LA Film Festival – LFM: Libertas Film Magazine

LFM Reviews In Football We Trust @ The 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. This is not the Utah we know from coming to Park City for Sundance, Slamdance or maybe skiing. This is Salt Lake City, home to the nation’s largest Polynesian immigrant community. Yes, many of them are Mormon, why do you ask? Their faith is with the Latter Day Saints, but their hopes and passion are in football all the way. Tony Vainuku (the first Tongan filmmaker accepted at Sundance) & Erika Cohn follow four top high school seniors throughout In Football We Trust, which screens during the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival.

According to Trust, Polynesian prospects are twenty-eight times more likely to make the NFL than any other demographic group. The film also acknowledges the same is not true for Ivy League medical and law schools. This is a problem, but Vainuku & Cohn will primarily focus on other issues, like religion and crime. The former is clearly a positive force for the families profiled in the film, often credited for providing direct assistance, as well as a social network and structure. The latter is never a good thing, but the intrusion of gang violence could well jeopardize at least one player’s future.

For obvious reasons, the filmmakers spend a great deal of time with the brothers Bloomfeld, Leva and Vita, whose reformed father was one of the founders of the Baby Regulators, a notorious Polynesian street gang. Their father might be out of the life, but the life will still come looking for at least one of the brothers.

In intriguing ways, Trust confirms some of our possible preconceptions, while contradicting others. All four POV players seem to be reasonably well accepted in high school (they are jocks, after all) and at one least has a popular, apparently Anglo girlfriend. It also seems like the Mormon mission call can be a rather handy escape hatch during challenging times.

Unfortunately, through Fihi Kaufusi’s experiences, Trust also raises timely issues of football safety. Kaufusi actually played on both sides of the ball, which is a practice many would have assumed went the way of leather helmets. He will suffer an injury that the team doctor “under-diagnoses,” so you can probably guess what happens next.

There is only so much Vainuku & Cohn can coherently address in a film of reasonable length. As it is, Trust is like a tighter, more disciplined Hoop Dreams, featuring more proactive, self-aware subjects. Yet, football fans will not shake the feeling the ghost of Junior Seau hovers over the film. The NFL’s inability to deal with concussions and brain trauma becomes especially problematic when we consider how many Polynesian families look to football as their means of economic advancement. Still, these high school players’ ambitions are real and compelling. Recommended for fans of beyond-the-field sports reporting, In Football We Trust screens this Wednesday (6/17) as part of LAFF ’15.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on June 15th, 2015 at 10:11pm.

LFM Reviews Maiko: Dancing Child @ The 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. For a prima ballerina, Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake is one of the most demanding ballets to perform. You’ve seen Black Swan, right? Well, try dancing the featured role a few months after pregnancy. Maiko Neshino set out to do exactly that. The question is not whether she has the drive or the talent, but whether she has enough time to rebound physically. Åse Svenheim Drivenes follows Neshino through rehab and rehearsals in the intimate documentary Maiko: Dancing Child, which screens during the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival.

It is almost too much, but the name Maiko really means “Dancing Child.” As is the case with truly elite dancers, her talent was indeed discovered at an early age. Neshino’s family made substantial lifestyle-effecting sacrifices to send her abroad to study. Consequently, she understood quite clearly failure was not an option. At the point the film picks up, she has been remarkably successful, maintaining her position as a principal dancer with the Norwegian National Ballet well into her thirties—and then she finally gets pregnant.

This was something she and her husband always wanted but never knew how to schedule, so they do the best they can. Most importantly, they have a happy and healthy baby. However, Drivenes is far more interested in the comeback process than the pregnancy. Swan Lake is the last significant role Neshino has yet to play, so she intends to honor her commitment, but it would be tough even under the best of circumstances.

Ballet is a graceful form of artistic expression, but those who are not part of its exclusive world will be a bit taken aback by the punishing nature of her training regimen. This is not for the faint of heart. Viewers might also get sick of hearing the same musical passage over and over again.

Frankly, it is a minor miracle the dancers never snap from the mind-torturing repetition.

Of course, the camera absolutely loves Neshino. She is elegance personified, so we can well understand why she has become the face of the Norwegian company, while her Horatio Alger-esque background makes her an even more compelling figure to root for. Drivenes also gives the audience an inside peak into to the training and rehearsal process, sort of in the spirit of Wiseman’s La Danse, but in more economical and contextualized servings.

Throughout the film, everyone makes it acutely plain nothing is guaranteed when it comes to ballet. Although it clocks in at a relatively concise seventy minutes, viewers will walk away feeling they have a good understanding of who Neshino is and what sort of professional and artistic challenges she faces. Recommended for patrons of dance and performing art docs, Maiko: Dancing Child screens this Sunday (6/14) and Tuesday (6/16) as part of this year’s LAFF.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on June 13th, 2015 at 11:55am.

LFM Reviews A Midsummer’s Fantasia @ The 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Japan and Korea share a lot of complicated history, but recent films too often reduce it all to wartime rebellion and revenge dramas. However, the sleepy village of Gojo is delighted to have Korean visitors and the Korean filmmakers are quite charmed by their hosts. Frankly, they are not precisely sure what they are looking or whether they find it, but they still find their trip rewarding in Jang Kun-jae’s A Midsummer’s Fantasia, which screened during the 2015 Los Angeles Film Festival.

A filmmaker has come to the provincial mountain village of Gojo to research his next film, bringing along his assistant director Mijung to translate. They definitely stand out, but not because they are Korean. Due to economic and demographic factors, nearly all of Gojo’s younger generations have migrated to the big cities, leaving a dwindling elderly population behind. While their stories are somewhat commonplace, the director and Mijung still find them compelling. Perhaps it is just something about their interview subjects’ presence.

Soon, they meet up with Gojo’s most eligible bachelor: a city official who was once an aspiring actor. He will take them on a special guided tour, impressing the Koreans with his choice of more telling, off-the-beaten-path locales. In fact, it might provide the inspiration the filmmaker is hoping for. The resulting film will probably be Well of Sakura, which also constitutes the second half of Jang’s Fantasia, rendered in color, as a change up from the elegant black-and-white of the first segment.

Mijung is now a scuffling Korean actress, who has come to Gojo as a tourist, seeking some sort of spiritual detox. A local persimmon farmer offers to serve as her guide after a chance meeting near the station. As they revisit the sites the film director visited, he becomes rather smitten. Unfortunately, despite their undeniable chemistry, Mijung does not feel free to reciprocate his romantic interest. Yet, she does feel something.

With its parallel structure and ships-passing-in-the-night themes, it is easy to liken Fantasia to Hong Sang-soo’s Hill of Freedom. In a way, they are inverse films, with Hong following a Japanese visitor to Korea desperately searching for the ex-girlfriend he never got over. Hill is one of Hong’s better films, so it is a rather apt comparison, regardless of his rep for mannered and precious filmmaking.

It is hard to describe, but Jang completely captures the sense of summer laziness morphing into something more serious. It is a carefully constructed film, but Jang privileges vibe and atmosphere over narrative, which provides quite a supportive platform for his small cast. As Mijung and Mijung, Kim Sae-byuk is simply incredible, managing to be simultaneously sad and seductive, as well as flirty and wise. Ryo Iwase is nearly unrecognizable as her two very different guides, cranking up the romantic yearning in the second half. Although he only appears in the black-and-white sequences, the distinctive maturity and humanism of Lim Hyeong-gook’s director also wears well on viewers.

In a way, Fantasia gives a slightly postmodern twist to the gentle, bittersweet Local Hero style of comedy, in which city folk take the time to smell the roses while temporarily ensconced in a picturesque provincial community. Yet, even with its gamesmanship, Fantasia is unusually fragile and fragrant, lingering pleasantly as a hazy memory after the initial viewing. Recommended for fans of summer breezes and brief but significant romances, A Midsummer’s Fantasia next screens this Sunday (6/14) during the Korean Film Festival at the Freer Gallery in DC (following Hong’s Hill).

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on June 13th, 2015 at 11:54am.

LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: For Love of the Game: Talking with Kurt Russell About The Battered Bastards of Baseball

[Editor’s note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

It’s the kind of thing you probably missed over Thanksgiving dinner, while gnawing on a turkey leg, bickering with your uncle, or falling asleep during a Detroit Lions game: the Miami Marlins just signed an outfielder to a $325 million deal, the largest contract in sports history.

You read that correctly: $325 million. That’s Hunger Games money, Transformers money. It’s the kind of figure you associate with World Bank loans or Rolling Stone comeback tours. Apple needs at least a day to make that kind of cash.

The young outfielder, named Giancarlo Stanton – no, I hadn’t heard of him, either – apparently hit .288 with 37 home runs last season. (Note to Marlins: those were roughly my numbers playing T-ball in 5th grade.) Stanton later celebrated his deal in a Miami nightclub with a $20,000 bottle of champagne coated in 22-carat gold leaf. I don’t know whether he kept the bottle.

It says something about baseball today that a guy you’ve never heard of – again, he plays for the Marlins – can be signed for $25 million per year over 13 years. Frankly, it’s probably a bad deal for the Marlins – especially if the names Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez or Josh Hamilton ring a bell. Players paid more than they’re worth – more than some national economies are worth – rarely stay motivated purely by love of the game.

Love of the game. That’s what sports are supposed to be about, isn’t it?

When you think about love of the game, you think of Lou Gehrig – the Iron Horse – playing in 2,130 straight games until his body gave out from ALS. Or Pete Rose, aka Charlie Hustle, barreling over Ray Fosse in the 1970 All Star game to secure a seemingly meaningless win. Or Kirk Gibson, gamely limping around the bases after hitting his clutch home run in the 1988 World Series.

And you should also think of the Portland Mavericks, the subject of a wonderful new documentary called The Battered Bastards of Baseball that premiered this past year at Sundance and is currently showing on Netflix.

My writing partner Govindini Murty and I caught Battered Bastards at Sundance and also at this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. At the Sundance screening we had the chance to speak to Kurt Russell, who’s interviewed in the film, along with his nephews Chapman Way and Maclain Way, Battered Bastards‘ co-directors.

LFM's Jason Apuzzo & Kurt Russell at Sundance 2014.

The Mavericks – an independent, Class A minor league baseball team between 1973-77 – were the brainchild of Bing Russell, the actor best known for playing deputy sheriff Clem on TV’s Bonanza. A hugely colorful showman with a fast wit (“I played Clem for 13 years on Bonanza and never solved a case”), Russell appeared in countless film and TV westerns, and made a career of getting killed on camera – most notably in Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo and John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers.

Of course, Russell is best known today as the father of Kurt Russell, who himself played for the Mavericks in 1973.

As Battered Bastards relates, Bing served as a bat boy for the mighty New York Yankees between 1936-41, when he got to know legends of the game like Joe DiMaggio, Lefty Gomez and Lou Gehrig (who gave young Bing his bat after hitting the final home run of his storied career). Although Bing later tried his hand at pro baseball, an injury cut short his career – leading him to try an acting career in Hollywood.

His love of baseball never left him, however – so when his acting career stalled in the early 1970s, Russell jumped at the opportunity to bring pro baseball to Portland in 1973 after the prior team left town.

“Baseball was a big part of our family,” Maclain Way told us. “Kurt, our uncle, played professional baseball. Bing, himself, played professional baseball. We had cousins who played major league baseball, so baseball was a huge part of our life growing up. I played baseball in high school because of Bing – he taught me how to play.”

The upstart Mavericks would become a team like no one had seen before – totally unaffiliated with any big league franchise, and filled to the brim with misfits and rejects – a scrappy, real life Bad News Bears squad.

“He had a great eye for ball players,” Kurt Russell told us, speaking warmly of his father. “We knew we could put a competitive team together.”

Kurt Russell & LFM's Govindini Murty at Sundance 2014.

Managed by restaurant owner Frank “The Flake” Peters, the Mavericks’ roster of wild characters would include: a shaggy, 33 year-old high school English teacher named Larry Colton (who’d later be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize); 38 year-old ex-Yankee Jim “Bulldog” Bouton (who’d been blackballed from baseball after writing a wild tell-all memoir); Joe Garza (aka “JoGarza”), a madman utility player who waved flaming brooms when the Mavericks swept opposing teams; Rob Nelson, who invented Big League Chew bubble gum in the Mavericks’ bullpen; star outfielder Reggie Thomas, who took a limo to games even though he lived only a block from the stadium; and fiery batboy Todd Field, who once got tossed from a game, and later became an Academy Award-nominated writer-director.

And, of course, there was Kurt Russell. “I got injured [playing minor league baseball in Texas], so I had the opportunity to go to Portland and help them get the ball club started,” Russell told us.

“It was just a time in my Dad’s life where I was really happy he was involving himself in something completely new,” says Russell. “It was a big part of our lives.” Continue reading LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: For Love of the Game: Talking with Kurt Russell About The Battered Bastards of Baseball

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Finding Movie Inspiration in NASA’s Real Science: The Case Study of Europa Report

[Editor’s Note: the post below appears today at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. Hollywood is in the midst of a science-fiction boom, yet few of its sci-fi movies are based on real science. That’s a shame, because the scientific discoveries emerging from NASA these days are as exciting as any Hollywood blockbuster. Whether it’s the stunning images from the Mars Curiosity rover, or the Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes’ observations of a dazzling array of exoplanets, or the announcement that Voyager 1 has become the first human-made object to leave the solar system, NASA is daily generating storylines that provoke the imagination and expand our horizons.

What makes these developments intriguing for adaptation into sci-fi movies is that they are real. At a time when audiences are increasingly jaded by computer special effects, there’s something fresh and engaging about a sci-fi movie that might actually have some basis in reality. Isn’t it time that we see more sci-fi films that explore the real mysteries of the universe all around us?

As a case study for a sci-fi movie inspired by NASA science, I recommend that people take a look at Sebastian Cordero’s Europa Report. With a cast that includes Sharlto Copley, Anamaria Marinca, and Michael Nyqvist, Europa Report is currently playing in select theaters and on VOD, and will be available on iTunes starting October 8th. The movie is one of the few sci-fi films in recent years to offer a realistic depiction of a manned mission to outer space – in this case, to search for life on Jupiter’s moon Europa.

I chatted with NASA- JPL astrobiologist Steve Vance, one of the science advisors on Europa Report, at the film’s LA Film Festival premiere. Vance expressed to me his enthusiasm about the movie:

“I’m just thrilled that I got to be part of something that is bringing Europa more into the public eye. I’m really excited about how this movie captures the passion of exploration and also the science.”

Europa has been the focus of much attention in recent years because it may harbor life in the liquid water ocean that is theorized to exist under its icy crust. Vance, who studies the interiors of icy moons like Europa and who is acting staff scientist on NASA’s Europa Project, told me that he and his colleagues are “pre-formulating a mission that we hope will fly to Europa to address the same kind of questions that were addressed in the movie.” The most pressing of these questions is whether life independently developed on another body within our solar system.

Although Vance noted that a manned mission to Europa isn’t currently feasible, due to the difficulties of even sending a human as far as Mars, he explained that NASA is assessing plans to send a robotic spacecraft to Europa (see NASA artist’s concept above): “The mission we’re looking at right now is [that] we’ll do multiple flybys to orbit Jupiter, and do thirty or more flybys of Europa and completely map the surface.” (See this paper in the August issue of Astrobiology on future missions to Europa, co-authored by Vance).

And this brings me to a larger point: whether it’s robotic spacecraft taking photos of the surfaces of distant moons like Europa – or movies that draw on that imagery to dramatize outer-space exploration – visual representation plays a crucial role in bringing science to life.

For example, the photos taken by the Galileo space probe as it orbited Jupiter and its moons from 1995 to 2003 gave the public the most detailed images yet of mysterious Europa and its icy, cracked outer shell. These photos (see below) then inspired the filmmakers of Europa Report. In turn, NASA scientists like Vance hope that movies like Europa Report will inspire public support for future missions back to Europa. In short, art and science play a surprisingly reciprocal role today.

Given how important photos and imagery have been to NASA, I was amazed to read in a recent NASA blog post that in the 1960s, NASA debated whether to even put cameras on board spacecraft. Fortunately, with the Mariner 4 mission that brought back the first close-up photos of Mars in 1965, the agency realized how crucial images were to advancing scientific knowledge and inspiring the public. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Finding Movie Inspiration in NASA’s Real Science: The Case Study of Europa Report

LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking About Women’s Roles with Director Kat Coiro of And While We Were Here

[Editor’s Note: the post below appeared yesterday at The Huffington Post.]

By Govindini Murty. It’s a welcome development to see more women directors emerging in the indie film scene and it’s my hope that this will soon translate into more women directing studio features, as well. We all know the statistics: the most recent studies reveal that women only direct 5% of the top 100 studio features – and yet in the indie film world, they direct 18% of the narrative features and 39% of the documentaries.

One indie woman director whose work I’ve enjoyed in recent years is Kat Coiro. Coiro’s latest film, the stylish, Italy-set romantic drama And While We Were Here, opens this weekend in select theaters and is also available on VOD. The film stars Kate Bosworth, Iddo Goldberg, and Jamie Blackley and features a voice-over by the great Claire Bloom.

Shot on location in beautiful southern Italy, And While We Were Here tells the tale of a neglected wife, Jane (Bosworth), who falls for a bohemian American youth, Caleb (Blackley), when her emotionally-remote viola player husband Leonord (Goldberg) is invited to perform in a concert in Naples.

The film is the latest in a tradition of stories about travelers whose lives are transformed by Italy. Bosworth and Goldberg give strong, sensitive performances as the troubled couple Jane and Leonard, while Blackley is disarmingly amusing as the Dionysian youth who disrupts everyone’s carefully ordered lives. Bloom (Jane’s Grandma Eves) provides a poignant voice-over commentary through tape-recorded interviews that recount her loves and losses during WWII.

I caught And While We Were Here at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2012 and had the chance to chat with Kat Coiro a few months later at the LA Film Festival where she was screening her charming short film Departure Date. A romantic comedy starring Nicky Whelan and Ben Feldman, Departure Date (see photo below) is the first film shot and edited entirely at 35,000 feet – an innovative effort made possible by Virgin Produced and highly worth viewing the next time you’re on Virgin Airlines.

Director Kat Coiro filming "Departure Date."

Coiro and I talked at the LA Film Festival about the importance of emotional honesty in storytelling, the joys of poetry, and the importance of creating films that honor brilliant women both past and present. The interview has been edited for length.

GM: I noticed in Departure Date and also in And While We Were Here that there’s a real romanticism to these films, that they breathe with a heartfelt, poetic spirit. What draws you to these sorts of stories?

KC: I appreciate simplicity and I find that creativity often flourishes within the constraints of doing these very small projects in a very short time – and making them something people can relate to. So I wrote both of these stories knowing I had to keep them very simple and I didn’t have time to get very flashy. You strip it down to what people enjoy: which is human connection, relationships, character-driven pieces. Continue reading LFM’s Govindini Murty at The Huffington Post: Talking About Women’s Roles with Director Kat Coiro of And While We Were Here