I’m thrilled and honored to welcome you to the first of several virtual roundtables featuring Oscar’s nominee class of 2012 — commencing today with those behind the five films nominated for Best Documentary Feature. They are (in alphabetical order):
Today is the next-to-last day of competition screenings here at the Berlinale , which means people are speculating about a possible winner – to the extent that speculation is ever possible. This year’s jury is headed by Mike Leigh, and at dinner the other night some friends and I were playing the “WWMLL” – What Will Mike Leigh Like? – game. Voting for prizes is a democratic process, but the jury president can set the tone. Even so, it’s hard to say, rummaging around in the Berlinale 2012 bag, what Leigh and co. might possibly go for. The critics’ favorites so far seem to be Christian Petzold’s Barbara , an unusual, slow-building drama set in 1970s East Germany, and Miguel Gomes’ Tabu , an inventive melodrama that uses old-school movie conventions – and sensuous black-and-white cinematography – to weave a story of love and loss. But critics’ favorites and a jury’s choices don’t necessarily align. At this point, the field is fairly open. I’m wondering what a Mike Leigh-led jury will think about Postcards from the Zoo , by the young Indonesian filmmaker who goes by the name Edwin. Postcards is a gentle story, with a loose-jointed, somewhat impressionistic narrative structure, about a young woman, Lana (Ladya Cheryl), who spends her life in a Jakarta zoo, though she doesn’t officially work there. She helps bathe the zoo’s baby tiger; she knows many facts about the zoo’s giraffes, which she shares authoritatively with the zoo’s visitors; and, one day, she takes up with another zoo denizen, a magician-cowboy who turns her into his assistant and accomplice. (She dons an Indian-girl outfit and takes her place in his knife-throwing routine.) During this meandering journey of self-discovery, Lana also becomes a massage girl at a spa, serving men who nonchalantly stop in for full-service satisfaction, complete with a happy ending (if they’re willing to pay for it). The picture is gorgeously filmed – the early section really is a series of postcards, a gentle meditation on the zoo’s peaceful, inspirational nature, including shots of a mother and baby hippo idling in a pool, and a droll little sequence in which Lana muses aloud about why one of the tigers won’t eat. (She surmises that he feels sorry for the hens that become his dinner.) Postcards , Edwin’s second feature, is so low-key that its emotional effects don’t really linger – the picture is inconsequential, but it’s also reasonably enjoyable, particularly for its pensive, low-key aura. Wang Quan’an’s White Deer Plain, on the other hand, is anything but low-key. This nearly-three-hour Chinese epic includes no real battle scenes and very little pageantry, but it does something that’s perhaps harder to pull off: It wrestles with the changes and hardships that the country endured between 1910, the end of Imperial China, and 1938, the time of the Japanese invasion. The story, an adaptation of a controversial historical novel by Chen Zhongshi, uses the power struggle between two village families – a struggle that’s intensified by the woman, played by an expressive actress named Kitty Zhang Yugi, who enters their midst – as a means of talking about sweeping and painful change in China during the first half of the last century. The picture is gorgeous to look at — well, not the famine sections, but pretty much everywhere else. Wang has a weakness for showing, over and over again, the shimmering golden wheat fields that play a key part in the story, and they are beautiful. The human characters, unfortunately, often take a backseat to the scenery. They’re cogs in the machinery of the country and in that of the movie, too – perhaps that’s intentional, but it does keep White Deer Plain from being as involving as it might be. So who knows, from what we’ve seen so far, what the Berlinale 2012 jury will go for? (The group also includes François Ozon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anton Corbijn and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as well as Asghar Farhadi, the director of last year’s Golden Bear winner A Separation .) A Hungarian picture that screened this morning, Bene Fliegauf’s Just the Wind, draws its subject matter from recent real-life horrors, in which several Romany families were murdered in their homes, the targets of racial hatred. The picture is harrowing, yet it’s also somewhat detached – Fliegauf often works harder than he has to, maybe, to underscore the fear and anxiety visited upon the community in the wake of these murders. But the picture is topical, and that’s sometimes a quality that makes a jury sit up and take notice. We’ll see what happens on Saturday, by which time I’ll have bid the Berlinale adieu for another year – though before that, I’ll be checking back in with a look at Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod’s Bel Ami , featuring the Pale One himself, Robert Pattinson. Read more of Movieline’s coverage from the 2012 Berlinale here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Portuguese director Miguel Gomes’s inventive, playful black-and-white Tabu — part drama, part romance, part malaria-induced fever dream — has turned out to be a favorite among critics at the Berlinale this week, alongside Christian Petzold’s Barbara , and it’s not hard to see why. Tabu was one of the few movies here to be heralded by a ripple of excitement — it seemed to be the one competition film everyone was curious to see. In the movie’s first section — despite an intriguing reference to a “sad and melancholic crocodile” — I feared the buzz would amount to nothing. And what if this crocodile never actually appeared? I wasn’t leaving without my crocodile, I decided, and luckily, I wasn’t disappointed. Gomes — who previously directed The Portuguese Nun and Our Beloved Month of August — used to be a film critic, and you know how those people are: They love their movie references, and Gomes uses plenty. (The film’s title itself is a nod to F.W. Murnau’s movie of the same name.) But he manages to avoid coming off as either a show-off or know-it-all, particularly in the movie’s second section. The first chapter deals with a mysterious elderly Portuguese woman named Aurora (Laura Soveral), whose mind appears to be disintegrating and who is convinced her housekeeper (Isabel Cardoso) is working black magic on her. She begs her neighbor, Pilar (Teresa Madruga), for help. It’s only after Aurora dies, and Pilar seeks out the man who used to be her lover, that the movie truly springs to life: The opening section is clearly intended to be an extended prologue, a means of whetting our appetite for what’s to come. In part two, we meet the young Aurora (played by Ana Moreira), a big-game hunter who, like good old Isak Dinesen before her, has a farm in Africa. Aurora is beautiful, headstrong, possibly emotionally unstable. She’s also a crackerjack markswoman who always gets her prey, sacking big game right and left. That includes menfolk: She’s married to a staid, successful businessman who doesn’t give her the attention she needs. It’s no surprise when she falls into the arms of Ventura (Carloto Cotta), a John Gilbert lookalike who plays in a local band — it specializes in hyper-romantic Phil Spector covers — and who also has some romantic complications of his own, in the form of a lover named Mario (Manuel Mesquita). The second half of Tabu is mostly silent. There’s sound, in the form of birds or crickets or rustling leaves, but all the dialogue of the story remains unheard and implied: The actors move their lips, but no words come out, and the effect is surprisingly intimate, like being keyed in to a secret language between lovers. We know what’s happening, and what’s going on in the characters’ heads, thanks to a voiceover narration provided by the old-man version of Ventura (Henrique Espirito Santo), as he reflects on his obsessive and marvelously melodramatic relationship with the young Aurora. Did I mention that by the time she and Ventura get together, she’s already pregnant with her husband’s child? Gomes piles one complication on top of another, but the effect is poetic rather than jumbled. I’ve been hearing people comparing Tabu to The Artist , couching it as a more art-housey version of that picture. There are similarities, but each film exists in its own distinct and imaginatively realized world. Gomes’s is dreamier, more impressionistic — at times, in the first section, the conversations between the characters spin out in oblique, off-kilter loops, as if they’d been invented by a less-flamboyant, less-kooky Almodovar. Gomes’s style here is winsome and affectionate; at times, it’s a little too arch and self-aware. But the picture’s satiny imagery, rendered in black, white and every glorious gradation in between, is so lovely that that hardly matters. The two lovers, Aurora and Ventura, lounge by a reflecting pool, glasses of lemonade on a tray between them, as that aforementioned crocodile — at this point, a mere babe — skims through the water like a silent witness to all that’s passing between them. Now we know why he’s sad and melancholic: He’s the croc who knew too much. But at least he’s been lucky enough to swim through this romantic dream of a movie. Read more of Movieline’s Berlinale 2012 coverage here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
No one, as far as I know, has come to the Berlinale in search of Gillian Anderson, the strawberry-blonde vixen who set millions of hearts aflutter — and not just male ones — with her role in the supernaturally beloved ’90s show The X-Files . But Anderson has surprised those of us who love her by showing up — in small roles, but still — in two films here, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Ursula Meier’s Sister . In Shadow Dancer , a thriller set in early-‘90s Belfast, she’s a British secret-service officer who squares off against a colleague (played by Clive Owen). In Sister , she’s the well-heeled patron of a tony Swiss ski resort — and a mom — who befriends a young thief and rapscallion who barely knows what it means to be a child. Anderson hasn’t really been in hiding. She was one of the best things — perhaps the only good thing — in last year’s Johnny English Reborn , and she recently played Miss Havisham in the British TV adaptation of Great Expectations . She chooses her roles carefully and doesn’t seem particularly attracted to big Hollywood vehicles — though it’s more likely that Hollywood isn’t particularly interested in her, which is certainly its loss. There are plenty of movies to parse and examine here at the Berlinale, but at dinner last night with some colleagues (who happened to be guys), Anderson came up in the conversation, and we just looked at one another: “Gosh! Isn’t she something?” is the gist of what we said. Perhaps we love her more because she shows up so infrequently and so fleetingly, like a ginger comet. Her role in Shadow Dancer is small and tokenlike, but it’s interesting for its metallic coldness, not a quality we usually associate with Anderson. Then again, maybe it’s really just a mirror angle of the clinical skepticism she brought to the role of Dana Scully in The X-Files : She’s good at playing characters who can turn the warmth off when it gets in the way of the goal at hand, and in Shadow Dancer , she plays a character who’s all about goals. In Sister , Anderson isn’t strawberry blonde but truly blonde, and the first glimpse we get of her is a mane of glorious, rich-girl hair. At first I could see only the oblique planes of her face and, not knowing she was in the movie, I thought to myself, “Could it be…?” Her role is small but potent: Her character, skiing at the resort with her own kids, meets the young thief Simon (played, beautifully, by a kid actor named Kacey Mottet Klein), and the two are immediately charmed by each other. He pretends to be a the son of the resort’s owner, when really he’s a mighty mite of a hustler who scrambles to make a living for himself and his sister (Léa Seydoux). Anderson scrutinizes his face as he advertises this fanciful false background — you can see, in this tiny but potent scene, that she’s amused by him and yet somehow, instinctively, she also feels protective. It’s not that she doesn’t believe his tale (she seems to buy it all); it’s that her better judgment tells her that this kid is in need of something, and though she can’t be the one to provide it, she grants him the kindest gift she can: She takes him seriously, reacting to him as if he were the miniature adult he’s trying so desperately to be, meeting him on his own scrappy turf. That’s a lot to pack into a few small scenes, and it’s a bit frustrating that her character’s role in the drama isn’t better worked out — her final encounter with Simon doesn’t feel true to the woman we met earlier. On the whole, the picture is unevenly worked out, but it’s ultimately touching, thanks to the bittersweet grace notes scattered throughout. Anderson is one of those grace notes; her presence is as subtle as a sigh, but it’s the kind that sticks with you long after the credits roll. Read more of Movieline’s Berlinale coverage here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
There were many happy faces among critics on Saturday, the third day of the Berlinale. Because despite what I wrote yesterday about the criticism the festival has faced in recent years, particularly in terms of the films chosen for competition, nearly everyone I’ve spoken to thinks this year’s festival is off to a promising start. Of the six competition films that have been screened so far, not one has set any of my random sampling of critic friends howling with derision, or walking around wearing a perpetual scowly-frowny face. When the festival lineup was announced, friends who had to write pregame assessments had a hard time finding even one or two movies that, sight unseen, had the potential to stand out. But on the strength of what we’ve seen so far, it appears that the best of this festival, whatever that might be, will again come from left field, as it did last year with Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation . Not every edition of every festival starts out that way, with a sense of adventure and anticipation. Don’t quote me yet, but we may be onto something special here. We can attribute part of the buoyant mood to the reception of the screening of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die on Saturday morning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Taviani Brothers rode high, on an internationally cresting wave, with pictures like Padre Padrone and The Night of the Shooting Stars . But in recent years, mentioning their name would be likely to elicit a blank stare or a “Taviani Who?” Even though the brothers have been steadily making films in Italy since then, they’ve dropped off the map in the United States, and even at home their profile hasn’t exactly been blazing. But Caesar Must Die may reignite the fortunes of this octogenarian directing team. The picture is stark and alive in its simplicity; rendered mostly in black-and-white, it’s gorgeous to look at — you could practically use it as an illustrated textbook on framing and composition. Caesar Must Die is a sort-of documentary that tells the story of a group of prison inmates — incarcerated at Rome’s maximum security Rebibbia — who mount a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Footage from the actual performance frames the picture: In the opening scene, we see a bunch of stubbly, rough-looking guys, wearing simple, stylized costumes that give the whole affair the aura of a children’s holiday pageant, doing some pretty interesting things with Shakespeare’s language. Not all of those things are, in the strict sense, good. But even the “bad” actors among this bunch — and remember, they’re not just nonprofessionals but convicted criminals, for Christ’s sake — contribute to the intense, quiet power of the final work. Most of Caesar Must Die is devoted to watching these men work their way through the material during rehearsal, learning its ins and outs, its dips and dives, and teasing out nuances and details that mean something to them. Sometimes the Tavianis draw the parallels between art and life a little too starkly. We don’t really need to hear the inmates reflecting on how Julius Caesar speaks to them when we can see how, in their proto-method-acting way, they bring every scrap of their experience to rehearsal: They touch each other warily but tenderly; when it’s time for a character to draw a knife, you can tell the actors respect it as both a weapon and a symbol, even though it’s presumably made out of plastic. You can bet these guys know a lot about duplicity and betrayal and power struggles, and they bring all of that to bear as they tangle with this challenging material, and with each other. The most wonderful sequence in this overall very fine picture may be the montage of the actors’ auditions, as they meet with the play’s director – a professional brought in from the outside – and try to impress him with their swagger and capacity for pathos. Many of them have both in spades. Some are awkwardly touching; others come off like they’ve spent too much time channeling Robert De Niro; and some are simply naturals, able to summon that deep-rooted whatever-it-is that makes magic happen in live performance. The picture also features a lovely, haunting Bernard Herrmann-inflected score — in places I could hear shadows of Taxi Driver . When Caesar Must Die eventually shows up in American theaters — and it will — it’s going to be easy as pie for marketing people to sell: An uplifting story about prison dudes finding meaning in art can pretty much sell itself. But even though that line essentially describes what happens in Caesar Must Die , it doesn’t come close to capturing the simultaneously joyous and mournful resonance of the picture. Caesar Must Die is really just about the way art lives on through people, sometimes in unlikely ways. There’s no way to keep it behind bars. Saturday’s press screening of Barbara, from German director Christian Petzold, didn’t draw the same kind of rapturous audience affection that Caesar Must Die did. But then, it’s a very different type of movie. In Barbara , a beautiful but rather blank-faced young doctor – played by the superb German actress Nina Hoss — arrives in a small East German town to take a new job at a tiny hospital. She doesn’t seem too happy to be there, though clearly the doc in charge – Ronald Zehrfeld, who somewhat resembles Brendan Fraser and is equally charming — takes an immediate shine to her. It’s 1980, as the movie’s press notes tell us, though if you go in cold, you probably won’t be able to immediately discern when and where the action is taking place. That’s probably intentional, and the approach works. This isn’t The Lives of Others, where the East-West divide is practically a major character; instead, it’s just a story about people living in constrained (and at times dangerous) circumstances and yearning for something more. Barbara is a drama and a romance, and it’s also laced with dry, delicate humor. There were times when the German members of the audience would laugh at a joke that I couldn’t quite get, and yet Petzold — the director behind the 2007 drama Yella, also featuring Hoss — is such a master of tone and mood that I could feel the vibrations of the movie’s subtle humor, even if I’d be hard-pressed to articulate it. Barbara starts out slow and then moves even slower — but by the end, somehow, it got me in its gentle clutches. 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It may be a relatively quiet Sundance year – even Pixar’s Lee Unkrich, in town for the festival, Tweeted his dismay at the “mixed bag” of movies – but films are selling. Granted, they’re mostly the ones with name actors and mostly okay-to-decent reviews (with a few exceptions), but buyers continue to be getting busy in the snow. The latest batch of pick-ups (Olsens and robots and scares, oh my!) after the jump. Liberal Arts (IFC Films) – Josh Radnor’s follow up to happythankyoumoreplease , another Sundance pick, features Radnor as a thirty-something man who returns to his college campus and is intrigued by both his former professor (Alison Janney) and a young coed (Elizabeth Olsen). IFC picked up Liberal Arts and plans on releasing it later in 2011. Robot and Frank (Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions/Samuel Goldwyn Films) – It’s Frank Langella and a robot. What more do you need to know? Oh, fine: Directed by Jake Schreier and co-starring Susan Sarandon, Peter Sarsgaard, and Liv Tyler, this charmer won over critics during Sundance. V/H/S (Magnolia) – The horror anthology opened to such a raucous, receptive Midnight debut that it’s no wonder a specialist like Magnolia snapped up the surefire genre pleaser. Did reports of a seizure at this week’s screening help? The Pact (IFC) – This deal’s a bit of a surprise, given the negative-to-lukewarm reviews Nicholas McCarthy’s feature debut (adapted from his own Sundance short of the same name) received this week. Yet another spooky tale, about a young lady investigating bumps and scares in her dead mother’s house, it went to IFC for a reported ” high-six-figure deal ” as the distrib hopes it catches fire in limited release/VOD. Previously: Arbitrage (Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions) – Nicholas Jarecki’s dramatic feature-filmmaking debut stars Richard Gere as a billionaire hedge-fund fraud seeking to cash in before he’s exposed. Susan Sarandon, Brit Marling and Tim Roth co-star. Look for the studio duo to duplicate the multi-platform success they enjoyed in 2011 with Margin Call , another financial-world potboiler picked up in Park City. The Surrogate (Fox Searchlight) – Sundance favorite John Hawkes turns in an brave performance as real life poet Mark O’Brien, who yearns to lose his virginity with a sex therapist (Helen Hunt) despite being paralyzed from the head down. Fox Searchlight paid a reported $6 million for the pic, which may face tricky ratings deliberations due to Hunt’s full frontal nudity. Beasts of the Southern Wild (Fox Searchlight) – The smallest narrative to get a deal thus far at Sundance comes off of strong buzz and acclaim for the tale of a young girl and her ailing father who live in a fantastical alternate version of the American South. Red Lights (Millenium Films) Negative reviews hurt the profile of this Rodrigo Cortes ( Buried ) thriller, despite featuring Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, Robert De Niro, and last year’s Sundance darling Elizabeth Olsen. For a Good Time, Call… (Focus Features) – The feature debut of shorts director Jamie Travis pairs Lauren Anne Miller and Ari Graynor as frenemies who start a phone sex line together, one of a gaggle of raunchy female-driven comedies in this year’s line-up. Celeste and Jesse Forever (Sony Pictures Classics) – With Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg leading a cast of familiar players, this was bound to attract buyer attention galore. Sony Pictures Classics snatched it up for a reported $2 million, adding C&J to their previous Sundance acquisitions Searching for Sugar Man and The Raid . Searching for Sugar Man (Sony Classics) – The documentary about 1960s musician Rodriguez played well to critics and was snatched up by SPC for a reported six figures. The Queen of Versailles (Magnolia Pictures) – Another well-received doc, Lauren Greenfield’s examination of Florida real estate mogul David Siegel was picked up by Magnolia on Friday. Black Rock (LD Distribution) – Katie Aselton’s thriller about three female friends (Aselton, Lake Bell, Kate Bosworth) surviving a weekend getaway gone wrong was the first Midnight selection to seal a deal, partnering with newbie venture LD Distribution. The Words (CBS Films) – Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, and Jeremy Irons lead a cast of recognizable stars in this literary drama about a writer (Cooper) who claims credit on someone else’s manuscript and is confronted by its real author, so it’s easy to see why buyers were interested. CBS Films reportedly made the most expensive buy of the fest so far, laying down $2 million for the film. Whether or not that move was smart remains to be seen, as this first review over at The Playlist is less than encouraging. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter . Get more of Movieline’s Sundance 2012 coverage here .
Movieline caught up with Will Forte this week in Park City, where he was at Sundance to support Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s absurdist midnight offering Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie . In the film, Forte plays the uptight, moustachioed owner of a sword store in a mall that bumbling filmmakers Tim and Eric have taken over following the epic failure of their brush with Hollywood. Forte compared the more restricted sensibilities of his gig on Saturday Night Live to working within the madcap, surrealist stylings of the cult duo. Forte, like Billion Dollar Movie co-stars Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly, also appeared on Heidecker and Wareheim’s Adult Swim sketch show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! He recalled his first time on the series, filming a bit called the Lazy Horse Mattress Ad. “I just did exactly what Tim and Eric asked me to do — that was the first time I ever worked with these guys, and it was the best experience,” Forte remembered. “It was so fun, because it’s this advertisement for a mattress store and in between there’s this crazy dream, and for the crazy dream part they just turned the camera on and said ‘Go nuts for a while!’” “They’d turn the camera off for four or five minutes, say ‘Try this, do this here…’ They were so good about giving you direction but also giving you a ton of freedom. It was one of the best times I’ve ever had – it was so therapeutic to just be able to go nuts for a while. You don’t get to do that very often.” His more famous gig on Saturday Night Live , on the other hand, is understandably a much different process. “I love SNL , but it’s different. It’s got to be structured because it’s a live show, so the director needs to know what you’re going to do so he can capture it best; you can go nuts on that show, but it’s a different type of nuts.” As for Billion Dollar Movie , Forte is just one of a number of zany characters populating the first Tim and Eric feature, and while his part is plenty absurd, it’s nowhere near the most bizarre or random bit in the film. (Just wait ‘til you find out what shrim is, folks.) “I’ve always been a fan of the nuttier stuff,” Forte enthused, “and you don’t get much nuttier than Tim and Eric – I mean that as a major compliment.” Sundance audiences didn’t quite know what to make of Billion Dollar Movie ; even crew members admitted to Movieline that you’re either a Tim & Eric fan, or you may not get their brand of random, hyper-ridiculous comedy. Still, if the film is a success, Heidecker told me, they’d possibly explore a prequel – Tim and Eric’s Million Dollar Movie , perhaps? [Photo: Getty Images] Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
If you’ve grown tired of the gimmickry and diminishing quality of “found footage” horror, Sundance’s Midnight program just delivered the cure: V/H/S , an anthology film comprised of shorts by six up-and-coming horror/indie filmmakers, each working within the parameter that their story be told via found media. The Devil Inside this ain’t; V/H/S is fresh and pulse-quickening to the end, one of the best discoveries of this year’s fest. Conceived by producer Brad Miska, V/H/S culls some of the most promising genre talent around for writing and directing duties: Ti West ( House of the Devil, Innkeepers ), Adam Wingard ( A Horrible Way to Die ), Joe Swanberg ( LOL ), David Bruckner ( The Signal ), Glenn McQuaid ( I Sell the Dead ), and filmmaking collective Radio Silence. Their six disparate segments are tied together thusly (though you won’t want to go in knowing much more about it than this): Four prankster punks are promised a big payday to break into a house and steal a VHS tape, but once they get there they find an empty house, a body, and a stack of bizarre tapes to sift through. As they pop in each cassette in search of The Tape, described in vague “you’ll know it when you see it” terms, we see what they see — a collection of found recordings documenting strange, grisly happenings. The segments unfold as follows (SPOILER ALERT: If you want to know nothing going in, close your eyes and skip to the next paragraph): Wingard’s Tape 56 , Bruckner’s Amateur Night , West’s Second Honeymoon , McQuaid’s Tuesday the 17th , Swanberg’s The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger , and Radio Silence’s 10/31/98 . While I won’t spoil the details (or even the premises) of these shorts, suffice to say V/H/S serves as a stellar showcase for its stable of writers and directors, some of whom also worked on each others’ selections. (Swanberg and Wingard, for example, each direct a short and act in another.) What’s interesting to note is that, as the directors explained late Sunday night following their raucous midnight premiere, none had any idea what the others were planning when they were all making their films. So when certain trends pop up — say, sex-hungry twenty-something young men undone by their own pervy impulses, a popular theme — it’s by coincidence. The film itself is an experiment in found-footage filmmaking, a trend much more profitable than it is respected, and yet these are the guys who aren’t cashing in on their neophyte horror cache by signing on to studio-backed horror sequels and remakes and trend-catchers. So while it’s a method commonly associated with the Paranormal Activity phenomenon, each director here manages to do something different with the form that defies convention while winking at the horror faithful. Some segments evoke classic slasher horror, others the supernatural thriller, and even the indie relationship drama, but they all exploit the medium as a storytelling aide, tweaking horror cliches with unexpected, and effective results. “On a large derivative scale, [found footage] is not appealing,” said West during the film’s Q&A, explaining what appealed to him about experimenting with an otherwise tired methodology like this. Thankfully — impressively, miraculously! — these folks have figured out a way to make the gimmick fresh again, and in wildly different but inventive ways. In a time when the found footage train shows no immediate sign of stopping, at least there’s proof that it can be done in new ways, and well. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
“Aziz [Ansari], barely audible over the jabbering crowd and telling jokes skewering everything from the gay hookup app Grindr to the sanctity of marriage, is bombing terribly. He’s visibly annoyed. All of a sudden, Cuba Gooding Jr. bum-rushes the stage out of nowhere, snatches Aziz’s microphone, and yells, ‘Everybody, shut the FUCK up! Have some respect for the black men onstage.’ Aziz —who is Indian— looks baffled, and when Cuba exits, remarks, ‘Y’all would be paying more attention if we were showing Boat Trip up here!’ Aziz: 1, Cuba: 0.” [ Sundance Channel / Daily Beast ]
The most polarizing films are often those that dare to push the envelope farther than is expected or comfortable, whether audiences are ready for them or not, and for this reason I tend to find the divisive films more interesting than those with universal praise or derision. Simon Killer , from Afterschool director/ Martha Marcy May Marlene producer Antonio Campos, reminded me of this rule when it debuted Friday at Sundance and left critics and bloggers somewhat split. Simon Killer marks the return of Borderline Films partners Campos, Sean Durkin, and Josh Mond to Sundance after debuting their Martha Marcy May Marlene last year (which was directed by Durkin), and like MMMM it focuses on a seemingly lost young twentysomething searching for their identity and place in the world while said world grows increasingly sinister. Here, however, that creeping menace doesn’t come from an outside threat but rather from within protagonist Simon (Brady Corbet), a recent college grad who’s drifted to Paris after a bad break-up. Taking up with a local prostitute (Mati Diop), Simon insinuates himself into her life driven by loneliness and longing, but piece by piece the portrait he paints of himself, to her and to the audience, starts to feel jarringly and disturbingly false. Campos presents his sophomore feature as an exercise in perception cued by Simon’s intellectual fascination, as he describes to pretty strangers and acquaintances alike, with the way the eye and the brain interact. Seeing is believing, but it’s not necessarily knowing; is this a young man nursing heartbreak in completely normal human ways — or a sociopath in the making? Campos employs a striking visual flair and bold use of sound and music, cleverly using diegetic sound, voice-over, and strobing effects to evoke Simon’s internal experience to allow us to tap into Simon’s psyche, bit by bit. The problem is that by the film’s midpoint Simon is so unlikeable and so morally detestable that you find yourself wondering why it is you should root for this miserable little slug, or care what happens to him, or, perhaps, even stay to the end. But the end is where Campos brings it all back together and leaves us to ponder the new picture we have of our protagonist, an unreliable narrator minus the narration. You’re not supposed to like Simon, or root for him, or care if a happy fate befalls him; he is, potentially, a monster in the making — possibly even one damn well fully formed — and Simon Killer only seeks to explore what he is and how he operates, how he, or someone like him, could operate in the world around us without giving off the slightest of clues to his true nature. [Campos, after the film’s premiere, offered a chilling bit of explanation: He was inspired by the case of Joran van der Sloot, the Dutch man suspected in the 2005 disappearance of Natalee Holloway who was convicted of murdering a woman five years later in Peru.] While I’m on the subject of polarizing Sundance 2012 films, I also caught Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie , a comedy feature spin-off of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s cult series which is itself a pretty “take it or leave it” kind of property. More on that and its critical reception here in Park City, to come. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
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