Outside of the documentary, this year’s SIFF seems to be full of genre exercises. So far, I’ve seen hipster westerns, moral samurais, rock n roll zombies, drug lords, romances, and other such films that, because of their foreign and/or low budget status, have been delegated from wide release to theaters. The truly formula breaking films – Blind and Manglehorn – have polarized the audience and myself in ways that are as brilliant as they are daring.
My Sunday dives deep into the genre, starting with People Places Things, an affable and witty romantic comedy written and directed by James C. Strouse. After breaking up with his long-term partner (not wife), Charlie (Stephanie Allynne), cartoonist and professor Will (Jermaine Clement) is forced to move out of New York City to Astoria where he is allowed to have time with their daughters on weekends. Feeling betrayed and adrift by the break up, Will’s personal life drifts into the classroom when 19-year-old Kat (woefully miscast Jessica Williams) sets him up with her hot single mama, Diane (Regina motherfucking Hall!) who is trying to protect herself from being the rebound girl.
Frequently, Strouse’s script is smart and witty. Strouse fully realizes both Will and Diane as characters who have their lives and pasts to get over. Even if Diane seems to barely exist as more than a paramour for Will, Regina Hall gives a genius performance that fully realizes Diane’s past history with men and as a parent. Diane knows she has to do better, and struggles every day. The character who suffers, however, is Charlie, who gets short-shrifted by Strouse’s refusal to show her as anything but a selfish ball of confused emotions. And, Kat is barely there as anything but a rope to keep Will and Diane tied together.
Not that there isn’t plenty of time for Strouse to have polished these characters just a wee bit more. He has plenty of time for bizarro situations like Charlie’s improv lessons and a student making a presentation about his first time masturbating. Strouse also has metaphors that feel a bit on-the-nose in the classroom as Will works out his problems through his lessons. Why not develop at least Diane beyond the personality that we demonize our exes with? Despite these issues, People so frequently funny, that one can overlook its faults even though it isn’t easy.
Doing a festival herk-jerk, I pop from RomComLand to NeoWesternVille. Mirage is a Hungarian western that has a strict adherence to formula only without the deserts. In the near future, Hungary has had a major natural catastrophe, and the populations dwindled. A caste system broke out, and bands of outlaws roll around to take over farms using the existing workers and other outlaws as slaves. Into this situation, a mysterious black stranger with a leather jacket and aviator glasses rolls into town. He’s the only black person in the film, so you know he’s important. As per formula, he’s captured and enslaved by the town and has to break free.
The end result is a cross between The Man With No Name, Django, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op. It is genre stripped down to its bare essentials, with a bare minimum of dialogue, and rendered with gorgeous cinematography and tensely languorous pacing. This is arthouse dishing out genre exercises at its finest. Szabolcs Hadju is using the genre devices to say something about dictatorship and corruption in Hungary, but without being familiar with Eastern block politics, it’s lost to me. Regardless of the intended SOS message, Hadju gives an eerie and disturbing film whose quiet stateliness creates an atmosphere of constant dread and loneliness. Even if you know the formula, it’s never been laid out so plainly or gorgeously.
Thomas Salvador worked with the same techniques to create his low-fi minimalist superhero movie Vincent, about a guy who gains the strength of 10 men when he’s wet, Folger’s Instant Hulk. Salvador’s film slavishly follows the genre origin story, minus the actual origin. When we meet Vincent (also Salvador), he’s already on the run knowing of his powers. His powers are revealed fairly quickly, as he enjoys swimming like a super-dolphin in the stream when he’s alone. Otherwise, he tries to fit in and minimize his presence. There is a love interest.
To reveal much more is to spoil the movie which runs at a slim 77 minutes. Stripped of dialogue, Salvador relies on our familiarity with the over-inflated superhero genre to deliver his movie. Even though Salvador isn’t satirizing the genre, he does find humor where it is needed and wanted. Vincent is a jaunty movie that recalls the quirky DIY ingenuity of Michel Gondry. There is little CGI, with most of the special effects limited to Vincent’s ability to jump. It feels homegrown, in part because it is. France likes our stuff, but really thinks that less is more.
With that, we come to the biggest disappointment of the festival so far: Sunshine Superman. A film about the late Carl Boenish, the man who developed BASEJumping (Building, Antenna, Span, Earth). Produced by CNN Films, and directed by Marah Stauch, Sunshine Superman is one of the least heart-pounding movies about an adrenaline rush of a sport. Carl Boenish was a man who was dedicated to filming his exploits. Throughout the film he is filming jump after jump, and additional people have cameras on their head. Whether these videos are deteriorated or lost, Stauch never tells us. But, she chops many of them up into tiny pieces and sets them to rock music to create mini music videos within the movie. Youtube has better edits than this.
Worse than that is Stauch’s dependence on talking heads and recreations. Many of Boenish’s important life moments were not part of daredevilry, and were not worthy of capturing on film. So, Stauch takes it upon herself to recreate the scene, specifically avoiding the replacement Carl’s face. She recreates such helpful scenes as Carl sleeping next to the couch on which his first-date and then-future wife slept, holding each other’s hands through the night. She also repeatedly shows fingers pressing play on tape recorders to hear Boenish’s recorded voice.
There are a million ways to cut a documentary, and Stauch chooses the worst possible cuts every single time. BASE Jumping is a sport worthy of unfettered IMAX treatment, similar to the film Speed (which is due for a re-release!). It could have also been given a treatment where the footage becomes the star and the talking heads take a back seat. There is one section where Stauch captures gorgeous footage of a key mountain, but then reuses the footage over and over again. Sunshine Superman is a waste of great footage marred by bad editing and direction.
The Argentinian “true” crime movie, The Boss, Anatomy of a Crime, starts where King Georges left off. Told through a dual timeline, Sebastian Schindel follows a lawyer who is trying to exonerate a butcher who killed his boss, and also the events leading up to that murder. The climactic murder isn’t a spoiler if the character is already in prison for it. Hermogenes is an illiterate and poor man from a poor district who comes to the big city with his wife for work. He starts work as a fat collector, but gets hired as butcher’s assistant and then to manage and run his own butcher shop. The Boss gives him and his wife a small room in the back, and makes the wife work around the shop for no money. Then, he makes her clean at his house for no additional money. The Boss traps Hermogenes in a web of poverty and desperation, as he continues to up the stakes of abuse.
On the flip side of the story, Armando is trying to figure out the whys and hows of the murder, and working at recreating the incidents in a compelling and sympathetic fashion. Hermogenes is being charged with first degree murder, and Armando believes that isn’t a fair shakedown. By presenting the investigation with the original story, the central mystery isn’t what will Hermogenes do, but when. When will Hermogenes finally break? What will be the last straw? What’s the point at which abuse and constant pressure becomes an acceptable mental breakdown?
Schindel updates the story, which originally happened in the 80s, to keep the idea that workplace abuse is still a regular and common practice in modern society. But, he also updates it because another central part of the story is the preparing and selling of rancid meat. Schindel researched common practices on how to keep meat from seeming rotten, including using it for ground beef, using sulfites to make meat pinker, dunking it in bleach, breading it to hide the rot, and mixing it as sausage. As The Boss’ abuse amps up, so does the rot in the meat, as one of the forms of abuse is The Boss giving Hermogenes increasingly rotten pieces of meat to start with.
The subject of The Boss, Anatomy of a Crime is far more compelling than the execution, which feels more like a TV Movie of the Week than an expensive cinematic adventure. The acting is fine, the cinematography is all but non-existent, the sets are few, and the script feels a bit too convenient on the investigation side of things. My favorite part is the Rorschach test where Hermogenes thinks of everything in terms of cuts of meat. The questions it asks is far more compelling.
Kiki Alvarez’ day in the life of three young women, Venice skirts around similar topics, but avoids them for personal drama and emotional misery. Three underpaid hairdressers finally get paid and go for one big blow out in the streets of Havana telling their life stories after getting wasted. Their night includes alcohol, drugs, sex, and scary electro music DJ’d by a nightmare clown. Basically, it’s the first segment of Go only with self-hating miserable women who can’t help but make the worst possible decisions at every possible moment. Can you say trainwrecks?
Venice could and should have been a zesty movie full of life and fury, but is more of a deep dark dive into misery and self-medication. Following these three women for 74 minutes isn’t a pleasurable experience, and it just makes you want to grab each of these women and shake them asking why they are doing these things to themselves? Maybe they enjoy it? It sure doesn’t seem like it at the time. Even when they’re joking, it’s still depricating humor as if they’re trying to rid themselves of something. What it is, I missed completely.
Lest you think I am all “meh” and little “OMG YAY!” the best movie of Sunday was the final movie of the night: SIFF’s Midnight Adrenaline series showed the 35mm print of a 1975 film, The Astrologer. Craig Denney’s brilliant work of self-indulgence, The Astrolger is a genre-hopping piece of insanity whose plot resembles The Jerk but with far more digressions. Perhaps it’s best to go in blind, because I did and it is wild, crazy, and my favorite movie of the festival so far.
Craig Denney is a real life astrologer who produced, financed, directed and starred in a movie called The Astrologer, a movie about a carnival astrologer, Craig Alexander, who smuggles blood diamonds in order to produce, finance, direct, and star in a movie called The Astrologer, which seems to be set in Germany? Alexander has a series of lovers, goes off on wild adventures that takes him to Kenya and Tahiti, and creates a multimedia empire! Alexander’s adventures in Tahiti and Kenya were Indiana Jones before there was Indiana Jones (one character even has to steal giant gems from a temple guarded by poisonous snakes!). There’s a dinner fight scene told completely in slow-mo with The Moody Blues playing instead of any dialogue. There’s a destitute hooker with the phrases “God is Dead,” “Shit on Life” and “Hell is Earth” scrawled on her bedroom mirror in lipstick.
Denney’s film isn’t just batshit crazy, it’s perfectly an example of megalomania. This is a film of genuine movie madness, where Craig Denney was making a movie out of pure passion, if nothing else. There’s no competence for storytelling, for characters, for action or filmmaking. The Astrologer just is purely from Craig Denney’s subconscious, and it’s beautiful. It’s kind of like reading somebody’s old high school poetry and knowing exactly where they’re coming from even if it isn’t necessarily a work of genius. This is The Astrologer, a work of overblown genius that demands to be seen over and over and over again.