A Clockwork Skinhead

Posted on May 4, 2007 by admin

The “enlightened” skinheads of This Is England. Sitting, left to right: Gadget (Andrew Ellis), Milky (Andrew Shim), Kes (Kieran Hardcastle), Woody (Joe Gilgun), and Pukey (Jack O`Connell); standing, Shaun (Thomas Turgoose).

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007
This Is England
102 minutes
Written and Directed by Shane Meadows
Starring: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Andrew Shim, Rosamund Hanson, Jack O`Connell, Kieran Hardcastle, Andrew Ellis, Vicky McClure, Sophie Ellerby, Chanel Cresswell, Danielle Watson, George Newton, and Perry Benson
From U.K.

By Robert Rosen

Despite the cross tattooed Charlie Manson-style in the middle of his forehead, for a gentleman who’s just gotten out of prison he seems like a decent enough chap. And he’s quite the orator, too. Combo (for that is his name) is telling an amusing story to his rapt audience at a small gathering of friends—something about a bloke stealing his “puddin’” in the joint, I think, his anecdote liberally sprinkled with fookin’ this and oi that. (His Scouse accent—at least I believe it’s a Scouse accent—is a little difficult to understand, and the occasional subtitle would not be out of place here.) The real problem with this Combo chap, however, is that to feel completely positive about him you have to overlook his rather dramatic entrance. Apparently, he’d instructed his mate, a fellow skinhead, to barge into the party and, pretending to be a neighbor displeased by the loud music, indicate that he was about to hack everybody to death with the machete he was wielding like a ninja gone bonkers. It’s not until Combo, played with menacing verisimilitude by Stephen Graham, waltzes in and announces that oi, it’s just a bleedin’ joke, lads, that we realize this party is not about to devolve into a total helter-skelter bloodbath. I’m still laughing.

What we have here is not the bucolic Britain on display in the 2007 “English Garden” calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall, its pages a seductive riot of “Red Georgette” tulips and blue forget-me-nots set against a background of green in all its glorious shades. It is, rather, the Britain of Shane Meadows’ stunning and brutal film This Is England, which is so different from the one I see every morning in my calendar, it may as well exist on a different planet.

Let’s call the planet “July 1983,” which is the date flashed on the screen following a rousing opening montage—set to the music of Toots and the Maytals—of every iconic image that was England at the time. And though the credits later say that the film was shot in Nottingham and Grimsby, which are about 50 miles apart, the setting is a generic East Midlands city gone to seed—a fictional town, based on Meadows’ experiences growing up in the area. You’ve got your blocks of council flats, some inhabited, some abandoned ruins; you’ve got your vacant lots, your bleakly unappealing beach, your “Maggie-is-a-twat”-style anti-Thatcher graffiti scrawled on various bits of concrete, and your young people dressed like Boy George and Cyndi Lauper, listening to the songs that pour from the radios, like “Come On Eileen” and “Tainted Love.”

Oh yeah, then there’s the kid, the star of the show. Shaun (Thomas Turgoose, making his acting debut) is 12 years old, lives with his mother, Cynthia (Jo Hartley), and he’s got issues. Primarily, he’s being picked on at school, cruelly taunted by the older kids about his father, who was killed in the Falklands war the previous year. Shaun will, without hesitation, go berserk on anybody who insults his dad—and he doesn’t give a flyin’ fook how big they are. His violent outbursts, however, tend to land him in the headmaster’s office, and in one memorable scene he coolly waits his turn for corporal punishment while listening to the screams of the kid he was fighting with as the headmaster beats him with a cane. Shaun, in short, is fearless.

The characters’ emotional complexity, as portrayed by a stellar ensemble of mostly unknown actors, is what makes this film extraordinary, one of the best to come out of England in a long time. The plot itself is simple—it revolves around Shaun’s relationship with two local cliques. First, he falls in with some stylish, semi-enlightened skinheads, apparently descendants of the Mods, who are led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), an appealing and articulate young man who takes pity on Shaun and invites him to hang out with his gang. They transform him into a miniature version of themselves, teaching him how to dress, buying him new clothes, and shaving his head, which freaks out his mother. But Cynthia understands that Shaun needs a father figure, and all she asks of Woody and the gang is that if Shaun is going to hang out with them, then they must take responsibility for him, and to please ask her permission before they shave his head again.

There’s genuine affection between Shaun and the skinheads; they even invite him to their parties. One of them, the Lauper-esque Smell (Rosamund Hanson), who’s about 19 and wears braces, takes a fancy to Shaun, and they become, essentially, an item.

“You might look like a baby, but you kiss like you’re 40 years old,” Smell tells him, later asking, “Why don’t you want to suck my tits? Don’t you like me?” Shaun says that he likes her just fine, but he hasn’t had a lot of tit-sucking experience and is a little nervous about it. Though essential to understanding the characters, this is a perfect example of the type of “taboo” material that’s so rarely seen in American films, and one of the reasons that This Is England has such an exotic feel to it.

It’s after Woody’s old mate Combo returns from prison, and begins to dominate the picture with sheer force of personality, that Shaun drifts over to the neo-Nazi skinheads. The crucial moment comes when Combo—furious with the Pakistanis and West Indians who he says are taking over England—delivers an eloquently fascist speech, which he begins by asking the one black man in the group, Milky (Andrew Shim) if he’s English or Jamaican. The moment is ominous, Combo’s propensity for violence always lurking just beneath the surface.

“I’m English,” Milky says after some hesitation.

“Good man,” says Combo, switching to a critique of the government’s stupidity in waging the Falklands war—at which point Shaun physically attacks him. This provokes Combo to declare that Shaun’s the only one in the group with any guts, and that he sees himself in Shaun at the same age.

Combo becomes Shaun’s new father figure, and along with the gang of neo-Nazis, they rob and trash Pakistani-owned liquor stores, harass Muslim kids playing soccer, and go to National Front political meetings—until it all culminates in an inevitable bit of completely insane Clockwork Orange-like ultra-violence.

It’s shocking, it’s horrible, it’s bloody, and it reminds you that, even though July 1983 was a long time ago, it’s still a lot closer than you might want to believe.

Posted in 1983, Andrew Shim, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Rosamund Hanson, Shane Meadows, skinheads, Stephen Graham, This Is England, Thomas Turgoose, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on A Clockwork Skinhead

Manhattan Rhapsody

Posted on May 3, 2007 by admin

Kate (Debra Messing) finally gives Murphy (Edward Burns) the time of day in Burns’s Purple Violets.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007
Purple Violets
100 minutes
Written and Directed by Edward Burns
Starring Selma Blair, Patrick Wilson, Debra Messing, and Edward Burns
From U.S.A.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“Pulp and popcorn and the same old crap.” This is Brian Callahan (Patrick Wilson), author of several popular detective novels and one unpopular “literary” novel, talking about what people seem to want from writers and other artists. Fortunately, those things are not what Edward Burns gives us (well, maybe a little of the popcorn) in his lovely new film, Purple Violets. Burns has taken the LIRR from Brothers-McMullen Long Island to Woody-Allen Manhattan, a land of cozy Soho restaurants, charming Village streets, and expensive big lofts, with the occasional foray into the Hamptons. (As in Allen’s films, you never believe anyone has financial concerns, even when he or she is supposed to.)

Patti Petalson (flower theme?), played by Selma Blair, has writer’s block, a lousy boss (in a real estate office), and a lousy marriage. But her luck changes when Brian, her college love, drops into one of those nice restaurants—kind of an ex-boyfriend ex machina—where she’s dining with her best friend, Kate (an acerbic Debra Messing). Of course, Patti has that pesky husband, the British Chazz (Donal Logue, who’s not afraid to be odious), and Brian has a girlfriend (Elizabeth Reaser)—even though she, a much younger indie-label A&R person, thinks he’s hopelessly square. He also has to explain to her that The Great Gatsby isn’t a band, but Burns has the confidence and knowingness not to hit us over the head with too many literary allusions just because two characters are writers (unlike the publishing-world movie Suburban Girl, and oh yeah, Patti, like that other movie’s female lead, reads while walking, but in her case it’s only from the bus stop to the door). Rounding out the main foursome is Burns himself, nicely portraying “the Murph,” Brian’s lawyer and best friend and Kate’s former beau, whom she has never forgiven for an indiscretion during those often-referred-to college days.

Blair has the right touch for Patti; she’s darkly beautiful but in a low-key, contained, slightly mysterious way (and I’m hereby bestowing on her the first Frances-McDormand-in-Laurel-Canyon-Small-Breasts-Are-Sexy Award). When Brian says that Patti is more talented than he is, we believe him, because she seems to have more reserves within her than he does (this could partly be due to Wilson’s all-American, Pat Boone looks, very effective in Little Children). Messing’s bitter, funny Kate is a good foil for her, as is Burns’s urban-good-ole-boy Murphy, who stalks Kate into letting him apologize for that long-ago dalliance.

In the parlance of cliché, Patti needs to find herself, and that she’s able to do so in a way that does not invoke the same old crap, but instead is intelligent and even somehow restorative (to the audience, I mean), is a blessing. With Woody in London (director-wise), it’s good to have Ed Burns in New York.

Purple Violets

Fri., May 4, 11:30 AM, AMC Kips Bay-12, 570 Second Avenue (at 32nd Street)

Sat., May 5, 7:30 PM, AMC Kips Bay-14

Sun., May 6, 7:00 PM, AMC 34th Street-13, 312 34th Street (bet 8/9 Avenues)

Posted in Debra Messing, Donal Logue, Edward Burns, Elizabeth Reaser, Patrick Wilson, Purple Violets, Selma Blair, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on Manhattan Rhapsody

The Butterfly Effect

Posted on May 1, 2007 by admin

In a segment called “Happiness,” Forest Whitaker contemplates the delicacy—and power?—of a butterfly.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007
The Air I Breathe
97 Minutes
Directed by Jieho Lee
Written by Jieho Lee and Bob DeRosa
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Brendan Fraser, Andy Garcia, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Forest Whitaker, and Julie Delpy
From U.S.A.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

No sooner had I watched Sarah Michelle Gellar extract herself from the tender hands of Alec Baldwin in Suburban Girl than I witnessed her tumbling into the rough (metaphorically speaking) hands of Andy Garcia in The Air I Breathe, in which Garcia plays an elegantly dressed gangster whose nickname “Fingers” refers to his tendency to separate digits from the bodies of debtors. His cruel ways set into motion a series of events that only become clear once we’ve seen all four stories of people whose lives interconnect (partly through a car accident, in the way of Amores Perros and 21 Grams).

The titles of the four stories are “Happiness,” “Pleasure,” “Sorrow,” and “Love”; according to notes on the film, these emotions refer to a Chinese proverb that calls them the cornerstones of life. But since a butterfly theme keeps popping up, audience members might instead latch onto the idea of the “butterfly effect”—the theory that the mere flapping of lepidopteran wings can cause a ripple in the atmosphere that eventually leads to something huge, like a tornado.

In this movie, when a bored and boring stockbroker portrayed by Forest Whitaker decides to get crazy and bet his all and then some on a horse (named Butterfly, of course), he triggers a tornado that won’t quit—usually taking the form of mayhem, which is why my eyes were shut for a lot of the film (this is also the way I watch, or don’t watch, The Sopranos). Whitaker’s carpe diem actions apparently bring him happiness, but there’s a twist to its source, as there is in the next segment to Brendan Fraser’s pleasure and, finally, to Kevin Bacon’s love.

More straightforward is the sorrow of Gellar, who plays an unstable singer traumatized early in life (another car accident—these people should watch where they’re going). This may be no surprise to Buffy fans (I never saw the show), but Gellar has range. I fully believed her terror while under the thumb (no worries: she keeps her own) of Fingers—however improbably; it’s as though John Gotti were the manager of Britney Spears and no one blinked. Gellar’s pop princess goes by the name Trista (obviously a play on triste, the word for “sad” in both French and Spanish) and, in a climactic moment, reveals her closely held real name to Fraser’s sensitive, psychic thug (but not to us, making it a tad non-climactic).

The other main characters do not appear to have names but are listed in the credits as the emotions they embody; thus Fraser is “Pleasure,” and the actor playing him as a teenager is even identified as “Young Pleasure” (aha! perhaps Trista’s real name is Sorrow). As signaled early on by the exciting, pulsing opening music, this is not a subtle movie—its color, sometimes grainy, sometimes dark, often looks ugly and feels assaultive. But Fraser and Gellar’s jump-started relationship does have an exquisite quality, rooted in urgency and mysticism. Can he save her (sadly, Fingers is no vampire, so she can’t do it herself)? Or how about that other fellow from whom she’s separated by only two degrees?

The Air I Breathe

Fri., May 4, 6:00 PM, BMCC1 TribecaPAC, 199 Chambers Streeet (between Greenwich and West Streets)

Posted in Andy Garcia, Bob DeRosa, Brendan Fraser, Forest Whitaker, Jieho Lee, Kevin Bacon, Sarah Michelle Gellar, The Air I Breathe, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on The Butterfly Effect

If Kerouac Were an Illiterate Argentine Sculptor

Posted on April 30, 2007 by admin

Tati (Ignacio Benítez), left, with his root sculpture, and Waguinho (Carlos Wagner La Bella) on the road to Buenos Aires.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007
The Road to St. Diego (El Camino de San Diego)
98 Minutes
Directed and Written by Carlos Sorin
Starring: Ignacio Benitez, Carlos Wagner La Bella, Paola Rotela, Silvina Fontelles, and Miguel González Colman
From Argentina

By Robert Rosen

Who is this Diego Maradona? As far as I can tell, he’s a retired soccer player, the Argentinean Pelé, a permanent fixture in the gossip columns, a cross between Che Guevara, John Lennon, Elvis, and Babe Ruth, a man loved and worshipped in his homeland but despised in every other soccer-playing country, particularly in Latin America. When I was in Chile a few years ago, people were still talking with mucho gusto about Maradona’s cocaine addiction, his rehab, his weight gain, and his heart attack, which is the real-life incident that puts the plot of this poignant comedy into motion.

In the idiot-parlance of Hollywood pitchspeak, The Road to St. Diego is Heart Beat (the 1980 film about Jack Kerouac) meets The Motorcycle Diaries meets the Virgin of Guadalupe, which, as far as I know, is Jesus’ mother, not a movie.

Tati Benítez, played to perfection by Ignacio Benítez, is the man who goes on the road in Argentina. Who is he? Let me put it this way: If he were an American, he wouldn’t be Jack Kerouac; he’d be Mark David Chapman—an obsessive fan stalking his idol, determined to murder him in cold blood (with a legally purchased handgun, no doubt) and steal his fame.

Happily, Tati is not American; he’s an illiterate Argentine from the backwoods whose inherent sweetness shines through in the charming way he’s always saying gracias to everybody. Tati has lost his job as a lumberjack, and has taken to carving sculptures out of tree roots and selling them to tourists to support his wife (Paola Rotela) and three kids. He’s also Maradona’s #1 fan: he has Maradona’s number 10 tattooed on his back; he’s taught his pet parrots to call Maradona’s name; he spends 50 pesos of his very limited funds on an autographed picture of Maradona; and he wants to name one of his girls Diego, but the authorities won’t let him because it’s not a girl’s name.

The film begins as a mockumentary—everybody in town tells their stories about Tati, mocking his passion for Maradona. They tell him that his autographed photo is a fake. “You probably bought it from a Brazilian,” someone says.

One day as he’s walking in the woods, Tati sees a tree root that looks like Maradona raising his arms in triumph after scoring a goal. He cuts it off, takes it home, polishes it, and carves number 10 on its back. He considers it miraculous, like finding the face of Jesus. Did he find it just “because,” he wonders? Or is it a sign from God? He decides to donate his sculpture to a soccer museum. But when he hears that Maradona has had a heart attack and is in the intensive care unit of a Buenos Aires hospital, he changes his mind. Despite the very reasonable objections of his put-upon wife—We don’t have enough money, she tells him—he says that he’s going to Buenos Aires to give the statue to Maradona himself. It is his destiny.

Encouraged by a psychic reading, Tati, his statue wrapped in plastic, hits the road. He takes busses. He hitchhikes. He meets people. They ask to see the statue and he shows it to them. Some ridicule it. Others think it’s a great likeness.

But only when he gets a ride from Waguinho (Carlos Wagner La Bella), a garrulous Brazilian truck driver carrying a load of live chickens, does it begin to appear that the statue may, indeed, have miraculous powers. The first miracle: Waguinho—who’s known as “The Bear” to the numerous prostitutes he frequents—initially isn’t going to take Tati with him because, like all Brazilian soccer fans, he hates Maradona. But then he decides he likes Tati and takes him anyway, despite the statue—and he’s going all the way to Buenos Aires.

It’s after Tati turns down a shopkeeper’s offer to buy the statue for 300 pesos and a couple of salamis because Maradona brings him good luck (he settles for a picture of himself with Tati and the statue) that Waguinho begins to believe in the statue’s powers. A spiritual man—he’s deeply impressed by his aunt’s ability to talk to the dead—Waguinho kisses the statue as if it’s a religious icon.

But it’s miracle #2, the saving of the cargo of 50,000 chickens, that makes Waguinho a true believer. A crowd of striking workers have closed a bridge and won’t let him pass. “But my chickens will die and I’ll lose my job,” he tells them. He then negotiates with the strike leader, telling him of the statue. The strike leader says that only the workers can vote on whether or not to open the bridge. Tati shows his statue to the mob of workers, Argentineans and soccer fans all. They cheer wildly and agree to open the bridge. The chickens are saved.

Greater miracles, encounters with whores and blind men, as well as a happy ending are still to come, of course. Ultimately, though, The Road to St. Diego serves as yet another reminder—and the Tribeca Film Festival is full of them—that some of the best movies being made today are coming from outside the U.S.A., especially Latin America.

There’s a scene towards the end that may give Americans pause, though that’s clearly not the intention of director and screenwriter Carlos Sorin. Maradona has left the hospital, and hundreds of fans have gathered outside his Buenos Aires estate to get a look at him and to give him gifts. The scene, however, is eerily reminiscent of the way fans used to gather at the Dakota when John Lennon was alive. And when Tati asks the guard at the gate if he can give his statue to Maradona, it may make you think of a scene in another film making its U.S. debut at Tribeca—The Killing of John Lennon.

But, happily, it’s not America, it’s Argentina, and fans there, no matter how obsessive, are not in the habit of carrying handguns.

Posted in Carlos Sorin, Carlos Wagner La Bella, Chapman, El Camino de San Diego, Ignacio Benítez, Kerouac, Lennon, Maradona, The Road to St. Diego, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on If Kerouac Were an Illiterate Argentine Sculptor

Bookgirl

Posted on April 29, 2007 by admin

Archie Knox (Alec Baldwin) and Brett Eisenberg (Sarah Michelle Gellar) engage in some editing foreplay.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007
Suburban Girl
96 minutes
Directed and Written by Marc Klein
Starring: Sarah Michelle Gellar and Alec Baldwin
From U.S.A.

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

“I left her a message.” This line from the romantic comedy Suburban Girl, based on two short stories from Melissa Bank’s The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, is not meant to be funny. Indeed, it’s meant to be poignant, as it’s spoken by a middle-aged man who has just called his estranged daughter. Unfortunately, that man is Alec Baldwin, so of course the entire audience at the press screening I attended burst into laughter. You can’t blame that one on the screenwriter/director; it was simply a case of art and life colliding (the Baldwin character also refers to having “two ex-wives and a spiteful daughter,” making me wonder if the actor did perhaps have a hand in the script). But who do we blame for the guffaws that erupted at the sight of a tear-streaked, beefy Baldwin face turning toward his delicate young girlfriend, Sarah Michelle Gellar, who has just discovered him falling off the wagon with a bottle and a blonde?

Something is amiss with this movie, and you sense it from the start. The titles montage shows Gellar editing a thick manuscript while walking down the street. I’ve worked in publishing many years, and I’ve never seen anyone do this (a reckless pedestrian, she reads books while walking, too). As she’s engaged in this ambulatory process, she crosses out an “of” and replaces it with a “that.” Huh? (I’d like a cup that coffee, please.) Named after Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Gellar’s book editor—or rather, associate editor, as we’re often reminded, as though the title were shameful—seems to know everything Dante and Byron did or didn’t say and makes remarks like “Don’t you just love alliteration?” Even her doofus soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend says something to the effect of, “I cheated on you because I was reading too much Strindberg.” Her new, older squeeze, a high-powered publishing-house head named Archie Knox, also speaks Literarese, but Baldwin manages to soft-pedal the writer references and has some funny lines, including one about his own early novel’s being on “Amazon’s endangered species list.”

Ultimately, this is one of those Shopgirl, thanks-for-teaching-me-now-I-must-move-on movies, with a big dose of de rigueur Sex and the City New York glamour. At least it’s more realistic than its cousin The Devil Wears Prada, if only because you can imagine yourself wearing Gellar’s India-inflected pretty clothes. And Gellar and Baldwin are appealing, both separately and as a couple. Still, I can’t quite trust a film in which a young woman wears a black lace low-cut cocktail dress to her father’s funeral—especially when she’s a devoted daughter who always answers his calls.

Suburban Girl

Tues., May 1, 10:30 PM, AMC Village VII-03, 66 Third Avenue (at 11th Street)

Posted in Alec Baldwin, Marc Klein, Melissa Bank, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Suburban Girl, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on Bookgirl

A Goy in the Land of the Jews

Posted on April 28, 2007 by admin

Mauro (Michel Joelsas), right, and Hannah (Daniela Piepszky) with the gang from Bom Retiro.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007
The Year My Parents Went on Vacation (O Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias)
104 minutes
Directed and Written by Cao Hamburger
Starring: Michel Joelsas, Germano Haiut, Daniela Piepszky, Paulo Autran, Eduardo Moreira, Simone Spoladore, Caio Blat
From Brazil

By Robert Rosen

Brazil, 1970: The people are under the iron-fisted rule of a vicious right-wing military dictatorship, but they’ve gone soccer-mad anyway. Everybody, regardless of age, sex, religion, or political affiliation, can’t wait for the impending World Cup tournament to begin. And why not? Pelé’s in his prime, he’s just scored his 1000th goal, and Brazil’s already won two World Cups.

Twelve-year-old Mauro (Michel Joelsas) is a soccer fanatic of the first degree whose ambition is to be a goalie. He obsessively plays a tabletop version of the game, collects pictures of the Brazilian players, and talks passionately about them with his father, Daniel (Eduardo Moreira), a Jewish communist whose wife, Bia (Simone Spoladore), is a Catholic communist.

To avoid arrest, Daniel and Bia have to flee the country, and they tell Mauro that they’re “going on vacation,” promising him that they’ll be back in time for the World Cup. They then drop their son at his grandfather’s house in São Paulo’s Bom Retiro district—which is composed of Yiddish-and-Portuguese-speaking Eastern European Jews—and drive away in their blue Volkswagen Beetle, leaving Mauro standing there holding his suitcase.

It’s hard to believe that loving, responsible parents like Daniel and Bia would, under any circumstances, dump their son on the street without first making sure that the grandfather’s home. But that’s what they do, and it’s this one flaw, as easily overlooked as it may be, that tarnishes an otherwise extraordinary film.

Mauro’s grandfather, the local barber, has died of a heart attack just a few hours earlier, and Mauro’s left to pound on the apartment door until Shlomo (Germano Haiut) the next-door neighbor and superintendent of the synagogue, finds him and tells him what’s happened.

The community gathers in the temple to debate Mauro’s fate. Are they obligated to take care of him because he’s the grandson of a member of the temple? Or is he not their responsibility because he’s a goy—they know this because Shlomo saw Mauro’s uncircumcised penis. To Shlomo’s alarm, they agree that Mauro should live with him until the parents return.

And it’s here we embark on a classic tale, beautifully acted and totally believable, of a goy among the Jews, a twist on the biblical story of baby Moses being taken in by the Egyptians—a fact not lost on the Bom Retiro community; they begin calling Mauro “Moses.” The other twist, of course, is that this is Brazil, a country not exactly known as a hotbed of Old-World Judaism—though an unsuspecting viewer might think that the story were set in Boro Park, Brooklyn, or in Williamsburg before the hipster invasion.

Adrift in this strange milieu, trying to adjust to his situation, Mauro, like a tramp from Godot, waits for his parents to return, seeing them in every car that resembles their blue Volkswagen. He tries his best to get along with Shlomo, despite the fact that the old man feeds him fish for breakfast, which Mauro finds disgusting. (And Shlomo, in turn, tries his best to get along with Mauro, despite the fact that the boy unwittingly desecrates his talis, using it as an accessory for his soccer uniform.)

Mauro also meets Ítalo (Caio Blat), a young revolutionary who knows his father, and the film perfectly captures the look and atmosphere of a student union circa 1970. But mostly, as the adults try to track down his parents, Mauro hangs out with a group of neighborhood kids reminiscent of the gang from The Wonder Years. Though they sometimes play soccer—with Mauro as goalie—the boys have another hobby, which they find infinitely more interesting. Their friend Hannah (Daniela Piepszky) allows them to peep into the changing room of her mother’s dress shop from a secret spot behind the wall—for a price. “First time’s free,” she tells Mauro.

As the entire country comes to a halt to watch the World Cup, Mauro’s parents still haven’t returned, leaving him in despair, unable to enjoy Brazil’s great victory, a moment of national ecstasy tainted by brutal scenes of political repression.

This is the kind of movie that could leave one feeling irrationally hopeful about the state of filmmaking. And one would hope—perhaps irrationally—that it might even provoke a few Hollywood studio heads to ask themselves: Why are we so often incapable of telling a coherent story that isn’t marred by gaping plot holes, and why do we so rarely make films like this?

The Year My Parents Went on Vacation

Sat., April 28, 4:00 PM, AMC Kips Bay-15, 570 Second Avenue (at 32nd Street)

Sun., April 29, 9:45 PM, AMC Kips Bay-14

Tues., May 1, 5:00 PM, Regal Battery Park Cinema-05, 102 North End Avenue (At Vesey Street)

Wed., May 3, 10:15 PM, AMC 34th Street-14, 312 W. 34th Street (bet 8/9 Avenues)

Posted in Ano em que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias, Bom Retiro, Cao Hamburger, Daniela Piepszky, Germano Haiut, Michel Joelsas, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on A Goy in the Land of the Jews

Paraíso Perdido

Posted on April 27, 2007 by admin

Filmmaker Camila Guzmán Urzúa (center) in the “Golden Age” of post-revolutionary Cuba with her classmates, called Pioneers.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007

The Sugar Curtain (El Telón de Azúcar)
80 minutes
Directed by Camila Guzmán Urzúa
From France, Cuba, and Spain

By Mary Lyn Maiscott

It was good, and then it wasn’t: This heartfelt documentary tries to find significance in the gap between filmmaker Camila Guzmán Urzúa’s Edenic childhood in Cuba in the 1970s and the way things are now. Since she nearly glides past the reasons why (mainly the collapse of the U.S.S.R.), this never quite happens. Still, we see the despair in the beautiful big eyes of her former classmates who continue to live on the isolated island—most have fled to such places as Spain, Canada, or, as with Guzmán Urzúa herself, France—admire the candor with which they speak of “Fifo” (Fidel) and their many problems, and remain fascinated by the sea-washed country that, at least for baby boomers, so affected our own childhood. A special gracias to the native rock band Habana Abierta (now living in Spain) who added a midway jolt of energy to a perhaps too-leisurely film, including the heartening sound of hundreds of Cuban youths deliriously shouting an obscenity-laced chant to the group.

The Sugar Curtain

Fri., April 27, 7:30 PM, AMC 34th Street-14, 312 W. 34th Street (bet 8/9 Avenues)

Sat., April 28, 1:45 PM, AMC 34th Street-10

Sun., April 29, 10:15 AM, AMC Village VII-03, 66 Third Avenue (at 11th Street)

Mon., April 30, 6:00 PM, AMC Kips Bay-15, 570 Second Avenue (at 32nd Street)

Tues., May 1, 9:30 PM, AMC Kips Bay-15

Fri., May 4, 5:00 PM, AMC Kips Bay-13

Posted in Camila Guzmán Urzúa, Cuba, El Telón de Azúcar, Habana Abierta, The Sugar Curtain, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on Paraíso Perdido

The Reluctant Vampire

Posted on April 26, 2007 by admin

Khalil Shams (Carlos Chahine): doctor, vampire, scuba diver.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007

The Last Man (Atlal)
101 minutes
Directed and Written by Ghassan Salhab
Starring Carlos Chahine
From Lebanon/France


By Robert Rosen

As if Beirut, Lebanon, doesn’t have enough problems, now they’ve got vampires on the loose? That’s an intriguing premise for a movie. And The Last Man does get off to a promising start, stringing together a number of compelling images: a flamenco dancer, a Christ-like man sitting up in his bed, the world beneath the sea as seen by a scuba diver. But the film doesn’t deliver on its promise, and it takes about 45 minutes to realize that this is a movie that goes nowhere slow—real, real slow.

The plot: Corpses of young men and women are turning up with puncture wounds in their necks, drained of blood. The authorities suspect a garden-variety serial killer. A kindly family physician (and scuba diving enthusiast), Khalil Shams (Carlos Chahine), participates in the victims’ autopsies and begins to suspect that he himself may be the one responsible. This disturbs him; he’s a compassionate man of medicine, he thinks, not a supernatural killer. At first he seems to have no memory of the murders, but he discovers that he has developed a taste for blood. For the most part, the good doctor—an attractive, balding bachelor—wanders the streets of Beirut and haunts its nightclubs, giving people the creeps and wearing a cool pair of shades during the day because the sun hurts his eyes, though it does not turn him into a pile of dust. Except for one ambiguous scene (is the doctor having sex with a patient?), it’s only later in the film that we see him feasting on his victims. And at the end he meets a fellow vampire, a white-haired man in a white coat (the Man from Glad?). They do not speak.

So, yes, the bodies pile up, yet nothing really happens. There’s no suspense, no drama. Most of the time, like the doctor, you don’t know what’s going on. But the crux of the problem is that you don’t get to know the victims in any depth, or care about them. No real relationships between vampire and victims are established. There’s no cat-and-mouse game—think Dracula and his unsuspecting houseguests. Nothing is adequately explained. What do the recurring shots of a flamenco dancer mean? Why is the vampire a recreational scuba diver? What does that have to do with anything?

There are some artful, arresting images—a shot of a lighthouse against the sky, the underwater scenes—and you are left with a visceral sense of modern-day Beirut, a city once known as the Paris of the Mediterranean but now ravaged by over 30 years of intermittent war.

But it’s the pace of this movie that ultimately drives a stake through its heart. A good vampire yarn should be rousing, and this one is somnolent. For my money, it’s hard to beat the original Dracula (1931), and Carlos Chahine is no Bela Lugosi. Actually, he’s not even Tom Cruise.

The Last Man

Sun., April 29, 4:30 PM, AMC Village VII-02, 66 Third Avenue (at 11th Street)

Mon., April 30, 4:00 PM, Tribeca Cinemas-2, 54 Varick Street (Below Canal at Laight Street)

Wed., May 2, 4:30 PM, AMC Kips Bay-11, 570 Second Avenue (at 32nd Street)

Fri., May 4, 10:00 AM, AMC 34th Street-13, 312 W. 34th Street (bet 8/9 Avenues)

Sat., May 5, 7:30 PM, AMC 34th Street-13

Posted in Carlos Chahine, Ghassan Salhab, The Last Man, Tribeca Film Festival | Comments Off on The Reluctant Vampire

Freaky (Russian) Movie

Posted on April 25, 2007 by admin

Valya (Yuri Chursin), sits in his Moscow bedroom, brooding about what to do with his life.

Tribeca Film Festival, NYC, April 25-May 6, 2007

Playing the Victim
95 minutes
Directed by Kirill Serebtennikov
Written by The Presnakov Brothers
Animation by Roman Sokolov
Starring: Yuri Chursin, Vitaly Khaev, Marina Golub, Anna Mikhalkova, Lia Akhedzhakova, Yelena Morozova, and Marat Basharov
From Russia

By Robert Rosen

My sister-in-law, who’s visiting from St. Louis, and whose taste in film is rather adventurous, asked me, about 15 minutes after I saw Playing the Victim, if I’d recommend it.

“I don’t know,” I said, realizing that this was not an easy question, and that I hadn’t even figured out if I liked it or not. The film, I told her, was certainly different, and it had its inspired moments of twisted post-Soviet comedic absurdity, to be sure (as well as its flaws, like subtitles that sometimes didn’t flow, making them difficult to read). It was, I said, a very freaky movie filled with allusions to Hamlet: the main character Valya (Yuri Chursin)—whose job is to act as the victim in police video reconstructions of murders—is visited by his father’s ghost, and he’s constantly dithering about what to do with his life.

But then I began to describe a scene: “Well, Valya’s in his bedroom, fucking his girlfriend, Olia [Yelena Morozova], you know, she’s riding him in the woman-superior position and she’s bitching about how they’re never going to get married and she’s going to be 33 and nobody’s going to want her, and she’s got a scarf wrapped around his neck to cut off the oxygen to his brain to enhance his orgasm (she’d read about this technique in Marie Claire), and then Valya’s mother [Marina Golub] walks in…she’s a piece of work, too…she might have poisoned his father and now she’s banging his uncle, who might have also had a hand in the murder…anyway, she starts talking to Valya like nothing’s going on, like his girlfriend isn’t even there. She wants him to go out and buy bread and they start arguing if he should get a regular loaf or pita bread, which she thinks is ‘more flavorful.’ But Valya refuses to buy pita bread because he’s afraid that terrorists have poisoned it. ‘What terrorists?’ the mother asks. ‘Those who bake the pita,’ Valya says, and then proceeds to pantomime the events of 9/11, showing two planes crashing into the World Trade Center, complete with sound effects. Then, as he’s having his orgasm, the movie switches to animation, with trains going through Valya’s skull and stuff like that. Well, maybe that was two scenes, but you get the idea.”

She did get the idea, I think, and it was after delivering this spontaneous soliloquy that I realized I must have liked Playing the Victim—and the more I thought about the movie, the more I liked it. Part of my problem, perhaps, was that it took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on. The opening scene is a murder reconstruction, as seen through a video camera operated by a less than competent policewoman, Lyuda (Anna Mikhalkova), who seems more interested in making dinner plans over her cell phone than concentrating on the job at hand. Apparently, a man has dismembered his girlfriend in a portable toilet outside a snack bar in a Moscow park. But who’s that guy sitting on the toilet making goofy faces at the camera and providing fart-like sound effects when the murderer says, “She farted,” in response to the chief detective’s (Vitaly Khaev) question, “What happened after you stuck the knife in her neck?”

Part of the film’s absurdity is that these murder re-creations—there are five altogether, and they’re all seen through the wandering, amateurish eye of the video camera—seem to serve no purpose whatsoever, beyond a vague explanation that they’re being done as an “investigative experiment” for legal reasons. The murderers are already in custody and they have already confessed (or have sworn that it was only an accident), sometimes on camera, sometimes dispassionately, sometimes hysterically.

But the real point of this film is to show the yawning chasm between Valya’s post-Soviet generation—a neo-lost generation, which he symbolizes with his aimlessness, his ambivalence, and his South Park T-shirt—and the older, more serious generation that came of age in the Soviet Union, symbolized by Valya’s boss, the middle-aged chief detective. All the detective’s frustration comes pouring out of him in the penultimate murder re-creation, a shooting in a Japanese restaurant. He delivers a fierce and eloquent Shakespearean soliloquy on the theme of “What the hell’s the matter with you kids today, shooting each other in the head over stupid insults…I had a wife and kids when I was your age.” And it has been set off by the detective’s distaste for sushi, which he sees as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the new, open and “democratic” Russia.

Impressively, Playing the Victim was shot on a budget of $750,000, and there is much to be learned from it—about the art of filmmaking and storytelling in general, and about black comedy in particular.

Yes, Cecilia, by all means, go rent it when you get back to St. Louis—if you can find it.

Playing the Victim
Thur., April 26, 4:30 PM, AMC Village VII-02, 66 Third Avenue (at 11th Street)
Fri., April 27, 8:30 PM, Regal Park Battery Cinemas 11-05, 102 North End Avenue (at Vesey Street)
Sun., April 29, 10:00 PM, AMC Kips Bay-13, 570 Second Avenue (at 32nd Street)
Tues., May 1, 10:30 PM, AMC 34th Street-09, 312 W. 34th Street (bet 8/9 Avenues)
Fri., May 4, 4:30 PM, AMC 34th Street-12
Sat., May 5, 10:45 AM, AMC 34th Street-14

Posted in Anna Mikhalkova, Kirill Serebtennikov, Marina Golub, Playing the Victim, Presnakov Brothers, Tribeca Film Festival, Vitaly Khaev, Yelena Morozova, Yuri Chursin | Comments Off on Freaky (Russian) Movie