Category Archives: Movies

I’m going straight for your attention-jugular with these words: Blancanieves (2012) is an adaptation of Snow White, except it’s about bullfighters. And yes, there are dwarves.

It also happens to be a fantastic movie.

Blancanieves is a Spanish, silent, black-and-white ode to the films of the late silent era. I’m pretty sure it is constructed entirely of magic and beauty. Eight years in the making, the film was finally released in 2012 in Spain, and is finally wandering its way over to the United States. (In fact, it’s playing in some art house theaters right now. And yes, you should go see it.)

The film is set in 1920s Seville, opening upon a bullfighting match where a love-distracted toreador is gored by a rampaging bull. As his life is saved in a hospital, his pregnant wife dies during childbirth, leaving the crippled father with an infant daughter. The father eventually marries his domineering nurse, who then locks the wheelchair-bound man in a room and turns the daughter into a servant while she cavorts with the toreador’s money. The tale follows the daughter as she grows up under the tyrannical rule of her stepmother. And yes, there are eventually dwarves.

The tale is told with love, humor, and charm by director Pablo Berger, who also wrote and produced the film. Every image feels iconic. I am immensely pleased that I got to see it in a huge theater that was packed with people, because this is the sort of film that brings an audience under rapt attention. Gasps and laughs abounded. The film was spellbinding. It’s pure movie magic.

If you can’t tell already, I love this movie. If I had a Blu-Ray of the film, I would have already shown the film to at least three people this week. This a film that embodies pretty much all of my sensibilities of what makes a truly great movie.

Keep an eye out for this one.

P.S. – director Pablo Berger is adorable in person. If you ever get the chance to see him do a Q&A, do it.

Director Pablo Berger (center) at Ebertfest 2013, explaining the symbolism of a falling hat from the opening scene of Blancanieves. (If a hat falls brim-down, it is good luck. If it falls brim-up, it is bad luck.)

Escape from Tomorrow is a film I literally thought I’d never get to see. Shot entirely at Disney theme parks without permission, this black-and-white fantasy-horror-comedy might never reach distribution before being squashed like a bug under the heels of Disney’s lawyers. However, it was the rage at Sundance a few months ago, and I was lucky that Roger Ebert managed to book it for Ebertfest before he passed away.

The film follows the story of Jim, a husband and father of two, who travels with his family to the unnamed-yet-obvious Disney World. While there, he loses his job, and then slowly descends into the same sort of middle-aged-American-male self-involvement fantasy/horror world explored in films like David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Jim starts seeing his children and wife as demon obstacles. He fantasizes about two French teen girls, which he begins to stalk around the park. The dolls at the thinly-disgused It’s a Small World ride (from which the movie blissfully excises the music) leer at Jim with evil eyes. He starts seeing conspiracies and horrors in every corner, all steeped in corrupt sexuality and disease.

The film is entirely about adult male anxiety and the corruption of the American dream. Really, Disney is the perfect setting for the film. After seeing Escape from Tomorrow, I fully understand why they went through the risks and trouble to film there.

The film is definitely low-budget, often amateur, and far from perfect. Some of the green-screen work is cringe-worthy. The acting sometimes feels stilted. The pacing is awkward at times. Sometimes, the symbolism (and oh, there is much symbolism) seems half-baked. Sometimes, it feels like the film doesn’t quite know where it wants to go.

However, much of this is overwhelmed by the sheer audacity of the movie. Escape from Tomorrow is the sort of film that plunges into the deep end and swims like a motherf*cker. This is a movie that may not be entirely graceful, but it’s absolutely fearless. This is a film that is unafraid to look ridiculous. And I guarantee you, you’ve never seen anything quite like it.

But that still leaves the question of whether you’ll ever be able to see it. It does look like the filmmakers are working to make the film releasable. The film uses no Disney material aside from the visuals of the theme parks. (The music is all original, and no direct mention is made of Disney properties.) The cut of the film I saw at Ebertfest was 14 minutes shorter than the one screened at Sundance. There are currently scenes that have parts of the screen obviously blacked out to cover text or logos, and there was at least one point where a certain D-name was bleeped out (to great comedic effect). I also heard word from a professional critic at Ebertfest that they could conceivably pull it off.

So here’s hoping I can make “cat flu” jokes at you guys sometime in the future.

Escape from Tomorrow Q&A at Ebertfest. Director Randy Moore is in the middle, speaking into the mic. To the right are cast members Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, and Annet Mahendru. To the left is editor Randy Moore Director
Soojin Chung.

If devouring an obscene amount of movies in my daily life has taught me anything, it’s the fact that there is no such thing as a film that appeals to everyone. Every great classic has at least one hater. The trick is whether the hater can reasonably articulate their dislike, rather than just dismissing the film outright.

I’m sad to say that I’m probably In the Family‘s lone “hater”.

I’m not sad to say that because I feel I’m incorrectly alone on this. I’m sad because I clearly didn’t get the buoyant joy from seeing a great film, which apparently everyone else in the audience got. It’s much more fun to enjoy a film than it is to sit in a theater and pick it apart.

I’m also sad because even I can clearly see that In the Family is an earnest, original film that is clearly very well made. This is a bold film with good in its heart. Every single other person I talked to at Ebertfest named In the Family as their favorite film at the festival. It was my least favorite.

So I guess my trick will be to find a good reason for being the lone dissident.

(Before I proceed, I should clarify: I don’t hate this movie. I found it flawed, and I’m comparing it to a lineup where all other films I saw were extraordinary. The bar is high at Ebertfest.)

In the Family is the 2011 directorial debut of Patrick Wang, who also wrote, produced, and starred in the film. The film centers around a family structure that is drawing heated debate these days: a young boy being raised by two gay men. Since the story takes place in Tennessee, the two fathers aren’t married, which means that the plot is set in motion by the problems that occur when one of the men, the boy’s biological father, dies suddenly. The living partner (played by Wang) suddenly finds himself without claim to the boy he calls his son.

After seeing the film, I called it “Ozu with gay people” because Wang’s film seems to take a lot of lessons from Yasojiro Ozu, who made Japanese family dramas during the 1940s and 1950s. Scenes in an Ozu film, and in In the Family, happen in a slow, naturalistic way. The scene usually starts when a character enters the room, and it ends when they leave. What happens in between may or may not be entirely relevant to the story. Much is said in subtext. Personally, I find Ozu films more of a challenge than a pleasure. However, Wang, to his credit, seems to capture the good things about working in an Ozu style without getting bogged down.

I also give credit to Wang as a performer. The whole film orbits around his character, and the movie would collapse if Wang wasn’t a good actor. The character he plays is quite fascinating, too: a gay Asian-American home construction guru with a deep Tennessee drawl. The film is worth watching just to see this character in action.

But here’s the thing, the thing that sucked me out of the movie more than anything:

The main character really really really really feels like a Mary Sue to me.

Those of you who don’t read fan fiction are scratching your heads, so let me elaborate: a “Mary Sue” is a character in fiction that is a thinly-veiled idealized version of the author. Mary Sue characters tend to be a sort of wish-fulfillment, wherein the author essentially makes themself perfect (beautiful, intelligent, wise, well-liked, etc.); if the character is flawed at all, the flaw is endearing.

And, wow, for all the character’s uniqueness, the main character of In the Family sure does seem idealized. In fact the character doesn’t even have a dramatic arc. In the endgame of the film, a supporting character asks the main character what he’d sacrifice in order to achieve his goals, and the list provided are all things that the character offers to sacrifice at the beginning of the film.

I missed the Q&A after the screening, so I don’t know much at all about Patrick Wang (except he doesn’t have a Southern drawl in real life), but the fact that the same guy produced, wrote, directed, and starred in the film adds to the sense that this could be a Mary Sue situation. I have no idea if this is actually the case, but the suspicion was enough to take me out of the film.

The film could also benefit by trimming about 30 minutes of its runtime. There are a couple of scenes that don’t seem to contribute anything at all. They’re watchable scenes, but they’re extraneous.

Honestly, though, I wish I liked this movie. I loved that it is a family drama centered on an interracial gay couple. I loved that it is a movie tackles the legal issues surrounding same-sex marriage bans. I loved Wang’s Southern drawl. I wish it all pulled together for me.

Do I recommend it as a film to watch? Yes, I do. This is a smart and heartfelt film. If you’re hyper-tuned to writing tropes, though, your Spidey-sense might get triggered.

(P.S. — Wouldn’t it be nice to see a movie that centered around a gay couple, and the main drama of the film had nothing to do with the fact that they were gay? Perhaps someday…)

A shot from Paul Cox’s Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh, which recreates van Gogh’s “Bedroom in Arles”.

Paul Cox is the sort of director that film nerds should know about. He’s a well-known arthouse director in some circles, but overall, he seems to fly under the radar. His work only became known to me after I started attending Ebertfest a few years ago; Mr. Cox frequently attends the festival, and his films (as well as a documentary about his fight with cancer) have been featured at the festival several times.

Cox’s films are filled with beauty and life. His work tends to be enamored with simple pleasures, like good food, nature, music, and lovemaking. There is something very comfortable and home-like about his movies, even when he explores difficult questions about death and loss.

Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh (1987) feels like a very personal passion project for Mr. Cox, even though the film is entirely about Mr. van Gogh.

Most people know the name of Vincent van Gogh as that of one of the world’s great painters, who languished in poverty before he died of a gunshot wound in 1890. He worked as a painter for a decade, producing over 2,000 pieces of art; he only succeeded in selling one. What most people don’t realize, though, is that he was quite a writer as well. His letters to his brother Theo are heartfelt, frank, and deeply personal documents about his life.

Paul Cox’s film centers on van Gogh’s letters to Theo. The soundtrack of the film is merely actor John Hurt reading these letters, and this plays over a kaleidoscope of images from Paul Cox. The film’s imagery combines shots of van Gogh’s paintings (often in extreme close-up, to show the dimensionality of the paint) with images from the countryside that surrounded the painter’s life. At times, the camera captures light in the way that van Gogh captured it, finding the peculiar purples and blues of evening and shadow. At other times, the camera captures a full-out, moving recreation of an iconic painting.

The overall result is a film of great personal depth and rich beauty, one that should be accessible even to those who are not intimately familiar with the life or work of van Gogh. This film is not a history or an analysis; it is a record of a human being.

Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh is not available on streaming services at the moment, but it is readily available on DVD.