Category: Take Two

Take Two

Hurt and Belief in 'The Yellow Handkerchief'

If the usual line about William Hurt is that he looked to become a major star in the 1980s, but didn’t fulfill that promise, in more recent years it’s become clearer, that Hurt probably didn’t want to become that kind of star. He certainly hasn’t run his career like someone desperate to get to the top and stay there—at least not for a couple decades. So, while he’s stayed busy in the interim, it comes as a bit of a surprise to see him take charge of a whole movie, as is the case with new indie The Yellow Handkerchief. Though after two Twilight movies his co-star Kristen Stewart might be much the bigger marquee star, it’s Hurt who dominates here, albeit quietly. Rather like Jeff Bridges in the concurrent sleeper Crazy Heart, this is an opportunity to appreciate a very good actor too often taken for granted, at the top of his form.

topics: actors, hollywood

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Beyond 'Berlin,' Eggers Brings out New German Gems

The moving arrow anoints a new hot spot of contemporary cinema every few years, and then moves on. In the last two decades, professional and amateur trendspotters have singled out Hong Kong, Iran, South Korea, Argentina, Japan (for J-horror, mostly), Romania and Israel. The magic number seems to be three; that is, three different (and preferably young) directors garnering major festival prizes in the same year denotes a wave.

That’s as likely an explanation as any for why Germany never makes the cool list, despite a steady stream of topnotch films.

topics: european film, international film, world cinema

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Expecting the Unexpected with Werner Herzog's 'My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done'

Werner Herzog has spent an entire career reaching wildly beyond the cinematic norm. His poetic, frequently transcendent narrative features have encompassed a parabolic society of little people (1970’s Even Dwarves Started Small), an adult wild child (Each Man for Himself and God Against All), putting his entire cast under hypnosis (Heart of Glass). Plus various permutations of Klaus Kinski, the brilliant, impossible actor Herzog showcased from 1972’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God through 1982’s Fitzcarraldo (on which Kinski replaced an ailing Jason Robards). The tortuous relationship between director and late subject—death threats included—was captured by Herzog’s My Favorite Fiend, one of his many great, eccentric documentaries.

topics: actors, film history

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Mostly British and Very Entertaining

Tragically underrepresented in the Bay Area’s densely packed world of globally oriented film festivals is: the land(s) of our erstwhile colonial rulers! Being English-language, films from the UK and its former colonies do have a leg-up in terms of crashing the U.S. foreign-film market. (Although Canada is the exception. . . . ) And those that don’t make it are frequently programmed in the larger festivals like the San Francisco International, Mill Valley and Cinequest.

Still, there’s a fair amount of good work that’s underseen Stateside. Ergo the San Francisco Neighborhood Theatre Foundation and California Film Institute’s second annual Mostly British Film Festival, which unfolds February 4-11 at S.F.’s Vogue Theatre and Feb. 7-10 at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael.

topics: bay area, british cinema

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'Fish Tank' finds truth

Writer-director Andrea Arnold created a stir with her first feature Red Road, which scooped up the 2006 Cannes Prix du Jury among a slew of other awards. (She’d also won the Live Action Short Oscar a year prior for Wasp.) It was a dark and surprising drama about a Glasgow woman who develops an obsessive, stalker-type interest in an ex-con who’s unaware they’d had a significant prior encounter long before.

The new Fish Tank which opens this Friday in Bay Area theaters, is arguably an even stronger work. It confirms Arnold—writing solo this time, where Red Road was based on characters created by others for a unique Denmark-Scotland coproduction trilogy—as one of the most promising screen talents to emerge from Britain in recent years.

topics: actors, british cinema, directors, women filmmakers

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PFA revisits Val Lewton's brooding mood, chilling themes

The horror genre has only grown stronger in recent years—not just commercially, but also in terms of creativity (albeit the latter mostly in the genre’s non-mainstream efforts). Throughout cinema’s first decades, however, horror movies were dismissed by most grownups (and nearly all critics) as juvenile, silly, even offensive.

We can look today at the peak work by 1920s horrormeister Todd Browning (director of Lon Chaney’s greatest hits) and his 1930s successor James Whale (of the first Boris Karloff Frankensteins, plus The Invisible Man) and realize they made some of the finest films of their Hollywood era. But at the time, theirs and all other horror films were considered basically stupid—as was anything that hinged on superstition.

topics: actors, cult cinema, curators, directors, pacific film archive

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Soulful "35 Shots of Rum" is gently intoxicating

Few directors remain as restless and unpredictable in their choices as Claire Denis has over the last 20 years—qualities rarer still for someone now past 60 who didn’t direct her first feature until age 40. (Before then she was assistant director to a starry range including Wenders, Jarmusch, Costa-Gavras and Dusan Makavejev.)

Her 1988 writing-directing debut first feature Chocolat (no relation to the 2000 Johnny Depp movie) drew on her growing up as a French civil servant’s child in colonial Africa. Immigration and multiculturalism in French-speaking societies has remained one consistent thread.

topics: cinephiles, directors, french cinema, women filmmakers

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Holiday film preview, part II

I don’t know about you, but I know what I want for Christmas (and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, for that matter): Some decent movies. Hope springs eternal, especially at this time of year. It’s Hollywood custom now to reserve the majority of its prestige titles for an annual late onslaught, the idea being that award-bestowing organizations’ voters naturally gravitate toward whatever is freshest in their memories. In the indie sector, too, there are some goodies timed for holiday gifting.

So, here’s part II of our glancing, far-from-exhaustive preview of what we’ve got to look forward to between now and New Year’s Day.

topics: activism, art film, bay area, cinephiles, critics, documentary, exhibition, experimental film, genre films, hollywood

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Workin’ it: "La Danse" and "Everything Strange and New"

Frederick Wiseman’s latest documentary operates as a potent antidote to the gnawing worry, fed by the grim global economic news, that the social fabric and civilization as we know it are at a precipice. If that accomplishment is somehow insufficient, La Danse: Le Ballet de l’Opera de Paris does double duty as a coolly furious rebuttal to the entropy that is the natural state of practically everything. Rust never sleeps, no question, but neither (it seems) do the dancers, choreographers and artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet. For an equally truthful and more familiar perspective on workplace satisfaction in the Age of Diminishing Expectations, there’s Frazer Bradshaw’s Oakland-set, understatedly eloquent Everything Strange and New. Wiseman’s doc (opening today at the Balboa and Elmwood) and Bradshaw’s feature (ditto at the Roxie) aren’t what you call typical holiday fare, though they assuredly provide An Education for Brothers and Avatars on The Road or Up In the Air.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary film, independent film, world cinema

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Shamir’s "Defamation" is a vintage documentary dust-up

Reminiscent of Marcel Ophuls’ fearless provocations in Hotel Terminus (1988), Yoav Shamir breaks every rule of polite documentary filmmaking in Defamation. The Israeli director audibly challenges his subjects’ statements (off-camera, but still palpably present) and keeps the camera running beyond a “natural” cut-off point until the audience becomes uncomfortable and the interviewees reveal their lunacy or idiocy. The irony is that Ophuls was chiseling away at the lies and complacency obscuring Klaus Barbie’s career as Gestapo chief in Lyon and postwar U.S. agent, while Shamir is questioning whether Jews today use the Holocaust to define themselves to an unhealthy degree. In both cases, the result is an endlessly entertaining and discomfiting film.

topics: activism, directors, documentary film, jewish cinema

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Chilean film "The Maid" liberates a genre

We think we recognize Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), the titular figure in writer-director Sebastian Silva’s The Maid, right away. She’s a familiar fictive type: The treacherous servant, suspicious, resentful, manipulative, surely up to no good as far as the welfare of her upscale Santiago employers are concerned. They’re privileged, pretty, relatively care-free. She’s plain, middle-aged, and not at all taken in by the condescending pretense of her being almost “one of the family,” even when they celebrate her birthday at dinner one night. A dinner she nonetheless cooks and serves.

topics: actors, landmark theatres, south american film, world cinema

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PFA offers a look at the exiled Ingrid Bergman

Before Ingrid Bergman, European starlets exported to Hollywood tended to be exotics, femmes fatales, mystery women—always the “other,” whether a grand tragedienne like Garbo or a vamp like Pola Negri.

Bergman was the first girl next door whose door happened to originate several thousand miles from Anytown, U.S.A. Even when she played “bad girls,” the American public trusted she was really above reproach. When they decided otherwise, she was virtually exiled for some years—sent back to Europe, where (diehard American Puritans imagined) such fallen women belonged.

topics: actors, european film, genre films, hollywood, immigration, italian cinema

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The fix is in: Yes Men take on the world

At the beginning of The Yes Men Fix the World, one of the titular duo nervously prepares for fraudulently representing Dow Chemical in front of a purported BBC World News audience of 300 million—telling “a really big lie which unfortunately is gonna wipe $2 billion off one company’s stock price.”

Now, why would anyone want to do that? Well, in this case to try shaming the corporation into properly addressing the 1984 gas leak at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, that cost thousands of lives. (Estimates including subsequent gas-related disease deaths run as high as 35,000.) It remains the worst industrial disaster in history. The original restitution sums and contamination cleanup efforts were pitifully inadequate; the area remains a health and environmental dead zone. Dow, which absorbed Union Carbide in 2003, claims it holds no responsibility for the tragedy or its lingering aftereffects.

topics: activism, directors, diy, documentary, performance, political film, reviews

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Remembering Chick Strand

This past July 11, filmmaker, teacher and lifelong Californian Chick Strand died at the age of 78. She was, without question, a crucial pioneer of West Coast experimental cinema. Strand is best known as one of the improbable few who helped instigate Canyon Cinema in the early 1960s, the Bay Area organization that has since nurtured several generations of avant-garde filmmakers. She began at Canyon as an enthusiast and community organizer, but by decade’s end was making her own work—films which, in the best experimental tradition, stretched the cinematic medium to realize a dynamic, idiosyncratic understanding of the phenomenal world. It’s only fitting that Cinematheque and Canyon would stage a tribute to Strand’s work (“After Day Comes Night & After That, Day Comes Again: A Tribute to Chick Strand,” in San Francisco Cinematheque’s program in SFFS Cinema by the Bay playing at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 23 and and “Cinematic Tribute: Films of Chick Strand” at the Ninth Street Independent Film Center on October 24); both are direct descendants of the grassroots screenings she helped run nearly 50 years ago.

topics: activism, authors, avant-garde, bay area, canyon cinema, critics, experimental film, yerba buena center for the arts

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Capturing a rough time for Clough in "Damned United"

There’s an advantage to being an insulated American when watching The Damned United and its dramatization of an important part of the life of British coaching legend Brian Clough. Since the States likes its football with helmets and shoulder pads and a ridiculous amount of commercial breaks, most Americans are likely not to know how things pan out for Clough, allowing The Damned United to offer the English football novice viewer complete discovery. The unknown unknowns were part of the pleasure in watching this film for me—but I will take your continued reading of this piece as permission to partly spoil that particular pleasure.

Brian Clough is a man known for many things by English football fans, but this film focuses on the 44 days he managed the Leeds United football club.

topics: british cinema, directors, sports film

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The turn-off sex cinema of Koji Wakamatsu

Porn isn’t usually a topic of much interest to film buffs, being less an art form than a functional one—bearing the same relationship to cinema as, say, instruction manuals do to literature. In the heyday of the Sexual Revolution, when adult movies were still shot on film and shown in theaters, some makers got ambitious, or at least playful, with narrative and style—two things that rarely factor in today’s enormous, factory-style porn industry.

In Japan, however, hardcore content has been and remains illegal. (You may have seen Japanese-release versions of films in which genitalia are electronically “fogged,” even in merely simulated-sex or entirely nonsexual scenes.) The challenge of titillating without graphic imagery fostered the peculiarities of “pink film,” a still-extant genre unique to Japan that flourished in the mid-1960s through the mid-‘80s, when adult video (though still “fogged”) dealt its popularity a significant if less-than-fatal blow.

topics: directors, japanese cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

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Heddy Honigmann and the art of interview

With Heddy Honigmann’s latest portrait in resilience, Oblivion, opening at the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki this Friday, it’s a good time to celebrate one of documentary’s most engaging storytellers. Honigmann is not without accolades—she won the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the 2007 San Francisco International Film Festival and has had retrospectives in Berlin, New York, Paris and elsewhere—but one still wishes the ongoing doc boom would have done better by her. Watch Oblivion, and you’ll see a master in full stride, gracefully handling a subject (class inequity and political disillusionment in Lima) that would turn to putty in lesser hands. The film is a deceptively smooth ride—we only realize the tremendous moral sense required to coordinate so many different stories into a common circuitry of experience and expression in the afterglow of Oblivion’s final notes of solace.

topics: documentary film, san francisco international film festival, sffs screen, world cinema

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Roy Andersson—and reality—elucidated

Roy Andersson’s Studio 24 in Stockholm, situated only steps away from posh Östermalmstorg Square, is like a parallel universe in atmosphere and aesthetics. The fact that the most internationally prominent of Sweden’s working-class film directors is operating in one of Stockholm’s most elite neighborhoods is ironic. Or perhaps that’s where he’s needed the most.

Bits and pieces of the beautifully designed props from his most recent film You, the Living (which plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki beginning Friday), randomly decorate the studio.

topics: activism, critics, directors, documentary film, european film, features, world cinema

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The mystery of Lucrecia Martel and "The Headless Woman"

Newcomers to Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s work might wonder what’s going on as her latest film The Headless Woman begins. In the same vein as her two earlier films, La Ciénega (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), her story plunges viewers instantly into a microcosm without offering any introduction or explanation. We are simply there, immersed in the senses and perceptions of the scene along with the characters. We hear the same natural sounds vying for our attention: snippets of conversation, shrieks from children, car doors slamming, dogs barking, car engines igniting—it’s a kind of madness but at the same time a perfect replica of reality. We hang on, wondering how this all will unravel and make sense. Martel’s extraordinary cinematic gifts amplify the tension she creates by fully immersing viewers in her story, where plot plays a secondary, though pivotal, role. Martel’s camera shots are like the paintings of Rembrandt or Caravaggio; her brilliant and relentless use of chiaroscuro in darkish, sensual interiors arrest the eye and breath, eliciting excitement.

topics: bay area, directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, south american film, women filmmakers, yerba buena center for the arts

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The sad dance of "Tony Manero"

Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s sophomore feature Tony Manero, opening Friday on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki, concerns itself with Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro), a man in his 50s obsessed with the idea of impersonating Tony Manero, John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever. It’s a fixation situated in the midst of the tough social context of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Raúl leads a small group of dancers regularly performing at a bar located in the outskirts of the city and every Saturday evening he unleashes his passion for the film’s music by imitating his idol. His dream of being recognized as a successful showbiz star is about to become a reality when the national television station announces a Tony Manero impersonation contest. His urge to reproduce his idol’s likeness drives him to the edge.

topics: hollywood, latin cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, south american film, world cinema

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“The Beautiful Person” uncorks the high drama of high school

In their recent introduction to a teen-themed edition of the online film journal Rouge, co-authors Helen Bandis, Adrian Martin and Grant McDonald begin by distinguishing between coming-of-age films which defang adolescence of its dangerous vitality by narrating from the perspective of adulthood and those which revel in what they call “teenage wildlife”: “The story of teenagers living in an eternal present moment, like a savage, roaming pack of animals.” The Beautiful Person is too mannered to qualify for the “brutal poetry” concerning the Rouge crew, but “teenage wildlife” seems an extremely apt phrase for the way French writer-director Christophe Honoré films the adolescents starring in his own high school musical. In the movie’s early scenes, when Honoré throws us into the noisy ecology of a tony Paris high school without orientation—we’re following Junie (Léa Seydoux), the damsel of the title, on her first day as a transfer student—he does so with indiscriminate immersion of an ethnographer. Later, when the characters settle into place, there are frequent cutaways to teens draping themselves over furniture and each other: public displays of affection are merely expressive of a natural order of heartbreak.

topics: french cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

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Carefully crafted "Flame & Citron" complicates the WWII-drama genre

There have been a fair number of films about WWII resistance movements lately, from sober Sophie Scholl (about Germany’s White Rose sect of anti-Nazi students) to Paul Verhoeven’s daft Dutch thrill ride The Black Book. Landing somewhere in the middle stylistically, if not geographically—is Flame & Citron, Ole Christian Madsen’s film about the two most famous Danish freedom fighters. One of the most expensive Danish films ever made, it’s an elaborately mounted historical drama that plays like an espionage thriller.

topics: actors, directors, world cinema

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"District 9" offers summer a sci-fi surprise

In terms of the movies fanboy types were looking forward to this summer, District 9 was until very recently more like District 923. Compared to a new Star Trek, Terminator, X-Men, Halloween or even Judd Apatow, what was this? Something about aliens, yes. But New Zealand-produced, set in South Africa, directed by some nobody and starring no one. (In fact its lead is an old friend of the director’s who had reportedly never acted before—though once you’ve seen the film that’s hard to believe.)

topics: genre films, science fiction, world cinema

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Instinct propels "Lion's Den"; a fact-fiction mix animates "24 City"

The best filmmakers working in the neorealist tradition today—the Dardenne brothers, Kelly Reichardt, Ramin Bahrani—turn the ordinary into the extraordinary with deceptive ease. Argentinian director Pablo Trapero has joined them with a growing list of films whose protagonists battle the pressures of the everyday in stories that turn out to be phenomenally unique.

He gained public attention at festivals, including the SF International, in 1999 with Mundo Grua (Crane World), a 16mm black-and-white character study of an ex-musician with an obesity problem attempting to find work in construction. His demons were beef and pasta and his charms, against a wide-open South American sky, were many.

topics: asian cinema, bay area, film festivals, landmark theatres, san francisco international film festival, sffs screen, south american film, world cinema

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Witty "In the Loop" is whip-smart

Given the surfeit of good real-world material these last few decades, one might imagine there’s always plenty of sharp political satire around. Yet take away The Colbert Report and suddenly the landscape looks a lot more barren than it ought. The dearth really becomes obvious when something arrives as high contrast: Something like In the Loop, the razor-toothed, no-stranger-than-truth British satire opening in theaters this Friday.

topics: actors, british cinema, comedy, political film, world cinema

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Tilda Swinton steals the show in Zonca's "Julia"

It may be a measure of the dopey levels general pop culture discourse has sunk to that when Tilda Swinton is noted by your average fan types—as she’s begun to be, having recently infiltrated Hollywood mainstream cinema—the subject of concern is usually her appearance. Physically striking, charismatic and a remarkable actress, Tilda Swinton isn’t going anywhere but farther into the general consciousness.

Of course she’s still going to be making eccentric art and even experimental films, because that is her preferred thing.

topics: actors, film history, french cinema, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, sffs screen, world cinema

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Iron Curtain call in the Poland of "Katyn"

There’s only one answer possible to the question “Who is the leading Polish filmmaker, past and present?” And it’s not “Roman Polanski." (He’s certainly from Poland, but not having directed a movie there since 1963 is a bit of a disqualifier.)

Andrzej Wajda stayed in his homeland through thick and frequent thin. (At one point the then-Communist government, infuriated by his films’ dissenting nature, simply forced his production company out of existence.) Further, he has few rivals anywhere in using the medium almost exclusively to explore his country’s history and character. With very few digressions over what’s been almost a 60-year career span to date, Poland has been his canvas, subject and muse.

topics: critics, eastern european film, sffs screen, world cinema

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"Fados" finds Saura on his toes

It is a typical complaint amongst older people that they miss most the passions, the fervent enthusiasms of their youth. Some folk, however, discover some new passion late in life that they pursue with unprecedented ardor—possibly to the bewilderment of those (including grown offspring) who now miss the more level-headed, more single-minded person they used to be.

One might conjecture something like that happened to Carlos Saura, the Spanish director who from the late 1950s onward made frequently striking films like Peppermint Frappe (1967) and Cria! (1977). Both of those starred his wife Geraldine Chaplin, who quickly became fluent in Spanish and had just the right sort of grave delicacy to inhabit his alternately sorrowful and caustic portraits of life in Franco’s Spain—a muzzled world whose strictures he (mostly) managed the artist’s trick of criticizing just slyly enough to avoid censorship.

topics: dance, directors, music, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

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Gory days: Raimi rides the horror genre again--with predictable success

Like Peter Jackson, Sam Raimi is a fanboy turned shockingly successful filmmaker whose career will probably always be divided into Before and After. The milestone in the middle being, in Jackson’s case, Lord of the Rings; in Raimi’s, another trilogy (at least so far), the Spider-Man movies.

Where do you go when you’ve done something that huge, yet still somehow hung onto your original goofy-fanboy cred? Go back to what inspired you in the first place, maybe.

topics: critics, diy, genre films, hollywood, horror, reviews

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"Night and Day:" Location, location, locution

Hong Sang-soo’s latest unraveling of the South Korean male ego is set in the City of Lights, but location matters less than locution in Hong’s world of mutual misunderstanding. The writer-director’s uneasy comedies depend more on structural calibration and emotional wavering than disposable yucks, and if Night and Day isn’t so tightly wound as some of his earlier bifurcated work, it still has more designs on us than we on it. One may chuckle at leading buffoon Seong-nam’s (Kim Yeong-ho) hopeless stabs at conversation (he is the type of fellow who, caught off guard by a female conquest telling him she prefers women, blurts out, “I know…but why do you have it emphasize that?”), but we’re just as likely to be boggled by his idiocy, especially since the film’s naturalistic dramaturgy would seem to promise a conventional approach to character. Hong’s is a distinctly modernist take on callowness.

topics: asian cinema

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Garrel's past haunts "Frontier of Dawn"; political horrors rock "Il Divo"

An autobiographical element is not uncommon in almost any artist’s work, but some take it further than others—and a few forge whole careers from examination of the self, however thinly veiled.

One is French director Philippe Garrel, son of actor Maurice (who’s frequently appeared in his films), father of actor Louis (ditto), and erstwhile companion to the late model/actress/Warhol Superstar/chanteuse de gloom Nico. A few years after their decade living and creating together ended, and just after kicking a 15-year heroin habit, she died from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 49.

Thanks to her music, ice-goddess looks and connection to the fabled Factory/Velvet Underground era, Nico—a performer who in popular terms never developed more than a small cult following during her life—is probably more famous than ever 20-plus years post-mortem. And she still looms large in Garrel’s films, though she stopped appearing in them after 1978. Perhaps beautiful, mercurial, self-destructive women are the only kind he’s ever been involved with. Or maybe they’re just the only ones he likes to make movies about.

topics: actors, drama, french cinema, reviews

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"Observe and Report"--Seth Rogen is (m)all over it

The vaunted Judd Apatow creative juggernaut has raised the game for mainstream American comedies—let’s admit it. Can you really deny this stuff is an uptick from the likes of stale chickflick rom-coms and other yukfests the studios have been greenlighting lately? It’s also made at least temporary stars of some folk one couldn’t have imagined crawling out of the sidekick ghetto not long ago.

Exhibit A being Seth Rogen, who before Knocked Up two years ago was one of those vaguely familiar faces surfacing in one funny small part or another, his identity locked only in the minds of those fervent few mourning the two acclaimed but short-lived Apatow TV series (Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared) in which he was a regular cast member. But now he’s Seth Rogen—name above the title. Even so, Rogen has barely had a chance to show what he can do.

He gets the opportunity to stretch in the new Observe and Report.

topics: actors, comedy, critics, festivals, genre films, hollywood, reviews

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Troell in fine form with "Everlasting Moments"

In the early 1970s it looked like Jan Troell was “the new Bergman”—not that Ingmar himself was anywhere near finished yet. Starting out as a cinematographer (a role he’d keep on most of his own films), he made two acclaimed first features before the epic—as long as 6 1/2 hours in some cuts—diptych of 1971’s The Emigrants and 1972’s The New Land. Starring Bergman’s favorite actors Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow as poor 19th century Swedish immigrants struggling to reach and survive in the American frontier, both films won numerous international awards and Oscar nominations (including Best Picture for Emigrants).

But Troell was not especially prolific, or flamboyant, with the result that—even in Sweden—he was sometimes taken for granted or simply forgotten. Thus his latest movie Everlasting Moments, which opens at Bay Area theaters today, may well prove for many an introduction to a 78-year-old filmmaker who’s been directing features since 1966.

topics: actors, drama, landmark theatres, reviews, world cinema

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"Examined Life" puts ideas into action

There have been a fair number of films and filmmakers considered to have a philosophical bent—Ingmar Bergman, to cite one of the more obvious examples. But movies have rarely addressed philosophy itself head-on. It makes sense: Really, how much can you do cinematically with an area that must basically come down to people talking about abstract concepts?

Which is exactly what Astra Taylor’s Examined Life consists of. The surprise is how engaging this documentary sampler of nine leading contemporary theorists emerges. Not just because the personalities and ideas are stimulating, but because Taylor (who previously directed another philosophy doc, 2005’s Zizek!) has the very bright idea of interviewing her subjects on the move, in settings that one way or another in real world terms illustrate (or contrast with) the concepts they discuss.

[Editor’s note: Director Astra Taylor and subject Sunaura Taylor appear in person at the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on Friday, March 6, and Sunday, March 8. More at SFFS.]

topics: authors, directors, documentary, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

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"Silent Light" and shattered landscapes

Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ third film is an unmistakably serious work, emblematic of the kind of brooding, large-canvas filmmaking which has become a rarity even at Cannes, where Silent Light won the Jury Prize in 2007. Reygadas endured much hectoring for the brash sex scenes in his second feature, Battle in Heaven, though one that it was the director’s unfashionable solemnity which accorded the wrath. No respite here. Silent Light unfolds in an isolated Mennonite community in hardscrabble Northern Mexico, a minimalist western landscape which inscribes the film’s slow-winding scenario and inexpressive performances by nonprofessionals with a pantheistic touch of raw, compulsive spirituality.

topics: directors, independent film, latin cinema, world cinema

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Gangster life goes verite in "Gomorrah"

Since at least The Godfather in 1972, the mafia has been more mythic movie character than anything else in the U.S.—which is not to say it didn’t exist, but that its stature in the popular imagination (as recently as The Sopranos, which many consider TV’s greatest drama ever) has long been disproportionate to its shrinking real-world influence.

topics: actors, directors, world cinema

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Terence Davies' "Of Time and the City" is poetic, personal

One might assume from the unhurried meticulousness of his features—and the fact that there have only been four of them over the last 20-plus years—that Terence Davies is simply a slow worker. But the truth is something much worse, at least for those of us who think he’s one of the greatest living filmmakers: He apparently just has a hell of a time getting his productions funded.

It’s been almost a decade since the brilliant Edith Wharton adaptation House of Mirth, and Davies has been quite public of late about his frustrations in getting the money people to commit. Such travails collapsed his plans to film the classic 1930s Scottish novel Sunset Song with Kirsten Dunst, amongst other fine fits. The BBC, Channel 4 and UK Film Council all declined his proposals—and what the freak should take priority for such institutions over supporting a national treasure like Terence Davies?

topics: british cinema, cannes film festival, directors, distributors, documentary, world cinema

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"Otto:" A zombie movie with heart, soul and plot

Sheer show-off brattiness can be attractive as it manifests in a young filmmaker’s works—but not so much if the filmmaker fails to mature in sensibility along with his or her escalating age. This has been a particular problem with certain figures in the ’80s Amerindie breakthrough, who still amuse and sometimes enthrall, but rarely get past cineaste in-jokery and prankish shock value to convey some real depth of artistic (or simply human) perspective.

topics: film history, filmmakers, frameline, queer cinema, reviews

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"Waltz with Bashir": autobio-animation and the horrors of war

Just as the graphic novel has in recent decades completely altered the once strictly-kidstuff landscape of the “comic book,” so now animated features are beginning to embrace more grown-up stories and audiences than anything in the long history of “cartoons” before them. Last year there was the striking Persepolis, which adapted Marjane Satrapi’s tragicomic memoir about growing up a Western-leaning liberal in increasingly fundamentalist Iran. Now there’s Waltz with Bashir, another autobiographical Middle Eastern story, albeit a very different one in both form and content.

A veteran Israeli director of both nonfiction and narrative works, Ari Folman has created an “animated documentary” that expands the definition of that lattermost term.

topics: animation, political film, san francisco film society, world cinema

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Bursting with "Button"

David Fincher is an odd duck, an extreme perfectionist who’s earned Hollywood’s respect but not its love. They’d be more forgiving if more of his exhaustively crafted films actually made money. But Grand Guignol noir Se7en and unusually conventional thriller Panic Room are exceptions; cool but ingenious The Game and underwhelming Alien3 just did okay. Fight Club and Zodiac were widely acclaimed, yet stubbornly failed to grab the wide audience that might justify their considerable expense.

It’s rare for an auteur to be so serially, extravagantly funded by the mainstream industry—Welles and Von Stroheim being famous pilloried examples—when they’ve already fallen flat with costly prior risks. But Fincher walks that plank again with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, opening on Christmas. This technically dazzling, decades-spanning fable is a more tenderhearted reflection on humanity than Fincher has allowed himself before. Whether it leaves you enchanted or indifferent may prove a matter of taste. But it’s a fascinating and accomplished gamble that again asserts Fincher as a major talent whose limits are still unknown.

topics: actors, directors, genre films, hollywood, reviews

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Genuflection: "Pray the Devil Back to Hell"

The violence that’s plagued parts of Africa throughout the modern era testifies not just to greed, corruption, cruelty or victimization, but the arbitrariness of defining nation-states themselves. Liberia is a perfect, if particularly bizarre, example. It was founded in the early 19th century by freed African American slaves who, despite their own historical oppression, began exercising a sort of colonialist domination over the west coastal region’s disparate indigenous peoples.

Complex tensions between that “Americo-Liberian” elite and some 16 distinct ethnic groups—as well as amongst the latter—finally led to coups, dictatorships and civil wars. The latter commenced in 1989. How their barely-interrupted progress over the next many years finally came to an end is chronicled in Gini Reiticker’s fine documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which opens Friday at SF’s Red Vic Movie House and Berkeley’s Shattuck Cinemas.

topics: african cinema, directors, documentary, documentary film, red vic movie house

Take Two

Something Wild: Martha Colburn’s collage animations

Martha Colburn’s incendiary animations flickered in my mind when I took a walk along a woodsy section of Paul Revere’s famous ride over Thanksgiving weekend. Like a hallucinatory People’s History of the United States, Colburn’s recent shorts plunge the interstices of Americana for a hidden history of fanaticism and double-faced hypocrisies. Myth Labs, for instance, features cutouts of Mayflower Americans giving Bible lessons while they choke on crystal meth. Colburn’s political exorcisms are fast and furious, deriving meaning not from a cogent chain of events but rather from juxtaposition and fragmented iconography—a punk take on the “old weird America.” As one of four featured artists of the Berkeley Art Museum’s Bending the Word exhibition, Colburn’s visionary (an overused adjective, but apt here) and frequently hilarious Myth Labs is playing in constant rotation in the museum gallery, but a special program at the adjoining Pacific Film Archive on December 2 offers a fuller tribute to the besieged beauty of her candy-coated color schemes, labor-intensive materiality and frenetic, unyielding stop-frames.

topics: animation, bay area, experimental film, filmmakers, independent film, pacific film archive

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"Lola Montès," revived

“Sadism demands a story,” remarked Laura Mulvey in her landmark piece of feminist film criticism, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema.” In Max Ophüls’ opulent swan song, Lola Montès (1955), sadism also demands a spectacle. Ophüls’ Technicolor rhapsody— newly restored by Rialto Picture to match the director’s original vision— opens in a three-ring circus worthy of DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Costumed dwarves, swinging chandeliers, horse-riding acrobats and tiers of audience members kaleidoscopically divide the frame, as the Ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) invites the audience to ask questions for 25 cents a piece to the star attraction, the scandalous adventuress Lola (the beautiful Martine Carol).

topics: performance, producers, reviews

Take Two

Soviet-critical "Cargo 200" premieres at YBCA

Senator John McCain may have been testing the limits of hyperbole when he claimed in the presidential debates that gazing into Vladimir Putin’s eyes he saw a "K," a "G" and a "B," but Russia’s unforeseen and boorish display of military grandstanding in Georgia gave cause for both candidates to make “curbing Russian aggression” a serious part of their foreign policy discussions. A different sort of Russian aggression is at work in Cargo 200, Alexei Balabanov’s latest nasty piece of work, which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Thursday, November 13.

Balabanov, working with producer Sergei Selyanov, has earned a reputation as Russia’s Quentin Tarantino—a populist auteur whose edgy, action-filled films dish their punches with formal polish and narratives of feel-good nationalism. But Cargo 200 presents a departure for the two. At a time when military parades are once again a fixture in Red Square and nostalgia for a pre-dissolution Russia is being stoked more than ever, Cargo 200 has garnered controversy in its native country for its unsentimental depiction of the era and brutal violence.

topics: political film, reviews, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

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Supernaturalism with "Let the Right One In"

With the film version of young-adult fiction sensation Twilight imminent—and the trailer for Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke’s adaptation does looks pretty great—it’s shaping up as a big moment for the underaged undead.

Onscreen and in print, vampire juveniles have had their most impressive prior outings via horror-lit faves Stephen King and Anne Rice, whose Salem’s Lot and Interview with the Vampire featured infant and preadolesent-girl vamps that continued to disturb in respective miniseries and big-screen adaptations. (The Interview movie, you might recall, introduced a pint-sized Kirsten Dunst as the eerily jaded young vampiress.) But these were strictly supporting characters.

New Swedish import Let the Right One In is, by contrast, all about underage drinking—blood-drinking, that is.

topics: actors, directors, genre films, reviews, world cinema

Take Two

The cosmic dance-floor of Arthur Russell

"His ambition was to write Buddhist bubblegum music."
—Allen Ginsberg

"He had to be the funkiest white boy I ever saw."
—James Brown backup singer Lola Love

"He’s one of the greatest songwriters ever, greater than the Beatles."
—Ernie Brooks, musician, formerly of the Modern Lovers

These assessments of Arthur Russell—none of them hyperbolic when measured against his musical genius and personal charisma—are made in Wild Combination, Matt Wolf’s finely tuned biodoc of the composer/vocalist/cellist. Born in Iowa farm country in 1952, Russell and his cello arrived in New York in the early ’70s by way of a Buddhist commune in San Francisco.

[This article appeared originally in Film Comment, May-June, 2008, and is reprinted with permission from the author.]

topics: avant-garde, bay area, documentary, music

Take Two

The fantastical imagination of "Wind Man"

When Wind Man appeared on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas’ schedule, moral crisis ensued. I’d seen and loved this big-screen directorial debut by veteran Russian screenwriter Khuat Akhmetov last year at the Montreal Festival du Monde, reviewing it for the trade magazine Variety without ever imagining it would find any berth (at least in North America) outside the fest circuit. I mean, when was the last time an earthy parabolic whimsy of the once internationally-popular Soviet Block (think Parajanov, Jakubisko, etc.) surfaced on U.S. arthouse screens? Er, 1970? Certainly long ago—long before the Iron Curtain fell.

Yet here is Wind Man, such a throwback it feels like the rediscovery of an exotic, presumed-extinct species, now unexpectedly perched for a week at the Kabuki. And its arrival trumps my capacity for the informative neutrality I’ve been asked to use in my approach to films on the SFFS Screen, which is programmed by the publisher of SF360.org, the San Francisco Film Society. Forgive me, but this will be a rave.

topics: russian cinema, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

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Chris Marker comes home, at last

I confess that for a long while I had the misperception, based on almost no exposure to his work, that French essayist Chris Marker made dense, dry films steeped in political theory and inaccessible to anyone but a narrow strata of irrelevant European intellectuals. This delusion persisted because Marker’s films truly were inaccessible; outside of the infrequent one-shot local premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival or the Pacific Film Archive, they never played. The exception is his tour de force short fiction La Jetée, which pops up with some regularity at venues like The Other Cinema and S.F. Cinematheque. (And even its army of admirers will concede that it’s less a pleasure trip about time and space travel than a pointed examination of the nature and meaning of images.) Marker’s unavailability wasn’t remedied by DVD, where one could only find La Jetée and Sans Soleil. Until today, that is, when Icarus Films releases The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), The Last Bolshevik (1993), Remembrance of Things to Come (2001) and The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004). A gust of fresh air, they’re guaranteed to whisk away your boredom (it’s OK, you can admit it) with story-driven American documentaries with quirky characters.

I should point out that these are individual releases, not a box set, though it hardly minimizes the echoes that ricochet across the films and the decades.

topics: dvd, experimental film, french cinema, reviews

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"Vicky Cristina Barcelona" summers in Spain

In the twilight of his career, famously stay-put New Yorker Woody Allen has suddenly and surprisingly taken to traveling for work. This is a big deal for a filmmaker whose last project shot abroad—perhaps even out-of-state—was 1975’s Love and Death. It spoofed Russian River and the Napoleonic wars, and thus couldn’t quite be pulled off on the Upper West Side or even in Central Park.

Was it the unpleasantness of that experience (Allen doesn’t seem to remember the film fondly), the backyard-set breakthrough of Annie Hall one year later, or sheer xenophobia that kept his projects as close to home as possible for the next three decades?

topics: reviews

Take Two

Dreamachines: "FliCKer" stares into the light

In our popular imagination—and especially in film— the request to “stare into the light” is often an invitation to let our waking life fall into submission. The words— often spoken by hypnotists, anesthesiologists, and mystics— also describe the act of watching movies, and speak to film’s implicit promise of taking us to some other scene accessed through the flickers on the screen.

The transportive and conscious altering qualities of light were not lost on William S. Burroughs and his compatriot and frequent collaborator Brian Gysin. "We must storm the citadels of enlightenment,” Burroughs wrote to Gysin, “the means are at hand.” The means at hand were Gysin’s revelation about the hallucinatory qualities of flickering light and the device he invented in 1957 to harness its potential: the dreamachine. Nik Sheenan’s hypnotic documentary FlicKer— which makes its U.S. premiere at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts-- looks into the dreamachine’s pulsating brilliance while also sketching a portrait of its troubled and brilliant creator.

topics: art film, yerba buena center for the arts

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Arghya Basu evokes the mystical and everyday in "A Listener's Tale"

If the Castro Theatre is the church of San Francisco cinephilia, then the Yerba Buena screening room is surely its laboratory—it’s only too fitting that leading curator Joel Shepard is spotlighting the idiosyncratic programming voices of five San Francisco independents for the museum’s upcoming Bay Area Now exhibition. Besides rounding up important international features (e.g. Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone) and oddball retrospectives (e.g. Phil Chambliss: Arkansas Auteur), Shepard also has a penchant for screening otherwise unhyped films which do not hew to typical genre norms. A case in point is A Listener’s Tale, a lovely if unclassifiable mixture of ethnography and poetic reverie which screened at last winter’s Rotterdam Film Festival.

In spite of the earnest attempts of academic critics to problematize both the conception and consumption of filmed representations of indigenous "others," filmmakers have been drawn to exotic cultures and landscapes since the Lumière Brothers first introduced lightweight cameras.

topics: bay area, documentary, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

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Review: "Surfwise"

The Bradys and Partridges. Cowsills, Osmonds, Jacksons. The old-school Von Trapps. There’s a certain fascination to family acts, heightening the interest that inevitably occurs when a performer’s professional and personal lives blur. While the above-named might all be musical acts—both real and fictive—nuclear units surface occasionally in other arenas of public life. Almost inevitably, some dynastic dirt is sure to emerge, because sooner or later the family that works, plays, competes and cohabits together is going to experience some cracks in the household-unity foundation.

There’s plenty o’ such juicy stuff on display in Surfwise, the latest documentary from Doug Pray (Hype!, Scratch). His subject here is the Paskowitz clan, whose patriarch and nine count ‘em nine children have been legends in the surfing world for decades. It’s an eccentric real-life saga that’s compelling whether you’re a wave rider yourself or couldn’t care less about the sport.

topics: documentary, sports film

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Review: "Love Songs"

French musicals are an acquired taste. I should know, because I thought I hated ‘em until I suddenly acquired it. The moment of revelation is cloudy, but may have been tethered to first hearing the Michel Legrand song score for 1968’s Young Girls of Rochefort—music so cheerful, insouciant, wistful and catchy it could charm the distemper from Guantanamo Bay. (It took several more years to actually see that film, which outside France was a big flop, only recently getting belated appreciation and restored-print DVD exposure.)

As defined by the original taste-making blueprint, Demy’s 1964 Umbrellas of Cherbourg (also with a Legrand score, one more famous but I think less intoxicating), the French musical is not at all like your classic Hollywood model—or even the Bollywood one. Songs simply seep into the "action," simply extending the inevitable discussion of relationships or their lack rather than providing plot with some flamboyant interruption. People don’t "burst" into song, they slip into it. The music is usually less Broadway than youthful pop, movement not half so formal as would require the term "choreography."

topics: french cinema, musicals, reviews

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Review: "Postal"

It may not be easy being Uwe Boll, but it must be fun. I conclude this only after having met the guy (and gotten on his emailing list, which is not recommended—you get multiple spammy missives about All Things Uwe every freakin’ day). He’s disarmingly friendly, boundlessly energetic, a fanboy-turned-maker who thinks large and has the entrepreneurial skills to pull off his ideas in the real entertainment-biz world. Who else could have cobbled together funding for so many modest-to-fairly-big-budget features without any major Hollywood studio backing whatsoever? Not to mention his talents as an ebullient self-promoter, one who seizes on bad press (of which he gets plenty) as a license for public pugnaciousness.

topics: games, reviews

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Review: "Mister Lonely"

Part Luis Buñuel parable, Artforum spread, Jonestown ballet and Warhol camp, Harmony Korine’s latest film is a prime, insomniac two hours of midnight-movie drifting. Mister Lonely is Korine’s first film since 1999’s Julien Donkey-Boy and his third feature since his rainmaking screenplay for Larry Clark’s Kids (released to much controversy in 1995, when Korine was all of 22). Erratic perhaps, but then maybe that’s a good thing given the endemic professionalism of much American independent film.

Mister Lonely is certainly his mostly plainly winsome film yet, though the 35-year old Korine still tends towards the associative, scene-by-scene narration style that’s marked his work since Gummo (1997).

topics: art, directors, reviews

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Review: "The Living End," remixed and remastered

What to think about attitudes toward and images of gays in U.S. media these days? It’s a complicated question. On one hand, clearly there have been enormous advances. Not so long ago, who could have imagined shows like The L Word or Will & Grace being long-running mainstream hits? Ellen and Rosie and such are beloved by housewives across America. Brokeback Mountain won Oscars—though not the big one, in what many speculated was a failure of nerve on the part of older Academy voters who simply didn’t want to watch it.

Yet Brokeback did not open the floodgates for gay-themed Hollywood projects as predicted, the studios regarding its success as a fluke. (We’ll see if Ang Lee’s upcoming gay-perspective Woodstock movie or Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk bio changes their minds.)

topics: bay area, dvd, queer cinema

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Review: "Boarding Gate"

Olivier Assayas made his name from the late 1980s via a series of “typical” intimate French arthouse dramas done with bracing freshness and verve. He felt like a leading light in that country’s cinematic next wave, even arriving at the job as so many New Wave greats had a generation before—by first working at famed critical journal Cahiers du Cinema.

From early youth studies Disorder and Cold Water to 1998’s Late August, Early September, he seemed the latest in a line of Gallic filmmakers who made low-key, casual observation stealthily add up to something powerful. Even his rather large-scale, starry “Les destinees sentimentale” (2000) felt cut from the same cloth.

topics: critics, filmmakers, french cinema, reviews

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Review: "Shotgun Stories"

In a recent documentary some interviewees recalled seeing Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets when it came out in 1973, and being amazed that someone, anyone, could actually make a movie about the type of people they’d grown up with in NYC’s tougher boroughs. Thirty-five years later, of course, the general attitude might well be, “Please God, not another Mean Streets knockoff!”—being that New York City slang-speaking East Coast youth dramas have become one of the reigning cliches of indie cinema.

Many things go in and out of fashion at the movies, but it’s seldom noted that among them are entire geographic and population sectors of American life. Middle-to-upper-class WASPS never seem to go out of style; boys (of whatever race) in the ‘hood are a relatively new prevalent flavor; desperately-seeking twentysomethings in the more glittering cities are a favorite; generic suburbia is a fallback setting for many genre exercises.

But the smaller-town “heartland” America that once held our majority populace—and which has duly been shrinking for many decades, though it ain’t vanished yet—is now seldom seen on screen.

topics: directors, independent film, reviews

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"Shelter"

I’ve no idea how many gay surfers there are—does anyone?—but for sure a whole lot of gay men have long fantasied about shootin’ the curl (ahem) with a surfie. What’s not to like? Laird Hamilton, for example, is a world-class sex object by any standard. Just ‘cuz he’s married with kids doesn’t mean a dude can’t dream.

While gay porn flicks have dubiously mined the surfer fantasy since their inception—at the least exploiting the stereotype of athletic California blonds—non-X-rated films have been much more hesitant. You sure didn’t see gay characters in Hollywood’s takes on surf culture (from Frankie & Annette to Point Break), nor in the never-ending documentaries that flowed from 1966 landmark The Endless Summer to the latest DIY effort at SF’s Red Vic Movie House.

topics: exhibitions, film festivals, gay lesbian cinema, independent film, reviews

Take Two

Q&A: Brillante Mendoza

It is clear from the very first interaction with Brillante Mendoza that he is an extremely gracious man. This, even after the substantial acclaim he had been garnering for three feature films he unveiled this past year. In the most obvious ways, the two of his films playing at the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, Foster Child and Slingshot, couldn’t be more different. The first of these films centers on the adoption day of Jon-Jon, a darling 3-year old, from a loving foster family. The latter examines the criminal underworld and its corrupt government counterpart in a dark and labyrinthine Manila. Still, as Mendoza makes clear, these films share a basic approach to the world, one that engenders respectful understanding through a desire to depict and see things as they really are. In part, because of filmmakers like him, Filipino independent cinema has enjoyed a renaissance in this first decade of the 2000s. Mendoza was in San Francisco for the first time recently for his screenings, when he took time to speak with SF360.org.

topics: asian cinema, critics, directors, documentary, film festivals, q&a

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"Paranoid Park"

You’ve got to give Gus Van Sant credit for integrity. Just when he seemed on the verge of turning into just another Hollywood sellout—via the increasingly impersonal, decreasingly interesting mainstream likes of To Die For, Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester (not to mention the 101 percent useless Psycho)—he did a total about-face.

His four features since have been not just low-budget personal projects, but true art films in a rarefied, semi-abstract, greatly patience-demanding mode that went out of style somewhere around the time that Antonioni and Resnais movies stopped automatically getting U.S. distribution. Sure, Gerry had Matt Damon, while Elephant and Last Days had hot-button themes (school shootings and Kurt Cobain, respectively). Yet they were almost anti-narrative exercises, cryptic reveries that could hypnotize you to death.

topics: authors, directors, independent film, reviews

Take Two

"Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick"

My high school physics teacher was a slight, nondescript fellow who hyperactively sparked to life in the classroom. His mantra was “Physics is fun!” and he gave one of the more clever lads an unexpected bonus point for devilishly scribbling it on an exam in place of an elusive correct answer. The reward wasn’t for sucking up, mind you, but for understanding that enthusiasm was more important than the dogged mastery of information. That this long-forgotten anecdote (and life lesson) came rushing back to me after spending some time with “Warts & All: The Films of Danny Plotnick” is neither accidental nor inappropriate. The 10 short comic narratives made between 1986 and 2001 assembled on this wonderful DVD are exemplars of an unpolished, unpretentious school of moviemaking that aims at every moment to be audience-friendly. It’s an attitude embraced today by thousands of adolescents screwing around with camcorders, and by one Seth Rogen. None of them has ever heard of the popular Bay Area filmmaker, I’d wager, but they all inherited his credo: Filmmaking is fun!

topics: bay area, directors, distributors, dvd, experimental film, independent film

Take Two

Review: "The Signal"

It’s an idea so vivid yet simple you’ve got to wonder why more movies haven’t used it: Something deliberate or accidental happens that indiscriminately turns the majority populace into irrational, violent maniacs. Zombie movies toy with the notion of familiar folks behaving in a most unfamiliar fashion; there have been a few more direct applications of the concept, like culty horror movies “The Crazies,” “Halloween III” and “Blue Sunshine.” But probably no film has ever deployed this conceit quite as cleverly or viscerally as “The Signal” — which would be mighty impressive even if it didn’t have the additional distinction of being created in sequential, exquisite-corpse style by three writer-directors, two of them making their feature debut.

topics: reviews