Archive for the “Film” category
John Seven • 7th Jul 2010 • Film • autism, documentary, horses, Mongolia, Zeitgeist Video
Somewhere near the beginning of “The Horse Boy” — recently released on DVD by Zeitgeist Video — mother Kristin Neff reacts to the idea of traveling to Mongolia with her autistic son Rowan like anyone probably would — the idea seemed foolish, crazy and a sure-fire way to distribute pain throughout the family.
Sometime later, though, there the family is in Mongolia, traveling vast lands in search of shamans that can offer ceremonial cures for the child, and husband Rupert Isaacson remarks that the trip to the far reaches of the world has been far easier than most trips to the grocery store. It’s in that observation that the power of “The Horse Boy” lies. Rowan is going to have problems anywhere — why not have them on an adventure in a foreign land instead of in the middle of the same old life?
It turned out to be the right decision.
Following the family prior to their moment of decision, and then interspersing the trip with scenes of home in Texas, “The Horse Boy” documents what surely counts as an unconventional mode of therapy for autism. Isaacson is a travel writer who has spent time with indigenous tribes in Africa, and given his experience, has noticed the role of shaman healers within these communities. Having tried just about everything — as most parents of an autistic child eventually do — Isaacson begins to seek alternative methods within his unusual experience not to cure autism so much as to manage it, understand it perhaps and give his son some peace.
Rowan is entranced by animals, and his interaction with horses in particular represent his most peaceful moments in life, which is unfortunately scattered with the mysterious bursts of autistic fury that many parents would do anything to heal, but seldom find the psychological salve that does so. Isaacson researches a strain of shaman within the birthplace of horse riding — Outer Mongolia — and proposes a journey of discovery for the family.
As the family encounters the shaman of Mongolia, “The Horse Boy” becomes filled with a mysticism that is anything but surface level.
In the spirit of keeping an open mind, Isaacson refuses to pronounce judgment as to whether the shaman ceremonies help directly — he admits that his personal beliefs fall into that camp — while Neff shows a bit more skepticism and portrays their trip as a catalyst to behavioral changes. Though the shamanic practices focus on spirits as the source of problems, Neff takes the spirits to be more symbolic than tangible.
Isaacson points to a fact that becomes an undertone to each encounter — that shamans in most societies are often the “special” children raised with extra vision focused on the unseen, and a special understanding of it. Put bluntly, the autistics of these so-called primitive worlds are the very ones who end up as special healers, and the film shifts into a real magical mode with the idea of communion between the neuro-diverse.
Despite the exoticism of the locale, the real strength of “The Horse Boy” lies in the way it captures the everyday emotions of parenting a child like Rowan. From the meltdowns to the self-doubt to the need to live from moment to moment with an eye looking ahead, the trials of autistic parenting — and the lessons about that job that differ from what might be required of parents of neuro-typicals — are well documented. Parents in the same situation as Isaacson and Neff will see a lot of their own lives in the film.
While we don’t all have to fly our kid out to the most remote spots on Earth in order to find ourselves as families, “The Horse Boy” does speak to the power of separating yourself from the chains of your daily life and even past your familial comfort zone. The film advocates for getting the hell out of your routine and apart from the things and people against which you see yourself and your child reflected, and just being able to look at the child and the family unit clearly, as an entity on its own.
It’s an important lesson for families with autistic children, and it’s one that will offer the sort of contemplation that will surely lead to further empowerment as you do the one thing you can do — take charge of your own situation, and don’t worry about getting to Mongolia in order to do it.
John Seven • 4th Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Film • Art Articles, Association for the Pickers of Jardim Gramacho, Brazil, catadore, documentary, Jardim Gramacho, Lucy Walker, poverty, Rio de Janeiro, Tião Carlos dos Santos, Vik Muniz
As with evolution, the ways in which gallery art can change someone’s life are often hard to witness with the naked eye. But you do have more of a chance of seeing a human absorb the work and experience in encounters with art and applying it to life than you do spying a bacteria transforming into a human being.
The latter, in fact, is impossible, but the transformative power of not only viewing an artwork, but also participating in the activity of creating an artwork and collaborating with a capable artist is very attainable, if not actually common.
In Lucy Walker’s documentary film “Waste Land,” the title reaches back to the T.S. Eliot poem and refers as much to the world’s largest garbage dump as it does to the lives of the people who wage a living by picking through it to gather recyclable materials, known as “catadores.”
Located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the workers’ lives are not so much a waste in terms of usefulness — in fact, most of the people presented in the film emit the sort of guile only the proudest of survivors can possibly exhibit — but rather as they are framed by the location of their endeavors, the circumstances that lead them to the work and the way the class-oriented society of Brazil views their honorable labor.
At the center of the film is contemporary artist Vik Muniz, a Brazilian native whose ascent from poverty to world renown within the world of fine arts begins to draw a circle in his life path when he decides he wants to direct his penchant for unusual materials into portraits of workers at Jardim Gramacho, the world’s biggest landfill — fashioned out of garbage. (more…)
John Seven • 4th Jun 2010 • Film • childhood, documentary, education
One thing that many actors and non-actors have in common when it comes to the trade of the former is that many of us got our start — and some of us, our finish — in an elementary school play. I’d wager a good portion of those who participated in their school play did so with “The Wizard of Oz” as their vehicle.
I know I did — that was third grade, 1974, and I played Toto. While I remember enjoying the opportunity to ham it up and soak in the parental applause, and I embraced the appreciation of my classmates for encouraging me to the role, I quickly realized that the stage was not for me. Strangely, that’s all I really remember of the experience — I can’t exactly recall whether it was hard work or just a bunch of extracurricular tomfoolery.
Judging by the documentary film “School Play,” it was a bit of both.
For the film, directors Eddie Rosenstein and Rick Velleu put their camera in Mamaroneck Avenue School in New York to capture the lead-up to the school production of the very play I and many others cut their thespian teeth on, with the idea that for these kids, it’s the last burst of childhood as it runs headfirst into the wall of adulthood. (more…)
John Seven • 1st Jun 2010 • Art Articles, Film
A new documentary film by Michael Sladek captures one dangling thread from the New York City art world explosion of the 1980s — the controversial figure Mark Kostabi — and imbues the legend with a level of humanity that does not soften his impact, negative or otherwise.
Sladek’s film, “Con Artist,” screens at the Berkshire International Film Festival on Saturday, June 5, at 9:15 a.m. at The Triplex in Great Barrington, and Sunday, June 6, at 11:15 a.m. at the Beacon Cinema in Pittsfield.
Kostabi burst on the scene with a blend of outrageous showmanship, media pandering and questionable artistic subversion. His pivotal moment of controversy came as he announced that he did not paint his own paintings — he merely signed them. Kostabi was a contemporary of Basquiat and Haring — and, for some, the important third point in a triumvirate with them — but his influence did not loom large over the years following. As the New York City art scene diminished from national attention, Kostabi’s fame waned outside those walls, and he began to function as an enfant terrible within a very cloistered world.
By the time Sladek caught up with him, he had partly morphed into a public-access game show host.
“I had never actually heard of him or known anything about him before landing in his studio one summer,” Sladek said. (more…)
John Seven • 19th May 2010 • Film • Agnieszka Grochowska, Facets Video, German film, Harun Farocki, Jim Jarmusch, Lukasz Garlicki, Polish film, Slawomir Orzechowski
Germany and Poland are two countries linked through history, but two new releases from Facets Video examine the core of each society and contrast them by parsing the soulful from the soulless.
Like a primer for an orderly society, Harun Farocki’s 1990 experimental documentary “How To Live In The German Federal Republic” presents a series of examples for interaction with people and objects culled from training classes that Farocki filmed. Rather than serving as a examination of Germany, the film is instead a document of Germany’s ideal impression of what it hopes it is, as seen through the efforts made to help the citizens realize this societal self.
The scenes take all forms, from therapy sessions to job interviews to dealing with complaints in businesses, well into the stranger territory of making arrests and administering births — as well as repeatedly prodding furniture with robot interaction to test wear and tear. As a kinetic museum of then-contemporary life in Germany, the film transcends documentary and takes on the form of absurdist, improvisational theater — if only the participants were aware of that! (more…)
John Seven • 7th May 2010 • Film • Michael Nyqvist, Niels Arden Oplev, Noomi Rapace, Steig Larsson, Sweden, Swedish film
Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” was a Swedish crime potboiler that hit unexpected heights outside of the author’s native country — and long after his 2004 death. It was the first book in a trilogy, and all three were published posthumously to great acclaim.
Although there is an American film adaptation in motion, Sweden has already produced the entire trilogy as movies, and the first is currently making the rounds in our country.
Larsson’s story is a sprawling tale of crime from the highest places and the lowest within Swedish society, focusing on investigative financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), now disgraced with a libel conviction and forced to leave the crusading news magazine he helped create.
At the same moment of his plummet from grace, rich industrialist Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube) hires Blomkvist for a temporary job of personal investigation. Forty years prior, Vanger’s niece had disappeared off the face of the island they lived on. Vanger believes she was murdered, and he wants Blomkvist to find the perpetrator.
Concurrent to that plot, Larsson follows Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a Goth punk under the charge of the state, who works for a security and investigation company. A skilled computer hacker with behavioral quirks that obstruct her ability to personally bond with people, Salander has been hired to investigate Blomkvist for Vanger but finds it hard to stop snooping on him after the job is over. Eventually her interest in Blomkvist’s investigations drag her into the process alongside the journalist.
The book on which the film is based was an alluring but undisciplined exercise that probably needed another draft or two in order to focus the core of the story — impossible because of the death of the author.
In the original, Larsson spends a lot of time on Blomkvist’s financial-world investigations, the running of the magazine and a his love life, thus padding out the story with huge girth that, while diverting, isn’t half as interesting as the central story of Vanger family secrets and Salander’s personal issues with abusive authority figures.
The film, thankfully, slashes away all of that and presents the audience with a lean, tight adaptation that might be short on the kind of poetry one might expect from a Swedish film, but large on the suspense — and, be warned, some uncomfortable scenes of violence that might make you squirm, even if you have read the book and expect them.
Director Niels Arden Oplev — he’s actually Danish — delivers a film with an economy that betrays his background, largely in television. In fact, the film resembles a better BBC crime drama more than a foreign movie.
Larsson’s biggest thematic concern — as evidenced by the book and film’s original title, which translated from Swedish means “The Men Who Hate Women” — is the misogyny inherent within the upper echelons of Swedish masculinity. Opley’s direction brings the focus to exactly that, with Rapace’s portrayal of Salander bringing it to full fruition.
Like a vengeful angel furiously plowing through the lives of sadistic men who punish women in order to prop up their own weaknesses, Rapace plays Salander like an alien to Blomkvist, as well as to the audience. What she wants, what motivates her and the cold precision with which she enacts her purpose, is the real mystery in the story — and even the small revelations offered really point to something larger and deeper.
The second in the series will hit our shores sometime in the fall, to be followed up by the third at some point after that, long before the American version ever sees the light of day.
There is plenty of material in the book that the American version can utilize to differentiate it, but the fact remains that this Swedish version is better than the novel.
Larsson had a lot of issues he wanted to cover and he does so entertainingly, but the real appeal is in a clever and compelling mystery story and a modern protagonist who serves as a cypher the victimized souls long past. The film version of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” captures that perfectly.
John Seven • 30th Apr 2010 • Film • documentary, female circumcision, female sexual dysfunction, pharmaceuticals, sexuality, vaginal laser gynoplasty, women's issues
Filmmaker Liz Canner’s film “Orgasm Inc.” might focus on the dubious medical area of female sexual dysfunction, but her investigation opens up all sorts of doors that lead to a wide examination of societal efforts to control a woman’s perception of her sexuality — and to take advantage of that to make profits off it.
Canner’s film specifically follows the efforts to create a Viagra for women, and the pitfalls inherent in such research, not the least of which is whether there is an actual need for such a drug or any possibility of developing one if there were.
Canner was introduced to the topic while doing freelance film work for a pharmaceutical company that was doing research into developing an orgasm cream for women. At the time, she had begun working on a historical documentary about the history of women’s pleasure as a salve for the traumas created by her past work.
“One thing that happens when you make documentaries — and I had been doing them at that point for about a decade — is that you tend to watch the same footage over and over again,” Canner said during an interview this week. “I had been making documentaries on human rights issues, such as police brutality and global poverty, globalization and homelessness, and some of the footage, especially the more violent footage, was starting to give me nightmares. So I decided my next film would be on something that was pleasurable. I decided, why not make a film on women and pleasure?”
She didn’t expect to get sidetracked on the issues in regard to the company’s research, but the more she encountered the givens of information that she was expected to fold into her work, the more she questioned their truth.
“One of the things that I had to do is write that 43 percent of women suffer from female sexual dysfunction, and you may be one of them,” she said. “I had been doing all this research. I had read tons of books, and nowhere did I come across the term female sexual dysfunction. I certainly hadn’t come across anything saying that half of all women — half my friends, half my relatives — have this disease. I thought that this is really curious — why haven’t I encountered this term, and why hasn’t anyone ever told me before that they’re dysfunctional?” (more…)
John Seven • 16th Apr 2010 • Film • Andrea Arnold, British film, Katie Jarvis, Michael Fassbender
Existing in that teenage netherworld where callous, knowing rebellion and aching naiveté co-exist, 15-year-old Mia (Katie Jarvis) mopes around the low-income projects of Essex, England, looking for meaning in a landscape that offers little variation from the usual emptiness.
Mia’s one secret passion is dancing — specifically break dancing, which she practices in a decrepit abandoned apartment in her neighborhood. It’s her one escape from the realities of her life, which don’t stink of tragedy so much as hopelessness. The antagonistic relationship with her mother (Kierston Wareing) — a self-involved party girl who seems to view her kids as obstructions to her good time — and her alternately hostile and clingy younger sister (Rebecca Griffiths) send her to this inner sanctum to play out her desire in private, free from ridicule.
So low is her threshold for anger that she routinely bullies a gang of girls who practice their dance routines in the neighborhood playground. It’s a form of posturing that seems more preemptive, taking the girls down a notch before they do the same to her.
It’s when an apparent one night stand of her mother’s blossoms into a relationship that Mia begins to see a light at the end of her gloomy tunnel. Indulgent of her interests and treating her on equal terms rather than as a child, Connor (Michael Fassbender) exudes a calm, intimate air that grows slowly and agreeably over several days as Mia’s manner becomes more and more familiar with him, lapsing into flirtation, and setting up a situation in which she gets to know about his life far better than her mother does.
One of the film’s great strengths is that Fassbender exudes a kind of easy charm that causes you to backtrack on his possible intentions even as he seems to cross lines.
The other strength is Jarvis, who is in some ways the real deal — discovered by the director during the middle of an argument with her boyfriend at a train station at age 16. She was on track to go to a technical college and had never considered acting. Plucked to audition for the lead role in this small British film. Jarvis proved to be an amazing choice — her performance is natural and unforced.
Director Andrea Arnold made an earlier splash with her quiet suspense film, “Red Road,” which also studied the psychology behind sexual expression for purposes other than love, and quite effectively.
In “Fish Tank,” the sympathy is most decidedly with Mia. Even at her worst, you feel her armor crackling under the atmosphere of her daily life and witness for yourself how little an arsenal she has to wield against its tyranny. Her one possible salvation — dancing — offers no real opportunities, and her abilities aren’t impressive beyond her enthusiasm. In fact, her presentation betrays the core of her innocence underneath her combative exterior.
She’s a multi-faceted character, both wise and unwitting, depending on her situation, and Arnold’s film uncovers further — it’s reminiscent of Shane Meadows’ “This Is England” and “Somers Town” — the broken nature of British society at the bottom.
John Seven • 9th Apr 2010 • Film • horror movies, Japan, Japanese film, Nobuhiko Obayashi
James Cameron may think that $500 million and the latest in bells and whistles buys you a great night out, but I’m here to dispute that, and the 1977 Japanese horror film, “Hausu (House),” is the most persuasive weapon in my arsenal.
Like something you would blunder upon at 3 a.m. on TV in 1986, “Hausu” — directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi — might be a haunted house film in conception, but its stylistic ancestor seems to be The Monkees film “Head,” with a little bit of Alejandro Jodorowsky thrown in the mix. More precisely, it’s in direct lineage to the opening sequence of Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Lidsville” television show — it’s both twisted and goofy at the same time.
The quick set-up is that Gorgeous and six other Japanese schoolgirls visit a weird house of horrors in which much giggling and terror ensues. Each girl has a descriptive name — my favorite is Karate, because she gets to demonstrate the reason for her moniker in slow motion and with a cool synth action theme. Left in the house unchaperoned — there was an accident involving a bucket and their teacher’s rear end — the girls are faced with some of the most original horror film surprises you will ever encounter, as the frenzied onslaught of feathered mattresses and Mad subplots and unusual little details abound — for instance, Gorgeous’ father apparently has a job writing film scores for Ennio Morricone — but they never get in the way of the main action, which mostly involves the girls tittering at little jokes they make and being faced with glowing-eyed cat that always heralds some mishap, like a particularly hellish piano or a butt-biting head.
It’s all realized through an unhinged utilization of old technology that must have seemed dazzling at the time. Obayashi uses video bleeds to create floating body parts and animation is rendered into live action scenes — these are just some of most prominent manifestations of this potpourri of low-tech filmmaking, not to mention plenty of psychedelic video washes for that otherworldly effect. The frenetic finale — which features the house breaking apart in a fury — beats anything I’ve seen done with CGI, and, by contrast, you can see the effort that went into creating these effects.
It’s not so much the fact that these techniques are employed, but the breakneck pace with which they come and go. The film is a frenzy of stylistic choices — one moment might be built around a wacky musical interlude, while the next is devoted to choppy, creepy slow motion, and then it moves onto something else. “Hausu” never rests. The fact that Obayashi went onto, among other things, a successful career in making commercials isn’t much of a surprise after watching “Hausu” — it’s like watching a master of multiple genre parody’s audition reel, and it’s impossible to settle in on whether the film is smart or stupid because of it.
“Hausu” won’t scare you — well, not in the normal way — but it’ll provide you with one of the best times you’ve had at the movies in ages. It’s literally like nothing you have ever seen before, and in this day and age, that’s a hard claim to be able to make.
John Seven • 9th Apr 2010 • Film, Headline • animation, Brendan Gleeson, Irish film
In “Secret of the Kells,” Irish filmmakers Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey mixes a tale of early Christianity and Celtic paganism with stunning stylized animation.
“Secret of the Kells” follows orphan Brendan (voiced by Evan McGuire) and his life behind the walls of an abbey that is being constructed as a fortress against invading Vikings. Brendan’s uncle, Abbot Cellach (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) directs his monks to fortify the stones of the compound with a fervor that dictates all their lives and prevents Brendan from ever stepping foot outside — fear is the main tool through which Cellach keeps Brendan in place.
But Brendan still has his youth and his curiosity, and these, combined with a new visitor in the abbey, set him on adventures outside the wall that introduce him to a magical and unChristian world populated by fairies such as Aisling (voiced by Christen Mooney). Inside the walls, Brendan has found guidance from Brother Aidan (voiced by Mick Lally), a master illuminator whose masterwork “The Book of Iona” seems only to be lead-up for his “Book of Kells.”
Unknown to Brendan, his new adventures serve as a training ground for his ascent in the same discipline as Brother Aidan, and his destiny to help the monk finish the book as he ages rapidly.
Moore’s screenplay is a fictionalized account of a real situation. The actual “Book of Kells” is an illuminated manuscript meant for sacramental purposes that is believed to date back to 800 A.D. and that includes four books of the New Testament and some other material.
Around the same time, there were Viking invasions that drove monks out of their abbeys. Unlike the film, the book was probably created by several monks, but its historical origin is a mystery. The most likely speculation has the book beginning in the abbey of Iona and continued at Kells, the theory that the film adapts.
Filled with both action and contemplation, Moore and Twomey present a landscape that is sometimes reminiscent of the illustration work of Peter Sis, with swashes of Samurai Jack coming out. The Vikings are fierce, dark devils who stalk a landscape of illuminated cartooning which brings the film and the book it is about into common visual ground. As a tale of growing up, “The Secret of the Kells” is also about how moving forward causes one to take stock in what is behind you and your culture — and how disaster can shape the future as it is shaped by both fear and bravery.
It’s a monumental achievement in animation that deserves its numerous worldwide accolades — most recently, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Film — but even more so as an intelligent work for kids that doesn’t skimp on the excitement.
In fact, everything in this film goes against the grain of accepted marketing in regard to what kids can appreciate, and what parents can enjoy with them. This is easily one of the best family films of the previous decade, and one that respects its audience.
