Day 3, Spend Your Weekend at AFI FEST!

We’re starting our first and only weekend of screenings for AFI FEST 2012, so come to Hollywood and spend the next couple of days seeing free films from around the world.

Tonight’s Gala is ON THE ROAD, in which director Walter Salles gives Jack Kerouac’s coming of age novel new life with a screen adaptation that burns brightly and boldly.

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
6925 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90028

Media check-in: 5:30 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 7:15 p.m.
Program begins: 8:00 p.m.

We’re also offering no less than three Special Screenings today:

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE is Ken Burns’ documentary about a group of teenagers who were forced to give false confessions and were wrongfully convicted for raping and beating New York City jogger Trisha Meili.

Media check-in: 2:30 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 3:00 p.m.
Program begins: 3:30 p.m.

HOLY MOTORS, director Léos Carax’s visionary film in which Denis Lavant plays a shadowy figure who inhabits many roles.

Media check-in: 5:30 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 6:15 p.m.
Program begins: 7:00 p.m. (at the Egyptian Theatre)

WEST OF MEMPHIS casts a light on the brutal murder of three young boys and the 18-year struggle to exonerate the teenagers convicted of the crime.

Media check-in: 5:30 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 6:15 p.m.
Program begins: 7:15 p.m. (at the Egyptian Theatre)

Expected to appear: ON THE ROAD (Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Walter Salles, Roman Coppola, Charles Gillibert, Rebecca Yeldham, Jose Rivera, Danny Glicker and Gustavo Santoalalla); THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE (Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, Sarah Burns, Ken Burns and David McMahon); HOLY MOTORS (Eva Mendes, Léos Carax); WEST OF MEMPHIS (Amy Berg, Billy McMilin, Lake Bell, David Byrne, Matthew Cooke, Anthony Hines, Lucinda Williams and Rebel Wilson); ALL THE LIGHT IN THE SKY (Jane Adams, Sophia Takal, Kent Osborne, Lindsay Burdge, David Siskind and Adam Donaghey); LAURENCE ANYWAYS (Suzanne Clément and Melvil Poupaud ); and ABCs OF DEATH (Adam Wingard, Adrian Garcia Bogliano, Simon Barrett, Jon Schnepp, Marcel Sarmiento and Jason Eisener).

3 November 1 Permalink

Mike Ott on Survival and Escape

PEARBLOSSOM HWY
11/04/12 - Chinese 6, 7:00 p.m.
11/07/12 - Chinese 1, 1:45 p.m.

By Katie Datko

On a map, the real Pearblossom Highway looks kind of like a scar bisecting northern LA County, a jagged stretch of mostly two-lane highway heading from the suburbs just north of LA east to the high desert. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that PEARBLOSSOM HWY, Mike Ott’s follow-up feature to his multiple award-winning indie film festival sensation LiTTLEROCK (which played at AFI FEST 2010 and won the Audience Award) is about wounds — specifically, the need to heal the fractures caused by denial or neglect and the longing for belonging and acceptance.

Partly based on the real lives of the main characters, Cory (Cory Zacharia) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), PEARBLOSSOM HWY is a humanistic yet barbed tale, darker and in many ways more poignant than its predecessor. The characters may be familiar to Ott fans, but both Cory and Atsuko have been given new back-stories. Cory is an unemployed whippet-huffing, orphaned rockstar-wannabe who longs to make it on reality TV. Atskuo, Cory’s friend and videographer who’s also an urchin of sorts, has been sent by her Japanese grandmother to live in Antelope Valley with her uncle’s family while trying to pass the U.S. citizenship test.

In PEARBLOSSOM HWY, Ott pushes the envelope on all levels. The intertwining narrative threads of the two main characters’ rites of passage mirror each other: Cory makes tapes for his TV show audition and manages to reconnect with his older brother, Jeff (John Brotherton); Atsuko raises money to go back to Japan to visit her ailing grandmother the only way she knows how — by selling herself — becoming increasingly more detached as the film progresses.

It might seem as though Cory’s story is front and center, but it’s really Atsuko’s journey that commands the viewer’s attention. Even though it’s unnerving on many levels, we get a clear sense of her slow unraveling — framed through mirrors, windows and montages of highways and truck stops. Atsuko’s first scene with a Japanese client shows her standing against a curtained window, her client’s voice off-screen. While she may seem childlike and innocent, she nevertheless stands her ground, asserts herself and, interestingly, speaks back to him not as a coy, deferential call girl, but using an informal, familiar tone. Even though Atsuko’s image becomes increasingly refracted, it is through her language that she seems to hold onto her sense of ‘self.’

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3 November 4 Permalink

A Meditative and Engrossing Vision

LEVIATHAN
11/04/12 - Chinese 2, 7:15 p.m.

By Brad Franklin 

LEVIATHAN is a film that is both unique and indefinable. It is easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. It is not a typical documentary. Its subject is commercial fishing off the New Bedford Coast of Massachusetts, but it does not treat its subject as a documentary would. There is no narration. There is no (discernible) dialogue. The only non-visual communication between the filmmakers and the viewer is a biblical quote from Job (made ominous with a scary font) that elucidates the film’s title and an endnote honoring the countless vessels and crew lost in the very waters where they filmed. These are not negatives. These stylistic choices are what make the film a truly immersive experience in a way that no IMAX documentary could.

In essence, it’s a visual diary portrayed in hyper-realistic terms. The directors employ an essentially raw form of filmmaking by simply shooting the environment of a fishing vessel with cameras placed at impossible-seeming angles from improbable perspectives, leaving their intent equivocal. Sharp cuts interrupt uncommonly long scenes that encourage the viewer to absorb the full spectrum of emotion and information that the camera captures, which involve all facets of life and death on the boat. The camera is not passive; it is always interfacing with what it’s shooting. A single scene can illuminate the brutal and transient nature of life, and evoke awe and wonder at the glory of creation.

Despite its raw, HD video aesthetic, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (SWEETGRASS, AFI FEST 2009) and Véréna Paravel (FOREIGN PARTS) have crafted a beautiful and arresting record of modern life at sea. LEVIATHAN presents a common-seeming vocation as an encounter with the sublime. This is complemented with an artful eye toward edits. It is not always clear if an edit has been made, if the camera jumped or if something in the environment changed. When a clear cut does come along, you are usually transported to a completely different sphere of life on the boat, which is always jarring yet is part of the mechanism that keeps the film truly engaging throughout.

Most shots are extremely intimate, as the camera has no regard for personal space. It pushes in uncomfortably close to the fishermen’s faces and stays there, watching. It is literally left to languish on the deck with the dead or dying fish and is lowered down into the sea as it is passed between ships. Often, shots are upside down or so dark they are indecipherable, but this does not detract from the potency of the atmosphere; it creates it. Certain shots transcend their initial surface quality and take on a foreboding, almost frightening tension, partly due to the lack of a guiding voice, but also because of their length. In this way, LEVIATHAN stands with the QATSI trilogy in its meditative and engrossing stream-of-consciousness staring, albeit limited to the realm of commercial fishing.

If LEVIATHAN does have a thesis, it’s that documentary filmmaking needs neither narrative, identifiable characters or a clear message to engage an audience, as these things are discoverable without guidance.  

Brad Franklin is a writer based in Los Angeles.

3 November 1 Permalink

A Drama of Restraint

BARBARA
11/04/12 - Egyptian, 6:15 p.m.
11/07/12 - Egyptian, 4:00 p.m.  

By Brad Franklin

Set in the German Democratic Republic in the ’80s, BARBARA begins with the struggle of the titular character’s (Nina Hoss) attempt to exit the misery of provincial life-in-exile. Shipped off to a small country hospital for applying for a visa to move west, Barbara maintains a formal manner and keeps to herself as she bides her time, waiting to escape. However, the kindness of her colleague, Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), begins to warm her, creating a conflict between her present and future lives. As the film develops, it becomes less and less likely that Barbara will find the escape she seeks.

Though not a thriller in the traditional sense, BARBARA delivers a sustained tension as the plot unfurls. The narrative is not heavy-handed; instead, it builds the story around the action. Back-story and character motivation fall into place quietly without distracting from the thrust of the narrative. Who she is, how she came to be desperate to escape and who the strange men are that come to her apartment to abuse her all become clear without direct explanations.

Hoss delivers a great performance that is remarkably restrained. You can feel the conflict in Barbara and the anxiety behind her stiff facade (particularly in regards to those who can hurt her) but with her patients, she shows a remarkable, almost uncharacteristic depth of compassion.

Zehrfeld’s Andre draws out this side of her further through his own empathy and shy, yet open, longing for her. His performance brings vibrancy to an otherwise tedious world — by design, as many of the characters have little to be chipper about. Mirroring Barbara’s character, the film itself never becomes too sincere or sentimental. When any scene might become trite or romantic, it retreats and reverts to its previous dispassionate alignment or “apologizes” for its indulgence, generating tension and creating an atmosphere of dulled, remorseful pleasure.

The story serves to paint a fairly accurate picture of life in the GDR. The director/screenwriter (Christian Petzold) has a personal connection to the period and locale, and he made sure to maintain strict attention to detail, going so far as to ensure that the clothing was factually from the period. Everything is vintage; no reproductions were used. He wanted to be sure everything looked, worked (or didn’t work) and moved as it would have during that time. 

BARBARA won the Best Director Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and will be Germany’s entry for Foreign Language Film at next year’s Oscars®.

Brad Franklin is a writer based in Los Angeles.

2 November Permalink

SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME

After Max discovers his ex-wife in bed with another man, he capriciously marries again, the disastrous cycle repeating itself perfectly. As he traipses through life trying to navigate love, friendship with his co-worker and business partner and the turbulent business world, Max clings to the suitcase, which might just possibly contain his personal fountain of youth.

Director Bob Byington is at the top of his comedic game in his latest film SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME, crafting memorable characters with a first-rate acting ensemble, including Megan Mullally, Nick Offerman, Keith Poulson and Jess Weixler.

Bob Byington and actor Nick Offerman will be at the Saturday screening for a Q & A. Screening on Saturday 11/3 at 7:15 pm and Monday 11/5 at 1:45 pm.

Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hptxBJLUWz4

Get free tickets: http://afifest.afi.com/sections/SOMEBODY-UP-THERE-LIKES-ME#.UJRjEM3UOSI

2 November 1 Permalink