualities that do not go together so often), Right Now, Wrong Then is recommended for those who appreciate mature relationship dramedies.  It screened this past weekend as part of the 2015 NYFF.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on October 12th, 2015 at 12:54pm.