My Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival Journal - Part 2

Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival
Rehoboth Beach, DE
November 10-14, 2010

Some more quick notes I jotted down after Amy and I returned home from this four-day film festival in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware...and which I'm only just getting to because of work and my ADD...

DAY TWO: Friday, November 12

A Matter of Size
(Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor, Israel, 2009)

My Movie Scorecard: A+
Awards: Nominated for 13 Israeli Academy Awards, winner of three; Audience Award, Karlovy Vary International Film festival; Audience Award, DC Jewish Film Festival
Life Lessons Learned from This Film: Fat men can lead happy, healthy, and honorable lives if they stop eating salads, take up sumo wrestling, and gorge on chankonabe; some can even score a hefty hearted girlfriend in the bargain

This was the first film both Amy and I picked when we first thumbed through the film program because...Who woulda thunk it - an Israeli comedy about sumo wrestling! Fed up with their fruitless attempts to lose weight, four fat friends are at the bursting point. Especially Herzl (Itzik Cohen). A 340-pound chef living at home with his overbearing mother (Levana Finklestein, whose performance won her the Israeli Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress) - perhaps the only Jewish mother in screen history who doesn't tell her son "Eat something, you'll waste away!" - he struggles to keep up with his diet workshop group and gets fired from a salad bar restaurant because of his "unpresentable" image. But when Herzl gets a lowly dishwasher job at a Japanese restaurant, the Pound Posse decide to give up their tortuous diets and try their luck in the girth-friendly arena of sumo wrestling. Led by Japanese restaurant owner Kitano (Togo Igawa), a former sumo referee, Herzl and his pals discover that there are places in the world where oversized waistlines are appreciated and happiness can be found in Living Large.

Watch the "A Matter of Size" trailer.


Herzl even finds the woman of his dreams in Zehava (Irit Kaplan, whose role won her the Israeli Academy Award for Best Actress), despite his mother's initial objections ("Your girlfriend's fat; I was hoping at least for thin grandchildren!"). In fact, the romantic scenes between Herzl and Zehava really set the tone for A Matter of Size; unlike a Fellini film, in which fat would be played for farce, the love-making scenes between these two lovers are always handled with dignity. (Not that the director avoids laughing at weighty subjects, like the hilarious - and totally unexpected - scene where Herzl recalls his father's death...no spoilers here, you must see this for yourselves!) That's why this funny, heartfelt, and romantic comedy is almost a perfect film! Or, as Amy said, paraphrasing her favorite line from The Hangover: "They funny 'cause they fat!"

Just as Herzl was literally a "big fish out of water" at his Japanese sushi bar, so were we at this sold-out screening, as Amy and I speculated that we were probably the only goyem in attendance for this boisterous, fun-filled crowd-pleaser. The theater was so packed, we had plop down in the front row where, sitting a mere six feet away from the screen, the big actors looked even more gargantuan. Which was fine until we realized that we were wedged between a jittery pistachio nut shelling-and-chomping yenta on one side (next to me) and a garrulous gay guy (next to Amy) whose non-stop chatter was either a result of cluelessness, nervousness, or a desire to impress his date. (Perhaps all three.) This man seemed to specialize in gutteral utterances, emitting a non-stop stream of sounds like Curly Howard of The Three Stooges (e.g., "Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!" "Gack!" "Huzzah!") in response to any- and everything happening onscreen. The woman next to me also had an open soda which she had trouble securing in the cup holder (tapping it trial-and-error style around the hole like Helen Keller), so I grimaced at her every sip, awaiting the inevitable spill onto my lap; Amy resigned herself to rolling her eyes at every onomatopoeic utterance from her right hand man. Thankfully, the movie had enough laughs to wash out the ambient audience noise.

Synchronicity: Looking through the program guide afterwards, we discovered that Freakononics (2010), a documentary (based on the best-selling book by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner) that was playing the next night, featured a segment by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney (Taxi To the Dark Side) on sumo wrestling; we made it a point to see it. This was one of three new films directed by the prolific Alex Gibney that were playing at this year's festival; the others were Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spizter (2010) and Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010) - the latter which I had missed earlier that year at the Maryland Film Festival. For my money, Gibney's the best American documentarian working today, bar none. He sets the bar.

******

Mesrine: Killer Instinct
(Jean-Francois Richet, France, 2008)

My Movie Scorecard: B+
Life Lessons Learned From This Film: The Algerian War served as young Jacques Mesrine's Career Counselor.
Awards: Nominated for 13 Cesars (French Oscars), winner of three (including Best Actor - Vincent Cassal and Best Director - Jean-Francois Richot); Cassal also won Best Actor awards from the Tokyo International Film Festival, Lumiere Awards, and Etoiles d'Or

Just a week before the festival, I was told that I needed to see this film by several Francophones whose opinions I respect. Actually, like Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Mesrine was actually two films, an epic crime-action narrative based on real-life '60s and '70s French gangster Jacques Mesrine that was split into two separate 2008 releases - Mesrine: Killer Instinct (L'Instinct de Mort) and Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1 (L'ennemi Public No. 1) - by director Jean-Francois Richet (best know stateside for 2005's Ethan Hawke and Laurence Fishburne action film Assault on Precinct 13 - a remake of John Carpenter's 1976 original). Both were playing at the festival, but like last year's 3-hour-long Japanese Red Army film that we wanted to see there, neither Amy nor I had the patience/stamina/bladder control required to invest in the full slog, so we opted to see part one; that way, if we liked it enough, we'd seek out the sequel on NetFlix eventually.

Watch the official "Mesrine: Killer Instinct" trailer.


We liked it more than enough. Even though it adds nothing new to the crime-action-gangster film genre - and suffers a few narrative jump cuts (like the jarring one that moves right from Mesrine planning a bank robbery to him sitting behind bars in the robbery's cocked-up aftermath, eliciting a joint response from Amy and I of "WTF?") - it's distinctively stylish (especially the opening credits sequence), entertaining (filled with lots of sex and violence), and well-acted.


Killer Instinct: Mesrine's larger-than-life story boasted a star-studded, larger-than-life cast

It didn't hurt that it starred the charismatic Vincent Cassal, who is sometimes called the French DeNiro, and who I will see in just about anything. It also starred the French Brando (or the French Orson Welles, depending how much Girth Gravitas you attribute to him), Gerard Depardieu, whom one cannot avoid seeing in just about everything from France (it must be a Franco-American trade law or something - not only is the increasingly obese Depardieu seemingly in every French film, but now his children are appearing in everything as well!). (Don't get me wrong - he's a great actor. There's just too much of him; he defines the term over exposure - or as Dan Hicks once sang, "How Can I Miss You When You Won't Go Away?")

When he's not robbing banks, escaping from prisons, knee-capping street thugs, or torturing kidnapped millionaire cripples, Mesrine gets down with the ladies, be they doe-eyed hookers like Sara (Florence Thomassin) or Spanish virgins like Sofia (the drop-dead gorgeous Elena Anaya of Sex and Lucia and Van Helsing fame) that he eventually marries and gets with child. But the one who really hooks him turns out to be Jeanne Schneider, played by Cecile De France (of Clint Eastwood's Hereafter, and Avenue Montaigne, High Tension, Russian Dolls, L'auberge Espangole), with whom his "equal opportunity" criminal exploits take on a sexy, Bonnie and Clyde vibe. In her brunette wig and spectacles guise here, De France bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Demi Moore, back when she played Jackie on General Hospital. (As if that's not enough babe-age for Cassal to paw over, Ludivine Sagnier also gets thrown into the mix, but not as a featured protagonist until the second film, Public Enemy No. 1.)


Une Liason Dangereuse: Jeanne & Jacques in their Bonnie & Clyde Courtship Phase

One thing's for sure - Cassal's a lot better looking than the real Mesrine who, sign of his times, sported atrocious mutton-chop sideburns (as shown below) like some Brooklyn indie rocker.


Hey Jacques - Jimmy Page called to say he wants his sideburns back!

But this Mesrine dude was no laid-back hipster; the film suggests this French Scarface gangsta's hot-tempered violent streak - and his loathing of Arabs - stemmed from his experience in the Algerian War, kind of like a post-traumatic psycho Vietnam Vet thing going on. In fact, Roger Ebert picks up on this connection when he observes: "Jacques Mesrine was born in a stable middle-class home, well-educated, then sent to Algeria as a paratrooper who soon became a torturer and executioner and found he liked the work."

I had never heard of Mesrine (pronounced "Merrine") - he penned an autobiography (L'Instinct du Mort, on which this film is based) but it's only available in French and the lone English book written about him is out of print - but there's an excellent article about the outlaw odyssey of the Man of a Thousand Faces who fancied himself a modern Robin Hood and came to be known as French "Public Enemy No. 1" in The Independent: "Jacques Mesrine: Le Grand Gangster." The short version? Jacques Mesrine killed perhaps 40 people, kidnapped people in France and Quebec, escaped from four prisons (including from La Sante prison - he remains the only man ever to escape from this maximum security facility in Paris), "stuck up banks the way other people use ATM machines" (in Ebert's description), made a little love, drank a little wine, and died in a hail of bullets as any good legendary villain (who aspires to be remembered as a romantic rogue) should.

The story of Jacques Mesrine is strikingly similar to that of our own John Dillinger, the infamous 1930s gangster who robbed banks, escaped from prisons and was shot dead in public by police when leaving a Chicago theatre on 22 July 1934. (Dillinger was also rumored to have an enormous penis; not sure how frere Jacques measured up, but he seemed to do OK with the ladies.) And Mesrine met his own end in similar fashion, being gunned down by Parisien police in August 1979. Dillinger's life story was also made into a film with a similar name, Public Enemies, in 2009.


Andre Genoves' "Mesrine" (1984)

Mesrine's story had been brought to the screen previously in Andre Genoves' 1984 film Mesrine, with Nicoles Silberg in the title role. Genoves' film begins with Mesrine's escape May 1978 from La Sante prison and follows his final 18 months on the run with Sylvia Jeanjacquot.

OK, ADD's kicking in...more film reviews later!

Stay tuned for:
"My Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival Journal - Day 3."

My 2010 Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival Journal - Part 1

Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival
Rehoboth Beach, DE
November 10-14, 2010

Some quick notes I jotted down after Amy and I returned home yesterday from this four-day film festival in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and before my ADD kicked in...

BLOW BACK: In Which Tom & Amy Revise Their Rehobo Filmfest Philosophy

This year's 13th annual Rehoboth Beach Film Fest was our first "full" Rehoboth festival proper. Last year we hit town just as a NorEaster with 50-mph-winds arrived to literally blow us back to Baltimore after just two days and three movies. Amy had discovered the RBIFF in her Marie Claire magazine (of all places!) and wanted to go because the festival's foreign country spotlight in 2009 was on Japan - no doubt inspired by Japan winning its first-ever Academy Awards that year for Yojiro Takita's Departures (Best Foreign Feature Film) and Kunio Kato's La Maison en Petits Cubes (Best Animated Short Film). Unfortunately, we couldn't score tickets to anything we wanted to see, mainly due to Rehoboth's snooty "preferred customer" tickets policy that lets card-carrying members buy tickets in advance of the general public; this irked us to no end, and though we enjoyed the "leftover" films we saw in 2009 (especially the Australian animated feature $9.99 - based on a short story by Israeli writer Etgar Keret - and Hirokazu Koreeada's Still Walking), we vowed to never go back again.

Plus we got the vibe that the Rehoboth Film Fest was kinda old and uncool. The audiences were filled with what I called "film fest amateurs," dominated by middle-aged casual film goers (the type who catch their media buzz from Entertainment Weekly as opposed to, say, Film Comment or Cineaste) - in fact, it would not be a stretch to rebrand it as the AARP Film Festival. There's a lot of gray hair, canes, and chattering Yentas at the screenings, not that the younger gen is any more savvy - I still grimace remembering the guy who, last year, asked a visiting Japanese director to explain those "newfangled terms like mongrel [manga?] and this uhneee-may [anime?] thing I keep hearing about." (*Groan*)

But as I flipped through the film festival program in the ensuing months, I was struck by how many films turned up on "Best Of" lists and/or cable TV's Sundance and IFC channels. The programmers knew their stuff, even if their audiences (and volunteer presenters) didn't. There's a lot to like about this festival; for one thing, there are no Q&A's following screenings. None. Zilch. Nada. Which I love. (Most Q&A's serve as Audience Show & Tells wherein Humanity's Hubris and Elitist Egoism rear their ugly heads; rarely have I seen an audience member ask a question that really wasn't a veiled attempt to call attention to his- or herself.) And it really made me appreciate the Maryland Film Festival back in Baltimore, where the 3-films-for-$20 dollars film package is the best filmfest idea I've ever encountered. Plus, the motel where we always stay in right next to the Dogfish Head Brewpub, where you don't exactly have to twist my arm to force pints of their yummy seasonal Punkin' Ale down my hatch.


Dogfish Head Brewpub (aka "Home Sweet Home")

So this year, after verifying with the weather service that the weather would be sunny and in the low-60s, we headed back to the film fest and (grudgingly) decided to bite the bullet and purchase "Associate Producer" memberships - this was the only membership level that allowed us to buy tix to all the films we wanted in a single trip to the Ticket Tent.



As backup, I also took along the "Producer" tag I got when I bought a pair of Express Producer Pants - y'know, the pants that guarantee you will be a "Hollywood power player with his finger firmly on the pulse." And I quote: "Known throughout the industry as the guy who knows the guy who knew the guy when he was nobody. Knows star power when he sees it. Can make or break a career with a single phone call. His name is on every list. It gets him into every party, opens every door." Yes, "The Express Producer Pant - The clothes that make the man."



(Mental note: Must be sure to add my new Associate Producer and Producer credentials to IMDB.)

DAY ONE: Thursday, November 11

First things first, which in Rehoboth Beach means heading down to Go Fish - our favorite (make that favourite) British gastropub - where Amy and I ordered our beloved Shepherds Pies, a hearty rib-sticking medley of seasoned ground beef and vegetable pie topped with mashed potatoes - a veritable value-meal steal at $9.95! But we were too stuffed to order their world famous Sticky Toffee Pudding, which has been featured on NBC's Today Show.


Go Fish: Rehobo's best Fish & Chips shop

We then made haste to purchase tickets at the Movies at Midway multiplex in the Midway Shopping Center up Coastal Highway Route 1...




...where the RBIFF had set up their big filmfest tickets and foodcourt tent...


Inside the Big Ticket Tent HQ

Watch the scene "Inside the 2010 Rehoboth Film Fest Tent."



Then it off to take in our first motion picture of the day...

****************************

Sound of Noise
(Ola Simonsson & Johannes Stjarne Nilsson, Sweden, 2010)
My Movie Meter Rating: B-
Life Lessons Learned from This Film: Noise annoys; love alloys.


Do not ask for whom the metronome ticks; if tocks for thee!

Amy picked this one, a quirky-albeit-uneven police procedural/musical/dramedy which she dubbed "The Motor Morons Movie" because its High Zero-style avant-audiophiles are obsessed with playing unusual instruments, like the human body, power station electrical wires, or savings bank cash registers and shredding machines.



See for yourself; watch the Sound of Noise trailer.


The plot revolves around what a character calls "Musical Terrorism," a term I had previously associated only with the unfortunate urban phenomenon of loud rap music blaring out of SUVs. As Moviefone's Jette Kernion described it:

Amadeus Warnebring (Bengt Nilsson) is a police inspector and also the only completely tone-deaf member of an extended musical family, including a younger brother who is a famous conductor. Warnebring knows enough about music to realize that a ticking noise his colleagues believe is from a car bomb is in fact a metronome ... and the discovery of that metronome puts him on the trail of a gang of musicians perpetrating odd crimes. Sanna (Sanna Persson) and her composer friend Magnus (Magnus Borjeson) are the head of a group performing Magnus's symphony "Music for One City and Six Drummers," which comprises four movements set in the most unlikely parts of town and involves the most unlikely musical instruments. Everything has musical possibilities in this group's hands, from medical equipment to shredders to bulldozers.

Those four movements of Magnus' magnum opus are:

1. "Doctor, Doctor, Gimme Gas (in My Ass)" - performed in a hospital operating room


2. "Money 4 U Honey" - staged as a bank robbery


3. "F*ck the Music, Kill, Kill" - staged as a demolition outside the town's symphony hall


4. "Electric Love" - played on Power Station wires

According to reviewer Jette Kernion, Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjaerne Nilsson previously directed Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers, a 2001 short film with the same theme and musicians but on a much smaller scale.

Watch "Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers."


I thoroughly enjoyed it; though I wouldn't advise people to rush out and see it, it's definitely worth adding to your NetFlix queue, where NetFlix will probably suggest you watch the similarly themed US indie film (Untitled) - another meditation on what constitutes art and music.



Synchnocity! I had just checked out Leroy Anderson's Greatest Hits from the library this week, so Sound of Noise's everyday objects-as-instruments mentality naturally reminded me of Anderson's "The Typewriter," whose pre-Kraftwerk electronic/ambient/found-sound stylings had previously gotten mass exposure on the big screen in Jerry Lewis' Who's Minding the Store?

Watch Jerry Lewis play Leroy Anderson's "The Typewriter."



And the film's opening musical number "Music For One Highway," with its ubiquitous sacro-sanct metronome (here mounted on a car's dashboard) made me think of the steady tick-tocking of Anderson's "The Syncopated Clock."

Watch Sound of Noise's "Music For One Highway."



I also noticed that Bengt Nilsson's police inspector character bore an uncanny resemblance to erstwhile German soccer star/coach Juergen Klinsmann, while "Music For One City and Six Drummers" composer Magnus Borjeson looked like Eric Lange, who played Dharma Initiative pain-in-the-ass Stuart Radzinsky on ABC-TV's Lost.


Dopplegangers Klinsmann and Lange

****************************

Animal Kingdom
(David Michod, Australia, 2010)

My Movie Scorecard: B+
Life Lessons Learned from This Film:

• "Everyone knows their place ... Things survive because they’re strong."


• "Crooks always come undone."


• "Your hands go anywhere near your arse or your cock, you wash ‘em after."

Just released stateside October 13, I missed this Aussie dysfunctional gangsta family drama (not to be confused with 1932's RKO production The Animal Kingdom starring Leslie Howard, Myrna Loy, and Ann Harding) when it played at Baltimore's Charles Theatre, but heard good things about it and decided to play catch-up Thursday night. We weren't disappointed. (OK, except maybe for the clueless volunteer presenter who, before the screening, said of star Jacki Weaver: "He's been getting a lot of praise for his performance in this film"; um, Jacki Weaver is a Sheila, mate! Guess he never saw her in Picnic at Hanging Rock...oh, well!) My ADD's starting to kick in just now, so I'll leave it to others to recount the storyline...

In his excellent review for inTROUBLE, Glenn Deegan observes:

After his mum dies from an overdose, teenager Joshua ‘J’ Cody (James Frecheville) moves into his grandmother’s (Jackie Weaver’s) house. Here he is drawn into the world of his uncles, Darren (Luke Ford), Craig (Sullivan Stapleton) and Andrew ‘Pope’ Cody (Ben Mendelsohn), and their friend Barry Brown (Joel Edgerton), who together make up a gang that is suspected of a series of violent bank robberies.

It’s a world on edge, where the sense is that violence is always a moment away. Underlying this is fear, because, as Josh puts it, “crooks always come undone”.

David Michod’s first feature is loosely based around the Walsh Street killings. Using the Pettingill family as a rough template Michod constructs a family unit that seethes with paranoia, fear and intimidation. Josh’s struggle to survive and find his own way is riveting. Animal Kingdom is not the descendant of the Underbelly trivialization of crime and criminals, but more a sibling of a film like The Boys (Rowan Woods, 1998). It’s about the suffocation of an insular and incestuous group, dominated by the strong. “Everyone knows their place ... Things survive because they’re strong.” Detective Leckie (Guy Pearce) explains to Josh, “But you’re not strong. You might think you are, but you’re weak.” The sense of danger hangs unspoken over most of the film until a disastrous series of violent explosions, quick and brutal. Ben Mendelsohn’s portrayal of Pope – dominating and cruel, his every gesture an implied threat – recalls the character of Brett in The Boys.

Although an outsider, Barry is a moral centre for the family, keeping them from running of the rails, and a tempering influence on the more out of control tendencies of Craig and Pope. When Barry sees Josh leaving a restaurant toilet without washing his hands he pulls him up, “your hands go anywhere near your arse or your cock, you wash ‘em after” he says. It’s one of the only examples of parenting in the film. J’s appreciative smile is one of the only breaks from his unreadable stoicism. When Barry is gunned down by the armed robbery squad, anger, fear and paranoia prove a fatal combination as violent revenge leads to series of disastrous events. Josh must decide on his own path through a moral minefield where a wrong decision can have fatal consequences.

The darker side of family seems to be a bit of a theme for Michod, his short Netherlands Dwarf (2008) is about the relationship of a father and son in the absence of a wife and mother. Crossbow (2007), which is included on the DVD, is about a mother and father and child. Animal Kingdom is as much a family melodrama as it is a crime film. It looks at where support amplifies the negatives as much as developing the strengths. The incestuousness of the Cody’s family unit, where outsiders are mistrusted, creates a claustrophobic atmosphere throughout the film.

The cast is wonderful. Newcomer James Frecheville’s minimalist performance of Joshua, an apparently disinterested observer at first of his mother’s overdose, and then his uncle’s criminal activities, is eventually forced to engage. Jackie Weaver is wonderful as Janine ‘Mama Smurf’ Cody, who dotes over her Boys a little too much, when the kisses on her son’s lips seem to linger into creepy incestuousness. She is willing to do anything and cross anyone to protect her little brood. Sullivan Stapleton’s Craig is manic, paranoid, always on edge and always moving. Luke Ford is passive, cowed by the stronger wills of his older siblings, and Ben Mendelsohn oozes menace.

An impressive supporting cast is led by the ambivalence of Pearce’s Detective Leckie. In a police force of faceless, nameless corruption it is difficult to tell where Leckie stands. At times he seems to act out of self-interest as he tries to strongarm J, just as his uncles do. At other times you feel he may be the one good cop. Laura Wheelright is a picture of worldly innocence as Joshua’s girlfriend, tragically open to new experiences. Noah Wylie plays the family lawyer Ezra White (interestingly the title character of David Michod’s first short film Ezra White LL.B (2003), who is crooked and sleazy. The production is first rate, beautifully shot by Adam Arkapaw and edited by Luke Doolan, Animal Kingdom is overlaid by an ominous soundtrack by Antony Partos.

Animal Kingdom won the Grand Jury Prize: World Cinema Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival, and has earned critical acclaim such as few other Australian films have in recent years. But my favorite part in this relentlessly tense and ominous, edge-of-your-seat film was the instructional hygiene bathroom scene wherein Barry's advise to Josh - "Your hands go anywhere near your arse or your cock, you wash ‘em after...make sure you use soap and work up a good lather!" - served as comic relief and elicited a titter of nervous laughter from the four gay guys sitting in the row in front of us, one of whom who added, "Got that right!"

I liked this mantra so much I kept repeating it every time I relieved myself back at our motel, much to Amy's annoyance, though as a long-standing fan of post-potty soap-lathering, she applauded the spirit of my newfound soapy enthusiasm for cleansing "mits-that-touch-naughty bits."




Hand washing: You can never be too clean after dirty business!

After the movie, we headed back down Coastal Highway to hit the Dogfish Head Brewpub for post-theatre pizza and Punkin' Ale. If we thought the brewpub crowd would be as sparse as last year during the NorEaster, we were gravely mistaken; apparently, there is no off-season at Dogfish Head - it's always packed! By the time of my second beer, a lightweight "Lawnmower" seasonal, I needed to hit the restroom - where I washed and lathered with gusto!

Cheers!

(To be continued...)

See also:
"My Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival Journal - Part 2"