As anyone who'd visited this site knows, I tend to get cranky, irritable and annoyed with some independent films......tiny little movies that wander through the festival circuit, begging for adoration from festival culture-vultures and hoping to snag whatever award the festivals might be handing out....the Golden Cantelope, the Silver Crossbow, the Platinum PeaPod or whatever.......
The preening, egotistical self indulgence of many indie filmmakers so often render their movies unwatchable.......weighed down with uninteresting camera shots held way too long, and spare, cryptic dialogue delivered by the actors with deadening, pregnant pauses between every line.
But in BQ's ongoing mission to bravely seek out the world's most obscure, cinematic oddities, I plunged into two such highly praised festival favorites.......no matter how dire the experience of viewing them might turn out. And came away.....well, read on and I'll tell you.....
For these films, you'll need to put away the popcorn and break out the more appropriate wine and cheese platters......cause here goes.....
Columbus (2017).....is an ever so modest, quiet meditation on modern architecture.....its creation and its effects on the both the people and the landscapes that surround it.
Despite its simplicity, the film's quite ambitious in its intentions......to use the impressive structures built in and around Columbus Ohio as a backdrop for two people, newly met strangers to each other, each struggling with grief, family dysfunction and their own unsettled futures.
Yep, the shots of the city's architectural wonders are held too long and the dialogue's rationed out in teaspoonfuls, but the film benefits from the the carefully crafted subtle performances of its core duo......John Cho as the estranged son of a dying architect and Haley Lu Richardson as a young library clerk (and and self-taught architecture fan) who curtailed her own future to help her meth-addicted mom.
I fully expected to spend the film's entirety rolling my eyes upward and fighting to stay awake, but Cho and Richardson (and even those lingering building views) somehow made it all compelling. 3 stars (***)....and with brief but welcome contributions from Rory Culkin as Richardson's snarky co-worker nursing a crush on her and none other than the 90's Indie film princess Parker Posey as Cho's former lover.
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) I do feel ashamed at how ridiculously late I am in catching up with this one.......(maybe cause it's so easily found on multiple streaming sites, which made it easy for me to put it on the back burner and hardly give it any more thought.....)
And indies don't come any odder than "A Girl..." an Iranian girl-vampire-on-the-hunt horror film safely filmed in California.
Not that I blame writer-director Ana Lily Amipour for staying as far away from Iran as she possibly could...(setting the film in a fictitious, depressed Iranian industrial wasteland called "Bad City"). I'm not sure what the rabid loons who run Iran think of female vampires, but I'm pretty sure they would've hung Amipour on a lamp post for daring to creatively express herself.
Once again, the still-life editing seems designed to wear out the patience of even the most forgiving audiences and the spare, pithy dialogue comes right out of the Mumblecore playbook.....
I still found a way to enjoy the film, whose pleasures come from Amipour's sampling anything and everything in cinema that's ever engaged and inspired her.....(at one point, like the much worshipped Tarantino, Amnipour has the soundtrack erupt into a full knockoff of Ennio Morricone's "A Fistful Of Dollars" score.....
The irony here comes from the film's lethal vampira, floating through deserted streets on a skateboard......Iran's recently disbanded (or so they say) Morality Police would give her a pass since she glides around fully cloaked in a black Chador, a literal Angel Of Death on the prowl....
Another semi-pleasant surprise here....3 stars (***)......so let me do a one person slow clap for "Columbus"s writer director Kogonada and to Ana Lily Amipour for fining a way to turn potentially stillborn mumblecore slogs into tolerable, watchable experiences.......nice goin' guys.....
No comments:
Post a Comment