Turbo: Film Review

'Turbo'

The Bottom Line

A juiced snail strives to win the Indy 500 in a very straight-line, young boy-aimed animated outing.

  

In delivering a film about a garden snail that dreams of winning the Indy 500, it's as if the makers of Turbo had been pressed to come up with the most extreme underdog tale they could think of. Or else animators really are running out of ideas for original new characters. An attractively designed but narratively challenged, one-note film that skews younger than the norm for big animated features these days and has limited appeal for little girls, this second Fox release (after The Croods) from DreamWorks Animation since the latter left Paramount looks to do mid-range business with family audiences.

“The sooner you accept the dull, miserable nature of your existence, the happier you'll be,” worldly-wise snail Chet (Paul Giamatti) advises his younger brother Turbo (Ryan Reynolds) after yet another day scouring a garden tomato patch. Turbo spends all his downtime watching VHS tapes of professional car races, especially the many won by his hero, Guy Gagne (Bill Hader, amusingly assuming a French-Canadian accent).

Of course, the message of the film, as with so many other kid-inspirational cartoons and other fantasies, is that no dream is too big, you can do anything if you set your mind to it, etc., etc. Unfortunately, the real embedded lesson of Turbo is that, if you're too small or weak or otherwise incapable of greatness, you have a shot to win if you're juiced.
Which is what happens late one night when Turbo, coming upon a Fast & Furious-style drag race in the dry L.A. River bed, gets sucked into an engine. Instead of being toasted, however, the little guy becomes infused with nitrous oxide, enabling him to zoom along the ground seemingly as fast as Superman shoots through the skies. Ahhh, the wonders of chemicals and strength enhancers. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire would approve.
Of course, Turbo needs a sponsor, which in finds in the form of Van Nuys taco truck driver Tito (Michael Pena), a wild dreamer himself who argues endlessly with his more practical brother Angelo (Luis Guzman) about the merits of promoting their forlorn business—Dos Bros Tacos—with a snail. Joining in is a rainbow coalition of smart-mouthed supporting snails and neighboring business owners voiced by the eminent likes of Samuel L. Jackson, Michelle Rodriguez, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, Ben Schwartz, Richard Jenkins and Ken Jeong.

The ultimate destination—Indianapolis--is inevitable but it takes a long time to get there, given a script by director David Soren (a dialogue writer on Shark Tale), Darren Lemke (Shrek Forever After, Jack the Giant Slayer) and Robert Siegel (The Wrestler, Big Fan) that is short on invention and long on largely unfunny yacking. Once the gang arrives and begins overcoming the obstacles that might prevent a snail from entering a car race (conveniently unmentioned is the most obvious one, that Turbo lacks four wheels and an engine), the hitherto genial Guy Gagne suddenly becomes a villain, feeling so threatened by the now-mighty mollusk that he goes to all lengths to prevent an eternally humiliating defeat.
In the run-up to the race and then during it, you mostly wonder about how a critter so small it can't be seen on the track (although its blue/white-hot streak can be) will avoid being crunched by the giant tires of the humans' racing machines; indeed, the film's most irreverent merit is that it is periodically honest about the fate of snails by casually showing them getting squashed by humans or gobbled up by animals, especially crows. In the event, Turbo just zips through traffic as if in an obstacle course, the obvious longshot pipsqueak favorite in a field of giants.
Although the dialogue becomes repetitive, the voice performances are all solid and distinctive. But better than that are some of the visuals, particularly in nocturnal scenes around the taco stand, which create both a heightened realistic evocation of shabby San Fernando Valley environs and an echo of classic noir visions of semi-desperate L.A. characters deciding to put all their chips on one roll of the dice. Kudos to the director and the animators on this score, but it should be noted that, just as Roger Deakins was engaged to advise on Rango, ace cinematographer Wally Pfister worked as visual consultant here. Henry Jackman's score is nothing if not propulsive.
Opens: July 17 (20th Century Fox)
Production: DreamWorks Animation SKG
Voice cast: Ryan Reynolds, Paul Giamatti, Michael Pena, Luis Guzman, Bill Hader, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, Ben Schwartz, Richard Jenkins, Ken Jeong, Michelle Rodriguez
Director: David Soren
Screenwriters: David Soren, Darren Lemke, Robert Siegel, story by David Soren
Producer: Lisa Stewart
Production designer: Michael Isaak
Editor: James Ryan
Music: Henry Jackman
Visual effects supervisor: Sean Phillips
Visual consultant: Wally Pfister
PG rating, 95 minutes

The Sad Smell of Flesh (El Triste Olor de la Carne): Karlovy Vary Review

KVIFF

The Bottom Line

Spaniards on the verge of a financial breakdown.

Venue

Karlovy Vary festival screening, July 2

Cast

Alfredo Rodriguez, Ruth Sabuceda, Sabela Vasquez

Director

Cristobal Arteaga Rozas

Filmed in a single real-time shot, this stark Eurodrama examines the human cost of economic crisis.

KARLOVY VARY – A minimalist drama for an age of austerity, The Sad Smell of Flesh unfolds in real time in a single unbroken shot. Filmed on the streets of an unnamed Spanish city by the Chilean-born writer-director-producer Cristobal Arteaga Rozas, this stark experiment in low-budget social realism takes place against the backdrop of the current financial crisis. Southern Europe has been hit especially hard, with Spain suffering records levels of unemployment, foreclosures and forced evictions.

The film’s theme is both ultra-contemporary and as old as poverty itself, updating The Grapes of Wrath or Bicycle Thieves for the 21st century. Following its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival last week, more festivals seem highly likely. The topical subject matter and unorthodox format could stir niche theatrical interest, though this harrowing Eurozone glumfest is easier to admire than enjoy.
An actor whose gaunt and haunted features say more than a thousand words of dialogue, Alfredo Rodriguez stars as Alfredo Barros, a middle-aged father in a state of anxious agitation. We first see him lingering outside a private house, entering without permission to make a pitiful plea that falls on deaf ears. After this cryptic clue to the film’s dramatic pay-off, he returns to his car and drives his young daughter (Sabela Vasquez) to school. Then he continues into the city for a series of increasingly fraught encounters with garage owners, pawnbrokers and storekeepers that all add up to a picture of severe financial distress. It slowly transpires that Barros is newly unemployed and flat broke, with a life of quiet desperation that is about to get a whole lot louder.
The Sad Smell of Flesh is filmed in a single unbroken shot on real city streets, a feat of choreography that involves an impressive amount of mutual co-operation between film-makers, bus drivers, bartenders and random pedestrians. The restless hand-held camera hovers constantly on the protagonist’s slumped shoulders and haunted face, stalking him along every alleyway and sidewalk. But while this is a technically skilful enterprise, it is not necessarily entertaining. A large chunk of screen time is spent watching Barros riding in buses and taxis, or trudging glumly through shopping arcades. Real-time movies like this are often counterintuitive tributes to the skills of editors.
In its final minutes, The Sad Smell of Flesh becomes a potent protest about the human cost of economic meltdown. Recurring clips from a state-of-the-nation speech by Spain’s prime minister, mostly heard on car radios, also serve to underline the film’s political message. Rodriguez gives a compellingly intense performance, and his young co-star Vasquez is superbly naturalistic given the shooting conditions, but the real-time format ultimately feels gimmicky and restrictive. By saving his killer punch until the last moment, Rozas also risks viewers drifting off into baffled boredom beforehand. A bold experiment, but does the cinema of austerity really need to be quite so austere?
Production company: Deica
Producer: Cristobal Arteaga Rozas
Cast: Alfredo Rodriguez, Ruth Sabuceda, Sabela Vasquez
Director: Cristobal Arteaga Rozas
Writer: Cristobal Arteaga Rozas
Cinematographer: Pablo Kaufman
Sales contact: Cristobal Arteaga Rozas
Unrated, 87 minutes

Israel: A Home Movie: Film Review

The Bottom Line

This haunting cinematic collage puts a human face on the country's strife-wracked history.

Director-Screenwriter

Eliav Lilti

Eliav Lilti's documentary uses amateur home-movie footage to depict the history of Israel in its first several decades.

For those not directly involved, home movies usually have a mundane air, chronicling moments whose emotional immediacy is heightened only by their nostalgic atmosphere. But the glimpses of often trivial everyday life captured in Eliav Lilti’s documentary Israel: A Home Movie have an inevitably more powerful impact since they take place over the course of the country’s first four decades. Devoid of overt politicizing or much informational context, the film, currently receiving its U.S. theatrical premiere at New York City’s Film Forum, vividly conveys how ordinary people are impacted by historical events.

Culled from amateur 8mm, 16mm and Super 8 movie footage shot from the 1930s through the 1970s and gathered from the attics and closets in which they’re usually stored, the film presents a series of often indelible images: A beach party taking place on Yom Kippur in 1973 is interrupted by the sight of a fighter plane being shot down; a 1967 wedding is conducted in a cave in newly conquered territory; a mosque’s minaret is destroyed, with offscreen observers debating whether it was a sacrilegious act; a beautiful young woman smiling into the camera, with a relative casually mentioning that she was killed by a terrorist attack when she was 30-years-old; and, more amusingly, Moshe Dayan urinating in the desert.
The famed general is not the only historical figure on display, as there are also glimpses of such important Israeli personages as Ariel Sharon and David Ben-Gurion, as well Egyptian president Anwar Sadat during his groundbreaking visit to the country.
Such seminal events as the massive influx of European refugees during the ‘30s and ‘40s, the Holocaust, the creation of the Israeli state, and the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War are the backdrop to the often scratchy footage. A major theme is the relations between Jews and Arabs, with several commentators pointing out that it wasn’t always so contentious.
Viewers should not expect a straightforward history lesson, with a reasonable knowledge of the country’s history proving crucial to the film’s impact. But this striking cinematic collage provides a hauntingly personal perspective on a country that has been wracked by strife from its very beginnings.
Opens July 10 (Alma Films)
Director/screenwriter: Eliav Lilti
Producer: Arik Bernstein
Editors: Roni Klimovsky, Tanya Schwartz, Avigail Dahan
Composer: Yuval Mesner
Not rated, 93 min.

Revival: Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

Czechs, drugs and rock and roll.

Venue

Karlovy Vary festival screening, July 5

Cast

Bolek Polivka, Miroslav Krobot, Karel Hermansk, Marian Geisberg, Zuzana Budovska

Director

Alice Nellis

A sunny Czech comedy about a veteran 1960s rock band attempting a comeback tour.

A band of ageing rockers once known as the Czech Beatles reunite for a comeback tour in this slight but agreeable comedy, which premiered at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival last week, where it picked up the publicly voted audience award. Written and directed by Alice Nellis, who has won multiple prizes for her Czech stage and screen work, this sunny farce goes on general domestic release later this week. Aiming for the same kind of universal feel good uplift as the comfort-food comedies of Richard Curtis, Revival has clear crossover potential in other markets, especially countries where subtitles and foreign languages are not deemed major commercial hurdles.

The film has fun with some fondly mocking flashbacks to the late 1960s heyday of Smoke, dope-smoking hippies with a penchant for psychedelic blues-rock sung in shaky English. Fast forward to today, and the band members have grown into cartoonish comic archetypes. There is the leather-clad bad-boy singer still partying like a teenager. There is a newly bereaved widower locked in unspoken oedipal rivalry with his handsome pop-singer son. And there is reformed hellraiser now living a monkish New Age life with his Yoko-ish control-freak partner. Also, there's an ageing dad with the much younger wife who scoffs at his rock-star dreams. Considering it was written and directed by a woman, Revival takes a fairly chauvinistic line on its female characters.
Inevitably, once Smoke’s comeback gets underway, ancient personality clashes and long-buried secrets resurface. Plans to generate media interest with a fake health scare also end in disaster, and old tensions threaten to tear the band apart again. Nellis offers up at least three major obstacles to prevent the final triumphant hometown show in Prague from happening, knowing full well that it will go ahead anyway, and fully aware that the audience know it too.
If all these sitcom-level jokes about elderly swingers with creaky knees and flagging libidos sound familiar, that is probably because they are. The 1998 British comedy Still Crazy, co-starring Billy Nighy and Billy Connolly, covered similar terrain. Revival offers much the same mix of sentimental Baby Boomer nostalgia, sanitized debauchery and heart-tugging emotional manipulation, lightly sprinkled with local references – such as the band claiming they were political dissidents during the Communist era as a marketing gimmick. This crowd-pleasing blend of Czechs, drugs and rock and roll is a little too sweet, a little too neat, but ultimately too warm-hearted to dislike.
Production companies: In Film Praha, Czech Television
Producer: Rudolf Biermann 
Cast: Bolek Polivka, Miroslav Krobot, Karel Hermansk, Marian Geisberg, Zuzana Budovska
Director: Alice Nellis
Writer: Alice Nellis
Cinematographer: Matej Cibulka
Editor: Filip Issa
Music: Jon Ponocny
Sales company: In Film Praha
Unrated, 115 minutes

Pacific Rim: Film Review

Warner Bros. Pictures

The Bottom Line

A better-and-smarter-than-average humans-vs.-monsters spectacular.

Opens

July 12 (Warner Bros.)

Director

Guillermo del Toro

Cast

Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Clifton Collins Jr., Burn Gorman, Ron Perlman

Guillermo del Toro's paradoxically derivative yet imaginative sci-fi epic is everything that monster movies since the beginning of time might have wished they could be.

Monsters mash, titans clash and humans are behind the eight-ball in Pacific Rim, a staggeringly loud, action-packed FXtravaganza that's both a numbing and pretty entertaining example of its movie species. It's Godzilla x 10, as thunderously clangy as any Transformers movie, and it may or may not have been inspired by the 1990s anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. But it also really moves, has an attractive cast to complement the humanity-threatening beasts and, in Guillermo del Toro, a director with a lively appreciation of genre tropes. Still, almost nothing has proven a sure thing at the box office this summer, so while massive success internationally looks likely, most of all in Asian markets, U.S. acceptance will depend partly upon finicky fanboys but most of all upon general audiences who could decide they've seen it all before.

In most ways, this paradoxically derivative yet imaginative sci-fi epic is everything every monster movie since the beginning of time might have wished it could be: In no way pinched budget-wise, it's got first-class special effects, crafty behemoths that calculate and react to circumstances in non-dumb ways, a smart director who injects a sense of fun and surprise whenever he can, a fair percentage of characters you don't mind watching, and a few decent plot twists. In this genre, that's saying something.

On the other hand, this is a formula in which cinematic niceties take a back seat to certain expectations that can only be met in fully anticipated ways, inviting a familiarity that will encounter various degrees of audience fatigue and/or resistance. Some viewers like seeing the same narrative, in this case human resourcefulness prevailing over terrifying brute force, and its accompanying satisfactions repeated again and again, while others will consider the story predictable, old hat and unworthy of attention.
In fact, one of the biggest gimme-a-break aspects of Travis Beacham and del Toro's screenplay, based on the former's story, lies in its bedrock. It's been seven years since the first Kaiju, an enormous amphibious dragon, rose from beneath the seas, Godzilla-style, to decimate San Francisco. Mankind's answer to continued attacks has been to build 25-story-high Jaegers, fighting metal robots controlled by two pilots positioned inside them. But it's been a losing battle, so the Jaeger program is being dropped in favor of building giant walls to protect seaside cities from the onslaught. If the international defense coalition here had only seen World War Z, they'd know high fortifications just aren't going to work.
But after so many years and with the knowledge that Kaiju come up from the ocean, wouldn't it have made sense to first evacuate obvious coastal targets such as Hong Kong and Sydney, which get stomped on during the course of the action here, thus forcing the Kaiju to march inland and be exposed? Have Paris, Moscow, Tehran and Mexico City been assaulted? Nope.
That said, the initial Kaiju/Jaeger showdown, along the Alaska coast during a nocturnal hurricane, is a doozy, as hotshot pilot Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and his older brother Yancy (Diego Klattenhoff) take on an aggressive beast with a stabbing snout and enormous jaws capable of biting through metal. Then there are two intriguing keys to the set-up: Because it takes two to control a Jaeger, the minds of the pilots sync up by way of The Drift, which opens up a total mental exchange between two brains; furthermore, because of the evolving nature of the Kaiju, it's determined that some sort of rational intelligence is behind the monsters' attacks, that there's more to them than just random viciousness.
The film's title only appears onscreen after this 18-minute action prologue has tragically concluded with Yancy's death and the disillusioned Raleigh dropping out. Desperation subsequently stirs Jaeger force commander Stacker Pentecost (where did that name come from?), played in strikingly macho fashion by Idris Elba, to dredge Raleigh out of anonymity to co-pilot one of the four remaining Jaegers in a last-ditch effort to vindicate the program and save the world from smart dinosaur descendants. Reluctant to share his mind with someone other than his brother, Raleigh has a balky, recalcitrant manner that's magnified by Hunnam's notable resemblance to Steve McQueen, who specialized in this sort of attitude. However, it's only a matter of time, and after a stick-fighting martial arts contest he's paired with beautiful Japanese candidate Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi, of Babel), who has a secret with Pentecost that must be exorcised before she's cleared to fly.
There's some cliched macho competitiveness worked in involving a father-son Aussie pilot team (Max Martini and Rob Kazinsky) versus Raleigh, while the Russian and Chinese Jaeger units get very short shrift. By contrast, the two key scientists, who are at odds over the source and nature of the Kaiju and how best to deal with them, are amusingly brought to life by a manic Charlie Day and an eccentric Burn Gorman, whose high-comic oddness positions his character as a theoretical grandson to Dr. Strangelove. Topping off the cast for sheer bravado and wayward weirdness is del Toro regular Ron Perlman as a sort of flashy Dr. Mabuse of the Hong Kong underground.

To kill time between action set pieces, del Toro has done an above-average job of avoiding tedium via some flavorsome casting, passably interesting plot contrivances and, above all, by maintaining strong forward momentum. Unlike so many similar crash-bang action spectaculars, this one feels lean and muscular rather than bloated or padded; the combat is almost always coherent and dramatically pointed rather than just splashed on the screen for its own sake.
The climax has an anatomical yuck factor hitherto withheld by the film, while the intriguing scientific underpinnings of the Kaiju's origins provide plenty of possibilities for sequels, if needed. “Today we are canceling the apocalypse,” Pentecost confidently declares before the final battle. Perhaps, but in the world of global disaster films, there's always room for one more.
Opens: July 12 (Warner Bros.)
Production: Legendary Pictures, DDY
Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, Rob Kazinsky, Max Martini, Clifton Collins Jr., Burn Gorman, Ron Perlman
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Screenwriters: Travis Beacham, Guillermo del Toro, story by Travis Beacham
Producers: Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni, Guillermo del Toro, Mary Parent
Executive producer: Callum Greene
Director of photography: Guillermo Navarro
Production designers: Andrew Neskoromny, Carol Spier
Costume designer: Kate Hawley
Editors: John Gilroy, Peter Amundson
Music: Ramin Djawadi
Visual effects supervisors: John Knoll, James E. Price
PG-13 rating, 131 minutes

Absence: Film Review

The Bottom Line

An intriguing premise is wasted in this latest example of the increasingly tired found-footage genre.

Director

Jimmy Loweree

Cast

Erin Way, Eric Matheny, Ryan Smale, Stephanie Scholz

A young woman's unborn child mysteriously disappears overnight in this found-footage style horror film.

The good news about the found footage genre is that filmmakers armed with little more than an inexpensive video camera can make perfectly respectable looking horror films.

The bad news about the found footage genre is that filmmakers armed with little more than an inexpensive video camera can make perfectly respectable looking horror films.
The latest example of this style that has long worn out its welcome is Absence, Jimmy Loweree’s micro-budgeted DIY feature debut that begins with an intriguing premise before lapsing into monotony and ultimately incoherence.
It concerns a young woman, Liz (Erin Way), seven months pregnant, who wakes up one morning to discover that her unborn child has literally disappeared overnight. Although we’re given no details about how this might have occurred, an ominous if misleading screen text appears early on informing us that “Cesarean theft” is responsible for 20 percent of infant kidnappings.
Treated with suspicion by the police and open hostility by the community, Liz and husband Rick (Eric Matheny) escape to a remote mountain cottage, accompanied by her younger brother Evan (Ryan Smale). Conveniently enough, Evan happens to be a budding filmmaker who decides to keep his camera perpetually rolling to document the proceedings for a university project.
A fourth character is shortly introduced in the form of Megan (Stephanie Scholz), a fetching local girl with whom the boyishly charming (or annoying, depending on your tolerance level) Evan quickly begins a romance.
Much of the film’s running time is consumed by the group’s subsequent trivial activities, including frequent bickering between the two men; soul-baring confessionals delivered by Liz to Evan’s camera; and a communal swim in a nearby lake.
But eventually ominous things begin happening, ranging from mysterious, UFO-like lights in the sky to Liz experiencing severe headaches and nosebleeds. By the time the proceedings reach their Paranormal Activity-style violent conclusion, the viewer’s interest has long since waned.
Opens July 5 (Cinedigm)
Production: Radcliffe Pictures
Cast: Erin Way, Eric Matheny, Ryan Smale, Stephanie Scholz
Director: Jimmy Loweree
Screenwriters: Jimmy Loweree, Jake Moreno
Producers: Parker J. Johal, Jimmy Loweree, Michaelangelo Covino
Executive producers: Mark Loweree, Neil Willner, Doug Kerr, Brent Emery
Editor: Christiano Covino
Costume designer: Stephanie Scholz
Not rated, 81 min.

September: Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

A solid sophomore film about loneliness and disaffection anchored by a strong lead performance.

Venue

Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Director

Penny Panayotopoulou

Cast

Kora Karvouni, Maria Skoula, Nikos Diamantis

Penny Panayotopoulou's second feature centers on a solitary Greek woman whose inner life is exposed after her dog dies.

The death of a pet prompts the unraveling of a Greek woman in September, the introspective second feature of director Penny Panayotopoulou. Eleven years after her well-received debut, Hard Goodbyes: My Father, it's clear that the Hellenic filmmaker still has a special interest in mourning and how it can be an extremely tough, irrational and misunderstood process but hopefully also offer a sense of catharsis in the long run. Modigliani-esque lead actress Kora Karvouni (J.A.C.E.) is terrific in a tricky role that requires her to telegraph many unspoken emotions and her beautifully under shaded performance reps the biggest selling point for the film, which, despite the occasional longueur, should have a solid festival run.

Ana (Karvouni) works in a strip-mall restaurant and is so attached to her dog, Manu, that she makes it wait in the car during her shifts so she can spend every break with her beloved pet. When, during a stroll, Manu goes into a neighbor's garden to play with some kids there, Ana's clearly jealous and scolds the dog when they get back: "So you're sociable now, traitor?"
Manu's primary school-aged playmates, Stefanos (Anastasios Tzertzemelis) and his sister Nelly (Irene Kolliakou), love the dog and their blonde mother, Sophia (Maria Skoula), is sympathetic to the neighbor with the canine companion. However, it's clear from an early scene at a supermarket in which Ana observes the happy little family of Sophia, her hubby Stathis (Nikos Diamantis) and their offspring, that she's witnessing a kind of dependency, affection and interaction that a life with a dog could never give her.
The fragility of the happiness that Ana does derive from her shared life with her dog is brutally exposed when, some 20 minutes in, Manu suddenly falls ill and dies. In an attempt to share her grief, Ana manages to get Sophia to agree to bury Manu in her garden. But this only offers Ana an excuse to move ever closer to Sophia and her family, and though the mother of two is initially sympathetic to her grief, Ana's actions and demands become increasingly blunt as she tries to replace her lost pet with something much bigger: a whole family.
Though too realistic and "normal" in execution to be part of the recent Greek Weird Wave of films such as Dogtooth and Attenberg, September does have things in common with other recent local titles such as Wasted Youth and Boy Eating the Bird's Food, which also chronicled how alienated, recognizable Greeks are driven to irrational acts in times of crisis.
It's an interesting paradox that loneliness can only really be revealed in the presence of other people and this thought is at the basis of the screenplay by the director and Kallia Papadaki, who  reveal the extent of Ana's solitude mainly through her increasingly erratic interactions with Sophia's family. The work of Karvouni relies on glances and looks as much as dialog and is crucial in making audiences understand what Ana desires and feels. She's ably supported by Skoula and Diamantis and the kids, while Dogtooth star Christos Sterioglou has a cameo as a bus passenger.
Giorgos Michelis' camerawork is practically without movement, allowing Ana's increasingly desperate acts to stand out against static tableaux and a deceptively stable world view. Music is sparingly but effectively used, while the final sequence is simple yet anything but simplistic and sends audiences out on a positive note.
Venue: Karlovy Vary Film Festival (competition)
Production companies: Penny Panayotopoulou Productions, Twenty Twenty Visions
Cast: Kora Karvouni, Maria Skoula, Nikos Diamantis, Christos Sterioglou
Director: Penny Panayotopoulou
Screenwriters: Penny Panayotopoulou, Kallia Papadaki
Producers: Penny Panayotopoulou, Thanassis Karathanos
Director of photography: Giorgos Michelis
Production designer: Lili Kendeka
Music: Giorgos Zachariou
Costume designers: Lili Kendaka, Eva Goulakou
Editor: Petar Markovic
Sales: Penny Panayotopoulou Productions
No rating, 105 minutes

Burning Bush: Karlovy Vary Review

HBO Europe

The Bottom Line

It's a stirring salute to the young martyrs who helped end the Cold War.

Venue

Karlovy Vary screening, July 5

Cast

Tatiana Pauhofova, Jaroslava Pokorna, Ivan Trojan, Petr Stach, Vojtech Kotek, Jan Budar

Director

Agnieszka Holland

This sumptuous historical miniseries from HBO Europe recreates the turbulent events of the Prague Spring.

KARLOVY VARY - Made by the European wing of HBO, this superior four-hour miniseries dramatizes the political and emotional shockwaves unleashed in January 1969 when young Czech student Jan Palach, protesting against Soviet military occupation, doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in the center of Prague. The director is veteran Polish Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland, who has a long track record of working on award-winning HBO shows in the U.S., including The Wire and Treme. Holland was studying in Prague at the time of the protests, and was even briefly arrested.

A deluxe multi-character drama that blends real history with semi-fictionalized spy thriller and soap opera elements, Burning Bush feels in places like an extended Czech remake of the Cold War-themed German Oscar-winner The Lives of Others. Already aired on local television to great acclaim, it is also playing on the big screen as a single marathon movie at this week’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where Holland is presiding over the jury. Though clearly tailored to long-form TV audiences, further film festivals and specialist theatrical airings are not out of the question.

Polished and crafted, Burning Bush exhibits all the high production gloss that comes with the HBO brand. The script by young Czech novice Stepan Hulik mostly favors subtlety over sensationalism. The stirring score by Antoni Komasa-Lazarkarkiewicz lends romantic sweep to almost every scene. And though some of the characters feel a little too flatly heroic, most have more complex shades. Forays into the Czech countryside are sumptuously shot in picture-postcard tints. Even the drab cobbled streets and comically frumpy Eastern Bloc cars of late 1960s Prague are recreated in gleaming, retro-fetishist detail. With all these chain-smoking young beatniks in chic vintage fashions, we could almost be watching an Iron Curtain version of Mad Men.
Palach himself is only a fleeting presence in the drama, which opens with a graphic depiction of his horrifying self-immolation in Prague’s landmark Wenceslas Square. In the first hectic chapter, the authorities race against time to prevent copycat protests and contain the political fall-out. With Palach clinging onto life in hospital, the focus initially falls on the morally ambivalent police detective Jires, played by Czech household name and Billy Bob Thornton lookalike Ivan Trojan. Like many of the core protagonists, Jires is a fictional amalgam, and afforded a degree of sympathy despite being essentially a regime enforcer.
As the story expands, it moves from police procedural to politically charged legal thriller centered on the campaigning lawyer Dagmar Buresova (Tatiana Pauhofova), who takes a huge risk by representing Palach’s family against a Communist politician who libels the dead student as a deluded stooge of enemy powers. Buresova is a real person and this was a genuine lawsuit, although the filmmakers may have glamorized her life a little, adding a subplot of sizzling sexual tension with her Justin Bieber-ish assistant.
Spy-movie intrigue escalates as state security agents do their utmost to intimidate Buresova and Palach’s elderly mother (Jaroslava Pokorna), targeting their friends, family and loved ones with blackmail and threats. Eventually, the personality cult around Palach becomes so troubling to the authorities that they exhume his body, cremate him and re-allocate his grave. Holland and her team maintain an impressive level of tension here considering the drama’s final hour mostly involves tense private conversations and nit-picking legal debate.
An evergreen human story with obvious contemporary parallels in the Middle East and elsewhere, Burning Bush might have ended as just another depressing condemnation of totalitarian oppression, but history later served up a happy ending. As the final coda suggests, even if the young protestors of the Prague Spring lost the battle, they later won the war. Two decades after his death, Palach’s enduring example proved crucial in the decisive defeat of Soviet Communism. After defending dozens of anti-regime dissidents in court, Buresova become the first Czech Justice Minister of the post-Communist era, and remains an active human rights campaigner today.
Production company: HBO Europe
Producer: Tereza Polachova
Cast: Tatiana Pauhofova, Jaroslava Pokorna, Ivan Trojan, Petr Stach, Vojtech Kotek, Jan Budar
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Writer: Stepan Hulik
Cinematographer: Martin Strba
Editor: Pavel Hrdicka
Music: Antoni Komasa-Lazarkarkiewicz
Sales company: Beta Films GmbH
231 minutes

Honeymoon (Líbánky): Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

A suitably uncomfortable trip into the past with a sophisticated use of time.

Venue

Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Director

Jan Hrebejk

Cast

Anna Geislerová, Stanislav Majer, Jirí Cerný, Kristýna Fuitová, David Máj, Jirí Sesták

Veteran Czech director Jan Hrebejk's character drama stars Anna Geislerová as a bride who has to deal with an uninvited wedding guest.

An unknown guest with a very unusual wedding present causes a lot of drama in Honeymoon, the latest collaboration of Czech director Jan Hrebejk and screenwriter Petr Jarchovský (the Oscar-nominated Divided We Fall). Local star and Hrebejk regular Anna Geislerová plays the bride who's creeped out by the presence of an insidious man who claims to have gone to school with the groom. An intimate drama about buried secrets and the possibility of forgiveness, Honeymoon is beautifully performed and well-modulated, with the notable the exception of the uninvited guest's homosexuality, which is an awkward red herring.

Honeymoon forms a loose trilogy about past secrets with Hrebejk and Jarchovský's Kawasaki's Rose (a 2010 Berlinale selection) and 2011's Innocence, the latter also with Geislerová. The Karlovy Vary premiere will be released in Czech Republic August 22, and name recognition should help it achieve solid arthouse numbers. Abroad, festivals will want an invitation to this party.
The broken glasses of Dominik (Matej Zikán), the 13-year-old son of groom-to-be Radim (Stanislav Majer), set the plot in motion, as a quick visit to a nearby optician results in the decision of the store owner (Jirí Cerný) to wander into the church where Radim is about to marry the pregnant Tereza (Geislerová). Pretending to be part of the wedding party, the friendly intruder takes pictures, plays with the guests' kids and follows the couple and their entourage to a beautiful pastoral retreat in Southern Bohemia where the celebrations will continue.
The bespectacled man introduces himself as Jan Benda, a character from Radim's boarding-school days that Radim claims he's pretty much forgotten. Tereza knows something isn't right but not until some 30 minutes in, when it's revealed that Benda's wedding gift is a funerary urn with his own name on it, does it become clear that something's very wrong. Radim then forcefully escorts Benda off the property and Hrebejk and Jarchovský begin their sophisticated use of time, with the subsequent and prolonged scenes of innocent dancing and drinking only serving to ratchet up the tension before the inevitable return of the character whose presence created more questions than it answered.

When Benda's back, he asks Tereza for ten minutes of her time to explain his behavior and the resulting dialog is shown in real time in a riveting back-and-forth. The filmmakers then turn things up a notch with another intense ten-minute, real-time conversation, this time between the newlyweds. The impassioned discussions are expertly cut together by Czech veteran editor Alois Fisárek, and Geislerová, one of the best actresses of her generation, and the two men, who both come from theater, are clearly in their element, tearing into the revelation-laden dialog with gusto.
While films about weddings and past secrets are a dime a dozen, what sets Hrebejk and Jarchovský's film apart is that it's less concerned with the revelations themselves than with the questions they engender. One such question — what if the "worse" in the vows' "for better and for worse" lies in the past but wasn't known at the time of marriage?  — even obliquely challenges the institution itself by suggesting perhaps it's impossible to ever know anyone and thus be absolutely sure about an eternal union. Issues of responsibility, the need for punishment and its more benign twin, the potential for compassion, are also explored and Jarchovský ensures that not only all the protagonists have some past baggage and flaws but also that all the supporting characters are convincingly drawn.
The only sour notes in an otherwise solidly plotted story are its too enigmatic ending (weirdly contrasted with overly explanatory flashbacks), and Benda's sexual orientation. The latter is used to reveal that one character is a homophobe but at the same time seems to assume that at least a part of the audience is as well, as a small subplot involving Benda and Dominik seems designed to derive tension from the fact that any homosexual might be a predatory creep who shouldn't be allowed near children.
Technically, the film's luminous, with Ales Brezina's score judiciously placed to further up the tension where required.
Production companies: Fog 'n' Desire Film, K Film Plus, Sokol Kollar, Trigon Production, Ceska televize.
Cast: Anna Geislerová, Stanislav Majer, Jirí Cerný, Kristýna Fuitová, David Máj, Jirí Sesták, Jana Radojcicová, Matej Zikán, Vlastimil Dusek, Eva Kukucková
Director: Jan Hrebejk
Screenwriter: Petr Jarchovský
Producers: Viktor Taus, Michal Kollar, Tomas Rotnagl, Jan Kadlec
Director of photography: Martin Strba
Production designer: Jan Kadlec
Music: Ales Brezina
Costume designer: Katarína Strbová-Bieliková
Editor: Alois Fisárek
Sales: Fog 'n' Desire Film
No rating, 98 minutes

Papusza: Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

It's a disjointed but rewarding literary biopic.

Venue

Karlovy Vary festival screening, July 4

Cast

Jowita Budnik, Zbigniew Walerys, Antoni Pawlicki

Directors

Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze

Polish husband-and-wife duo transform the troubled life of a celebrated gypsy poet into a ravishing visual poem.

KARLOVY VARY - Spanning most of the 20th century, this slow but ravishingly beautiful biopic commemorates the life and works of Bronislawa Wajs, the first publicly feted female poet from Poland’s travelling gypsy minority. More generally known by her nickname “Papusza” (“Doll”), Wajs survived Nazi invasion, Communist persecution and bitter excommunication from her Roma community. Premiered last week in competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where it earned a special mention from the jury, Papusza is sufficiently serious and visually absorbing to deserve further festival exposure. Outside Poland, it has theatrical potential with niche audiences nostalgic for the somber grativas of old-school Eastern Bloc art cinema.

The first film in nine years by the married writer-director duo Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze, Papusza was clearly a labor of love. Shot in exquisite monochrome by Krzysztof Ptak and Wojciech Staron, every frame is a painterly masterclass in light and shadow. The mostly non-professional cast spent a year becoming fluent in the Polish Roma dialect. Early 20th century gypsy camps and Jewish shtetls were recreated in impressive detail. Hollywood make-up experts flew in to help with ageing Jowita Budnik, who plays Wajs across five decades of adulthood.

Graced with a lively soundtrack and several stand-out musical interludes, the film nevertheless risks confusion with its non-linear structure, which zigzags through Papusza’s life, jumping back and forth to disconnected vignettes in different decades. It is left to the viewer to join the chronological dots between the fiery young gypsy girl forced into marriage with a domineering folk musician (Zbigniew Walerys), the elderly woman living in bleak poverty despite her literary fame, and the late-blooming poet who is excommunicated as “unclean” when she unwittingly breaks the Roma code of silence towards the non-Roma “gadjo” society.
Major events hover in the background, including two world wars and the forced settlement of gypsies during the Communist era, but barely a trace of historical or political context ever intrudes on this closed world. Only a handful of Papusza’s simple, folksy verses are quoted in the script, and nor is there much psychological insight into her character. Cursed for being self-educated and gifted by a fiercely patriarchal culture, her story becomes a kind of universal feminist fable, but low on personal detail or emotional warmth.

Ultimately, Papusza is less of a literary biopic than a widescreen ensemble drama that recreates the lost, culturally rich world of Poland’s Roma community in the 20th century. Even if it undersells its elusive subject a little, it rewards the senses with an immersive, melancholy, sumptuous visual symphony.
Production companies: Argomedia, Polish Television, Canal + Poland, Studio Filmowe KADR
Producer:  Lambros Ziotas
Cast: Jowita Budnik, Zbigniew Walerys, Antoni Pawlicki
Directors: Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze,
Writers: Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze,
Cinematographers: Krzysztof Ptak, Wojcech Staron
Editor: Krzysztof Szpetmansky
Music: Jan Kanty Pawluskiewicz
International sales: New Europe Film Sales
Unrated, 131 minutes

Shame: Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

Maritime tragedy becomes marital trauma.

Venue

Karlovy Vary festival screening, July 4

Cast

Maria Semenova, Elena Korobeynikova, Helga Filipova, Seseg Hapsasova

Director

Yusup Razykov

Frosty Russian drama weighs the emotional cost of a submarine accident on the wives back home.

A stark drama about life on a remote Russian submarine base inside the Arctic Circle, Shame is a visually arresting mood piece with just enough gorgeous scenery and romantic intrigue to compensate for its underpowered plot. Dozens of films have been made about courage and claustrophobia beneath the waves, but the veteran Uzbekistani director Yusup Rasykov instead concentrates on the naval wives as they anxiously await the return of their menfolk in a crumbling apartment block perched on the edge of a stunning snowy peninsula.

The director has a track record of social and political critique, both under Communism and afterward, and Shame maintains this tradition. The story echoes the notorious case of the submarine Kursk, which sank in 2000 with 118 sailors onboard, the Russian authorities apparently preferring to let them die rather than accept Western help. Premiered in competition at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival last week, where it won the Fipresci critics’ prize, this downbeat winter’s tale will likely resurface at other festivals. It also has modest theatrical potential among lingering fans of vintage Soviet-era fatalism.
Rasykov and co-writer Ekaterina Mavromatis wrong-foot us with the opening scene, which seems to be setting up an underworld crime thriller, before quickly shifting focus onto more low-key domestic matters. Maria Semenova gives a coolly compelling performance as Lena, a newly married arrival at the base, where her sub-crewman husband is stationed. A boldly unsympathetic heroine, Lena remains aloof from her neighbors, shunning their petty social events. Instead she goes drinking in local bars, attracting hostile gossip with a brief extramarital affair.
When dark rumors of a submarine accident begin to circulate, Lena remains chilly and detached. The other wives use different coping mechanisms -- denial, alcohol, or claiming imaginary phone calls from their missing spouses. One even revives an ancient folk tradition by making a sacrificial offering, tipping an old TV set into the icy sea. Naval authorities initially remain silent, an act of cruelty that only increases desperation and wild speculation among the women.
After the grim truth emerges, Razykov does not sensationalize. Instead, Lena’s muted emotional reaction is channeled into a private investigation into her husband’s romantic secrets. At this point, the film links back to the opening scene, becoming an unlikely rescue story and sour indictment of Russian mental health policy. This late narrative gear-shift is not wholly convincing, though it arguably serves to underline the film’s main message about casual corruption and abuse of power in a secretive state. Shame never quite lands any killer punches, but thankfully cinematographer Yuri Mikhailyshin delivers an endless gallery of epic snowscapes more dramatic than any of the film’s human stories.
Production company: Cultura Initiatives
Producers: Vladimir Malyshev, Andrey Malyshev
Cast: Maria Semenova, Elena Korobeynikova, Helga Filipova, Seseg Hapsasova
Director: Yusup Razykov
Screenplay: Yusup Razykov, Ekaterina Mavromatis
Cinematographer: Yuri Mikhailyshin
Editor: Denis Luzanov
Music: Alexey Artishevsky
Sales contact: Yusup Razykov, urazykov@yandex.ru
Unrated, 90 minutes

The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier): Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

An aloof adaptation of Agota Kristof's bestseller "The Notebook" that's technically impressive but precludes audience identification.

Venue

Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Director

János Szász

Cast

László Gyémánt, András Gyémánt, Piroska Molnár, Ulrich Thomsen, Ulrich Matthes, Orsolya Tóth

Hungarian director János Szász's Crystal Globe-winning adaption of Agota Kristof's bestseller, about twin boys during WWII, co-stars Ulrich Thomsen and Ulrich Matthes.

Two 13-year-old twin brothers are forced to shack up with their evil, country-bumpkin grandmother during the war in Le Grand Cahier, Hungarian director János Szász's rather detached adaptation of Agota Kristof's heart-rending, French-language WWII bestseller The Notebook. Technically almost too immaculate, the film smoothens many of the original's rough edges, replacing the book's unreliable and disturbing children's point-of-view with a distancing voice-over, cute animated sequences and two stone-faced performances that make it hard to care about these identical siblings who decide to train themselves in cruelty so they'll stand a better chance of surviving the war.

However, the novel's notoriety and the European co-production's recent top Crystal Globe win at Karlovy Vary should help it get noticed in Europe. Stateside, where films about children during WWII often find a niche audience, a boutique distributor could also come on board, especially if Hungary submits the film for Oscar consideration.
Probably to avoid starvation and air raids, two unnamed twin boys (László and András Gyémánt) are taken by their mother (Gyöngyver Bognar, also in Szász's Opium) to their grandmother (veteran actress Piroska Molnár, terrific), who's lived in a countryside shack since a Nazi officer (Ulrich Thomsen, another Opium alumnus) has taken over her farmhouse. But it's not a warm welcome, as Grandma has never seen the boys and feels no warmth for them or her estranged daughter.
The villagers call Grandmother "the Witch," and the boorish, often drunk and cruel woman does her best to live up to her reputation, calling the siblings "bastards" and making them work extremely hard for very little food. The dark-haired twins, who look like they've escaped from a Benetton Kids ad rather than a city devastated by years of war, find solace in their self-imposed study time, when they write everything they learn from their Bible and books into a notebook (the "cahier" of the book's original title) given to them by their father (Ulrich Matthes).
The novel only contained this "homework", intentionally naive compositions in which the first-person narrators try to only describe truthful, objective things instead of emotions. What made Kristof's book so powerful is that between the lines, a powerful picture emerged of two children whose psyche was severely warped by the war through their realization that some of their own family, fellow countrymen and final liberators, the Soviets, had become just as cruel as the Nazi occupiers.
Szász tries to conserve both the young teenagers' dispassionately objective voice and simultaneously convey what they are going through emotionally — something the kids deny themselves by applying themselves to "cruelty training," systematically fighting each other and not eating for days in order to heighten their chances of surviving the surrounding brutality.
But the frequent voice-overs, in which the boys read what they wrote (heard over shots of them writing), add distance rather than insight because it is not the action of writing that's revealing but the events and thought processes that led them to write what they did (or made conspicuous by not writing about it). Similarly, the occasionally animated notebook drawings are unintentionally eye-catching rather than naive and shocking because Szász seems more interested in the visuals themselves rather than what led to them being drawn.
Since Cahier doesn't shown much of the twins before they become so hard on themselves, it's hard to care for them in the first place and this feeling is reinforced by László and András Gyémánt's intentionally expressionless performances, which suggest too much what they've become and not enough what they've had to give up to get there.
The film is beautifully conceived — almost too much so for a tale about the devastating mental and moral deformation caused by the war — with Haneke's regular cinematographer, Christian Berger (The White Ribbon), capturing the Hungarian countryside with a real feel for the seasons and Jóhann Jóhannsson's percussion-driven score punching up the drama.
Production companies: Hunnia Filmstudio, Intuit Pictures, Amour Fou, Dolce Vita Films
Cast: László Gyémánt, András Gyémánt, Piroska Molnár, Ulrich Thomsen, Ulrich Matthes, Gyöngyver Bognar, Orsolya Tóth
Director: János Szász
Screenwriters: János Szász, Andras Szekér, based on the novel "The Notebook" by Agota Kristof

Producers: Sandor Söth, Pal Sandor
Director of photography: Christian Berger

Music: Jóhann Jóhannsson

Costume designer: Janos Breckl

Editor: Szilvia Ruszev

Sales: Beta Cinema
No rating, 111 minutes

Review: The Only Thing Holding 'The Way, Way Back' Way, Way Back Is Its Hero

At 16, we're not inclined to entertain the thought that, just maybe, the oppressive and regimented adults in our life are actually right about a few things. That the self-absorbed brooding at which we excel so greatly can actually claim a few victims. These are the sorts of things that we learn later in life, which is why movies about teenagers (ostensibly written by adults) often come with that bump of self-awareness about the cantankerous habits upheld throughout the high school era. The Way, Way Back seems to set up for this sort of revelation — introducing Duncan (Liam James) as an unconfident, socially inept, family-loathing teen who has got to learn a few lessons about not only accepting himself, which he eventually does, but about accepting those around him... which he doesn't.
Forgoing its coming-of-age identity, The Way, Way Back seems to stunt Duncan's development just past the boost in self-esteem. After being carted off to spend the summer with his mother (Toni Collette), her douche of a boyfriend Trent (Steve Carell), and his judgmental daughter (Zoe Levin), Duncan stumbles upon a world unlike any he's ever known: the Water Wizz water park, "run" by golden hearted goofball Owen (Sam Rockwell). After continuing to alienate himself from his well-meaning mother and the thick-headed Trent, Duncan seems to find himself earning the affection of people like Owen, the rest of the water park's fun-loving staff, and the diamond-in-the-rough neighbor girl Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb).
But we never quite understand where the interest stems from. Socially awkward and standoffish, Duncan makes no real effort to connect with any of these characters, shunning all attempts at consideration offered by his mother. Offered the contrast of Levin's Steph, we understand that we're supposed to think of Duncan as kind, sensitive, and "deeper" than the rest. But... he's not. He's shy. Not a particularly bad guy. But he's not a particularly good guy, either.

Fox Searchlight Pictures

And he never really learns to be. The film never asks Duncan to step up to the plate, open his mind to the pains his mother might be suffering in regards to his distance and her boyfriend's mistreatment of her. There's not a single act that Duncan performs in the movie that isn't self-driven. Aside from learning to laugh a little bit louder, the character barely changes at all from beginning to end.
But his journey, while perhaps not emotionally successful, is a lot of fun. All scenes that pair Duncan with Owen — hell, all scenes with Owen at all — are remarkably enticing, acting as a catalyst to the viewer's own fantasies about escaping our realities and diving into a carefree, mystical water park universe. The comically obsessed Owen's little world involves gags, games, parties, and a romance with a cold shouldered Maya Rudolph, who is even a delight as the straight man character. Writers/directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash offer a good deal of fun as one-note park employees — a sexually charged man child and a miserable park fixture with dreams of starting his life anew, respectively.
In fact, we experience everything Duncan does. We revel in the fun offered by Owen and his gang. We are oddly stimulated by the supercharged douchebaggery offered by Carell (fantastic in this bad guy role). But we don't really learn anything, just as he doesn't, which is the film's only fatal flaw. In order for these summertime follies to have any value, they must offer their hero something. Sure, he has a good time, figures out how to relax a bit, and maybe even snags a few points in the self-esteem department. But by the end of The Way, Way Back, Duncan is no more a man, no better a person, than he is at the start. And for a coming-of-age story, that's a pretty big problem.

3.5/5

The Deflowering of Eva Van End: Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

An angelic guest wreaks havoc in suburbia.

Venue

Karlovy Vary screening, July 3

Cast

Vivian Dierickx, Rafael Gareisen, Abe Dijkman, Tomer Pawlicki, Jacqueline Blom, Ton Kas

Director

Michiel ten Horn

Todd Solondz meets Pasolini in this bittersweet Dutch coming-of-age comedy.

KARLOVY VARY, Czech Republic -- An impossibly perfect visitor exposes the hidden faultlines within a dysfunctional suburban family in this darkly funny cautionary tale from the Dutch directing debutant Michiel ten Horn, which is showing at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this week. The deadpan tone and ironically sunny aesthetic recalls the bracingly sour tragicomedies of Todd Solondz, but there is more redeeming lightness in this highly engaging Eurodrama, which has enough bittersweet charm and universal relevance to appeal to discerning audiences beyond the festival circuit. Having much of its multilingual dialogue in English may also prove an added selling point.

Our main window on the story is the family’s teenage daughter Eva (Vivian Dierickx), a sensitive ugly duckling who is bullied at school and largely ignored at home. But the arrival of her German exchange student pal Veit (Rafael Gareisen), a strapping Aryan blond with movie-star looks and an apparently angelic nature, sends shockwaves through the entire family. While Eva is consumed by unrequited love – and unspoken lust -- her older brothers reveal themselves as racist idiots and pompous jerks. Meanwhile, their bickering parents go off the rails in a doomed bid to match Veit’s New Age lifestyle and charitable good works. The consequences prove catastrophic, and almost fatal.
The film was purportedly inspired by events in the director’s youth, although first-time screenwriter Anne Barnhoorn is also clearly referencing Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 quasi-Biblical political parable Theorem, in which Terence Stamp's beautiful stranger emerges from nowhere to seduce every member of a bourgeois Italian household, transforming their lives but plunging them into despair. Barnhoorn borrows many of Pasolini’s plot developments, but removes most of the sex and leftist social critique. Still, were he still alive, the veteran Italian radical might have been gratified to see history repeating itself just as Marx predicted. His film was tragedy, this is farce.
Ten Horn has a background in animation, hinted at by the film’s bright toybox palette and stylized, cartoonish look. Editing is crisp and camerawork agreeably fluid, most notably in the single bravura tracking shot that frames the final scene. Although it never takes the simplistic option of making Veit an evil sociopath with a smiling face, The Deflowering of Eva Van End essentially inverts Pasolini’s message. Eva and her family are irrevocably changed by their angelic visitor, but his smug superiority eventually proves destructive, and his departure is ultimately a healing process for everyone. Be careful when you wish for perfection, it may just turn up on your doorstep.
Production company: Pupkin Film
Producers: Peter Kuijpers, Sander van Meurs, Iris Otten
Cast: Vivian Dierickx, Rafael Gareisen, Abe Dijkman, Tomer Pawlicki, Jacqueline Blom, Ton Kas
Director: Michiel ten Horn
Screenwriter: Anne Barnhoorn
Cinematographer: Jasper Wolf
Editor: Sander Vos
Music: Djurre de Haan
Sales company: M-Appeal
Unrated, 98 minutes

Review: 'The Lone Ranger Is Fun. Goofy, Mindless, Overdrawn, Inoffensive Fun.

Peter Mountain/Walt Disney

Two goofballs rattling around the desert — one uptight and twitchy, with a nice smile and a healthy head of hair, the other slathered in face paint and prancing about like a certified loon — on a high stakes mission of some nebulous sort, occasionally breaking from their humorous bickering to hop a runaway train or match pistols with the sort of criminals who exude the very odor of evil. That's The Lone Ranger in a nutshell. There's nary a moment in Gore Verbinski's latest Johnny Depp venture when you're challenged, provoked, or asked to use your brain even for a minute. Whether this is a problem — as it might be in the eyes of the scrutinizing critic who thinks even commercial art forms should leave its spectators with new questions — is up for debate. But to all those on board with setting eyes agape and just soaking in some visually inspired, harmonically engaging, and comically enchanting nonsense, The Lone Ranger is a triumph.
The setup is almost immaterial, albeit outrageously kooky: dutiful attorney John Reid (Armie Hammer) is killed along with his gruff but good-hearted sheriff brother after the two saddle up to apprehend a vicious escaped criminal, Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner). Afterwards, a "spirit horse" tells a very Deppian Native American that the fallen lawyer is destined to return to life to save... um, whatever it is that need be saved. See? It's bonkers, and barely rooted in the mythology surrounding the iconic American character.

Peter Mountain/Walt Disney

But this thoroughfare of zaniness proves that the movie not only serves its purpose as easy entertainment, it embraces it. Cracking wise at its own expense throughout its two-and-a-half-hour run (yes, it is 150 minutes long, dipping in interest in a handful of its middle low points), The Lone Ranger is never above silly humor, reality bending, or fourth wall destruction. Time and time again, the film seems to ask, "What is the funniest thing we can get here?" forgoing character, adherence to era-appropriate speech patterns, or general logic in the meantime. And this is the right move.
Yes, a few eye rolls might be incurred by a 19th century Native American muttering a sarcastic "What's with the mask?" when brought face to face with a meathead Ranger Reid on a quest for new allies. But would we prefer a film so reverent that it was humorless? One that paid more mind to legitimate world building than to one-off chuckles? A story that took itself, dare we say, seriously? In some instances, sure. But with its inherently ridiculous source material, The Lone Ranger knows that its main goal is to have fun, no matter the cost.
So we hop aboard horses and renegade locomotives, we blow up bridges and battle off crusading conmen, we slink into brothels and don railway worker disguises. We pull every silly trick in the book along with the Lone Ranger and Tonto, happy to accompany them as they dash through exciting action sequences and bicker wittily in a stellar, sun-baked Old West. And in all these efforts, we and The Lone Ranger reign victorious. When topheavy middle chapters take the stage, laying groundwork for the excitement to come, we might find ourselves yawning and checking our watches. But thankfully, a deadpan Depp shtick or laughably earnest Hammer routine is always right around the corner. All in all, the film is a riotous train ride through a beautiful countryside... it just tends to stall at one or two stations.
3.5/5

Review: 'Despicable Me 2' Might Just Be Colorful Enough to Distract from the Fact That It's Not Very Good

Universal Studios

There are animated movies — the wistful works of Hayao Miyazaki, the dignified and stoic Adventures of Tintin, the mortally horrifying Polar Express — and then there are cartoons. Zany, kooky, rabble-rousing characters stumbling into the sorts of situations that no human being would ever face. With Pixar's sentimental soft spot and a general propensity for animated features to engage older audiences as well as younger ones, we don't often see the sort of Looney Tunes hijinks that once occupied every animated feature and short on the market. This is what makes Despicable Me 2 — or at least its early scenes — such a delight. Those of us who fawned over the off-the-wall shenanigans of Bugs, Daffy, and Elmer in our earlier days will beam with glee over high-speed chase sequences, minions scooting every which way, and even the simple element of how these oblong characters are drawn. At its core, Despicable Me 2 is a love letter to the wild, visually ravenous yore of animation.
And for many, this will be enough. Your eyes never tire of the aesthetic charms of the bright, colorful world that sprouts from the dens of DreamWorks. The funny-looking characters bounce along in a springboard universe, never sinking below giggle-worthy in their desperate command of your unblinking attention. Transforming the ceaseless banter of vaudeville greats into the visual spectrum, every movement in Despicable Me 2 becomes a gag. Nine out of 10 times, a successful one.
But that's as deep as the joy and charms go here, which is a shame and a surprise, considering the heartfelt original feature. While the nefarious Gru's (Steve Carell) first big screen outing had him changing his ways in light of a newfound affection for three orphan girls, the sequel finds the character, now wholly reformed, embarking upon the substantially less interesting adventure of getting a girlfriend. Not only to lay his childhood insecurities to waste, but also to appease his youngest daughter, Agnes (Elsie Kate Fisher), whose life "just isn't complete" without a mother.

Universal Pictures

And so, Gru teams up with secret agent and aspiring superhero Lucy (Kristen Wiig) in a mission to bring down the mysterious purveyor of an evil plot for world domination. After the inception of this plotline, things pretty much peter out, thematically. Gru fumbles with his feelings for Lucy, and she with hers for him, with a vile plot carrying out under their extensive noses all the while. The film grabs at some tender moments, but is undone by its own reputation: in no way could a simple undercooked romance story ever live up to the heart-melting triumph that was Despicable Me.
As such, the gags prevail as the biggest win of the sequel. Placing the minions center stage, the sequel seems to know what it's doing, banking on the universal appeal of the slapstick ensemble. Those who revel in nostalgia for the near-dead era of animated physical comedy will smile knowingly at Despicable Me 2's revival of the trade. But anyone looking for that sweet sentiment, that heartfelt substance, the admirable story of the original will have to settle for a lot of babbling green things. They're cute — you'd better believe they're cute — but that's about it.
2.5/5

Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux jours): Film Review

The Bottom Line

Thoughtful and touching old age dramedy features strong performances from a seasoned cast.

Opens

June 19 (in France)

Director

Marion Vernoux

Cast

Fanny Ardant, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Chesnais, Jean-Francois Stevenin, Marie Riviere

Fanny Ardant, Patrick Chesnais and Laurent Lafitte topline Marion Vernoux's story of a love affair between a man and a woman twice his age.

A former dentist having a late-life crisis finds comfort in the arms of a much younger man in Bright Days Ahead (Les Beaux jours), writer-director Marion Vernoux’s tender and terrifically cast coming-of-old age dramedy. Starring Fanny Ardant as a soul-searching retiree, Laurent Lafitte as her pot-puffing beau, and the superb Patrick Chesnais as her mildly suspicious husband, this well-tempered love story gets a tad too airy in its third act, but otherwise provides a frank and endearing portrait of cross-generational relationships—somewhere between the explicitness of Ulrich Seidl and the feel-goodness of Quartet and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Released locally by Le Pacte in mid-June, the film scored a promising 200K admissions it its opening week, and could very well become a summer box-office mainstay in France, with older audiences turning out in healthy numbers. Overseas, Days could travel beyond the usual Francophone circuits to selected art-house distributors, especially those who can smartly market it to the senior set.
Based on co-screenwriter Fanny Chesnel’s novel Une jeune fille aux cheveux blancs (A Young Girl with Gray Hair), the story follows the amorous travails of the recently retired Caroline (Ardant), who visits a nearby senior center—named "Les Beaux jours," which is also the film’s French-language title—where she’s supposed to partake in time-killing activities like ceramics and amateur theatre. Instead, she finds a brand new hobby between the sheets with carefree ladies’ man, Julien (Lafitte), who teaches computer classes when he’s not bedding half the women in their small seaside town.
The initial courting scenes between the two are among the film’s strongest, with Ardant showcasing the charms that made her one of France’s most seductive stars in movies like Francois Truffaut’s Confidentially Yours and The Woman Next Door, while Comedie-Francaise troupe member Lafitte reveals a darker character than he’s played in recent hits like the cop caper On the Other Side of the Tracks.
Never outright explicit but racy none the same, the lovemaking soon becomes a regular routine between the two, with Caroline discovering newfound passion in her uneventful retirement, and Julien slowly growing attached to what was initially just another easy—albeit significantly older—lay. Meanwhile, Caroline begins to neglect her dentist spouse until he figures out something’s up, and the way that the excellent Chesnais  (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) portrays the cuckolded yet deeply understanding hubby is a study in intuition and restraint.
As things slide into the third act, the film heads in rather expected directions and winds up wrapping things up in a manner that seems all-too neat for such a host of messy lives. Still, as a whole, Bright Days Ahead remains an acute and endearing character study, and definitely one of the more convincing portraits of senior sex-and-love to come out in recent years.
Tech credits are classically polished, with cinematographer Nicolas Gaurin (Cold Showers) intimately capturing the Nord Pas-de-Calais locations, and Czech composer Quentin Sirjacq providing an emotionally infused score. A convincing cast of additional elders includes vets Jean-Francois Stevenin and Marie Riviere – the latter of whom famously starred in Eric Rohmer’s classics The Aviator’s Wife and Summer.
Opens: June 19 (in France)
Production companies: Les Films du Kiosque, 27.11 Production
Cast: Fanny Ardant, Laurent Lafitte, Patrick Chesnais, Jean-Francois Stevenin, Marie Riviere
Director: Marion Vernoux
Screenwriter: Marion Vernoux, Fanny Chesnel, based on her novel Une jeune fille aux cheveux blancs
Producers: Francois Kraus, Denis Pineau-Valencienne, Juliette Favreul Renaud
Director of photography: Nicolas Gaurin
Production designer: Yann Dury
Costume designer: Marite Coutard
Music: Quentin Sirjacq
Editor: Benoit Quinon
Sales Agent: Le Pacte
No rating, 93 minutes

Killing Season: Karlovy Vary Review

The Bottom Line

A drawn out cat-and-mouse game never catches fire.

Venue

Karlovy Vary Film Festival

Opens

July 12 (Millennium Entertainment)

Director

Mark Steven Johnson

Cast

John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Milo Ventimiglia, Elizabeth Olin

Robert De Niro and John Travolta go mano a mano in Mark Steven Johnson's film about two ex-soldiers with some unresolved business.

KARLOVY VARY -- A former Serbian soldier and his one-time American opponent get a second — and third, and fourth… — chance to torture each other in Killing Season, from director Mark Steven Johnson (Daredevil, Ghost Rider).

John Travolta plays a Serbian with a fat accent and a grudge the size of the Austro-Hungarian empire who travels to the U.S. to "accidentally" befriend Robert De Niro, a retired U.S. soldier who also fought in the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Their hunting trip in the Appalachians quickly turns into a long-winded chase as the true reason for the Serb's visit emerges, though the film struggles to suggest the former fighters are true equals or even interested in actually killing each other, thus deflating what little tension there is.
Though some moments of gore as well as the first pairing of the two veteran stars might spark some initial audience interest, the performances themselves won't aid word-of-mouth. Millennium Entertainment will release the film stateside July 12 after premieres at the Taormina and Karlovy Vary festivals, though this modest-scaled project should perform better as a small-screen item (it goes out day-and-date on VOD).

Emil Kovac (Travolta) was part of a gang of vicious Serbian soldiers during the Yugoslav conflict. Benjamin Ford (De Niro) fought there as part of the NATO force, though nowadays he's retired to a hunting lodge in the Appalachians where he not only enjoys hunting but equally savors being far away from his ex-wife and her new husband, though, perhaps with some regret. He also sees very little of his adult son (Milo Ventimiglia), who's just had a child of his own.
When Ford's car breaks down in the forest, a foreign man claiming to be Bosnian miraculously appears to help him out. When it starts pouring, he's invited back to the cabin, where the men trade war stories. Since the film begins with a flashback to the war and a scene in present-day Belgrade, where Kovac lays his hand on a file with Ford's information, it doesn't come as a surprise that the Serb suggests a hunting trip the next day. The trip quickly turns into a very different type of hunt.
Unfortunately, there's little to no tension in the film's first lazy 30 minutes.
When the truth surfaces and the chase begins, there are initially a few clever details, such as the use of walkie-talkies so the two can communicate even when they're running from each other. There's also the fact both men hunt with a bow and arrow. Their archaic weapon of choice directly leads to the film's first scene of gore, which sees one of the men hit in the calf by an arrow and subsequently hung from a string pulled through the resulting hole.
But the tension and element of surprise of this first bloody interlude are largely absent in what follows, as the subsequent cat-and-mouse game continually repeats a single setup: one of the two catches the other until the latter gets away and everything starts all over again.

Various backdrops and torture methods — including waterboarding with a laughable amount of salt and lemon juice instead of water — are used, but not once do De Niro, Travolta or Johnson manage to suggest the men are truly in mortal danger. Coincidences must pile up so the chase can continue. The screenplay by Evan Daugherty (who had a story credit on Snow White and the Huntsman) also lacks humor and struggles to integrate the supposed confessions and conversations the two often bone-weary men have about the war and God. Things even unintentionally tip over into parody when Kovic and Ford face off in a church at the crack of dawn.
Cinematographer Peter Menzies (Die Hard: With a Vengeance, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider) isn't as nearly interested in the scenery (shot in Georgia and Bulgaria) as Travolta, who chews large quantities of it as Kovac. He not only looks disconcerting with his pitch black chinstrap beard but also sounds it, with his thick, occasionally unintelligible Slavic accent.  De Niro is particularly subdued here, further reinforcing the impression that a true battle of the wills between the protagonists will never materialize. The obvious use of body doubles in several sequences is also distracting.
Christopher Young's busy score tries to add tension to scenes that clearly didn't have a lot of it going in, and the pursuit also ends rather abruptly after just over 70 minutes, with the remaining time of the 90-minute duration split between the various codas and drawn-out end credits.
Originally called Shrapnel, the film was meant to team up Travolta with his Face/Off co-star Nicolas Cage under the direction of John McTiernan before finally being made in its current configuration.
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Special Events)
Opens: July 12 (Millennium Entertainment)
Production companies: Corsan, Millennium Films, Nu Image
Cast: John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Milo Ventimiglia, Elizabeth Olin
Director: Mark Steven Johnson
Screenwriter: Evan Daugherty
Producers: Paul Breuls, Ed Cathel III
Director of photography: Peter Menzies
Production designer: Kirk M. Petruccelli
Music: Christopher Young
Costume designer: Denise Wingate
Editor: Sean Albertson
Sales: Media Pro Distribution
R rating, 90 minutes.