Days Nine and Ten
Okay, the festival is over and my plane lands in about 45 minutes, leaving me
roughly half an hour before all electronic devices must be turned off. (Incidentally,
why is this such a big deal? If listening to my iPod on descent could legitimately
threaten the planes navigational system, perhaps I should consider alternative
forms of travel.) So unlike the lugubrious slog of my previous blog posts, this
will be an exercise in speed. Without further Apu:
Tristram
Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story: Michael Winterbottom’s
riff on one of the world’s earliest post-modern novels (“written before
there was even modernism to be ‘post’ about”) is loaded with
funny lines, mostly commenting on the filmmaking process. I’d have liked
it to go deeper, but the Steve Coogan that ran off with the funniest segment in Coffee & Cigarettes is in full effect here.
Wallace
& Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit: The Wallace & Gromit
shorts are still the perfect length for their adventures, but the eagerly awaited
feature version sustains the fun and invention for longer than you might expect.
Oddly enough, director Nick Park comes up a bit short in the sort of Rube Goldberg
finale that he usually nails, but that’s a minor complaint when he turns
out such hand-crafted delights.
Hostel:
Eli Roth made a big splash a few years ago when his goofy debut film Cabin
Fever closed the festival. Roth returns to the same midnight slot with Hostel
and offers more of the same frathouse humor and gore, but it seems less charming
this time around. There’s something funny about the idea of three all-American
buddies who wind up in Slovakia after finding Amsterdam not sufficiently debauched,
but then again, that same scenario popped up in Eurotrip.
Midnight
Movies: From The Margins To The Mainstream: If I had time, I’d
write a whole essay about why this frivolous documentary shouldn’t be in
the festival (short take: It’s not good enough. It’s in the Dialogues
section, which is usually reserved for filmmakers presenting older films that
are not their own. It’s based on the Midnight Movies book by J. Hoberman
and Jonathan Rosenbaum, both of whom were at the festival and yet weren’t
asked to participate in the discussion.) In any case, a diverting enough look
at the midnight phenomenon, but the film only spends about five minutes on the
latter half of its subtitle and some crucial questions are left unexplored as
a result.
Pusher, Pusher
II, Pusher
III: I reviewed the gritty Danish crime movie Pusher
several years ago and I mostly stand by my review, though I appreciated its seedy
look, dark humor, and highly charged lead performance more on a second viewing.
The sequels, produced one after another, offer more of the same, each following
a different character in the drug scene. It would have been better if the movies
interacted more closely—the stories are told in straight chronology, and
information from previous films rarely bleed from one film to the next—but
the film strikes me as an ideal HBO series in the making. The half-series on display
here is well worth a renewal.
No
Direction Home: Bob Dylan: Martin Scorsese’s 220-minute
opus on a decade in Dylan’s career has been labeled “definitive,”
and for awhile, it wears that definitiveness like an iron weight. But the film
picks up in the second half, when Dylan becomes the highly reluctant figurehead
for the peace movement and all things leftist. To that end, his decision to “go
electric” is as punk rock as it gets, and Scorsese nicely captures the extraordinary
(and extraordinarily misguided) outrage that followed. Better still, Scorsese
is interested exclusively in the development of Dylan’s craft and its relationship
to the culture, so not a minute is wasted on the personal trivia that clutters
most screen biographies.
Thank
You For Smoking: The runaway success of the festival, this satire
on the spin industry sparked a bidding war between Paramount and Fox Searchlight
that was nearly as comical as the movie itself. (One had a verbal agreement, the
other had a written one. Guess which prevailed?) Jason Reitman, son of comedy
maestro Ivan, works in broad strokes as he follows a tobacco lobbyist (played
by Aaron Eckhart with the full force of his oily charm) who gets hung up in political
controversy. Many big laughs here and a surprising lack of sentimentality: The
presence of Eckhart’s impressionable son sets off some alarm bells, but
it doesn’t necessarily stiffen his “moral flexibility.”
So that’s my festival. Look for a formal wrap-up by Noel and myself in an
upcoming issue. For now, I leave you with a festival Top Five:
1. Brokeback Mountain
2. A History Of Violence
3. Hidden
4. Sympathy For Lady Vengeance
5. L’Enfant