Sep

“Higher Ground,” from Vera Farmiga, shows us a different, personal struggle toward Christ

Each of us searches for personal meaning in life, a purpose. Some use a holy book in that search. “Higher Ground” tells a story of a woman, Corinne’s, walk with her faith, from elementary age into middle age. Hers is a stuck in coming-of-faith story. When you finally feel a firm grip on how life works, your place in the world and how you’ll work that, that’s one definition of coming-of-age. Coming-of-faith is when you feel that with your faith. To be stuck in coming-of-faith is when you’ve not yet found a firm ground or steady conviction when it comes to your faith or god.

A young, critically thoughtful Corinne (Courtesy: Sony Classics)

This interesting, profound drama, adapted from the memoir, “This Dark World,” by Carolyn S. Briggs, opens at the Edina Cinema on September 9th.

“Higher Ground” is a feature-length film, directed by and starring Vera Farmiga, about how a girl, raised in a verbally abusive household, sticks with a choice after having committed herself to a conviction, Christ, without being convicted. She’s hungry for a church to guide her; maybe jumping the gun will be the catalyst?

Corinne wants to write fiction and live immersed in a world of art and critical thought. A man and a moment of sexual hunger overtake that: she clicks with Ethan (Joshua Leonard), a like-minded, sensitive musician, concedes her virginity, clings to and finally marries him, in time for her pregnancy to show. He’s provincial, with a level of curiosity that leaves him content with family and without questions that challenge or test him.

Another sign and symbol of their disconnection: shortly after marrying, they commiserate about opportunities lost in having a child: he wants to perform with a band. She, a resolute, practical dreamer admits that she’d love to write novels, but hasn’t the time. And kisses her baby with adoration.

Ethan flails in one last gesture of rebellion. He takes his band, and Corinne and their daughter on a music gig – ill-fated. His band mates are sophomoric, and want neither Corinne nor a baby sharing the band bus. Straining to be a diplomat, and good sport, she’s at her wit’s end. Their daughter needs a play or nap space in this Animal House setting. Ethan screams for her to use a cooler! Soon after stowing the baby, Ethan is distracted and crashes their bus. They all bolt from the bus, Ethan dragging Corinne along with him. She alone remembers that their daughter’s in the cooler – on the bus! Once safe, Ethan declares “God saved her.” A hasty conclusion?

A happy young marriage? (Courtesy: Sony Classics)

Corinne poses questions, which no one around her is ready for, or leave them comfortable. As her children grow, Corinne becomes increasingly chafed by her husband, Ethan, and the church’s disinterest in her questions and spurning of her obstinacy. Neither of them considers pursuing an examined life, as Aristotle extolled, and which she wants. This clashes with who she wants to be, but at the same time, she tries to focus on what God wants from her. She still wonders: how to submit to God when vital, incisive questions nag her?

“Higher Ground” is a quiet, patient story about a girl-come-young-woman’s spiritual search and yearning. It resembles a chronic, persistent chafe similar to many of those in Martin Scorsese’s stories. “The Last Temptation of Christ” is the obvious one. There Jesus is offered the option to simply live a human, mortal life, with a family, instead of living with the sacrifice and selfless service. Corrine has already sacrificed her idea of a happy life in order to appease her church. And she’s losing herself.

At the end of a scene Ethan sees, written on the wall, how far she has drifted from him, and how impotent he is in the face of that. He finally sees a chasm between them. He just doesn’t get her. While talking about their children, and a petty complaint about her, she runs to their station wagon and away from him.

A man, different from Ethan, makes her glow? (Courtesy: Sony Classics)

She’s fed up with him, or how far he has drifted from her. She locks the driver’s side door. He takes the seat behind her, and tries to convince her to stay docile, to be Godly, but doesn’t know how to fight that without hitting her – he seizes her throat from behind, and squeezes, more to vent than to hurt her. But that’s it!

She needs to try life independent of Ethan, and maybe find God again that way.

Later, after leaving Ethan, she has just testified to her church about not yet having found home within God, after more than 20 years. The final shot is potent and subtle: Corrine looks back at the congregation with hope and uncertainty.

Religious movies can be difficult when they paint outside of the lines, whether those are bound by belief, outright doubt or vice. The zealous Christian probably wants a movie that’ll affirm their convictions and submission to God’s will. Those on the other, secular, side want something that’ll confirm theirs; they’re tired of hearing dramatic, dogma of their imminent damnation.

“Higher Ground” is a good film. If you demand a fast-paced, metropolitan take on religious life, this might refresh you. If you sympathize or are comfortable with tough questions left dangling for Corrine or with the way she pursues her faith, then this’ll suit you. If not, still try it. Thoughtful, even-handed stories about religious or spiritual life are rare.

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Sep

What would happen if you recorded your “Life in A Day?”

“Life in A Day” is a documentary directed by Kevin MacDonald. Video cameras were given to more than 80,000 people and families from more than 190 countries. Each recorded their lives for a single day, July 24, 2010. Doing a chronicle like this is a production gauntlet. A thankless one.

The film begins slowly. How many people are patient enough to watch the waking moments of a dozen people from across the planet? It’s not bad, but best bits follow the waking opening.

A teenager shaves for his first time with his dad on-hand

This opens at the Film Society of Mpls./St. Paul on September 2nd.

As happens with the occasional film, this has no plot, nor story, but has characters. The storytelling method reveals character and characters in ways no other films do. There are people, whose points of view or sections stand out. The randomness might remind you of the “Visions of Light,” the American Film Institute’s documentary, from 1992, about movie lighting.

A great moment: something is giving birth, but you can’t tell if she’s a mammal or not. And then the point of view starts to teeter and slumps to the floor. A man has fainted. He’s now a father!

The magic comes when the subjects answer any one of four questions like “who do you love?,” “what do you love?” “what do you fear?” On the part of fear, one woman flaunts her fat boy. Another mentions loneliness.

“Life in A Day” is worth watching.

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Aug

“Vincent Wants to Sea” is a charming German roadtrip about escape, both real and imaginary

“Vincent Wants to Sea” is a German-made story of escape and healing, both real and imaginary from director Ralf Huettner. The original German title: “Vincent will Meer.” Vincent’s a young man with the socially isolating Tourette Syndrome, who’s mourning his mom’s death, and also has to deal with his dad. A dad whom he barely gets, and who barely gets him. With all this in his head and heart, he simply wants to escape or vacation to the sea. In Italy. Where his mom finally wanted to be.

Troubled young people on a roadtrip in "Vincent Wants to Sea" (courtesy Boston.com)

But he’s left with his dad. Vincent’s (Florian David Fitz) tics seem to be worse with his mom gone and his dad not.

This worthwhile small German story is showing at the Lagoon Cinema from August 12th.

Vincent’s Alpha-male dad, Robert (Heino Ferch), fits a stereotype. He doesn’t understand, how to help his son, or even want to. When life events clash with his plan, as with a dead wife and a troubled son, he acts like a child: picture Gordon Gekko’s infantile outbursts in 1987′s “Wall Street.” Robert finagles a spot in a therapeutic clinic, and drops his son there.

Soon after, Vincent clashes with his obsessive-compulsive and anti-social roommate, Alexander (Johanne Allmeyer) and might click with a curious, coy anorexic woman, Marie (Karoline Herfurth). But the clinic is too much for this odd, needy fledgling couple. Vincent and she decide to seize and flee in the doctor’s car, and take the at-times man-child Alexander with them so, he doesn’t tattle. They become a surprising team.

A healing, erotic connection? (courtesy fanpop.com)

After the clinic’s doctor, Dr. Rose (Katharina Muller-Elmau), tells Vincent’s dad about the incident, he comes to help her bring them back. The duo cooperates to find the trio. They also become a team of sorts. Their teamwork is the sort, which we’d expect to amount to kisses and more. But maybe not.

“Vincent Wants to Sea” is a simple, amusing road trip with wit. Laughter marks the teams’ run-ins with car theft, petty gas station robbery and car accidents. There are touches of 1986′s “Stand By Me,” albeit with different brush strokes on power, self-discovery and adventure from that.

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Jul

“How to Live Forever,” a baby boomer’s light-hearted documentary on aging, which offers sparse chuckles

America isn’t obsessed with youth, living longer or forever, but it probably seems so. As fashion expert Tim Gunn has lamented, models aren’t yet fully developed women, and still the masses look to them as a standard of beauty. In the public’s imagination youth rules. Young beauty, that is.

101 year-old Buster mugs for the movie

A documentary feature, “How to Live Forever” from middle-aged filmmaker, Mark Wexler, is coming to the Lagoon Cinema on Friday July 29th. His effort is a look at how we consider age and what do to about it, avoid death and in general try to beat the odds.

The story is peculiar in that Mr. Wexler starts off with funeral director’s convention in Las Vegas; this opening bodes poorly.

“How to Live Forever” almost seems to last that long. It’s interesting and amusing, but only entertains, amuses or informs once in a while; when you find yourself sitting back in a recliner, nodding off for a bit, and feeling sure that, when you open your eyes, you missed nothing, something wrong.

Mid-20th-Century fitness icon Jack Lalanne is one of the highlights. Others include a 70-something Japanese male porn star, a beauty competition for women over age 60 and a high school class that visits a retirement home. That final one is remarkable: the youths confront their own preconceived ideas about how depressing, off-putting or gross old people might be. But Mr. Wexler also speaks to more than a few 100+ year-old women. Strangely he doesn’t mix men among them. When’s the last time you asked yourself what 100 years looks like? 105 yrs? 110 yrs? Or 114?

What does longevity look like? (courtesy Flickr)

“How to Live Forever” is interesting and sweet, but is also clearly an amateur’s work; it’s long and even indulgent. It has two vital problems: Wexler has made an incoherent narrative from his footage. The point of his story, and what he wants us to find in it, are vague. If he’s disinterested in a clear narrative, then so be it, but that’ll chafe viewers who expect more. The lack of organization harkens somewhat to the way the vignette format that Spike Lee used in his autobiographical “Crooklyn;” but that choice worked because the sequences were connected in a nearly explicit way.

Also Mr. Wexler rarely engages or excites as a host; he looks and acts tired and run-down, which seems to be one of his motivations for examining “How to Live Forever.” He isn’t having much fun throughout the story; that tone, which he set, rubs off on viewers.

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May

“Incendies” is story of family history, forgiveness and one mom’s daunting, final request

With their enigmatic mom, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal), dead, her astonishing last will & testament sends her fraternal twins Jeanne (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin) and Simon Marwan (Maxim Guadette), who are Canadian, on an odyssey in the Middle East.

This is just the edge of the flame that is “Incendies,” from director Denis Villeneuve. Upon her death, Nawal’s will sends them to pursue another brother and a father – utter mysteries to them both.

Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Guadette consider mom's will in "Incendies" (courtesy Sony Classics)

“Incendies,” which is fire or flames in French, is a daring tale of family history & forgiveness that describes what ruins Nawal has left behind for Jeanne and Simon to walk through. It tells one mom’s life story while hinting at how her daughter might reconsider hers. This, while the pessmistic son, who feels none of the guilt, which he’s sure Jeanne does, just ignores Nawal’s final request.

Minneapolis’ Uptown Theatre shows this for a week starting on May 13th.

The twins’ journey will upturn their lives and themselves. It might or might not reveal truths, which’ll hurt them, and change how they know themselves and their mom.

The film introduces Nawal as a young lover, pregnant and unmarried. In these circumstances, she shames her family and is shunned, and then is sent to a madrassa to be educated. After she goes through to college, and writes for the school newspaper, her political zeal leads her to an agonizing descent: she commits an act of political violence, and lands in prison.

The dusky light within Nawal becomes dark when she’s sent to jail for several years, languishing. Her agonies are so intense and profound that she hasn’t dared to confide to anyone. Upon her death, Jeanne and Simon grew up with the image of her a long-time secretary, no more no worse.

Nawal seizes her view to a kill in "Incendies" (courtesy Sony Classics)

Armchair soldiers often talk, with puffed-out chests, about the “glorious” realities & ravages of war. Her story reeks of those imprints – they mark her body, her life and herself. Those harrowing scars might just rival Sophie Zawistowska’s in 1982′s “Sophie’s Choice.” Nawal’s story, which only Jeanne takes on in full, shows the grimiest and grimmest of her life’s shadows. Nawal couldn’t bare herself enough to share these with her children.

One hint: the three dots on one boy’s or man’s heel tell 1,000s of words about Nawal’s twisted, unbelievable life.

One problem: Mesdames Azabal and Désormeaux-Poulin, and the geographic landmarks, resemble each other too much, so it can be hard to tell the difference between the scenes where mom walks her life or her daughter retracing those steps. We might not know what or how to feel.

“Incendies” is a witty and difficult film to watch; while some plot elements might sicken you, this story and its message are valuable.

May

“Love During Wartime” is a tense, political “Romeo and Juliet” story for millennials

“Love During Wartime” is a political “Romeo and Juliet” story for millennials. It’s a documentary from the Sweden and Israel, and director Gabrielle Bier. This is about two young artists, Jasmin, an Israeli Jew, and Osama, a Muslim Palestinian who have to fight against their home states in order to keep their love.

Assi and Jasmin in love, and against the state

Osama’s nickname is Assi. He and Jasmin fall for each other around 2007 and want to make it official, against the odds – generations worth of political angst. She is a working ballet dancer, and former soldier. He is a visual artist. Neither of their home countries can comprehend interfaith love.

This was shown during the 30th Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival.

The byzantine bureaucracy of each war-weary and wary country treads a paranoid path that reaches Kafkaesque levels of absurdity. This tense love story is very talky with meager action: the lovers either talk or argue with each other. Or Jasmin argues with or confides in her German parents about warring states and the stakes, or Assi does likewise with his friends. Assi and Jasmin struggle, loving and living separately for several months while waiting for either Israel or Palestine to treat them as people in love instead of wartime talking points.

Jasmin and Assi (courtesy Mpls St. Paul Int'l Film Festival)

Each of them visits the other under temporary permits. One time is in Germany: Jasmin wants him there so they may marry and he may become a citizen because she already is. And then he may start working. Just then he holds a student visa, lives off of her, and aches to work.

To some extent “Love During Wartime” resembles Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” from 1995. Except that the levels of political and social angst leech the fun from Assi and Jasmin’s love. Those tensions lift their romantic stakes, and the drama, above the banal ones that were involved in “Before Sunrise.”

This documentary is interesting and worth watching, although maybe it’s only “fun” for those viewers who really dig this.

Apr

“Potiche” is a French retro farce of sexual & workplace politics, which might remind you of “Nine to Five”

“Potiche” a French farce of sexual politics, set in the 1970s is an amusing, campy and retro story. This story of a trophy wife (the translation of potiche) who takes her CEO husband’s place at the umbrella factory, which he claimed from the marriage.

This feels like a flipside telling of the 1980 workplace comedy movie, “Nine-to-Five.” The look, feel is out-dated, but that retro view helps to make this basically smart, but also shallow story amuse us.

“Potiche” takes place when the U.S. was amid its feminist and labor revolutions, which were also marked by “women’s work” sections of the newspaper want ads.

Landmark Theatres’ shows this at the Edina Cinema for a week from April 29th.

There is une petite leçon beyond the campy and ironical comedy. It’s worth seeing.

Apr

“The Princess of Montpensier” reminds us that wars have been fought over women

“The Princess of Montpensier” is a costume romantic drama, from Bertrand Tavernier, and set in the 1500s. The fight over the princess’ favors reminds us of what much of classical poetry and literature has observed: “wars have been fought over the favors of a woman.”

This is an era that damns the men, even the kingdom and dooms her. Marie (Mélanie Thierry) is torn between two men, two cousins’ love (unrelated to her). One she wants, Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel). The other, who she doesn’t, Prince de Montpensier, (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet) but her father does – for politics and property. He coerces her into marrying the prince, but the prince is too young and too immature to be a good match for his newly arranged wife.

poster (courtesy Flickr/Creative Commons)

This will be showing at Landmark Theatres’ Edina Theater for a week from Aprill 22nd.

This princess’ life and the story become more fraught when we see that all the men who spend a lot of time around the princess are enchanted by her, succombing to her assets. The prince’s mentor and tutor, the Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson) a gentleman, warrior and scholar – a rarity. And the prince’s commander, Duc d’Anjou (Raphael Personnaz), also vies for Marie. While the Comte is deliberate about this, showing his maturity, the Duc is younger, impulsive and urgent (or just lusty) about it.

This is one of those “if only” stories, where you notice that, if not for one road taken, there’d be none of this trouble – but also this intricate story, this romantic and political tumult and suspense wouldn’t interest us.

An exchange tells a lot about the princess’ and the prince’s bond: on their way into his castle…

He asks “When will you love me?”

She says, “When you order me to?”

–If only she didn’t cave in to her dad.

–If only women hadn’t been considered chattel and beasts of burden then. And head-strong women were such oddities as to be thought mad.

The most interesting subplot belongs to the best-drawn supporting character, the Comte de Chabannes; he’s a warrior turned pacifist. He laid down his long sword after having killed a very vulnerable woman by accident, but in the heat of a fight.

The romantic and political intrigues are complex to a Shakespearian level. More than a few shades of truths and lies push Marie, her husband, her tutor and the Comte away from one another – but mostly her.

The beautiful colors used in the costumes and photography overall draw our attention, but the plot, the performances and the plotting over love and lust command that attention. Those scenic colors are incidental to the great characters and the ways in which their stories clash with one anothers’.

See this film!

The big problem: the more than two hour sitting might make you antsy, even though the story’s great. Also, if you want sword fights, serious ones from this, you might find the few in this to be pale and shallow.

Apr

“Cameraman: the Life and Work of Jack Cardiff” is a fun, witty treat for movie nerds (and their friends)

A cinematographer, Jack Cardiff, of England, waited until age 95 to leave us. He had a story of 70 years of defining and designing how the light looks in movies – chiefly British ones. His reputation across the pond was so eminent that independent filmmaker Craig McCall (not a household name in American movies) just had to make a film about his talents, his contributions and ambitious & zealous artistry. That’s “Cameraman: the Life and Work of Jack Cardiff.”

When was the last time you went to a movie and considered who was in-charge of its look or visual attitude? Cardiff and others talk about how he was inspired by painters, particularly impressionists, such as Vincent Van Gogh and Johannes Vermeer, to light for drama and emphasis. In fact Christopher Callis, one Mr. Cardiff’s peers, said that he helped to found the British movie look.

In the late 1940s his work founded his reputation as a go-to cameraman, and as a man who was game for artistic risks. His big break came with 1946′s “Matter of Life and Death” aka “Stairway to Heaven” in America. His work on 1947′s “Black Narcissus” helped to forge his reputation; the lighting and look of it are extraordinary, bold and evocative. It showed new ways to see and understand how artistic a film could be. In addition, he worked on the first ever documentary that wasn’t a travelogue: 1945′s “Western Approaches.”

Martin Scorsese, a renowned American movie icon, whose voice seems to out weigh several of the others in this film, described Mr Cardiff’s work as “painting in-motion.” To that point, Orson Welles once called movies “an enormously expensive paint box,” which is another way to say just how Cardiff expressed his talents when directors gave him the led-way.

In a couple of books about Mr. Scorsese, he describes how he reveres English filmmakers, especially Michael Powell, and the degree to which they inspired his own work. “Cameraman” uses a brilliant split screen that briefly illustrates point-by-point, on how Mr. Powell’s “The Red Shoes,” from 1948, showed a daring new way to show point of view: from the mind’s eye of a performer. Rewatch in boxing scenes in 1980′s “Raging Bull” after watching “Red Shoes’” dance scenes – you’ll get it.

This is a niche movie; there aren’t a lot of people who watch documentaries. And this isn’t the first documentary about a director of photography, or a group of them.

During an audience Q & A with the filmmaker, Craig McCall, after the first screening, at the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, he said that this, which he spent 13 years making independently, was inspired at least in part by the American Film Institute’s (AFI) 1992 documentary “Visions of Light.”

That’s an extraordinary documentary about American movie aesthetics, and specifically about movie lighting and those men – mostly – who made movies like how they do. McCall had wanted to make a version about cinematographers from the United Kingdom, but… he hadn’t the AFI’s wallet.

Jack among some of his subjects (courtesy JackCardiff.com)

McCall calls this a conversation with Mr. Cardiff – that’s the style. Movie’s usually summarize some part of our world, and how we understand or want to understand it. Maybe cinematography summarizes how freely we might use our imaginations, or how open it is, when watching movies.

If you’re the kind of movie-goer who goes to film festivals or habitually checks out the special features on DVDs, which are barely and rarely special these days, then “Cameraman” is great. Even if you’re not…You’ll have a lot of fun while learning fascinating details about movies and how they’re made.

Apr

“In A Better World” is a smart, soft movie about angry boys and men

“In A Better World” is a drama from Denmark & Sweden, and director Susanne Bier, that yearns for peace. The story begins by confusing us a little: it starts with middle-aged doctor going into an African camp to help. Then we see boy giving a eulogy, straining to be stoic. Then we see a boy being bullied by several peers. You don’t really know whose story this is – the boys’ or the men’s?

Three boys and a man try to avoid a fight (courtesy Sony Classics)

We see a lot of anger, tension and clenched fists, even when they’re just words. Basically this’s the story of angry boys and men, and how each of them deals with this, whether with softness or hardness.

This plays at Minneapolis’ Uptown Theater for a week on April 15th.

There are two boys and two fathers, each of them dealing with what manhood and strength mean to themselves. One teenager, Christian, (William Jøhnk Nielsen) strong and resolute on the surface, is still smarting from his mom’s death from cancer; he doesn’t know what to do with his confusing mix of feelings: agony, guilt and wrath.

The other boy, Elias, (Markus Rygaard) is the opposite; continually bullied in school, he has withdrawn and shed any sense of self-confidence. His dad, Anton, (Mikael Persbrandt) a doctor in Africa, isn’t around and is in the middle of separating from Elias’ mom. Elias, cowing in the face of obvious and imminent divorce, just wants his home life to be ok again.

At his new school, Christian, already vulnerable without his mom, who succumbed to cancer, overcompensates in the face of problems. Elias needs a friend, a source of strength – someone who’ll fill in as a protector, even if that poses that imposes a price.

Angry boys Elias and Christian (courtesy Sony Classics)

Aside from the boys’ angst-ridden fights with their worlds and themselves, their dads have equally difficult problems. Dr. Anton has to deal with his meek, unsure son. But in Africa he contends with a monster whose men do things to women that’re best left to the imagination. And Christian’s dad starts to wonder, in a taciturn way, why his son’s this angry.

When the boys meet Christian is hit, while standing up for poor Elias, who was just struck himself by a bully and his followers. Christian underestimates his foe, and is rewarded with blood. Next time under the “cover” of a bathroom, he sucker punches the boy, this time using overwhelming force, a chunk of metal, while he’s on Elias again. He gets the drop on the little bastard – and an interview with the police. This makes us wonder how messed up Christian is, and how barbaric he’ll be.

In the abyss of Christian’s confused wrath, he resorts to a pipe bomb. The lives of mom and daughter joggers are caught in this. “In A Better World” reminds us of how some boys are taught to deal with stress, their own anger and with conflicts, and the kinds of men they might become.

The story’s quiet, letting the boys’ angst flare through words and pauses, without needing action scenes to show the tensions. This intense story is smart and interesting.

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