Telluride Film Festival 2003 8/29-
“If you would like to know more about bringing film to the filmless…”
LOVE ME IF YOU DARE, aka CHILD’S PLAY
YOUNG ADAM Well, I did it again. I took some time off to go work the Telluride Film Festival. Not so many celebs this year, but I did get to stay with a bunch of cool guys, made a few friends, discovered some new music and saw a bunch of great films. And really that’s what film festivals are all about.
Now, if I could only afford to do it all the time.
They said that the unofficial theme of this year’s festival was kind of a changing of the guard. There were more first time filmmakers this year than any other of the 30 years of the festival. 10 out of the 20 premieres were by first timers. And Sofia Coppola was a second timer.
But what the theme actually seemed to be was infidelity and politics. Not necessarily at the same time, but there were a lot of movies about both.
Let’s start with the politics first.
In 1986 Denys Arcand (Jesus Of Montreal and Love And Human Remains) directed a film called The Decline Of The American Empire. I’ve never seen it, but it’s considered I guess kind of a minor classic of French Canadian film. Now, I didn’t even know that there was really a film movement there, but, hey, everybody’s gotta have film, right?
I’ve vaguely heard of that first film, but this is a revisiting of the characters almost 20 years later. (Damn, I feel old.) Now I didn’t really want to see a sequel before I saw the first one, but it fit into my schedule and it was film that light was shining through, so I went.
And I was fortunately surprised. I loved this movie.
Remy (Remy Girard from Jesus Of Montreal) is dying of cancer. There’s nothing he can do, so he basically throws a party inviting all of his friends and family to join him while he dies. His son, who seemingly has nothing in common with his father, comes in and basically takes over the whole operation making things as comfortable as he can for his dying father while making it as uncomfortable as possible just by being there.
Along the way all of the characters have some very interesting discussions about politics (American and Canadian), health care, sex and love.
This was truly a great movie. Everyone I talked to who saw it loved it. The acting was brilliant, the dialogue was nearly perfect and the characters were well-drawn and witty. It made me want to seek out the first movie so that I could spend some time with these people when they were younger.
Arcand obviously has some opinions about his country and the country to the south of him. He apparently doesn’t like the Canadian healthcare system (“I’m lucky I’m not in the hall.”) and feels that 9-11, while a tragedy, was not unexpected. (The shots of the plane hitting the Trade Center were a little jarring and I didn’t exactly understand why they were there. The event is never mentioned again, so it could have been cut without any harm to the story.) He feels that the barbarians are everywhere, not just in Remy’s body.
Listen for a reference to Telluride.
Speaking of 9-11, let’s move over to Afghanistan’s first film in seven years.
A woman’s life in Taliban ruled Afghanistan is not good. Not good at all. They aren’t even treated like second rate citizens. They’re treated worse than most animals. They aren’t allowed to get and education or work, not even if the only men in their lives have died. If that happens they’re pretty much screwed. They’re not even allowed to go out of the house unless they are accompanied by a male relative. After all, other men may be aroused by them.
Wait. Who don’t they trust? Themselves or the women?
One family is in just such dire straits. It’s three generations of women with no men to help them live. The mother (there are no names for any of these characters because their individuality has been taken away) works at a hospital, but has to hide that fact anytime the Taliban come around. She pretends to be there with a dying male relative. The grandmother is too old to do much more than sew and lament their condition. So it’s up to the young girl to support her family.
The little girl’s mother decides that the only way they can survive is if they disguise the girl as a boy and put him to work at a friend’s shop. When all of the young boys in the neighborhood are taken for Taliban school things go from bad to worse.
There was no bin Laden in this film, just the Taliban. Osama is the name that a boy gave to the girl when he realized that all of the other boys were catching on. He was hoping that the name would strike fear in the other boys so that they would leave her alone.
This is a stark, stark view of what has been going on in Afghanistan for decades. There is no way out for these women unless the Taliban are stopped. Like The Bicycle Thief, this little girl sees her beloved mother in a way that she would rather not see her and there is no escape from the poverty that is enveloping them. This is even more hopeless, though.
The non-actors were all very good and showed the desperation that they all probably knew first hand. When the mother says, “I wish God had never created women.” you can believe it. What kind of a life is that? It was probably the most hopeless line in the entire film.
Director Siddiq Barmak shot this film with the only 35mm camera in Afghanistan. You would think that, since no one had ever really worked with it before, that it would be shot poorly. But there are some truly beautiful shots in the film.
This film brings up another unofficial theme of the festival: sheer depression.
But let’s thematically stay over in the Middle East and check out a film that, while it doesn’t take place in that part of the world, predicted what’s going on over there right now.
In the 50s the French were treating the Algerians like animals. Algeria wasn’t even considered a country, it was a province. On maps it was labeled “France.”
So, of course the Algerians were sick of it. Soon they started to use terrorism to convey their messages. Women would take bombs into diners and dance halls, look around to see babies and kids having fun, think of the greater good that will come of it and leave the bombs to explode killing everyone inside.
When a young man named Ali La Pointe (Brahim Haggiag) is pulled into jail for being a con-man, he sees what really goes on in his country. People are put to death basically for wanting freedom. Ali wants to do something about it. When he is let out he joins the fight and becomes a leader.
This film was made in 1965, just a few years after the events took place. It was commissioned by the new Algerian government to show the world exactly what happened. Director Gillo Pontecorvo was intrigued and decided to take the project on. He was somehow able to get French people in on it, too, although the French government banned the film for years.
Using stark black and white photography, non-actors (only one actor, Jean Martin, had any previous experience) and a tense score by Ennio Morricone Pontecorvo creates a documentary style feel that puts us in the action. We feel the urgency of these people who are trying to win their freedom. But he never shows them as the good guys. No one is good nor bad. The French are trying to stop the killing, but they are going about it all wrong. The Algerians are trying to win their freedom and using the only tactics that they think the French will listen to. They are not happy to use them, but it’s their last resort.
The film brings up a lot of hard questions. First off, what makes a man political? Most of these people were just tired of being oppressed, so they rose up. They didn’t care about politics before. I know I became political because I saw what kind of shit we were being put through so that someone could make a little money. And then I saw the Democratic Way being skewed and broken.
The hardest question that it brings up is whether or not terrorism is always a bad thing. These people were at the end of their ropes. They had no other choice. The French weren’t listening to reason, so they killed some people to get their voices heard. The the French turned the place into a police state. Things got worse.
The same thing is going on in Iraq right now. We took out one regime just to start a new one. The Iraqis know which way things are going, so they are rising up. They are killing our soldiers. It’s not Hussein sympathizers, it’s Iraqi sympathizers. The “terrorist acts” as Bush calls them are really just people trying to get a message across. Yes, it’s horrible that they are killing our guys, but it’s the only way some people will listen.
Think of it this way: our country would not have been born without terrorism. Hard, but true.
This is probably the most important film I saw this year in Telluride. It is amazingly timely and a great, great film.
Let’s move on to something that implicitly pertains to our country and politics.
FOG OF WAR: ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. MCNAMARA
Robert Strange McNamara (yes, that’s his real middle name) was the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson from 1961-68. He went from hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis to villain of the Vietnam War. Now he wants to make amends.
Sort of.
Errol Morris is one of the greatest documentary filmmakers ever. He can take a subject that has no truly interesting facets and turn them into riveting cinema. Fortunately McNamara is a very fascinating man and Morris pretty much just let him go. It’s all from his perspective and he is the only narrator. We learn about his early days of being an efficiency expert for the Army and his days as president of Ford Motor Company. That’s where Kennedy found him and gave him his most famous job.
Then the Cubans started to threaten us and McNamara became a household name. He and the Kennedy boys saved our lives, but even they didn’t know just how close we all came to total annihilation. Even Thirteen Days doesn’t really tell us. Castro had bombs and he wanted to use them even if it meant the end of Cuba.
Then Kennedy was killed and Johnson took over. Things took a turn for the worse for McNamara. Someone misread a radar and told him that missals were coming from Vietnam towards our ships. They weren’t really missals, but we retaliated and started the Vietnam War. (Ok, it wasn’t quite that simple, but that’s the way history has read it.)
With interesting images and some cool music by Philip Glass, Morris treats his subject like he deserves to be treated: a slightly misunderstood American icon. While he is apologetic for what happened with Vietnam, he also says that all generals make mistakes. He is an intelligent and peace-loving man who was fired because he didn’t agree with what was going on in the war that he helped to start. He had scary powers back then and desperately wanted to use them for good.
Then again, it’s all from his point of view, so it’s probably a bit skewed to his side. It seems that he is trying to clean up his image. But I trust Errol to show all sides.
And who knew that Errol Morris sounded so much like Ray Romano?
Now for one that’s not so much political as just audience dividing. This was THE love it or hate it film of the festival.
Gus Van Sant won the Golden Palm and Best Director at Cannes for this one, and deservedly so, I think.
In an affluent suburban high school things are about to go horribly, horribly wrong. The day starts late for John (John Robinson) when his dad (Timothy Bottoms, who I can’t see anymore without thinking of Dubya) comes home drunk to take him to school. John walks through his day, talking to friends, getting in some trouble and basically being a kid. Then, as he’s walking out of the building, he notices a couple of kids walking in with guns. He asks them what’s going on and is told to not come back in the school because something’s about to go down. John knows something very, very bad is about to happen, so he starts warning people to not go in the school.
Now back up. Time to follow Nathan with his camera. Then Elias and his girlfriend. Then, finally, Eric and Alex, the two boys with guns.
Like a kind of teenage Rashomon, we see the events of the day from the points of view of many different students. We follow them through their daily rituals on the morning of many of their deaths.
Now, a lot of people walked out of this film saying, “That was pointless.” All they saw were long shots of the backs of kids heads as they were walking through the halls not doing very much. What they didn’t see was a pretty accurate version of a day in the life of one of these kids. Not all kids live interesting lives like the kids in John Hughes movies. Most of them just walk the mundane halls waiting for the day to end.
And this makes it hard to know any of these characters. There’s not a lot of dialogue (and what there is was ad-libbed by the kids (who were all inexperienced actors), so it sounds totally real) and the characters are pretty much stereotypes. Only one character (John) has enough dimensions to really care about him. So, why did I think this movie was so good? Because that’s how high school is. You sort of get to know a lot of people and then, when it’s all over, you realize that you never really knew them. Even your best friends are completely different people and maybe you didn’t even like them very much. You only hang out with them because they are popular. (The three girls who hang out together in this film are victims of that affliction, among others.) If they died you would be sad, but only in a very superficial way. It’s sad, but true. I grew up in a high school very much like this. Thankfully there were no guns, but the kids were the same.
Since John is the only kid who really seems to care about anybody else (he’s the only one who tells people to run), he’s the only one we really care about. (Possibly Benny, too.)
Van Sant doesn’t offer answers here. He only offers a glimpse of the life. He shows the killers as human beings who are tormented at school. Why? Because they’re different. Not too different, but different enough. It’s a cold and distant retelling of the events of Columbine. (It’s not supposed to be Columbine, but one of the kids is named the same as one of the Columbine killers.) And it’s cold and distant for a reason.
This is an important film and should probably be seen by students and parents. It may be brutal and hard to watch, but we should all see it. Unfortunately it won’t play in Peoria, which is exactly where it should play.
Note: This is the second year in a row that a film about Columbine had its American debut in Colorado. (Last year was Bowling For Columbine.) Wonder what’s next.
Time to go even further into Teenage Wasteland.
Noi (newcomer Tomas Lemarquis) is a brilliant and bored albino teenager in a small town in Iceland. Now, if you think small towns in America are bad you should spend some time in an Icelandic village. There’s seriously nothing better to do than to hide out in the basement.
Noi’s family is no help at all. His father is a dead beat, drunken Elvis fan and his grandmother who is raising him carries her shotgun around using it to wake him up in the morning.
Everything starts to turn around for him when he meets Iris (Elin Hansdottir), the daughter of a book store owner who befriended Noi. Iris is in town for the winter while she sorts through some things and she and Noi start a slightly forbidden romance. As much as the book store owner likes Noi, he doesn’t want him around his daughter. He’s just too much of a screw-up.
This is a true and bleak look at small town life, not only in Iceland, but all over the world. We’ve all been in Noi’s shoes, even if we weren’t wearing tennis rackets on them. The characters are good and the story is interesting.
The problem is that things drag on WAY too long. I felt like I was in that theatre for about three hours, but it was only about an hour and a half. Maybe this was intentional, but Van Sant did a much better job of showing the mundaness of teenage life. At least his film moved. I’m ok with slow films. Hell, I liked both versions of Solaris. But this was just stupid slow.
And then the end just cancels everything out to make us feel even sorrier for Noi. It’s almost too depressing. He has nothing going for him. He’s extremely smart, but he absolutely does NOT want to use it. I guess that’s true of a lot of kids, but he never learns anything. And they really wanted this to be a comedy. To be fair there were some very funny parts, but the whole was way too depressing and hopeless to be anything but pure tragedy. The ending was pretty horrific and too bleak. I didn’t get the feeling that the events had changed Noi at all.
Director Dagur Kari is touted as a cross between Jim Jarmush and Aki Kaurismaki (The Man Without A Past), but he doesn’t seem to have the sense of humor that those guys have. They can be bleak and funny at the same time. Kari is just plain bleak and doesn’t seem to have a lot of faith in or love for his characters. That’s too bad because he can draw them pretty well.
How about some young love, French style?
LOVE ME IF YOU DARE, aka CHILD’S PLAY
Julien (Guillaume Canet from The Beach) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard from the upcoming Tim Burton film Big Fish) met as kids just as Julien’s mother was getting sick. She gave him a tin carousel that he thought was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. When little Sophie was being picked on and laughed at by all of the kids on the bus he sent he bus on its way without the driver and vowed to share the carousel with his new friend. It became a trading game. They traded the carousel for a dare and each dare got bigger and bigger and so does their love for each other. Of course, they can’t admit to that.
The movie starts out as a charming little love story shot very much like Amelie and, while it would almost seem to be copying that films style, it works so well with this one that I didn’t even notice. The director, Yann Samuell, is a visual artist and put his eye to work on his first film. I can’t wait to see what he does next. He could give Jean-Pierre Jeunet a run for his money. (By the way, he says that he wrote the film before Amelie came out, so he couldn’t be copying it, right? Who knows?)
As the story goes on it gets darker and darker. The two leads grow older and the games they play get more hurtful to each other.
There are few films out there that can make you simultaneously love and hate the protagonists/antagonists. These two people were so sweet to each other and then so pitifully hateful that it was hard to get a handle on how I felt about them. I wanted them together, but I knew that they should definitely be apart forever. It’s a credit to the actors that they were able to keep that balance. They were both great.
Even with its problems, I actually loved this movie. It’s a dark romantic comedy kind of like War Of The Roses without the divorce. I already want to see it again to see what I missed.
Now let’s check on another foreign country. This time, though, they speak English. At least they say they do.
Let’s see if I can get a basic plot going on this one. Not sure it’s possible.
John (Cillian Murphy from 28 Days Later) is a small-time hood in Ireland who is in a holding pattern (an intermission, if you will) with his girlfriend, Deirdre (Kelly Macdonald from Trainspotting and Gosford Park). He’s broken up with her for a while to test the waters a bit and see if they really love each other.
Meanwhile, his buddy Lehiff (Colin Farrell in the only truly Irish film I’ve ever seen him in…are we sure this guy’s Irish?) is running around town trying to steal from anyone he can. He’s a true thug and even has a cop after him full time. That cop, Det. Jerry Lynch (Colm Meaney, who we don’t see nearly enough of anymore), is being followed by a tv producer who wants to turn his life into a reality tv show. Jerry is all for it and now sees himself as a star.
Dierdre is starting an affair with a married man who is about 20 years older than her. Her sister (I don’t see her name in the IMDb credits, but it has to be Shirley Henderson, Moaning Myrtle from Chamber Of Secrets) recently got a divorce and is into hating all men. Oh, and she has a mustache that would make Burt Reynolds jealous.
There’s a way to tie all of these plots together, but it’s too convoluted to make my way through in a short review, so I’ll leave it to you to figure out.
At the end of the first scene I thought, “I LOVE this movie!!” It was so cool and unexpected and everything just clicked. Unfortunately it couldn’t keep up that momentum for the whole film. Soon it devolved into kind of a typical heist comedy with romantic overtones. In fact, it was kind of slow at times. But it was still interesting and I liked it. It was very episodic (which got a little annoying after a while), but it held together and had a strong cast.
I think a lot of people will go to this thinking that it’s Colin’s movie, but they’ll be disappointed. This is definitely Cillian’s movie. Colin has a relatively small role, but he’s good at what he’s got.
Check it out if it comes to a theatre near you, but don’t pay full price.
Want more Cillian? Well, here he is.
Johannes Vermeer (Colin Firth) only painted a few paintings in his lifetime. I believe they said around 30. Girl With A Pearl Earring is one of the more famous and mysterious ones. No one knows what the story is behind this girl. Was she a lover? Was she just a peasant girl that he liked the looks of? Or was she something that he dreamed?
Tracy Chevalier gave the mystery a shot. Her novel is about the relationship between Vermeer and a young peasant girl named Griet (Scarlett Johansson from Ghost World and The Horse Whisperer) who was sent to his home as a servant.
Vermeer’s wife is a shrill woman who is jealous beyond all comprehension. “Why don’t you paint me?!?!” is her mantra. His reply is usually along the lines of, “Because you don’t understand, bitch!”
Oh, and I promised you more Cillian. He plays a butcher’s son (maybe apprentice?) who falls for Griet. Tom Wilkinson is also here as a man who gives Vermeer money to paint for him. He is the one who commissions the painting of Griet. And he’s not as nice as he seems.
I have rarely ever been so indifferent to a movie. I thought it was an interesting version of an artistic mystery and I absolutely LOVE Scarlett. She’s beautiful and talented, a combination that is a rare commodity in this world. I could watch her reciting names from the “I Hate Keanu” petition.
In fact, all of the actors did their best. The problem was that the whole thing was not engaging at all. I didn’t care how it all came out or if any of the characters lived or died. And that’s a real problem. I came out of the whole thing thinking, “Yep. It was a movie.”
Luckily, Scarlett’s other film at the festival was MUCH better.
Thirty years ago, Sofia Coppola came to the first Telluride Film Festival. She was only 2 years old, but she was there with her father who was being tributized. (Erm…is that a word?)
Now she’s back with her own movie. It’s her second film (her first was The Virgin Suicides) and is hopefully her first one without too much input from her dad.
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is an American actor who is in Japan making commercials for some kind of bourbon or something to that effect. Charlotte (Scarlett) is a young woman who is in Tokyo with her record producer husband (Giovanni Ribisi who, behind sunglasses, is starting to look a lot like Michael Keaton). He’s too busy to pay too much attention to his young and beautiful wife, so she finds a friend in Bob. The two of them run off together to have adventures in the streets of Tokyo and fall in deep, deep like with each other.
The movie starts off with one of the greatest shots in film history. A buddy of mine thinks that all movies should start with that shot even if Scarlett isn’t in the movie. Her butt will just have to make a cameo appearance.
From there it turns into a very funny and affecting film. Nothing too deep, but a lot of fun. The deepest it gets is to show just how easy it is to latch onto someone in a foreign country just because they speak your language. Of course it helps that Bob and Charlotte have quite a bit in common. They’re both in semi-unhappy marriages and are ready for a little fun.
I noticed a lot of homages to Bill’s career throughout the film. He plays golf (a real-life passion for him), he sings karaoke, there’s a shot of him from SNL and (this one may be a bit of a stretch) the way he says “Hello” once when answering the phone is exactly like the way he says it when he goes into Dana’s apartment after she turns into Zuul. (Ok, maybe I’ve seen that movie WAY too many times.)
Some of the scenes go on a little bit too long (did we need to see that much karaoke? But Bill was hilarious) and there are a LOT of Japanese stereotype jokes. But the two leads were a lot of fun together and very good apart. They had surprisingly good chemistry.
This is one that I’ll be buying when I get my hands on a dollar again.
By the way, Sofia said that this was based in part on her experiences in Japan. I just wonder how much of it is true. Did she find a guy over there that Spike didn’t know about? Hmmmm.
Either way, I think she and Scarlett have good, long careers ahead of them.
From two nearly bad marriages to one absolutely horrendous marriage.
There are many ways to have a bad marriage and Hollywood has made movies about all of them. There’s wife-beaters, people who ignore, absolutely hate or steal from their spouses and even people who seduce others to kill their spouses. But none get the revenge that Alexandra got on Steve in Rolf de Heer’s Alexandra’s Project.
You see, Steve (Gary Sweet) did the unthinkable: he liked to have sex with his wife. (Quiet your gasping!) Ok, so he did a few other bad things, too. He cheated on her and ignored her needs. By all means I’m not saying he was a great guy. He had his asshole qualities.
But more on that later. Alexandra (Helen Buday) decided to get revenge on her husband the only way she knew how: she made a video.
It started out innocuous enough. Steve got home from work to find the house completely empty. No kids (whom he adored, by the way), no wife, no friends…just a video that said, “Play me.” It started as a video of his wife and kids saying “Happy Birthday” to him and blah, blah, blah. Then she sent the kids off and started a private show. Yes, she did a strip show for her husband. That got his attention.
Then the bitch session started. And the crying. And the overall evilness. Then the insanity.
Now, as I said, Steve is not blameless. He was a jerk. But Alexandra is a cold bitch. Her main complaint against him is that he would touch her ass or occasionally try to have sex with her and she didn’t like it. Not even at the beginning of their relationship. It made her feel like a sex object. Now, he did fast forward through a lot of her bitch session to get to the stripping parts, but most of what she was complaining about sounded like pretty normal stuff that newlyweds do. They love each other AND their bodies. They want to always be touching each other. It’s fucking normal! She thought he married her body and not her.
But, as I was told over and over, she didn’t like it, so he should have stopped.
Basically, I didn’t like either character enough to have any emotion invested in this movie at all, and I think we were really supposed to feel something.
There was one bright spot in the whole film. Just as she’s getting to “the goods” in the striptease she stops and tells Steve that she has breast cancer and that he should enjoy them now while he still can. They both cry and you really start to feel for both of them. I think that if Alexandra had been in the room with Steve at that point she would have shut off the VCR and gone back to him because he was genuinely concerned about his wife. Then she peels the polyp off and reveals that she was lying to him. It’s a great, dark moment in a film that should have been filled with them. And it was the last time I felt anything for either character.
She goes WAY too far with her punishment of Steve and yet sex is her only weapon against him. She used it the whole time until the very end. It’s like there’s nothing else in their life. She just wasn’t very creative.
Besides, haven’t these people ever heard of divorce? Or couples therapy?! Why destroy his life?
There were some who liked the movie. I wasn’t one of them. I came out of it bored and sick of the whole thing. It brought up some interesting points about marriage and fidelity, but it drove them into the ground and got tiresome as hell.
From a terrible marriage to a good one with a tragic twist.
Back in 1993, Nicole Kidman and Michael Keaton were in a film called My Life where he was dying of cancer and trying to put his life in order while trying to find a cure.
Now Sarah Polley is trying the same territory, but this time it works better. (Although I kinda liked My Life. But, then again, I’m a total sap who is in love with Nicole and thinks Michael is awesome.)
Ann (Polley) is a young wife and mother of two cute little daughters who has just found out that she has inoperable cancer and probably only a couple of months to live. Instead of rushing home to her support system to tell them all that their beloved wife and mother is going to leave them soon, she keeps it to herself. She doesn’t even tell her mother (Deborah Harry). She finds other ways to put her life in order. She makes audio tapes for her daughters for each birthday that she’ll miss until they are 18. She makes tapes for her husband, Don (Scott Speedman), and mother to explain why she didn’t tell them. And, most importantly to the movie, she makes a “Things to do before I die” list.
One of the main items on the list is to make love to another man and make someone fall in love with her. The embodiment of those two items is Lee (Mark Ruffalo). But, in doing so she also falls in love with the quiet, unassuming young man with a painful past.
Almodovar produced this film by Isabel Coixet and it almost shows in some of the dark humor that Ann faces her death with. But it’s not overly bizarre like most of Almodovar’s films. Instead it is simple and sweet and very, very sad in a life-affirming way.
All of the leads do a great job. Even Speedman is very good as a decent young husband who only wants to provide for the women in his life. And Sarah Polley impresses me more and more everytime I see her. She’s beautiful and talented and hates Hollywood. I love her.
The movie itself is manipulative and all that, but in a good way. It may not be an Oscar winner, but it’s a good tear-jerker and there aren’t just a whole lot of those around anymore.
Now how about a marriage made in Surrealist Heaven?
Fifty years ago a very strange thing happened. Salvador Dali came to Hollywood and tried very hard to become a Hollywood player. He had worked with Luis Bunuel in Spain on a couple of shorts and loved the work. The most that ever really came of it was a set decoration job (Don Juan Tenorio in 1952 and still in Spain) and the designing of a couple of dream sequences (Hitchcock’s Spellbound in 1945 and Father Of The Bride in 1950). But there was an untold story amongst all of this.
At one point Dali called Walt Disney one of the greatest surrealists of all time. “What?!” you say. “Walt Disney? The guy who made a talking mouse one of the biggest icons of American culture? The guy who turned children’s dreams into money?” Yes, that Walt Disney.
The two met and hit it off pretty quickly. They also decided that they had to work together. Disney bought the rights to a Spanish song and had Dali come up with the images for an animated short based on the song. It was going to be part of a compilation film like Fantasia and Make Mine Music. Production started and pretty much ended in 1946 after about 15 seconds were finished. No one really knows why it was stopped, but some say that Disney figured that anthology films like that had run their course and there was no need to finish it. Others say it was strictly budgetary. Whatever the reason it was amicable and Disney and Dali remained friends for the rest of their lives.
Fast forward to 1999. Bette Midler mentions the project in Fantasia 2000 and sparks Roy Disney’s interest. (Of course Bette really had nothing to do with it. It was in the script.) He decides that Destino MUST be finished.
After months of looking at the storyboards that Dali had put together they finally figured out exactly what order they were supposed to be in. They also figured out that the short would be about 8-10 minutes long. So they cut it down to about 5, took out some stuff that made no sense to the “story” whatsoever (a LONG section with baseball players was excised). After all, they wanted the story to make sense, right? Of course, Dali said, “If you understand it, then I have failed.”
The decision to use some computer graphics in the short was a sort of controversial one, but I think it works. As one reviewer said (I forget who), Dali was always a dimensional artist and the 3-D computer work jibes perfectly with his style.
The end product of Roy’s vision of the Dali/Disney vision was nothing short of AMAZING. It is quite possibly the best work they have put out in over 20 years. The animation, story, art, characters, music…all of it is perfect. It is mostly a surreal music video, but the story of two lovers trying to meet (I think) is a lot of fun. There are a few laughs (a baseball player does actually show up out of the cut bit), but mostly it’s just a wonder of animation and surrealism. Dali and Disney were great together. It’s too bad that they didn’t decide to work together regularly.
Will this revitalize the Disney corporation? I don’t know. I certainly hope it gets their creative juices flowing, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
Now, if we could just get that Looney Tunes/Frida Kahlo thing going.
(I’m kidding, folks. Don’t get all excited.)
This film was a short shown before…
The French have never really been known for the animation. In fact, I can’t think of a single French animator that has ever gotten any acclaim. Then again, I don’t really pretend to be an expert in world animation.
Sylvain Chomet may just be the first, though.
His Triplets Of Belleville is the story of a young man who has nothing but dreams of becoming the winner of the Tour de France. He lives with his grandmother who tries everything to make him happy. She buys him candy, games, a dog…nothing works. Then she finds a scrapbook under his bed with pictures of bikes and Tour winners.
Fast forward a few years and he is vigorously training for the race. His grandmother is pushing him beyond his limits and he all but ignores his faithful dog. After getting into the race and nearly falling over from the strain, he gets kidnapped and taken to a warehouse where he…um…I’m not really sure why he was kidnapped. That’s not very well explained. It’s all a set-up to get grandma into action.
She follows her grandson all over Belleville (??—is this France or America?) just trying to get him back with the dog in tow.
Now, I have no idea what the film was trying to accomplish. Sure, it was funny in spots, but I thought it dragged on a bit in the middle. The beginning was pretty good and the end was great (the Lonney Tunes-esque car chase was awesome), but I didn’t understand a bit of what was in the middle. Something about the kidnappers and the titular trio (a group of old ladies who were big tv stars at the beginning of the film). Other than that I was utterly confused.
And there were a LOT of French stereotypes. I thought all of the characters were supposed to be French, but it seemed that the ones in France spoke English and the ones in what looked like America spoke French. (Not that there was much dialogue at all. Probably about three lines in the whole thing that weren’t sung, and none of them were important.) French characters ate frogs, had long, pointy noses, loved bad comedy…it was as if an American with a very skewed vision of the French made the film instead of a French guy.
Two things that I truly did like: the animation and the music. The animation was pretty amazing with completely full frames and a mix of 3-D computer and 2-D traditional. (Hence why I said that Chomet could give Disney a run for their money.) And the music was a lot of fun and almost annoyingly catchy.
Keep in mind, I’m one of the only people who didn’t really like this film. The rest of the audience all thought it was very charming and fun. I thought it was too long and kind of boring with an interesting story that was just too overdone.
And on to a movie that could use some animation.
Someone on the IMDb said that this film is “patient and thoughtful” and for “patient, thoughtful viewers.” I can be pretty damn patient with films. I never walk out because I have to know the ending. I understand why some films are slow and some are fast-paced. I have a lot of patience and like to think I’m pretty thoughtful.
That being said, this was one of the more pointless movies I saw at the festival this year.
Joe (Ewan McGregor) is a young dock worker who finds the body of a girl floating in the river he and his co-worker (Peter Mullan) are working in. Then, the most I could figure is that he has lots and lots of sex. Sex with his co-worker’s wife (and their boss), Ella (Tilda Swinton). Sex with a young woman he meets along the way. Sex with just about every single (and not so single) female he comes in contact with.
Oh, and he has secrets. But they’re not very interesting or surprising secrets, so who cares.
The acting was ok across the board, but nothing special. Even Peter was a little lacking. I guess Ewan was ok, but his character really didn’t develop at all. He was always an almost decent guy whose existence revolves around sex. He seems to want to do right by the law, but when he should speak up he doesn’t, so he doesn’t really learn a damn thing. In fact, that was the only interesting part of the whole film.
Although there was one funny part. When he is describing what he thinks happened to the dead girl he goes into great detail about every aspect of her life. It was like he was reading a novel. As if he had thought about it just a bit too much. I almost laughed out loud. No one else did. In fact, no one in the movie thought it was very strange.
The best thing about this film was the score closing song by David Byrne. I just wish the movie had been good enough for it. Unfortunately it seemed to be only a workout for Little Ewan.
And don’t even ask me what the significance of the title is. No one could figure it out.
Speaking of working out. (Oh….so bad.)
In 1985 two young men, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, decided to climb the west face of Siula Grande, a 21,000 ft peak in the Peruvian Andes. The problem is that they didn’t realize that it was unconquered for a reason.
This is the amazing story of Joe, Simon and Richard Hawking, their base-camp contact and how Simon attempted one of the most daring rescues ever mounted.
When I went into this movie I really didn’t have much interest in seeing it. I’m not a mountain climber and I’ve never been very interested in movies about mountain climbing. The closest I’ve ever gotten to one is Cannibal! The Musical. And that ain’t close. I just wanted to see a movie between the times that I worked.
Luckily this ended up being one of my favorite movies of the festival. Not only did they have interviews with they guys, but they recreated just about the entire climb and descent for our viewing astonishment. I have no idea how they did it, but the actors looked like they were actually climbing to the top of this gigantasaur of a mountain. (I know. Movie magic.)
Kevin McDonald (director of One Day In September and grandson of famed Hollywood writer Emeric Pressburger) knows how to lay on the tension. It’s funny, exciting, painful, interesting and informative…all things that make it not just a great documentary, but a great film.
That’s it. That’s every movie that I saw at the festival this year. Well, actually there was one more called Reconstruction, but I fell asleep so many times during it that I can’t, in good conscience, review it. But what I remember of it was pretty pretentious.
It was a good weekend of films even if most of them were depressing. Can’t wait for next year!
