dir. Jared Hess
Opens Fri June 25.
Most teen comedies barely scrape the pimpled surface of adolescent drudgery. Even "unpopular" silver screen kids are usually still attractive enough for your average Noxzema commercial, and the worst devastation characters suffer is not making/making it with the cheerleading squad/football team. There are plenty of laughs to mine from the pseudo-tortured lives of more realistically nerdy, unpopular, and just plain odd 14- to 18-year-olds, though, as most of us were some combination of those, and, as Napoleon Dynamite shows us, young geek alienation is just as fun to parody as its grownup counterparts. In this charming new film, 24-year-old writer/ director Jared Hess mines the nebulous area between popular chic and weirdo freak, where outcast attributes are both quality, subtle comedy, and a charmingly dark part of our collective high-school unconscious.
Coming off like a Wes Anderson film populated by benign Harmony Korine castoffs, Napoleon Dynamite focuses on title character Napoleon, played in flawless deadpan by Jon Heder. Napoleon is your classic high-school outcast--tall and lanky with a shock of blond Afro, moon boots, and wire-frame glasses--who doodles pictures of man-beasts and plays tetherball alone on the playground. He's a smart teenager who's frustrated with the world but rarely confident enough to struggle against it, instead living under a veil of quick sarcastic outbursts and eyeing people with a squint. His life gets shoved in a new direction, though, when his butch grandma gets injured in a sporting accident and creepy Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) becomes temporary caretaker for Napoleon and his 30-year-old nerd brother Kip (Aaron Ruell) at the same time an earnest Mexican kid named Pedro (Efren Ramirez) becomes Napoleon's friend.
New blood is slowly infused into these characters' lives as the men in the Dynamite clan shape their identities in a middle-of-nowhere Idaho town. Uncle Rico is so fixated on the past he's willing to buy a time machine (and hit on girls half his age), while Kip puts his faith in Internet romance. Napoleon, content to live in a fantasy world of his creation, attempts to alter his life the least, but ends up learning the art of spontaneity in spite of himself.
Napoleon Dynamite is a character-driven movie, as each new introduction only adds color to the already rich cast, and wisps of plot are less important than how the individuals interact with each other. JENNIFER MAERZ
Two Brothers
dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud
Opens Fri June 25.
Unless his next film is about the misadventures of a pack of fluffy bunnies, it's hard to imagine that Jean-Jacques Annaud (who also made The Bear; in addition to Seven Years in Tibet and Quest for Fire) is ever going to trump the cuteness standard set by this DV tale about two tiger cubs in Indochina who get separated from their mom and from one another. The wee tigers are so goddamn cute that you almost start crying before the bullets fly, before the cage doors slam shut, before the fires blaze. And when those calamities get going, forget it. But Two Brothers, I'm relieved to note, is more than mere kitty porn for hippies and little girls.
Annaud's great trick is to turn the essential, undeniable, heart-exploding adorability of the cubs (and the constant threats that come their way) into the stuff of proper drama. Annaud handily pulls off that feat by making Sungha and Kumar distinct characters--one is timid and sweet, the other ferocious--and by suffusing their plight with emotions you can only call human. Because this is a movie about animals, he also supplies an endless array of scenes in which beasts suffer and die at the hands of men. And because the animals remind you of your sweet little housecat, you cry. But somewhere in there, you also become invested in the story, which is so primary as to be almost Greek, and is told with techniques so purely cinematic as to confirm the essential power of movies. Two brothers grow up separately, and are reunited as strangers in combat. Will they recognize one another? Will they be tigers or will they be brothers? Will I dry my teary eyes with Kleenex or a handkerchief? Two Brothers dares to ask all these questions and more. And Guy Pearce is in it, too, as the token human. SEAN NELSON
Remembrance of Things to Come
dir. Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon
Fri-Sun June 25-27 at Consolidated Works, 8 pm.
Though it bears the signature still montage of a Chris Marker film, Remembrance of Things to Come (or as the less ponderous French would have it, Le Souvenir d'un Avenir) is more interesting for the way it resists being subsumed by that famous Marker oeuvre. The documentary's subject is Denise Bellon, whose unique photographs provide the basic material for the film; her background in photojournalism dictates the sensitive yet straightforward quality of the images that illustrate her story. (She's also the mother of co-director Yannick Bellon.)
Denise Bellon moved in avant-garde social circles in pre-World War II Paris, and she's most famous for her photographs of Surrealists. The film also features her stunning portrait of Marcel Duchamp, his gaze brimming with muted energy. And it is thanks to Bellon's documentary zeal that we know the director of Paris' legendary Cinémathéque, Henri Langlois, did indeed hide stacks of film reels from the Germans in his bathtub. But in assembling these photographs, Marker and Bellon fille assert their ability to dictate the meaning of the images for the viewer.
Following the time-bending prescription of the film's title, superimposed images link prewar fantasy with postwar sobriety, and solemn narration demands that unconscious juxtapositions presage later political developments. It's as though, through Marker, the Surrealist figures in Bellon's pictures are reaching out of the frame to mess with history. The effect is at times amusing, at times irritating--but those little temporal jokes are beside the point. The real fascination of this film lies in the way Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon manipulate pictures, and how those images mutely push back. ANNIE WAGNER
The Notebook
dir. Nick Cassavetes
Opens Fri June 25.
Halfway through The Notebook, a fairly obvious thought occurred to me: The cinematic romance is all but dead. Sure, there may be occasional highlights--Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, for two--but outside of these glimmers, love is a barren field. Titanic, Pearl Harbor, Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember--tripe, tripe, tripe, and more tripe. And those are just four examples; the final list, taken from just the past 10 years, is surely much longer.
Out of the four films listed above, two of them--Message in a Bottle and A Walk to Remember--were based on books by Nicholas Sparks, one of the largest hackasauruses scribbling today. The Notebook, which was directed by Nick Cassavetes (talentless son of supremely talented John Cassavetes), is also based on a Sparks tome, and it bears the mark of all his work. That mark is complete and utter bullshit, and the end result is a bullshit film--a weepy, obvious, and painfully unromantic romance.
The anorexic story: Allie Nelson (Rachel McAdams) and Noah Calhoun (Ryan Gosling) meet cute, date cute, break-up not-so-cute, and reunite cute. Along the way, there are stints in WWII, flings with widows, proposals from wealthy gentlemen, and family strife. And framing this bluster (since all romances following Titanic must have a frame)? A backstory involving an elderly man (James Garner) reading the tale of Allie and Noah to an Alzheimer's patient (Gena Rowlands) in a nursing home. Can you pinpoint the looming plot twist?
In a proper world, Nick Cassavetes would have taken a cue from his father and directed The Notebook with a rugged and honest style. Unfortunately, this is not the case--coated in saccharine and saddled with mighty musical thunder, the film is lazy, uninspired, unoriginal, and nearly void of all talent. In fact, there are only two real bright spots to be found: Rachel McAdams and James Garner. The former acts her heart out; the latter is... well, James Garner. Everything else is unacceptable. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Facing Windows
dir. Ferzan Ozpetek
Opens Fri June 25.
Facing Windows is an Italian film by the Turkish-Italian director Ferzan Ozpetek, whose prior films have touched on issues of Mediterranean culture and topics such as the bathhouse. Here, he tries his hand at a mainstream romance movie. Facing Windows, this year's popular-vote winner at SIFF, manages to simultaneously succeed and still fall short of Ozpetek's apparent capacity.
A young woman in a struggling marriage is freed from her unhappiness by a series of events set in motion by the accidental acquisition of an elderly, amnesiac houseguest. The key event in the film is an incipient affair our heroine pursues with a young man whose apartment window faces her kitchen window. To convey more on this matter would be indiscreet.
The old man, we learn eventually, is (a) gay, (b) a Jew, (c) a concentration camp survivor, (d) a decorated hero of the Italian Republic, and (e) a legendary pastry chef. Despite this piling-on and the use of other romance-novel devices, I found myself musing on the film long after I had seen it, something that I found puzzling, at first.
Throughout the film, Ozpetek's golden light conveys romance and elegy at once, and several times he brings striking images of great beauty and depth to the screen. The film's opening sequence depicts a bloody handprint fading over time as dawn light illuminates the wall that carries it, moving the narrative forward by 50 years. The handprint faded from the wall but replayed in my mind long after the film's screening. What more can we ask from a film than that we reflect upon and recollect what we've been shown, rebuilding the experience from one of looking to one of memory? MIKE WHYBARK
