2007 represents the third year that I
have attended the local San Diego Film Festival, which
usually offers a mostly-uninspired but thoroughly-welcome
line-up of films. This time around, I am flying solo—both
festivals in the past, I attended with a guest—allowing me
to choose to attend whatever programming I wish without
being heckled for it. After the four days of the festival
are over, I will have seen a total of fourteen feature
films, four of which I will cover in this column. Despite
the lackluster quality of three of these, I still have
hope for this year’s Official Selections (although I do
rather detest the lack of foreign films available to
festival-attendees). One thing is for sure: whatever its
problems related to programming-choices and
event-coordination, the San Diego Film Festival gets
better with each passing year. That being said, let’s dive
right into The Movies…
The first film that I saw on Opening
Day of the festival was Nina Menkes’ Phantom Love,
a wacky journey through the pervading feelings of
entrapment found in its female protagonist’s psyche. The
film is a slow-paced, black-and-white-shot meditation on
the emotional confinement that this woman, Lulu (a
terrific Marina Choif), feels in her everyday life, as
manifested by her actions and Menkes’ employment of
external symbolism. In a way, Phantom Love is best
described as David Lynch-lite; the pictures establishes
itself as a very Lynchian odyssey, but utilizes its
obscure style simply to develop the feelings of its
protagonist, rather than to advance a detailed external
plot as Lynch would. The experience captures the viewer’s
interest for its notable visual intricacies and
anti-narrative, but fails to satisfy on the whole due to
Menkes’ choice of an obvious, ineffectual conclusion.
The clear selling-point of Phantom
Love is its textured, eerily lit cinematography. This
aspect of the film works immensely well, providing it an
old-fashioned look that interestingly juxtaposes against
its very post-modern themes. Cinematographer Christopher
Soos’ use of contrast and focus, particularly in regard to
his depiction of human flesh in the film’s sexual motifs,
is highly reminiscent of that found in Alan Renais’ 1959
French New Wave picture Hiroshima mon Amour. The
visual flourishes provided by Soos are especially vital to
Phantom Love’s success given the fact that there is
little going on in its story.
Speaking of story, the absence of such
is probably why Phantom Love ends up a bit of a
failure. I understand exactly what Menkes is going for by
focusing exclusively on the emotional-arc of her confused
protagonist, but this creative-choice leaves her with
nowhere to take the character at the end of the film.
Instead of naturally closing the picture without tidily
tying up every loose end, Menkes feels the need to
create a conclusion for a story that simply doesn’t
need one. This results in the presence of an ending that
feels all too clean and easy in context. The final shot of
Phantom Love is as cloying and unsurprising as
cinematic-metaphors come, a complete abandonment of the
frustratingly engaging psychological tone of all that has
come before it. On the whole, the picture proves engaging
but, after considering its straightforward conclusion, far
more regular than it ever should’ve been.
And now for something completely
different. Marcy Garriott’s Inside the Circle
is a documentary following two Texas-based “b-boys” (a
term meaning “young break-dancers”) and the hip-hop
culture to which they belong. At 102 minutes, the movie is
a bit too long and lags during its middle-section (a few
anti-Bush interludes come across as especially
unnecessary), but ultimately proves riveting due to its
ability to intimately capture the lives of these
teenagers.
The focal two young men are Omar and
Josh, whose lives are consumed by break-dancing. At the
beginning of Inside the Circle, neither guy makes
money off of their talent; they merely view it as an
obsessive hobby. For Omar, the American son of poor
Mexican-immigrants, and Josh, a troubled-teen who has had
numerous encounters with the wrong side of the Law,
dancing is a way to forget their everyday troubles. They
met when they both belonged to the same “crew” (a team of
b-boys that compete together). When the audience meets
Omar and Josh, the two have since joined separate crews;
Omar is a member of the already-established Jive Turkeys
and Josh has found a spot on the newfound Masters of
Mayhem. Both crews are gearing up for “B-Boy City 9,” an
annual competition held in Austin by accomplished b-boy
Romeo.
Garriott follows Omar and Josh for
nearly four years, much like Steve James did with the
subjects of his 1994 documentary, Hoop Dreams.
While Inside the Circle doesn’t compare to that
classic, it benefits from utilizing a similar approach.
Josh’s transformation over time is particularly profound:
he goes from being a confused-juvenile to a
somewhat-accomplished (if still on probation) individual
in his field. Omar finds even more success than Josh as a
b-boy; he gains sponsorships and is soon paid to travel
all over the world to dance in international competitions.
What’s fascinating about all of this is the fact that two
started in almost exactly the same place, under similar
circumstances. The viewer is able to observe the ways in
which Josh and Omar’s actions and personalities create a
divergence in how b-boying affects them as people. Even if
Inside the Circle contains some extraneous material
and becomes occasionally bogged down pace-wise, the
intimacy of Garriott’s accomplishment is somewhat amazing
in that exists on such a grand scale. For its
introspective look into a relatively-unknown culture and
its deeply human observation of its subjects, Inside
the Circle is a documentary worth seeking out.
A.J. Kparr’s The Box is
set to be released directly to DVD, which is good, because
the small-screen is exactly where it belongs. The movie is
a part-whodunnit, part-police-procedural story with enough
twists to surprise the viewer, but not enough creativity
to involve them. It seems that writer/director Kparr’s
strategy in making the film was to provide it as
complicated a plot as possible in order to distract the
viewer from realizing the lack of true skill involved in
the production by forcing them to constantly concentrate
on the preposterous details of the story. The Box
isn’t a particularly bad movie, but it is as uninspired as
they come. This type of tepid material frankly doesn’t
belong in any major city’s film festival. Period.
Gabrielle Union turns in a
respectable, if somewhat generic performance as lead
Detective Cris Romano. Romano and her partner, Det. Dwayne
Burkhalter (Giancarlo Esposito), are investigating the
murderers of several men, who were presumably shot dead
because their killers thought that they were harboring
money that didn’t belong to them. The only survivor among
the group was Finn Williams (Yul Vazquez), who claims to
be horrified by the deaths of his supposed close friends.
Romano, on the other hand, thinks that he had something to
do with the murderers, primarily because of his traceable
ties to murder-suspect Danny Schamus (A.J. Buckley).
Ruthless interrogation and numerous plot twists later
ensue.
I admit that I didn’t see The Box’s
crowning third-act twist coming, but its unpredictability
did little to improve my opinion of the film as a whole.
The Box is a rote crime-drama, through and through.
If CBS were to produce an extended, R-rated episode of “C.S.I.”,
it would be exactly like this movie. By the time The
Box is released on DVD in January, I likely will have
already forgotten about it.
The Opening Night Film Selection for
this year’s festival was Kabluey, a sitcom-y
farce about, quite simply, the social estrangement felt by
a man wearing a big blue suit. Said man is the confused
and somewhat-isolated Salman (played by writer/director
Scott Prendergast). In the film’s first act, Salman comes
to live with his sister-in-law Leslie (Lisa Kudrow), whose
husband (Salman’s brother) is stationed in Iraq. He is
offered free room and board with Leslie’s family, so long
as he takes care of her two single-digit-aged boys while
she is at work during the day. This task proves to be more
difficult for Salman than he initially expects; the kids
act obnoxiously and treat him horrendously. As soon as
Leslie sees things aren’t exactly going according to plan,
she tries to distance herself and her children from Salman
by allowing him to take a part-time position for her
company. His job: to wear the aforementioned big blue suit
and hand-out fliers advertising office-space to passersby
on the side of a road in the Middle-of-Nowhere. With this
newly-acquired blue alter-ego in tow, Salman becomes a
master-eavesdropper. He soon discovers that Leslie is
having an affair with her boss, and desperately sees the
need to end it, especially as he comes to connect with his
emotionally-disgruntled nephews.
Kabluey’s story is cute enough,
but doesn’t end up going anywhere. Prendergast’s script
merely relies on hugely broad comedy that is only funny
for so long. Many of the film’s characters and situations
practically scream out “Look at me! Aren’t I clever?” This
gets to be rather tiresome for the viewer, especially when
they realize that all the movie does is repeat said
characters and situations. In the Q&A session after the
screening of the film, Prendergast claimed to have based
the movie’s concept heavily on personal experiences with
his own sister, but one would never guess this based on
what’s onscreen. The film’s sense of humor does not come
across intimately within the context of the movie’s story
at all; in fact, it is so average in its showy quirkiness
that it would probably be better off accompanied by a
laugh-track. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Kabluey
is painfully unfunny; rather, its comedy simply comes
across as too safe and too appeasing to lend to the
creation of a multi-dimensional story. In fact, the
picture doesn’t even have the narrative or thematic depth
of the average episode of “Seinfeld”, “Frasier”, or
“Everybody Loves Raymond”.
The lackluster performances in
Kabluey don’t offer its unified whole much help,
either. Leads Prendergast and Kudrow deliver entirely
average performances, fulfilling the roles outlined by the
script and never reaching above and beyond what’s required
of them. The child-actors playing Salmon’s nephews in the
film, Landon Henninger and Cameron Wofford, are
occasionally amusing but not much more. The only truly
inspired performance found in Kabluey is delivered
by first-time actress Angela Sarafyan, who plays a local
grocery-store clerk that slowly develops a compassion for
Salman. Sarafyan, who was incredibly shy in-person at the
screening, is apparently already onto bigger and better
projects than Kabluey, hard at work on a very
high-profile studio-financed 2008 picture starring Mickey
Rourke.
When it is released on DVD around this
time next year (it will be playing in cinemas in the
spring), Kabluey will likely prove to be a
satisfying entertainment. Seen in a theatrical setting,
however, its only occasionally-amusing comedy will seem
too minor to viewers for it to be worthy of the price of
admission. Ultimately, Kabluey is just too marginal
to be thoroughly successful.
Four films down;
ten to go. I am
hoping to see at least one masterpiece at this year's festival
but, given the sheer ordinariness of the selections that I have
just discussed, that may prove to be too much for me to
ask for. For now, I’ll settle for some much-needed sleep
before another full-day of screenings.
-Danny Baldwin, Bucket Reviews
(post date: 9.28.2007)
