Film Articles

All too often, doe-eyes from across a room stand in for a credible romantic spark, and it’s only because we have to accept that two characters are in love that we indulge shallow characterizations. For plot’s sake, of course. But the cleverness of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day lies in its being both romantic and comic without obviously falling into the romantic comedy genre trap.

Denmark isn’t Denmark in this adaptation of Hamlet, directed by Alexander Fodor and co-written with Emeke Nwokedi. It’s a child of low-budget necessity set in a room above a pub, door-lined corridors and the odd outdoor settings. The film could have been a theatrical production filmed in someone’s apartment complex or basement. But low-budget isn’t a liability to Fodor, who does the only sensible thing: he makes an art film. Denmark, through Diego Indraccolo overexposed (occasionally unstable) cinematography, inverted colours, and other avant-garde rock-video tricks, takes the ordinary and makes it hallucinatory. It’s as if we’re watching the drama unfold in a kind of timeless, spaceless limbo, a purgatory in which mundane places become haunted spaces with the characters serving as ghosts enacting tragedy in a kind of eternal recurrence. Recalling, at least in the broad strokes, Lars Von Trier’s “Dogville” experiment in which the sets consisted of lines on the floor, the lack of conventionally identifiable locations in Fodor’s Hamlet creates a tingly feeling of claustrophobia and otherworldliness. The drama’s the thing; everything else is supernatural.

Writer/director Ruvin Orbach lands a solid punch in thirty minutes, despite the undefined feeling of deja-vu that comes with circumstances surrounding the moral quandary faced by two brothers entangled with the mob.

Imagine the genie from Disney’s Aladdin as an elephant voiced by Jim Carrey, and that pretty much says it all about the kind of pop-culture humour that laces the film.

Get a sneak preview of upcoming movies and exciting discussions with stars and filmmakers through Stephen Farber's REEL Talk. Series starts on March 10th.

When independent filmmaker Timothy Vanderberg described the film he sent me for review, “4th and Long,” as a comedy about football fans trying to save their hometown team, I thought to myself, “Self, you can’t stand football… What the heck kind of chance does this film have of getting a fair review?” To make matters worse, I went back to some of the indie films I reviewed while still a baby film critic and, given their – how shall I put it? – inadequacies, another worry popped into my mind. What on earth would I write if I didn’t enjoy the film? It’s one thing to take shots at studio films; putting down an indie film feels like an act on a par with punting puppies. I had visions of writing diplomatic meta-critiques. Surely I’d have to discuss film theory. At the least, I’d have to examine differences in cinematic standards between big-budget Hollywood films and low-budget independent films. The point is: I fretted.

It’s tempting to view art, in whatever form it takes, with skepticism, to dig up the bones of Dadaists long gone and point out art’s failure as a force for social transformation. And with good reason: Art, indeed, has failed. For all the poets waxing poetic about poetry, writers proclaiming the power of the novel, painters exulting new visions, film critics singing the praises of cinema – for all that, art still hasn’t succeeded in saving us from the worst in ourselves. How many war films are there? War novels? War poems? In this beginning of the 21st century, we have more access to art communicating, representing and illustrating the horrors of war than ever. Yet we have Iraq. We have Israel and Palestine.

Review: “­National Treasure: Book of Secrets”

Like both sides of a frosted mini-wheat in an argument, Fred and Erik discuss the merits of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”

Fred: I see “National Treasure: Book of Secrets” scored 35 percent at Rotten Tomatoes.

Erik: Probably for the same reasons the first one scored 41 percent. But so what? I really liked it. I had a good time.

Fred: Really?

Erik: Yeah! You didn’t?

Like both sides of a frosted mini-wheat in an argument, Fred and Erik discuss the merits of “National Treasure: Book of Secrets.”

Review: The Orphanage

Warning! The following may contain spoilers…

“The Orphanage” is very much a traditional ghost story with traditional elements of the genre: A large, gloomy house with plenty of nooks, crannies, creaks and groans; a narrative structure founded on a mystery to be solved, namely, discovering the violent, traumatic event underlying the ghostly activity; a child sensitive to the presence of ghosts; and others. It is actually in some of these other elements that the film’s function as a ghost story critically compromises itself.