True/False 2015: Almost Famous

"Fuckery and shenanigans." That's how the sister of one of the antagonists in Finders Keepers (2015, directed by Bryan Carberry and J. Clay Tweel) describes the film's conflict over a severed leg found in a barbecue smoker. It's as good a description as any, I guess. Finders Keepers is the kind of film that Flannery O'Connor might have written had she lived in the current media age. She once wrote a story in which a traveling salesman makes off with the prosthetic leg of a lady professor, so there's a precedent there. This is a film that certainly veers uncomfortably close to hicksploitation, to say nothing of the Southern Gothic.

Read more below the fold >>

True/False 2015: A Better Tomorrow

Another persistent subject of the contemporary documentary zeitgeist are the lives of people--particularly children--who squat in the ruins of post-Capitalism. It would be easy to think of these kinds of films as social problem films, or at the very least as a kind of "poverty porn," but that would do the best of them a disservice. The good ones mark the lives of specific human beings, however desperate their lives, and let those lives illuminate more universal concerns. Spartacus and Cassandra (2014, directed by Ioanis Nuguet) is one such film. It chronicles the lives of two young Roma children struggling to live in Paris with parents whose basic competence to be parents in the first place is deeply suspect. This is a closely observant film that knows the power of an image and how to play with images without losing the integrity of the narrative. The end result is a highly aestheticized form of social realism.

Read more below the fold >>

Myths, Stories, and Songs

Song of the Sea (2014, directed by Tomm Moore) expands on the design aesthetic of Moore's The Secret of Kells, while diving even deeper into waters of Irish mythology. Like that previous film, Song of the Sea is visually ravishing, though to an even further extent. Unlike that film, Song of the Sea occasionally invites comparisons to other films, particularly films by Hayao Miyazaki. The film can withstand the comparison, but it's not the same kind of singular experience as Kells, nor does it have the overarching design-as-theme element. Don't get me wrong: it's beautiful; it's one of the most beautiful films of recent vintage. But its beauty is beauty for its own sake rather than as an integrated element of the story. Whether or not this is a flaw in the film, I can't really say. Beauty is its own justification a lot of the time.

Read more below the fold >>

True/False 2015: A Bitter Almond

Director Adam Curtis claims that he's a journalist, not an artist. There's a presumption in this idea that the two are mutually exclusive, though I'm not sure I believe that. I certainly don't believe it of Curtis, whose films are powerful beyond the scope of mere document. Curtis's new film, Bitter Lake (2015) pushes at the boundaries of non-fiction. It's a film of great formal daring, one that internalizes post modernism in its image collage and its multitude of allusions. It's an object designed to be consumed on the internet, though it works fine as a cinematic experience. Whether or not it manages to connect the dots of its argument--something that can be debated--is almost beside the point.

Read more below the fold >>

True/False 2015: Remote Control

Documentaries about the "War on Terror" seem like a permanent fixture in the contemporary film landscape. So long as horrible things are being done either against the democracies of the West, or, more probably, by the democracies of the West themselves, these kinds of films will be with us. They tend to paint a dismal picture of the world, one that more and more resembles George Orwell's prediction of the future as "a boot stamping on the human face forever." This year's crop includes Drone (2014, directed by Tonje Hessen Shei), a film that attempts to provide a multiplicity of viewpoints on the Obama administration's campaign of remote control warfare. That very multiplicity tends to blunt its impact.

Read more below the fold >>

True/False 2015: Poison Pens

I'm late to the party this year when it comes to writing about the 2015 edition of the True/False Film Festival. The delay was unavoidable. Life gets in the way sometimes. I need to get all of this down before I forget it all. Fortunately, I took lots of notes this year.

---

Best of Enemies (2015, directed by Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon) resurrects the 1968 debates between arch conservative William F. Buckley and arch liberal Gore Vidal on the occasion of that year's national political conventions. "Debate," is probably the wrong word for what these were. Duels, is more like it. Some kind of bloodsport. A harbinger for what media discourse on politics would later become. Buckley and Vidal were mortal ideological enemies and they jabbed at each other with spears tipped with venom, with invective scrawled with acid.

Read more below the fold >>

The Devil, You Say?

Alexandre Aja is a director who is never likely to live up to his promise. I'm not a fan of his signature film, Haute Tension, but I could see the talent involved with its making. Before it immolates itself with an unearned twist ending, it's a razor sharp horror movie, one that knows the value of suspense while keeping an instinct for the jugular. Nothing he's made since then has been as assured, though I do have a soft spot for the cheap pulp thrills of his remake of Piranha. I don't know why I expected more from his latest film, Horns (2013), but I did. It has a good cast and a droll source novel. In principle, the elements are all there. Somehow, Aja fumbles it all.

Read more below the fold >>

Ministers of Grace

My first impression of Calvary (2014, directed by John Michael McDonagh) was that it was deadpan religious noir. It's a film that attempts to reconcile the mission of the Catholic church with the wickedness done by that church's ministers. It falls into the category of noir because it's a crime film of sorts, one particularly concerned with a fall from grace. Its concern with states of grace is more (little "c") catholic than is normally the purview of noir, but its fall from grace is an equally dark descent. The punch, when it comes, lands with a brutalizing force even to a mocking unbeliever like me.

My second impression was that it was the cinematic equivalent of Hieronymus Bosch's "Christ Carrying the Cross," which has a central figure carrying the weight of the world through a crowd of leering grotesques. Bosch's painting has always had multiple interpretations, depending on the worldview of the critic. Is it deeply spiritual? Is it an irreligious mockery? I tend to think it's the former. Calvary provides a similar dichotomy, but it's more clearly an expression of spirituality. It's an argument for the necessity of the church in an increasingly secular and sinful world, and an indictment of the Catholic Church's utter failure in the face of its own mission.

Read more below the fold >>