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Non-Review Review: Hannah

Posted on March 6, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

Hannah is a quiet, meandering movie elevated by a powerhouse central performance from Charlotte Rampling.

The second feature film by Andrea Pallaoro, Hannah unfolds primarily in silence – or in the absence of talking. There is dialogue, but it often seems incidental to the story being told. Much of the film consists of extended wordless passages, focusing on the eponymous character as she moves through the world. Dialogue is often perfunctory and functional, seldom exposition driving a scene. A lot of the sound in the film is ambient; a train approaching and then pulling into a platform, a cloth cleaning a gigantic glass door, water trickling from taps and faucets.

As the title implies, Hannah is essentially a character study. Charlotte Rampling plays the eponymous character, the film following her through her routine. Gradually, the film sketches out her world, first in broad pencil strokes and then in fine detail. Rampling anchors the film, conveying so much through her eyes and her expression, providing a strong emotional core to the film buried beneath an emotionally reserved exterior. Rampling’s performance is crushing and heartbreaking, and all the more powerful for its low-key nature.

However, Hannah is perhaps too low-key. Barring a bunch of clumsy symbolism, there are points at which the film feels like it might easily lapse into a coma without anybody noticing.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: adiff, adiff 18, charlotte rampling, film, hannah, Movie, non-review review, review | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Le Fidèle (The Racer and the Jailbird)

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

The Racer and the Jailbird is certainly a very strange film, and not in a particularly interesting way.

Running two hours and ten minutes, The Racer and the Jailbird is essentially two very different films stitched together. Michaël R. Roskam‘s third feature-length film is a curious hybrid, a passable eighty-minute Heat knock-off followed by an interminable European Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week. How stereotypical European, you ask? So European that it features a completely earnest reading of the line, “I am not pregnant with new life, but with death.” it is kind of brilliant, in its own ways. Many writers spend their lives in search of prose that purple.

To be fair, there is something interesting in the premise of The Racer and the Jailbird, and in its eventual narrative substitution. There is something be said for setting up a premise and then swerving dramatically to upset an audience’s expectations, to catch them off-guard by establishing a familiar set of genre elements and then twisting sharply in an unexpected direction. However, these sharp turns demand a very precise set of skills, including complete mastery of tone and narrative.

The Racer and the Jailbird lacks that control, and so misses the turn, spinning out of control and flipping dramatically before ending up as a mangled heap by the side of the road.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: adiff, adiff18, film, Movie, non-review review, review, The Racer and the Jailbird | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Unsane

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

Unsane is off the wall.

The movie simply should not work, by just about any conceivable measure. Unsane is at once a conspiracy thriller criticism of the hypercapitalist impulses of the American healthcare system and a self-aware trashy nineties psychothriller about a young professional woman who may or may not be dealing with a stalker, all shot on an iPhone. It is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest meets Single White Female meets Tangerine. It is astounding that the film works as well as it does, that Unsane remains compelling and engaging even as it careens off the tracks.

A large part of this is down to a fantastic central performance by Claire Foy, who holds the thematically loopy and surreal adventure together through sheer force of will. Unsane subjects its protagonist to a cavalcade of horrors and twists, any one of which blatantly absurd upon even the most cursory of examinations. However, Foy anchors the film in a compelling and engaging central performance to manages to keep the audience both off-balance and sympathetic at the same time. It is a deft (and impressive) balancing act.

Similarly, writer and director Steven Soderbergh also deserves a great deal of credit for keeping Unsane from completely unspooling. For all the chaos and absurdity of the film, for all the tonal shifts and weird contrivances, for all the trashy genre tropes and gonzo plotting, it never feels like Unsane escapes its director. Soderbergh walks a fine line, producing a film that veers wildly and unpredictably, while also seeming to know exactly what it is doing. The result is bizarre, but engaging. It might be too much to describe Unsane as good, but it is good fun.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: claire foy, film, Movie, non-review review, psychological thriller, review, Steven Soderbergh, unsane | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Meeting

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

The Meeting is a fascinating story, told terribly.

The real-life events that inspired The Meeting are genuinely moving. Nine years after she was sexually assaulted walking home from the bus, Ailbhe Griffith convenes a meeting with the man who raped her. In a small room, Ailbhe Griffith and Martin Swan engage in a dialogue about those events, about how that evening shaped both of their lives, and about the scars that linger. It took remarkable courage for Griffith to put herself in that room, and she is clearly a thoughtful and fascinating subject. There is a great movie to be made of this story.

Unfortunately, The Meeting is not that great movie. There are various reasons why The Meeting doesn’t work. Some of those reasons are justifiable and understandable, fair creative choices that simply don’t pay off in a satisfying manner and serve to undercut the narrative being constructed. However, some of those reasons are unjustifiable decisions that could never have worked even in abstract theory and which serve to turn The Meeting into a spectacularly ill-judged piece of cinema.

The eponymous meeting might have been a genuinely moving and affecting experience, but The Meeting is nothing short of a disaster.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: adiff, adiff 18, ailbhe griffith, alan gilsenan, film, irish film, Movie, non-review review, review, the meeting | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Annihilation

Posted on March 5, 2018 by Darren

Annihilation is a science-fiction smorgasbord.

Early in the film, a group of scientists determine that the are of land which they have been sent to investigate has taken strange properties. Local plants and animals seem to have mutated and warped under the influence of some strange beings. Impossible hybrids stalk the landscape, exotic combinations of recognisable forms in order to create something uncanny and unsettling. In its own way, Annihilation feels self-aware.

The mouth of madness.

Alex Garland’s latest film is very much a hybrid itself, a synthesis of iconic science fiction elements, fused together to create something novel and exciting. Audience members will recognise a strand of DNA here, a stronger marker there. Even its harshest critic must concede that Annihilation has a broad palette; a dash of Stalker, a shade of Alien, a hint of Arrival, the slightest trace of Solaris, a nod towards The Thing, some 2001: A Space Odyssey for flavour. All these elements thrown together and mixed to create something eccentric and something intriguing.

Annihilation is a brainy high-energy imaginative science-fiction mixtape, and one both enticed and horrified by the idea that this is essentially the future culture.

“He was always throwing himself into his work.”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: alex garland, allegory, annihilation, film, netflix, non-review review, review, science fiction, stalker | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Filmworker

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

What must it be like to surrender a life in service of somebody else pursuing their dreams? It is a challenging and provocative question; very few people are willing to risk everything to chase their own dreams, so what level of devotion must be required to do that in service of somebody else’s aspirations?

This is the central question of Filmworker, the documentary charting the life and times of Leon Vitali, who essentially surrendered his life to director Stanley Kubrick, to help the director fulfill his creative vision and realise his dreams on celluloid. The opening voiceover, lifted from Matthew Modine’s diaries working on Full Metal Jacket, likens Leon Vitali to a moth drawn to Stanley Kubrick’s flame. It’s an apt metaphor, one that plays through Filmworker.

For years, Leon Vitali was Stanley Kubrick’s right-hand man, the film offering varying labels; some call him an “assistant”, others a “factotum”, while Leon’s own official classification of his job for paperwork and applications was “filmworker.” Whatever title might have been applied to Leon, the man did everything did everything. The jack-of-all-trades coached actors, he oversaw casting, he restored negatives, he documented decisions, he engaged with distribution. He was essential to the operating of Kubrick’s creative machine, yet he remains mostly anonymous.

Filmworker engages with this relationship, with the sacrificing of an individual’s autonomy to enable another’s creative vision. The film is refreshing frank in some respects about the demands of such a life, of the temperamental impositions made by such artists of these devotees. The film captures the romance of working with genius, but also the toll that it exacts.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: cinema, documentary, film, kubrickian, leon vitali, Movie, non-review review, review, stanley kubrick | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Red Sparrow

Posted on March 2, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

Red Sparrow puts a tacky (and tame) erotic sheen on a tepid (and tawdry) espionage story.

Red Sparrow has an interesting premise, both in terms of history and in terms of genre. It is a spy film structured around one of the more unsettling and uncomfortable aspects of the Cold War, the use of espionage agents to harvest information through sexual means. It is also a premise that could serve as a fascinating deconstruction of the tropes that audiences have come to expect of such films, a timely exploration of how issues of consent apply in the sorts of deception-laden love scenes that populate the genre. Red Sparrow could be James Bond as a sexual horror story.

However, Red Sparrow is far too tame to deliver on either premise. The film is too devoted to the conventional structure and dynamics of an espionage thriller to upset the audience in the way that any meaningful exploration of this history of sexual exploitation would, and is too comfortable with the rhythms and beats of the genre to offer a searing deconstruction of how its characters frequently leverage sex as just another weapon.

As a result, Red Sparrow is a meandering and uneven example of the espionage, trapped between two stools. The film is not sordid enough to excel as a visceral thriller in its own right, and not committed enough to offer a sobering examination of its themes.

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Non-Review Review: Isle of Dogs

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

Isle of Dogs is a beautiful piece of work, in every sense of the word.

The obvious point of comparison is The Fantastic Mister Fox, Wes Anderson’s previous stop-motion adventure. Isle of Dogs and The Fantastic Mister Fox are certainly of a piece with one another even beyond the wonderful production design, featuring meditative canines engaged in existential struggles. However, Isle of Dogs represents an extension and deepening of the work that Anderson did with The Fantastic Mister Fox.

Isle of Dogs reflects the more daring formal experimentation that made Grand Budapest Hotel such a treat, trusting the audience to accept and even embrace Anderson’s consciously hyperstylised approach to storytelling. In a strictly logical or rational manner, almost every major creative decision in Isle of Dogs seems to have been made to remind the audience that they are watching something constructed and crafted, the film consciously and artfully heightened so as to remind the audience of the remove that exists between them and the film they are watching.

Although Anderson has come to be known for this conscious and playful aesthetic, it is not his greatest accomplishment as a director. The most wonderful and beautiful thing about Isle of Dogs is that the film is so lovingly and carefully crafted that repeatedly drawing the audience’s attention to the artifice of it renders it no less real and no less moving.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: adiff, adiff 18, artifice, dogs, film, isle of dogs, Movie, non-review review, review, stop-motion, wes anderson | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Dawson City – Frozen Time

Posted on February 28, 2018 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2018.

In 1978, the city of Dawson was demolishing an old ice rink to make room for a new recreational centre. During the demolition, the construction crews stumbled on something remarkable. Reels and canisters of films buried in the old swimming book, sealed away and forgotten about. This was a treasure trove for cinema historians, the unearthing of a collection that included films that had been presumed lost to history. It represented a tangible and literal connection to the rich history of cinema and – through that – to the history of American popular culture.

Bill Morrison’s Dawson City: Frozen Time is a documentary looking at this archeological discovery, but it is also so much more. Using footage taken from the recovered films, and from other contemporaneous materials, Morrison takes the audience on a trip through the cultural history of the eponymous settlement, from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century through to the unearthing of these nitrate film reels in the late seventies. The result is a beautiful and compelling exhumation of something much more than those invaluable and long-considered lost silent films.

Morrison weaves a fascinating and compelling narrative that seems to tie all of this together into a convincing and expansive social history. The result is a documentary with startling ambition and scope, in some ways reflecting the approach taken by those earliest of settlers panning for gold in the Yukon territory. Dawson City follows both the social evolution of the settlement and occasionally digresses to follow some of its most important inhabitants. Some of these digressions introduce players who will return to the narrative later in the film, both others suggest a broader social context for the film.

Dawson City is occasionally just a little bit too unfocused for its own good, casting its net just a little bit too wide to bring everything back together for an otherwise satisfying finale. Nevertheless, Dawson City is a powerful ode to a community and to cinematic history, one with big ideas and provocative insights.