| 29 May 2010
Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider.
I was in college when I first came under the influence of Dennis Hopper, going with my roommate and fellow counterculture rebel wannabe to see a movie called Easy Rider, which Hopper wrote, directed and appeared in.
It was a call to all of us closet revolutionaries to leave our humdrum lives behind and hit the open road, preferably on a souped-up motorcycle. It was an infectious fantasy and a stirring film that I would be afraid to see again today, for it could never be as good as my memory has made it.
Hopper died today of prostate cancer at age 74, leaving behind a handful of first-rate films (Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, Apocalypse Now, Elegy), a few that would be unwatchable without his performances (Waterworld, Super Mario Brothers) and more than 100 others that were variously undistinguished.
By his own admission, Hopper never fully lived up to the promise of Easy Rider. As he said to me when he came to the Palm Beach International Film Festival in 2006 with another of those mediocre releases, 10 & Wolf, “I’m not sure that there’s a meaningful body of work there, but certainly not the kind of body of work that I wanted to leave.” The irony, of course, is that the festival had lured Hopper to South Florida to accept a career achievement award.
Much of his career output was thwarted by years of drug and alcohol abuse that led to Hopper being committed to a psychiatric hospital, sense memories of which crept into some of his recent performances. Still, he told me with unusual honesty, “I feel that after ‘Easy Rider’ I never directed the great movie that I wanted to direct. I never really played the great role that I wanted to play. They didn’t happen, in my opinion.”
Ben Kingsley and Dennis Hopper in Elegy.
Not by 2006, perhaps, but two years later, he gave a performance in Elegy, the screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s short novel The Dying Animal that shows the virtuoso actor he could be. He played the best friend and fellow academic of Ben Kingsley, two lecherous old men who meet for morning coffee, a brilliantly underplayed role that certainly deserved an Oscar nomination at the very least. Chances are you have not seen Elegy, which was underappreciated and under-distributed, but is worth seeking out.
(Yes, I know the Academy Awards get it wrong too often to use that as a measure of an actor’s skill. It is worth noting that Hopper played the snarling villian in Speed, the movie that brought Sandra Bullock to prominence. Now she has an Oscar, and a real actor like Hopper does not. I’m just saying …)
From our 2006 interview, Hopper commented on some of his cinematic career high points:
* Easy Rider: “I wanted to leave a time capsule of what was happening at the time. I never thought about directing when I was in the theater, but I got into the movies and there was somebody telling me every line, to do it differently. I realized the director was really an important guy.”
* Blue Velvet: “That was one of my first roles coming back out of rehab and detox. I finally got sober and it was a terrific experience.”
* Apocalypse Now: “It was unbelievably arduous, but a great creative experience.”
* Waterworld: “One of the best vacations I’ve ever had. It didn’t do well in the United States because everyone shot themselves in the foot talking about ‘the most expensive movie ever made.’ ”
When we spoke, Hopper was a month away from turning 70, a milestone that he could not quite fathom. “It seems ridiculous,” he said. “I was the one who said I didn’t think I’d live to see 30.” He scoffed at the notion of retirement. “I don’t think acting or painting or taking photographs -- the kind of stuff I do -- that one day you just stop because you’re too old. You continue doing them as long as you can physically do them, and I’m feeling pretty good physically.”
Dennis Hopper (1936-2010).
| 26 May 2010
Stagecoach (Criterion)
Release date: May 25
Standard list price: $30.99
As the legend goes, John Ford’s Stagecoach established the Western as an A picture, reviving it from its creatively moribund inception as disposable, one-dimensional nickelodeon fare and elevating it to the lofty standards of Whitmanesque poetry and pre-Wellesian compositional virtuosity that all of our great Westerns, from Red River to Unforgiven, now possess.
With the hindsight of an endless canon of these great Westerns, each of them one Netflix click away, it’s difficult for most viewers today to imagine what Westerns were like before Stagecoach. Because we remember the classic Westerns through the films of the masters – Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, William Wellman and Ford, with his Monument Valley landscapes – we tend to forget how forgettable most of their genre antecedents were, and how important Stagecoach was. It was Ford who first visualized the Western as the iconic bedrock of uncharted American civilization and first gave its characters psychological complexity. Oh, yeah: and he kinda discovered John Wayne as a leading man, too.
With Stagecoach hitting stores in an outstanding 2-disc Criterion release, it’s a great time to reacquaint yourself with this epochal picture. These days, we can see that its deceptively simple story about a handful of familiar-seeming characters aboard a potentially hazardous stagecoach ride through the American West was well ahead of its time. Stagecoach was one of the earliest examples of the road movie, and the premise of clashing archetypes confined to an enclosed space established the template for every reality show long before televisions were even in common use.
Furthermore, Stagecoach was subversive in that it was an action-centric genre with little action. The first gunplay sequence, the famous shootout scene that pitted the weary travelers against Geronimo’s Apaches, doesn’t come until 70 minutes into the 98-minute film. Almost the whole film is building character, not plot, and during that time Ford balances crudeness with beauty and surprisingly bawdy humor with enormously affecting empathy. And every shot is framed like a painting, with Ford’s marvelous deep-focus photography going on to inspire Orson Welles, who recruited Ford cinematographer Gregg Toland to film perhaps the most exquisitely filmed black-and-white movie ever made in Citizen Kane.
As always, Criterion’s supplements are a comprehensive feast, spanning the technical, historical and theoretical aspects of the film and its director. The most prized extra included here, for the first time on DVD, is Ford’s 1917 silent feature Bucking Broadway, an early culture-clash Western comedy. From the technical side, we get a nice tribute to Stagecoach’s legendary stuntman Yakima Canutt, and from the revealing historical side, Ford’s grandson Dan discusses his grandfather’s intertwining personal and professional relationships aboard his fabulous boat, which we see in priceless home-movie footage.
One of the most interesting, if occasionally eye-rolling, supplements, is Ford author and theorist Tag Gallagher’s video essay Dreaming of Jeanie, a creative remixing of Stagecoach clips with his own insertions, repetitions, superimpositions and semiotics-laced interpretations, which can be as pompous as they are illuminating. Some of his more pretentious, obsequious nuggets: “Has there ever been a bigger shot in movies before this one? Vast, like our aspirations in life.” “Every shot is a movie all by itself.” I love theory as much as the next cinephile, but the compositions, editing and spatial depth of Ford’s seemingly invisible directorial hand are so self-evidently brilliant that such deconstructionism is unnecessary and risks reading too much into things.
An essay like Gallagher’s is something Ford would no doubt scoff at. In my favorite of all the bonus features, we get to hear an hourlong 1968 interview with the man himself, conducted by British journalist Philip Jenkinson. Many of his questions, most of them commendable, are mocked by the prickly Ford, notorious for being a tough interview. Early on, Ford tells Jenkinson “I’m not interested in movies. It’s a way of making a living.” Like Howard Hawks, who, in a late-period interview for Turner Classic Movies, shrugged at the thought of Cahiers du Cinema critics like Andre Bazin and Francois Truffaut analyzing his movies as great art, it seems Ford never saw himself as anything but a craftsman. We’ve been arguing otherwise for decades, and we show no signs of slowing down.
Yesterday Girl (FACETS)
Release date: May 25
SLP: $26.99
FACETS’ long-awaited series of Alexander Kluge films begins this month with Kluge’s first feature, 1966’s Yesterday Girl. Kluge was one of the pioneering figures of the New German Cinema – Yesterday Girl predated the first features of arthouse heavyweights Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders – yet he is largely unknown in the West. FACETS is hoping to change that. The distributor is releasing 16 Kluge films, one a month beginning this week. Yesterday Girl reveals Kluge to be a visionary right from the start, his provocative style borrowing as much from the radical playfulness of Godard and early Truffaut as it does the associative montages of Eisenstein and the surrealistic shocks of Buñuel. Naturalistic in its presentation and fragmented in its storytelling, Yesterday Girl employs unexpected intertitles, silent-film collages, stop-motion animation and more, proudly treading on conformity as it follows Anita (played by the director’s sister, Alexandra), a petty thief and lost soul adrift in Germany’s postwar economic miracle. Anita is a cipher of a protagonist, but the film exudes life through her various encounters, which involve a dalliance with a politician, forays into philosophical thought and several inquiries into the morality of Germany’s judicial system. This is thinking-person’s cinema all the way, and I can’t wait for the future releases from this unsung titan.
Owl and the Sparrow (Image Entertainment)
Release date: May 25
SLP: $24.99
Tremulous handheld camerawork and naturalistic, on-location settings give an authentic air to this touching Vietnamese fairy tale about a wide-eyed, inquisitive girl laboring in her tyrannical uncle’s bamboo-blind factory after the death of her parents. That is, until she flees to the big city of Ho Chi Minh, selling roses to make a living until she decides to play cupid to two lonely city dwellers: A zookeeper whose fiancée abandoned him, and a sweet but promiscuous flight attendant having a passionless affair with a married man. The film’s heart is as big as its budget is small. It’s a lovely little romance about second changes, told in a minor key – it’s so charming that even the film’s overly sentimental, third-act Hollywood trappings can’t quell the honesty that runs through it.
Waiting for Armageddon (First Run Features)
Release date: May 18
SLP: $20.99
Tackling a subject of enormous breadth in a scant 74 minutes, this documentary directed by Kate Davis, Franco Sacchi and David Heilbroner examines the theories of rapture, tribulations and Armageddon that America’s 50 million evangelical conservatives ascribe to. The filmmakers interview religious leaders and extremist congregants who believe literally in metaphysical phenomena that much of the remaining population would consider nuts, and they do so without a shred of editorializing or condescension -- making Waiting for Armaggedon a more mature and compassionate work than Bill Maher’s unbearably smug Religulous. In addition, the film travels to the past – and, evangelicals would argue, future – Biblical battleground of Jerusalem, exploring the complex relationship between fundamentalists Christians and the holiest of Jewish holy lands. It’s all fascinating and revealing stuff, but it’s insufficiently comprehensive. For a movie with three credited directors, there simply aren’t enough sources to paint a complete picture of a movement.
| 09 May 2010
Tokyo Sonata (E1)
Release date: May 4
Standard list price: $21.49
Tokyo Sonata, the latest from Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is seemingly a departure from the director’s preferred forte of cerebral horror and science fiction. At least that’s how it begins, with a focus on the lives of a middle-class Japanese family of four that echoes Yasujiro Ozu’s gentle domestic dramas.
But it’s a film very much of the moment – Ozu’s preoccupations about the passage of time and how progress and maturation affect and dissolve the family unit are updated to reflect the economic recession of the 21st-century global job market through the character of husband and father Ryuhei (Teryuki Kagawa), who is downsized from his corporate position in the film’s opening.
A bureaucratic paper-pusher with few if any practical skills and a cringe-worthy lack of confidence in job interviews, Ryuhei is quickly absorbed among the throngs of unemployed drones. Full of shame, he keeps the news of his dismissal from his family, but his sins of omission are nothing compared to his neighbor, a long out-of-work man who dresses like a CEO and has programmed his cellphone to ring with supposed “business calls” every few minutes.
Ryuhei’s patriarchal leadership is slipping away, and with it generations of regressive Japanese tradition. He seems to have little control over his sons, one of whom (Inowaki Kai) pays for forbidden piano lessons with his lunch money while the other (Yu Koyanagi) leaves to fight for the United States in the war in Iraq. His anger and frustration at his diminished role inside and outside the family boil to the point where his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) barely recognizes his behavior.
There comes a point when you’re reminded that Tokyo Sonata is made by the the guy that gave us the modern paranormal classic Pulse (later repurposed as a flaccid Wes Craven slasher) and the mesmerizing serial-killer chiller Cure – and the movie never really settles down from there. This exceedingly dark transformation comes to a head when an inept robber (Koji Yakusho, one of Kurosawa’s most frequent collaborators) bungles an attempted job at Ryuhei’s house and instead steals away with a curiously compliant Megumi.
What seems at first like an awkward attempt to recast Yakusho as comic relief becomes the start of a journey that’s as strangely mystical as it is shockingly violent. This is a narrative punctuated by child abuse, rape and double suicides, and one main character is hit by a car and left for dead. But ultimately one leaves Tokyo Sonata with a sense of spiritual transcendence, a little bit of hope in a bleak and uncompromising world.
Movies this foundation-shaking and blazingly original don’t come across often; Kurosawa has been gifted enough to direct several, and Tokyo Sonata is somewhere near the top.
Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties (Criterion)
Release date: May 18
SLP: $61.49
This is the collection art-house cinemaniacs have been salivating for. Oshima’s Outlaw Sixties compiles five obscure early features from one of Japan’s most celebrated and controversial provocateurs, Nagisa Oshima. He’s most known in the west for his 1976 shocker In the Realm of the Senses, which depicted genital mutilation and unsimulated sex. Indeed, Oshima was one of the first Japanese directors to present uninhibited sexuality on the screen; Pleasures of the Flesh, included here, is one of many of his country’s “pink cinema,” or heavily edited soft-core porn titles, of the period. But he was also politically astute and cinematically audacious, his avant-garde sensibilities justifiably compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s (His Violence at Noon, included in this set, boasts more than 2,000 edits). The five-disc set also features Sing a Song of Sex, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide and Three Resurrected Bastards, censorship-baiting studies of youth culture that brewed together sex, violence and political invective, making Oshima an enfant terrible to be reckoned with.
Mine (Film Movement)
Release date: May 4
SLP: $22.49
One of the more underreported ripples from Hurricane Katrina’s devastating landfall has been the hundreds of thousands of pets abandoned in the storm’s wake. Geralyn Pezanoski’s documentary Mine follows the volunteer activists who led the rescue effort and the Katrina survivors looking to be reunited with their displaced animals, many of which have been relocated to families elsewhere. While it would seem the pets’ original owners should have the right to reclaim their animals, you can just as easily make the argument that the pets are better off frolicking in idyllic suburban neighborhoods or agrestic fields than potentially struggling in the blighted rubble of post-Katrina New Orleans. Narrowing its focus to four or five specific animals and their traumatic journeys from one loving family to the next and, sometimes, back again, Mine is sympathetic and understanding of all sides of this complex quagmire of moral, legal and practical considerations. If you’re a pet lover, prepare for your waterworks to be turned on full blast, either from sadness, joy or both. But you don’t need to love pets to appreciate filmed journalism as compelling as this. Mine is a story about love, kindness, greed, selfishness, community involvement and sacrifice – epic themes delivered in a tight 80-minute package.
One Deadly Summer (Bayview)
Release date: May 11
SLP: $27.99
This forgotten, Golden Palm-nominated 1983 noirish melodrama by Jean Becker aims to reach a new audience courtesy of Bayview Entertainment’s exceptional transfer. Isabelle Adjani stars as Eliane, the tartish femme fatale who seduces the affectionately named auto mechanic Pin-Pon (Alain Souchon) in order to unlock the secrets hidden in his family’s dusty barrel organ: Turns out the organ was delivered by the men who raped her mother and led to her conception – or so it seems. One Deadly Summer is full of interesting twists and surprises that help to compensate for some of its dated techniques, such as the shifting, unnecessary voice-over narration, which never achieves the Rashomon-like sense of conflicting perspectives and subjective realities that it’s shooting for. Adjani brings a compelling cocktail of fearlessness and vulnerability to her role, developing a tragic character that’s ultimately more memorable than the movie she’s in.
| 27 April 2010
Surviving Desire, Possible Films: Vol. 2 (Microcinema)
Release date: April 27
Standard list price: $22.49 each
It’s not hyperbole to suggest that my cinephilia in general and my specific interest in writing about films are the result of one director’s work: Hal Hartley.
Known for his insightful, quirky movies about hyper-literate drifters and outcasts who converge on Long Island, Hartley was one of the earliest mavericks of the contemporary American independent cinema, alongside Jim Jarmusch, Richard Linklater and Spike Lee. My introduction to Hartley in my formative college years was the kind of career-altering epiphany that only happens a handful of times in somebody’s life.
Through Hartley, I discovered Wim Wenders (and through Wenders, Rainer Werner Fassbinder; and through Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk); Jean-Luc Godard (and through Godard, the French New Wave, Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller); and Robert Bresson (and through Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer). The rest is film history.
Hartley was a prolific writer-director throughout the 1990s, and he developed a cult following among indie rockers, arthouse attendees and nu-bohemians. A true auteur, his films are as instantly identifiable as anything by Hitchcock, Godard or Cassavetes, and like most uncompromising artists, his work tended to polarize. After the commercial and critical failure of his revisionist Beauty and the Beast parable No Such Thing in 2001, his films became increasingly difficult to fund and distribute. He’s released just two features since, moving to Berlin in 2005 partly because his work was better appreciated in Europe.
Undaunted, Hartley is back on DVD shelves – and, briefly, back on our shores – for a mini-revival of his films past and present. At the IFC Film Center in New York recently, he introduced screenings of his 1991 feature Surviving Desire as well as a program of his five most recent shorts, all of which have just been issued on DVD from Microcinema.
Looking at Surviving Desire once again – I’ve been the proud owner of the out-of-print Wellspring release for years – is like reentering an former home I hadn’t visited in years. Made for public television, Hartley’s hourlong experiment is, on the surface, a movie about an intellectually constipated professor (Martin Donovan, Hartley’s earliest onscreen surrogate) who falls in love with a flighty student (Mary Ward) who’s only interested in seducing him for literary material.
But nobody watches Hartley movies for the plots. Surviving Desire is really a profound meditation on love, attraction, faith, inspiration and whatever other theoretical concepts float around the director’s dialectical miasma of a script. Brilliant lines and clashing non-sequiturs zing by like a machine gun’s rat-a-tat, the highbrow and lowbrow coexisting harmoniously.
Characters read philosophy books on camera, try to comprehend Dostoevsky, engage in impromptu dance choreography, accidently marry vagrants on the street and walk past public rock ‘n’ roll serenades. Weird off-screen sound cues and deliberately constrictive visuals further set this classic apart, a great introduction to early Hartley that, hopefully, will make newbies want to look at his other masterpieces from the period, The Unbelievable Truth (1989) and Trust (1990).
The image quality of Microcinema’s Surviving Desire disc is supposedly digitally remastered with color correction supervised by Hartley, but the difference from the original release is negligible. The only supplemental addition is the 11-minute featurette Upon Reflection: Surviving Desire, a funny and entertaining look at the movie’s production and the director’s overriding themes.
The second Hartley release of the month, Possible Films: Volume 2, collects five movies, ranging from 3 to 28 minutes long, which the filmmaker shot in and around his Berlin apartment in 2008 and 2009. There’s nothing here quite as ambitious or socially conscious as his most recent features – the cool sci-fi dystopia The Girl From Monday (2005) and the spy-movie deconstruction Fay Grim (2006). But these shorts prove that Hartley has been far from inactive in Berlin; he’s still creating art, if on a smaller scale than before.
Like Fay Grim, nearly every shot in this collection is a canted, or slanted, angle, calling attention to the formalism and suggesting that something is perpetually askew. The shorts all deal in some capacity with modern media, the artistic process and communication, and all are cut from the same fold of cloth. In an interview on his website, www.possiblefilms.com, Hartley referred to the shorts, collectively, as a suite.
The shorts consist of A/Muse, which follows an aspiring actress as she campaigns to become Hartley’s next onscreen muse; Implied Harmonies, a documentary about Hartley’s involvement filming the video portion of composer Louis Andriessen’s epic multimedia opera La Commedia; The Apologies, about a playwright working on a musical version of The Odyssey who lends his apartment to an ex-girlfriend for an afternoon; Adventure, which finds Hartley and wife Miho Nikaido candidly analyzing their marriage while traveling to Tokyo, New York, Istanbul and Berlin; and Accomplice, a spy thriller in miniature about a woman asked to pirate a rare videotape.
If there’s something not completely satisfying about these shorts, it’s their inherent brevity. Hartley is too talented a mind to stop mass-producing movies for theatrical distribution. A little reflective solitude away from the noxious movie industry is a great thing; more artists should do it to refuel their imaginations. But Hartley has been away from the game long enough. Word has it he’s working on an omnibus film called Moving the Arts, along with directors such as Jia Zhang-Ke and Atom Egoyan. Here’s hoping it leads to the kind of exposure Hartley earned in his ‘90s heyday.
Vivre Sa Vie (Criterion)
Release date: April 20
SLP: $29.99
The country’s greatest DVD distributor finally releases one of the greatest films of the French New Wave, and it’s a vast improvement over the previous edition by Fox Lorber.
The most memorable collaboration – or cinematic dance, if you will -- between director Jean-Luc Godard and star/wife Anna Karina, My Life to Live is an account of a girl’s descent into prostitution, balancing dispassionate, documentary detail with groundbreaking theatrical formalism. Equal parts boundary-pushing cinematic experiment and powerful social critique, Vivre Sa Vie is the kind of film people write theses about and still manage to run out of space. It’s an epochal work of art and an endless wellspring of depth that still astonishes no matter how many times you see it.
Australian film writer Adrian Martin offers a passionate, invigorating commentary track, and the bonus features are delectable. These include a 40-page booklet, excerpts from a 1961 French television broadcast about prostitution, a 45-minute 2004 interview with French film scholar Jean Narboni and, best of all, a 1962 TV segment on Karina in which the interviewer asks her some very weird and visibly uncomfortable questions – such as “Do you think you’re ugly?”
The Barbara Stanwyck Collection (Universal)
Release date: April 27
SLP: $36.49
This six-disc collection goes a long way to display the versatility of one of our greatest actresses ever (by the American Film Institute’s estimate, she was No. 11), spotlighting movies that never turn up in most Stanwyck “Best of” lists. What a joy to finally have on DVD films such as 1937’s Internes Can’t Take Money, which marked the first appearance of Dr. Kildare (played here by Joel McCrea); 1942’s The Great Man’s Lady, which starred Stanwyck as the 100-year-old (!) widow of a legendary leader; and 1949’s The Lady Gambles, one of the earliest Hollywood pictures to deal with gambling addiction.
The two brightest gems in this set are the pair of mid-career Douglas Sirk melodramas that many have waited years to arrive on DVD: All I Desire (1953), which finds Stanwyck, as an aging actress, returning home to the family she abandoned 10 years prior, and There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), about an affair between a married toy manufacturer (Fred MacMurray) and Stanwyck’s lonely fashion designer.
Tales From the Script
Release date: April 20
SLP: $20.99
More than just a visual how-to manual for aspiring screenwriters, Tales From the Script is an absorbing compilation of interviews from dozens of Hollywood screenwriters sharing joys and frustrations, insider secrets, revealing anecdotes and even philosophical truths. Interspersed with memorable film clips depicting screenwriter’s struggles (In a Lonely Place, Barton Fink, et al.), Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman’s documentary picks the minds of John Carpenter, Paul Schrader, William Goldman, Allison Anders, Larry Cohen and many others.
Subjects range from a general lack of respect for the profession to studio executives hacking apart their work, to the perpetual struggle to meeting actor’s and director’s needs to the scourge of the focus group and working in a “post-content era,” where an overreliance on franchise films and familiar generic tropes discourages new ideas. Screenwriters compare their work to everything from dance to war to heavy gambling over the course of 105 minutes, but the most memorable interviews are the personal stories of triumph and dejection, whether it’s Bucket List writer Justin Zackham sharing his sweet success story or BloodRayne scribe Guinevere Turner discussing the complete butchering of her script by notorious hack director Uwe Boll.
| 22 April 2010
The cast of Altar Boyz at Jacksonville’s Stanton College Preparatory School, from Thespians.
Cut down to five days, and minus the glitzy gala that always seemed more important to its organizers than the movies themselves, the Palm Beach International Film Festival at 15 is reportedly on its last legs.
After a decade and a half, the event never really caught on with the local public and has become a financial drain on the county as recession-strapped corporate sponsors have fallen away.
I would like to report that there are plenty of worthy films to be seen, but executive director Randi Emerman remains stingy about showing movies in advance to the press, perhaps because she does not want reviews out that would only discourage attendance. According to a festival publicist, Emerman insists that no major film events outside of South Florida hold advance screenings, an assertion that will come as a surprise to festivals in Toronto and Tribeca, to name a couple.
Ultimately, screenings were held for four films, which the publicist insisted were the only four available to be shown. That is awfully hard to believe, but then these four were certainly not selected for their quality, so maybe it is true. It would be a mistake to extrapolate the quality of the entire festival based on these four films, but feel free to jump to your own conclusions. (By the way, the best of the films reviewed below, Thespians, was not made available by the festival staff, but by its director.)
For more information, call (561) 362-0003 or go to www.pbifilmfest.org.
* * *
Dennis Sims, theater instructor at the Dreyfoos School, with student Jeremy Daniels, from Thespians.
* Thespians (Saturday, 2:30 p.m., Cobb Theatres Downtown 16) -- Competitions as a subject matter often make for strong documentaries in which moviegoers can become emotionally invested. Think of Spellbound, Wordplay and Mad Hot Ballroom. Now comes Thespians by Jacksonville-based Warren Skeels, a look at the Florida statewide high school drama festival, as seen through the aspiring actors of four schools, including West Palm’s Dreyfoos School of the Arts. Skeels, a former thespian himself, got unusual access to the preliminary work and rehearsals within the schools, has a good eye for capturing the backstage tensions and he edited it all down to a tight hour and a half.
There is commercial potential in the film because of its timing, coming just as High School Musical and TV’s Glee are hot. Skeels digs for the personal stories of the performers, and is particularly successful with a couple of best friends from an Orlando school who tackle an intimate scene from John Patrick Shanley’s Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and the geeky, rhythm-challenged guys of a Jacksonville prep school who get whipped into shape for a highly choreographed number from Altar Boyz. Dreyfoos’s Jeremy Michaels gets a nice showcase, but otherwise the school is a bit shortchanged.
A scene from Exam.
* Exam (Monday, 7 p.m., Cobb Theatres Downtown 16) -- So you think you’ve got a hard time landing a job? It is nothing compared to what the applicants for an unspecified position at a major biotech company do through in Stuart Hazeldine’s Exam. Those who suffer from claustrophobia can pass on this yarn, which all takes place entirely inside a sterile, windowless room where the test is administered. For that matter, those who insist on applying logic to their viewing experience and crave a satisfying wrap-up will want to pass as well.
Still, the premise does tantalize. Eight employee candidates, most of them young, attractive and well-dressed, are read the stringent guidelines for the exam before them on their desks and are then left alone, with only a silent guard to toss out those who break the rules. Then the stakes are quickly raised when they realize that their test papers are blank.
So they have to work together, or at least seem to, to learn first what the exam question is, then how to solve it. In this psychological puzzle, Luke Mably takes control of the group dynamic, and the movie. Hazeldine handles the harder job -- executing the camerawork so the film’s inert quality is minimized -- but he eventually writes himself into a too-obvious corner.
Adham, an Egyptian recycling worker, from Garbage Dreams.
* Garbage Dreams (Friday, 4:45 p.m., Muvico Parisian; Sunday, 11 a.m., Movies of Delray) -- As we learn in the opening titles, Cairo, Egypt, is a city of 18 million people, yet it has no municipal waste disposal system. What it does have is the Zaballeen, a sub-culture that has been eking out a meager living picking up the city’s garbage and recycling it for what value they can derive. It is, as you can imagine, an enormously unsanitary occupation, yet these people are shown diligently rummaging through the refuse for the hidden worth -- mostly metal cans and scraps -- within.
Director/producer Mai Iskander rubs the viewer’s nose in the garbage and does what he can to delineate characters for us to follow, but it is a narrow subject with little to add once the eye-opening existence of the Zaballeen is established. The film cries out for narration, for we learn almost everything from the profiled individuals, who prove not to have much to say.
Paris Hilton and the paparazzi, from Giving It Up.
* Giving It Up (Friday, 7:15 p.m., Cobb Theatres Downtown 16; Sunday, 9:15 p.m. Movies of Delray) One does not need to like the subjects of a documentary, but this look beneath the surface of Hollywood’s paparazzi culture is a particularly shallow look at gang wars fought with cameras. Our national obsession with celebrity should probably come as no surprise, so nor should the exponential increase of these stake-out artists who live off the grab shots of the Paris Hiltons, Britney Spears and Angelina Jolies of the world that they then sell to the tabloids and other photo services.
Director-writer Frank Ruy follows along on a few high-speed pursuits, as the photographers race across L.A. to gain position outside tony restaurants, and wait for the A-list stars to emerge and make their payday. Understandably, Giving It Up includes only those celebs that the paparazzi are able to find and cajole into cooperating long enough for a saleable shot, so one wonders if what Ruy is up to is just as annoying, being the paparazzo to the paparazzi. Yes, these guerilla photographers get their own 15 minutes of fame in the film, but it is time you will want back.
Tovah Feldshuh in Ten Stories Tall.
* Ten Stories Tall (Saturday, 7:15 p.m., Muvico Parisian; Sunday, 8 p.m., Lake Worth Playhouse) -- Writer-director David Garrett wades into familiar territory with this dramatic tale of death, grief and dysfunctional family tensions, but succeeds with it thanks to an unblinking touch and a first-rate cast, led by Tovah Feldshuh as a guilt-wielding mother who comes unhinged at the funeral of a lifelong friend. Garrett’s dialogue is well-honed, and even the minor characters feel fleshed out and multi-dimensional. Ally Sheedy gives an impressive performance as the dead woman’s daughter, trying to keep a level of civility to the proceedings, bringing her own career back from the dead. Theater fans will appreciate seeing Emily Skinner in a small, crucial role.
