Gateway Cinephiles

Quick Review: Moscow, Belgium (Aanrijding in Moscou)

2008 (Belgium)
Director: Christophe Van Rompaey
Viewed: March 26, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

Scruffily endearing and accented with a gratifying guilelessness, Christophe Van Rompaey’s Moscow, Belgium is a working-schlub dramedy with a clear sense of its operating parameters. The tale of separated forty-something working mom Matty (Barbara Sarafian) and her fumbling affair with a twenty-something truck driver (Jurgen Delnaet) is played for mellow laughs and cringing melodrama. The film paints an emotionally detailed but tightly framed portrait of middle-aged confusion and longing, and that’s about all it does. Hence the absence of any substantial thematic aims, counter-balanced somewhat by a studious regard for its characters. The peripheral roles are cartoonish, but the principals are plump enough to reveal fresh layers in each successive scene. With the exception of Sarafian, who uses her eyes, mouth, and even hair to delicate effect, the performances don’t exactly dazzle, nor does the script. There’s uncertainty in the story, and refreshingly so, but there is also triteness and contrivance. What makes Moscow, Belgium more pleasurable than slicker romantic fare is the loose structure of it conversations and its penchant for subdued observation elsewhere. These don’t make the film a marvel or anything, but do render it more appealing than the genre’s usual ephemera.

Favorite Film Characters Meme

Kevin J. Olson at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies has tagged me with the Favorite Films Characters Meme, which appears to have originated over at FilmSquish. I don’t have a film to review at the moment, so what the heck? Bear in mind that my film literacy skews recent, and my own life experience skews… er, white and male. Therefore my list perhaps inevitably reflects those biases. Here we go, in chronological order:

1. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins), Psycho (1960)

People always mean well. They cluck their thick tongues, and shake their heads and suggest, oh, so very delicately.

Hitchcock may be the hand behind Psycho’s whipsaw narrative shift and its preternaturally sneaky diversion of audience sympathies, but it’s Anthony Perkins’ timeless and astoundingly skillful portrayal that lends the film its humanity (paradoxically enough). Never mind the crude Freudian outlines to Norman Bates. Psycho is scarcely big enough to contain the chilling, contradictory gestalt that Perkins creates: placid, defensive, genial, resentful, anxious, seething, all capped with a dose of awkward schoolboy eroticism. The effect is simultaneously disquieting and pitiable. Norman is a monster who is acutely cognizant of his own guilt, but completely unable and unwilling to cease his atrocities. Traumatized and wracked to his core, the viewer almost feels sorry for him. Then again, there’s that ghost of an impish smile as Abergast’s car sinks into the pond: “I’ve been a bad boy, haven’t I?”

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Quick Review: Breakfast with Scot

2008 (Canada)
Director: Laurie Lynd
Viewed: March 18, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Breakfast with Scot was featured at the 2009 QFest, the St. Louis LBGTQ Film Festival]

Given that the film plays as a conventional family comedy, the set-up of Laurie Lynd’s Breakfast With Scot requires a convoluted flowchart: Eric and Sam, a straight-laced gay couple, take in Sam’s brother’s dead ex-girlfriend’s son, Scot. Got it? It turns out that the titular eleven-year-old is swishier than his new guardians, which leads to tension vis-à-vis the nominally straight face Eric prefers to present to the world, to say nothing of the perils of raising a manifestly gay preteen. Mild and sweet and ultimately forgettable, the film is strongest when it keeps the focus on Noah Bernett’s oddly charming performance as the uber-girly and somewhat oblivious Scot, and on the paralyzing complexity of Eric’s reactions to responsibility. Unfortunately, the story is unfocused, pivoting between the Gay Story and Adoption Story flavors of melodrama with a distinct ungainliness, and frittering time away on peripheral characters and subplots for thin sitcom chuckles. Ultimately, the film sweeps away all conflicts with the tidiness of an after-school special, which does a disservice to its ostensible aim to humanize the struggles of gay parents and gay kids. Still, LGBT-friendly family comedies are a rare breed, and they don’t come much more benign than this.

Ode to a Landscape Lost

Of Time and the City
2008 (UK)
Director: Terence Davies
Viewed: March 14, 2009
Format: Theatrical Print

[Of Time and the City premiered in St. Louis at the 2008 St. Louis International Film Festival. The film was also recently featured in a limited engagement on March 13-15, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

Even the most supple and contemplative documentary features usually make gestures towards a narrative, sculpting their visual and aural components into hand-holds where viewers might find purchase. The only noteworthy exception to this principle in recent memory is Philip Gröning’s magnificent Into Great Silence, a film that broke every rule of the medium and achieved something singularly beautiful. While Gröning’s triumph strove for a quiet, observational character, Terence Davies’ equally superb Of Time and City takes an entirely different track, embracing the director’s own memories and emotions with soaring enthusiasm. The ultimate effect is daring and exquisite, resulting in a film that functions as a tone poem to a vanished environment, and yet also as a tuning fork keyed to the viewer’s own nostalgic impulses. Via a collage of images, music, and narration, Davies explores the most cherished crevasses of his heart, where the lost Liverpool of his youth still resides, and in doing so he tunnels into our own hidden stores of bittersweet remembrance.

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Ordinary’s Just Not Good Enough Today

Watchmen
2009 (USA)
Director: Zack Snyder
Viewed: March 11, 2009
Format: IMAX Theatrical Print

Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen is a dizzying feat of world-building, among the densest and most bewildering I’ve ever seen. It’s a sprawling, exhausting work, one that perpetually threatens to burst from the director’s control, and on occasion succeeds in effecting just such an escape. The story Snyder is attempting to tell is simply too vast, too intricate, too discomfiting, too pensive, and too nasty for its nearly-three-hour running time to accommodate. It is, in other words, a glorious mess of a film, offering novel, absorbing sights and themes but also unfortunately susceptible to off-key indulgences and the wearying effect of an undisciplined structure. That said, Watchmen is a fascinating mess, one that calls out to be scrutinized, explored, and savored, like a cinematic collage. It is the not the ur-superhero film that fans might have hoped, but no matter. It will rattle and mystify many viewers, I suspect, especially those who have never paused to contemplate the implications of a world of caped crusaders.

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Film Diary: The Great Race

1965 (USA)
Director: Blake Edwards
Viewed: March 12, 2009
Format: DVD - Warner Brothers (2002)

Film Diary: Happy-Go-Lucky

2008 (UK)
Director: Mike Leigh
Date Viewed: March 10, 2009
Format: DVD - Miramax (2009)

Film Diary: Rachel Getting Married

2008 (USA)
Director: Jonathan Demme
Viewed: March 10, 2009
Format: DVD - Sony (2009)

You’re Lost, Little Girl

Coraline
2009 (USA)
Director: Henry Selick
Viewed: March 8, 2009
Format: Real 3D Theatrical Print

When Henry Selick delivered the ambitious, whimsically prickly The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1995, I doubt that he had any inkling that his little fable–rendered via the exhausting, old-school technique of stop motion animation–would become a cultural touchstone for a generation of nostalgic goths and wannabe goths, who grooved on the film’s mashup of Jules Bass Christmas specials and Tim Burton’s droopy sensibilities. (Not that I’m speaking from personal experience of anything. *Cough.*) In the years that followed, Selick made a blander stop motion follow-up and a rather notorious flop, but with his new film, Coraline, the director has come blazing back to the front lines of both feature animation and “mature” children’s storytelling. Here is a film that dares the viewer to resist its enchantments and terrors, boasting some of the most dazzling design since, well, The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, Coraline decisively surpasses Selick’s previous milestone in both a technical and artistic sense, setting a high-water mark for the sort of intricate, captivating animated stories that seem in short supply these days. And the story! The sooty fingerprints of modern myth-spinner Neil Gaiman are all over this wondrous tale, which borrows equally from Victorian nursery literature, kid-savvy afternoon TV fare, and a Hero’s Journey that would make Joseph Campbell do a double-take.

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Film Diary: Across the Universe

2007 (USA)
Director: Julie Taymor
Viewed: March 5, 2009
Format: Blu-ray - Sony (2008)