indie films

Take This Waltz: Complex Toronto Love Triangle

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Take This Waltz (2011), directed by Sarah Polley, is a good example of the type of character and dialogue driven independent film that is too nuanced and slow paced for the average movie audience. It stars Michelle Williams as Margot, a young married woman who very tentatively slips into an affair with her neighbor Daniel, played by Luke Kirby.

Take This Waltz has certain contrivances and affectations that will alienate certain viewers as well as critics. The way that Margot and Daniel meet, for example, is more than a little farfetched. Not knowing that they live within a stone’s throw from one another in Toronto, they just happen to meet at an obscure historical reenactment event in Novia Scotia. They also happen to be sitting next to one another on the plane ride home.

What I admired about the film was the way it did not make Margot’s choice between Daniel and her husband Lou (Seth Rogen) easy. Both men are portrayed as decent people who truly care bout Margot. Everything about the film is ambiguous and fluctuating. While some people may find this disturbing, this is actually more like real life (though the film can hardly be considered realistic in other ways).

Margot and Lou have an odd but believable relationship that contains lots of teasing and flirting alternating with hostility. While Margot seems restless and not particularly happy, we sense that this is something intrinsic to her and not really Lou’s fault. Lou’s sister Geraldine (Sarah Silverman) adds a dimension to the movie. She is a recovering alcoholic who is almost as outspoken and unpredictable as Silverman is in real life.

As played by Williams, Margot is revealed as a fascinating yet frustrating character. Her facial expressions are constantly shifting between smiles and frowns and she conveys sense of being confused and adrift. While we can sympathize with her actions as she spends more and more time with Daniel, we can also sense that it will be hard for things to end well for anyone involved. All of the performances in Take This Waltz are excellent, and the script keeps us completely uncertain about the future for these characters.

One of the things that I found a little irritating about the film is that it inhabits a kind of indie film fantasy world where ordinary factors such as economics barely apply. Everyone seems to live in near luxurious circumstances despite the fact that no one has a real job. Margot is a writer who confesses that she hardly ever writes. Lou is a writer of cookbooks who spends the day experimenting with recipes. Indeed, one of Margot’s complaints is that he’s always cooking chicken.

Although late in the film it is revealed that one of his books becomes a big success, this doesn’t explain how they maintain a spacious apartment in a fashionable neighborhood up till that point. Daniel is a rickshaw operator who seems to always be free during the day to pursue Margot. Towards the end of the film, we see a montage sequence where two of the characters are living in a vast loft that looks like something out of Architectural Digest.

These issues don’t directly lessen our enjoyment of the film, but they do undercut its credibility in a subtle way. Take This Waltz is certainly not the only movie that is guilty of this, of course. It seems that many filmmakers feel that audiences want to be reassured that all of their characters live a life of relative luxury and can spend their days focusing on their emotions and relationships.

Take This Waltz gets its name from a Leonard Cohen song, which is played during the film. Despite some quibbles about contrivances and economic unrealities, I enjoyed this film and admire the way Polley micro-focuses on conversations and minute changes in emotional atmosphere. This is exponentially more complex than the type of relationships portrayed in a mainstream romantic comedy.

Sarah Polley, though still in her early 30s, has had a long career as an actress. After some roles as a child actress, she appeared in films such as The Sweet Hereafter (1997)Go (mentioned in the chapter on Ensemble Films), and Guinevere (1999). She also directed Away From Her (2006) and the documentary Stories We Tell (2012).

Indie film directors

Rubberneck: Workplace Stalker

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Rubberneck (2012)

Director: Alex Karpovsky

In Rubberneck, director Alex Karpovsky also stars as Paul, in the familiar movie role of an obsessed stalker. Yet the film is sufficiently subdued and character driven that it manages to be more engaging than the typical entry in this genre.

Paul has a brief fling with co-worker Danielle (Jaime Ray Newman). After a weekend together, however, Danielle is clearly tired of Paul, who remains willfully ignorant of her disinterest. Rather than having Paul immediately transform into the psychotic stalker, however, Rubberneck gives us a series of painful and awkward moments as Paul loses control.

Rubberneck is one of those rare films that is actually better than the description makes it sound. Aside from the stalker cliche, we learn that Paul has abandonment issues regarding his mother. This type of Freudian back story has been used so many times in the last 50 years or so of cinematic history that it has the potential to be painfully familiar. Yet here it actually seems fresh and believable. Karpovsky comes across like a real person rather than a foaming-at-the-mouth psycho. Although his nerdy, repressed character is never quite sympathetic, he is at least believable and human.

Part of Rubberneck’s authenticity comes from the focus of the workplace environment. Paul, Danielle and a dozen or so other people work in a claustrophobic lab that conducts tests on guinea pigs. Karpovsky (as director) does an admirable job at capturing the low key, everyday interactions that seem trivial but carry potent emotional undercurrents. For example, we see Paul trying to appear casual as he watches Danielle flirt with another co-worker. We can sense his inner turmoil, but Karpovsky (the actor) doesn’t overplay this. He never quite loses control -until he does.

Rubberneck is a small, indie film and is not exactly momentous or groundbreaking. Yet it’s a fascinating and fresh look at a subject that most movies reduce to near parody.

Alex Karpovsky has been busy with interesting, low key indie films in the last few years, in the role of actor and/or director. I also enjoyed his performance in Supporting Characters, an inside look at the making of a film.

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    Uncategorized

    Pulp Fiction Mystery

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    The Cracked video below is, as you might expect, tongue and cheek, but it nevertheless illustrates some reasons Pulp Fiction is still one of my all time favorite films. While it can be dismissed as an exercise in violence, vulgarity and all around excess, it has lots of layers that bring up issues such as morality, redemption and, as this video asserts, possibly even parallel realities.

    Apparently there is a slight discrepancy in the dialogue between the opening scene (with the bank robbers) and the return to this scene at the end. Was this a blooper or a deliberate device Tarantino snuck in the film. Another mystery -why has no one noticed this in the almost 20 years since its release? Perhaps it has been noticed and commented on -despite having a fledgling movie blog, I’m hardly a movie trivia savant.

    Anyway, this is something to watch for the next time you view Pulp Fiction!

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      dystopian films, indie films

      Branded: Interesting But Confusing Dystopian Satire

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      Branded (2012)
      Directors: Jamie Bradshaw, Aleksandr Dulerayn

      This movie is a confused mess, but an interesting and sometimes thought-provoking mess. I actually wanted to like it, as it had some compelling social themes and displayed some real originality. Unfortunately, the lack of focus and editing waters down any message about the role of brands in the modern world.

      The story is set in Moscow and is a Russian-American production, though most of the film is in English. The hero is Misha (Ed Stoppard), a marketing wizard who eventually discovers (in a truly bizarre manner) that brands are not merely a manipulative force in the world, but are living, predatory monsters who literally consume people.

      Branded is basically a dystopian sci-fi satire that is sort of an updated Brave New World. The main focus is on fast foods, and how large corporations set out to make it fashionable to be fat. Even though the film definitely contains the element of satire, the mood is too often deadly serious. This is part of the problem, as more humor could have made the bizarreness of it all more palatable.

      There are two main problems with Branded. The first is that it has a long middle where it drags. There is an extended period when Misha drops out of the ad game, has a strange vision, performs a Biblical style animal sacrifice and learns the weird truth about brands. Even if we are to accept this at face value, this part of the film dragged on longer than necessary and should have been edited.

      The other problem is that the concept of the living brands isn’t really coherent. We never learn how these monstrous creatures were created Was it deliberately done by corporations or did it just happen, the way Godzilla was a byproduct of nuclear radiation? The film never tells us. There also seems to be some confusion about what the real nemesis is here. At one point, Misha helps a company create a vegetarian chain of restaurants to dismantle the evil burgers that are making everyone fat. As if there weren’t enough subplots, people are dying from a mysterious disease that may or may not be Mad Cow Disease. This is another potentially interesting and topical point, but it creates more ambiguity as far as the film’s main plot is concerned. Is the problem with beef and unhealthy food or brands per se? Aside from addressing the problems of fast food, there are also stand-ins for Apple and other popular brands that are not food related. The theme so broad that it’s just too difficult to keep it hanging together.

      The romance between Misha and Abby (Leelee Sobieski), the niece of Misha’s boss, is sometimes interesting and provides some relief from the dystopian sociology. Yet this too drags out as the two are constantly coming together and breaking up until the very last scene.

      Branded is a movie that deals with some important and serious topics. In many scenes it does so in an intelligent and original manner. Yet it is ultimately too muddled to make the kind of impact it should have made.

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        Documentary

        Radio Unnameable: The Singular Career of Bob Fass

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        Note: This review has recently been re-published on Devtome.

        Radio Unnameable (2012)
        Directors: Paul Lovelace, Jessica Wolfson

        This is a documentary about Bob Fass, an underground celebrity not widely known outside of certain circles. I must confess that his name was only vaguely familiar to me prior to seeing the film. This was a good thing in a way, as it allowed me to learn all about the subject from the ground up. Fass is the kind of character who, even if you’ve never heard of him, you have certainly heard of many people and events where he played a central role.

        The name Bob Fass will be familiar mainly to New Yorkers who tune their dial to the independent radio station, WBAI, which is owned by Pacifica Foundation. WBAI’s slogan, according to their website, is Free Speech Radio, and they have traditionally featured many controversial and offbeat programs, such a Democracy Now!

        Pacifica has had its share of controversy in recent years as it has undergone various changes in leadership and faced financial hardship. Currently, there are rumors that Pacifica is about to sell out (literally!) to corporate radio giant Clear Channel.

        Fass, whose program was called Radio Unnameable, was the creator of free form radio. As the name suggests, this meant that his program was a completely open-ended affair where guests and callers could discuss anything under the sun. These often ended up being radical and controversial topics, but they were just as often random and personal stories.

        Part of the uniqueness of Radio Unnameable was its time slot -the wee hours from midnight to 5 a.m. This fact alone tended to skew his listener base to the unconventional. There is something about the late night hours that makes people drop their usual filters.

        Fass was at the hub of many iconic countercultural events of the 1960s. Arlo Guthrie’s famous Alice’s Restaurant was introduced on Fass’s show in 1967. Other guests included Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Allen Ginsberg, Judy Collins and Abbie Hoffman.

        All of this and more is captured in this quite thorough documentary, which is sure to appeal to Fass’s fan base as well as those not yet familiar with him. Many of the events portrayed in Radio Unnameable are long forgotten by most people (those who knew about them in the first place). For example, Fass helped to organize a “Yip-in” at Grand Central Terminal which started off like an exuberant party but degenerated into police-instigated violence.

        Watching this, we are reminded that in the pre-Internet days, radio played a pivotal role in keeping people informed and connected. Parallels are drawn to Twitter, as several of the events portrayed are analogous to the type of flash mobs that now rely on social media for their momentum.

        The amazing thing about this man is that he began broadcasting in 1963 and is still at it today. After being thrown off the air for several years, he was reinstated by WBAI, albeit on a part time basis –the current WBAI schedule lists his show on Friday from 12 to 3 AM.

        The young documentarians Lovelace and Wolfson provide a healthy sense of perspective to Fass and his story. While they obviously admire him, they also don’t fall into the trap of relegating all of this to a bygone era. They are aware of how internet activists and the Occupy Movement, for example, use similar tactics. This places Fass in a contemporary context as well as an historic one, which is certainly where he deserves to be.

        For more information about this film, see: Radio Unnameable

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          Western

          Good For Nothing: Deadpan Western Spoof

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          Note: This review has been re-published on Devtome.

          Good For Nothing (2011)
          Directed by Mike Wallis

          Good For Nothing is an unusual Western -one that veers back and forth between seriousness and deadpan comedy. Judging by some of the reviews on Netflix, the comedy part went right over the heads of many viewers.

          I’m not sure how this was possible, as having a tough gunfighter with a case of erectile dysfunction would seem to be a clue that this movie isn’t exactly a straightforward Western. Perhaps it’s true that Americans have no sense of irony?

          Good For Nothing was filmed in New Zealand, though many of the scenes looked like they could have been from Colorado or Wyoming. It stars Cohen Holloway as the ruthless, steely eyed outlaw whose name is never mentioned –obviously a reference to Clint Eastwood films such as High Plains Drifter (Holloway does a pretty decent Eastwood impression with his perpetual squint as well).

          Inge Rademeyer plays Isabella, a prim and proper Englishwoman who arrives in the wild west to visit an uncle’s ranch. No sooner does she set foot in a saloon than a gunfight erupts and she is abducted by the savage and mostly silent gunfighter.

          The rest of the film revisits the usual cliches of Westerns. When the man kills a sheriff, a posse of misfits sets out to kill him. The towns in Good For Nothing are like ones you’ve seen a hundred times before (assuming you’ve seen that many Westerns, that is), only more so. Everyone is staggering around drunk, firing a gun or glaring menacingly around the room.

          The unlikely couple never exactly bond, but their relationship turns somewhat symbiotic. At some point, Isabella recognizes that she has nowhere to run, and the posse is out to kill her as well as the outlaw. While on the run, he seeks a cure for his embarrassing condition, first from a Chinese doctor and then from an Indian medicine man with less than stellar results.

          Good For Nothing was not created to be a crowd pleaser. It’s too slow paced to satisfy action fans. The humor is extremely dry and subtle — one exception is a scene where two inept gunfighters fire and miss at each other until one is finally killed. It is definitely not, however, Blazing Saddles.

          The panoramic scenes of the wide open country and the occasionally graphic violence prevent it from being an out and out comedy. It also isn’t going to win any points for political correctness. The casually brutal way that the man treats his captive for most of the film is likely to offend many viewers, especially since he is portrayed as at least borderline sympathetic by the end.

          Overall, Good For Nothing is a well acted, often interesting and offbeat but ultimately not very memorable entry in an ever popular genre.

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            Film Festivals

            Tribeca Film Festival 2013

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            The Tribeca Film Festival, which began in 2002, is running from April 17-28 in 2013. This year, as usual, there is a wide assortment of offerings, including a few fascinating documentaries.

            There are now so many film festivals that it’s hard to keep up with them all, but Tribeca films a definite need. While most film festivals are in small towns that come alive strictly during the film festival, this one is right in the heart of New York City.

            So what’s on the agenda this year? Here are just a few of the selections:

            The Motivation, a documentary by Adam Bhala Lough on the world of street skating.

            Lenny Cooke, directed by Josh and Benny Safdie, is a documentary about a young basketball player who doesn’t make it into the NBA.

            Adult World -directed by Scott Coffey, is about a poet who works in a sex shop.

            The Acrobat, directed by Gerardo Herrero, is a Spanish documentary that looks at the phenomenon of suicide.

            AB, directed by Daniel Klein, is about a man who has an accident in a remote area in the middle of winter.

            Lil Bub & Friendz, directed by Juliette Eisner and Andy Capper, is a documentary that focuses on celebrity cats on the internet.

            Mistaken For Strangers -directed by Tom Berninger, follows the rock group The National on a big tour.

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              indie comedies, indie films

              The Comedy: Parodying Hipsters

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              The Comedy (2012)
              Directed by Rick Alverson

              The Comedy, the ironic title to a relentlessly ironic film, may appeal to fans of Borat. Yet this film goes beyond the mockumentary style of that film, asking us to believe that a series of sketches is a depiction of real life. The Comedy is an example of how a movie can be clever and well acted and still be fundamentally lacking in authenticity.

              The antihero of the movie is a slacker/hipster named Swanson (Tim Heidecker), a bearded, pot-bellied character whose entire life is devoted to being obnoxious. He lives on a houseboat and cavorts with a group of male friends who share his taste for psychological pranks.

              In the opening scene, we are privy to a bacchanal where these guys drunkenly dance around naked and grope at each other simulating sexual acts. Aside from the fact they are all in their mid-30s or older, the scene could have been shot at a frat party.

              The rest of the movie follows these decidedly uncharming guys around as they engage in non-violent but not quite harmless pranks at the expense of taxi drivers, gardeners and other hapless victims (at least as they are portrayed here).

              The underlying premise of The Comedy, to the extent that it can be said to have one, is that Swanson and his friends are wealthy or at least relatively affluent. They don’t have to work at 9-5 jobs, though Swanson takes on a dishwashing job for no apparent reason (except to harass his co-workers, of course).

              The Comedy can be seen as an expose of the excesses of hipster culture. Yet I’m not sure that the subculture depicted here actually exists. They are perhaps meant to be a 21st Century version of the ne’er do well playboys or cads of much older films. Yet those type of characters took great pride in their personal appearance and cultivated a charming, debonaire aura. Even today’s hipsters usually try to look, well, hip. Swanson and his crew flaunt their lack of style and personal hygiene.

              These are more like refugees from the 1978 film Animal House -if those characters aged but didn’t mature and had enough disposable income to avoid regular employment. They don’t seem to have the usual hipster fetishes for art openings, gourmet foods, alternative rock or the other activities you might see on Portlandia (if you’re not lucky/unlucky enough to live near real hipsters). They do, however, live in a state of perpetual irony -mocking everything and everyone at all times, including each other.

              What I found most annoying about The Comedy is that many of the scenes simply didn’t ring true. At least in a scenario like the show Punk’d (and its predecessor Candid Camera), or Borat, it’s understood that we are watching scenes that are set up for an audience.

              As drama or comedy, scenes require a certain sense of truth if they are to be accepted. The Comedy doesn’t really deliver on this count. For example, we watch as Swanson, a soft looking white guy, goes into a bar full of black men and proceeds to fearlessly make racially charged comments to everyone in the room. How likely is this?

              Similarly, women seem to find Swanson attractive no matter how unappealingly he behaves. At his dishwashing job, he begins his seduction of a waitress by making blatantly offensive comments to her. This would more likely lead to his immediately losing his job than to her ultimately falling for his (non-existent) charms and eventually sleeping with him.

              If The Comedy is saying anything at all (a dubious proposition), it’s that this is what you get when you take hipsterism too far. A bunch of completely unlikable, borderline sociopaths who go through life in a soulless haze of perpetual irony.

              Yet it doesn’t even really say this much. It hedges, making Swanson borderline human towards the end -for no apparent reason, except because it’s a rule of cinema (even indie cinema, it seems) that characters are supposed to change over the course of the 90 or so minutes we get to spend with them.

              Swanson and his friends are never established as bona fide people with motivations that make sense. Perhaps we could believe that one person, such as Swanson, might have a personality disorder that leads him to act as he does. But a whole cadre of friends who share these characteristics? Who are they and how did they get this way? Who supports their idle lifestyle? Swanson has a wealthy father who is about to die, but the others have no back story whatsoever.

              The Comedy is, despite its basic emptiness, funny at times, in a similar way that a mindless action movie can provide moments of excitement. Yet it ultimately leads nowhere. Though, I suppose, that might be the whole point.


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                Bindlestiffs: Using the Homeless as Props

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                Bindlestiffs (2012)
                Director/Writer: Andrew Edison
                Starring John Karna, Luke Loftin, Andrew Edison

                The title of this film comes from an old word meaning hobo. The main distinction of this film is that it was “presented” by Kevin Smith. Other than this, it’s an extremely low budget and rather amateurish indie film that is part comedy, part drama and part random weirdness.

                As someone who mainly watches indie films, often obscure ones, I am usually fairly tolerant of offbeat stories without a linear plot. Nor am I a reviewer who is a stickler for political correctness. This one, however, left a bad taste in my mouth, mainly for the way it portrays a homeless person as a faceless, purely symbolic entity who exists solely as a prop in the lives of a group of suburban teens.

                Bindlestiffs is about three teenagers (Karna, Loftin and writer/director Edison) who are suspended from high school when they protest the banning of The Catcher in the Rye. This book has long been a symbol of teenage angst and rebellion and, more recently, associated with mass murderers (a fact that becomes relevant to the story).

                The three friends embark on a trip to the big city where they intend to experience as much as possible, sex included of course. This is extremely familiar movie territory, but Bindlestiffs is no typical Hollywood teen movie. Unfortunately, it ends up being even more inane and less coherent than the average entry in this genre.

                Things get really weird when one of the kids has a sexual encounter with a homeless woman, who then apparently dies. The three drag her body around but before they can dispose of it, she comes back to life. Yet she has no lines, and we never see her face -only a tangled mess of gray hair. For the rest of the film, they carry and drive her around as though she was a mannequin. Even if you do find this amusing, the joke would start to wear thin after an hour or so of this.

                There are other scenes involving a hooker and one of the teens smoking crack. Yet none of it seems real. It’s more like a series of disjointed fantasy sequences, dreamed up by a group of sheltered teens with little experience beyond the suburbs.

                Another ill formed character is the high school security guard, who plays the stereotype gung ho military type. He is actually funny at first, but gradually devolves into a silly parody. He comes up with a paranoid idea that the kids are planning a school shooting. This could have led to some dark humor, but this is a thread that gets forgotten as the film reaches its pointless conclusion.

                I seldom actively dislike low budget indie films, but this one really annoyed me for a few reasons. The dehumanizing of the “hobo” was one factor, and then there were the constant references to The Catcher in the Rye -as if merely mentioning this book could somehow prop up the film and give it depth and meaning.

                If you want lightweight teenage rebellion, stick with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which may not be profound but is at least entertaining.

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