Incendies

The camera, starting at mid-range, slowly tracks to the face of a boy with a grimly violated expression on his face, receiving a hair cut for what seems to be a military operation. There is no sound other than the swell of "You and Whose Army?" by Radiohead (used later in the film to a far lesser effect), which is plenty. For my money, this moment, coming at the very beginning of "Incendies" (translated as "Fires," which will make sense to anyone who sees it), is the most arresting bit in the entire film. We have no context in which to process this scene until towards the conclusion, so it becomes all the more powerful when we realize its true significance: In a movie about the loss of innocence, this is the most prominent example, which ultimately frames everything else.

If this movie was just, you know, better, it would be a masterpiece. Denis Villeneuve has many of the elements he needs to make something great. His visual style is top-notch. He knows how to light and shoot a scene, and he's picked actors whose faces he can utilize to the extreme. The premise of the film is tantalizing, and the structure is well-designed. It's really the script that lets this film down. (I'm going to go ahead and make assumptions that the translation from the French and Arabic is good.)

Adapting from Wajdi Moawad's play, he has little scope of what details are interesting, what details are not, and how to write bearable dialogue. He also has an annoying tendency to spell out major plot points to the audience. The film is over two hours long; that could be solved by cutting out some scenes that repeat obvious information and dilute the film's cutting emotional strength.

The film moves between the relative present and 70's Palestine, the site of a vaguely defined conflict between Christians and "refugees" (of what I'm not sure). As we begin, the presumably 20-something twin children, Jeanne and Simon (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), are parsing out the will of their late mother Narwal (Lubna Azabal). They are given notes which they will relay to their (absent) father and brother, respectively. However, on the way to finding their missing family members, they - and we - will learn more about their recently deceased matriarch.

To say much more about the plot specifics, I would have to dodge more spoilers than I'm comfortable with. So I'll speak in more abstract terms: much of the film from this point onwards is extremely dull. It seems to sincerely believe that thin political soup we've encountered in many other films is going to be interesting. To add to that, we don't get any of the details that are actually helpful/compelling, such as: what was the relationship between the mother and her children before she died? Villeneuve always seems to be worried that he's going to ruin the grand scheme of his film by not controlling the exposition enough. He's so devoted to preservation of the core of the film that he jumps through a hell of a lot of hoops to keep it together; a few too many, it must be said. Finally, the dialogue is clumsy throughout, especially in the abysmal scene that uses math metaphors.

It's sad when you have pretty much everything you need for a success, but botch it with the execution. ("Dogtooth," a fellow also-ran of "Incendies" for Best Foreign Film, showed there are positive results when everything is pushed to, or near, its fullest potential.) In how he tries so hard to lead us down a certain path to not spoil anything, Villeneuve lets many things fall to the wayside. Though many will be horrified/pleased by the twist ending, a good number of folks will also either a) predict it far before intended or b) not appreciate it when it comes to light. The thing about Villeneuve is that he's the right director, but he needed some help with realizing this idea, help he didn't get. C+

Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2010/2011

Here are capsule reviews of the nominated live action shorts, in order of preference:

Always a step ahead of you in the way that "The Social Network" was, but much more purely enjoyable and wacky, Luke Matheny's "God of Love" stands above the others in its category. With a trite voiceover, B&W, and an appeal to god for help w/r/t unrequited love, it seemed to be heading for mannered eccentricity, but with verve, esprit, and great timing it bounds out of its shackles. Matheny is probably the only one who could have realized his vision to the fullest extent, and so he stars as Ray, who sings and throws darts simultaneously. He's in love with the drummer in his band, Kelly (Marian Brock), who's in love with Ray's buddy Fozzie (a great Christopher Hirsh, who keeps up with Matheny). Ray out of nowhere gets a bunch of darts that, when thrown at someone, strike the victim with an uncontrollable urge to be with the person they immediately look at. That is, for 6 hours. After that, they either snap out of it or continue onwards entranced. It's an intriguing idea (like something out of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"), and, with a countdown and all, Matheny examines it to its fullest, funniest extent. The film's quasi-coda, which completes the film's circular structure, falls a bit into sappiness and doesn't resist the temptation to have things fit perfectly together, but what Matheny does shouldn't go unnoticed and should hopefully win him the Oscar. A-

Ivan Goldschmidt's "Na Wewe" is the short of this year's crop that I would call the most audacious. 19 minutes long, it takes place in real time and plays out in only one scene. It takes place in '94 Burundi, where a Belgian newsperson or something and his assistant are picked up after his car breaks down. The guy talks on and on to the annoyance of the other people in the car before the vehicle is forced to stop by a group of Hutus who want to kill all of the Tutsis onboard. They try to separate their targets from the rest, but everyone stays as a group. They go on to question every person in the crowd, with each person giving reasons why they should be spared. Once it gets going, you can see how it will end, but it throws curveballs in along the way, as kids are not automatically allowed to live. Of course, due to its subject, it gets a bit heavy-handed, and some of the details (especially the whole bit about U2) are a little dubious. But the acting (which I would single out, but can't do to the fact that I can't find the players' names on the Internet) is quite solid, and (as my friend noted) the editing is splendid. This film has a good chance at winning the award. B+

The way that the somewhat stilted "The Crush" by Michael Creagh portrays its story, in a condescending manner, is spot on, even though I thought otherwise when I began watching. It's about how a second grader named Ardal (again, I cannot find the actors' names) wants to marry his teacher Ms. Purdy (strangely named, since that's the moniker of Creagh's production company) and how he tries to obstruct her jerk of a fiancee from beating him to the punch (right down to a duel at a handball court, which yields those banal observations which show how Ms. Purdy much of an a-hole the dude really is). One could have developed this to be something creepy, but instead Creagh makes it sweet and coy, though perhaps a little too syrupy at the close. One weird thing: the lighting makes some of the actors look like they're made out of clay, which in my opinion doesn't do the film too many favors. B

Tanel Toom's visual style in "The Confession" is seriously good, especially in how he juxtaposes two still shots of a road and a cornfield and how he shoots inside of a church. However, no tonal sensitivity is evident, and the film's eventual spiral from control seems both deliberate and unintentional. We follow a youngster named Sam (Lewis Howlett, whom we will hopefully see again), who is coming to his first confession with nothing to confess. He spends his days innocuously with his friend Jacob (Joe Eales), making fun of the whole process (mimicking the eucharist with potato chips) and biking around. Jacob feels that Sam should have something to say when he goes his first time, and so the two for some reason decide to take a scarecrow down from the cross on which it is hung and place it in the middle of a road. Why they do this I guess can be seen as an instance of the logic of children, but it goes underexposed, as do most things as the film progresses from this moment, the turning point in the film. Toom does have something interesting to say about how confession can be rendered meaningless, and Howlett is strong portraying a kid who now has way too much to confess, but it's hardly an impeccable work. B

"Wish 143" promises something subversive (a la "Cashback") with its premise of a cancer patient who wants to use a Make-a-Wish style program to lose his virginity rather than rub elbows with a famous person. Instead it takes the path of least resistance, ending up depressingly cloying. To the film's credit, it does set up a good comedic duo in Samuel Peter Holland and Jim Carter, who play the patient in question and his priest friend, setting up some pretty humorous scenes. But it goes all chickenshit and turns from comedy to sentimental drama at the drop of a hat, replete with that cheesy generic narration that connects some sort of obscure knowledge with life. The film is mildly touching, yet the ways it could have developed are potentially much more interesting. All directors should remember: you only get to direct a film once, so make the most of it. C+

Biutiful

The only innovation in "Biutiful" is having different colors for subtitles in different languages (white for Spanish, blue for Chinese, yellow for Senegalese), something that last year's confusing Oscar nominee "Ajami" could have used. Otherwise, "Biutiful" is an emotionally manipulative, 147-minute tapestry of cliches and poorly-developed characters that Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu puts together clumsily and without much coherence. A good but not necessarily Oscar-worthy performance by Javier Bardem (co-winner of Cannes Best Actor) and a pretty touching (and at times pleasantly mechanized) score by Gustavo Santaolalla (et al.) are to the film's benefit but don't really help it work as a whole.

Uxbal (Bardem) is a disciplinarian who has a handle on everyone but (you guessed it) himself. He tries to get money to support his children but his long-lasting felonious venture (something involving construction) seems to be nearing its end. His other job, telling people what their recently deceased family and friends (who look like something out of J-horror) said, is also losing steam as people are tired of him sayingthat their kids stole things (even if they did). His separated wife, Marambra (Maricel Alvarez), whom he still loves, claims to be stable but engages in an affair with his brother Tito and, when Uxbal moves back in with her, displays all of the problems she's said to have overcome.

Before his life bursts by itself, he finds he has contracted cancer (portrayed gratuitously with bloody urinations and needles) and neglected it beyond the point of return. Uxbal doesn't want the same thing to happen to his kids that happened to him when his father (whom he never met) passed early on in his life, but there's very little he can do about it. And that's all I'll say about the film's plot, since I'm getting annoyed describing it and also because I don't want to transcribe the whole movie right here, which is sort of tempting.

Bardem has some nice scenes of anger, tenderness, and sadness, but the performance isn't exactly the slam-dunk I was expecting. He, along with the other actors, is at the mercy of Inarritu's screenplay (with Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone). It throws in corny characters (a cop, a fellow supernatural friend, a conflicted immigrant), kills off minor ones to try to grip us, and doesn't treat the substantial ones as well as possible. The film's ending (and also prologue) is a mild triumph for the script, though. Despite lingering on an overplayed image, it made me feel something. "Biutiful," between its introduction and conclusion, however, doesn't really dig that deep. C

I've now seen all the nominees of the "above the line" categories at the Oscars. This enables me to do my feature to its fullest extent, though I'm unsure of how that'll work out. Stay tuned, though.