Christopher Shea's profile

Reviews: The Boston Phoenix

Covered movies and events at Berlin film festival (Berlinale) for OUTSIDE THE FRAME, the film blog of THE BOSTON PHOENIX. Combined reviews and observations from the festival into two online "diary entries."
 
(Original reviews available here and here)
Christopher Shea's Berlin Diary, part one
 
Christopher Shea, our correspondent at the Berlin Festival, a.k.a Berlinale 2013, files this report.
Reviews:
 
THE GRANDMASTER
Set in World War II-era Foshan and Hong Kong, THE GRANDMASTER traces the rise and fall of Kung Fu master Ip Man. The movie is gorgeous, strange and stylized, bouncing between tea houses and brothels and beaches and back alleys, all with operatic sweep. A slow-motion  Kung Fu fight in a train station is a highlight, as is one slow-motion scene where brothel employees sweep fans across their faces while staring straight into the camera. The ladies don't fight often in this movie, but their strength is nothing to sneeze at.
 
Still, full enjoyment of the movie probably rests largely on your belief in the infallibility of Wong Kar Wai's genius. Seen through this lens, the movie's inscrutability is a sign of mastery; its nearly incomprehensible early scenes - during which we learn the details of 1930s Sino-Japanese politics and the history of Kung Fu - aren't sloppy, but deliberately, unsettlingly obscure. If you trust that your ignorance of Kung Fu wisdom and Wong's  craft lie behind these little confusions, you'll love the movie; otherwise you might find it satisfyingly epic, but opaque.
 
 
PARADIES: HOFFNUNG (PARADISE: HOPE)
The third installment in Ulrich Seidl's PARADISE trilogy takes place in a summer camp for overweight teens, where a young camper (Melanie Lenz) begins a strange almost-love affair with the resident doctor. What starts out as a slight breach of standard bedside manner slowly morphs into something chaste enough to stay within the bounds of law, but far from fully kosher.
 
Seidl has a terrific cast, a good ear for teenage dialogue, and a sly humor about the whole dictatorial enterprise of fat camp. He doesn't pass moral judgment on his characters, refusing to humiliate the ones who behave badly or to reward those who do good. Instead, he seems content simply to creep us out quite mildly by showing the budding relationship but allowing it to remain tame enough that we can never quite cry foul. The result is an exceedingly clever movie, and a satisfyingly amoral one, but one your brain sheds as easily as water weight.
 
DON JON'S ADDICTION
Don Jon (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hits the gym daily, slams ladies on the weekly, makes good money at the Jersey bar where he works, and looks a bit like Rocky. Unfortunately, he's also addicted to porn-- like several times a day addicted. The combo's well and good and fairly unobtrusive, all things considered, until a husband-hungry ladyfriend (Scarlett Johansson) turns up, discovers the porn, and wants the filth to stop.
 
The movie is Levitt's first foray into feature film writing and directing, and it has a rookie's feel, steeped as it is in obvious metaphors - Don Jon's hair frees itself from gel just as he frees himself from himself, and so on. Certain things also straight up don't make sense. Barbara (Johansson) really cares that much that he watched porn? Don Jon's really never heard of clearing his internet history? The latter wouldn't be such a problem if the plot didn't hinge on it.
 
Still, Joseph Gordon Levitt's movie is sweet, funny, and incisive. Levitt is appealing as always, and it's intriguing to see this congenitally erudite-shy boy take on the persona of a meathead. Julianne Moore provides her usual blank but soothing presence, as a woman who Don Jon meets in night-school who ends up being his cure. The script is sympathetic to all of its characters, but also probing, and by the end it makes a very trenchant point about how selfish the selfless drive to start a family can be.
 
IN PASSING:
 
Overheard at THE GRANDMASTER:
"These are the expensive seats. There are no more expensive seats. We are only not sitting down in those seats because we got here later than they did."
 
Catchy refrain:
"If you're happy and you know it clap your fat"
PARADISE: HOPE
 
Notable entrance:
On the movie screen just before PARADISE: HOPE began, we could watch the actors and directors enter the building lobby and walk into the movie theater in real time.
 
Notable: The sound of hundreds of press heads trying not to gawk.
 
Stray observation:
The perfume of the woman sitting next to me's thoroughly altered my experience of PARADISE: HOPE.
Christopher Shea's Berlin Diary, part two
 
OUR TAKE
 
VIC + FLO ONT VU UN OURS
Just out of female prison for sentences we never learn the details of, Vic and Flo move into Vic's quadraplegic uncle's remote Quebec home, more for the bed, board and isolation than out of any sense of filial piety. Soon enough their past comes back to haunt them, in the cute but sadistic form of Jackie, a sociopath from back in prison, who Flo made the mistake of crossing some time long ago. The movie's got a lot of violence, and a pretty bleak outlook that, at the end of it all, feels a bit unearned. But screenwriter/ director Denis Côté's abrupt and adept genre switches make for an unusual and entertaining ride. The movie starts on a wry note-- with Jackie telling a kid to improve his trumpet-playing if he wants to hack it in the busking world-- and ends somewhere far, far creepier. Definitely worth a viewing.
 
JE NE SUIS PAS MORT
A freaky Friday for the art house set, JE NE SUIS PAS MORT follows a prestigious Parisian professor who dies suddenly and enters the body of one of his poor but precocious Algerian students. The body-switching's a bit of a literalized letdown, given the subtle, creepy ways Mehdi Ben Attia draws parallels between the professor and his student in the movie's early scenes (a slowly oozing bloody nose on both men, for example). The film's got comely actors and pleasant Parisian settings, but it feels by its end like Attia could have done something more subtle and more satisfying.
 
NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON
Based on the 2004 novel about an aging teacher who finds a train ticket to Lisbon in a book and follows the bread crumbs to Portugal to find the author, LISBON has good and bad sides. Here, for your convenience, a list:
 
The good:
●        Lisbon looks lovely under director Bille August's gauzy filter.
●        So does Jeremy Irons.
●        Some young pretties, such as Mélanie Laurent and Jack Huston, show up.
●        The multilnational cast speak English with odd, fake Portugese accents.
●        Backward time-jumping plot means jazzy costumes from the 1970s.
●        Inadvertently hilarious scene where protagonist (Irons) locks love interest in his car for hours (watch for it).
 
The bad:
●        Outrageous sentimentality.
●        Schizophrenic desire to make you cry and then laugh like you're watching LOVE, ACTUALLY.
●        It is not BRIDESHEAD: REVISITED.
 
GOOD BUZZ AND BAD BUZZ
 
POZITIA COPILULUI
Word on the street is that this year's ultra-triumph is POZITIA COPILULUI, a Romanian movie about a mother trying to buy her son out of jailtime. This reviewer didn't make it to the press premiere, but heard that the host introduced COPILULUI as the odds-on favorite for the Golden Bear (a claim which, we should note, was surely made without any consultation with the jury). The film received a great audience reaction after the screening, too.
 
GOLD
The great disappointment for the Berlinale's host country, meanwhile, is GOLD, one of two German entries in the competition that left audiences hugely disappointed. One moviegoer recommended the film-- which chronicles German explorers' search for gold in 19th-century Canada-- as a good choice for a German-learner, "because there isn't much you have to understand."
 
RANDOM THOUGHTS
 
Perplexing film motifs 
A perplexing film motif that I've seen in too many places to count: The professional theater production with high school level sets. In this year's JE NE SUIS PAS MORT, the lead character's wife is an actress. When we finally see her perform, it looks like she's doing WAITING FOR GODOT on a set designed by a 15-year-old in his basement.
 
On Subtitles
An otherwise perfectly artful movie, BAEK-YA -- about two young men who meet on the internet for sex, but end up going on a sordid adventure instead-- featured some of the worst subtitles I've seen on screen.
 
Some were just clunky. When one character asks another what airline he works for, the other responds, "the German one." You know, the German one. We didn't want to deal with a lawsuit, so the German one. Other dialogue was far stranger. As the two men sat on a stoop in a moment of apparently peaceful repose, one ripped through the silence with an inexplicable "fuck you."
 
The whole thing felt a little dada, like someone had made one movie, and someone else had dubbed over it with jungle noises.
 
What do you do in a case like this? Chalk it up to bad subtitling, or blame the script?
Reviews: The Boston Phoenix
Published:

Reviews: The Boston Phoenix

A diary of reviews and observations from the 2013 Berlin Film Festival, or Berlinale.

Published:

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