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CIFF40 Diary Days 9 & 10: Connecting Dots

Werner Herzog certainly doesn’t seem like the most likely candidate to team up with a network systems company like Netscout for an examination of the digital world but of course being one of the world’s greatest living documentarians never hurts matters. Instead of what could have been a bumbling catalogue of an old man’s misunderstandings about technology Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is a thoughtful, if somewhat scattershot, essay on connectivity and its impact that never fails to enlighten and entertain throughout its ten chapters. Grounding the audience with the knowledge that a single day’s worth internet data if burned onto disc would produce a stack of CDs so large that it would reach to Mars and back, the director explores the history of the internet as well its future and what it all means for people. Starting from the UCLA computer lab where the first internet connection was made before moving on to to robotics the film flits around the digital landscape exploring subjects as diverse as gaming addicts, radio signal enthusiasts, digital signal sensitivities and even Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. Of course there’s also plenty of Herzog’s quirky sensibility to go around such as his “the corridors here look repulsive” description of UCLA, asking a a robotics engineer who builds soccer robots if he loves his best “player” and most strangely his interview with the family of “Porsche Girl” Nikki Catsouras whose fatal accident photos were sickeningly turned into internet meme. Herzog frames the family, dressed in nearly all black, standing behind three large, full trays of baked goods. “I think the internet is the manifestation of the Antichrist . . .” His camera watches as a woman goes from sympathetic grieving mother to tragically obsessed fanatic with a large selection of muffins and scones on full display. It isn’t one of Herzog’s best but it’s still a Herzog film and that alone makes it better than most of the rest.

When New Zealand-based journalist David Farrier came across a FaceBook ad offering all-expenses-paid trips to Los Angeles and hefty compensation, to young male athletes for the purpose of participating in competitive ticking events, he thought he had found perfect fodder for his “News of the Weird”-style TV segment. After contacting the company responsible for the ad, Farrier was subjected to a barrage of harassment over his homosexuality and threats of lawsuits for reporting on the company and the sport of competitive tickling. Tickled is the kind of documentary from which the primary pleasure is derived by the blindsiding nature of many of the unexpected twists and turns so to describe more of it would be to spoil it. Farrier and his co-director Dylan Reeve do their best to keep the mood and tone of the film tongue-in-cheek and the pace brisk while doing their globe-trotting sleuth job buts it’s clear that they swing from the instinct to just laugh at these guys to being scared shitless to pure outrage. Tickled is much more about the journey than the destination and there isn’t much of a takeaway other than that people can be deeply strange and access to large amounts of money can exacerbate and enable those eccentricities in some pretty scary ways.

Anna Rose Holmer’s debut feature The Fits is a film with a narrative so slight it threatens to vanish into the either. 11-year-old Toni (Royalty Hightower) spends most of her spare time training as a boxer with her older brother at the local community center. One day she catches a glimpse of a dance class in progress and her interest is sparked. As her fascination grows and she joins the troupe, one by one the become afflicted with mysterious uncontrollable convulsions. Rather than exposition, the director allows mood, texture and just a splash of magical realism to do the film’s work. In the post-screening Q & A, Holmer revealed that after she had cast West End Cincinnati dance troupe the Q-Kidz in the primary roles, she worked with the girls to transform the dialogue she had written with her co-writers (Saela Davis, Lisa Kjerulff) into the dancers’ own words. This type of egoless approach allowed her capture believable, naturalistic performances from group of non-professional children. That’s no easy feat for a director of any experience. The Fits is a remarkably assured first feature that avoids nearly all of the major pitfalls usually associate with a novice director.

#CIFF40 #Cleveland International Film Festival #film festivals #film #movies #cinema #film criticism #movie review #cinema studies #The Fits #Tickled #Lo and Behold

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.

#CIFF40 #Cleveland International Film Festival #film festivals #film #movies #cinema #cinema studies #Movie Reviews #film criticism #Gala & Godfrey: The Classics #What Would Beethoven Do?

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

#ciff2016 #entelechy #ciff40 #cleveland #entelechyfilm #clevelandinternationalfilmfestival

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.