I must confess that as soon as a festival ends, I lose roughtly 75% of my motivation to write about it, even though there are plenty of films I really enjoyed but didn’t have time to cover during the fest. But I don’t want these to get away without any mention, so here’s one last post of LA Film Festival capsule reviews. This pretty well finishes out everything I saw; I do plan to get a full review for Miranda July’s The Future up sometime this week, so I didn’t include it here. As you’ll notice by the ratings throughout the coverage, I really did enjoy almost everything I saw at the festival. My overall top films remain Drive, The Innkeepers, The Dynamiter and Winnie the Pooh, with The Guard, The Bad Intentions, Haunters, Kawasaki’s Rose, Familiar Ground, The Future and Love Crime right behind.

Love Crime

(4/5)
2010 France. Director: Alain Corneau. Starring: Ludivine Sagnier, Kristin Scott Thomas, Patrick Mille, Guillaume Marquet. 104 min.

Love Crime turned out to be the final film of French director Alain Corneau, who died shortly after completing it. He’s known for his crime thrillers, and this fits right into the mold. Kristin Scott Thomas is Christine, an ice-cold executive of an international firm who seems to be grooming up-and-coming exec Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier), partnering with her on various business deals and pitches to clients. They’re an excellent business team, closing multiple deals together with aplomb. They also have kind of a complicated personal relationship that Christine calls “love” – it certainly has a sexual aspect to it, though both women also date men…the same man, actually. Turns out Isabelle is potentially even better at her job than Christine, and soon they’re vying professionally and on cool terms personally. The crime plot that follows is twisty and will keep you guessing, even though you know exactly what happened – it’s Hitchcockian, really, in its ability to tell you who did it up front and still keep suspense very high. Both actresses are great; my only real complaint is that it’s shot rather flat and uninterestingly. Once the plot really got going it wasn’t an issue, but early on when relationships were still being set up, the bland photography and composition was a little distracting. Releasing in the US on September 2, from Sundance Selects.

The Yellow Sea

(3.5/5)
2010 South Korea. Writer/Director: Hong-jin Na. Starring: Yun-seok Kim, Jung-woo Ha, Seong-ha Cho, Chul-min Lee. 157 min.

The Yellow Sea opens by explaining Yanbian, an area within China that has a large number of displaced Koreans, and the plight of Ku-Nam, a Chinese-Korean man whose mixed heritage marginalizes him with both Chinese and Koreans. Facing financial trouble and worrying about his wife, who was supposed to send money back from her job in South Korea and has not, Ku-Nam accepts a job from the local crime boss to carry out an assassination over in South Korea, which requires a dangerous and illegal crossing over the Yellow Sea. But predictably, stuff goes wrong, and he ends up being chased by the police, the mob leaders (who he thinks ordered the hit but apparently did not and are upset it happened), and the middleman who smuggled him across the Sea. Then all these groups of people get into it with each other. I honestly had to look up a bit of the plot to recount it here, because I was zoning in and out a bit during the exposition and setup (festival tiredness, not the film’s fault). But once the film gets going, it’s pretty incredible, and I certainly didn’t zone out during any of the adrenaline-pumping, almost non-stop chases and knife fights (no guns) till the breathless end. The most amazing thing is the chases (both on-foot and car) are shot really close and edited quickly, but somehow they managed not to be incoherent the way most American action scenes are – I felt the visceral rush of Ku-Nam narrowly missing being hit or caught, or cars slamming into each other behind him, but I never felt disoriented. I want to watch it again just to try to analyze how they achieved that effect. No US distribution.

Terri

(2.5/5)
2011 USA. Writer/Director: Azazel Jacobs. Starring: Jacob Wysocki, John C. Reilly, Bridger Zadina, Olivia Crocicchia, Creed Bratton. 105 min.

This was the last film I saw at the festival, and the most disappointing. It was one of the bigger-name ones at the fest, with John C. Reilly anchoring the coming-of-age, awkward high school story as the unorthodox school principal who befriends the overweight, friendless title character. Terri himself is played by newcomer Jacob Wysocki, and he does quite well in the part, refusing to let Terri fall into pity territory while also acknowledging his difficulty with interacting with others. There are some really great parts, like when Terri arrives at the edge of school property (he walks through the woods from his uncle’s cabin), then waits in the trees watching the other students hang out and joke around in the soccer field before class. When the bell rings, he waits for them to pick up their bags and head into school before tossing his bag on the field where theirs had been and going to pick it up before going to school. That little gesture of wanting to do what the other kids do, but not wanting to be with them and risk ridicule was probably my favorite thing in the film. Other things didn’t fare quite so well with me. Reilly is great, as usual, and his relationship with Terri was different and fun, but some of Reilly’s more serious dialogue didn’t ring true to me at all. Some of the directions the story went with Terri, his weird “friend” Chad, and Heather (a girl Terri helped early in the film) didn’t feel right to me, and took me out of the film, especially since they left other character moments established early in the film (like Terri’s fascination with leaving dead mice for a hawk to eat and his relationship with his uncle, a great run by Creed Barton). Ultimately, there were a lot of individual elements I liked a lot, but just as many that frustrated me, and the whole film doesn’t come together or distinguish itself above the dozens of other coming-of-age-high-school movies. The pieces are there, but the film squandered them. In US theatres now.

Kawasaki’s Rose

(4/5)
2009 Czech Republic. Director: Jan Hrebejk. Starring: Lenka Vlasáková, Milan Mikulcík, Martin Huba. 100 min.

I was first drawn to this Czech film because I’m kind of fascinated by the Czech Republic and its history, and then I discovered it’s the same director (Jan Hrebejk) who did Divided We Fall back in 2001, a film that just bowled me over when I saw it. Like Divided We Fall, Kawasaki’s Rose deals with the issue of collaborators and dissidents during the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, but from the other side. Pavel s about to receive an award for his outspoken dissident efforts, but as a pair of documentarians (one of them his son-in-law, the other his son-in-law’s mistress – yeah, it’s complicated) work on the story, they discover that at one time, he had collaborated with the KGB. There are a ton of plot threads in this film, of Pavel and his wife Jana, who may or may not have known about his activity; their daughter Lucie, who not only has a straying husband, but a rare medical condition and a kid who’s a bit of a punk; Jana’s former lover Borek, a dissident who fled Prague not long before Jana and Pavel married, and Borek’s Japanese expat buddy Kawasaki, and more. But they all manage to find their way back to the center, unveiling layers like the origami rose Kawasaki paints which gives the film its title. It could get soapy, but it doesn’t – it has a lot of depth to it, stemming both from the characters and the historical background. I’m not sure it’s quite as amazing as Divided We Fall was when I first saw that, but together they make a darn good double feature about the Czech experience. Release in the US TBD from Menemsha Films.

Mysteries of Lisbon

(4/5)
2010 Portugal. Director: Raoul Ruiz. Starring: Adriano Luz, Maria João Bastos, Ricardo Pereira, Clotilde Hesme. 272 min.

Clocking in at 4 hours and 17 minutes (thankfully they did include an intermission), this film presented a challenge to me I just couldn’t pass up. Although I will admit to drifting into a bit of a stupor a few times, the film remained intriguing throughout the epic run time. Directed by Chilean expat Raul Ruiz, now working in Europe, the film is based on a Portuguese novel that follows a fatherless boy in a parish school, but tangents off frequently into lengthy related stories – such as how his mother and father met and were driven apart, how the priest who cares for him came to be a priest, and even about the neighboring nobleman who intersects with the boy’s life a few times. Well, the stories seem tangential but actually intertwine quite closely and ingeniously. The fact that you’re actually watching several interrelated stories of many different characters makes the running time not quite so much of a burden, and then the ending will have you wondering about everything you just saw. It’s paced fairly slowly, but gives a languid sense of the setting and society of the 19th century – that plus the length give plenty of time to maneuver around all the different characters and their different personas throughout the multiple storylines. It’s a masterwork of narrative structure, and I definitely want to revisit it to get nuances I missed when zoning out here and there. Releasing in the US on August 5, from Music Box Films.

Familiar Ground

(4/5)
2011 Canada. Writer/Director: Stéphane Lafleur. Starring: Francis La Haye, Fanny Mallette, Michel Daigle, Sylvain Marcel, Denis Houle. 90 min.

I circled around this Quebecois film in planning my schedule, but it ended up being one of the last things I finally decided to see. And I’m very glad I did – I enjoyed watching it, but it has grown in my estimation considerably even since I saw it. It was billed as a black comedy about a deeply unhappy family focusing on a sibling relationship, with a random sci-fi element of a man coming from the future (not the distant future, just September), offering warnings to the brother about an accident the sister might have soon. It’s not a particularly exciting film to watch – there’s a lot of awkward sitting and staring about by this family that clearly has a rift in it, but we’re not told exactly what happened or why they’ve grown so far apart emotionally. It’s slow and rather antagonistic (as the main characters are), but it is quite funny in an extremely deadpan and slightly absurd way. Certainly it isn’t a friendly film to watch, but the way the end finally plays out as the brother quietly tries to figure out how to avert this accent is pretty clever and fits well with the tone of the film. The lightly techno/synthy soundtrack is really unexpected but also works quite well. I liked the film much more thinking about it later than I did while actually watching it – you really have to give yourself over to the pacing and tone to get enjoyment out of watching it. I expect I would like it even more on rewatch. No US distribution.

Mamitas

(3.5/5)
2011 USA. Writer/Director: Nicholas Ozeki. Starring: EJ Bonilla, Veronica Diaz, Jennifer Esposito, Joaquim de Almedia, Jesse Carcia, Pedro Armendariz Jr. 110 min.

Echo Park-set teen drama Mamitas intrigued me immediately when I saw it in the program, both because I like seeing films set in different neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and because the trailer reminded me of Raising Victor Vargas, a Latino-American coming-of-age drama from a few years ago I liked very much. And I wasn’t wrong in my intuition; Mamitas is a really charming understated drama of a teenage boy who puts of a front of being hot stuff – cutting class, hitting on girls, generally acting too cool for school – but shows a much more caring side to his ailing grandfather and one girl who manages to break through his facade. It’s all played very down-to-earth and realistically, with all the actors bringing great warmth and charisma to their roles. The title refers to “little mothers,” and a good bit of the plot is tied up with the boy trying to find a man that his mother (who died when he was born) knew years earlier in hopes of understanding her better, as well as his own troubled relationship with his father – this plot development could’ve gone very eye-rollingly soapy, but it stayed away from most of the cliches it suggests, and I appreciated that immensely. The only problem is that the film is 110 minutes, and it should’ve been about 95, trimming off a couple of false endings. But I was enough charmed that I didn’t care too much. No US distribution.

The Bad Intentions

(4/5)
2011 Argentina. Writer/Director: Rosario Garcí-Montero. Starring: Fatima Buntinx, Katerina D’Onofrio, Paul Vega, Kani Hart, Melchor Gorrochátegul, Jean Paul Strauss. 107 min.

This Peruvian film caught my eye with the festival guide describing it as a black comedy about a precocious nine-year-old who’s convinced that she’ll die as soon as her baby brother is born, and the morbid ways she acts out in rebellion to the idea of no longer being an only child. Meanwhile, it’s 1982 and revolutionary groups are wreaking havoc in Lima. I don’t know enough about Peruvian history to get a lot out of this part, and a little more illumination of the parallel connctions to the main plot (which are hinted at but not spelled out) would’ve helpd me, but the main plot is clear enough and quite enjoyable on its own. For people who do know that history, it will be a welcome additional layer on top of an already excellent film. The film is very darkly funny, especially for the first two thirds or so, thanks to the sardonic script and solid performance from young newcomer Fatima Buntinx, who portrays Cayetana with world-weary innocence. She’s obsessed with Peruvian heroes who died in battle, and with death itself – something she’s clearly just starting to figure out, and her combination of matter-of-factness and naivete is refreshing and consistently interesting. The last third of the movie delves a bit into surrealism, as the threat of her brother’s birth looms nearer and she dreams visions of the historical heroes. The turn didn’t totally work for me, but the film is still really solid, evoking a bit of The Spirit of the Beehive in terms of the little girl coming into contact to death, and here,
birth, and working to make sense of it within her childish framework. No US distribution.

Entrance

(3/5)
2011 USA. Directors: Dallas Richard Hallam & Patrick Horvath. Starring: Suziey Block, Karen Gorham, Joshua Grote, Karen Baird, Florence Hartigan. 83 min.

A horror-thriller about a barista in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, with what seemed like a stalker angle? Sign me…up? Heh, I’m always curious about indie horror films that seem to take more of a thoughtful point of view on the genre rather than just going for the whole slasher thing. Funnily enough, the filmmakers’ working title for Entrance was “Slasher,” but it certainly isn’t a typical slasher movie. Most of the film is, in fact, a straight drama, with the main character Suzie (played by Suziey Block, who is also a barista in Silver Lake) getting increasingly lonely and disaffected, soon deciding she wants to leave LA entirely. This sounds like a dozen other films, because disaffected Angeleno stories are fairly easy things for low-budget LA filmmakers to write and film. But it actually pretty much works on that level, even leaving aside the horror stuff – it’s not particularly distinguished, but it’s decent, for which most of the credit goes to Block, who is quite personable and imminently believable. Throughout, an odd undercurrent runs, though, as she wakes to hear footsteps she can’t quite track down, her dog goes missing, she randomly finds her garage doors open, etc. When the climax comes, it’s quite well done, with a lot of smart choices on the part of the writers and directors; it did get a little drawn out toward the end, though, and I thought that could’ve been tightened up a fair bit. But I still enjoyed myself with it, and so did most of the rest of the audience – many of whom were there supporting friends in the cast or crew. It was the world premiere of the film, and it’s fun to be in that friendly an audience for that. No US distribution.