Review: Expedition to the End of the World

*This review was originally posted at The Film Experience during the Hot Docs International Film Festival. 

I'll have the watch till 11 o'clock. Then I'll go down to the saloon and write the meaning of life.”

As a general rule, I try to avoid all films that deal with the ocean. I'm not averse to action adventures but I suffer from intense thalassophobia and cinema is an experience I'd like to enjoy, not endure. Exceptions have to be made every now and then, of course, and a few experiences have been rewarding enough to justify all the shaking and sneaking through fingers. I made one such exception for Expedition to the End of the World, based on strong word of mouth, and I’m happy to say I came away thoroughly satisfied. 

This Danish film follows a group of explorers – crudely referred to only by their respective professions: the archaeologist, the geochemist, the artist, the other artist, etc. - who sail to the North East of Greenland to a previously untapped fjord in the ocean where access had been denied prior to the partial melting of the North Pole. It’s a small benefit of global warming, as one of the scientists puts it, that these men are able to explore this particular region, but here’s the catch: the inlet is only open for a short while as a result of this melting. In a few weeks, it will trap the group in between the mountains.

Best Shot: The Talented Mr. Ripley

For personal reasons, by which I mean starting a new job this week and a few family commitments, I've had the craziest time imaginable and haven't really had the chance to watch/write anything these past few days. However, I surprised myself by managing to squeeze in a screening of The Talented Mr. Ripley last night so I feel that, despite not having enough time to write a proper article, I should still go ahead and post my favorite shot because...well, I've chosen one, so why not? 

The above shot is of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) playing his instrument by the window of a room in his villa in Italy - what a coincidence, by the way, that we're following up another 'American in Italy' film with this one for the series. The reason I'm choosing this shot - one of many candidates but a clear favorite for me - is two-fold. For one thing, the composition is absolutely beautiful and it fits in nicely with the rest of The Talented Mr. Ripley in producing a subdued, gentle imagery of Italy's beautiful architecture and the interiors of Dickie's villa. Minghella avoids almost every opportunity to magnify the scenery or the opulence of Dickie's possessions. The visual focus of his camera is always the characters and their human interactions. (Think of how he manages to juxtapose objects with people in ways that connects them together thematically, most obviously in the sequence of Miles' murder with the bleeding statue of a male head.)

More importantly, however, this is my favorite shot because it captures the essence of Dickie's character in a single frame. Cast in this silhouette, Dickie is at his most mysterious, hiding secrets and charming at once. With the golden shine of his instrument and the golden flow of his hair, Dickie's image is as enigmatic and alluring as it is cryptic. The shadow tells us nothing about him, while telling us so much at the same time: his elegance, his casual handsomeness, his love of jazz, his cool demeanor. After his death, when his persona is inhabited by Tom, he becomes an increasingly illusory figure for the audience. The boundaries between Dickie and Tom's impression of Dickie get murkier and we become disillusioned with all our knowledge of him; and the more unattainable he becomes, the easier it is for me to recognize that this one splendid mirage represents Dickie in ways a thousands words could not. 

Review: The Great Gatsby

Grade: B+

After months of anticipation and trepidation, Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby finally reached our screens. As if excitement for a new Luhrmann film and apprehension about another adaptation of one of my favorite books of all time wasn't enough to keep me anxious, Warner Brothers decided to change the release date from December 2012 to May 2013, in a move that made me nervous as much as it relieved me. Nervous, because I wondered whether there were re-edits in store that signaled a lack of confidence on the part of the director or the studio. Relieved, because with the weight of expectation on the film’s shoulders in the awards season, critical reaction would have been vicious. Luhrmann, like many other directors whose styles are strongly pronounced and whose visions are uncompromising, inspires as much reprimand as he does adoration, and with a source novel as popular and as seemingly unsuited to his style, knives were out for his film the very day production started.

In retrospect, the date change proved to be an incredibly smart move. For one thing, in the box office heat of the summer, The Great Gatsby will perform much better than it would have in the glut of December prestige releases. The opening weekend figures suggest it is easily on its way to making a sizable profit. More importantly, the critical reaction, though not exactly favorable, will not be as detrimental to the film’s public acceptance or longevity. Not that it deserves such critical disrespect anyway. Luhrmann’s adaptation is a film that, despite many glaring flaws, cannot be dismissed for its sheer audacity alone.

If you've never read the book – which would be a bit strange for anyone who cares enough to read this review – The Great Gatsby, a timeless classic by F. Scott Fitzgerald of which I have always been an absolute devotee, is narrated by Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) who is a failed author and a bondsman living in New York in the 1920s. His cousin, Daisy (Carey Mulligan), is married to the preposterously wealthy, “old-money”, Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), and spends her days wandering around her mansion in the East Egg, chatting about all matters of insignificance with her friend Jordan Baker (Elizabeth Debicki) who is a famous golfer. Nick lives across the bay in the West Egg, where his humble house is located next to the ostentatious castle of a mysterious man name Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). All that is known to the public about Gatsby is that he throws lavish parties frequently, where alcohol and music and debauchery run wild. Gatsby rarely ever introduces himself to the guests, though he does so to Nick, in the hope of getting to meet Daisy, whom he reveals to be a former lover of his before he went to the war, leaving Daisy to marry Tom.

Review: The Manor

*This review was originally posted at The Film Experience during the Hot Docs Film Festival. 

"My friends had parents who were dentists or ran stores. My parents own a strip club." 

So says Shawney Cohen, the director of The Manor, the Canadian film that opens the festival tonight. Advertised with images of the invitingly neon-lit entrance of a strip club and scantily-clad dancers, The Manor seems to have been chosen as the opening night film based on an old adage we know all too well: sex sells. It’s a risky move by the festival’s programmers because anyone going in to buy sex will surely leave the theatre disappointed. Those of us going in not based on the marketing material but on the promise of a great opener had nothing to worry about. The Manor is an intimate family portrait that explores universal themes of familial bonding through a sharp and wryly humorous lens.

Shawney was six years old when his Jewish parents – Roger, a European immigrant, and Brenda, a Torontonian – bought The Manor, a strip club in suburban Ontario with a hotel attached to it. The purchase of the club proved to be a turning point in the life of the Cohen family that, for better or worse, has remained tied to the locale for nearly three decades; and indeed, this tenacious relationship between the Cohens and The Manor forms the core of the film.

Very little of what happens on the stages of the club is captured by Cohen’s camera. The Manor isn’t even passively sexy; it’s actively unsexy. Cohen’s attention is directed at what the audience doesn’t want to see. He’s directed his focus on the all-encompassing impact that the strip club has made on the lives of everyone connected to it. From the concierge of the adjacent hotel – a former stripper at the club – whose overdose throws everyone for a loop to the arrest of one the mainstays at the club – an adopted son figure to Roger Cohen – everyone’s life seems irreversibly affected by their presence at The Manor.

Best Shot: Summertime

When I watched David Lean’s Summertime for the first time last night to prepare for this post, I had a feeling it was the worst film Nathaniel had picked for this series over the years. To be fair, the standard of films we've watched so far is so high that “worst” doesn't necessarily entail a bad film, per se, but Summertime was just not my cup of tea. So I started writing my article about the film and its best shot, which opened with the following paragraph:

Maybe I’m jealous of Katherine Hepburn for spending her summer in Venice when I have to be in Toronto. Maybe I’m not the target demographic of this film. Maybe I’m not in the mood for summer yet even though it’s sunny and bright and beautiful outside. Maybe it’s because it’s sunny and bright and beautiful that I don’t like to be sitting inside watching a tepid romantic drama with little substance beneath a splendid façade. Or, most likely, I had sky-high expectations of a David Lean film because of the man’s otherwise stellar filmography.

You can see where I was going with that. Now, that’s not to say the film is entirely without its pleasures. For one thing, its absolutely picturesque photography makes it a perfect candidate for a series like this. The entire film reminded me of the opening scene of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, where postcard-perfect pictures of Paris are shown back to back. Substitute Paris with Venice and extend the sequence to a feature-length film and you have the cinematography of Summertime. There are moments of great chemistry between Katherine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi that play beautifully into the film as well. But overall, this film can’t touch the best work of either Hepburn or Lean’s career with a ten foot pole.

So I woke up in the morning, went to work and came back home to edit my post and lo and behold, I felt like discarding the whole thing. Having slept on the film and spent some time with it in the back of my head – because let’s be honest, we all think about films even when we're at work – I like it a lot more than I did this time last night. Not that I think its skin-deep treatment of middle-aged romance is any more substantial than it was last night or that its depiction of Venice as the backdrop for this story amounts to anything more than an excuse for culturally stereotyping, Euro-themed banter and a sightseeing tour. (For a much superior example of both middle-aged romance and geography as thematic centerpiece, refer to Abbas Kiarostami’s Italy-set Certified Copy.) I still maintain that the film suffers deeply from those issues but, in retrospect, I enjoyed it quite a bit too. Maybe it’s a film I’ll remember more fondly than I thought I would as I was watching it. Maybe under different conditions, I’ll give it another try and examine it in more detail.

Anyway, my about face on the film didn't affect my choice for its best shot, which comes really early in the film and has very little significance in the narrative. But, as some of the older readers may remember, I’m an architecture enthusiast and if the film is so intent on showing off Venice’s unique, exemplary architectural sphere, the only logical choice for me is to take advantage of that.

When Katherine Hepburn’s Jane Hudson arrives in Venice, having notified us earlier that the city is completely unfamiliar turf to her, she seems overwhelmed by the city, its inhabitants and its structural pizzazz. Once she gets off her “bus” and finds a guide to the hotel, we see her walk into a seemingly narrow alley following her guide. She looks upward with a look of bewildered admiration in her eyes while her helper remains nonchalantly unmoved. It’s a moment that completely captures my own sensations of every instance where I encountered new architectural types on trips, and the reaction of blasé locals to my excitement is always identical to the Italian man in this scene.

After we see shadows overtaking Hepburn's figure completely, the scene cuts to her perspective and we see for the first time what she’s looking at: an incredibly long strip of buildings on either side of this narrow walkway that seem to be closing in on her, and us. The shot lasts 13 seconds as the camera moves forward and the alley only seems to get narrower and narrower between these intricately designed buildings and their delicate decorations. The reverse shot then shows Hepburn again, this time her wonderment justified for the audience. Needless to say, the guide remains unenthusiastic. Whereas the rest of Summertime highlights Venice’s architecture with grandiose palettes, beautiful long shots and open spaces, the underplayed beauty of this sequence captures a more grounded element of Venetian architecture but an integral one. It's a rich thematic introduction to Hepburn's ensuing loneliness in the city as well. She's intimated and overtaken, as if she would remain in captivity if she doesn't find what she's really there to find. 

Best Shot: Double Indemnity

This week's episode of Hit Me With Your Best Shot is on one of my favorite films of all time, the Barbara Stanwyck-starring Double Indemnity. As you already know, I'm very busy with the Hot Docs festival these days, so I haven't had time to rewatch this film. If I did, I'd probably choose something with Stanwyck in it - most likely that glorious shot of her walking down the stairs - but for now, I'll stick to an image I'd posted here before, because... drive thru beer people! Drive thru beer!

Hot Docs Review: Trucker and the Fox

Trucker and the Fox, which is the only Iranian film at this year's Hot Docs film festival, follows the struggle of Mahmood Kiyani Falavarjani, a truck driver who wants to make a film about the anthropomorphic love story between two donkeys separated by a fox and a crow. Kiyani, who has just recently finished a spell at a hospital where he'd been under treatment for his bipolar disorder, has not yet overcome the death of his pet fox. His obsession with animals - many of whom he keeps in his backyard - has led him to film several award-winning short documentaries that follow mundane moments in the interactions of different species with each other. His family, however, has had enough of his antics. He's making less and less money from his daytime job as a trucker because of his erratic work ethic and his doctor pleads with him to forget the death of his beloved animal and move on with life. 

Describing the film as such makes it sound much more interesting that it actually is, because Trucker and the Fox makes no attempt to explore any of its central issues beneath the surface, so much so that by the end, following Kiyani on a hunt to find animals becomes almost exactly like one of his own observational short films. Unlike animals whose seemingly meaningless interactions can be contextualized by narration, however, Kiyani's human motives and his past experiences with mental illness make it incredibly difficult to explain any of his actions. This could have been a fascinating study of the lengths this amateur filmmaker is willing to go to create art despite financial and personal hardships but the film opens with a conversation wherein Kiyani explains his bipolar disorder and the doctor warns him about his infatuation with animals. The audience is therefore never given the chance to speculate over Kiyani's intentions. There is always a niggling suspicion that something is seriously wrong with the man whose life we entertain ourselves with. 

What weakens the film even further is that it makes no attempt to conceal the staged feeling that many of its sequences suffer from. Combined with Kiyani's love for filmmaking, the wooden line readings confirm that many of the film's supposedly spontaneous conversations have been premeditated. By the end, when Kiyani's love of his animals has lost much of its positive implication and has started to appear curious at best, the film loses all its coherence and direction. Trucker and the Fox doesn't speak about anything beyond this one man's (staged) story; in and of itself, that wouldn't necessarily be a problem but for the fact that the film's admission to Kiyani's illness upfront deprives the audience of the ability to sit through this film without wondering why the director doesn't put the damn camera down and help his subject instead.