#ciff40

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CIFF40 Diary Day 8: Pump Up The Volume

Bourgeois romantic comedies aren’t really in my personal wheelhouse but the use of the phrase, “ . . . within the framework of a record album, Gala & Godfrey tracks the classic moments . . .” was enough to pique my interest. Unfortunately the use of this of poorly thought out conceit is limited to the opening scene and few quick shots of a spinning record inserted throughout the film. When the film opens, nineteen-year-old Ava is reminiscing about her parents. Her father, she tells the audience, used to be a musician and believes that kids her age have the wrong approach to music because they care only about singles and not deep cuts (of course this makes little sense in combination with film’s subtitle, The Classics). With this she puts on record and we flashback 19 years to the moment her parents first met. Gala (Molly Pepper) attends an approximation of a punk rock club show that careens of the rails when guitarist and lead singer Godfrey (Adam Green) leaves the stage to fight an audience member. Other than the aforementioned record player inserts, that’s basically the extent of the film’s connection to music. What’s left is nearly two hours of a couple that just can’t quit each other. In fairness, Green and Pepper are very good in their roles and the film does manage to hit its stride for a stretch in the middle. Curiously, the film ends twelve years after the initial flashback on hopeful note, which is fine except for the fact that it supposes that nothing significant happened in the lives of young Ana or her parents between her twelfth and nineteenth year. Life works that way, right? From a technical standpoint, Gala and Godfrey: The Classics seems as if it might still be a work in progress. Sound recording and mixing issues are one the biggest bugaboos of low-budget filmmaking and it’s a major problem here. The credits list two cinematographers, with three others getting additional cinematography credits, which may be the root cause of some of the resolution and color correction issues at play and is surely to blame for the general visual inconsistency. Having said all of that, it’s possible that there’s a releasable indie rom-com hiding inside of Gala and Godfrey: The Classics but it will take some pretty severe cutting and another round of post-production work to find out.

Spinning out from the notion that classical music’s stuffy reputation and ceremonial formality make it difficult to build new audiences, What Would Beethoven Do? seeks to break down those barriers and enlarge the tent. Director Jonathan Keijser, a classically trained musician himself, takes a vérité approach to investigate what those on the vanguard of the music scene are doing to expose new ears to something they are so clearly passionate about. That includes people like Sri Lankan-born and Juilliard-trained composer Dinuk Wijeratne as he premieres a new work for string quartet and DJ with the Afiara Quartet and Skratch Bastid, and choral composer Eric Whitacre who crowd sourced videos of singers performing his composition “Sleep” to create the world’s first virtual choir. Very little of the film’s time is spent on the history of traditions of the orchestra as an institution and instead is focused on those who are trying desperately to break the music out of the cloistered world of the concert hall. We meet Charith Premawardhana, the founder of Classical Revolution, who organizes and promotes chamber music events in the type of venues usually reserved for rock bands and DJs, as well as conductor and founder of the Santa Cecilia Orchestra, Sonia Marie de Leon de Vega whose very presence is proof to little girls that they too can be conductors if they so choose. If you think there are far too few women in the filmmaking community (there are) you may or may not be surprised to learn that the problem is much worse in the world of conducting. The star of the film is seventy-five-year-old conductor Ben Zander whose enthusiasm and exuberance is a metaphor for the film itself. From dancing with five year olds at a Boston elementary school to preparing a youth orchestra for their first performance at Carnegie Hall, Mr. Zander never fails to be inspired and inspiring. It’s not difficult to see how someone with limited exposure to classical music could walk away from What Would Beethoven Do? with a newfound desire to explore its pleasures. For the curious, the title refers to the fact that in a time when musicians were considered servants, Beethoven was the first to walk in through the front door.               

[arianadelawari]

They missed the last two words ... To a vision "Of unity" ;) Friends in Cleveland see you at Cleveland International Film Festival @clefilmfest 5th & 6th. Entelechy will be screened on 4/5 during Shorts Program 10 at 4:10 pm and on 4/6 and at 11:30 am on 4/6 📽🏔✌🏽 #entelechyfilm #entelechy #ciff2016 #cleveland #clevelandinternationalfilmfestival #CIFF40

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CIFF40 Diary Day 7: Fear & Loathing

Without specific knowledge of the Swedish legal system, it’s difficult to gauge the plausibility of the setup of The Here After, but no such specialized information is needed to question the behavior of many of the film’s characters. Scandinavian pop star Uilrik Munther makes his film acting debut as John, a teenager who is being released from a youth detention center after serving time for the murder of his girlfriend. Without the good sense to get out of town, his parents bring him back home to the same house and send him right back to the very same school. As one would expect, John is immediately ostracized by his peers but strangely, rather than reacting in fear and horror, they make him a target for their abuse. The whole thing plays out like a Bizarro World version of a typical school shooting narrative with getting picked on coming before the murder. The main character is mostly a blank void and the film withholds crucial details of his crime before heaping one dubiously motivated contrivance on top of another. The film’s saving grace is Lukasz Zal’s (Ida) carefully composed, elegant cinematography in hues of gray and green. Stylistically, it appears the director Magnus von Horn is attempting an edgier version of what made the Dardenne brothers masters of world cinema but instead he ends up with a mediocre, if beautiful, bore.  

Perhaps the most shocking thing about Ross Adam and Robert Cannan’s The Lovers and the Despot is that it mostly avoids red baiting and anti-North Korea propaganda. Based on the same story as This American Life’s “Same Bed, Different Dreams” the film spins the tale of how South Korea’s biggest film star and her director husband were abducted by the Kim dynasty and forced to make films in North Korea before finally making their daring escape. Centering on an interview with actress Choi Eun-hee about her terrifying and fantastic ordeal, the filmmakers use a fairly standard mix of talking heads, feature film clips, vintage news footage and most importantly a surreptitiously recorded phone conversation with Kim Jong-il himself, to chronicle this tale of love and politics, heartbreak and art. The assumption would be that director Shin Sang-ok, who drove his production company into bankruptcy in the capitalist South, would have to work as what Martin Scorsese would call a “smuggler” (that is to say, a director who must smuggle subversive ideas into very restricted material) in North Korea but such is not the case. Because of Kim’s love of cinema, the filmmaker found himself with not only more resources than ever before but greater creative freedom as well, leading to his greatest success. The portrait drawn of Kim Jong-il is more empathetic and humanizing than most, covering his strange upbringing and passionate love of the arts while also chronicling the consequences of the dynasty’s despotism but the film works best when focusing on the plight of the artists rather than on political intrigue. If the filmmaking is a bit by-the-numbers at least the directors know better than to get in the way of a good story. After his daring escape from North Korea and subsequent move to America, Shin tried to catch on as a Hollywood director but managed to get little traction. He did, however, produce the 3 Ninjas franchise. Womp womp.     

[wwwdot34lukefilmsdotcom]

CIFF40 Meet the Filmmakers :: Director Ben Selkow from BURIED ABOVE GROUND

Filmmaker interview from the 40th Cleveland International Film Festival where @buriedabovegroundfilm played in the Global Health Competition.

[molly-pepper]

❄️Beautiful S N O W F L A K E S today❄️ #cleveland #CIFF40 #galaandgodfreymovie @engagecleveland @clefilmfest (at Cleveland, Ohio)

[creamcitysavvy]

Good morning, Cleveland! #cleveland #ciff40 (at Cleveland, Ohio)

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CIFF40 Diary Day 4: The Evil That Men Do

Along with Cristi Puiu, Corneliu Porumboiu and Cristian Mungiu, One Floor Below director Radu Muntean is a major figure of the Romanian New Wave. Stylistically these films are typically muted and austere while the narratives most often deal with the collapse of Ceaușescu regime and the country’s shift toward a market-based capitalist economy. One Floor Below, a thematically dense tale of a bureaucratic middleman who may have witnessed a murder that he can’t bring himself to report, is no exception and it’s an easy fit for the “anti-thriller” label that frequently gets slapped on these movies. Teodor Corban stars as Sandu Patrascu, a middle class husband and father who runs a car registration expediting business with his wife. When he hears a violent lover’s fight in a young woman’s apartment after returning from his morning dog walk, the mixture of concern and curiosity causes him to pause. When a married neighbor (Iulian Postelnicu) subsequently emerges from the apartment and takes note of Patrascu, his suspicions are further stoked. Those suspicions are confirmed when the police are soon investigating the woman’s murder. Despite being directly asked by police, Patrascu claims to know nothing about the incident. As this finely detailed parable of the conflict between moral obligation and self preservation plays out, the suspected killer insinuates himself into the life of Patrascu and his family as the tension gradually builds to what passes for an explosive climax in modern Romanian cinema. The simple, clean style makes the film a visual pleasure as cinematographer Tudor Lucaciu creates frames within frames shooting through doorways, windows, computer screens and mirrors, his camera most frequently examining the tortured visage of Corban in shallow focus.     

Cinematographer and director André Turpin’s Endorphine is a nonlinear cinematic puzzle that seems to focus on a woman named Simone, who as a young girl witnessed the brutal murder of her mother, at three very different points in her life. From a single viewing it appears that the deeper thematic concern of the film is how traumatic events can continually resurface in our lives like bad dreams though it also takes frequent diversions to explore the nature of time and even cinema itself but a second viewing would be required to unpack it much further than that. Nevertheless, the aggressive style and structure manage to keep the film compelling throughout its runtime and The Book Thief star Sophie Nélisse gives a nuanced performance as the youngest Simone that belies her age.  

There are two major problems that come part and parcel with using the single continuous shot technique in narrative features. The fist is that you’re working at cross purposes with regards to the performance of actors versus complex choreography of technicians. It’s nearly impossible to nail them both in a single long take. The other is that the technique itself often works against the narrative and dramatic needs of the scene. Too Late’s first time feature director Dennis Hauck decided to shoot his hardboiled story of a private eye hellbent on avenging a young stripper’s death not only in five continuous Steadicam shots but he also chose to do so in 35mm. Then he doubled down by only releasing the film in that format. Hauck certainly deserves kudos for his ambition but the film does have some issues. The first problem mentioned above rears its ugly head in the first of film’s non-chronologically organized scene (each one runs about twenty-two minutes or length of one film reel) where the camera movement is certainly virtuosic but the performances mostly fall flat. Perhaps that’s because it’s the scene with the least of John Hawkes who portrays private investigator Samson and turns in the expected excellent performance. Too Late looks gorgeous and there are some truly impressive camera movements, including one so complicated that it apparently required two Steadicam operators with one passing the rig off the other halfway through, but there are also long stretches of seated conversations. That’s where the second problem comes into play, sweeping camera pans from one speaking character to the next (in lieu of shot reverse shot) only serve to call attention to the technique and distract from the narrative. To it’s credit, the film feels like holdover from the ‘90s American indie boom but it may get accused of being a Tarantino knockoff (a charge possibly bolstered by the casting of Robert Forster and Jeff Fahey) though it’s more likely that both directors are simply influenced by the same strain of grindhouse cinema. Natalie Zea and Dichen Lachman deliver good turns in their respective scenes but nobody else gets enough screen time to make much of an impression (although The Jesus Lizard frontman David Yow makes a cameo appearance as a strip club patron).        

[creamcitysavvy]

Can't wait to marry my festival wife, Karen, tonight!!! #cleveland #festivalwedding #ciff40 to Donald Glover/Marry You! (at Cleveland International Film Festival)