SFF Selections 2014: Richard Ayoade's "The Double"

The Double * * * ½

     IT Crowd actor turned film-maker Richard Ayoade turns in his second directorial effort on the heels of official SFF selection Submarine's success with his deadpan Dostoevsky-inspired The Double. Jesse Eisenberg's Simon is easily the least noticed man on the planet. Working at quite possibly the worst-lit office of all time doing nondescript clerical work (either Tim Burton or a '40s-era private-eye seem primed to pop out of a cubicle at any given moment), in one scene he looks at a photograph of company-head "The Colonel" and it's notable that there's actually a reflection in the frame's glass. His own mother can't even pick him out in a television ad for his company, asking, "Which one was you?" Befuddled at how to reply, Simon bumbles, "I'm me!"

SFF Selections 2014: "The Congress"

The Congress * * * ½

     Having meticulously replicated the Wright-brothers' flying machines, real actress Robin Wright's fictitious son of The Congress brags, "I build in the world of jet planes and space ships." He is a living master in a dying field. Less a master of her own skill-set due to the "lousy choices" her agent incessantly references, the Robin Wright of The Congress is also in a dying field: acting. In the first of two scenes in which Wright's agent Al addresses her with a monologue -the camera transfixed as her face reacts (like in Birth's timeless long take or the newly minted classic shot of Chiwetel Ejiofor in 12 Years A Slave), Wright's eyes silently expel tears as Al (a world-weary Harvey Keitel) says that the studio has only one more last chance to offer. This last chance is "scanning": the studio systems assumption that all actors are driven by money rather than artistry.

SFF Selections 2014: "Mood Indigo" -All Style, No Substance

     Friday the 4th, Rory Kennedy's doc Last Days In Vietnam opened 2014's Sarasota Film Festival. Having skipped this year's opening night film, my interaction with this year's fest began last night at 6:00PM with the first of the 31 films/events that make up my itinerary. Up until this post's publishing, Rodney&Roger devotees may have noticed the blog's longest hiatus from regular postings in years...

From Wordy to Wordless, J.C. Chandor's Minimalist "All Is Lost"

All Is Lost * * *

     All Is Lost is a singular story, simple, told well, and in the present. It compounds a series of losses, all disastrous in their immediacy but salvage-able in their wake. As the poet Bishop wrote, "The art of losing isn't hard to master." Spare words and a plot transpiring entirely in the now characterize the film's every moment beyond the "8 days earlier" title screen that follows it's inconsistent antithetical out-of-sequence opening where Robert Redford's voice is heard reading a letter to his loved ones. Then the inciting incident where a cargo crate's rough corner slices open a hole in Redford's sailing vessel plays out in real time. He calmly anchors the crate to pry it out of the boat, deftly maneuvers the boat to lift its gouge above water, and expertly begins repairs with a glue compound and a paintbrush.

SFF Selections 2013: "Red Velvet" Review & My Interview With Director Aude Cuenod

Red Velvet * * * *

   

     With the popularity of film's like Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive or Christopher Nolan's... well anything, the "film-noir" is cinematically in vogue. A staple of all great noir conspicuously absent from many "neo-noirs" of late is the femme fatal: the beautiful, mysterious, powerful woman who lets noir's men think they hold a good set of cards when she in fact holds the whole deck. With DePalma-esque eroticism, Aude Cuenod's masterful genre short Red Velvet not only finds noir's seemingly lost femme fatale, but its small cast of essentially three is almost entirely made up of women (subverting the genre's archaic gender dynamics in much the same way the Wachowski's Bound did).