Film is Truth 24 Times a Second

I only heard of [REC], the new Spanish horror film, by word-of-mouth and watched it for the first time before it was available on DVD, online, in eight different segments. I got together with about eight different people and we all crowded around my laptop to watch it in the dark. Despite the small, pixilated screen and the large group, the film still made a significant impression on everyone in the room.

Not too long after my first viewing of it, the American remake QUARINTINE came to Film Is Truth. To be fair, I watched that also and was (as I expected to be) greatly disappointed. Though the story tagged many of the same points, it just couldn’t be taken seriously and the acting was enough to distort the characters into people who I couldn’t really sympathize with, no matter what “horrific” events they were put through. Even the makeup jobs didn’t hold next to the original.
So I waited, in high anticipation, for [REC] to finally be released on DVD, to get the chance to see it again and spread the word. Although I was worried that it would somehow not be as realistic or as frightening when seen on a TV screen rather than a laptop, I had no need to be. This film is one of the pinnacles of new, foreign horror. Like LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, it takes an old favorite and refurbishes it into something refreshingly original. And it just so happens to be one of the handful of horror films ever to scare me.
Angela Vidal is our main character, a reporter for a late night TV show, who is filming at a fire department to get a first hand view of what the volunteers do. While most of the night is routine and quiet (setting an appropriate pacing for the film, one that continually builds to the end) they are soon called out to an apartment building where a woman was reported to be screaming in her home. When they arrive, it is first very unclear what the situation is, but the panic of the other tenants sets you on edge before you even know what you’re afraid of. Seen through the eye of the camera, and while other films have used this same technique (BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, CLOVERFIELD), [REC] makes it believable and not at all dizzying. The camera becomes a character, as its presence is questioned by the police officers also responding to the call, and they are forced to turn it off by authorities, even as the equipment falters during high-paced moments.
After finding the woman who was screaming, an officer is wounded and the situation becomes much more urgent. Before anyone can get the injured medical attention, however, they reach the bottom floor to find that the building has been sealed and they are all locked inside. Again, while some films have used claustrophobic settings before, [REC] uses it without staring at the same scenery the entire time. The quarantine still gives the story and the characters room to move, and makes climbing the floors of the buildings and either trying to reach the remaining people upstairs or keep them there a magnificent plot device. Asked to wait downstairs, the tenants panic and the terror rises as the state of the injured turns horrific.
Now, I’m struggling not to reveal too much more, because this film is better seen with few ideas about what happens. I am certain the surprises will get to you, but while watching also make note of the incredible make up jobs, and the impressive acting because without the work of these actors the film would fall apart. Part of the actor’s presence is due to the directors, however. In watching The Making of [REC], I learned that the directors only told the actors pieces of what would be happening, so they’re fear was more tangible and their confusion was legitimate. The finale is amazing and by the time you get there, I promise you won’t be able to look away.
This is a must for any horror or thriller fan, and for those who are craving an original plot out of the flurry of summer movies. Come by and pick up [REC], if only so I can talk further about this fantastic movie without giving anything away!

Imagine Singin’ In the Rain… except without rain, and less singin’… and really attractive French actors… and they all sleep together.

I guess that’s the best way for me to describe one our new releases Love Songs (Les chansons d’amour) by French director Christophe Honoré (Dans Paris). This new musical set in Paris is advertised as a musical, which I guess it is, but the musical performances aren’t anything flashy, and insane like Funny Face.

Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire won’t take you on a tour de musical madness around the entirety of Paris in a 5 minute musical number in this film.

If I haven’t lost your interest yet, then what you will see when you watch this film is a modern day Paris through the eyes of Honoré, with spectacular songs with even more spectacular lyrics, sung by a cast of characters tangled together in a love story that simultaneously carries moments of sophisticated humor and deep sadness. Here’s a quick breakdown…

Ismaël is dating Alice.

But Alice also likes Ismaël’s co-worker Julie.

But then Ismaël falls for someone else… Erwann.

Oh dear.

If you wanted to move to Paris after watching Paris, je t’aime or 2 Days in Paris then this movie is for you. Just don’t be fooled by the ugly jacket cover. The French version of the jacket is rad, but the American version looks like a 2-year-old took a crayon to it. Bummer.

bon appétit!

A recently added animated gem currently graces the new arrival shelf in FIT, Princes and Princesses, a 2000 French release by animator Michel Ocelot. In the same style as one of the first full length animated films ever made, Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, (Germany, 1926) Princes and Princesses uses cut out black silhouette animation against saturated jewel tone backdrops to relate six stories of royalty from an array of time periods and places in the world. Although the initial idea of 70 minutes of black cutouts dancing across the screen may strike some as tedious, the movement and stylistic detail of the art direction make turning away from the film as difficult as putting down a well crafted children’s book halfway through. The vignette-style presentation of the stories, laden with delicate props ranging from magical diamonds to Egyptian figs, assists in creating an entrancing all-ages flick.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson star in In Bruges, the feature film debut from Irish playwright Martin McDonagh, who won an Academy Award in 2005 for his short film Six Shooter.
If you missed it’s run at The Pickford, this is your chance to check out one of the funniest and darkest buddy comedies to come along in recent memory.

Colin Farrell plays Ray, a rookie hitman whose botched first job finds he and his older, more experienced partner, Ken, (Brendan Gleeson) cooling their heels in Belgium’s most picturesque tourist destination, the city of Bruges. While Ken enjoys himself taking in the sights of the town and kicking back, Ray feels trapped by the city and is haunted by the mistake that got he and Ken sent into exile. But when it turns out the job might not be over after all, Ken and Ray end up having a much more exciting time in the laid back town than they expected to.

Though he comes from a stage directing background, McDonagh is a natural behind the camera, and his directorial sense translates beautifully to the more expansive, full city setting of the film. Through long panning shots and an obvious love of the city’s medieval architecture, McDonagh makes viewers feel like gawking tourists in a strange place. And as we watch another film being shot in the town’s ancient square as a plot piece, the sensation of being bystanders to this sordid, violent and immensely entertaining debacle is unmistakable. While his eye for direction has adapted to the fit the screen, McDonagh’s sharp screenwriting carries over directly from his award winning stage pieces such as The Pillowman, which played at Bellingham’s own Idiom Theater earlier this year.

Owing much to acclaimed playwright Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, which also features a pair of hitmen bickering in exile following a job gone sour, In Bruges is replete with sudden violence, dark humor, deadly misunderstandings and slapstick comedy, along with a heaping helping of midget humor thrown in for good measure. By turns unflinchingly stark and comically surreal, it also features a phenomenal chase scene through the city’s canals, the most civil and considerate shootout ever put to film and a great third act performance by Ralph Fiennes as the two killers distinctly unhappy employer.

Click here to listen to an interview with McDonagh, and be sure to watch the official trailer here. Or just come on down this week and pick up a copy for yourself!

If you’re like me, and you enjoy animation for grown ups, you owe it to yourself to check out the breathtaking, surreal and groundbreaking work of Bay Area underground animation giant Larry Jordan, the greatest cartoonist you’ve probably never heard of.

I didn’t know a thing about Jordan’s work until seeing a smattering of reels a few years back, including Sophie’s Place, which you can check out a fairly low quality print of on YouTube here. ( A caution here - though animated, Jordan’s works are not for kids. Consider yourself duly warned.) I was hooked. Jordan’s stop motion collage animation, culled in large part frm paintings, etchings and engravings, was mesmerizing, a kaleidoscopic array of colors, shapes and themes that collide, fade, vanish and transform, only to return later as something entirely new. It was bizarre, yes, and calling it inscrutable is probably being a bit generous, but Jordan’s work transcends a need to entirely understand it. Comparable to Cocteau in his imagery and symbolism and Rauschenberg in his sense of color design, the films of Lawrence Jordan defy simple explanation. They are by turns challenging and carefree, mystical and lurid and always supremely rewarding.

After my brush with Jordan’s work, I found myself trying to hunt down copies of his other films with at best marginal success, occasionally lucking into a third generation copy or sub-par internet clip. Luckily, the fine folks at San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema have released a new boxed set representing the entirety of Jordan’s 40 year filmmaking career. Whether they know it yet or not, animation fans everywhere are in their debt.

Culled from archives across the nation, many of these works are seeing the public eye for the first time in years, bringing new and deserved attention to animated classics like the Orson Welles narrated Rime of the Ancient Mariner or the magical documentary The Sacred Art of Tibet. Also included is Jordan’s live action work, including the only existing footage of reclusive surrealist assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell, for whom Jordan worked as an assistant for a brief period. If you’re interested in surrealist art, avant garde cinema, the history of animation, or just having your mind blown, I cannot reccomend this collection highly enough. And of course, you can find The Films of Larry Jordan in our New Arrivals section this week here at Film is Truth.

Having chipped away at a couple of more Criterion Releases recently, I have to mention and recommend The Honeymoon Killers, a 1970 film from one time director/full time composer, Leonard Kastle. I was immediately fascinated by the entire tone of the film itself, and the method it would use to expose the story. Shirley Stoler is the perfect choice for the troubled Martha Beck, a woman who eventually falls in love with Tony Lo Bianco’s Ray Fernandez, a con man who marries women and then steals their money and belongings. The couples cons escalate further and further, until murder becomes their only resort. For an American picture, the film has a completely different tone than you might expect, with a great deal of attention put on the movement of the camera and the interactions between these characters. Pacing, mood, environment; it’s all dealt with quite delicately.

There is an almost documentarian feel to the entire thing, putting us uncomfortably in the room with these tragic lovers and their exploits. Leonard Kastle shows us his obvious appreciation for classical music as the score is “instrumental” (yeah, i’m going there) to the film, with exclusive use of music by Gustav Mahler, overwhelmingly dramatic and perfect. I was surprised to learn that Scorsese was originally set to direct, but am thankful he didn’t get the chance. as Kastle proves his worth here, surprisingly. It’s unfortunate he never tried his hand at directing again, if this film is any indication of a potentially brilliant career.

The Honeymoon Killers is quite dark in many ways, but there is also a fragile romance in there somewhere, and while perhaps disturbing, it is in it’s own way just as touching.

“whew…wow…uh…huh?”

That’s really all I had to say after watching Southland Tales, the latest film from Richard Kelly, who gained notoriety for Donnie Darko in 2001. When the buzz of Southland Tales hit the newswire a couple of years ago, the task was ambitious to say the least. Tied into 3 graphic novel prequels, and a completely immersive internet campaign, Southland Tales was set up to be one of the most sought out films of that year. When it debuted at Sundance, it received some of the worst of reviews in the entire festival. Kelly would have to re-edit the entire thing, start from the beginning. That was in 2006. Here we are in 2008, finally able to see what all the fuss was about.

As minimally as I can describe, Southland Tales is essentially about the alleged “end of days” that is imminent after America becomes a police state under an uber-Patriot Act to fight the “war on terror” after being bombed. We find ourselves concerned with an actor, a porn star, and twin brothers who are all seemingly tied together in a strange and confusing way. Oh yeah, and Christopher Lambert (Highlander kids) is an arms dealer who sells guns out of his ice cream truck. Yeah, I know.

Honestly, I don’t know if the film is even remotely decipherable. For me, that was pretty irrelevant. Kelly is trying to follow Lynch in ways, granted not with as much “artistry” (or maybe just a different breed), but with some of the same intent and open-ended interpretations. First and foremost, for me, ST was a comedy. With so many cameos and the sheer insanity of the performances, I was laughing all over the place. Sure some of the funnier parts may have not been trying to be hilarious, but that made it even better. When I wasn’t asking myself, “WTF?” I was just enjoying the ride. Kelly has created something that has a lot of potential, and certainly to him, must make sense, somewhere, somehow. The idea of the story is enough for me to fill in the gaps, to buffer what I am given to somewhat make sense of it all. If some things were tweaked here and there, I’d see audiences embracing the story with more ease. But Kelly seems to push his audiences between a rock and a hard place, almost forcing you to hate it in many respects. I can’t tell if it’s just a complete train wreck, or just one that is so gnarly and completely awe-inspiringly awry that it becomes a beautiful tragedy.

This will certainly not be for everyone, and to some/many, will seem horrendously absurd and painfully awful. It made an impression on me, and although I don’t think it was much more beyond the experience/confusion/self-destruction of it all, it’s more than some films have given me recently, which says a lot. It’s hard not to compare it to Inland Empire, but the two are quite different. I am going to watch it again next week, if it makes even an nth of a degree of more sense, it’ll be worth it.

It’s funny to look back on the day when this simple phrase meant so much. It was always top priority for me to make sure video tapes were rewound when I returned them to rental shop, for both personal and financial reasons (DVD’s obviously replacing that necessity). Michel Gondry’s latest film not only takes its title from this phrase, but brings us back to a different time in the video rental world - the time of VHS.

Yep, I had to trek down to Burlington to see it, but it paid when I found myself quite touched by this Jack Black/Mos Def led film about a duo of video clerks who are forced to make their own “sweded” versions of popular movies to help keep the store afloat when all the video tapes are accidentally erased. While the premise seems as throw-away as any other comedy out there (”save the store from corporate takeover/enemies”), Be Kind Rewind accepts this somewhat silly idea and runs with it, stemming from a contrived, tired plot to something a bit more deep.

Jack Black (who has been walking the Bill Murray line with more “serious” roles in King Kong and Margot at the Wedding) still relies on his over-the-top behavior, but is much more willing to share this screen time with a more subtle Mos Def, the two of which make an unlikely but successful comedic team. The “sweded” films are great, although we don’t get to see enough of them (Gondry’s touch being essential to their appeal, and I would gladly watch every sweded film if Black and Def did them. Hmm, franchise anyone?).

Overall, the film is not without its flaws, but I appreciated the idea so much that it was difficult to dislike anything about it. It was just fun, simple as that. The film began with a silly premise, but eventually revealed itself to be about community and the interconnectivity of cinema, and ultimately about innovation and imagination, something I daresay is difficult to come by these days. Personally, VHS brings me back to my youth, that excitement and freshness of discovering movies and all that entails, this film perfectly titled to bring out that nostalgia.

Hopefully the Pickford gets it soon…nudge nudge…wink wink…and if they do, it’s well worth the wait.

The first full length film from Japanese director Mai Tominaga is one of those films that while I was watching it, I felt a little guilty when I needed to blink… The aesthetic is delicate without being overly whimsical, giving the viewer visual aperitifs throughout the duration of the movie. This is done both through the central role that stylized, vintage objects play (the main characters are two meticulous sisters who have spent their life collecting and cataloging bizarre cast-off junk in their decaying mansion) as well as the frequently changing methods of narration through assorted types of animation (in addition to the live-action footage which makes up the majority of the film.) Complementing this is a score of thumping, dissonant cello sonatas; the charm of the film allows this to work effectively, without any implied pretension.

The plot is, like the imagery, confusing but endearing. The sisters, after discovering a trail of crimson yarn find an unexplained girl on their kitchen table in the middle of the following night, frantically knitting the same red yarn into a matted dress, which she then unravels in a rage, ransacking the house in the process. This continues night after night until the sisters are at their wits end…

I have been accused of sloth in the “watching new stuff” category, and so this week I made an extended effort to watch at least some of the new stuff coming into the store.

Michael Clayton - It was pretty good, but it wasn’t refreshingly great. Clooney does alright, but he is kind of always the same guy. I was rooting for him though. Overall, check it out if you liked The Constant Gardener or the Bourne Trilogy.

American Gangster - Not since Virtuosity have Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe been this good together (what, you forgot about that nugget of cinematic gold?). This felt like a condensed 5 seasons of The Wire meets Scarface (why don’t these gangsters get out when they should?), but it was overall easy enough to get through the 2.5 hour runtime. I appreciated what Scott chose what and what not to focus on as well. I cannot believe that Ruby Dee is up for a Best Supporting Actress here though, she was only in 3 scenes and had no more than 6 minutes of screen time.

Walker - Do not be fooled by either the content or line-up here - this is more of a comedy than anything else. Ed Harris and Alex Cox treat this strange and brutal story with an almost “South Parkian” touch (I was reminded too much of Cannibal! The Musical numerous times). If that appeals to you, check it out.

Margot at the Wedding - I am no Noah Baumbach aficionado, but I found this one more interesting than I thought it would be, with Zane Pais as Claude dominating the entire film. I was frustrated by the actions of the characters, but then I began to realize, this might just be how some people react to each other, how some families actually exist within themselves. Was I raised in a dysfunctional family? I guess I’ll never know now.

For The Bible Tells Me So - Homophobia fuels lot of hatred in this country. This film debunks a lot of the “proof” used to condemn that gays are going to burn forever in hell. I, like many, many people, have never looked into what exactly the Bible says regarding this matter (and was shocked what I found, not regarding homosexuality, but everything else).  In the film, a lot of the arguments are put to the test by qualified people, who readily take them down to their most basic and (most importantly) contextual meaning. The film is truly about understanding the power the Bible has on people in general, and how that power can be abused. Show your friends and family this great, great film; I highly recommend.