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Traverse City, Michigan: Traverse City Film Festival Features Outdoor Movie Screenings -A Review of “Baghdad High” (2007)

by Open Air Cinema on 15. Jul, 2009 in Outdoor Film Reviews

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Outdoor Movie Review of Though the Traverse City Film Festival may not have the prestige or notoriety of Sundance or Tribeca, it has been growing rapidly in the last few years. The festival has begun to be known for featuring independent and foreign films, and has attracted celebrity appeal to its screenings. It’s outdoor film screenings give it a unique flavor, and film critics and celebrities alike enjoy the movies under the stars. One of the outdoor movie screenings featured in last year’s festival was the little-known but well-reviewed documentary “Baghdad High”. As the title suggests, the film follows 4 high-schoolers attending their final year in Baghdad. The following is a review of the film from Cinematical. You can read the original blog post about the outdoor cinema event here.

The HBO-produced documentary film Baghdad High offers a fairly basic yet intriguing enough premise: The filmmakers gave video cameras to four Iraqi high school students and asked them to simply record as much of their “normal life” as possible. (I’m of the opinion that any time you give a teenager a camera, you’re getting everything BUT “normal life,” but obviously I’m not the first to claim that the act of recording something instantly obliterates “normalcy.”) The point here seems to be that … hey, you know what? Aside from the fact that they live very far away in a country that’s going through some terrible problems these days, these teenagers are a whole lot like … our teenagers! Wow, how shocking is that?!?!?

What’s most interesting about these kids is that, despite the fact that they all live in Iraq, they also come from very different religious backgrounds — and yet they’re still friends! (Hope for the future sometimes comes in small packages, I suppose.) All four of the boys are perfectly charming and entirely typical: They whine about homework, they stress over studies, they gripe about being bored, they argue with their parents, and they do all the stuff that your favorite teens do: Video games, pop music, sports, rough-housing, etc. So far all its admirable intentions, the simple truth is that Baghdad High makes a very good point about the similarities of human nature (especially where teens are concerned), but then it just sort of … keeps making the same point over and over.

Outdoor Movie Review of The fact is that these teenage boys are a LOT like the kids we know and love, but we get that point after less than 40 minutes of Baghdad High — and then we’re just left to watch the kids study, hang out, and stress over school. A more insightful documentary might have spent time showing how similar we all are — before covering exactly why our cultures are so different. Aside from a few small moments in which the boys’ parents discuss the nearby war zones, the punishment of Saddam Hussein, and the presence of the American military, the movie gives us practically zero insight into how young Iraqis really feel about America. Obviously they like our rap music and some of our clothes, but are these kids being raised to be open-minded about the world stage, or are they growing up as insular and ethnocentric as most American teens?

Even without that sort of socio-political meat on its bones, there’s little denying that Baghdad High does offer some colorful insights into what these kids go through every day. It also helps that the four subjects — Hayder Khalid, Mohammad Raed, Anmar Rafat, and Ali Shadman — are very compelling young men. They go from serious to silly to sincerely scared about the explosions three streets over, and Baghdad High does a very good job of making the viewer think “Damn, it’s just not fair that good kids like these have to deal with terrifying stuff like this every day.” Baghdad High will undoubtedly prove very insightful to those who believe all Iraqis are “the enemy,” but to those of us who choose not to vilify an entire country for the horrible actions of a few hate-filled war-mongers, the movie feels just a little bit simplistic.

Still, you could do a lot worse than to spend 90 minutes with this quartet of affable young Iraqi kids. Despite the fact that it doesn’t get all that “deep” into the kids’ mindset regarding war, violence, and America, Baghdad High is still a perfectly entertaining and somewhat insightful affair. I’m sure that co-directors Ivan O’Mahoney and Laura Winter have plenty of footage that’s “less than flattering” (or worse), and one can’t help but wish Baghdad High had been a bit more of a “warts and all” affair.

Source: “Tribeca Review: Baghdad High” by Scott Weinberg -Cinematical. Read full article at: http://www.cinematical.com/2008/05/01/tribeca-review-baghdad-high/.

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Sydney, Australia: St. George Open Air Cinema Presents Oscar-Winning Film -A Review of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008)

by Open Air Cinema on 09. Jul, 2009 in Outdoor Film Reviews

Outdoor Movie Review of The St. George Open Air Cinema in Sydney, Australia is one of the hottest spots for outdoor movie viewing around the world. The outdoor cinema hosts premiers and parties, and its indie and arthouse fare attracts celebrities, critics, and movie-goers alike. The 2009 outdoor film season has shown films such as “Milk”, “Easy Virtue”, and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. The following is a review of the latter, a critically-acclaimed film that won 3 Oscars. You can read the original blog post about the outdoor movie events here.

When we’ve reached the end of a story that touches us deeply, we rarely move right on to the task of figuring out how or why our armor was breached. That kind of assessment might come later, but one of the deep and lasting pleasures of the movies — and of art in general — is allowing ourselves the freedom to surrender, to bask in that brief loss of self. That’s why a picture that’s almost moving — a picture you try hard to fall for as you’re watching it, only to find yourself failing to sink into its embrace — is often more of a disappointment than a hollow picture that fails on all counts.

David Fincher’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a curious case in point: It’s so almost moving — a meticulously crafted mechanical bird — that it nearly feels like the real thing. Maybe what’s most affecting in “Benjamin Button” has less to do with the story or the acting than with watching a filmmaker stretch in a new direction, trying things he isn’t fully comfortable with and doesn’t exactly know how to pull off. Like Fincher’s other movies, “Benjamin Button” is ambitious and painstakingly constructed. But unlike those pictures, it’s devoid of macho showiness. There’s none of the “Are you man enough to take it?” posturing of “Fight Club” or “Se7en” or “Zodiac.” Fincher clearly wants to keep us suspended in a state of wonder as he explores the nature of love and loss.

But the illusion works only part of the time. “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is a loose adaptation of a compact and sharp short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a man who’s born elderly and grows younger instead of older. Fincher and screenwriters Eric Roth and Robin Swicord have fleshed out and padded the story — you’d have to, in order to get a full-length movie out of it — and created a framing device that tangentially involves Hurricane Katrina. (Much of the movie is set, and was filmed, in New Orleans.) Brad Pitt stars as Benjamin, brought into the world in 1918 as a squalling infant with the face of an 80-year-old man. (In Fitzgerald’s story, Benjamin is full-grown at birth — biologically impossible, of course, but perfectly acceptable in the context of the story’s fantasy framework.) His mother dies in childbirth; his father (Jason Flemyng), horrified by the sight of this tiny, excessively wrinkled creature, drops him off in the street, where he’s rescued by a young woman, Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who works in a nursing home. “You are as ugly as an old post,” she tells the little mite, “but you’re still a child of God.”

St. George Open Air Cinema Screens Benjamin’s body grows up as his face becomes younger. In the movie’s early scenes, he has the visage of a 70-year-old tacked on a youngster’s body, which means he fits right in at the nursing home — he doesn’t look much different from the oldsters around him. And it’s there, during his unusual but happy childhood, that he meets the love of his life, a young girl who will one day, of course, be older than he is. Daisy (the young version is played by a preternaturally serene Elle Fanning; grown up, she’s Cate Blanchett) is a smart, willful girl who grows up to be a talented dancer. She and Benjamin lose track of each other over the years: He heads off on a tugboat adventure (the boozy, tattooed captain is played by a scrappy and likable Jared Harris) and ends up fighting in World War II; she trots off to Europe to do ballerina stuff. But the connection between them never withers, and when the time is right, they once again find each other.

That’s not where their story ends, but where it begins. “We’re meant to lose the people we love,” says a character in “Benjamin Button.” “How else would we know how important they are to us?” That’s the movie’s central idea summed up in a straightforward and rather poetic line of dialogue. But the movie structured around that line isn’t quite so straightforward. Fincher has constructed an elaborate, multilayered shell around the basic egg of his narrative: The movie opens with a backstory about a clockmaker who, in the year of Benjamin’s birth, builds a clock that runs backward. (It’s the man’s wistful acknowledgment that he’d like to turn back time, to prevent the death of the son he lost in the first world war.) Then comes the framing device: An aged and dying woman (it’s Blanchett, beneath some pretty realistic-looking age makeup) reflects back on her life from her hospital bed as her daughter (played by Julia Ormond) reads from a journal, filled with secrets that her mother has kept safe for many years. And then there’s the story of Benjamin, and of Benjamin and Daisy, which spans most of the 20th century and spills into the 21st.

Nothing in “Benjamin Button” happens casually or without a reason. And maybe that’s why, even though it offers us much to marvel over, it sparks little magic: The effect, ultimately, is one of applied whimsy. Shot by Claudio Miranda, with production design by Donald Graham Burt, the picture is certainly lovely to look at. Aside from serving up some romantic European and Russian settings, Miranda and Burt capture the sepia-toned coziness of Benjamin’s New Orleans childhood, as well as the freshness and optimism of the home Benjamin and Daisy build together in the early 1960s. Fincher devises a few lovely sequences, including one in which Daisy performs an impromptu outdoor ballet: The misty night is her painted backdrop, the singing of crickets her accompaniment. Fincher conjures, intentionally or otherwise, some of the dreaminess of Michael Powell’s “The Red Shoes.” And he does pull off a devastating final scene, using a single vivid image to capture the essence of love and loss. (It’s the movie’s proper ending, even though Fincher has to tie up numerous other loose ends before the credits roll.)
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St. George Open Air Cinema in Sydney, Australia

St. George Open Air Cinema in Sydney, Australia

Yet it’s telling that the most effective ideas in “Benjamin Button” are also the simplest ones. This is an elaborate, epic fantasy, one that operates on the false principle that more is always more. (Even Alexandre Desplat’s score, heavy on oh-so-sensitive piano tinkling, tries way too hard.) And Fincher’s big dreams make the actors’ jobs more difficult: Henson is lovely as Benjamin’s sensible, affectionate adoptive mother, and Tilda Swinton shows up briefly to play a lonely aristocrat — she’s crisp, efficient and affecting. Blanchett’s Daisy is stunning to look at, and yet a bit too cool: Her skin is almost magically luminous, like a delicate paper lantern lit from within. But her performance could use a little more fire, considering she’s one crucial half of a timeless, supposedly passionate love story.

Pitt has better control over his character, and he’s attuned to the inherent mournfulness of the story Fincher is trying to tell. (Maybe he’s even more attuned to it than Fincher is.) Benjamin Button is perpetually an outsider looking in. He lives in a world where people are constantly aware that youth is drifting away from them — but it’s the very thing that’s coming to claim him, a future that’s just as debilitating as old age.

Pitt is generally at his best when he’s not working too hard at acting, when he allows himself to relax into a snapshot of casual, good-looking American style. But he’s often very touching here; his performance is a quiet, interior one — he plays Benjamin as a man who observes more than he participates. Even though “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” rarely amounts to much more than a series of magic tricks, now and then it does hit a beat of perfect synchronicity. Pitt’s Benjamin reaches the peak of his adult beauty in the early- to mid-1960s, just as the British are invading and the Beach Boys are driving kids wild by surfin’ USA. At one point, he and Daisy, a young couple just starting out, dance in their sparsely furnished living room as the Beatles perform on television. Pitt’s Benjamin is just the right age to enjoy the youthquake of the ’60s, an era he would have missed if he weren’t aging in reverse. As he dances in that living room with his beautiful young lover, we see intimations of the boyishness he’ll grow into. With that easy smile and that crop of blondish hair, he offers a vision of the beautiful baby he’ll become.

Source: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by Stephanie Zacharek -Salon.com. Read full article at: http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/2008/12/25/benjamin_button/index.html?CP=IMD&DN=110.

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Sydney, Australia: St. George Open Air Cinema Opens the 2009 Outdoor Movie Season -A Review of “Easy Virtue” (2008)

by Open Air Cinema on 03. Jul, 2009 in Outdoor Film Reviews

Outdoor Movies Review of Earlier this year we featured an article about one of our favorite open air cinemas, based in Sydney, Australia. On January 12th the St. George Open Air Cinema kicked off it’s 2009 outdoor movie season with a screening of Milk among old movie-goers and celebrities alike. Among the outdoor films to be screened is the critically-acclaimed Easy Virtue. The following is a review of the film featured in the Los Angeles Times. You can read the original blog post about the outdoor cinema here.

There are probably no better hands to entrust virtue of any sort to than those of writer-director Stephan Elliott, the Aussie filmmaker who brought such delightful flamboyance and forgiveness to the drag queens at the very generous heart of “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.” A horrific ski accident pulled him out of the movie game for years until some clever producers tracked him down and got him to help adapt and then direct “Easy Virtue,” a Noel Coward comedy of manners.

Let me just say, it is very good to have Mr. Elliott back.

The setting is the British countryside post-World War I, decades before Elliott’s drag queens invaded the outback, but the problems are the same: old conventions fighting off inevitable change.

Outdoor Movie Screening of In this case we have the Whittaker family, typical of the landed gentry of the ‘20 and ’30s, which means trying to cover their uncomfortable new impoverished state with the occasional fox hunt, ladies’ teas and the nightly formal dinner, butler included.

Everything is fraying around the edges of this family. Headed by Kristin Scott Thomas, this tightly wound, ticky matriarch is betting the bank on son John’s return, having long since given up on her war-damaged husband, played by Colin Firth. There are the requisite unmarried daughters in the mix too.

John (Ben Barnes) sweeps back into this dangerous brew, all dashing carefree charm, with a big surprise for mummy. The boy’s come back married to an American. If that weren’t crime enough, Larita, played by Jessica Biel, is dangerously glamorous, drives race cars, smokes cigarettes and, from the looks of it, enjoys spending money. She is also not one bit afraid of the formidable Mrs. Whittaker.

Biel’s looks alone make her ideal for the role. She has a very American fresh-scrubbed openness that is almost brash, and her long, lean body is made for the elegant slip satins that ever-so-gently skim those athletic surfaces. She’s a modern woman who says what she thinks, a characteristic that is particularly galling to her new mother-in-law.

It is a treat to watch Biel and Thomas go at it, though it’s hard to imagine anyone who could survive the quiver of acerbic barbs that Thomas delivers with unerring accuracy. She’s let herself go mousy and pinched for the part, and it’s as if that physical change unleashed a deliciously catty side that we’ve not seen up close.

Larita’s arrival sparks a different sort of fire in Firth’s Mr. Whittaker. He’s managed to survive the trenches, but he’s lost what little drive the war had left him to the disappointment he faced from his wife at home. He’s gone happily to seed, but nothing has been quite as pleasurable in years as watching his wife meeting her match.

Firth is an effortless actor, and he works that magic again here. But he is a generous one too, and everyone, especially Biel, benefits when he’s in the scene.

There is a clever sophistication to the story, which Elliott wrote with Sheridan Jobbins, but then it is rooted in a Coward play. At first it would seem that Larita is the woman of easy virtue, as the Whittakers keep discovering the skeletons in her closet. Mrs. Whittaker, and then John’s sisters too, become convinced that Larita’s seduced their gullible boy for his money, though there is none. And their shock at everything about this interloper is really barely masked delight.

Of course, it’s not Larita’s virtue that is in question at all, and Elliott seems to delight in wrapping up the tawdry tale in beautiful satins and silks and a curl of smoke from Larita’s cigarettes. Throughout the film, it’s anyone’s game as to who will win in the end. What is a given is that everyone will get bruised along the way.

Elliott has created a wonderfully rich battle for propriety in “Easy Virtue.” The humor might sting, but the pain is worth the pleasure.

Source: “In ‘Easy Virtue,’ an American bride turns British aristocracy on its ear” by Betsy Sharkey -LA Times. Read full article at: http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/reviews/cl-et-virtue22-2009may22,0,5746543.story.

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Seoul, South Korea: Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival Begins -A Review of “Gake no Ue no Ponyo” (2008)

by Open Air Cinema on 10. Jun, 2009 in Outdoor Film Reviews

Outdoor Movies at Seoul's Outdoor Film Festival in South KoreaApril marked the beginning of the “Good Movie Film Festival” in Seoul, South Korea, and we featured an article depicting the festival’s popular outdoor movie screenings. The festival will continue screening movies under the stars until October, presenting local, independent, and popular Korean films. One of the films screened is “Gake no Ue no Ponyo” a revolutionary picture in the children’s genre. Director Hayao Miyazaki has yet again transcended the boundaries of juvenile cinema, presenting a film that is profound and enjoyable for children and adults alike. The following is a review of the film from The Japan Times. This film is just another gem not to be missed at The Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival. You can read the original blog post about the outdoor cinema event here.

Hayao Mizayaki is the reigning giant of Japanese animation — and the Japanese box office. Since “Majo no Takkyubin (Kiki’s Delivery Service)” in 1989, every Miyazaki film has been a smash hit, drawing the widest possible audience. In 2001, his coming-of-age fantasy “Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)” set an all-time Japanese box-office record — ¥30.4 billion.

But this, and other Miyazaki megahits, including “Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke)” (1997) and “Howl no Ugoku Shiro (Howl’s Moving Castle)” (2004) are anything but lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Even though his heroines (rarely heroes) are usually in their early teens or younger, their adventures unfold in rich visual and narrative matrices, with everything from personal memories and contemporary environmental concerns to ancient Japanese mythologies and fantastic European cityscapes tossed into the mix, in combinations that would only occur to Miyazaki’s well-stocked, endlessly inventive mind. One reason his films keep the turnstiles spinning is that they repay — even require — repeated viewings.

But Miyazaki’s most beloved film in Japan — “Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro)” (1988) — is also among his easiest to understand. Even tots can thrill to the film’s epic ride on the Cat Bus — one of the coolest forms of transportation ever invented, as long as you’re not allergic to felines.

Movies Under the Stars at the Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival in Seoul, South KoreaHis latest feature animation, “Gake no Ue no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea),” exceeds even “Totoro” in simplicity, with a core target audience about as old as its hero — 5. This is not to say that those who have mastered hiragana (or the alphabet) will be bored, as long as they leave their expectations for the usual Miyazaki film at the door.

Miyazaki has made what is for any adult — but especially a 67-year-old anime veteran — an extraordinary leap: In “Ponyo” he is not just telling a story to tikes, but imaginatively becoming one himself. I was reminded of the famous opening of James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” with its recital of the hero’s earliest memories in the language of infancy (”Once upon a time there was a moocow coming down along the road and . . .”), as if the author were re-inhabiting an earlier self.

At the same time, Miyazaki revisits themes from other, more adult-focused films, such as humanity’s destruction of the natural world, and nature’s revenge on its human tormentors. Also, the animation is Miyazaki’s familiar mix of the realistic and fantastic, with extinct sea creatures swimming contentedly alongside their contemporary — and accurately rendered — descendants. In other words, there is still plenty to engage the mind and eye, as well as keep the small army of Miyazaki explicators busy.

The title character, Ponyo (voice by Yuria Nara), is a girl fish with a human face who decides one day to leave her underwater home — and her school of smaller sisters — to see what lies on the surface. Riding on the back of a jellyfish, she is nearly trapped by a drift net, but escapes — with her head stuck in a glass jar. Sosuke (Hiroki Doi), a boy who lives on a house on a seaside cliff, spots Ponyo in the shallows and rescues her. He is delighted with his new pet — and Ponyo is delighted to be in the human world at last. She says her first words, to Sosuke’s astonishment — and begins a transformation from half-fish to human.

Outdoor Movie Screenings at the Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival

Outdoor Movie Screenings at the Good Movie Outdoor Film Festival

Meanwhile, her human father, Fujimoto (George Tokoro), who lives in an undersea manse with Ponyo’s sea-queen mother (Yuki Amami), starts to search for her. With his long hair, beaky nose and tormented, bags-under-the-eyes expression, Fujimoto looks like a decayed aristocrat from a shojo manga (girls’ comic), but he possesses magical powers over the waves, which become like living creatures under his command. What can a mere kid, if one with a feisty mom he calls Lisa (Tomoko Yamaguchi), and a good-natured, if mostly absent, ship-captain dad (Kazushige Nagashima), do to stop him?

“Ponyo” is not about a simplistic struggle between good and evil, however. Fujimoto is more of a worried father than a scarily powerful villain. Also, with the aid of her sisters, Ponyo unleashes powers of her own, with awesome, if unintended, consequences.

The film meanders into various byways, such as the day-care center for the elderly that Lisa runs, with a female clientele that runs the gamut from the cute to the cranky — and serves as a Greek chorus to the action.

The focus, though, stays mostly on Sosuke and Ponyo, whose relationship undergoes a change from master/pet to protective older brother/bubbly, if trouble-prone, younger sister. There is something dreamlike about their adventures in both the thrilling wish-fulfillment of them and their spooky shape-shifting. Small children, who naturally live on the borderline between reality and fantasy, will have no trouble following along.

As with most Miyazaki films, I walked out of “Ponyo” thinking less about the rambling story, based loosely on “The Little Mermaid,” than certain strangely gripping scenes, such as a grimly determined Lisa zipping along a seaside road in her mini car, with Sosuke at her side, as angry anthromorphic waves crash and lash around them, or Sosuke and Ponyo puttering idyllically over a submerged town in a toy boat powered by a burning candle, which has magically grown big enough to hold them.

No one but Miyazaki could have created anything like these moments, with anything like his mastery. If “Ponyo” is the start of his artistic second childhood, I say welcome to the sandbox.

Source: “It’s kids’ play for anime king” by Mark Schilling -The Japan Times. Read full article at: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ff20080711a1.html.

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