Interview: Tyson director James Toback

Director James Toback (above, center) has only one indisputable classic under his belt: the anguished 1978 character study Fingers, starring Harvey Keitel as a man torn between being a pianist and a loan shark for his father. The rest of his career has been about polarizing audiences like few other filmmakers. From the studio-hijacked The Pick-Up Artist (1987) — his first of many collaborations with Robert Downey, Jr. — to Two Girls and a Guy, Black and White, Harvard Man and When Will I Be Loved, Toback’s films tend to be unwieldy and unpredictable, in both the good and bad sense, as though he was just throwing a party for his many famous friends (which, in a way, he is). Among those pals is Mike Tyson, who in Black and White memorably put a beat-down on RDJ after his character hit on him at a party. Iron Mike is the sole — and I mean sole — focus of Toback’s latest film, Tyson — an unapologetically sympathetic documentary featuring what amounts to Tyson’s view of himself (and his take on certain, ahem, legally questionable segments of his career). PW very briefly sat down to speak with Toback while he showed Tyson at this here film festival.

You’ve been friends with Mike Tyson for over twenty years. How did your perception of him change while making Tyson?

“I was not aware of the degree to which fear was the ongoing trigger to al of his behavior — that he was carrying around this sensitive, self-assured, easily-humilated kid who couldn’t handle things after awhile. As a result he was fearful all the time. And he consciously looked to immerse himself in his fear. While boxing he would infect his opponent with this fear through his eyes, so that all of a sudden the opponent would be the one who was afraid of him. All that was new to me, and fascinating not only in and of itself but to the degree to which he experienced it.”

What do you say to those who criticize the film’s lack of objectivity?

“Well, it’s not intended to be an objective portrait, or a dialectical movie. It is intended to be a self-portrait of Mike Tyson, orchestrated and presented by me. There’s no pretense that this is the guaranteed truth. There’s no ‘I was there, I saw everything and he’s right and I’m telling you that he’s right and demand that you believe he’s right.’ I’m simply saying, ‘Here is Mike Tyson as he sees himself to be.’ That, to me, is a far more interesting movie to see than a movie where twenty people are telling different versions of the same story.

“And ultimately, who cares? What I’m interested in is the dynamic of his personality. There’s a reason Mike Tyson came from nowhere to become the greatest fighter in the world twice. It’s not just that he was strong. It was his character, his will, his intelligence, his discipline, his personality. So why would you want to have someone with such such complexity and substance share screentime with people who are infinitely less interesting? I’m just saying, here’s a human being who’s one of the most famous people in the world about whom people have all sorts of views, and here’s his view of himself. That was always in my mind to do it that way. I’m glad I did. I wouldn’t even want to see the other movie.”

This is your first documentary. In what ways is it different doing a documentary than doing a fiction film?

“It was, in a way, more fun, because I could sort of luxuriate in the control of the circumstances and not have that fractured ADD sense when you’re making a larger movie. You’re always asking yourself if you should be doing that, are you giving enough focus to that, and so forth. On the other hand, it was much more nerve-wracking because I had no idea where I was going with it. So when we got in the editing room there was every possibility that it would never come together. A lot of movies don’t come together when you have them written and you shoot them exactly as they’ve been written. And when you see the finished movie, you say, ‘How did that happen?’ Fortunately I have never had that happen. But look at the number of movies with scripts done as written, and you think, ‘Why didn’t they fix this stuff? Look at this shit.’ So you never know until it’s done. When you start from where I was starting, anything was possible. I could have had a first cut and could have been in total fucking shock and said, ‘What am I going to do?’ But I’m excited by stuff like that. Rather than that be a reason not to do something, that makes me eager to do it — the fact that there’s a potential for disaster.”

Tyson will return to Philadelphia for a theatrical release sometime in May. My capsule review is here.

Today, Apparently, is Jeremy Renner Day at the PFF/CF: Picks for April Fool’s Day

Despite the holiday, I am not kidding about any of these. They all suck or are merely okay.

Jury Duty Jean-Pierre Darroussin, whose subtle work have been highlights of films like Cold Water and Red Lights, lends a whole heaping lot of credibility to Edouard Niermans’ sledgehammer subtle look at race relations in ‘60s France. Darroussin plays a middle aged white guy who, in the opening scene, attempts to rape then kills a young woman in a barn. Not only does her Algerian lover gets the blame but, in a silly turn of events, Darroussin himself winds up on the jury. Does he speak up? No, but he doesn’t want the innocent kid to get the shaft. But Jury Duty – its original title, Le Septième Juré (The Seventh Juror), reworked to sound like a Pauly Shore movie why? – isn’t interested in Camusesque existentialism as much as hoary plot twists, each more risible than the last. Grade: C 4:45pm, Prince Music Theater.

Food, Inc. Fast Food Nation scribe Eric Schlosser is all over this documentary on the food industry — both a sign that filmmaker Robert Kenner is on the right track but also that we’ve done this before. Despite casting a net further than the fast food biz, Kenner comes to most of the same conclusions as Schlosser and offers up little other information. Worthwhile but redundant. Grade: B- 4:45pm, I-House.

Wages of Spin There’s a priceless doc to be made of the original, Philly-based incarnation of American Bandstand, and despite the sometimes distracting amateurism of Shawn Swords’ doc — a cheesy “’50s” score, subpar video, even worse sound work, a crippling minimum of photos — the opening stretch serves as a worthwhile evocation of a time and place. But once villain Dick Clark enters the scene, Spin turns into a haphazard hit piece, and one that barely hits its mark. Just about everyone has nasty things to say about Clark, who the film alleges to have engaged in payola and other nasty business. But all Swords can get is hearsay and he takes his subjects’ claims at their word, with no further research. Clark appears for exactly five seconds at the end to say he won’t discuss the allegations. Case closed, eh? Grade: C 6:45pm, I-House.

Previously Reviewed

• Don’t Look Down B 2:15pm, Ritz 5
• I Sell the Dead B 4:45pm, Ritz East
• The Chaser B- 4:45pm, Ritz 5
• GS Wonderland B- 7pm, The Bridge

Unseen So Far But Of Note (Possibly)

• Majid Majidi, he of such Iranian kiddie movies as Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise, returns with The Song of Sparrows, one of those city-bad/country-great movies, this time about an ostrich farmer. 12:15pm, Ritz East.
• As alluded to in the title, this is the day with two films starring Jeremy Renner, the quite awesome, though so far fairly obscure, budding thesp of Dahmer, North Country, Twelve and Holding and The Assassination of Jesse James Yada Yada. First up is Lightbulb, in which he and Dallas Roberts (Joshua) play schemers out for a get-rich-quick idea. 2:30pm, Ritz East.
• Renner also headlines The Hurt Locker, the exceedingly well-liked Iraq War bomb squad movie from Kathryn Bigelow (Near Dark, Point Break). Almost no one doesn’t like this film, nor denies that it’s unbelievably tense. I mean, check out that trailer, above. Ralph Fiennes and Guy Pearce also pop up…briefly. 7pm, Prince Music Theater.
• Blind Loves is a four-part doc on blind people in Slovakia. Woot. 9:15pm, I-House.

Reviews: Both an Iranian Woman and Rachel Weisz Rap and Sonny Liston Gets No Budget

By now, seeing disadvantaged Iranian women on a movie screen is old hat; at least half of the country’s cinema that makes it to America concerns that very topic. (Incidentally, please rent Offside.) It’s not often that you see a more hope-filled, though far more detailed and scary, view, let alone the real deal. Hamid Rahmanian’s doc The Glass House (B) trails around a series of shockingly independent women eking out a living in Tehran on their own, albeit one that involves a hefty amount of struggle with no possible end in sight. One girl is trying to break through in the rap scene; another is flitting from one temporary marriage (a curious Iranian mainstay for those who want the benefits but don’t want to commit) to another; on the very bottom is a young girl who’s in and out of rehab due to the fact that her drug business mom hooked her on drugs at a very early age. Rahmanian mostly trails them, fly-on-the-wall style, with the occasional on-screen clarification, and the result is as moving and harrowing as you’d expect.

There are some movies that are so sad, so feeble in how little they achieve at what they set out to do, and so not in need of being kicked when they’re already writhing on the floor in agony, that it’s sometimes best just to leave well alone and walk away. That, in essence, is my review of Phantom Punch (C-), Robert Townsend’s attempt at a standard Sonny Liston biopic on a shoestring budget starring Ving Rhames, who’s sometimes double the age he’s supposed to be playing. Okay, I’ll stop. Let’s just nod politely and move on.

Though it also played Toronto in the fall, The Brothers Bloom (B), Rian Johnson’s splashy follow-up to his terrific high school noir Brick, was bumped from a Christmas release to this summer. That’s too bad: seeing it after Duplicity robs it of some novelty, namely that both films manage to locate — I’m struggling to find a way to not put this nauseatingly — the heart in the everyone-fucks-eachother genre. Duplicity just happens to do it better — seriously, everyone’s wrong, this movie’s awesome — while in Bloom its novel and fairly moving presentation of the effect con arting has on the soul is rammed down our throat a bit too much. Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo play lifelong conmen, with Brody as the sadsack, lovelorn one sick of never being able to trust anyone. Enter new mark Rachel Weisz, an uber-wealthy agoraphobe freak dwelling in Jersey’s only Euro-looking estate whom Brody struggles not to fall for while fleecing. Like Duplicity the mega-twists and caterwauls are mere fronts; there’s an emotional undercurrent that’s unmistakable throughout. Unlike Duplicity, Bloom is a heckuva lot goofier, or more accurately Wes Andersonesque; Weisz “collects” hobbies (accordion playing, chainsaw juggling, rapping) while third wheel Rinku Kikuchi (Babel) only speaks three words, among them “Campari.” But the seriousness tempers the quirk and vice versa. And besides, there’s not a funnier performance in awhile than Weisz’s; dig her lengthy, multipart awkward reaction early on to being told she looks nice.

(By the way, perhaps you’ve noticed everything I’ve seen I’ve awarded no higher than a B. And not only that, but I usually go with the B-/C+ area. Yes, I’ve noticed this, too. And I assure you it’s not me. Okay, maybe a little. But in any case, such middle-of-the-road-ness is a whole lot worse for me than it is for you.)

Go See (or Don’t!) These Fest Films: Tuesday, March 31

Boy Interrupted Considering it’s a documentary about a mentally ill teen who killed himself that’s been made by the kid’s parents, you’d expect Boy Interrupted to be infinitely too personal — moving, yes, but still therapy-made-public and in need of some distance. I’m still not entirely convinced it didn’t need a third party behind the lens, but it’s nowhere near something like Nicole Conn’s unsightly and self-aggrandizing “doc” little man (not the Wayans comedy, though possibly worse), about her and her partner’s struggles with a grossly premature baby. Hart Perry, who lensed Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A., collaborated with his documentarian wife Dana on this evocation of their dead son, who jumped out of a window at 15 after an entire life of suicidal behavior and experiments with various meds. Despite the filial connection, Boy Interrupted often does feel like it’s been made by someone else: when interviewed, the Perrys speak soberly and (mostly) without tears. They seek not pity but explanation and their film’s portrait of trying to medicate the mentally ill manages to balance the personal with the universal. Grade: B 7:15pm, Ritz East.

The Girl From Monaco Slightly more inventive than your usual wad of French fluff, this breezy number from Anne Fontaine (How I Killed My Father) unites a middle-aged barrister (Fabrice Luchini), his stiff Arab bodyguard (Days of Glory’s Roschdy Zem) and a bubble-brained hotcha weather girl (Louise Bourgoin) in an almost-love triangle in scenic Monaco. Things don’t quite work out the way you’d expect, and the three leads are spirited. But it’s still, you know, fluff. Grade: B- 9:15pm, Ritz East.

Cuttin’ Da Mustard Judging from his IMDb page, Mustard maker Reed R. McCants is going by experience with this fitfully amusing comedy about a troupe of out-of-work actors, led by Tropic Thunder’s Brandon T. Jackson, who try to mount a production at a Queens theater. There’s a couple decent, if Hollywood Shuffle-derived yuks about black actors doing Menace II Society monologues in Shakespeare class and whatnot, but the jokes are too light and the semi-autobiography too earnest. Grade: C+ 9:30pm, I-House.

Able From Philadelphia-based filmmakers but filmed in Germany with a German cast speaking English, Marc Robert’s apocalyptic horror gets kudos for abstraction. There’s no exposition — it just opens up with a virus of so-far-unknown intent already having decimated Berlin, and with a small group of people filmed in an unclear manner that nearly out-obscures Fernando Meirelles’ busy work on last year’s Blindness. Long as everything is unclear, Able is a creepy-crawly mood piece filled with striking images; soon as anyone speaks, or does anything, it immediately crumbles. Grade: C+ 9:30pm, Ritz East.

Previously Reviewed

• Landscape #2 B- 12pm, Ritz East
• 9 to 5: Days in Porn B- 12:15pm, Ritz East
• Goodbye Solo B- 2:15pm, Ritz East (above)
  
• GS Wonderland B- 4:45pm, Ritz East
• Kisses C 7pm, The Bridge
• Don’t Look Down, B 9:45pm, Ritz 5

Unseen So Far But Of Note (Maybe)

• From The Syrian Bride’s Eran Riklis comes Lemon Tree, another look at Israeli-Palestinian relations, this one starring The Visitor’s great Hiam Abbass. 2:15pm, Ritz 5.
• The awkwardly titled 4bia is a Thai omnibus of four short horror films, including one from the guy who made the crossdressing sports comedy Iron Ladies. 4:45pm, The Bridge.
• Speaking of Hollywood Shuffle, Robert Townsend’s latest is Phantom Punch, a Sonny Liston biopic starring Ving Rhames. 7pm, Prince Music Theater.
• One more screening of The Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson’s quirky follow-up to Brick that isn’t getting much love but which I stubbornly believe will be secretly awesome. With Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody, Rachel Weisz and much conman shenanigans. 9:15pm, Prince Music Theater.

Yesterday’s PFF/CF: Advertising, Mystical Sex, Dominican Baseballers and Death by Hubcap

So, I was going to say that film festivaling is easier with a bike, but not when the wind blows at 30 mph. Come on, intelligent designer.

The advertising documentary Art & Copy (C), from Doug Pray (Scratch, Surfwise), takes an, um, original stance on its subject, namely that it’s not an evil and grossly manipulative pox on humanity, but instead an art form. Pray sits down with many of its biggest practitioners, and their elaborations on their methods prove predictably fascinating. But when it comes time to judge them from an ethical standpoint, A&C is comically feeble. When some point out that the ads that helped re-elect Reagan were so fantasy-America they made even Reagan balk, the subjects uniformly distance themselves from it, without any follow-up from Pray about how what they do isn’t any better. If the rather immodest claims made by the ad guys — and the dude who came up with the infamous 1984 Apple ad (see above) essentially claims credit for the 21st century — are to be believed, these are the most diabolical puppet masters the world has yet seen. Pray sporadically throws in terrifying factoids about how much is spent on advertising or the price tag of an ad on American Idol or the Super Bowl, but is far too in awe of his subjects’ mad skills. So he’s the one.

Surely (hopefully) the WTF of the festival’s wares, the Argetine Don’t Look Down (B) is officially “hot stuff” and definitely deserves a spot on this list. After claiming to be visited by his dead father’s ghost, a young man with sleepwalking problems (Hugo Arana) enters into a sexual relationship with the neighborhood hottie (Anotella Costa), a spiritual-mystical type who’s all too willing to be his guide through the Kama Sutra, as well as to teach him how to hold in his wad past 81 thrusts. Eventually, Arana discovers he can materialize in far-off lands when he bones — as though sex were the spice from Dune. (Sample post-coital line: “Venice is incredible!”) This, mind you, is basically played for giggles, with writer-director Eliseo Subiela maintaining a gentle dreamy-absurdist tone that feels like Buñuel minus the anticlericalism (if that makes any sense). Cheerfully inscrutable, with a deftly sustained, calmly deranged performance from Costa, it unfortunately can’t figure out an ending and so just stops. There’s a sexual metaphor for that condition, right? (Plays again: Tues., March 31, 9:45, Ritz 5 and Wed., April 1, 2:15pm, Ritz 5.)

Can the makers of Half Nelson function without the terrific actors? Having directed three of the best performances in recent memory, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck go with non-pros for Sugar (B-), and the answer is: sorta. Concerning the life of Dominican baseball players as they’re fed into the American baseball machine, it’s largely beholden to its subject, with a lead character (played by Alegnis Perez Soto) who’s generally likable but mostly a cipher. Boden and Fleck retain the herky-jerky/long lens cinematography, but their camerawork was far more interesting when trying to bottle up the Method stylings of Ryan Gosling, Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie. It’s a generally “good” film and valuable, but even with a topic that rarely gets coverage it still feels cookie-cutter.

Lastly, the British Danger After Dark entry Plague Town (C+) overcomes unusually shitty video, truly heinous acting and a couple frankly pathetic gore effects to reveal a set-up that unravels itself slowly and mostly satisfyingly. An American family stranded overnight in nowhere Ireland are beset upon by a bunch of freaky-faced kids who beat victims with hubcaps and tree branches, plus a chick who’s apparently a doll come to life. It’s not clear where this is going even in the final minutes, and unpredictability is all this one’s got. (Plays again: Fri., April 3, 4:45pm, I-House.)

What You Should/n’t See at the Film Festival: Monday, 30 March

Dioses Peruvian filmmaker Josue Mendez’s follow-up to his faintly promising Days of Santiago is a crass burlesque, in which the rich are so evil the son of a tyrannical bastard lusts after his hottie sister while the bastard’s new trophy wife is a social climber twenty years his junior. Yes, it appears all’s not well for the wealthy. WERE YOU EVEN AWARE OF IT?, as John Hodgman would say. Simply too easy. C 12:15pm, Ritz East.

The Other One See review here. C+ 2:15pm, The Bridge.

Salt of the Sea See review here. B- 4pm, Prince Music Theater.

Kisses See review here. C 4:45pm, Ritz East.

The Way We Get By See review here. B 5pm, Ritz East.

Kabuli Kid See review here. B 7:15pm, Ritz East.

Goodbye Solo Exceedingly talented neo-neo-realist (or is that neo-neo-neo-neo-realist?) filmmaker Ramin Bahrani makes a slight, though far from fatal, misstep with his third film, in which a Senegalese cabbie (Souléymane Sy Savané) begins a begrudging and mostly one-sided friendship with a grizzled old man (Red West, formerly of Elvis’ Memphis Mafia) planning to kill himself. After the tough, organic social realist wonders of Man Push Cart and especially last year’s Chop Shop, even a little sentimentality feels like a betrayal, though Bahrani and his two leads do their best to keep the emotions internal. If anything their a winning team: Savané unfailingly chipper and West unfailingly unamused. But the sudden journalistic blitzkrieg over Bahrani is one film too late. B- 7pm, Ritz East.

The Chaser Indebted, and vastly inferior, to fellow countryfilm Memories of Murder, Na Hong-jin’s debut takes a similarly bemused but horrified look at the incompetence of the police force. Once again there’s a serial killer on the loose, but in an amusing twist he’s captured and confesses before the first act is up. Alas, the police are too disorganized and corrupt to hold up his case, meaning the killer’s out on his feet after 24 hours, possibly to carry on with his work. Na’s set pieces have a disarming calmness, particularly one towards the end, but he’s consistently in the shadow of Murder’s far more insanely talented Bong Joon-ho. B- 9:15pm, Ritz East.

Landscape #2 See review here. B- 9:30pm, Ritz 5.

Unseen (so far) but of interest:

• The Brothers Bloom, Rian Johnson’s star-studded follow-up to his excellent Brick, hasn’t attracted a lot of love (and was already bumped from a Christmas release). But look, Brick was awesome and everyone agrees that Rachel Weisz — co-starring with Mark Ruffalo, Adrien Brody and Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi as con artists — is about as awesome, too. 2:15, Ritz 5.
• The Danger After Dark player Left Bank, about a Belgian woman unlocking horrible mysteries and whatnot, was called Polanski-esque by Phawker’s Dan Buskirk. Fine. I’ll be there. 6:15pm, Prince Music Theater.
• Though no one seems to be going agog over it as they did Half Nelson, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s sophomore effort, Sugar at least joins the shortlist of Bull Durham in focusing on minor league baseball. And with a poor Dominican teenager as its hero, no less. Fleck and Boden will be present. 7pm, Ritz 5.
• If you care to see a studio picture shot in Philly, as well as see the very talented Jeff Daniels in person receiving the “Artistic Achievement Award,” go see The Answer Man tonight. Unless, of course, you’re icked out by the premise of a man who writes god books falling in love with Lorelai Gilmore. 8:30pm, Prince Music Theater.
• One last chance to catch the allegedly solid (and lengthy) manga-to-movie adaptation 20th Century Boys. Its follow-up, Chapter Two plays again Thursday. 9pm, The Bridge.
  

I Review the First PFF/CF Weekend

Back Soon So many comedies, particularly those that ride the festival circuit, just aren’t closers; momentum dies and so do the laughs, usually once the third act rears its head. (The fest’s ‘60s Japanese pop satire GS Wonderland is a prime example of this sad phenom.) So whenever some yuk-fest manages to never lose grasp of its tone, it’s time to slightly overrate it. That’s the deal with Back Soon, an Icelandic weed comedy that, objectively, is no great shakes — it’s a weed comedy, for one thing — but which managed to make me laugh fairly consistently for its full 92 minutes. An exercise in ultra-digressiveness, Solveig Anspach’s film is essentially a litany of deadpan-absurdist humor, and it won me over in its opening minutes when a traveling Irish girl innocently asks one sadsack native for a light and is instead given a fairly epic and graphic description of the guy’s father’s fatal bout with lung cancer, to which she politely and guiltily listens. From there its frozen fish used to (unsuccessfully) break car windows, guitars descending from just above the top frame line for impromptu musical numbers and cell phones eaten by angry geese. And best of all, it never vies for seriousness, or much of anything other than your hard-earned cackles. And after imbibing a batch of interesting but fatally flawed films or even outright mediocrities, such unambition can simply hit the spot. B

Kabuli Kid There are few genres I don’t do more than the “baby (or kid) who de-assholes an asshole” genre. (See Tsotsi, Three Men and a Baby, et al.) So imagine my surprise when this Afghani film about a malcontent cab driver who finds one of his passengers has left their newborn in the back seat turned out to be almost comically devoid of sentimentality. Taking its cue from Iranian cinema, Kid focuses largely on process — the loops the cabbie (Hadji Gul) has to jump just to feed and take care of the baby, which winds up being so time-consuming he can barely do his job. Not too soon in it becomes apparent that this won’t end with the cabbie coming to want the baby himself; he’s trying to peddle it off, in increasingly desperate and crass ways, well into the third act. Most surprising? Almost no cute baby close-ups. Let me repeat that, all caps: ALMOST NO CUTE BABY CLOSE-UPS! Writer-director Barmak Akram has no trouble being didactic, though his gripes re: Kabul life post-U.S. invasion feel slightly natural coming out of a pissy cab driver’s mouth. B

Landscape #2 So many Eastern-European films serve as metaphors for specific homegrown horrors American audiences likely know little about; see the Bulgarian Zift, playing later. (Or, rather, don’t.) I’m sure this nasty little Slovenian number is an allegory for the way the youth know little about their country’s disgusting history, chiefly a post-WWII massacre that opens the film in striking blurry out-of-focus. Cut to today and two burglars — one old, the other young and horny — steal a painting and some documents that tie a slimy, ancient general to said massacre, causing the release of a taciturn badass to annihilate most of the supporting cast. Even with my ignorance this feels a bit too tidy, though it’s hard not to appreciate its cynical rot — wherein the truth only comes out when it no longer matters, and it emerges not out of honor but just by some clueless scoundrel out for his own purposes. Message: avoid Slovenia. B-

9 to 5: Days in Porn Though it indulges more than a bit too much in vacuous porn star confessionals, Jens Hoffmann’s spacious porn doc deserves credit for trying to find as many angles from which to look at an industry as successful as it is loathed. Some are full of shit; some treat it as pure business; some fail; and some — notably former star-turned-watchdogs Sharon Mitchell and Nina Hartley — have a complex mix of appreciation and critique. If anything its net is too wide; the film lacks organization and its take on the biz sometimes seems less complex than schizophrenic. B-

The Other One There are two things holding this moody character study together: star Dominique Blanc and pretty shots. Directors Pierre Trividic and Patrick Mario Bernard know how to create an arresting image, usually via a combination of long lenses and obtrusive objects blocking part of their frames. But their story, in which a middle-aged woman (Blanc) goes quite bonkers after her younger lover takes on another woman exactly her age, meanders too much, veering drunkenly and constantly needing focus. At least they have Blanc, who brings an intelligence and wit that makes her character seem at least slightly aware of her increasing craziness — long as there’s not a hammer lying around. C+

Salt of This Sea Vascillating between well-observed and just plain stupid, the feature debut of Annemarie Jacir (Like Twenty Impossibles) tells of a Brooklyn-born woman of Palestinian-descent (Suheir Hammad) who journeys into the West Bank in an attempt to forcefully claim her ancestry. Cue the expected feuds with customs, border guards, etc. Less expected are the almost surreal strains of credibility, starting with how a tourist can both get into Palestine and then elude arrest after her visa runs out, plus a mid-film bank heist for which there just aren’t words. Jacir’s perspective is a lot more complex than her protagonist’s, and she includes one scene where Hammad comes off as the bad guy compared to the nice Israeli girl living in the house from which her grandfather was booted half a century prior. B-

Tyson First things first: please note that one of the executive producers of this doc on Mike Tyson is Mike Tyson himself. But that ain’t nothin’: if it didn’t often look like a Jame Toback film, you’d assume Tyson directed it as well. Like The Kid Stays in the Picture, Tyson puts an iron grip on its subject’s surely tainted perspective, never thinking of looking for a second opinion on, say, whether Iron Mike really didn’t rape that girl or whether he really didn’t beat ex-wife Robin Givens. Longtime Tyson bud Toback (Fingers, Two Girls and a Guy) is at least honest about his lack of objectivity, never pretending that this is anything but one man’s often self-pitying view of himself; hopefully it wasn’t Toback who decided to have Tyson often staring sensitively into the ocean. Its still questionable. C+

As promised: Absolutely Epic Weekend Picks Post

Before the Fall There’s a surreal conceptual miscalculation in this Spanish thriller, and that surreal conceptual miscalculation is this: it’s the apocalypse and there’s a serial killer on the loose. Yes, a meteorite is due to destroy the planet in 72 hours, and after indulging a bit in the kind of widespread panic and rapid societal decay you see in Children of Men and Blindness, director-cowriter F. Javier Gutierrez apparently just got bored and threw in a dude out to pick off a couple more bodies before End Times. Gutierrez works up such a hypberolic directorial lather that I assumed he was just auditioning to do the next Wes Craven remake. I believe The People Under the Stairs is free. Turns out joke’s on me: Craven is remaking this very film. C- Sat., March 28, 4:3pm, Prince Music Theater and Sun., March 29, 9:30pm, The Bridge.

GS Wonderland If not quite the strangest fad to take over Japan then strange still, the late-‘60s trend towards Beatles-derived, identically dressed theme Group Sound bands is the focus of this wacky time capsule comedy. Director Ryuichi Honda takes a purely comedic approach, and the first half is a spirited and inventive (albeit a little easy) romp about a quartet assembled near-Monkees-style by a manager so crass he passes off a girl as a boy, a lie he even passes off on the other band members. There’s a ton of camp though realistic detail: in the best scene a group of execs try to find a new GS gimmick and discover that everything’s been done, even a band where all the guys wear skirts. (“God, the GS world is weird,” remarks one.) Alas, Honda can’t keep the invention up and the second half is a steady descent into seriousness. Fun while it lasts, though. B- Sun., March 29, 9:30pm, Ritz East.

Herb and Dorothy Documentaries that are really nothing more than elongated special interest stories tend to leave me cold, and Megumi Sasaki’s profile of longtime art collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel definitely falls into that category. It’s a not-particularly-deep look at two staples of the New York art scene who are notable chiefly for being mildly unusual: two normal-looking plebians who have amassed, in their many decades, and strictly on their own dime, 4782 pieces of conceptual and minimalist art. That’s a lot, isn’t it? That reaction is basically the extent of Sasaki’s focus. And yet Herb and Dorothy is still a terrific watch, mostly because the angle from which it illuminates its milieu rarely gets covered, namely, those who admire art but don’t make it themselves — an oft-ignored but no less important part of the artistic process. It’s refreshing to see a film about modern art that doesn’t feel compelled to tiresomely explain its “significance,” though Sasaki does score a killer quote from one talking head, who says, “All good art is a dialogue between the object that’s there and the viewer.” The Vogels, along with Sasaki, will be at the Saturday show. B Sat., March 28, 4:45pm, Ritz East and Sun., March 29, 12pm, Ritz East.

Hunger Already near-legendary, this portrait of the last months of IRA martyr Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) from Steve McQueen (no, not that one) chucks context to focus on the tactile. Sands and co.’s escalating, ultimately fatal protests become unbearably physical: The beatings feel 3-D while you can all but smell the feces on the wall during the “dirty protest.” McQueen fumbles in the third and final hunger strike section, succumbing to silliness like idyllic flashbacks and bird symbolism. But his attention-getting gambles usually pay off, notably during a 17-minute unbroken static shot that relishes in Fassbender and Liam Cunningham (as a priest trying to dissuade him) kicking actorly ass. B+ Sat., March 28, 12:15pm and Sun., March 29, 7:15pm, both Prince Music Theater.

I Sell the Dead Dominic Monaghan (LOTR, Lost) and indie horror maven/Jack Nicholson lookalike Larry Fessenden (Habit, The Last Winter) play 18th century graverobbers. They rub shoulders with the undead, aliens and Angus Scrimm. Ron Perlman is a monk. Sometimes it’s just this easy. B Fri., March 27, 9:45pm, Ritz East (Sold Out!).

It’s Not Me I Swear! The darker and funnier close cousin to Phoebe in Wonderland, French-Canuck Philippe Falardeau’s adaptation of Bruno Hébert’s beloved books offers up a far more dangerous unhinged child: Léon (Antoine L’Écuyer), a young suburban Montrealite who’s already set fire to his parents’ bed before harried Mom destroys him by hightailing it to Greece. In its literary incarnation L’Écuyer’s character is schizophrenic, whereas here he’s yet to be diagnosed. A bit questionable, that, but there’s no mistake that there’s something far worse affecting him than mere sadness, and Falardeau sticks very close to his side, somehow keeping things funny even when it plunges into absolute darkness. B Sat., March 28, 7:3pm, The Bridge and Sun.,  March 29, 4:30pm, Ritz 5.

Kisses This Irish kiddie saga lost me almost immediately, when the lead boy (Shane Curry) is shown to be sensitive and fragile by being asthmatic. Is director Lance Daly not aware that’s a stereotypical screenwriter shortcut? Things don’t get any better from there, with Curry and girl-next-door Kelly O’Neill running away from their asshole parents and miserable outside-Dublin surroundings, shown in stark B&W (video), to muck about Dublin, shown in color. Any claims as that Daly’s paying homage to the kitchen sink dramas, either of the ‘60s or of Mike Leigh, are dashed long before a car chase featuring Curry using the rollers on the heels of his sneakers. Oi. C Sat., March 28, 2:30pm, Ritz East.

Lake Tahoe Back when Mexican directors Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men), Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Alejandro González Iñárittu (Babel) were dubbed “The Three Amigos,” some of us wondered if they couldn’t swap the latter for Fernando Eimbcke, whose Duck Season was a Jarmusch-y treat with some unexpected emotional heft. (Now I wouldn’t mind swapping out del Toro, too, and putting in Gerardo Naranjo, whose excellent I’m Going to Explode plays the fest next weekend.) Eimbcke’s follow-up descends even further into the deadpan static long take ether, with Season’s Diego Catano as a teen who meets new, eccentric characters in his town as he struggles to get his crashed Nissan fixed. For awhile Tahoe seems like a non-starter – a series of one-note grotesques (including a young mechanic really into kung fu) with nowhere to go. But like Season it sneaks up on you, delivering a leftfield, and curiously unplacable dose of weird sadness. This time, however, the melancholy feels piped in, as if out of panic. But maybe a second viewing smooths it all out. B- Fri, March 27, 7:15pm, The Bridge; Sun., March 29, 12pm, Ritz 5.

Mommy is at the Hairdresser’s It’s almost not fair that Léa Pool’s drama is in the same festival as It’s Not Me I Swear! (see above). Both involve mommies leaving their families, both feature devastated kids who act out, both have crappy fathers struggling to be less crappy, both are set in the French-speaking part of Canada during the ‘60s. And yet Swear is infintely superior and singular, while Mommy is pure bland. On the evidence of this and her lesbian drama Lost and Delirious, Pool’s shtick is banality done with conviction. But it’s still banality, and though there’s a smattering of well-observed moments, one can’t help wish for some oomph. Luckily, its funnier, smarter doppelganger is playing almost next door. C Fri., March 27, 7pm, Ritz 5; Sat., March 28, 2:30pm, Ritz 5; and Sun., March 29, 5pm, The Bridge.

Not Quite Hollywood No shock that Quentin Tarantino is all over this history of “Ozploitation” — the sex films, road movies and demented horror films that thrived throughout the ’70s and ’80s (and paved the way for respectable fare like Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli). Luckily the director’s hyperbolic ravings are upstaged by the aging filmmakers themselves, who remain an ornery, accusatory lot, railing against the critics who despised them and, more often, each other. Though shallow — the issue of Americans like Jamie Lee Curtis being shipped into Australia, thus taking away jobs from Aussie actors, is raised then ignored – Not Quite is as trashily entertaining as its copious crazy clips, among the most unexpectedly drool-worthy being Howling 3, which relocated the franchise to the Down Under and includes such sights as a ballerina turning into a werewolf mid-pirouette. Bring a notebook and hit Netflix after. B Sat., March 28, 10pm, The Bridge and Sun., March 29, 9:30pm, Ritz 5.

Number One With a Bullet Scattershot when it would require better aim, Jim Dziura’s doc takes on violence in hip hop, covering everything from rappers who’ve been shot — including The Last Mr. Bigg, who memorably put a $100,000 diamond in his glass eye — to a Temple University Hospital Trauma Unit doctor who quotes Black Star. Director Jim Dzuria tries to deflect thoughtless blame-gaming, putting lie to the claim that gangsta rap birthed violence, when it was responding to the violence that was already there. But elsewhere he does some blaming himself, turning on the old, white guy record companies that profited off N.W.A. and etc., then on gun-loving rednecks, then whomever else. But Dzuria tries to survey the subject rather than solve it, making the subject more of a healthy debate than an easy solution. B Sun., March 29, 9:30pm, Prince Music Theater.

One Day You’ll Understand Israeli director Amos Gitai — whose 2005 film Free Zone opened with a ten-minute long take of Natalie Portman in an epic crying jag — heads to France and a kickass French cast to make one of his nakedly didactic non-dramas. Perhaps the relocation has done something to him because this one’s almost a drama. Arnaud Despelchin regular Hippolyte Girardot plays a wealthy middle aged man who discovers his ancestors may (or may not) have cooperated with the Nazis during the French Occupation. Is that the source of his wealth? Title aside, Girardot never knows and Gitai isn’t so much interested in plumming his anguish as banging out hypnotic tracking shots that try to capture the intangible. He almost succeeds, in particular because of the presence of Emmanuelle Devos, Dominique Blanc and Jeanne Moreau, who it must be said looks really, really fucking old. B- Sat., March 28, 7pm, Ritz East and Sun., March 29, 12:15pm, Ritz East.

Pressure Cooker A favorite, easy trend among documentarians is finding some loudmouth firecracker onto which to glom. This doc on the culinary program at Northeast Philly’s Frankford High School appears to have found its own in Wilma Stephenson, the program’s stern, gabby and ill-tempered instructor who swears that if you can pass her class you can pass life. Yikes! But not so fast: it becomes quickly apparent that Stephenson isn’t an Anna Wintour devil but in fact a good and decent and deeply caring person, who genuinely engages with her young charges and, despite possessing a short fuse, pushes them in the most constructive way possible. So hooray! But while Pressure Cooker is heartwarming, it’s almost, in a sense, too feel-good, too lacking in drama. The kids in Stephenson’s class are all overcoming one odd or another, and they all try their damndest and they all — or at least the handful the film hews close to — succeed. So that’s nice. But I’m not entirely sure why it needs to be watched. B- Sat., March 28, 6:30pm, Prince Music Theater and Sun., March 29, 4:45pm, Ritz East.

Revanche Götz Spielmann’s intensely introspective drama lost the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar a couple weeks back; let’s just say that winner Departures better be the best movie ever. Johannes Krisch leads an incredible small cast playing an ex-con whose Ukrainian prostitute paramour (Irina Potapenko) is accidentally killed by a cop (Andreas Lust) during a bank holdup. Will Krisch enact revenge? Or will he be moved by Lust’s plunge into guilt and depression? An indecisiveness that would irk even Hamlet eats up the film’s transcendantly glacial second half, which is peppered with numerous, always jarring scenes of Krisch pouring his madness into dutifully chopping wood. Like his protagonist, Spielmann seems unsure of where this mess of a situation will wind up, but they both find a conclusion that’s satisfying and authentic. B+ Fri., March 27, 4:45pm, Ritz East and Sat., March 28, 9:30pm, Ritz 5.

Rumba Less annoyingly quirky than their L’Iceberg but a quirk-a-thon nonetheless, the latest near-wordless retro comedy from trio Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy is the tale of a hoofing couple ruined after a car crash. She loses a leg, he gets amnesia, and then things really take a nosedive. As with L’Iceberg the gags are gruesomely hit and miss: rear projection jokes mostly kill while a distended bit with an automatic door is never funny. But the three anchor the hijinks with a surprising and unexpectedly deep melancholy, with the characters descending ever so gradually into a dark funk. Abel, Gordon and Romy aim for Jacques Tati and too often settle for Mr. Bean, but at least it’s not all sunshine. B Fri., March 27, 4:30pm, Ritz 5 and Sat., March 28, 7:15pm, Ritz 5.

The Sea Wall Isabelle Huppert lends her, well, Isabelle Huppert-ness to this well-lived-in but too episodic portrait of 1930s French Colonial Indochina. Surely Marguerite Duras – who wrote Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour and made such aggressively alienating films as India Song and The Truck, which features nothing but Gerard Depardieu and her reading narration cut with shots of, that’s right, a truck – would be pissed that anything this close to middlebrow would bear her name. And yet her childhood memoirs inspired this film from Rithy Panh (S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine), who brings just enough of his documentarian skills to make this at least periodically interesting, though only fitfully engaging. B- Fri., March 27, 4:45pm, The Bridge; Sat.,  March 28, 4:45pm, Ritz 5; and Sun., March 29, 7pm, Ritz 5.

As yet unseen but looking promising:

• I’d love to report on Moon, the debut feature by David Bowie’s son Duncan Jones, which features Sam Rockwell in space. But it’s sold out and my trusty film badge, this year, does not include Friday and Saturday night screenings. Sorry, David Bowie’s son! Fri., March 27, 7:15pm (Sold Out)
• From Doug Pray (Scratch, Surfwise), Art & Copy examines advertising, though apparently, according to City Paper’s Sam Adams, not with the angry foaming at the mouth you’d expect. Hmm. Fri., March 27, 7:30pm, Ritz East.
• No less than Tony Luke, Jr. stars in The Nail: The Story of Joey Nardone, the first Philly film ever to feature a boxer punching his way against low odds. Also features William Forsythe and Tony Danza. Fri., March 27, 7:15pm, Prince Music Theater; Sun., March 29, 2:15pm, Ritz East.
• Stubbornly singular filmmaker and first-class perv James Toback directed Tyson, a doc on his good friend and sometime cast member. (RDJ famously hit on him, and then got hit back, in Toback’s Black and White.) Apparently it’s very, very pro-Tyson. Fri., March 27, 7:15pm, Prince Music Theater and Sun., March 29, 2:15pm.
• Allegedly a decent manga-to-movie translation, both 20th Century Boys and 20th Century Boys: Chapter Two — running in total nearly five hours — plays separately, for those who want to get on this particular trolley. Chapter One: Sat., March 28, 9:15pm, Ritz East. Chapter Two: Sun., March 29, 9:15pm, Ritz East.

Reviews of the films I see this weekend arriving when they arrive. Enjoy the lovely weather! And I’ll see you at the movies! (Maybe.)

Incidentally

Today is my birthday. I am now 30. Goddammit. What happened?

Review: (500) Days of Summer

I didn’t go to the actual, technical kick-off of the film festival; I was stuck at home watching a surreally bland ‘50s alien movie pastiche opening at the Ritzes next Friday. I presume that the festival commenced with a man running in with a torch and a bag filled with doves being released and so on. But at least at the second show featured Mayor Nutter proclaiming the importance of art and the importance of the PFF/CF in particular, all while making corny, apparently Bruce Villanch-written jokes (“(500) Days of Summer — I wish for one day of summer”) somehow mildly amusing, thanks to his singularly nasal mushy-mouth delivery. That guy can make anything funny.

And then was screened what was very likely the best opening night PFF film in…forever? At least since Jesus’ Son in 2000. I mean, there’s not much competition; this was an opening night film one year.

Last month, some of us took umbrage with the film version of He’s Just Not that Into You. No, really, we did. We took umbrage. Our umbrage was specifically fomented by the way the film — albeit in its crazily overstuffed, poorly organized way — pretended to be a corrective to roughly three billion years of fuzzy rom-coms that fed lies to romance-stricken audiences about eternal love and meeting The One and all that…only to pull a 180 in the final reel and succumb to the genre’s every cliché and happy ending. Well, wouldn’t you know the “anti-romantic comedy” (500) Days of Summer is the male version of that, only without the backpedaling finale. Well, more or less.

As you might surmise from the note of finality in the title, the romance between Smiths-loving greeting card writer Joseph Gordon-Levitt and fetching pile of dreaminess Zooey Deschanel (named, of course, Summer) ain’t going to last. For a couple seconds I was worried that the film would end it by pulling a Love Story. Rest assured, it’s just not that kind of movie. The problem with these two crazy kids is that she is Just Not That Into Him, while he is quite the opposite. They have a non-defined relationship involving everything people who are dating do but without the title — a non-status that she states up front and which he, too puppy-dog in love to resist, rather stupidly accepts.

This isn’t going to end well, causing (500) Days of Summer to indulge in its favorite trick: jumping around Gordon-Levitt’s 500 days of obsessive infatution with La Zooey. First sparks coincide with their break-up; moments of intimacy sit side by side with instances of utter, booze-filled depression. One particularly upsetting cut leaps from the two in early seduction to her, under a year later, visibly irked by his attempts at goofy humor. What at first seems like one of those all-too-autobiographical “here’s an ode to that bitch who broke my heart” films (see, to name just one random example, The Wackness) instead possesses both the proper distance to critique Gordon-Levitt’s reckless abandon and the required mooniness to indulge in it as well.

In other words, this is director Marc Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Webber‘s collective Annie Hall – a paean to a relationship that can’t work, between two people who can’t connect no matter how much at least one of them wants them to, that vies for brutal honesty while also acknowledging the necessity of love and all that. Indeed, there are a welter of specific moments I’ve been waiting forever to see in a movie, much less a film that’s technically a hyperkinetic, bubbly comedy, albeit often a clinically depressed one. It’s a pity (500) Days of Summer can’t stay tough-minded all the way through, eventually giving in to a finale that’s just a touch too hopeful. But a film that essentially tells people that they shouldn’t be smitten with people who aren’t as smitten back is probably allowed a bit of over-optimism.

Oh, and Gordon-Levitt? Continues to rule. His role as written is bland emo-ness and there’s only so much he can do with it. But he works in reams of unexpected, strange actorly moments. There will be few more awesome throwaway moments this year than the laugh he cracks after coldcocking some douchebag in a douchebag bar, just before getting coldcocked himself. I cannot wait to see this guy’s Cobra Commander. Grade: B