Hope for the Broken Contender
What can one expect from a video-shot melodrama made by eager neophytes in Calgary and Regina, for less than $7,000, about a young man trying to quit slinging crack by the railroad tracks in order to become a champion prizefighter, thus fulfilling his dead father’s dream? I will say this for Hope for the Broken Contender: it has a tremendous amount of heart and it is pulled off w/ a surprising amount of technical acumen, particularly in the video and sound editing departments. Charlie Robson’s central performance also has moments of genuine pathos – he appears to have a good sense of when to hold back to dramatic effect. That being said, the script is a mess and the central love interest (is that what she is supposed to be? it’s actually sort of unclear) looks twelve at most. Creepy (that much is clear). The blocking is contrived (characters speaking to one another w/ their backs theatrically turned to one another – what is this the 40s?), and the economy John Woo crime / action subplot is absolutely inane, further complicated in that its third act resolution renders the hero a total punkass bitch (though the slow-mo gunplay, belonging in some other movie altogether, does actually come off weirdly well, especially considering the absence of a budget). Twenty Four Seven this is not. Scheuerman and crew could have stood to learn something from Shane Meadows’ aforementioned testosterone soap. When you have a low or non-existent budget and are dealing w/ young gang members taking up the gloves you are well served by angling towards social docu-realism and understatement instead of full-on heartstring yanking – also best to avoid turning the women into risible clichés (in one case an explicitly and unapologetically racist exemplar thereof – the Asian slut arm candy was WAY too much). What you risk doing, and what Contender repeatedly does, unfortunately, is end up eliciting unintentional laughter when things are most supposed to count. If Hollywood actors would have trouble pulling the shit off then that doesn’t bode well for the local drama club. When trainer Joe gets emotional and tells his young, wet-behind-the-ears charge that he is the greatest boxer he has ever seen, well, one can only imagine what George Foreman could do to the poor fucker w/ one arm tied behind his back. This is a film that will only appeal to the most naïve of audiences, unfortunately, though the young upstarts involved do have talent and vigor to burn. I wish them the best of luck on whatever’s next. Please consult a few actual gang members on the script if yr gonna go this route again, though. Sorry guys.
What can one expect from a video-shot melodrama made by eager neophytes in Calgary and Regina, for less than $7,000, about a young man trying to quit slinging crack by the railroad tracks in order to become a champion prizefighter, thus fulfilling his dead father’s dream? I will say this for Hope for the Broken Contender: it has a tremendous amount of heart and it is pulled off w/ a surprising amount of technical acumen, particularly in the video and sound editing departments. Charlie Robson’s central performance also has moments of genuine pathos – he appears to have a good sense of when to hold back to dramatic effect. That being said, the script is a mess and the central love interest (is that what she is supposed to be? it’s actually sort of unclear) looks twelve at most. Creepy (that much is clear). The blocking is contrived (characters speaking to one another w/ their backs theatrically turned to one another – what is this the 40s?), and the economy John Woo crime / action subplot is absolutely inane, further complicated in that its third act resolution renders the hero a total punkass bitch (though the slow-mo gunplay, belonging in some other movie altogether, does actually come off weirdly well, especially considering the absence of a budget). Twenty Four Seven this is not. Scheuerman and crew could have stood to learn something from Shane Meadows’ aforementioned testosterone soap. When you have a low or non-existent budget and are dealing w/ young gang members taking up the gloves you are well served by angling towards social docu-realism and understatement instead of full-on heartstring yanking – also best to avoid turning the women into risible clichés (in one case an explicitly and unapologetically racist exemplar thereof – the Asian slut arm candy was WAY too much). What you risk doing, and what Contender repeatedly does, unfortunately, is end up eliciting unintentional laughter when things are most supposed to count. If Hollywood actors would have trouble pulling the shit off then that doesn’t bode well for the local drama club. When trainer Joe gets emotional and tells his young, wet-behind-the-ears charge that he is the greatest boxer he has ever seen, well, one can only imagine what George Foreman could do to the poor fucker w/ one arm tied behind his back. This is a film that will only appeal to the most naïve of audiences, unfortunately, though the young upstarts involved do have talent and vigor to burn. I wish them the best of luck on whatever’s next. Please consult a few actual gang members on the script if yr gonna go this route again, though. Sorry guys.4/10
Mýrin / Jar City
Clearly Iceland is a country invented for the swooping helicopter car-traversing-vast-landscape shot. Take that opening of The Shining! I have been meaning to check out Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur’s films since first reading about 101 Reykjavík (which I am now even more eager to get around to) and Jar City is an extremely promising introduction. Though it ain’t got nothing on Joon-ho Bong’s 2003 masterpiece Memories of Murder, this is a formally vivid and darkly moving policier w/ a real honest-to-goodness head on its mournful shoulders, if it remains unquestionably (and clearly quite intentionally) a minor work in scale. Jar City’s trump card is that it bespeaks a materialist ontology so that its dabbling in forensics and genetic science / ethics serves a bleak philosophy of life rather than too-easy CSI:Reykjavík titillation. It is a film about tragic genealogy and repression (buried bodies and origins, hidden mysteries and the pain and suffering that comes w/ digging the shit up). It also puts the seat of the soul in its proper place, the city of the title, a place where special brains are kept in jars after the obligatory autopsy. It has its central characters (all exceptionally rendered) ask the same existential question that Jude Law’s character in I Heart Huckabees found himself asking repeatedly in the form of an unwanted mantra like a gnawing upon the brainstem: “how am I not myself?” The answer, of course, is in the blood. Deeper than that, though, is the real answer by which you would be wise to abide: “trust me, you don’t wanna know kid!” Cans of worms get opened and it never ends until yr buried too. Powerful stuff, though it could have gone further.7/10
Man on Wire
It is impossible not to be blown away by Man on Wire, though I defy you to imagine how anybody could fashion a documentary out of this material that didn’t blow you away, especially if they have sections of Michael Nyman’s score for Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Naughts and Satie’s “Gymnopédie No.1” to cut the stuff to (!). Man on Wire tells the story of Philippe Petit, rock star of the poetic-terrorist guerilla action (Christ, the fucker even looked like Brian Jones when he was younger and actually pulling this shit off), and how he and a motley assortment of transcontinental cronies rigged a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and sent the crazy Pepe Le Pew bastard out, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, to smilingly dance there, in a state of infectious rapture. The real power of Man on Wire (the title taken hilariously from the subsequent police report) is not, as many critics would have us believe, the presencing absence surrounding the present absence of these particular twin architectural behemoths, which goes unmentioned, but rather the effect that this transcendental roundelay in the sky had on the very real human relationships of those who came together to make it happen. The most beautiful moments in the film are of the preparation for this breathtaking coup of August 7th, 1974 – the frolicsome unity of the young, irresponsible, and collectively in love. The moment Petit stepped down off the wire into the clutches of the NYPD, nothing these beautiful young lovers had could ever be recovered – it was incontrovertibly sucked into the vortex of a too-great transcendence that caught the imprisoning eyes of a whole vampiric planet what wouldn’t let go. The most integral accomplice, Jean-Louis Blondeau, cannot speak of this heartache through the tears. The whole things is framed like one of the heist movies Petit gorged himself on in preparation for le coup, but it is really a tragedy about lost love and the families we build only to be shed like dead skin. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, these volk can never go home again. Kansas is but a memory, home being where the heart no longer is. Effortlessly intoxicating, but tremendously sad.
Man on Wire
It is impossible not to be blown away by Man on Wire, though I defy you to imagine how anybody could fashion a documentary out of this material that didn’t blow you away, especially if they have sections of Michael Nyman’s score for Peter Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Naughts and Satie’s “Gymnopédie No.1” to cut the stuff to (!). Man on Wire tells the story of Philippe Petit, rock star of the poetic-terrorist guerilla action (Christ, the fucker even looked like Brian Jones when he was younger and actually pulling this shit off), and how he and a motley assortment of transcontinental cronies rigged a wire between the two towers of the World Trade Center and sent the crazy Pepe Le Pew bastard out, a quarter mile above the streets of Manhattan, to smilingly dance there, in a state of infectious rapture. The real power of Man on Wire (the title taken hilariously from the subsequent police report) is not, as many critics would have us believe, the presencing absence surrounding the present absence of these particular twin architectural behemoths, which goes unmentioned, but rather the effect that this transcendental roundelay in the sky had on the very real human relationships of those who came together to make it happen. The most beautiful moments in the film are of the preparation for this breathtaking coup of August 7th, 1974 – the frolicsome unity of the young, irresponsible, and collectively in love. The moment Petit stepped down off the wire into the clutches of the NYPD, nothing these beautiful young lovers had could ever be recovered – it was incontrovertibly sucked into the vortex of a too-great transcendence that caught the imprisoning eyes of a whole vampiric planet what wouldn’t let go. The most integral accomplice, Jean-Louis Blondeau, cannot speak of this heartache through the tears. The whole things is framed like one of the heist movies Petit gorged himself on in preparation for le coup, but it is really a tragedy about lost love and the families we build only to be shed like dead skin. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, these volk can never go home again. Kansas is but a memory, home being where the heart no longer is. Effortlessly intoxicating, but tremendously sad.8 / 10
En la ciudad de Sylvia / In the City of Sylvia
In the City of Sylvia is, quite simply, one of the most sad, funny, moving, and exquisitely constructed works of art that I have ever seen committed to celluloid. On the surface it is merely a film about a beautiful and strange young man, habitually sketching the amorphous charcoal shrouds of women (or a woman that is manifested in each – in his notebook he writes “elle” under one sketch only to promptly add an s) who stalks a strange and beautiful woman he believes to be Sylvia, a chick he met at the conservatory café six years previous, through the meandering streets of Strasbourg (a city in which my first love lived for some time when I most missed her). One is reminded, of course, of Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie trailing Kim Novak’s human question mark through Vertigo’s psychosexually spiraling San Francisco only that in Sylvia the desperation so awkwardly worn on this young man’s face and suffused through his every move demonstrates in a way that I have never seen before what Pasolini once called in a poem “proof of love” – and not just love for Sylvia but for all Sylvias as for the pumping of blood through your own body like a tympani drum as you lie in bed dead sober, more powerful than any drug. This is a film about ridiculous desire and its tremendous gravity, and it encapsulates this like no other work of art I know. Only three films have ever done this to me before: Au hazard Balthazar; The Devil, Probably; L’Argent. The Bresson film that Sylvia most invokes, though, is Four Nights of a Dreamer, Bresson’s only romance (no matter what Paul Schrader thinks the end of Pickpocket means). This is clearly done intentionally, as director José Luis Guerín has gone out of his way to tell this dreamer’s story in three chapters: “First Night”; “Second Night”; “Third Night.” Amazingly enough, I would take these three nights over Bresson’s four any day. The greatest film ever about we desiring-machine monads, trapped magisterially in our eyes and ears, pumping pure life into the veins of our collective civic self. A miracle of a thing.
En la ciudad de Sylvia / In the City of Sylvia
In the City of Sylvia is, quite simply, one of the most sad, funny, moving, and exquisitely constructed works of art that I have ever seen committed to celluloid. On the surface it is merely a film about a beautiful and strange young man, habitually sketching the amorphous charcoal shrouds of women (or a woman that is manifested in each – in his notebook he writes “elle” under one sketch only to promptly add an s) who stalks a strange and beautiful woman he believes to be Sylvia, a chick he met at the conservatory café six years previous, through the meandering streets of Strasbourg (a city in which my first love lived for some time when I most missed her). One is reminded, of course, of Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie trailing Kim Novak’s human question mark through Vertigo’s psychosexually spiraling San Francisco only that in Sylvia the desperation so awkwardly worn on this young man’s face and suffused through his every move demonstrates in a way that I have never seen before what Pasolini once called in a poem “proof of love” – and not just love for Sylvia but for all Sylvias as for the pumping of blood through your own body like a tympani drum as you lie in bed dead sober, more powerful than any drug. This is a film about ridiculous desire and its tremendous gravity, and it encapsulates this like no other work of art I know. Only three films have ever done this to me before: Au hazard Balthazar; The Devil, Probably; L’Argent. The Bresson film that Sylvia most invokes, though, is Four Nights of a Dreamer, Bresson’s only romance (no matter what Paul Schrader thinks the end of Pickpocket means). This is clearly done intentionally, as director José Luis Guerín has gone out of his way to tell this dreamer’s story in three chapters: “First Night”; “Second Night”; “Third Night.” Amazingly enough, I would take these three nights over Bresson’s four any day. The greatest film ever about we desiring-machine monads, trapped magisterially in our eyes and ears, pumping pure life into the veins of our collective civic self. A miracle of a thing.10/10
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