Welcome to Nollywood

Jaime Meltzer’s documentary on the Nigerian film industry is not a whole slew of things I would love to see about the Nigerian film industry. It is, for instance, only glancingly attentive to the history of the industry (a few title cards letting us know that film production really began there a scant 20 years ago, ‘though the industry now accounts for an astonishing amount of very profitable product). It is inexplicably inattentive to the social and political landscape of Lagos, of Nigeria, even of Africa (‘though, again glancingly, there is some intriguing stuff about Liberia bubbling up in the account of one particular production). It is only an hour long, not nearly enough time to spend ….

Yet as a snapshot of a few filmmakers–exuberant, prolific, very (very, very, very) self-confident filmmakers–and their work on projects now, it’s a suggestive, rewarding little blast. Meltzer interviews three directors/producers, then starts more directly following two as they work on their latest productions. Along the way, you get a few intriguing details about the marketing of these films (30 or so films rushed to dvd or vcd each week, often within a month or so of shooting) and about viewing habits (a tendency to dismiss Hollywood blockbusters in favor of the local product, after years of dominance by Indian film)… and some snippets of the films themselves… and it’s just a fascinating glimpse of real extra-corporate filmmaking, of local production and consumption habits.

Perro Come Perro/Dog Eat Dog

This popped up as a new release yesterday but I don’t recall hearing much about it before–and the couple stray reviews kept comparing it to City of God or talking (often dismissively) about its ostensible status as a film deploying crime to get at some sociological vision of Colombia. Nah, it’s just a crime film. And I say that with real appreciation, a snap in my step, a gat in my britches — this was a fine surprise. Continue reading Perro Come Perro/Dog Eat Dog

kaminey

this is the latest film by vishal bhardwaj, the director of the excellent maqbool (macbeth adapted to the bombay underworld) and the pretty good omkara (othello adapted to rural/small-town politics in u.p). those earlier films were more “serious”, not quite mainstream bollywood. kaminey, on the other hand, is pitched directly at the mainstream but is pretty damned good anyway. it stars shahid kapoor as a set of twins, one a petty criminal, one a do-gooder, whose lives get intertwined with corrupt cops and drug dealers (the bad brother) and corrupt, thuggish politicians (the good brother). a case of mistaken identity brings the two narratives into collision and mayhem ensues. it’s a stylish film–though there are a few unnecessary artsy flourishes, and the editing and cinematography are great. the performances are top-notch. particularly good are the two primary villains–amol gupte as bhope, the politician-thug; and tenzing nima (a newcomer) as tashi, a cool but ruthless druglord.
Continue reading kaminey

Baader Meinhof Complex

Not a great movie, but a great story. This film is a semi-fictional account of the decade of existence of the German Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader Meinhof Group after its two leaders. The account is fictional in that almost all the dialogue is imagined, but it is based on a well-regarded book written by one of the peripheral figures in the RAF who subsequently became disgruntled. The events and outcomes that it depicts are real. The film takes its time bringing its characters together, then rushes through the early 1970s when most of the RAF bombings and attacks took place, before slowing down to examine in detail the last two months in the lives of the RAF leaders, the kidnapping of Hans-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane (which eventually led to the rescue of the passengers at Mogadishu). Continue reading Baader Meinhof Complex

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Well, I think I’ve recovered adequately from this film to say a few words about it. First, the story (of which there is little). Terence McDonagh is with his partner, Stevie (played by Val Kilmer), in a flooded building in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. The two are standing safely above water, looking down on a criminal trapped behind a barred window, water up to his neck. And the water is rising fast. Stevie is a bad cop. He wants to watch the criminal drown. What makes Stevie bad is that Terence is just a little better. When Terence sees the criminal pray for his life and bless himself, Terence dives into the water. Doing the right thing kills his back. Continue reading Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Paper Heart

Touching, occasionally funny, but not terribly profound, this is Charlyne Yi’s exploration of love and relationships through interviews, puppets, and the semi-fictional depiction of her relationship with Michael Cera. Quirky, but not in a good way.

Sad ha-ha

Judd Apatow’s Funny People is half of a great film and all of a good one; it’s consistently funny yet displays more room for its cast to breathe, bump about and into one another, with fewer inspired improvisatory riffs and giggles but a lot more nuance than came out of his previous films.

The excellent half starts with bigtimestar waking up alone and lonely in his manse; George, almost too-perfect a superimposition onto a certain image of Sandler himself, makes low-brow high-concept films and is much, much loved by the public for it. He breezes through his life–shaking hands, posing for photos, then scurrying home to wander the halls–but is caught short by an unexpected terminal diagnosis. And the film digs deep, illustrating that this impending doom does less to change George’s approach to life than to most fully reveal it. He starts doing stand-up, and it is bitter, biting, self-loathing stuff. (First time back onstage, he bombs, too miserable to sell the punchlines, including one really brutal one about the Holocaust. I laughed, but no one on screen does.) There are all these amazing bits intertwined with some more conventional stuff (meeting a young mentee, sidestories about reconnecting with family and an old flame) where Sandler is just bilious. He plays a little “joke” tune on the piano to one audience, singing slightly off-key how he hates them, they’re all cocksuckers, and when he dies they won’t even come to his grave. As a study of the rage and fear and anxiety underlying comic performance, it’s up there with some of Shandling’s stuff . . .

It then, alas, becomes quite a bit more familiar when he decides to reignite that old flame. Oh, it doesn’t just get all sweet redemptive pap, and maintains a corrosive edge–and resists neat happy ends. But the rigor of some of that earlier rage is diffused and–for this viewer–is missed. Still, I wasn’t surprised to enjoy it, but I was surprised at how good Apatow is with a much broader range of tough emotions–it recalls and returns to some of the stuff he did on tv, with Shandling and Freaks and Geeks.

I am a Wes Fanderson.

So my judgment will be suspect, as he seems to pitch films directly at this sweet spot where my open crazed appreciation of the sublimely silly and the elaborately constructed coincides exactly with my usually-repressed sentimental streak. The Fantastic Mr. Fox has more going for it than the old Andersonian shtick, but there’s no real way to get around the fact that it is entirely besottedly invested in that shtick: the protagonist with the outsized ego determined to see & reshape the world around him (always him), carrying along an extended family for various forms of collateral damage; the glorious wonderbox compositions, the zesty deep-track pop soundtrack, the arch snappy dialogue running perpendicular to deep veins of sadness and loss; assorted and sundry Anderson familiars, from Bill Murray to a Wilson to Wally Wolodarsky.

But even the non-fan might be taken with the fussy florid detail of the stop-motion sets and figures — it is a pure aesthetic delight just to see the film unfold: the head-on shots of opossum Kylie’s spiral-eyed stare; the shadowed skeletal frame and outsized dome of villainous Bean backlit in a doorway, face momentarily glowing orange as he lights a cigarette; Ash’s towel cape; the frenzied wild-animal rubble-rubble-rubble as the animals tear into their meals throughout the film. And there’s something apt about ye olde WA plot dynamics spun through a children’s tale, where the thin yet sturdy little moral of every Anderson film (it is hard to grow up, yet we must) seems more exactly in touch with the generic concerns.

Funny, sweet, always gorgeous, fun. It even has a good bit of Latin. I loved it, but I am almost genetically-predetermined to love it. Still–I think you might, too.

The Thirst

Thirst is the story of a priest who becomes a vampire. In the latest offering from Chan-wook Park, Kanh-ho Song (justly praised by Mike for his last role in The Good, The Bad, the Weird) plays the priest who is resurrected as a vampire after volunteering to be in a medical experiment. Resurrection is appropriate because the priest struggles with the sins he is forced to commit in his new life, and is even worshiped by a small cult. He begins an affair with the wife of a childhood friend, played by a superb Ok-vin Kim, and she rapidly becomes entranced with his vampirism and indulges a taste for blood with far fewer inhibitions than the priest. Mayhem, and blood galore, ensue.

This is good, in places very good, but it doesn’t rival the Vengeance trilogy for raw emotional heft and powerful imagery. There are some long sections in the middle of the movie, particularly a subplot about a watery haunting, that distract from the central narrative and make the movie longer than it needs to be. But the last half hour is near perfect as the priest tenderly tries to tame his slaughterous lover, and ultimately finds a way to end the bloodshed. Near the end the priest finds a way to disgust his followers, and thus end the cult, and as the camera follows him leaving the encampment, we see a small smile playing on his face as knows he has made some small amends for his sins. And once Park is able to expand his palette beyond dark interiors and nighttime, the richness of the imagery becomes breathtaking.

Certainly, if you want an antidote to the version of love and vampires in New Moon, this is well worth watching.

Two flavors of indie realism

We could probably define independent American cinema–in broad, unsustainable strokes–via a couple of longstanding styles.

One tastes like sadness, call it Lyric Despair, where we have somewhat stoic, even silent characters suffering under psychic and social burdens which emerge through the course of the film, obliquely. LD films eschew dialogue, or boil it down to improvisatory snippets that are hard to untangle — they capture an almost-desperate inability to communicate. Yet the images–trains rolling along, the protagonist in shadows backlit by a brilliantly-shaded gray sky, the cluttered composition of dirty city streets–are lovely, evocative. Expressionist. Lance Hammer’s moving, thoughtful, and (yup) lovely Ballast is an LD.

The other recipe relies more on handheld images, seems grainy almost as a badge of honor, full of close-ups in apartments and hotel rooms and small spaces, the emphasis almost on found dialogue. Lots of talking. Talking talking talking — mumbling, as so many critics have noted — full of ums and pauses. I don’t like “mumblecore,” but I’ve got no good substitute. The inability to communicate here becomes an obsessive attention to the need to communicate. Images are almost after-thought; the camera’s incisive sociological eye unconcerned with composition, instead intent on community and identity and behavior. Lynn Shelton’s very funny, occasionally and obliquely moving, and often incisive Humpday is one of these.

See ’em both. Continue reading Two flavors of indie realism