I WISH: LETTING KIDS BE KIDS

 

There's absolutely no doubt after watching Hirokazu Kore-eda's latest film I Wish that his reputation for being among the best two or three directors working in Japan today is well deserved.  Relating the story of two brothers, Koichi (Koki Maeda) and Ryunosuke (Ohshirô Maeda), separated by their parents divorce, this is a simply told and greatly observational drama that stands with the director's best work, including Still Walking and his 1998 masterpiece, After Life.

Living with his mother, Koichi quietly mourns the loss of his family life.  Early in the film, Kore-eda allows us to see how the divorce has impacted his social life at school, where he's made to feel ashamed when a teacher doles out homework based around the occupations of each student's father.  Koichi takes refuge in fantasy and denial and, when news of a new bullet train hits town, he (naturally?) theorizes that the exchange in energy created by the simultaneous passing of old and new trains will grant a wish to anyone who witnesses it.

In addition to the trains, Kore-eda cleverly plays with the dynamic between the old and the new in several places in the film.  Koichi repeatedly holds up his current home life against how things were in the past.  And his grandfather expresses their distaste for contemporary Japanese sweets by trying to replicate and mass produce a traditional recipe from his youth.  Nostalgia is a hallmark in many of Kore-eda's films and, like in his prior work, it's never overemphasized here as much as it flows out of the material with a gentle honesty that's perfectly matched with the material at hand.

Best of all, this is a movie that excels at letting the child actors shed the appearance of performance; it allows these kids to be kids.  No doubt, a film involving children dealing with divorce needs to have some gravity, but, thankfully, I Wish doesn't force the type of emotive trauma that's become almost  de rigueur in contemporary coming of age cinema.  This is a very good film that wisely applies a light and fanciful touch in lieu of the dark theatrics favored by others.  And what a refreshing choice that is.

I Wish begins its run at Living Room Theaters on Friday, June 29nd.  More info available here.

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PINK RIBBONS, INC.: THE PINKWASHING OF AWARENESS

There was a point nearly halfway through Pink Ribbons, Inc. where I began to actively wonder what exactly was the thesis of the documentary I was viewing.  It was clear that director Léa Pool was passionately trying to work towards revealing the "pinkwashing" that's become nearly unquestioned in the corporate sponsorship of public campaigns promoting breast cancer awareness and research.  And yet, the actual point of the film, that there's an inherent hypocrisy built into the cynical practice of corporations, especially those selling products containing carcinogens to women, marketing their products using lil' pink breast cancer awareness ribbons, doesn't end up being very well articulated until far too late in the film for its impact to be fully appreciated.

It's also difficult to shake the feeling that the film is treating women who buy into the themed products and events like the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure in a condescending manner.  Time and again, it cuts from dark proclamations from the film's cadre of experts about the uselessness of the current awareness culture (pink yogurt lids, juice bottles, etc.) to supremely light and silly images of women (oh, my god, actually having fun and bonding while) participating in that culture. 

It's not as if the points being made by Pool's interviewees aren't valid.  Yes, breast cancer campaigns were once linked to activism that demanded actual results in medical advancement, rather than the vague banner of "awareness" that most efforts rest under today.  And it's true that there's something rotten in Denmark when Ford can slap a pink emblem on the side of a car, rake it in, and only contribute a miniscule amount of the profits to breast cancer research.  Sadly, there's a lack of focus in the manner that these observations are organized, contributing an overall slackness to the piece that makes it feel overly long and tangential at times.

Fortunately, it's not all gray skies, as there are many things that the film does gets right.  In particular, there's a wonderfully sharp and charismatic interview with breast cancer activist Barbara Brenner woven throughout that offers up many of the most clear-eyed moments of insight in the film.  Brenner quickly becomes the film's voice of reason.  Pool also brings her cameras to a gathering of women living with stage four cancer.  Both their thoughts on the commercialization of their illness and their mere presence in the film force the viewer to grapple with what is truly at stake.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. begins its run at Cinema 21 on Friday, June 29th.  More info available here.

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HOW TO GROW A BAND: REACHING FOR RESOLUTION

Personally, I had never heard of Chris Thile or his former band Nickel Creek before viewing Mark Meatto's How to Grow a Band, a documentary about Thile's post-breakup (of both his band and marriage) efforts to rebuild his musical persona via a radically different angle on the roots-based music he's played since childhood.  Thile picked up the mandolin at the age of five and, if the testimonials of such musical luminaries as John Paul Jones and Yo-Yo Ma are to be believed, he's a musician of uncommon talent.  Now at a crossroads in his career and personal life, the mandolinist finds himself writing a 45-minute, classical bluegrass string quintet for his new band The Punch Brothers.

Meatto's film spends a lot of time intimately peering in on Thile and his bandmates' interpersonal relationships as they tour this new music around the country.  For all that focus, there are only hints of tension followed by a few terse band deliberations about how to make the difficult music being played more palatable to audiences.  Various members of the band think that some compromises can be made to audiences; Thile disagrees and shuts down every time the topic is broached.  Even with Meatto's cameras capturing discussions that exclude Thile from the conversation, the overall effect of all this polite disagreement is a rather toothless reading of the conflict present in something like the far superior Sam Jones documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.

Fortunately, the film knows what to do when it's time to witness what the band does best.  It would be a complete disservice to the audience if, when conveying the four movements of their "The Blind Leaving the Blind" quintet, the standard music doc practice of cutting away from the performances was employed too prematurely.  To Meatto's credit, he knows when to stay in the moment; there are extensive sequences throughout the film of the band playing the piece and the film is even divided into sections that relate to each movement.

How to Grow a Band sheds any reservations one might have about the individual personalities within the band and truly comes alive in these moments.  Just like the music being featured, it's a difficult concoction that only periodically reaches for resolution.

How to Grow a Band screens at the NW Film Center's Whitsell Auditorium (in the Portland Art Museum) on Friday, June 29th and Saturday, June 30th at 7pm and 9pm.  More info available here.

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TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME -- A FASCINATING MESS, INDEED-Y

Easily among the most confounding broadcast-to-big screen translations ever produced, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me completely capsized both in terms of critical and audience reception at the time of its 1992 release.  To be fair, a good deal of the once large, built-in, tv fan base for the film had already fallen away during the final season of the show (for more discussion on that topic, see this previous post).  Personally, I recall seeing the film on opening night at a small town, local theater with somewhere around seven other people in attendance; the film was dead upon arrival and limped out of town shortly thereafter.

The reviews were brutal.  The late Vincent Canby wrote that it was "not the worst film ever made; it just seems to be."  Peter Travers declared that "the impulse in the arts to build idols and smash them has found another victim in David Lynch."  My own reaction was a fairly muted response; I liked the parts I liked and remained curious about the other stuff, but it's a film that's difficult to be enthusiastic about on a first viewing.  Time has been kind to FWWM (Fire Walk With Me) and, unsurprisingly, given Lynch's growing reputation as our nation's chief surrealist, a cult audience has been erected around the film after its release on home video.

As an unabashed Lynchophile, I've seen it at least two dozen times now; it was one of my favorites vhs tapes to toss on when I was working graveyard shifts in the late 90s.  Some fans (British critic Mark Kermode among them) now insist that it's his greatest work, an assessment that I find more reasonable each time I view the film.

To a large extent, though the film's plot is explicitly informed by conditions drawn out by the series, the major difference between FWWM and many of the other films in Lynch's oeuvre is that there's such a magnitude of obscurity packed into its many wild and wooly passages that by the time the end credits crawl across the screen it remains essentially unknowable; it becomes an indecipherable mystery that trumps the relatively basic puzzle proposed by the series.

In terms of sheer inscrutability, only Inland Empire, the film that very well end up being Lynch's swan song, can challenge FWWM for pure WTF whiz-bang.  Fire Walk With Me is both an untidy and teetering mess from a master filmmaker and a masterwork that contains many ill-advised and resolutely awful sequences of questionable performance and construction.  A fascinating mess, indeed-y.

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Wednesday, June 27th at 9:30pm.  More info available here.

 
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GRINDHOUSE FILM FESTIVAL presents DON'T GO IN THE HOUSE

It's that time of the month again: Dan Halsted's back with another installment of his Grindhouse Film Festival at the Hollywood Theatre.  This month's selection is the 1980 Joseph Ellison chiller Don't Go in the House.  It's a rare opportunity to see the film on the big screen and probably the only chance most Portlanders will ever have to see in projected on 35mm.  Don't miss it.

Here's the Grindhouse Film Fest rundown of the event:
Don’t Go in the House (1979) Donald is a young man living with his overbearing mother. When he comes home one day to find she has died in her sleep, his sanity (which was a little shaky to begin with) flies out the window, and the voices in his head become overpowering. When he buys a flamethrower, this becomes one of the greatest horror films of all time. 35mm 70′s horror trailers before the movie!

Don't Go in the House plays one-night-only at the Hollywood Theatre on Tuesday, June 26th at 7:30pm.  More info available here.

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MUSIC FROM THE BIG HOUSE & SURVIVING PROGRESS

Hey there faithful readers, 

I'm in the midst of shooting a couple of projects right now, so, rather than writing two separate posts, here's a couple of capsule reviews of two new documentaries opening today in Portland:

Bruce McDonald directed one of my favorite b-grade road movies of the 90s (Highway 61).  For Music from the Big House, he turns his eye to the real life setting of Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary, one of the sites where the blues was born.  It's the prison where Leadbelly and countless other inmates suffered and turned that suffering into musical expressions based in their experiences.  

Canadian blues singer Rita Chiarelli has visited Angola off and on for some time now, eventually inspiring her to hold a collaborative concert within the prison walls with several bands made up entirely of inmates.  And while the film is based around that mission, McDonald wisely places the majority of the focus on the inmates, rather than Chiarelli.  It's not that she's particularly uninteresting--quite the contrary, actually--but it would take a lot to trump the moving, personal tales of woe relayed by the inmates to McDonald and his crew.

Recommended.

A still from Music from the Big House

Music from the Big House begins its run at the Hollywood Theatre on Friday, June 22nd.  Rita Chiarelli will be in attendance and will perform at the Friday, June 22nd screening.  More info available here.

A still from Surviving Progress

Surviving Progress is a documentary adaptation of Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress.  It's one of those apocalyptic, doom and gloom eco docs of which there seems to be no shortage of nowadays.  The film sports a sizable cast of A-list intellectuals, such as Margaret Atwood, Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall and Wright himself, all of which make a strong case against the drive for endless progress; Wright calls out the experiment known as civilization as being what he terms a "progress trap."  

Somewhere around the 2/3rds point, though, the film bogs down as it attempts to cover too much ground for an under 90-minute feature.  The message gets a bit lost as the filmmakers spend an extensive amount of time investigating the theft of Third World resources by multinationals, something already documented quite well in many other films.  Surviving Progress would have benefited from both a bit more focus and, perhaps, some specificity when it came to offering solutions to the problems it presents.

  

Surviving Progress begins its run at Living Room Theaters on Friday, June 22nd.  More info available here.

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IN THE FAMILY: THIS FILM BREATHES

If you see enough movies, you quickly become accustomed to the particular rhythms and stylistic flourishes associated with various genres and levels of production.  It gets to the point where, whether you're headed into a summer blockbuster, the latest indie hit or a made-for-export foreign flick, you can probably reasonably predict the form that the film will inhabit.  This isn't a criticism of what some might term cookie-cutter cinema; it's just an observation.  These conventions exist and are used widely because they're time-tested, work well and help filmmakers engage the audience in a story without having to reinvent the wheel with each new project.

All of which is a means of introducing the level to which Patrick Wang's In the Family upends one's expectations of how low-budget indie fare should operate.  Most indie films try to obscure their lack of means via quick, clever editing schemes that build excitement belying budgetary constraints.  In the Family goes almost the complete opposite route.  This is a shockingly, slowly-paced movie.

To be clear, the film isn't slow in the vein of a Tarkovsky or Malick, where transcendence is imparted to the audience via glacially measured beats matched with technical brilliance.  Instead, Wang fills every scene with the potential for reality to be reflected in the moment; basically, In the Family breathes more than any film I've seen in a very long time.

Those readers who have seen Steve McQueen's Hunger may recall the long sequence where Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and a prison priest (Rory Mullen) discuss the political and philosophical angles of Sands' hunger strike; it's an extended display of acting ability, one that seems to last forever without a cut.  In the Family feels like the three-hour version of that scene. It lives in the moment being presented, always.  And, as a result, it soars without relying on cheap tricks or diversionary tactics.  It's a film that leans hard on the writing and performances; there's really little else to the film, both of which are superbly focused and marvelous to behold.  Yes, it's a patiently-moving, long film but, make no mistake, every minute vibrates with a quiet, resonant beauty.

The story itself is simple:  a man's (Wang) life partner (Trevor St. John) passes away and, due to an outdated will, his custody of their son (Sebastian Banes) is called into question.  What's far more complex is the overall impression one gets while watching the film.  To view In the Family is to witness the birth of a new and authentic voice in American cinema.  Wang's work, both in front of and behind the camera, is impressively self-assured, especially given that it's his first time as a director and, as the lead, he's front and center for much of the three-hour running time.  This is an astoundingly great film, easily one of the ten best I've seen all year.

In the Family begins its run at Cinema 21 on Friday, June 22nd.  Director Patrick Wang will be in attendance for the 7pm screening on the 22nd and the 3:30pm and 7pm showings on the 23rd.  More info available here.


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