PAN AFRICAN FILM FESTIVAL 2010

PAFF Founder Ayuko Babu (left) and others at this year's festival. 

Coloring the blank screen
 
By Ed Rampell

The 18th annual Pan African Film and Arts Festival, which takes place yearly during Black History Month, is one of Los Angeles’ cultural jewels. Arguably America’s top black movie event, PAFF is a leading U.S. showcase for independent, studio, student, foreign (especially from Africa), political and progressive pictures. Many movies have their U.S. debuts at this venue, and over the years some have found distribution deals.

From Feb. 10-17 PAFF screened 125-plus features, shorts, documentaries and videos from the neighborhood to Mother Africa to the black Diaspora. PAFF also included entertainment industry-oriented panel discussions, an arts exhibit and awards ceremony.

This well-attended black-themed cultural extravaganza is the vision of founder Ayuko Babu, a former Black Panther Party member. Appropriately enough, 41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers, which is as exciting as any Hollywood shoot-’em-up, won PAFF’s Audience Favorite Award Documentary. The award was presented by the actor, CCH Pounder, who, fittingly, plays the wife of the indigenous inhabitants’ chief in the anti-colonial sci-fi blockbuster, Avatar. 41st & Central is directed by Gregory Everett, son of ex-Panther Jeffrey Everett, who is among the doc’s interviewees providing eyewitness accounts, along with Panther icons Kathleen Cleaver, Elaine Brown, Ericka Huggins and longtime political prisoner, Geronimo Pratt (AKA Geronimo Ji Jaga). The two hour-plus film is a riveting saga of the creation of the Panthers in Oakland and the black power organization’s spread to Southern California. The doc recounts the socialist-oriented Panthers’ clash with the so-called “pork chop” cultural nationalists of Ron Karenga’s US Organization, which apparently led to the 1968 shootings of Carter and Huggins at UCLA.

The film’s title refers to the climactic shoot-out between LAPD and Panthers at their L.A. HQ at 41st and Central. One of the survivors of the tense confrontation declares onscreen that during this violent five or so hour standoff he never felt freer, as he was a black man deciding who would and would not enter the Panther office, which was aerial bombed during the armed clash. While 41st & Central: The Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers is indeed a story about heroic resistance, it’s also a cautionary tale about reckless bravado and an implicit critique of the Panthers’ philosophy of what Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton dubbed “revolutionary suicide.” In revolution the goal is to kill your enemy, not get killed. In any case, after PAFF’s screening the onscreen events – plus the plight of African Americans today – was discussed by a historic panel that included ex-Panthers, a US Organization representative and current City Councilperson Bernard Parks.

This year PAFF’s Opening Night Gala was the civil rights drama, Blood Done Sign My Name, about 1970s community organizers, such as Dr. Ben Chavis (Nate Parker) who became the NAACP’s executive director and participated in a post-screening panel.

Other powerful nonfiction films screened at PAFF included Freedom Riders, which details the dramatic campaign to desegregate the Deep South largely by committed young black and white students who violated apartheid-like racial segregation laws by riding Greyhound and Trailways buses below the Mason-Dixon line in 1961. Stirring, heart rending archival and news footage is combined with contemporary interviews with freedom riders, such as John Lewis, who went from Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman to Congressperson. The most important lesson Freedom Riders teaches is how a small yet devoted cadre of freedom fighters can change and reset the government and public’s agendas to focus on otherwise overlooked issues.

Additional docs from that struggle included Good Fight: James Farmer, Remembers the Civil Rights Movement and Soundtrack for a Revolution, about the role songs such as “We Shall Not Be Moved” and “We Shall Overcome” played in the people’s crusade to end Jim Crow. GO-BAMA Between Hope and Dreams is Afro-German filmmaker A. Rahman Satti’s account of Obama’s presidential campaign in America and Germany.

Part of its internationalist vision, PAFF has a history of showing South Pacific films, such as this year’s Forgotten Bird of Paradise, a short documentary about the struggle of the West Papuan people, who are Melanesians, against their Indonesian colonizers. Caribbean pictures are screened too, including many Cuban films over PAFF’s 18 years. Haiti: The Sleeping Giant covers that troubled island’s history all the way from slavery to the anti-French uprisings to the recent earthquake. Proceeds from the PAFF’s screening ticket sales were donated to the Haitian recovery effort. On the other side of the world, another former French colony was featured in Clay Claiborne’s Vietnam: American Holocaust, narrated by noted activist and actor, Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now).

While Hollywood has made features about genocide in Africa, Rwanda: Beyond the Deadly Pit is directed by Gilbert Ndahayo, a survivor of that mass murder, who confronts, on-camera, his parents’ killers, in a very personal nonfiction work.

Probably the most controversial film screened this year at PAFF was the Australian documentary, Stolen, which, according to co-director Daniel Fallshaw, started out as a documentary about the plight of people in refugee camps as a result of the West Sahara liberation movement against Morocco led by the Polisario. But, he said, in the process of filming, Fallshaw and co-director Violeta Ayala purportedly stumbled upon something quite unsettling: the existence of slavery in these resettlement centers, with some blacks owned by Arabs in the camps. (Perhaps, as Regis Debray put it, “Revolution In the Revolution” is needed?)

Among PAFF’s fiction films this year was Hurricane Season, which like the Nelson Mandela drama, Invictus, and The Blind Side, is a black-themed crowd pleaser based on a true story about how sports can inspire. Forest Whitaker is a natural portraying real life coach, Al Collins, in post-Katrina New Orleans, whose “never say die” spirit rallies his basketball team and his ravaged city -- similar to the Saints victory in 2010’s Super Bowl.

As usual, PAFF presented a number of African features. Daniel Kamwa’s Mah Saah-Sah is an entertaining look at sexual customs and political corruption in Cameroon that also wryly illustrates how Africa’s cinema is influenced by Hollywood. Kamwa’s pic actually ends up becoming a clever African reworking of the 1967 Dustin Hoffman classic, The Graduate.

Similarly, Minky Schlesinger’s Gugu & Andile is the best remake of Romeo and Juliet since West Side Story, transporting Shakespeare’s romance from Verona to South Africa. Set against the dramatic backdrop of the anti-apartheid struggle, with racist whites whipping up tribalism in a divide and conquer campaign, Gugu & Andile’s grand finale is twice as tragic as Shakespeare’s.

The Kenyan movie, From A Whisper, is a sensitive drama about the impact the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi had on Africans. Wanuri Kahiu’s film won PAFF’s Best Feature Narrative Award and closed the festival with an encore screening.

THEATER REVIEW: NORTH ATLANTIC

 

Frances McDormand and Kate Volk star in North Atlantic. Photo by Steven Gunther.

Action in the North Atlantic
 

By Ed Rampell

Do you have an indelible memory of a theater experience? One winter in the 1970s, while I was a film student at Manhattan’s Hunter College, I heard that Mother Courage, by that red cat, Bertolt Brecht, was being performed downtown at Wooster Street. 

I attended the Wooster Group’s production at the Performance Garage. As Mother Courage traipsed about the countryside following the 30 Years War’s armies, all of a sudden the entranceway to the garage-turned-theatrical space opened, and the cast literally took the play out into the streets. Of course, this caused the theatre to freeze, but I never forgot this creative, bold bit of staging because it so jauntily shattered the fourth wall and proscenium arch while organically furthering Brecht’s storyline.

Flash forward to today. When I heard that the Wooster Group was performing at Los Angeles' Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) with Oscar winner, Frances McDormand (Fargo). Besides, expressionistic painter Suzanna Schulten had strongly recommended that I see a play at REDCAT, so your most humble and obedient scribe dutifully beat a path to Downtown La-La-Land to see North Atlantic.

With Wooster’s conventionalism-be-damned sensibility this production is definitely not every theatergoer’s cup of tea. Those who prefer shows like, say, South Pacific, may require a North Atlantic Treaty Organization in order to sit through this raucous, riotous production. James Strahs’ 1982 play is decidedly for those who prefer their theatre on the avante garde, experimental side. According to press notes it takes place aboard an aircraft carrier located somewhere in the North Atlantic (where else?). Set during the Cold War, North Atlantic is a caustic satire about the U.S. military, and the sexual politics of our men and women in (and out) of uniform. In the gospel according to Strahs the military-industrial complex has a Freudian component as well.

Much theater is dialogue driven, and while North Atlantic has its fair share of clever wordplay (especially the staccato rapid fire delivery by Ari Fliakos as gun-toting Captain Roscoe Chizzum), what is especially riveting about North Atlantic is Jim Clayburgh’s berserk set and the madcap mise-en-scene imaginatively presided over by director Elizabeth LeCompte, the Wooster Group’s founder. This is combined with a soundtrack that veers or rather, careens, from Broadway musical spoofs to aircraft soaring through the wild blue yonder as military women work their communications console like demented DJs madly mixing their turntables.  

 
The upper portion of the stage, with said communications table, is at a jaunty angle that becomes more and more perilous, and is perched on or something like hydraulic lifts. This requires the thespians to have the athletic prowess and agility of those daring young men (and women) on the flying trapeze as they, astronaut-like, seem to defy gravity. Whereas next door, at L.A. Opera, audiences "ooh" and "ahh" at various opulent sets, I’ve never seen anything quite like North Atlantic’s contrivances, finding them to be extremely creative and innovative. The Mad Hatter blocking integrated with the Escher-like set is dramatically exhilarating and liberating (once again, like that garage door those wild and woolly Woosterites flung open in the 1970s) from the moribund confines of ho-hum conventional stages. At last, a set to match architect Frank Gehry’s wacky design of the Walt Disney Concert Hall REDCAT is, appropriately, set in.

Wearing civvies, Paul Lazar plays the on-the-make General Lance “Rod” Benders with the appropriate dash of sliminess associated with those who abuse power, especially to gain sexual favors. Steve Cuiffo and Zachary Oberzan portray Marines Doberman and (not Hot Lips) Houlihan with Gomer Pyle-like panache. Maura Tierney and Kate Valk are listed in REDCAT’s credits as playing Corporal Nurse Jane Babcock and Ensign Word-Processor Ann Pusey –- “Pusey Galore” type femme fatales whose military duty includes catering to the Penta-goons’ sexual desires. Sporting a shaved skull, Tierney dons wigs and sensuous personas in order to curry favor from the males who (literally and figuratively) outrank her.

And now a word about Frances McDormand. Why would a Best Actress Academy Award winner act in a theater with only around 200 seats and for, presumably, much less money than the silver screen coughs up? Especially as Master Sgt. Mary Bryzynsky (whose name suggests Pres. Jimmy Carter’s Defense Secretary, Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of those we have to thank for Al Qaeda), which is not necessarily even the lead role in North Atlantic? McDormand isn’t the first actor who hit it big in Hollywood and has acted with the Wooster Group. Willem Dafoe, co-star of blockbusters such as the Spider-Man hits, had a long relationship with Wooster too, somewhat similar to that of Tim Robbins’ with L.A.’s Actors’ Gang. And Tierney has acted on the tube in programs such as ER and Rescue Me.

I think why McDormand goes from screen to stage can be found by looking at the career of another Frances and another Group: Frances Farmer, who also left Tinseltown to act with New York’s Group Theatre during the Depression. During North Atlantic’s curtain call (that is, if the stage had a curtain) McDormand’s positively gleeful smile said it all: This play and the venerable Wooster Group provides artists with the sheer joy of acting.  

North Atlantic runs through Feb. 21 at the REDCAT, 231 W. 2nd St., L.A., CA 90012. For more info: 213/237-2800; www.REDCAT.org.   

 

THEATER REVIEW: THE PRICE

 

Marvin Kaplin and Diane Travis play The Price right. 

The Price is right (on).

By Ed Rampell

At a Paul Winter concert (I think) one summer in the 1980s I somehow found myself backstage at Carnegie Hall beside a very tall man. I looked up and was shocked to see who stood next to me: Arthur Miller. “God bless you, Mr. Miller!” I blurted out to the American Shakespeare, much to the amusement of Miller. I proceeded to have a conversation with the socially conscious playwright of Death of a Salesman about nuclear free Palau, where I was then living in Micronesia.

So it was with great expectations that along with Jacob Kamhis, co-writer of the new play Air Force Man, I attended the premiere of Miller’s The Price at L.A.’s Theatre West, and I was not disappointed. If rats are a leitmotif of George Orwell’s books, running from Down and Out in London and Paris to Homage to Catalonia all the way through Big Brother’s torture of Winston Smith in 1984’s dreaded “Room 101," tthen the flopped businessman is Miller’s recurring nightmare of the American Dream gone wrong.

Unlike Miller’s immortal Willy Loman, the failed wheeler-dealer in The Price is never seen on stage, yet his presence is felt everywhere.  He is the deceased father of brothers now in their sixties, NYPD officer Victor Franz (Cal Bartlett) and Walter Franz (Don Moss), a surgeon. Although the patriarch is long dead the long arm of the law of the persistence of memory still haunts his sons who grapple -– literally and figuratively –- with their old man’s legacy, as they meet in an attic to dispose of family heirlooms and belongings. An 89-year-old appraiser (a droll Marvin Kaplan as Gregory Solomon) and Dianne Travis as Victor’s wife Esther also complete the scene.

This confrontation between the brothers has been simmering since the Great Depression, and is a sort of High Noon without the gun play (despite that fact that Vic, as one of NYPD’s blues, is indeed packing heat). It’s a sign of the Miller's prowess that playwright's able to generate emotional intensity crackling with tension without resorting to violence as many screenwriters often do, substituting mindless action for thoughtful probing of the human condition in order to ratchet up viewers’ passions. But even more than that, Miller uses the family drama as a microcosm of capitalism, and how it affects ordinary people ensnared by it and market mentality.

The 1929 stock market crash sets the wheels in motion for this Tony Award-winning drama that debuted on Broadway almost 40 years later. The Depression wipes the Franz’s paterfamilias and his business out (or does it?). Vic, who has a promising career as a scientist before him, abandons his dreams (and hope) to support his broken old man as a cop (the security of civil service, don’tchaknow?), while Walter apparently goes his merry way to attain fame, fortune and status as the man of science Vic could have also been. Esther is Vic’s long-suffering wife, driven to drink by her yearning for the good life and respectability that only money could buy (or can it?). As the appraiser, Solomon puts a dollar value on the accumulated possessions in the old family attic, where Vic and his father had sought refuge from the ravages of the Depression (losing the rest of what had been their home), as the house faces demolition in New York’s never ending cavalcade of urban renewal.

But the analytical bard is not content with just exploring how the collapse of capitalism affects individuals, but how its underlying ideology poisons them and their relations with one another, rendering them into being what Herbert Marcuse called “one dimensional men” (and women). Willy Loman and the Franz’s father may be fiscal fiascos, but Walter’s eminence and  “success” has also taken their toll on him, and his relationship with his family. What price making it? Like Miller’s Salesman masterpiece, and his war profiteering drama All My Sons, The Price is a scathing critique of the capitalist system, which places a price tag on everything and everyone.

Amidst the bric-a-brac for sale is the harp their long dead mother once strummed, before surrendering her dreams of la vie artistique in order to be taken care, by any means, as the wife of a man of means. Miller captured and expressed the hippie critique of materialism and nine-to-five drudgery then in vogue when The Price premiered in 1967. However, considering today’s crises and free fall of the free market economy, The Price has a renewed relevancy for today’s audiences.

Of course, Miller is a dramatist, not a pamphleteer, and it’s this playwright’s enduring genius that he presents all of the above in a highly entertaining way, deftly directed by Stu Berg with skilled ensemble acting by an able cast. But by placing the angst of his dramatis personae firmly within the context of capitalism, Miller clearly illumines the long day’s journey into night of the Franz family. (By the way, not enough emphasis is placed on Eugene O’Neill’s connections to the Left, from John Reed and Louise Bryant to the Group Theatre and the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project. They clearly impacted on his thinking, as his characters, too, often act out of an economic imperative that influenced their tormented psyches.)

Although the ancient appraiser sometimes personifies capitalism, other times Kaplan displays an all-knowing wisdom of Solomon, as he coolly, analytically appraises the situation (even as he hustles to make a buck and to revive his once thriving livelihood and raison d’etre). Solomon also provides the comic relief in what might otherwise have been an overheated family drama, as  Kaplan wittily steals most scenes he’s in.
  

The Price runs through March 21 at Theatre West, 333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, L.A., CA 90068.  For more info: 323/851-7977; www.theatrewest.org.     
 

FILM REVIEW: THE WOLFMAN

 

The Wolfman (Benicio del Toro) wants his mommy.

Fatherhood of the wolf

By Don Simpson

In 1935, during the golden age of Universal Pictures’ infamous monster movies, Werewolf of London was released starring Henry Hull. Written by John Cotton and directed by Stuart Walker, this was the first Hollywood movie featuring an anthropomorphic werewolf. Unfortunately, for Universal it was a box office failure. That did not deter Universal Pictures from giving the werewolf story a reboot in 1941 when they released The Wolf Man, a monster movie starring Lon Chaney Jr. (following in his senior’s footsteps as a Universal monster), written by Curt Siodmak and produced and directed by George Waggner. By all accounts, The Wolf Man was a hit.

Universal Pictures is rekindling their classic werewolf story once more, using Siodmak’s The Wolf Man script as a rough guideline. The 2010 edition features a change in the spelling of the title to The Wolfman; the characters’ names remain the same, but their roles are much different.

Lawrence Talbot (Benicio del Toro) returns to his ancestral home after receiving notice from his brother's (Simon Merrells) fiancée, Gwen (Emily Blunt), that his brother has mysteriously gone missing. By the time Lawrence arrives home, his brother’s corpse has already been found, thoroughly mangled and torn apart as if ravaged by a rabid beast.

In a slight slice of back story, we learn that Lawrence left home at a ripe young age after discovering his dead mother (Cristina Contes) covered in blood while being held in the arms of his suspicious father (Anthony Hopkins). Lawrence has not spoken to his father ever since, presumably because he continues to blame his father for his mother’s mysterious death (lending itself to a tiring and ho-hum Oedipal subtext).

Lawrence finds a mysterious medallion with Ben's belongings and discovers that it came from a nearby gypsy camp. He travels to the gypsy camp on the night of a full moon and meets with a fortuneteller named Maleva (Geraldine Chaplin) who warns Lawrence of a great danger. Suddenly, a werewolf appears at the gypsy camp. Lawrence is bitten by the werewolf and we all know what that means (besides always listen to gypsy fortunetellers)…Entrails are eaten! Arms are ripped loose! And decapitations are aplenty!!!

Lon Chaney Jr. brought a certain sympathetic sweetness and emotional depth to the role of the ill-fated Lawrence in the 1941 version; the mumbling del Toro is baggy-eyed and weathered even before becoming a werewolf, once he is bitten he acts no differently and appears no more (or less) brooding and haggard. It is even less convincing that del Toro’s Lawrence has abandoned a starring Broadway role as Hamlet (this Lawrence is by no means a Broadway actor) in order to return to England. However, this backstory does provide a lame excuse for del Toro’s blatant lack of a British accent (he speaks like a New Yorker). That is not to say that del Toro does not make a great werewolf, because he does; it just would have helped if he played his pre-werewolf scenes straighter and cleaner. (A better script would have aided del Toro as well.)

Hopkins’ performance as Lawrence’s father is overstated and hammy; but unfortunately his character is lacking in both depth and purpose. Sure, the moonlight reveals a sparkle in his eyes; but otherwise his only true emotions are revealed while expressing the grudge he holds against his son. If anything, Hopkins’ is the truest in performance to the campy nature of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s.

Gwen is a mixed-up girl with a demented penchant for wandering around in the fog during full moons and seems to believe that she alone can cure lycanthropy (the question of how she plans to do so remains a complete mystery). The sole purpose for Gwen’s existense in this script is to ignite the already firey tension between father and son by closely resembling’s the deceased wife/mother (thus perpetuating the Oedipal subtext as Lawrence falls hopelessly in love with her).

Director Joe Johnson’s The Wolfman is the antithesis to the recent influx of vampire movies and television series. Rather than utilizing youth and sex appeal to propel this all the way to blockbusterdom (imagine the box office sales if Johnson had cast Taylor 

Lautner as Lawrence), Johnson drained every ounce of sexiness from his aged male leads. Blunt is the only actor able to retain some resemblence of her inate youthfulness and sex appeal.

Other than the Oedipal subtext (which in itself seems overly forced and lacks purpose), The Wolfman – unlike its 1935 and 1941 predecessors – bears no symbolism or meaning, and features very little plot. The visual effects are fun bordering on kitschy and the all-star cast tries their best to save this film, but my keen wolf senses tell me that The Wolfman will suffer the same box office fate as Werewolf of London.


 

JOHN ESTHER'S TOP TEN OF THE DECADE

Depressed and repressed America: a scene from Lars von Trier's Dogville.

Cinema descending

By John Esther

In a stark refutation to Darwinism, the first decade of the new century/millennium showed very little promises for the future of the planet. We continue to create more problems than pride as the beginning of 2000 moved toward the end of 2009.

If my top 11 films of the decade list is any legitimate Darwinist indicator, cinema is in decline as well (as the recent decision of 10 Oscar picks for Best Picture illustrates). The first couple of years tended to be a lot better than the last couple of years, with 2009 being the worst year of cinema for the decade.

The first three years produced five top films of the decade: Bread and Roses (2000), The Deep End (2001), Y tu mama tambien (2001), 24 Hour Party People (2002), and Ararat (2002). The next three years produced one pick for each year: Dogville (2003), Machuca (2004), and La Petite Jerusalem (2005). The next two years gave us only two, one each year: Inland Empire (2006) and There Will Be Blood (2007); while the last two years gave us zero champs.

This is not to dismiss the many good, very good and excellent films out there, but cinema is clearly not reaching greater heights at this time, despite all the talent, avenues, materials, creativity and special effects available. What are the problems?

Nor is this to ignore the best decade we have ever had when it came to documentaries, although none made my list. Filling a huge void corporate media created, there have been numerous documentaries that have enriched our knowledge of the world around us, providing insight to what we have done and what we face as the new decade rolls out.

Having said that, without much more ado, here are a few reasons why these 10 films, out of the thousands I watched between 2000-2009, made the great list.

They are listed in alphabetical order.

24 Hour Party People –- Directed by possibly the best director of the decade, Michael Winterbottom - who also directed In this World (2002), Code 46 (2003), A Cock and Bull Story (2006), The Road to Guantanamo (2006) and A Mighty Heart (2007) – yes, Nine Songs (2004) was a dud - recreated the greatest era in rock and roll music (1977-1984) with a mixture of brilliant archival footage and actors, including stellar performances by Steve Coogan as producer Tony Wilson and Shaun Ryder as Joy Division’s infamous front man, Ian Curtis. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce and featuring music by The Clash, The Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols, Siouxie & the Banshees, and New Order (back when they were good), 24 Hour Party People can be appreciated many and any time while under various different states of mind.

Ararat –- Challenging the frequent filmmaking phenomena of atrocity and glamour, history and relevance, writer-director Atom Egoyan’s feature film about making a feature film about the Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 hit the nails on so many levels about what it means to make a big budget film about historical tragedy. What is important and how does that make for good storytelling? Should historical accuracy take precedent over political emotion? Can filmmakers recreate atrocity or is it an insult to the victims, because that is not what “really happened.” Is it appropriate to dress to the nines at some premiere for a film dealing with the slaughter of millions on screen? A project near and dear to the Armenian heart of one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, Ararat questions what we see and how we see it and what it means to speak about anything of cultural value.

Bread and Roses –- No feature of the first decade championed the working class at such a level as director Ken Loach and writer Paul Laverty’s account of a janitorial strike of Los Angeles - which was released a month after a similar strike in LA. Featuring striking performances by Pilar Padilla, Adrian Brody, Elpedia Carrillo and George Lopez (in a different kind of role) plus a few unsuspecting and unaccredited actors like Tim Roth and Benicio del Toro as themselves, perhaps only an outsider like the British Loach could have shown us such a sympathetic picture of what it means to be amongst the struggling Latino poor of Los Angeles. This is gritty realism at its apex.

The Deep End –- Written and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s novel, The Blank Wall, there have been few films in the history of cinema, certainly none during this time period, which addressed the burdens and sacrifices single mothers make, both large and small, when the father is away. In another terrific take on modern female angst, Tilda Swinton is Margaret Hall, a lonely woman trying to raise a family in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, while her husband is miles away. When her son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), gets into the kind of trouble from which only his mother can save him, The Deep End repeatedly visually reminds Margaret of her irrevocable burden of motherhood. Reminiscent of the greater works by Yasujir Ozu’s and Ingmar Bergman’s treatment of similar material.

Dogville –- Giving just one of the many mesmerizing performances found here, Nicole Kidman gets Grace, a woman who enters a small mining community in the heartless-land of America. At first Grace is treated well, but when things go from bad to worse for the hell bent-over hicks, a scapegoat is needed and decency buries itself deep in the fake ground. Staged against a minimalist set design of sorts, writer-director Lars Von Trier’s Dogville blasts Bertolt Brecht’s theatrics into groundbreaking new avenues. Offering special effects of a higher kind, the dramatic three-hour film sent more than one chill up my spine.

Inland Empire –- Finally shedding the reactionary tropes plaguing his films for nearly two decades, writer-director David Lynch flipped a switch and went straight for the jugular with a radical razor. Multi-layering films within films, Nicki Grace/Susan Blue (Laura Dern) negotiates her narrative behind and in front of a vast array of surreal situations on and off the screen(s) only to find an arbitrary ending in a deconstructive destination. A welcome change, Inland Empire was a cerebral triumph for a director who had been undeservedly and misguidedly taken serious for a long time.

La Petite Jerusalem –- The debut of the decade, writer-director Karin Albou’s tale of two sisters, Laura (Fanny Valette) and her older sister, Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein) working and searching in a series of sexual/political/cultural/historical crossroads is filled with symbolic gestures resisting patriarchy. With her follow-up, The Wedding Song, Albou is proving to be a joyous new presence for the future.

Machuca –- Admirably addressing a subject near to my lifelong heart, for no discernable reason hitherto, co-writer/director Andres Woods takes a look at life during the torrid times leading up to General Augusto Pinochet’s coup over the democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, through the eyes of two boys. Forced together by circumstances at school, Gonzalo (Matías Quer) and Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) share the few final days of freedom as their country goes asunder. Blazing with intelligence, innovation and intensity, Machuca is a world-class piece of filmmaking rarely equaled.

There Will Be Blood –- Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) hated everyone, especially the hypocritical religious leaders he occasionally depended on. And money meant freedom from other people so off he went to dig as many hole/s-y as his miserable existence could create. Based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and set nearly 100 years ago, There Will Be Blood is very much about America then as it is now. In right-wing politics the rich and the religious serve each other, but it is the religious who must always acquiesce when the time comes. Featuring Day-Lewis’ great performance, among so many other attributes, There Will Be Blood was a major step forward for writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia; Punch Drunk Love).

Y tu mamá también –- Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) are best friends with lots of issues. Troubled by the upcoming changes in their lives the two decide to take a road trip – along with Ana (Ana López Mercado) to turn up their good time and testosterone. Their lives will never be the same. A splendidly spirited celebration of life, love and longing, co-writer/director Alfonso Caurón’s film takes many a chance and it pays off, over and over, again.

On a related note, my top 13 films of the 1990s are: Barton Fink (dir. Ethan and Joel Cohen); Goodfellas (dir. Martin Scorsese); Hamlet (dir. Kenneth Branagh); Heavenly Creatures (dir. Peter Jackson); Husbands and Wives (dir. Woody Allen); Natural Born Killers (dir. Oliver Stone); Nouvelle Vague (dir. Jean-Luc Godard); The Player (dir. Robert Altman); Romper Stomper (dir. Geoffrey Wright); The Portrait of a Lady (dir. Jane Campion); Short Cuts (dir. Robert Altman); Toto le héros (dir. Jaco van Dormael); and Vincent & Theo (dir. Robert Altman).

FILM REVIEW: A TOWN CALLED PANIC

 

Oh yes, A Town Called Panic.

Une histoire de jouets
 

By Don Simpson

Welcome to a town where panic is the prevailing emotion ("Oh, no!" is spoken more than any other line of dialogue). Here, three aptly named roommates –- Cowboy (voiced by Stéphane Aubier), Indian (voiced by Bruce Ellison) and Horse (voiced by Vincent Patar) –- with unbelievably bad luck are able to unleash utter (and occasionally udder) mayhem at the drop of a brick amongst the quaint rolling hills of the rural community in which they call home. 

Their neighbors are a gruff farmer named Steven (voiced by Benoît Poelvoorde) and his wife, Jeanine (voiced by Véronique Dumont). Other townspeople include: Madame Longree (Jeanne Balibar) –- a horse with a name –- who teaches music lessons to the younger inhabitants of town; and the mere figure of order, Policeman (voiced by Frédéric Jannin), who dances better than he polices.

The film commences with Horse's birthday –- an occasion that Cowboy and Indian fail to remember. Cowboy and Indian scramble to find the perfect gift for Horse resulting in a comedy of errors in which 50 million bricks are delivered to their house. It is not long before the story dissolves into a surreal assault of nonsensical situations that are tied together by neither rhyme nor reason. One minute, Horse, Indian and Cowboy are dangling mere meters above the Earth's molten core; the next minute they are swimming after three little amphibious thieves in a parallel underwater universe; then, they are aimlessly trekking across icy tundra where they encounter a team of mad scientists traveling in a giant snowball-throwing robotic penguin. And forget about cats and dogs, in A Town Called Panic it rains cows.

Neither sense nor logic exists in the world of A Town Called Panic. This is essentially a cinematic representation of the playtime fantasies of a dangerously imaginative and hyperactive five-year old child (it makes the Toy Story films seem like snooze-fests written by stodgy and stuffy Hollywood studio hacks). The sets are constructed with papier-mache and cardboard; the characters are plastic toy figurines -– most of which stand upright with the aid of a flat base to which their feet are attached –- of mismatching dimensions, as if the aforementioned child was let loose in a vintage toy shop for 10 minutes and given enough funds to buy a bucketful of toys. Coherency and cohesion be damned, A Town Called Panic is pure unadulterated anarchy!

When the characters are not communicating in the universal language of hollers, screams and yells; they speak (or, more accurately: shout) in French (with English subtitles). Sure, A Town Called Panic could have quite simply been overdubbed by English-speakers; but for a non-French speaking audience, the foreign language –- at times seeming sped up to the high-pitched squeal of the Chipmunks –- adds a whole other level of absurdist craziness to the mix.
 
Densely packed with 75 minutes of relentless gags and absurdist galore, A Town Called Panic is the crazed creation of Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar the Belgian stop motion (more specifically: puppetoon) animation duo. Aubier and Patar, who met at Belgium's School of Visual Arts, introduced humankind to the fantastic world of A Town Called Panic by way of a series of five-minute short films that eventually made their way onto television networks worldwide. Existing fans should rest assured that the feature-length film is no less brilliant than their short films and this premiere foray into cinemas is by no means a sell-out; instead, it is the next logical step towards the world domination of Cowboy, Indian and Horse.

You better watch your backs, Sheriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear, A Town Called Panic will surely wreak havoc to your Real 3-D world with this ingenious little toy story.