VeeShapeOpening ThisWeek
VeeShape
VeeShapeThe Congress
VeeShapeRuns Fri., Aug. 29–Thurs., Sept. 4 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 122 minutes.
VeeShapeBased on a 1971 sci-fi novel by Stanislaw Lem, this movie begins intriguingly as Hollywood satire. Robin Wright plays Robin Wright, an actress on the wrong side of 40 with two kids to support. The roles aren’t there, so her agent (a very warm, welcome Harvey Keitel) gets her an unusual audition with a studio boss (Danny Huston, ever charming and malevolent). Basically the deal is this, he explains: We get your past and future likeness to manipulate however we want in the computer—but no porn!—now and forever, so as to not compete with yourself. “I need Buttercup,” he says. “I don’t need you.” These are the best, funniest scenes to The Congress, though not the most eye-popping ones, which soon follow.
VeeShapeThe movie’s directed by Ari Folman, whose animated Waltz With Bashir (2009) recounted his experiences in the Israeli Army when it invaded Lebanon in the ’80s. This is a very different, futuristic kettle of fish, rendered in both live-action and animation to mixed results. War, as veterans will tell you, can be a surreal experience—oddly well suited to the animator’s fickle pen. But Hollywood has always been about magic and shape-shifting: We expect to be tricked and enchanted. Thus, 20 years later, when Robin drives out to a fan-filled entertainment convention center in the desert (perhaps to sign a fresh contract for a new product), then doses herself with a certain drug, things get delightfully but unsurprisingly strange.
Suddenly the sand turns to waves and cars morph into smiling creatures that comport like dolphins. Robin’s hotel is a pill-popping psychotopia, a kind of phantasmagoric Kafka theme park where paying guests get to be their favorite celebrity. Folman packs the movie with plenty of familiar faces, though he avoids the names: Tom Cruise, Marilyn Monroe, Beyonce, Michael Jackson, Grace Jones, etc. Yet in this Disneyland-on-acid milieu, Robin finds a fascist edge—entertainment as mind control, a means of subjugating the populace. Uncle Walt has become a dictator.
This is where Lem, a Pole who spent most of his life behind the Iron Curtain, proves a hard fit with today’s Hollywood. As Folman lurches his story (and Robin) forward by another seven decades, his parable grows ever more unwieldy. Jon Hamm and Paul Giamatti show up in supporting roles, but they get lost in the shifts from Kansas to Oz and back. (When Robin complains, “I just wanna get out of this hallucination,” we share the feeling.) The Congress is at its sentimental weakest when it comes to Robin’s son (Kodi Smit-McPhee from The Road ), who’s going blind and deaf. (This allows Wright to shed ever more tears, apparently written into her contract.) Its second-half strength is the animation, richly colored but flat, like Betty Boop, early Disney, or Looney Tunes—Hanna-Barbera meets Matisse. Forty years ago, this might’ve been considered a trip movie, like Allegro non troppo. Today the debates about free will versus chemical mind control feel dated and a little too Matrix-y.
Finally, nobody should worry about the fate of Robin Wright. Thanks to House of Cards, she’s doing just fine in her career—without benefit of the computer. Brian Miller
VeeShape
VeeShapeExpedition to the End of the World
VeeShapeRuns Fri., Aug. 29–Thurs., Sept. 4 at Northwest Film Forum. Not rated. 90 minutes.
VeeShapeI was told there would be more penguins . . . well, not actually. The modern-day explorers in this Danish doc are actually headed north, not to Antarctica, though it must be said that Werner Herzog’s far superior Encounters at the End of the World casts a long antipodal shadow here. Another problem? Not enough snow; nor are there any maps to show where our research schooner is headed, which turns out to be the northeast coast of Greenland, not the thawing Northwest Passage. Polar bears are tantalizingly promised, but elusive.
VeeShapeSo, short of adventure, what is this voyage about? In English and Danish, the ship’s scientists and artists discuss their different methods. One side, in director Daniel Dencik’s dialectic scheme, is supposed to illuminate the other. Sorry to say, I don’t see it. The scientists are a pragmatic lot: drilling core samples of permafrost; dredging up new species of sea-dwelling worms; searching for remnants of Stone Age encampments during Greenland’s long-ago warm spell (which could well be returning, as several note). The artists take photos and make sketches, but they’re too self-conscious in their roles. You get the sense that all of them have seen Encounters and—when the camera turns to them—are anxiously worrying, “What would Werner say?”
Both parties speak often of evolution and adaptation, of the geologic change embedded in the fossils, ice, and seawater below. Given such silence, the absence of ringing cell phones (though not of the ship’s stereo system), and the grandeur of the fjords, the talk inevitably turns philosophical. Even if Dencik’s conceit is somewhat forced, it has the effect of concentrating the mind on cosmic matters—perhaps like the campfire musings of those ancient Stone Age settlers.
Finally we see a polar bear! Only instead of a majestic killer, he’s reduced to burglarizing fishing shacks, perhaps because the changing environment has already reduced his natural supply of seals and ice. The explorers pass by, heading home to snug Copenhagen, and you can almost imagine the sad bear thinking, “Take me with you!” Brian Miller
VeeShape
VeeShapePA Five Star Life
VeeShapeOpens Fri., Aug. 29 at Seven Gables. Not rated. 85 minutes.
VeeShapeIrene is keen at finding flaws and reluctant to commit to permanence. In that sense, her job couldn’t be more ideal: secret hotel inspector. She travels to first-class resorts around the world, sampling the food, checking the dust on the mantels, rating the efficiency of the staff. Already deep into a stylish middle age, Irene is aware that her status is unusual and perhaps unsustainable. She knows this not so much because she feels great angst about it—by the looks of things, she doesn’t—but because other people keep implying that her nomadic life must be unfulfilling in some essential way.
VeeShapeIrene, played by Margherita Buy, is the protagonist of A Five Star Life, directed and co-written by Maria Sole Tognazzi. (The Italian title is Viaggio Sole, so something like Solo Traveler would’ve been a better English title.) With this setup, you can see the movie’s conventional arc shape up: a midlife crisis; epiphanies involving children and a new man; and a last-act expression of growing and learning. But Tognazzi and Buy aren’t having it. In Buy’s splendidly neutral performance, Irene does do some soul-searching, but she will not fit into the arthouse formula; Tognazzi invents situations that seem to promise a cozy solution, and then casually sidesteps them. Irene’s sister (Fabrizia Sacchi), for instance, is married with kids, but if this example brings Irene a pang about not being a mother, she doesn’t sweat it too much. Irene’s ex-beau (Stefano Accorsi), still a friend and currently going through his own midlife uncertainty, seems a possible option for Irene, or then again maybe not. Even a pleasantly flirtatious encounter with a stranger at a Marrakesh hotel ends without melodrama—or even drama.
In short, Tognazzi is doing something subtly heroic here. She delivers the requisite eye candy, but denies us the tidy resolution. Instead she seems to ask: Who are we to decide that Irene needs to “grow” and “learn”? Irene may well be lonely at times, but so is everybody else at times. Is it just possible that she doesn’t need to have children or take a husband in order to be all right? Every ounce of our movie-watching history tells us resolution needs to happen—but why? A great scene at the very end of Five Star Life flirts with the possibility it’ll fall into the very cliche Tognazzi has been avoiding all along, but not to worry: This movie is smarter than that. Robert Horton
VeeShape
VeeShapePFrank
VeeShapeOpens Fri., Aug. 29 at Varsity. Rated R. 95 minutes.
VeeShapeMichael Fassbender is in there somewhere. The Irish-German star of Shame and the X-Men movies spends most of this unlikely band comedy inside an oversized papier-mache head, which ought to make Frank the world’s worst musical frontman. Instead he inspires fierce, cultish devotion among his followers—which is to say his band, the Soronprfbs, for they may have no actual fans. Part of the suspense here for viewers is when or if Frank will ever remove his fake noggin. For new keyboard player Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the suspense is whether Frank’s suspicious acolytes will ever truly accept him; and further, if Frank will ever acknowledge Jon as a musician likewise possessing genuine talent.
VeeShapeThis is a fundamentally sad film, yet one full of slapstick, silliness, and laughter. Frank is essentially unknowable, so his band willingly accepts every humiliation and ridiculous challenge to earn—or at least guess at—his good favor. (The most hilariously protective of Frank, and scornful of Jon, is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s fierce Clara—a kind of muse and ninja.) Is Frank cult leader or charlatan, genius or insane? It’s hard to decide, since he never breaks character—or can’t, really, given the mask. (“I have a medical condition,” he insists at a border crossing; otherwise, like Jon, we’re left to wonder why he wears it.)
There’s a small grain of truth here: English journalist Jon Ronson (The Men Who Stare at Goats) really did play in a band led by a guy who wore a big fake Frank head. However, he and director Lenny Abrahamson have greatly embellished the tale, which now makes you think of any number of outsider artist-savants and the thrall they exert over their insecure followers. Frank is equally Jon’s story: from aimless post-collegiate songwriter to eager bandmate who begins promoting the Soronprfbs on YouTube and Twitter, which eventually leads to an invitation to the South by Southwest music festival in Texas. Jon’s ambition, checked at every turn by Clara, turns out to be not such a good fit with the group, which may not truly want to be heard. (Their songs are by Stephen Rennicks.)
Fine, you might ask, but what about poor Fassbender? How can he even act inside that blank orb? Well, by using his voice (he sings a bit like Ian Curtis), playing passable guitar, pratfalls, and passing out notes. (“Welcoming smile,” reads one.) It’s a stunt, but it’s an effective stunt: He’s withholding from us what Frank withholds from his band. The less he shows, maybe the more we like him. And conversely, the envious, ingenuous Jon becomes less attractive as the movie goes along. Perhaps the music snobs are right in the end: You ruin something good by sharing it. Brian Miller
VeeShape
VeeShapeMoebius
VeeShapeRuns Fri., Aug. 29–Thurs., Sept. 4 at Grand Illusion. Not rated. 89 minutes.
VeeShapeOrdinarily, one might expect that a total absence of dialogue would be the most distinctive element of a movie made in the 21st century. Rest assured this is not what you will be talking about should you venture out to see Kim Ki-duk’s Moebius, a film that blithely dallies in multiple outrages and borderline-unbearable horrors. The South Korean filmmaker has proved himself adept at projects both delicate (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring) and wild (Pieta), and in either mode he can seem like a scientist demonstrating a preordained theory. His ideas are sharp, but the execution sometimes sterile.
VeeShapeThe skill is still on display in Moebius, even if the film’s watchability is a distinct issue. It opens with a jealous wife (Lee Eun-woo) attempting to castrate her philandering husband (Cho Jae-hyun) while he sleeps; unsuccessful at this effort, she turns the knife on her teenage son (Seo Young-ju). (The characters are not given names.) The father determines to undergo self-mutilation in order to provide his son with a replacement organ; meanwhile the son undergoes bullying and begins an ill-fated fixation on the woman with whom his father was having an affair. (She’s also played by Lee, a casting decision that doubles the creepiness.) From there, it’s only a short hop to genital-transplant surgery, rape, incest, and—just in case anybody might be in danger of losing the thread—more castration. All of which would be impossible if Moebius were played as straight drama. But Kim gives it an undercurrent of wacko ludicrousness, although the actors are completely straight-faced.
In the course of all this, Kim swings at some provocative notions about the subject of family horror and the nature of power. I think that material struggles to find traction against the rampant ugliness on display—but the wordlessness is interesting. It feels like an affectation in the early reels, a labored device. At some point it becomes haunting, as though we’re watching these fragments of scenes—having somehow missed the dialogue—while the encounters have been boiled down to the brutal business of staring, slapping, or worse. The people do make sounds, but only at a bestial level: grunts, screams, groans. That’s a soundtrack to an intriguing experiment, but here I suspect it’ll get lost in the film’s bloody carnival. Robert Horton
VeeShape
VeeShapeThe November Man
VeeShapeOpens Wed., Aug. 27 at Sundance and other Theaters. Rated R. 108 minutes.
VeeShapeHere we are in Berlin and Belgrade and Lausanne, and there’s Pierce Brosnan running through the streets. We have Russians, secret interrogation chambers, and terrorists. And microfilm! No, wait, that can’t be right—despite the trappings of Cold War espionage, this is a 21st-century movie. So it’s not microfilm, but something downloaded onto a thumb drive, which is much less fun to say than “microfilm.”
VeeShapeThe November Man is strong evidence that sometimes a genre needs no excuses. This is not a great movie, nor perhaps even a particularly good one, but as the above litany of component parts suggests, it’s a straight-up spy picture with distinct attractions. One of those is Brosnan, who makes a much better James Bond now than he did when he actually carried the license to kill. He plays Peter Devereaux, a retired secret agent much surprised when his former apprentice (Luke Bracey) and old boss (bullet-headed Bill Smitrovich) get caught up in a botched rescue mission. It’s all connected to a corrupt Russian politician and Chechen rebels, tied together with an enjoyably wild conspiracy theory. The mystery woman, because there must be one, is a social worker (Olga Kurylenko, recently seen twirling in the nonsense of To the Wonder); there’s also a stone-cold female assassin, played by gymnast Amila Terzimehic, who doesn’t seem to be very good at her job but certainly looks cool doing it. Brosnan does not spend time here bedding down with women young enough to be his progeny—and while somewhere Roger Moore is scowling, this discretion suits the movie’s wintry attitude.
The political intrigue distinguishes it from a Liam Neeson vehicle, even if the story line actually pulls a chapter from Taken in its late going. Hot-and-cold director Roger Donaldson (Thirteen Days) is able to keep things trundling along here, but he can’t disguise the mostly terrible dialogue. A few genuinely shocking moments notwithstanding (Devereaux is willing to get nasty when he needs to), your tolerance for November Man will rely almost entirely on a pre-existing fondness for spy movies. They are now sufficiently rare enough that this film’s very lack of novelty is an attribute—it’s neither better nor worse than the average spy flick, and those terms are agreeable to this fan of the genre. Robert Horton
VeeShape
VeeShapeSong of the New Earth
VeeShapeRuns Fri., Aug. 29–Thurs., Sept. 4 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 89 minutes.
VeeShapeMaybe it’s just me, but the therapeutic efficacy of music must have more convincing advocates than “sound shaman” Tom Kenyon. Subject of this doc by Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game), Kenyon travels the hotel-conference-room circuit here and in Europe leading meditative seminars—drawing audiences to hear him chant in an odd, throaty falsetto (that often suggests Hermione Gingold) accompanied by finger cymbals, sonorous bowls, and the like. Kenyon arrived at this calling after years as a fairly promiscuous collector of spiritual influences (statuary from Ganesh to Our Lady of Guadalupe adorns his Orcas Island yard) and epiphanies, here rendered in off-putting animated sequences by Drew Christie: among several others, there’s an hours-long spontaneous teenage trance in a cow pasture; visions of angels on the University of North Carolina at Greensboro campus; and, most momentously, a visitation from androgynous Venusians, the Hathors. (Their insights Kenyon has transmitted and published in The Hathor Material.)
VeeShapeThough a perfectly nice man, Kenyon neither says nor does anything in Song of the New Earth to persuade me he warrants this prettily photographed hagiography; it’s by acolytes for acolytes. There’s no reason to doubt his sincerity (even when his response to an off-camera voice asking what he says to those who think all this is nuts is an insufferably glib “I agree with them!”), or the sincerity of those who benefit from his workshops. But there’s very much reason to doubt that anyone not already a Kenyon devotee will find much to interest them here. Gavin Borchert
VeeShape
VeeShapePThe Trip to Italy
VeeShapeOpens Fri., Aug. 29 at Sundance Cinemas and SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 108 minutes.
VeeShapeYes, you would like a second helping. Director Michael Winterbottom and his two stars, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, aren’t really asking—they’re insisting you come along on their latest culinary adventure. First was the improv-laden BBC TV series, The Trip, condensed into a 2010 road-trip movie about two incompetent gourmands in the English Lake District. Another TV series followed; and hence their latest adventure in northern Italy, which faithfully follows formula: eat, kvetch, impersonate. (Inevitably, I suppose, their third trip will be to America.)
VeeShapeThere aren’t many surprises here (and I’m a fan of the movie), but maybe in fine dining you don’t want surprises—certainly not at the four-star joints they’re visiting, not at these prices . . . well, the prices we’d pay if we followed their itinerary, which is awfully tempting: from Rome to Capri and the Amalfi coast. Part of the joke here is that Steve and Rob are both working-class blokes who’ll never be entirely comfortable with the posh life. (Coogan’s bigger in the U.S. and a huge star in the UK thanks to his Alan Partridge character.)
Coogan and Brydon are playing caricatures of themselves (who also co-starred in Winterbottom’s 2005 Tristram Shandy), not quite frenemies and not quite BFFs: two guys anxious about their personal and professional standing at midlife. Joking about the classical past and the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, they constantly worry how they’ll rate against the greats. Though it didn’t occur to me when I saw the movie during SIFF, their constant nattering about the permanence of art versus the fleeting pleasures of the now makes them fellow travellers with Toni Servillo in The Great Beauty. He could almost be their tour guide, and they need one.
Now I grant you that newbies may find less to appreciate in the dueling Roger Moore impressions and crushed hopes of middle age. This is not a comedy for the under-40 set. “Do you think everything’s melancholy when you get to a certain age?” asks Rob. Yes, and visits to Pompeii and a Neapolitan ossuary—where Steve quotes Hamlet’s “Where be your gibes now?” to Yorick’s skull—are downright somber. Still, the gorgeous locations and food may inspire happy travels of your own. Go while you’ve got time remaining. Brian Miller
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