As James Toback’s Tyson opens, what hits you first is the technique. The idea behind the project is pretty simple — essentially, this is an extended interview with infamous boxer Mike Tyson as he reminiscences about his roots, and on the highs and lows of his career and private life. But in crafting what is otherwise a straightforward personal testimony by the former (and disgraced) heavyweight, Toback opts for a dynamic, eye-filling presentation: He employs split-screens that balance the interview with archival photos and video footage that together form a mosaic of one man’s recollections. Sometimes the audio behind those recollections is layered together, one track echoing away, then replaced by another that offers a revised version in its place.
Read it here…
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Tyson
April 22, 2009A Christmas Tale (aka Un Conte de Noel)
January 26, 2009
Nearing the Christmas holiday, family matriarch Junon (Catherine Deneuve) learns she suffers from a rare cancer that requires an urgent bone marrow transfusion. The terrifying illness prompts a reunion with her four children over the titular holiday, and, soon, Junon’s home — which she shares with her much older husband Abel (Jean-Paul Roussillon) who, judging by his high-riding pants and suspenders, still thinks it’s 1933 — is inundated with family members, bearing gifts and baggage, emotional and otherwise.
Turns out, only two members of her family are blood matches and, hence, potential donors for Junon — her eldest son, Henri (Mattheu Amalric), a troubled, failed entrepreneur with whom she has a strained relationship, and Paull (Emile Berling), the mentally disturbed son of Henri’s uptight, domineering older sister Elizabeth (Anne Consigny). It doesn’t help that Henri is the black sheep of the family, and that Elizabeth wants nothing to do with him.
Junon and Abel’s younger son, Ivan, is there too with his wife Sylvia (Chiara Mastroianni) and Ivan’s painter-cousin Simon (Laurent Capelluto). A weird triangular psycho-sexual dynamic is at play among them, as Sylvia, it seems, harbors both a grudge and an attraction towards Simon that dates back to their more youthful days.
The major drawback, one that constantly distances us from the emotions at the heart of the material, is one of excess. Director Arnaud Desplechin is an adroit and talented craftsman; A Christmas Tale manages to keep us hooked largely on account of its generous style, mashing together classical and modern techniques, shifting gears and moods deftly according to whatever the scene calls for.
Yet you could throw all the style you want into a story and not come up with a decent film if the screenplay is not up to task. And with A Christmas Tale, Desplechin and co-writer Emmanuel Bourdieu try to stuff at at least four films into one — as the above description suggests. As the director, Desplechin seems determined to tell all of them, and, in the process, he does right by not a single one. A Christmas Tale is an endlessly busy and stylish film with a hollow emotional and spiritual core.
Everyone here has some beef with someone in this movie, but everyone in this famoily, it seems, is given to saying or doing ludicrous things. What they say or do may vex and puzzle us, yet Desplechin never unravels these moments, and what they might really mean for his characters and, as a result, for his audience. How are we to respond when, after Simon and Sylvia have slept together, she greets her smiling children with unfazed candor and her husband, Ivan, reacts to the infidelity with a bemused smirk? It’s one of the year’s most exasperating movie moments, because Desplechin’s filmmaking keeps us compulsively at a distance, never searching these moments for their implications, and this lack of curiosity on his part keeps us from sympathizing with characters whose only perceptible quality is self-absorption.
A Christmas Tale exists along its surfaces. It keeps itself preoccupied with the frenetic energy of its style and its characters’ simmering interplay, but Desplechin never succeeds in plumbing deeper. It’s a shame because Deneuve is excellent (as always) and one senses real potential in the storyline depicting her tense bond with the estranged Henri, a volatile failure of a man yet possibly her sole hope for survival.
With a richer and bolder screenplay, one that pared itself down to just one or two of the family’s key struggles, and more heartfelt direction, less devoted to style and more on human beings, we might’ve had a rich and involving family saga. As is, Desplechin’s film is just as dysfunctional as the family he depicts. And the only one who suffers in that scenario is the audience.
Grade: C
Directed by: Arnaud Desplechin
Written by: Arnaud Desplechin, Emmanuel Bourdieu
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupoud, Hippolyte Girardot, Emmanuelle Devos, Chiara Mastroianni, Laurent Capelluto
Rated: N/A
Runtime: 150 min.
Transsiberian
December 22, 2008
Brad Anderson (The Machinist) assays Hitchcock territory, and does a fine job in this riveting thriller about an American couple traveling across Russia on the titular express train and getting caught up in drugs, murder and the watchful eye of a suspicious detective. Having wrapped up a charity mission in China, the mid-western hayseed Roy (Woody Harrelson) and his wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer), a recovering drug addict, decide to book passage on the Transsiberian and take in the famed Russian hinterland.
They end up sharing their berth with another couple — a young American runaway, Abby (Kate Mara), and her Eurotrash boyfriend Carlos (Eduardo Noriega). With his easy smile and bedroom eyes, Carlos works his scruffy, roguish charms on Jessie, who’s taken with his aura of mystery and bad-boy mischief. He’s everything she left behind in her free-living drug days, and still pines for privately. While Roy is busy doting over train engines and rail gauges (he’s a train buff), Jessie shares an impulsive intimacy with Carlos that starts a chain of consequences that ends fatally for Carlos. That’s when Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy’s plot kicks into gear.
What was a holiday one minute turns into a nightmare of paranoia, guilt, and suspicion as Jessie now harbors the secret of what befell Carlos while the two were out in the desolate country. The suspense gets racheted to tantalizing levels when Roy and Jessie are approached by Grinko (Ben Kingsley) who claims to be a detective on the hunt for drug smugglers believed to be on board the Transsiberian. When Jessie discovers a load of Russian dolls that belonged to Carlos stashed in her luggage — dolls containing heroin — she realizes the mess she’s gotten herself into. What’s more, it dawns on Jessie and Roy that Grinko’s intentions are more ruthless than he’s letting on.
Anderson and Conroy do an excellent job of drawing out the tension between Jessie and Grinko while the oafish Roy becomes the unsuspecting barrier protecting Jessie from her potential inquisitor. Jessie can’t hold out forever, of course; soon enough, the two find themselves in Grinko’s clutches.
In neat and deft maneuvers, Anderson and Conroy use the violence and desperation of their characters to drive them forward and against each other like chess pieces. The wintry Russian desolation makes for a bleak and menacing game board, for sure, of which this script and cast make maximum utility. The weakest link here — and the one factor that could’ve easily derailed Transsiberian — is the nauseating Carlos. The mystery man’s grinning, conniving persona is an unwelcome irritant, a derivative of a thousand Eurotrash cliches, and his exchanges with Jessie, while sexually charged, are generally pathetic in their see-through insinuations. While Carlos is the instigator of Anderson and Conroy’s entire premise, his character amounts to tedium which, thankfully, ends with his departure, leaving room for Kingsley to show up and take command of the narrative.
Kingsley sinks his teeth into his role, he’s clearly having a blast, and we take delight in watching the seasoned actor playing the dubious Grinko. Mortimer too comes to life once the peril to her character becomes immediate, and Anderson’s handling of Jessie’s attempts not to lose her cool vis-a-vis Grinko and Roy and to save herself from a desperate scenario would make Hitchcock smirk with quiet pride. It was the Master’s favorite set-up after all: An innocent who finds the murderer’s weapon planted in his hands, and who must now do his damndest to keep authorities off this trail.
Transsiberian never quite worked up the media attention it deserved in the festival or theatrical circuit in 2008. But as Hitchcockian thrillers go, it’s one of the smarter and more absorbing ones made in recent years. And it gives the enterprising and versatile Kingsley one of his juiciest and most memorable roles in years.
Grade: B+
Directed by: Brad Anderson
Written by: Brad Anderson, Will Conroy
Cast: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Kate Mara, Eduardo Noriega, Thomas Kretschmann
Rated: R
Runtime: 111 min.
The World Unseen
November 3, 2008Race, gender, tradition, politics and sexuality get thrown together into a bright but bland masala mix in Shamim Sarif’s debut feature, The World Unseen. Sarif adapts from her own novel about the simmering attraction that develops between two Indian women in 1950s South Africa. One of these women is demure, compliant Miriam (Lisa Ray), mother of three and housewife to a dull prick of a man, Omar (Parvin Dabas), who runs a grocery business outside Capetown. Like most Indian immigrant settlers in South Africa at the time, Omar marches lockstep to the drum of a ruthlessly racist society, and while he keeps Miriam under his thumb, he carries on an affair with his sister-in-law Farah (Natalie Becker). Slowly yet surely, the emotionally neglected Miriam begins to fancy someone else, but her defiance of the norm is far more taboo-breaking than her husband’s, because the object of her adoration is the carefree Amina (Sheetal Sheth), the owner of a local café, and a woman.
Read it here…
