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Features
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The Wheat and Chaff of LAFF
A pair of ethno-centric documentaries and an all-star female cast top critic Todd Gilchrist’s preview list for this year’s Los Angeles Film Festival.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
By Todd Gilchrist
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Lion's Gate Films
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Lisa Kudrow in Happy Endings
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Film festivals, once the last bastion of cinematic appreciation and celebration, have changed in fundamental ways in recent years. Much like the burgeoning independent film movement of the early 1990s, fetes like those at Cannes, Venice, Berlin, and even Sundance have become increasingly co-opted by the business side of that time-honored chestnut, show business. No longer merely content to glean acclaim and early exhibition of anticipated works, the major studios have transformed these celebrations of celluloid into auction blocks where distribution rights are snapped up by the highest bidder and artistic merit is often measured by prospective box office gross.
Still, some smaller ceremonies around the world do still exist for the express purpose of singing the medium’s praises, in all its kaleidoscopic forms. The 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF), which opens today, offers such a wide and disparate array of projects, both big and small, that it’s nigh impossible to pinpoint to whom - if anyone - they might be pitching their wares. Most prominent, of course, are the features that are already destined for big-screen distribution, either by virtue of their bankable casts and crew (Don Roos’ Happy Endings) or imminently provocative subject matter (Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins).
Those, however, are not the entries we have previewed; instead, we humbly offer a brief look at some of the other selections so that you may weed through the chaff and get straight to the wheat of this year’s June 16th – June 28th event.
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Fine Line Features
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Kurt Cobain impersonator Pitt
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Nine Lives: This centerpiece premiere is a remarkable little film that centers around not one but nine protagonists, women at different stages of their lives who must learn how to deal with their pasts in order to enjoy a happier, healthier future. Director Rodrigo Garcia (Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her) assembles an all-star cast that includes Holly Hunter, Amy Brenneman, Kathy Baker, Glenn Close, Sissy Spacek, and Robin Wright Penn to tell his evocative vignettes, which occasionally overlap but never in ways we expect. The film is scheduled for release in little more than a month, but be one of the first to get in on this precious little project; it’s a film that bucks conventional structure and tugs at your heartstrings as strongly as the most professionally-crafted Hollywood epic.
2046: Director Wong Kar Wai returns to his In the Mood For Love territory with this unofficial sequel, which stars Tony Leung as a frustrated writer who stages a series of romantic rendezvous with different women in order to concoct a story about a future paradise where fantasy and reality collide with one another. For those who have not yet seen 2046‘s predecessor, Wong’s film is occasionally obtuse and often a challenge, but it’s also a rewarding one. Leung gives a remarkably nuanced turn as the central figure in lives that run parallel with his but never intersect, with Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li and Maggie Cheung all making appearances and the cinematography proving predictably lush. But even with a bevy of suitors and a seemingly endless series of couplings, ultimately you’ll find less passion here than moments of artful introspection.
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Lion's Gate Films
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Rize's Lil' C
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Last Days: On the other hand, Gus Van Sant’s eagerly-anticipated document of the final moments of Kurt Cobain’s life (click here for our related Cannes blog item) proves to be nothing more than a self-congratulatory exercise in countercultural nonsense. Not having seen either of Van Sant’s previous ‘elliptical’ films, Elephant and Gerry, I went into the film expecting a tale of wanton youth, creative overload, or artistic alienation, as so many better (and to be fair, worse) films have done before. Instead, Van Sant abandons not only the notion of ‘motivation,’ as in Cobain’s reasons for killing himself, but shreds the concept of forward narrative drive, and opts instead for a ruminative piece that feels like Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny without providing anything cathartic as an orgasm to cleanse the palate after 90 minutes of virtual nothingness.
Michael Pitt, who played indistinguishable iterations of same character in The Dreamers, Murder By Numbers and the sublime Hedwig and The Angry Inch, adds zero dimension to this wafer thin portrait of an artist at the crossroads between art and commerce; meanwhile his director amps up ‘organic’ sound and unstructured cinematography (read: out of focus and/or frame) to give it the viscera it might gain if it were bound by the strictures of even the loosest framework or context. Last Days is the kind of crap that convinces commercially unsuccessful hacks that they are serious artists; to say that it’s the cinematic equivalent of Lou Reed’s disavowed noise-fest Metal Machine Music is an insult to Lou Reed.
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Nine Lives co-star Close
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The Beautiful Country: Featuring Damien Nguyen, Bai Ling, Tim Roth and a brief cameo by Nick Nolte, this feature amounts to a fascinating if overlong tale of a half-Vietnamese, half-American boy who journeys to America to find his father years after the Vietnam War. Nguyen brings depth and resonance to the story, which could easily have succumbed to ‘triumph of the will’ platitudes, and director Hans Petter Moland keeps a firm grasp on the material to keep it true to life’s infinite and fickle possibilities. Thin Red Line director Terrence Malick produced the project, and his sense of sincerity, sometimes overwrought, hovers over the film; but suffice it to say you could do worse than see one of the few fiction entries available that makes you feel and think.
Rize: Even though David LaChapelle remains on my shortlist of music video directors I’d least like to see make the transition from small to big screen success, his debut feature documentary may just turn out to be one of the best movies I’ll see all year. Outwardly a document of street dancing in all of its repetitive glory, the film captures the social and cultural underpinnings of a dance movement called ‘crumping’ that emerged from South Central Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots, and does so with such force that its occasional detours into emotional button-pushing are easily forgiven. The fetishistic LaChapelle, who seems a tailor-made choice for subject matter dealing with the kinesis of the human body, uses digital video to shoot much of the action, but none of its power or beauty is lost; seek this film out for a triumphant, satisfying and spine-bending ninety minutes at the movies.
Beauty Remains: For fans of Chinese cinema, movies like these are a dime a dozen, and director Ann Hu’s sophomore effort does little to distinguish itself from the hordes of family dramas that precede it (better filmmakers such as Zhang Yimou made more than ten years ago). Telling an intimate tale of two sisters, one half-legitimate and one fully so, the film explores social and familial constructs of mainland China before Communism fully descended in 1949 in fully human if frequently melodramatic terms. As the sisters, Vivian Wu and Xun Zhou do their best with rote expressions of privilege and rebellion, but the film falls apart far too soon to sustain its featherweight story; Hu achieves the look, but not the feel, of territory traversed by the likes of Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige years ago, and makes a lackluster film that should find few stateside fans.
How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (And Enjoy It): Last, but certainly not least, Joe Angio’s documentary on the life of Melvin Van Peebles follows in the footsteps of Melvin’s son Mario’s quasi-factual rendition of the making of Sweet, Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but takes enough detour to keep audiences interested before, during and after the making of that landmark motion picture. The film is a winning portrait of a man who would not bend - either to social constraints or to commercial pressure - and who succeeded on two continents as a writer, filmmaker, musician, provocateur, and even Wall Street trader for a while. Angio presents as much affection for his subject as Mario did with last year’s Baadassss!, but takes the fictional sheen off the material and creates an indelible portrait of one of America’s most influential artistic voices.
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