Half-Assed Movie Reviews

March 1, 2010:  Instead of Abracadabra

Instead of Abracadabra is a live-action short film from Sweden, running 22 minutes.  It was nominated for an Oscar for 2009, but did not win.  After a disorienting opening, during which a man stands in his house looking out the window at a mother and son moving in next door, the man is established as an unemployed son still living with his parents well into his twenties, trying to follow his passion and become a magician.  His Dad wants him to get a real job, particularly after the son tests out a magic trick with his mother involving her getting in a box and him sticking swords into it, which results in a hospital trip for her.

Ah, but the cute new neighbour lady works at the hospital, which leads to a chance meeting and a gig at her son’s birthday party, after which she agrees to then attend another show at the magician’s father’s birthday party.  Apparent disaster turns out to be part of the trick, and our hapless magician’s world is turning around.  When performing his tricks, “Chimay” is the word he uses instead of abracadabra, hence the film’s title.

This is a delightfully goofy little film, with quiet emotional moments as well as completely off-the-wall theatrics.  It was my choice for the Oscar for best live-action short film, but did not win.

Give this 22 minutes, if possible.

March 1, 2010:  Miracle Fish

Unfortunately, Miracle Fish has been deteriorating in my memory since I saw it, which is a shame since at the time, aside from a few points, I thought it was pretty good.

Miracle Fish is an Australian live-action short-film Oscar nominee for 2009, running about 17 minutes.  Walking a fine line between clarifying itself as either real or a dream, it starts out innocently enough with a mother dropping off her son at school, but quickly veers into mystical territory as the boy wakes from a nap in the nurse’s office and finds the school deserted.

Despite initially thinking that alien abduction is to blame, after quite some time during which he enjoys some fun and games in the empty halls, the boy eventually learns that the school is deserted because there’s a crazy gunman running loose.  Using the titular cheap plastic cellophane “miracle” fish the boy had received earlier that day from his mother as a birthday gift, he accurately predicts the demise of the gunman, in a climax which will scar the boy for life, and possibly some viewers as well.

The film is generally very quiet, which is a gutsy technique in general but can be more easily made to work in short film territory.  Perhaps it was the slow start, or the lack of clarity around what the film was about, which left me cold.  However, there’s still plenty to experience here, and the Oscar nomination was well deserved.

Strange mix of magic and reality.

March 1, 2010:  Kavi

For the first time, my local movie theatres were showing all of the Oscar nominated short films before the Oscar show.  They packaged up all of the live-action shorts on one night, and the animated ones on another night, in the week leading up to March 7.  This was of course a mixed blessing since it would mean 10 more reviews I’d have to write, but I’ve long been fascinated by these categories and have only rarely managed to see one or two of the nominated shorts, typically one of the animated ones tacked onto the start of a Disney or Pixar film.  So for approximately the next 10 reviews, I will experiment with reviewing styles for short films, determining whether they really deserve only a paragraph or two each, or if they need to be more complex than that.  I’ve decided that for the most part, it’s OK to spoil the films since most readers will not be seeing them and will get more out of the reviews if they know more about the story.

Kavi is a live-action short from India, running about 19 minutes.  Kavi is a child worker in India, manufacturing mud bricks, and at first we see a boss treating him like one of his prized employees and a very fast worker.  It quickly becomes known that Kavi’s father owes money to the brickmaker, making him effectively a modern-day slave who is forced to work off his debt.  Kavi is also made to work and his father can do nothing about it, and although the boss is typically pleasant with Kavi, there is ferocious punishment if he gets out of line, for example falling behind in his work or leaving the compound.  During one such departure, Kavi encounters a couple of well-dressed but seemingly suspicious guys in the nearby woods who offer him a drink.  He reluctantly accepts, and gets in trouble upon his return.

Kavi wants to go to school, and to play cricket.  These seem like modest and achievable goals.  If only he knew.

Eventually, social workers raid the brick “factory”, and they turn out to be the same guys Kavi encountered in the woods.  The boss, anticipating this, has already sent away most of the slaves to hide them somewhere, and Kavi remains the only one, locked up inside a hut.  When he escapes, he is given the choice to go with the social workers, under the boss’ threat that he’ll never see his parents again.  Kavi makes his choice.

At the close of the film, we are reminded that 27 million people live in modern-day slavery.  This is a heartbreaking statistic, and the film illustrates all too well how easy it is for this to happen in areas of the world which don’t have strong civil rights and anti-corruption laws and culture in place.  Kavi achieves its goal of personalizing the pain, and needs fewer than 20 minutes to do so.

Lots of pain in little time.

February 28, 2010:  Un Prophète

I feel like I want to say so much about Un Prophète, and yet I know that I shouldn’t.  This Cannes grand jury prize winner from last year is a complex and violent 2.5-hour tale which never lets up for a minute through its run time, brilliantly depicting a young man’s journey through the gangster underworld of France.

Starting out in prison as he commences a 6-year sentence, Malik is clearly vulnerable and lost.  Quickly taken in by the Corsican contingent despite his arab roots, Malik diligently works for them doing menial jobs, and proves his allegiance through a brutal and fitfully planned murder of one of the other inmates, whose ghost continues to haunt and advise him through the rest of the film.  Malik grows to be trusted by the Corsican ringleader, moreso after several of the Corsican gang are released unexpectedly due to political wrangling in the outside world, leaving the boss with a decidedly smaller entourage.  Malik continues to deliberately appear dumb and out of the loop, when in reality almost everyone he talks to provides additional information or opportunities, and he quickly progresses to a position of significant underworld power both inside and outside the prison.

There’s violence where there needs to be violence, but this is much more about the mind games and the risky but sometimes rewarding strategies chosen by each individual.  Malik has a compelling and charismatic personality, and is clearly very smart, and it’s unfortunate that he had to go to prison in order to live up to his potential.  He is an almost uncanny judge of character, which is what earns him the prophet nickname, but I felt that this near-mystical element was underplayed and didn’t quite fit in the grounded story.

Un Prophète is a relentless experience, and absolutely justified as France’s entry for Oscar consideration in the foreign-language film category, in which it was nominated but did not win, although it was my top choice.  I won’t spoil any more of the story for anyone up for a viewing of this rewarding film.

Tough but also intelligent crime drama.

February 26, 2010:  Nine

This film, Nine, had a bunch of strikes against it by the time I’d merely seen the poster.  Director Rob Marshall was the man behind Chicago, Best Picture winner for 2002 and the movie I had to accept as an Oscar-winning musical in order to get it out of Hollywood’s system so they could get back to letting real movies win awards.  Penelope Cruz is heavily featured here, and while I can’t quite put my finger on why, I’m most definitely not a fan of hers.  And an ensemble cast of questionable coherence, including none other than the annoying Sophia Loren, made me dread having to see Nine when it got its inevitable Oscar nominations.  It ended up with four – Supporting Actress for Penelope Cruz, an original song, and Art Direction and Costume Design.

The tone and look are similar to Chicago.  The music is OK, and the production design and costumes are impressive enough as per the nominations, although one could easily make the opposite argument and say that the music is uninventive and the sets are just a bunch of scaffolding.  But the story carries some extra level of interest for me, as it centres around a filmmaker, played by two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, a Fellini-esque character who is struggling to make his next film.  The film, as it turns out, has been greenlighted based on the past success of the director and is actively casting and searching for locations, but in fact it hasn’t been written at all.  Nine boils down to being a love letter to the aesthetic of Italian cinema, and I have to respect that.

Of course, when we add Cruz and her usual exotic “overdramatics”, Nicole Kidman spouting a terrible Italian accent, people breaking into song for no reason (which tends to be a real sticking point with me, Grease notwithstanding), and a broadly-drawn wife-mistress conflict subplot, and the movie starts to seem a bit scattered and lose me.  OK, I get it, I know what the movie is about, now let’s get on with it!  I could easily have never seen this movie, and it doesn’t even have the story depth or coherence of a more fully-developed musical such as, I hate to admit it, Chicago.

Even a musical about movies disappoints.