The Killer Inside Me

Based on a book by Jim Thomson (which I've heard are hard to adapt), this film stars Casey Affleck as a small town Texas deputy, Lou Ford, who is asked by a local big wig/construction businessman (Ned Beatty) to run a prostitute Joyce (Jessica Alba, she doesn't get to do much except be a coquette) out of town.  This meeting between Ford and the woman starts a chain of events that lead to his dark side being exposed, jeopardizing not only his standing in town but also the lives of several people connected to him.

The businessman thinks Joyce is a bad influence on his son since they plan on marrying--she's not marriage material and perhaps she is a golddigger too. Ford, looked on by the town as a sympathetic lawman who takes the time to help them, initially approaches her with that in mind.  But as in film noir stories, lawmen are pretty hard and unsympathetic with used women.  Joyce refuses his "help" and a physical altercation between them turns into a sexual encounter. This incident brings out Ford's latent and long-standing sadism.

Another thorn in Ford's side is his girlfriend Amy (Kate Hudson) who is a little shrewish and possessive. When she accuses him of running around with Joyce, it forces his hand and he blurts out it is she, Amy, he wants to marry instead, something we know he really doesn't want. Other events, some of Ford's making, combine to force his hand yet again as one murder turns into two, two into another. Slowly the town gets an inkling that the mild-mannered and helpful deputy is not as he seems. Co-stars include Elias Koteas as a labor unionizer (he gets the most acting to do among the supporting cast, outside of Alba and Hudson), Bill Pullman as a loud lawyer, Simon Baker as the local lawyer.

Free event: Soog

The Chicago Public Libary has a bunch of films this fall in their Global Lens series.  First up is Soog (Mourning), which comes from Iran.  A couple leaves home but their son is left behind in the care of a deaf couple who don't tell him the entire truth.  You can see that this concept is depicted by the promotional poster.


Soog
Thursday, November 2, 2012
6:00 p.m.
Harold Washington Library Center
Cindy Pritzker Auditorium
400 S. State Street

Hammett

This is a decent but fictional story about Dashiell Hammett, played here by Frederick Forrest. Directed by Wim Wenders, but was revamped and partly reshot by Francis Ford Coppola (although FFC picked WW to direct this, I think there was eventually some conflict between them).

In San Francisco in the time of his mystery novels, Hammett here is a writer who has just about finished his next book, where he imagines people from his real life as characters. But his manuscript is stolen, so while on the trail of it, he comes across organized crime in San Francisco's Chinatown that is linked to several powerful men in the city.

Past seven days

The Fest has wound down, with several Best of the Fest selections being offered today.

Antiviral
Caesar Must Die
Cineyouth
Color of Sky
Consuming Spirits
David Robinson's Silent Surprises
Dreams for Sale
Frankenweenie
F*load of Scotchtape
Germania
Kuma
Looper
Night Across the Street
Paranormal Activity 4
The Scapegoat
Shorts Program 2: Animation: Blurring the Lines
Shorts Program 3: Midnight Mayhem
Shorts Program 7: Chaos Theory
Sinister

Past seven days

Took in nine movies in my first (half) week of the Chicago International Film Festival. Still groggy from the After Dark screenings.  Also managed to fit in the new film Argo as well as a coupple DVDs.

Argo
The Art of Conflict
The Bella Vista
Black Pond
Cinema Paradiso
The Citadel
The Cleaner
Dragon
The Exam
Miss Potter
Of Snails and Men
Sleep Tight

CIFF 2012: Sleep Tight

This Spanish horror thriller takes place in an apartment building, and focuses on the live-in concierge Cesar who works there during the day. He seems friendly and helpful enough and caters to his tenants' needs and whims. But we see his dark side at night--he hides in the apartment of a beautiful tenant, Clara, drugs her so she won't wake up, then lies beside her all night, waking in time to leave and pretend life is normal.

Although at first we are led by his actions and narrating dialogue to believe he is a typical stalker, this is not exactly (or not initially) about sex. Cesar is depressed, to the point where he cannot stand that Clara always has a smile on her face. His vendetta against her to is to make her as unhappy as he is.

Cesar's actions against Clara get more and more extreme. He injects chemicals into her lotions to cause a rash. He infests her apartment with bugs. In one scene he is almost caught by Clara's boyfriend. Later we come to know that Cesar has sexually violated Clara without her knowledge.

We see that the neighbor kid across the hall has seen some of this illicit behavior and has been blackmailing Cesar. A curmudgeon tenant has looked into Cesar's past and discovered he has never been able to keep a job, suggesting to us that Cesar has done this many times before. Cesar frames the cleaning lady's son when the police discover the stalker letters. All this causes Cesar to contemplate suicide.

CIFF 2012: Dragon

As you can tell from the title, this is a Chinese martial arts movie. It also has veins of a police procedural as well as a Western.

It is the late 1910s in a Chinese village.  The action starts when two hoodlums extort money from a merchant. A papermaker, Jinxi (Donnie Yen), at first cowers and hides as the hoodlums attack the defenseless merchant, but when Jinxi can stand it no longer, he reveals himself. Through a lot of apparent good luck, he manages to kill the two thugs.

A young policeman Baiju (Takeshi Kaneshiro) has been sent out to investigate this crime. Jinxi is seen as an accidental hero but due to Baiju's personal knowledge of Chinese Qi knowledge (accupuncture and accupressure and things like that), he is able to view the evidence and surmise that the deaths of the thugs were not strokes of good luck, but due to Jinxi's expert knowledge of where to hit someone to cause them to have anuerisms and the like. This knowledge of course seems too advanced for a humble papermaker, and Baiju, through his investigation, finds out Jinxi is actually the son of a noted mobhead; it seems Jinxi was unable to live the cruel life his father wanted and left to be a simple man.

Since the time he left home, Jinxi had met and married a woman with two children whose husband has abandoned her, and by taking her family name, was able to live under the radar for a while. But due to Baiju's desire to follow the letter of the law, Jinxi's identity has been exposed, bringing the wrath of his father onto his new family.

CIFF 2012: Of Snails and Men

This Romanian film taking place in the 1990s follows a popular movie theme--laborers at a government-run auto plant face potential shutdown. The factory is being bought and privatised by a French company that plans to make it into a snail cannery. It only intends to rehire 300 employees, leaving a couple thousand out of a job.

One of the guys, Gica, sees an ad for sperm donation, and rallies the guys to take this opportunity to raise enough money to buy the factory themselves. The husband and father Gica is also having an affair with the staff secretary Manuela, but she is taken with the son of the French businessman, thus giving the story more complexity.

When Gica and his coworkers try their wacko plan, it does not turn out well and in fact is not successful at all. Manuela, as in many of these types of stories, at first is played just as a sex object, but the story gives her character more backstory and rounds her out, and even gives her character integrity as when she hears Gica intends to stay with his wife, she still decides to help him against the French.

CIFF 2012: The Citadel

In an unnamed desolate Irish neighborhood, a young couple are preparing to leave their condemned public housing high rise. They are looking for a more hopeful future as she is pregnant. As Tommy gets in the elevator to go down, his wife is attacked by some creepy faceless kids in hooded sweatshirts, who seem to want her unborn child. She dies but the baby is saved.

As a result, Tommy has become paranoid and fearful of leaving his new but equally bad public housing apartment. He barricades himself and his baby inside and can barely force himself out to attend therapy sessions to confront his fear and agoraphobia. At his wife's funeral, he meets an angry priest who seems to know something of the creatures who killed his wife. A caring nurse tries to help Tommy.

Later the priest reveals that the creatures are people who have been infected by the evil of the high rise, turning into zombie-ish creatures who prey on those on whom they smell fear. With the help of a blind boy, who appears to be one of those creatures but has been helping the priest, they are shielded from the blind creatures' smell and are able to escape.

CIFF 2012: The Exam

This takes place in late 1950s Hungary. A young spy, Andris, is to be tested for his loyalty. He is the type that manages some minor espionage agents, collecting their information as they monitor certain people, and passing on their info to his own handler, Markos. Unknown to Andris, Markos has a team opposite his apartment building, monitoring Andris' moves, tapping his conversations. The exam involves positioning Andris with opportunities to reveal his identity or betray his organization, and seeing if he will take that step to do so.

The story shows us how Markos tries to stay ahead of the action as it moves pretty quickly, taking place over a few days around Christmas. An innocuous test observer turns out to have a more powerful position than he appears, which affects Markos.

CIFF 2012: Black Pond

A mockumentary style movie about a family who was accused of killing a stranger and burying him. As we see in the film, this does not appear to be so. A dysfunctional family of four, parents and two 20-something daughters who live away from home, are interviewed after the fact. An innocuous stranger whom the husband meets is invited to an isolated home for tea, then dinner, then a swim, then to stay the night. The stranger tells a tale about the nearby pond, where he claims a woman died.

The next morning the stranger rushes in to tell them their dog died of an accidental drowning but there is a bit of suspicion that he may have actually killed it.

There is also a male friend of the daughters who is also interviewed and in a twisting of the facts, the family believes he ratted them out and got them arrested. He actually went to a weirdo therapist to help him work out his feelings, as he is in love with both the sisters, who could care less about him. The therapist seems to be the one to have passed on this news and made it public, as the stranger's death was not the family's fault and they, out of respect, only buried him.

The parental couple are also going through their own romantic dissolution, as the wife thinks the husband doesn't understand her. He finds some old poetry of hers which he has never seen, which she eventually admits were cries of help pertaining to suicide.

CIFF 2012: The Art of Conflict

This documentary is about murals in Belfast, Ireland that have depicted the history and volatile emotions surround the hundreds of years of oppression that the Irish, especially those in the Belfast and Ulster regions, have felt under British rule. They depict scenes from the times of William of Orange to fairly current unrest (1980s). Made by Valeri Vaughn, the actor Vince Vaughn's sister, and he narrated.

The artwork (of the more recent unrest) often are paintings off of newspaper photographs, or memoralizations of the dead, whether they were militant rebels or innocent bystanders, or depicted whom they saw as enemies, such as Margaret Thatcher, or heroes, such as Bobby Sands. Depictions of older history show key battle scenes or moments of victory or defeat. Sometimes there are even paintings that show correlations to other civil uprisings, such as the Little Rock, Arkansas/Central High School conflict when schools were desegregated--comparing this to the time when a small group of Irish Protestant grade schoolers had to pass through a heavy Catholic community to get to school, and suffering an attack.

Murals are shown to be done with care, artistry, and maintained with respect (during Q&A the filmmakers and an attending muralist said that although it was unspoken, you would put your life in your hands if you dared deface a painting). Although many of the murals from the 1960-80s show hooded militants defending their turfs, in recent years government intrusion/reform have forced some of these murals to be painted over with new murals showing modern social problems such as drug abuse or things like that. Even though this was a way to try to deflate some of these long-standing emotions, the filmmakers admitted the Irish don't appreciate that the government is forcing this change, as it doesn't really change the emotions of the community.

The film ends in a hopeful note as two artists from opposite sides joined together to paint a version of Picasso's Guernica, an anti-war painting.

Past seven days

Another eclectic week.

Fantomas
The Master of Ballantrae
The Sessions
Seven Psychopaths
The 13th Floor
This Gun for Hire
Who's Afraid of the Devil
Wild Target

Meet: David Robinson

Meet David Robinson, a film critic and director of a niche film festival, the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in Italy.   You should visit the website and read the history about how this festival was formed, it is deserving to be made into a movie itself!

Mr. Robinson appeared at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2011 and I was captivated by the selections of early silent short films he brought with him.  Some links to videos he brought with him are below. 

Cochon Danseur
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2tP9s8y2Ic

Acrobates Japonais (Les Kiri-Kis Acrobates)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6BtCxtni9Y

Those Awful Hats
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Awful_Hats
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORwC7gNyUaY

Chess Fever
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_Fever
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3727820471573567512


You can see that many of these early films had a lot of humor and art, even if it was a new medium then.  I was pleased see he is returning for the 2012 fest and have put his program on my "must-see" calendar.

Half Broken Things

I believe this is a British tv film. A professional housesitter, Jean (Penelope Wilton), takes her final job, as due to her advancing age her employer can no longer afford to insure her for the business. Jean is still a professional, but we see she has inner anger about this.

Her final job is at a country manor while the owners are on a summer holiday, only being allowed to live in a few rooms in the large manor. Although she has been professional in the past, she starts feeling resentful of her situation, both the pending loss of her job as well as resentment of having to always work for rich people who don't tend to value her; when she finds a jar of keys to the other rooms, she takes it upon herself unlock them and to live throughout the house, snooping into things, wearing the owner’s clothes, tearing up their pictures—it’s as if she believes she is owed a better life by the world.

Meanwhile two other characters are introduced. Michael (Daniel Mays), a young man who is in some financial and perhaps criminal trouble, steals some religious objects to sell. He has some experience of antiques so he knows what to steal, and is adept at pretending to be someone he is not. He is nearly caught so goes on the lam. Steph (Sinead Matthews), a very pregnant young woman, escapes an abusive boyfriend and chances on Michael’s sympathies. They both happen on the manor Jean is living at, and she keeps up her fake story of being the owner until Michael susses her out. Once he does though, Jean finds it easier (and convenient) to confide in them, and to let Michael sell the owner’s things so they have money to pay for the upkeep of their living quarters, since she has no budget of her own. The three start living together as a sort of family. But as expected their touch and go existence is jeopardized—Michael is recognized as a thief; Steph steals a baby. Meanwhile, Jean abets this behavior, even justifying it.

Past seven days

A couple interesting film related events this week.

Chinese Take-away
Robot & Frank
Snow White

Robot & Frank

This story is about an aging man who is refusing to acknowledge the problems of his advancing age, at the same time those around him are not connecting to his frustrations about being independent while growing old.

Frank (Frank Langella) lives alone but his children, especially his son Hunter (James Marsden), feel that his growing forgetfulness needs to be monitored full time.  Despite Frank's stubbornness, Hunter insists on providing a helper robot to live with Frank, to perform housework and monitor his health signs, and thus hopefully giving them (Frank and son) some independence from each other.  Frank will get less nagging from his kids to live healthier, and Hunter will be able to devote more time to his own family rather than his father, who lives far from him.

As expected Frank initially does not take kindly to the robot.  Frank longs to stay in the past, which is shown in the sorts of forgetful memories he has--a favorite restaurant has closed down years ago, and son Hunter is no longer a student at Princeton.  Frank also has a sparkly eye on the local librarian (Susan Sarandon), but the library too is being infiltrated by machines, so much so that the library is being digitized and old books are being gotten rid of.

Frank discovers the robot (voice by Peter Sarsgard) does not have any moral limitations, so he teaches it how to pick locks and rob things, a quasi secret from Frank's past.  This leads to suspicion of Frank when jewels go missing, and he begins to see how he and the robot have a lot in common--essentially, the risk of wiping the robot's memory since it has recorded all of Frank's movements--Frank equates this to his own increasing memory loss.