Screenings, 01-18-08
Stranded: I Have Come From A Plane That Crashed On The Mountains (dir. Gonzalo Arijon)
Headline: Plane crashes in Andes; survivors eat the dead
Indie Type: "A look back" documentary, with talking head interviews, archival footage and surprisingly well-done re-enactments.
Soundtrack: Haunting piano plunks, with the occasional atonal string hanging.
Report: The saga of the Uruguayan rubgy team that resorted to cannibalism after crashing in the Andes in '72 has been told maybe too many times–heck, I saw a special on ESPN's Outside The Lines a couple of weeks ago–but it's no exaggeration to say that Gonzalo Arijon's Stranded is the story's definitive version. Arijon's interviews are well-shot, framing the survivors against clear blue skies, and his re-enactments never detract from those survivors' articulate, poetic reminiscences. The film drags a bit in the middle–as the actual experience did for those rugby players, no doubt–but that's mainly because Arijon has so many good quotes that he uses more than he needs. On the other hand, Arijon's choice to film the survivors returning to the Andes with their children pays huge dividends, leading to an ending that puts the real meaning of their survival in moving terms, and pays the proper respect to those who didn't make it.
Grade: B+
Eat, For This Is My Body (dir. Michelange Quay)
Headline: Haitian race relations "real fucked-up," surrealist asserts
Indie Type: Symbolist art
Soundtrack: Afrobeat, industrial hum, and exaggerated ambient noise
Report: No, this isn't a sequel to Stranded, though nearly everybody who saw both made that joke. Eat is rather a plotless meditation on the complicated historical relationship between French aide workers and Hatian natives, as embodied here by a frail old woman, her officious daughter, and the black kids they educate (or perhaps enslave). Quay emphasizes black-and-white color schemes and the line between freedom and savagery, and your tolerance for the film will depend on whether you can keep yourself from imagining Quay instructing his cast of young boys, "Now destroy the birthday cake! Destroy!" or whether you can stand the tension of a scene in which Syvie Testud may or may not dip her face in a vat of cream. Personally, I found Eat fairly enjoyable, though I largely ignored the heavy-handedness of Quay's black-and-white symbolism and just grooved on the sumptuousness of his imagery and the rhythm of his camera moves and editing.
Grade: B
Recycle (dir. Mahmoud al-Massad)
Headline: Former Mujahideen drives cardboard-hauling truck in Jordan
Indie Type: Verité (Maysles-style, not Wiseman-style)
Soundtrack: Jazzy fretless bass and rapidly plucked guitar
Report: There's not much to this slice-of-life doc, which follows devout Muslim Abu Amar as he wiles away his days hauling garbage, watching TV, working on a book about Islam, and talking politics with his buddies. Ostensibly, the movie argues that since our no-big-deal protagonist comes from the same hometown as arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then he too is at risk of becoming an international, unless he finds steady work first. (In fact, at various points in the film, Amar's friends contend that Zarqawi "wasn't even that religious" before he helped found Al-Qaeda.) What's most compelling about Recycle is how Abu and his friends take different approaches to their faith and politics, yet still drink tea together and hit each other up for money, just like guys do everywhere. Be warned: this is a slice-of-life in its truest sense, with little point beyond presenting a character sketch (aided by a few blatantly staged scenes). A critic friend I dined with afterward hated this movie, but I found it endlessly fascinating. (Note: Recycled was preceded by an excellent short, "Salim Baba," about a man who operates a traveling "cinema cart" in the slums of Bombay, projecting snippets of Bollywood fare inside a black box, for kids. The short doesn't appear to be avaiable for on-line viewing anywhere, unfortunately.)
Grade: B+
Frozen River (dir. Courtney Hunt)
Headline: Poor woman dabbles in human trafficking to pay for new doublewide
Indie Type: Small-town wallow, plus bravura performance by underappeciated character actor
Soundtrack: Twangy slide guitar and plaintive plucking
Report: Aside from the sagging face of Melissa Leo–always a welcome sight–the first 10 minutes or so of Courtney Hunt's feature filmmaking debut is pretty dire, dredging up one boonies-set indie-film cliché after another, including missed payments on household appliances, a runaway husband with a crippling addiction, and kids who blame mom for everything. But then Leo tracks her husband's car down to a diffident Mohawk woman, who ropes Leo into a well-paying job driving illegal immigrants across the Canadian border, via a frozen river that connects the Canadian side of her reservation with the American side. The story gets increasingly involving from there, despite the occasional over-obvious context-setting reminder of how desperate Leo is. (Her boss is a jerk who won't give her enough hours; her son is a delinquent-in-training who almost burns their trailer down, etc.) And though the use of the frozen river as a symbol for Leo's precarious life is just as over-obvious, it's also surprisingly effective (and nightmarish for those of us with bad experiences combining ice and cars). Hunt builds a lot of tension in the film's final half-hour, and emerges with something that's about on the level of really good TV–which makes Leo the perfect actress to anchor it.
Grade: B
The Wave (dir. Dennis Gansel)
Headline: Fascism bad; possibly inevitable?
Indie Type: Teensploitation with a message
Soundtrack: Hip modern rock from across the decades
Report: I have vivid memories of the 1981 American TV movie version of Todd Strasser's juvenile novel The Wave, which ABC aired in prime time even though it was made as an Afterschool Special. Perhaps you remember it too: High school kids form a fascist society as part of a class project, and soon find most of their fellow students joining in? Ring a bell? Initially, Dennis Gansel's German adaptation of the story–a true story, by the way–promises added significance given where it takes place, but after some early, appropriate questions about whether words like "discipline" and "nationalism" should be automatically suspect in Germany, the movie more or less ignores its setting and becomes a beat-for-beat remake, filmed like a typical American high school movie, but with more profanity. The Wave is by no means a bad film; it's just already been done. And when it was done before, it was aimed at teens. Grown-ups shouldn't expect to get much out of it.
Grade: C+
Festival Notes…
I felt a little presumptuous when I bought waterproof hiking shoes before taking this trip, but as it happens, I've been ankle deep in snowdrifts fairly often over the past three days. Like every other wintry community in America, Park City plows its snow off to the side of the road, effectively eliminating safe places for pedestrians to walk. Today while trying to get from one theater to another–a trip that should've taken about three minutes–I took a wrong turn, followed a shoveled walk and ended up about a half-mile down the road from where I supposed to be. So I trudged back, cutting across the beaten path, and nearly spilled out onto the road in front of a shuttle bus. And here I thought Sundance was supposed to be about hobnobbing with Woody Harrelson