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Review: Off the Hump

By Mike Faloon

Whenever I watch a short film where the writer/director also appears on camera I wonder which skill set they're trying to showcase.  So many people use shorts as business cards that I'm left scratching my head; is this guy trying to show how he can frame a shot, write well, or charm an audience?  The greatest strength of Off the Hump, a collection of 15 shorts ranging from 30 seconds to eight minutes, is that filmmaker Adam Bourget seems to make shorts as an end unto themselves.  Digit Goes Digital probably won't land Bourget a job, but it should.  (In said short, Digit, the ambitious primate, leaves the jungles of Rwanda for the jungles of the movie business.  It's good fun and perfectly scored by a host of songs from the Primate 5.)  Ditto for Superflake, the story of K-77, the world's first cloned snowflake.  Off the Hump is a fine way to spend an hour.

Review: The Grace Lee Project

By Mike Faloon

Smart, nice, and soft spoken-these are the words people come up with to describe the Grace Lees they know, so filmmaker Grace Lee embarked upon an project to dig beneath the surface of the stereotypes.  The movie doesn't take hold until Lee shares interviews with Grace Lees who astound and surprise her, women who seem older, wiser, and stronger than those depicted in snippets during the first third of the movie.  Once filmmaker Grace Lee begins marveling at her subjects the focus shifts away from her self doubts ("I am not a typical Grace Lee!") to portraits of remarkable people who happened to be named Grace Lee.  Overall, an interesting concept that yields mixed results.

Review: Fateless

By Mike Faloon

Scene: There's a beautiful damsel tied to the tracks, steam engine approaching.  The villain fondles his handlebar moustache and smirks at a job well done...until the good guy, dressed in white, leaps from his stallion to save the day.  Whoever cast that mold could never conceive how long their template for moviemaking would last.  Even though Westerns have faded from the Hollywood foreground, it's amazing how American movie makers cling to the dynamic depicted above, especially when a movie deals with racial or religious identity.  One example that comes to mind is Men of Honor, ostensibly the story of the Navy's first African-American diver, Carl Brashear, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr.  The film's true focus is on Robert Deniro's character, a grizzled veteran determined to see Brashear fail.  Deniro, the good guy in white, gets the spotlight while Gooding remains bound and gagged on the tracks, a prop to make Deniro's character look virtuous.  (Check out Radio, another Gooding gem or Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning for similar experiences in "You have to hand it to white folks willing to work with black people!")  To some extent you see this in holocaust related films too.  Take Schindler's List, for example, which the Village Voice dubbed "a feel good movie about the ultimate feel bad experience."  The point?  All of this makes Fateless such a welcome, if unrelenting, movie experience.  Set in 1944, Gyura, a 14-year-old Hungarian, is sent to a labor camp.  The healthy teen slowly disintegrates before our eyes.  Every time it seems like he can fall no further, the bottom gives way and Gyura continues his descent; it reminded me of reading The Jungle.  The pacing is a bit odd at times (a few scenes are cut short before they could develop their full impact), but it's directed by a cinematographer, Lajos Koltai, making his debut as a director so that, the pacing, is more than offset by the fact that Fateless is ceaselessly stimulating visually.  Highly recommended. 

DVD Review: Dreamgirls

For movie junkies, Oscar season is both the best and worst of times. As the hype surrounding the year’s most outstanding achievements in film reaches a fever pitch, it is nearly impossible, logistically and financially, to satisfy the craving to see all of the nominated pictures. At $11.00+ a pop, the movie fan must sometimes take it to the street. In this case, that street is Queens Boulevard in Elmhurst, where $5.00 will get you a taste of the most-nominated film of the year: Bill Condon’s Dreamgirls.

Cinematography: B
Either the cinematographer is an extremely disciplined yoga student or a conspicuous tripod was utilized in the making of this film. Aside from a man with a very large baseball hat obscuring the screen at the 39-minute mark, the camera work is steady throughout. Eddie Murphy’s pomp and Beyonce’s rump both translate with vivid clarity.

Audio: C-
Had this been a neo-realist art house exercise,  “scratched Motown 45 played on a toy mono phonograph” would have been an interesting aesthetic choice. The dialogue is virtually inaudible, but, what the hell, it’s a musical. Background noise is limited to a few surges in applause (Jennifer Hudson’s showpiece “And I Am Telling You I Am Not Going” and Eddie Murphy’s “I Want You Baby” both drew heavy audience response), the occasional “Amen!” and some popcorn bag ambiance. Just like being in the theatre with a malfunctioning hearing aid.

Performances: B+
Based on the singing, dancing, and this reviewer’s interpretation of facial tics, eye acting, and voice volume shifts, Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson’s Oscar noms are well deserved. Oscar voters sadly overlooked Danny Glover’s stylized delivery of garbled dialogue.

Story: C
If one reads the synopsis on the back of DVD container and views the trailer on YouTube, the plot will mostly make sense. The use of montage and musical numbers advance the plot rapidly, making this an ideal film to enjoy in pirated form. The disc ends mercifully at the two-hour mark, presumably before the end of the theatrical version.

Music: B-
One guesses that in the multiplex or on CD, the music would probably be a bit too slick to capture the energy of 1960’s and 70’s R&B. However, poorly recorded and burned to a cheap DVD, the soundtrack reclaims the gritty quality of the time period represented.

Packaging: B
The color printing on the DVD case is top-notch (no dot matrix job here!). One complaint: the credits printed on the back of the box are actually for V for Vendetta.

Overall: B-
Are there better quality bootlegs of Dreamgirls out there? Probably. But this particular print is a tangible proof that—from Jennifer Hudson’s improbable rise to fame to a Korean junk vendor’s perseverance in the face of copyright law—the American dream is still attainable.

-- Brett Essler

Review: Save the Green Planet

By Mike Faloon

Is Lee nuts or is he just painfully aware of plans for an impending alien invasion?  Can he trust his circus performer girlfriend?  Was he right in kidnapping the CEO of the chemical company?  Will he be able to avenge his mother's tragic death?  Can he juggle all of these dilemmas while still paying the bills as a bee keeper?  There are so many reasons to like Save the Green Planet, but the absurdly humorous sci-fi storyline is overwhelmed by the unsettling violence.  You know those interrogation scenes they always cut away from in Bond movies?  The scenes where they let us blink to break the tension?  Green Planet director Jang Jan-hwan never lets us look away, squeezing every drop of blood he can from the exhausting torture scenes; it's excruciating.  This is one to avoid, at least until the Save the Green Planet: Edited for Pussies DVD comes out.   

Review: Wheel of Time

By Mike Faloon

I went into this one blind.  It was the first day of summer vacation and it had been weeks since I'd been to Film Forum; I wanted to go to a mid-week matinee simply because I could.  A documentary about Buddhism?  Let's go!  I'd heard of the director, Werner Herzog, but never seen any of his movies, and knew even less about the subject matter.  I topped it off by stumbling into the theatre five minutes late.  I had my work cut out for me but found Wheel of Time to be a near-perfect experience.  It doesn't set out to tell us about Buddhism, instead showing us the awe-inspiring devotion of which Buddhists are capable.  The main event is a gathering in the spring of 2002 for an initiation ceremony to be led by the Dali Lama.  Nearly half a million people came together, forming an impromptu city of tents.  Some traveled thousands of miles to attend, many walked the entire way.  I was just starting to think how much grumbling my 40-minute commute induces when Herzog interviewed a Buddhist who spent three years crawling to the gathering ("I measured the Earth with my body.")  Then, as if their faith had been insufficiently tested, the Dali Lama's health forced him to cancel the main portions of the ceremonies.  The sights and stories in Wheel of Time mesmerized me.  I daydreamed throughout much of the movie--there were long stretches without speaking and just as many scenes without subtitles--and still know nothing about Buddhism, yet recommend Wheel of Time to anyone in search of a unique movie experience. 

Review: Yang Ban Xi

By Mike Faloon

With most documentaries, I focus on content more than process; if the topic's interesting, I'm in.  Most of the time.  With Yang Ban Xi, the topic is a chip shot: a documentary on the absurdist propaganda movies produced during China's Cultural Revolution ('66-'76).  Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, a member of the Gang of Four (she started on bass but later switched to rhythm guitar) banned traditional Chinese operas and oversaw in their place a series of musicals that combined MGM spectacle with overt communist propaganda (not the wishy-washy pre-HUAC stuff that bogged down Hollywood).  People dancing with rifles and singing the praises of fighting the good fight and laborin' for the good of the people.  An hour of highlights of the 8 Model Works (of the 13 musicals produced during the Cultural Revolution the eight most popular movies were deemed "Model Works") would have kept me in my seat, but director Yan-Ting Yuen also interviewed key figures involved with the making of the 8 Model Works--actors, dancers, writers, and musicians.  (Not even communists want to talk to crew members, apparently.)  Their stories are amazing.  In particular, the woman who relates how, after the fall of the Cultural Revolution, she was forced to work in a factory and her co-workers claimed that she didn't deserve a raise because of her perceived close ties with the Gang of Four.  Yet even more telling are their current circumstances; they talk about being treated like pop stars during their time but now most of them reside in the tiniest, though remarkably well-kept, apartments.  With so much going for it, what gums up Yang Ban Xi?  First there is the overly ironic narration (provided by an actress, always shown in shadows, playing Jiang Qing (the real Jiang Qing committed suicide in 1991).  Second are the incongruous music videos, for lack of a better term, that are meant, I suppose, to show what music is like in contemporary China.  The narration is a repeated joke that never works and the videos are jarringly out of place.  (At first I thought the projectionist had made a mistake.)  In the end, if you love Chinese history and/or musicals, there's enough to see you through.  Everyone else will spend half of their time reaching for the "fast forward" button.   

Review: A Decent Factory

By Mike Faloon

The notion of "corporate social responsibility" looms large in the landscape of A Decent Factory, and though the entire film focuses on just one case study, the central question remains unanswered: do corporations want to clean up their acts or merely present the illusion of caring?  In this case, Hannah, working for Nokia, leads a team in conducting an "ethical assessment" of a factory that supplies components for Nokia.  With Nokia owned largely by Finnish stockholders and the factory located in China but run mostly by British managers, I expected the movie to be driven by cultural and class conflicts.  "Check" on both fronts, there are ample amounts of both.  What I didn't expect were the numerous conflicts along the gender divide.  Hannah leads an inspection team staffed solely by women while the factory's managers are all men, so when the inspectors go poking and prodding in search of violations there's an air of teachers reprimanding wayward pupils, the men playing out their roles as "bad boys" by, generally, owning up to their many infractions, taking a mischievous pride in getting away with storing open containers of hazardous chemicals in the washroom and keeping double sets of books, for example.  And there's more because 90% of the factory's workers are young, single women over whom the managers lord like an out-dated father/daughter relationship.  Throughout the movie we see and hear from the inspectors and the managers, but we don't hear from the filmmaker nor do we have any sense of how the Nokia brass perceives the process of ethical assessments.  The lack of another point of view makes it difficult to put what we see on the screen in perspective, to triangulate.  A Decent Factory merits a qualified recommendation.  In the right context it has a lot to offer, but be sure to see it with a friend so you'll have someone to dissect it with.  I got a lot more out of A Decent Factory while thinking about it after I left the theatre than I did while I was actually watching it. 

Franz Kafka's The Aristrocrats

By Brian Wallace, Brian Cogan, and Mike Faloon

Review: Desert Wind

By Mike Faloon

When it comes to identity politics all parties seem united by one belief: wealthy, white, heterosexual men suck and no one wants to hear their stories because those stories are so pervasive as it is.  Enter director François Kohler and psycho-therapist Alexis Burger.  They recruited a dozen guys, mostly from Europe, took them into the Tunisian desert, and asked them to talk about their feelings.  Early on you get a lot of what you'd expect (best summarized by one man who said, "My mother screwed me up and my wife finished the job.")  But as they come to trust each other, the participants are unusually reflective; these are not the thoughts of the Monday Night Football crowd.  And they have to trust each other because Burger asks them to engage in very unconventional activities.  For example, asking each man to stand before the group, nude, and talk about what he likes and dislikes about his body.  Desert Wind is a weird ride and though it lacks a clear destination for the audience, it's worth checking out.