There’s a great new feature today over at Apple’s iTunes website about the return of the historic battleship Missouri for the new film Battleship. Check it out. Battleship opens this Friday.
Posted on May 15th, 2012 at 3:58pm.
Category: Articles
Class Conflict in Today’s Russia: LFM Reviews Zvyagintsev’s Elena
By Joe Bendel. Elena could have been an old world Russian babushka. She even still wears the traditional head scarves. Yet, she has married into the world of oligarchic privilege. It is a pleasant if loveless marriage, but fundamental disagreements with her wealthy husband will take a dark turn in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena, which begins a special two week engagement at New York’s Film Forum this Wednesday.
The working class Elena met the sophisticated Vladimir while working as a nurse during his convalescence two years ago. They have little in common except their dismal records as parents. His grown daughter Katerina is an entitled party girl emblematic of New Russia’s excesses. Elena’s slobby, unemployed son Sergey is only fit for queuing in lines and getting drunk. That might have been perfectly fine during the Soviet era, but it does not cut the mustard any more. While Vladimir readily underwrites Katerina’s high-flying lifestyle, he begrudges any support Elena offers her deadbeat family.
If anything, Elena’s thuggish grandson Sasha is even less accomplished than his father. In order to forestall his military service, Sergey will have to bribe Sasha’s way into college, but Vladimir is not having any of it. After collapsing in the gym, issues of inheritance come to the fore, provoking Elena to action for the sake of her proletariat family.
Such “action” is a relative term in Zvyagintsev’s deliberately paced film. He is much more interested contrasting the dramatic class distinctions of contemporary Russian than engaging in Double Indemnity style suspense. Frankly, viewers need to pay attention throughout Elena, because it is easy to miss the crossing of the Rubicon.
In contrast, it is impossible to not notice the differences between the two Russias. One is a world of glass and steel luxury (perfectly underscored by sparing excerpts from Philip Glass’s 1995 Symphony No. 3), whereas the other is a grubby suburb of Brutalistic socialist era architecture dominated by noxious looking nuclear containment domes. There is also a pronounced psychological difference, as well. Vladimir harshly dismisses Sergey as a lazy drunken slacker, but he is not exactly wrong.
Indeed, a mother’s love may oftentimes be blind (it might have been clever to have opened Elena over the weekend, but it is hard to imagine any son taking mom to see it) and Elena is arguably indulgent to a fault. However, it is her relationship with Vladimir that is most intriguing. Nadezhda Markina palpably conveys a complicated lifetime of struggle as the title protagonist, while developing some ambiguous yet very real chemistry with actor-director Andrey Smirnov’s Vladimir. The precise nature of their union remains hard to pigeonhole, with several scenes supporting disparate interpretations.
Elena certainly shines a spotlight on the inequalities of Putin’s Russian – still a playground for compliant oligarchs. Yet, as a film it is really a showcase for Markina’s remarkable, unadorned performance. Though the tempo is undeniably leisurely, there is a real point to it all, as it heads towards a very specific destination. Recommended for viewers with adult attention spans, Elena opens this Wednesday (5/16) at Film Forum.
LFM GRADE: B
Posted on May 15th, 2012 at 3:57pm.
LFM Reviews Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
By Joe Bendel. As cute as he is, Quill is a dog with a role in life. By virtue of his intelligence and empathetic intuition, the golden retriever will become a guide dog for the blind. His eventful dog’s life is lovingly depicted in Yoichi Sai’s Quill: the Life of a Guide Dog, which opens this Friday in New York.
Out of a litter of five pups, Quill is the shrewdest. His owner wanted them all to become guide dogs, but only Quill makes the grade. As a result, he will experience his first parting, leaving his puppy home to live with the Isamu and Mitsuko Nii, a couple who care for prospective guide dogs until they reach the age training commences. Considering how the Niis dote on him, Satoru Tawada’s training kennel requires quite an adjustment, but again Quill adapts.
Tawada has Quill in mind for Watanabe, the irascible chairman of a local nonprofit support organization, but the middle-aged man is resistant. Of course, Quill wins him over, but Watanabe’s health problems will complicate their time together.
Sai once served as an assistant director to Nagisa Ôshima on In the Realm of the Senses, a film about as dissimilar to Quill as one can possibly imagine. Not afraid of a little manipulative sentiment, Shoichi Maruyama and Yoshihiro Nakamura’s screenplay hits all the dog-lover bases good and hard. However, Quill’s adorableness at all ages is an undeniable ace in the hole. By the time the aged Quill comes full circle back to the Niis, even the brawniest of men will find themselves getting choked up.
No question, the canine cast is truly endearing, with the film’s trainer Tadami Miya maximizing their cinematic charm. The human ensemble is also rather pleasing, including Teruyuki Kagawa (recognizable from far darker Japanese imports, like Tokyo Sonata and the 20th Century Boys trilogy) and Shinobu Terajima (unforgettable in Wakamatsu’s disturbing Caterpillar), who are genuinely touching as the Niis.
Featuring a sensitive soundtrack by the Kuricorder Quartet, Quill has a gentle, humane vibe not unlike the work of Kore-eda. Though Sai’s film has been kicking around the festival circuit since 2004, its belated American release coincides with the dramatic increase in the social and commercial organization of U.S. dog lovers. Frankly, post-Marley and Me, it has enormous crossover potential. Recommended for canine fanciers and Japanese cinephiles, Quill opens this Friday (5/18) in New York at the Cinema Village.
LFM GRADE: B+
Posted on May 15th, 2012 at 3:55pm.
LFM’s Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty at The Atlantic: “At the Summer Box Office, a Battle Between Two Ways of Filming”
[Editor’s Note: the piece below was featured today on the front page of The Atlantic.]
Digital moviemaking is on the rise, but some high-profile directors still shoot popcorn flicks the old way.
By Jason Apuzzo & Govindini Murty. This summer, Hollywood’s blockbusters are engaging in a high-stakes format war between cutting-edge digital technology and old-fashioned, photochemical film. Digitally photographed thrillers like The Avengers, Prometheus, and The Amazing Spider-Man will be battling it out with equally epic movies shot on film such as The Dark Knight Rises, Men in Black 3, and Battleship. Indeed, no summer in recent memory boasts so much variety in terms of how films are photographed and exhibited.
Yet with studios looking to trim costs on increasingly expensive “tentpole” movies, traditional celluloid film—easily the more expensive of the two formats—may be on its way out as the cinema’s medium of choice. Still, advocates of film continue to make compelling arguments about why theirs is the more enduring medium, even as both sides pull out their biggest guns this summer in an effort to prove definitively the commercial value of their respective formats.
Right now, advocates of film have numbers on their side. Of this summer’s major blockbusters, more were shot on film than digitally. Aside from The Dark Knight Rises, Men in Black 3, and Battleship, other summer tentpole movies filmed photochemically include Snow White and the Huntsman, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and The Bourne Legacy.
But digital technology has the momentum and the prestigious advocates who will likely help it win out eventually.
For the rest of the article please visit The Atlantic.
Posted on May 14th, 2012 at 1:32pm.
The Perils of Life in Communist Yugoslavia: LFM Reviews Easter Eggs @ Tribeca 2012
By Govindini Murty. The best films about Communism nowadays are emerging from countries whose citizens have directly experienced Communist rule. One sees this in the wave of films coming out of Eastern Europe as well as in recent Chinese documentaries like High Tech, Low Life that just screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Eastern European filmmakers, perhaps having more distance from life under the Communist boot, tend to take a farcical, absurdist approach when it comes to depicting totalitarian oppression. Croation director Slobodan Karajlovic’s narrative short Easter Eggs, which screened at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, follows in this tradition by showing what happens when Communist intolerance targets a family’s innocent Easter celebration.
Set in 1970s Yugoslavia, Easter Eggs depicts a mother who is determined that her young son and daughter enjoy Easter the way she did as a child – with an egg hunt, special tea, and commemoration of Christian ritual. The only problem is that her husband is a vehement Communist opposed to all signs of Christianity – even when practiced in the privacy of the home. A career-minded army officer, he is convinced that any sign of ideological deviation in his family will be disastrous for his career. As he rants at his wife when she persists in practicing Christianity: “You work against me, you work against the country.” Their child, the unseen narrator of the film, describes him as “an ingrained and incorrigible Communist.”
Nonetheless, the mother secretly arranges an Easter celebration for her children when her husband leaves for work, hiding eggs in the living room, setting up a nice tea table, and placing a cross on the sideboard. In one of the funniest moments of the film, the children look at the figure on the cross and ask if it is Tito, the communist dictator of Yugoslavia. The mother answers “It’s not Tito, it’s Jesus.”
Things then take a somewhat melodramatic turn, but Karajlovic keeps a nice balance between comedy and drama in depicting the horrifying reality of life in communist Yugoslavia. Evoking the drab colors and settings of life in the Eastern bloc, while humorously depicting the army officer father’s obsession with his mustache and his demands for heated underpants, Easter Eggs follows in the absurdist style of such favorite films of ours as the Estonian-Finnish documentary Disco and Atomic War. Like Disco, Easter Eggs shows how average citizens through small or symbolic acts of resistance can subvert apparently monolithic communist and totalitarian ideologies. Recommended for anyone interested in celebrating freedom through film.
LFM GRADE: A-
Posted on May 14th, 2012 at 1:31pm.
A View of Life at the Grassroots: LFM Reviews CatCam @ Tribeca 2012
By Govindini Murty. Cat owners through the ages have pondered the pressing question: where do their furry feline friends go all day? Seth Keal’s charming Tribeca short film CatCam documents the efforts of a German engineer named Juergen Perthold to solve this very question. Juergen lives in South Carolina and adopts – or is rather, adopted by – an insouciant stray tabby cat whom he names Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee disappears for hours and sometimes days on end, and yet mysteriously returns not hungry for food.
Determined to find out where Mr. Lee is going on his adventures, Juergen devises a small camera that dangles from the cat’s collar, and activated by motion, takes periodic photos of what the cat sees. The results are remarkable. The photos reveal that Mr. Lee leads an active life roaming through the neighborhood and into the nearby countryside – encountering a busy network of cat friends (and the odd cat foe) along the way. Juergen posts his cat’s story and photos online – and soon Mr. Lee is an internet sensation.
Fans write from around the country asking how they can buy a version of Juergen’s camera so they can see what their own cats are up to. International media pick up the story of the auteur cat who takes pictures. A prestigious European photography contest even awards Mr. Lee a prize for his daringly composed, impressionistic photos. This leads to a heated controversy in Europe over whether there is an “intentionality” behind Mr. Lee’s photos – an “artistic eye” that entitles him to be deemed “a photographer.” Ultimately, Mr. Lee is more interested in the shrimp served in his silver prize cup than in the prize itself – showing that despite his celebrity, he still has all four paws firmly planted on the ground.
Definitely recommended and recently the winner of the documentary short jury prize at SXSW, CatCam can be seen at future screenings to be detailed on the film’s website.
LFM GRADE: A
Posted on May 14th, 2012 at 1:30pm.