Blackfish

“Blackfish” is a scathing investigative documentary about Tilikum the killer whale and SeaWorld.

The 2010 documentary “The Cove” gave me all the reason I needed to never return to SeaWorld again. While that film played like a melodrama, horror movie, heist caper and took swipes at an entire country and their “culture”, the new documentary “Blackfish” targets the amusement corporation directly with a scathing journalistic exposé.

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s film is produced and distributed by CNN Films, and it has a sharp investigative quality and traditional, talking heads approach to this horror story. While it lacks some of “The Cove’s” pathos and energy, it still packs a wallop.

“Blackfish,” like “The Cove,” has the unique quality of not being an environmental film. Both dolphins and whales are characterized as animals with specifically human-like qualities. Each of the trainers that interact with the orcas describes the sensation of looking into their eyes and seeing something back. Cowperthwaite can reach the audience on moral terms and never has to raise questions of the effect of removing these whales from their habitat on the broader environment.

It’s more accurately the story of Tilikum, a male killer whale captured from the wild in the ‘70s since used to breed others throughout the SeaWorld enterprise. In 1983, he killed a female trainer at a dinky amusement part called Sealand. The “accident” was swept under the rug and Tilikum was sold to SeaWorld, where 20 years later he killed Dawn Brancheau in much the same manner. Continue reading “Blackfish”

Dallas Buyers Club

Matthew McConaughey’s performances as Ron Woodroof marries the gristle and charm found in “Dallas Buyers Club.”

Dallas Buyers Club

Throughout Matthew McConaughey’s career, he’s exerted a certain level of charisma and charm in every role he’s played. Even in this reinvented hot streak of his career where he’s played sleazy, scary and strange characters who could not be more off type from his rom-com roots, there’s a certain mark of personality that has allowed him to settle into yet another comfort zone.

His performance in “Dallas Buyers Club” is different, one that drains him of any likability and finds him at this lowest point. Doing purely lived-in and physical work, McConaughey shows his abrasive, lewd, intense and vulgar dark side before winning us over again. This may not be the showiest performance of his recent run of movies, but it’s the one that demonstrates the most range, the most compassion and the most chance at winning him an Oscar.

“Dallas Buyers Club” is the true story of Ron Woodroof, a slimy electrician and rodeo jockey in Texas in the 1980s. Despite his lanky appearance (McConaughey lost nearly 40 pounds for the role), greasy hair and scummy potty mouth, he still finds himself having sex with women and “$100 hookers” in his trailer home and in dark corners of the rodeo arena.

After being brought to the hospital due to an accident at his job, the doctors inform him that he has tested positive for HIV, that it has already become AIDS and that he has roughly 30 days to live. Woodroof is staunchly heterosexual and shockingly bigoted and refuses to believe he has a disease like “that Rock Cocksucker Hudson” until he does his own research and pleads for help from Dallas Mercy’s Dr. Eve Saks (Jennifer Garner).

She gives Woodruff two options: a support group where he can “go get a hug from a bunch of faggots” or a double blind test of a drug called AZT, in which some patients will only receive “sugar pills,” better known as placebos. Continue reading “Dallas Buyers Club”

CIFF Review: Domestic

“Domestic” is a comedy as part of the Romanian New Wave, and it captures family dynamics with a surreal twist.

“Domestic” screened as part of the Chicago International Film Festival, where it had its American debut. This early review is merely an impression from the festival. It does not have an American release date. 

Our extended family is Italian. Being loud, persistent talkers is just part of the dynamic. That anything funny or even profound can come out of the conversation at all is a triumph.

Although the families in “Domestic” are Romanian, director Adrian Sitaru has some absurd fun with this conceit: keep the chatter up as normal and see what surprises can come out of it.

“Domestic” is a household comedy following in the footsteps of several families and tenants in a single apartment building. The whole building is up in arms over a timid dog that has supposedly caused some problems. The landlord argues and discusses it with his wife and pre-teen girl one evening. It’s a conversation as normal, but Mom has just brought home a live hen for dinner. Mom assumes Dad will kill it, Dad doesn’t know why Mom bought it and the girl volunteers to take care of it… for a small fee.

Where did she learn how to do that? “That’s how kids in America make their money.” The scene seems to continue on in a loud, speedy argument for quite some time until finally there’s blood on the wall. We hear screeches from the bathroom down the hall, and the door swings open with the little girl humming and smiling as though this was a normal occurrence. On paper this seems grim if not downright surreal. But with a richly cultured audience who understands this family dynamic, it’s hilarious. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Domestic”

CIFF Review: Closed Curtain

Jafar Panahi is still under house arrest, “Closed Curtain” IS a film, and it’s a puzzling mess.

“Closed Curtain” screened as part of the Chicago International Film Festival, where it had its American debut. This early review is just an impression from the festival. The film does not yet have an American release date.

“Closed Curtain” starts with a stark reminder that its director, the Iranian Jafar Panahi, is still under house arrest by the Iranian government and banned from making films. His first under these conditions was the critically acclaimed “This is Not a Film.” This is a film however, and it’s a strange hybrid of fantasy and documentary that, with the strenuous nature of its making, collapses under the weight of being so meta.

The opening shot is an extended take of the camera facing out a barred window. It sits there as though it’s just recording whatever may pass by, and over agonizing minutes, we see a man pull up in a car, take a bag out and carry it all the way inside the house. He has just smuggled a dog into the home, but the man is not Jafar Panahi.

He’s a writer (Kambuzia Partovi), and he’s illegally harboring this dog in his home, covering up the windows with black curtains to hide that he has it. But one night as he is cleaning out the dog’s litter box, two refugees find his way into his home. One goes to look for help while the other, a young woman named Melika (Maryam Moqadam), remains and causes the writer unnecessary stress. Continue reading “CIFF Review: Closed Curtain”

CIFF Review: Salvo

“Salvo” is a peculiarly modest Italian thriller with a minimalist story and style.

“Salvo” screened as a part of the Chicago International Film Festival. This early review is merely an impression of the version screened. It does not yet have an American release.

Would you recognize a miracle when you saw one? We view miracles on a grand scale, and they probably happen every day without many people noticing. It’s not quite what they mean when they say “miracles come in small packages,” but the mini-miracle of “Salvo” is that it strips away virtually all of its story telling or character embellishments and discovers something special through senses alone.

“Salvo” is an Italian mob film that premiered this year at Cannes. It’s immediately a misleading label, as the film is without action or any sort of mafia family plot structure for its entirety.

After being ambushed and almost killed, a nameless assassin (Saleh Bakri) discovers who arranged his murder and hides out in his home to kill him.

Awaiting him is a blind girl named Rita (Sara Serraiocco). She never leaves the home and spends time listening to pop songs and counting money. Agonizing minutes go by as the assassin sneaks out of Rita’s way, the camera playing close to the chest and the back of the head to create palpable trepidation and tension. But just as he’s killed Rita’s companion and held her, blinding light suddenly comes from her perspective, and for the first time we get a glimpse of our mobster’s face.

She can see, although not clearly yet. “Salvo” plays with the idea that someone being given sight for the first time in their life may take significant time to adjust to massive amounts of light their eyes have never known.

The assassin locks her in an abandoned warehouse as she gains her eyesight back, and the resulting film is essentially a love story between two people in need, one of them trying to escape the world they’re in, the other being forced to discover it.

“Salvo” in a way reminds of “Only God Forgives,” a slight tale of redemption told through style and sensory imagery alone. Both films are expertly made, but directors Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza have a fascinating way of depicting sounds and sights through pure minimalism rather than Nicolas Winding Refn’s opulence.

“Salvo” is sinister and arresting when it wants to be, but it’s awfully thin as a result. What little there is to latch on to in terms of character and ideology is something the intimate, tense and measured aesthetic can’t make up for.

3 stars

Nebraska

Alexander Payne’s latest film stands to be a hilarious crowd pleaser.

“Nebraska,” Alexander Payne’s black and white road trip comedy of middle America, has a habit of demeaning and humiliating the simpleton white folks who fill out the ranks of this country. Their mouths are slightly agape, they’re overweight, they lack ambition or much to say as they sit uniform in front of a small television with their cheap beer, and the marquees and sign posts in town feel modest and bland with words like “Sodbuster” and “Bankman” serving as the Midwestern town’s only landmarks.

It’d be easy to say that Payne’s movie feels slight and that these people are too easy of targets, but America as a country is a bit humiliating. That doesn’t mean that the film and the people can’t harbor a sense of kindness and pride that gives this country its character.

“Nebraska” is great Americana. It’s a warm, funny, wholesome film that captures the comical family dynamics of ordinary people. Perhaps this isn’t your family, but we seem to know families like this, and it can be a beautiful sight to see. Continue reading “Nebraska”

Blue is the Warmest Color

For a lesbian romance and art film with controversial sex scenes, “Blue is the Warmest Color” feels very normalized.

 

Beyond “Blue is the Warmest Color’s” length, its country of origin, its intimate aesthetic or its controversial, NC-17 lesbian sex scenes, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Palme D’Or winning film feels hardly like an art house movie at all. It’s groundbreaking in the way that this love story of two lesbians, a subject so often embroiled in politics, oppression and hardship when seen in the movies, can feel so ordinary.

“Blue is the Warmest Color” is a life story, a story of a relationship; it’s a romance, a coming-of-age teen drama, a tale of a woman’s journey or just about as close to a genre movie as you can get. That Kechiche and his two actresses, Adele Exarchopoulous and Lea Seydoux, get at this story with such honesty is good enough; it doesn’t have to be a “gay” movie.

The film follows the relationship of 17-year-old Adele (Exarchopoulous) and college art student Emma (Seydoux) over several years, exploring their intellectual chemistry, artistic and political forays and every inch of their passionate lovemaking.

The much-buzzed about sex scenes in question are so vivid, so steamy and so clear in depicting their naked bodies that it imbues the whole film with vigorous physical intensity. The first of three such scenes lasts for over seven minutes, forming a complicated web of body parts and arousal that leaves little to the imagination. Short of calling it pornography, the film in reference to these scenes could easily be called “Tangled Up in Blue.”

And yet their story itself is not as complex. Adele is a girl just discovering her sexuality. Her gossipy friends tell her that a hot senior has a crush on her, and when the two talk together on a bus, their conversation feels familiar. He plays guitar, she “likes everything” when it comes to music, they go out and share a few laughs, and when they finally have sex in a scene quite similar to those with Emma, if Adele is missing something, it’s not for a lack of physicality.

What Adele is missing is something intangible, and Kechiche will spend the course of three hours trying to piece together what that is. Some may criticize the film’s length, but then relationships take time. Continue reading “Blue is the Warmest Color”

The Counselor

Ridley Scott’s “The Counselor” is too strange to be sexy, alluring or memorable.

“The Counselor” spoils easily one of the most memorably bizarre scenes in a studio drama this year. In it, Cameron Diaz takes off her panties, clambers onto the hood of Javier Bardem’s Ferrari and proceeds to dry hump the windshield. Bardem refers to the distinct visual he receives from the front passenger seat as “like a catfish.”

Bardem calls it too odd to be sexy, and he’s right, but Director Ridley Scott plays it for laughs because he’s not sure what to do with writer Cormac McCarthy’s scene either.

This is McCarthy’s first original screenplay following multiple film adaptations of his novels including “No Country for Old Men” and “The Road.” He’s written a drug cartel drama in which women, morality, paradoxes and regret take a prominent role while a mysterious, never seen evil pulls the strings in the background.

Scott however shoots “The Counselor” like it’s “American Gangster.” It amounts to a clunky thriller reduced to tedious conversation pieces, a nonsensical plot and unclear motives or forces trying to create suspense. Continue reading “The Counselor”

The Unknown Known

Donald Rumsfeld comes across as a real character in Errol Morris’s “The Unknown Known.”

Errol Morris must have been ecstatic at the opportunity to interview Donald Rumsfeld for his latest film “The Unknown Known.”

The man, despite his politics and his unique perspective on his actions and the history he helped lead this country through, is a one-of-a-kind showman, infectious in front of interviewers and cameras. He discusses national policy of the gravest of circumstances with paradoxical double speak, and he seems to end each turn of phrase with a disarmingly knowing smirk.

And yet Morris must also have been surprised to talk with Rumsfeld simply because in some ways, he’s been at the root of Morris’s work for the last decade. After “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure,” Rumsfeld can finally give Morris not the answers he’s looking for but the perspective straight from the horse’s mouth.

In some ways, “The Unknown Known” is Morris repeating the style and the work he did in “The Fog of War,” jumping down the same rabbit hole with a different Secretary of Defense. And yet in another, this is Morris doing what he does best, composing an incisive and tense documentary capable of near damning revelations and understandings of perspectives. Continue reading “The Unknown Known”

Enough Said

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is perfect in “Enough Said.”

Julia Louis-Dreyfus is the master of awkward conversations. In nine seasons on “Seinfeld” and beyond, she demonstrated a level of nuance, charm and etiquette in even the most ham-handed, despicable and uncomfortable of moments. She’s done so with a signature guffaw and a smile that looks amicable to her addressee and forced and in agony to everyone else.

“Enough Said” is Louis-Dreyfus’s first real film role in quite some time, and it’s a shame she doesn’t do indie films like Nicole Holofcener’s more often, because she takes everything that has made her an iconic actress and built the most pathos filled role of her career. Given the casual complexity of the screenplay, it’s likely this is a romantic comedy that wouldn’t be possible without her.

Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a divorced masseuse about to send her daughter off to college. At a party she meets both Marianne (Catherine Keener), a potential client, and Albert (the late James Gandolfini), a potential boyfriend after the two find they have a little in common.

The rub is that Albert and Marianne were once married, and now each confides in Eva how much they hate the other as she grows to be their true friends.

The first virtue of Holofcener’s screenplay is that it allows this fact to pass by unexplained to the audience and to Eva for quite some time, and we’re allowed to see Eva and Albert develop as a couple with real chemistry before the coincidence drives them apart. Continue reading “Enough Said”