Dead Europe: Melbourne Review

MELBOURNE -- Australian director Tony Krawitzs debut feature, adapted from compatriot Christos Tsiolkas ambitious and disturbing third novel, is a riddle wrapped in ugliness and shrouded in spite. A morose mood piece tracing a young Greek-Australian mans ill-fated return to his ancestral homeland, Dead Europes impenetrable narrative and dogged bleakness make it a decidedly uncommercial prospect.

It is, however, proficiently made, and festival audiences will find plenty of big themes -- history, guilt, poverty, migration and entrenched bigotry, among them -- to chew on. Following its screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Australian-English production heads to Toronto next month to screen in the Contemporary World Cinema program, and further festival play is a given.

Isaac (Ewen Leslie, star of Krawitzs 2005 short Jewboy) is a gayart photographer heading to Athens for a gallery exhibition of his work. His father, Vassili (William Zappa), a former Communist Party member, reacts violently to news of Isaacs planned trip abroad, eating a fistful of dirt before driving off in his car at a suicidal speed. It is after Vassili dies in a subsequent car crash and Isaac voices his desire to take his ashes back to his Greek birthplace that he learns of a family curse.

Hell is for Jews and Muslims, his mother (Eugenia Fragos) announces at this point, flagging a deep anti-Semitic stain that seeps through the film, sporadically given voice by characters seemingly created for this sole purpose.

Dead Europe is the latest in a line of Tsiolkas novels adapted for the screen, the most successful being the popular and critically acclaimed 2011 television series The Slap. Scripter Louise Fox here wrestles the complexities of what is arguably his knottiest storyline, one that skips across time and embraces supernatural elements, into a frustratingly obscure, trancelike narrative. It is difficult to follow.

Emotionally distant as he engages in random sex and drug-taking, Isaac drifts through an unsightly Europe, a cemetery of ghosts and dark secrets, peopled by wary, hostile observers. In Athens, he unwittingly awakens a phantom in the form of a young Jewish boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee of The Road) who appears to him intermittently thereafter, a symbol of the dark secret from his fathers past.

A creeping horror pervades the film as the story moves -- artificially, it must be said -- from Athens and the mountains of Greece, through Paris to Budapest, where Isaac tracks down his estranged older brother, Nico (a typically excellent Marton Csokas), now a junkie working in the porn industry.

Tsolkias view of Europe, embraced here by Krawitz, is of an irredeemably bleak continent full of racism, criminal activity and political apathy. Drug addicts and pimps, people smugglers and prostitutes merge into one incoherent blast of nihilism.

Wan, sickly lighting, Jed Kurzels troubling, bass-heavy score and restless camerawork by cinematographer Germain McMicking set the tone, but in the end mood is all, and its a bummer.

Venue: Melbourne International Film Festival
Production companies: See-Saw Films, Porchlight Films
Cast: Ewen Leslie, Marton Csokas and Kodi Smit-McPhee
Director: Tony Krawitz
Screenwriter: Louise Fox
Producers: Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Liz Watts
Director of photography: Germain McMicking
Production designer: Fiona Crombie
Costume designer: Emily Seresin
Music: Jed Kurzel
Editors: Alexandre De Franceschi, Scott Gray
Sales: Wild Bunch
No rating, 84 minutes

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Somewhere Between: Film Review

Four bright teenage girls represent a generation of intercontinental adoptees in Linda Goldstein Knowlton's Somewhere Between, an affecting look at the wave of children displaced by China's One Child Policy. Full of accessible human drama and likable (if not particularly colorful) characters, the film should benefit from good word-of-mouth among documentary fans and the large pool of families who'll see themselves reflected here.

Bookending the story with her own experience adopting a Chinese infant, Knowlton wisely stays out of the movie otherwise -- though one wonders if she's subconsciously expressing optimism for her own child by selecting four subjects who have coped so well with their situation. It isn't that they're completely without angst -- they speak, occasionally with mild adolescent self-absorption, about conflicted racial identity and the stigma of having been abandoned. But these girls have been well served by the adoption process and can realistically dream of being, say, the first Asian fiddler to play the Grand Ole Opry.

A large chunk of time is spent on how the teens wind up processing emotions about their roots: One, touchingly, becomes attached to a Chinese orphan with cerebral palsy and keeps tabs on her for years as an American family adopts her. Another goes hunting for her birth parents and, rather surprisingly, finds them. The large reunion scene is awkward but less so than one would expect of an encounter in which an adoptive mother asks, "We wanted to know, who actually abandoned her?"

The film's perspective might be intentionally narrow, playing down questions about what motivates the adults on both sides of the equation and completely ignoring larger geopolitical questions. (In another recent documentary, this one focused on escalating Chinese power, an American man who adopted a Chinese girl wonders if he has in fact done her a favor.) But adoptees themselves almost certainly will find Somewhere Between an empowering reminder that tens of thousands of kids have walked this path before.

Production: Ruby Films
Director-producer: Linda Goldstein Knowlton
Executive producers: Bobby Chang, Jon Fitzgerald
Directors of photography: Nelson Hume, Christine Burill
Music: Lili Haydn
Editor: Katie Flint
No rating, 88 minutes.

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Bad Seeds (Comme Un Homme): Film Review

PARIS -- A bizarre amalgam of psychological thriller, family tragedy and Haneke-style teensploitation flick, Bad Seeds (Comme un homme) attempts to be many films at once, but never quite flowers into a credible whole. Nonetheless, this relatively intriguing and well-realized effort from genre-jumping director Safy Nebbou (Dumas, Mark of an Angel) has enough appeal to warrant minor art house and ancillary play following its mid-August French release.

Adapted from a 1970s novel by Boileau-Narcejac (the duo behind Clouzots Les Diaboliques and Hitchcocks Vertigo), the film stars real life father-son actors Charles Berling (Summer Hours) and Emile Berling (A Christmas Tale) as a high school principal and his wayward teenage son, Louis, who we quickly learn is involved in a rather dubious extracurricular activity: the kidnapping of an English teacher, Camille (Sarah Stern), under the guise of his troubled best buddy, Greg (Kevin Azais).

Bounding, gagging and eventually sequestering their victim in a remote log cabin, the two seem to lack any real motivation (passing mention is made of a previous altercation between Greg and Camille) beyond the desire to do something evil. But just when the film seems to be headed into Funny Games territory, Nebbou and regular co-writer Gilles Taurand switch gears, introducing a backstory involving Louis mother, who we learn died in a car accident a few years prior, casting a shadow of doom and gloom over the household.

When Greg gets in a near-fatal crash on the very same road (talk about coincidences), Louis is left to deal with Camille on his own, and his actions throw a new light on the problematic relationship he shares with his dada man who buries himself in books and Beethoven to avoid the awful truth about his crumbling household.

Its certainly a strange form of family therapy that Les Berlings have chosen to undergo here, but youve got to give them credit for participating and performing quite well in a project as offbeat as this one. Lucky for them, Nebbou has the chops to provide a steady dose of suspense up through the closing act, with Pierre Cottereaus cool widescreen cinematography adding plenty of atmosphere, especially in the misty swamplands where much of the drama plays out.

Where Bad Seeds doesnt quite work is in its constant plot shifts, oscillating between icy adolescent antics and deeper emotional content, to the point that one never quite knows what sort of movie is being played out. But as tweeners go, the tone is stable enough, and the craft solid enough, to make for a laudable attempt at crossing various genre boundaries toward unexplored terrains.

Production companies: Diaphana Films, Samsa Film, Artemis Productions, France 3 Cinema
Cast: Emile Berling, Charles Berling, Sarah Stern, Kevin Azais
Director: Safy Nebbou
Screenwriters: Safy Nebbou, Gilles Taurand, based on the novel Lage bete by Boileau-Narcejac
Producer: Michel Saint-Jean
Director of photography: Pierre Cottereau
Production designer: Cyril Gomez-Mathieu
Music: Jerome Reuter
Costume designer: Magdalena Labuz
Editor: Bernard Sasia
Sales: Memento Films International
No rating, 93 minutes.

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The Apparition: Film Review

Todd Lincoln's suburbia-set ghost flick The Apparition, which involves various fungus-like manifestations of the otherworldly, is in a couple of ways like dealing with a black-mold problem: You have to be a certain kind of person to get very disturbed by it, and once it's over you're quite likely to feel cheated. It may draw in the reliable genre audience on opening weekend, but word-of-mouth won't serve it well.

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Stars Ashley Greene (as Kelly) and Sebastian Stan (Ben) start off on shaky ground, exhibiting no chemistry as a young couple who, moving into a newly built home Kelly's parents own, have nothing more interesting to banter about than trips to Costco.

As they settle into their new digs, though, Lincoln finds his genre groove: Some skimpy (but PG-13-friendly) nightclothes here, some autonomously-moving furniture there -- this new house is so evil it even kills the neighbors' shaggy dog, which must be particularly galling for Kelly, who wants to be a vet.

Eventually we learn this haunting's source: Back in college, Ben and his classmate Patrick (Tom Felton) did some tech-enhanced communing with the ghostly plane and opened -- wait for it -- "a rift between our world and theirs." Once contacted, Patrick brings over all sorts of broadcasting and amplification gear, convinced that playing recordings of the original experiment in reverse will send the baddies back to Purgatory.

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What Patrick's version of Bose Ghost-Canceling technology actually does, though, is shut the movie down. Lincoln's script has no knack for the pacing of cinematic exorcisms, and the truncated climax he does offer is short on action and scares. A stylish credits sequence, unspooled at the picture's end, seems to have received more attention than the story's third act.

Production Companies: Warner Bros., Dark Castle Entertainment
Cast: Ashley Greene, Sebastian Stan, Tom Felton
Director-screenwriter: Todd Lincoln
Producers: Alex Heineman, Todd Lincoln, Andrew Rona, Joel Silver
Executive producers: Daniel Alter, Sue Baden-Powell, Steve Richards
Director of photography: Daniel C. Pearl
Production designer: Steve Saklad
Music: tomandandy
Costume designer: Kimberly Adams-Galligan
Editor: Harold Parker
PG-13, 82 minutes

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The Revenant: Film Review

Combining elements of everything from An American Werewolf in London to Zombieland to Death Wish, D. Kerry Priors horror comedy features the intriguing premise of zombies turned vigilantes. The sort of effort that attracts lots of attention at horror film festivalswhere its been kicking around for three years--and seems specifically designed to achieve cult status, The Revenant ultimately suffers from an uneven execution and repetitive overload. But its hard to totally dismiss a horror film that includes a scene of a disembodied head talking with the help of a vibrating dildo applied to its throat.

The film begins realistically enough, with American soldier Bart (David Anders) falling victim to an ambush while serving in Iraq. His body is shipped home and buried, but he soon rises from the grave and seeks the company of his best friend, Joey (Chris Wylde), a slacker type with a wisecrack for every occasion.

And this occasion certainly prompts plenty of them, as the pair comically tries to deal with the fact that Bart is now a revenant, a sort of combination vampire/zombie whos both undead and has an insatiable thirst for blood. At first they try to satisfy Barts urges by stealing blood from a hospital, but when they stumble on a convenience store robbery and kill the assailant, another solution comes to mind. Theyll roam L.A.s streets at night and do away with bad guys, thereby providing Bart with a steady supply of fresh blood from their victims and solving the citys crime epidemic in the process.

Its a clever gimmick, made more so when Joey also becomes a revenant after one of the duos crime-stopping efforts goes wrong. Reveling in their immortality, they becomes sort of undead superheroes, albeit ones who quickly lose perspective when their literal bloodlust gets the better of them.

Running nearly two hours, the film eventually wears out its welcome, especially in its endless scenes of vigilante-style violence that reveal some uncomfortable racial overtones. But the freewheeling profane banter does display flashes of anarchic wit, and the ultra-gory special effects are extremely impressive despite having been executed on an obviously low budget.

Opens August 24 (Paladin Films)
Production: Putrefactory, Lighting Entertainment
CAST: David Anders, Chris Wylde, Louise Griffiths, Jacy King
Director/screenwriter/editor: D. Kerry Prior
Producers: Liam Finn, D. Kerry Prior, Jacques Thelmaque
Director of photography: Peter Hawkins
Production designer: Thomas William Hallbauer
Costume designer: Charlotte Kruse
Rated R, 110 min.

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Premium Rush: Film Review

An asphalt-action tale as unadorned as the fixed-gear cycle its hero rides, David Koepp's Premium Rush supplies just enough dramatic rationale to set a series of Manhattan bike chases in motion and then follows without pretending it cares much about anything beyond the adrenaline. A quick pace and always-enjoyable lead Joseph Gordon-Levitt will please moviegoers, even if the pic's ticking-clock approach isn't as invigoratingly pulpy here as in the Koepp-penned Snake Eyes and Panic Room.

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Gordon-Levitt plays Wilee, a law student-turned-bike messenger who blew off the bar in favor of battling traffic for peanuts. His bike, lacking fancy gear-shifts or even a brake, is dumb steel compared to the slick cycles his coworkers ride, but Wilee and the film embrace its stubborn brand of constantly-forward motion as an existential imperative.

Sent uptown to his alma mater, Columbia University, to fetch an envelope destined for Chinatown, Wilee becomes the targetof a bad cop (Michael Shannon) bent on stealing the package -- which contains a marker for $50,000, intended as payment for smuggling a refugee from China to the U.S. Koepp's script, co-written by John Kamps, zips back in time occasionally to explain itself -- showing, for instance, how the package's sender (a Chinese Columbia student who happens to be the roommate of Wilee's girlfriend) wound up fretfully entrusting this valuable slip of paper to a daredevil on two wheels.

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But the main attraction of these narrative detours is the time they afford us with Michael Shannon, who chews scenery while accumulating massive debt in Chinatown gambling dens, then desperately setting out to repay it by intercepting Wilee's package. Shannon and Aasif Mandvi (as Wilee's dispatcher) are high points in a supporting cast that otherwise fails to add much to one-note roles.

Gordon-Levitt sets aside much of his boyish charm to play a character who relies less on wit than nerve. As he hurtles down New York streets, the actor's alert eyes are as vital in conveying the kinetic geography as is Mitchell Amundsen's camera, and Koepp's occasional time-outs -- stopping action to visualize possible routes through vehicle-and-pedestrian chaos before settling on the least hazardous one -- are effective in getting us on Wilee's hyper-perceptive wavelength.

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Whether Wilee is being chased by Shannon's unmarked cop car, trying to catch up to competitive co-worker Manny (Wol Parks, who with a bit more charisma could have made a mark here), or dodging the odd out-of-nowhere cab door, the cycling action is consistently invigorating, clearly relying on actual stunt work instead of CG (and recalling a time when that would have gone without saying).

Though he cheats his geography from time to time (weaseling Harlem's elevated train tracks into scenes set further downtown, say), Koepp clearly enjoys setting his action on actual NYC streets. For all the gains planners and activists have made in carving bike lanes into the city's grid, it's strangely comforting to see that some riders will always find exciting ways to make them unsafe.

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Production Company: Pariah

Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon, Dania Ramirez, Wol Parks, Jamie Chung, Aasif Mandvi

Director: David Koepp

Screenwriter: David Koepp, John Kamps

Producer: Gavin Polone

Executive producer: Mari-Jo Winkler

Director of photography: Mitchell Amundsen

Production designer: Thrse DePrez

Music: David Sardy

Costume designer: Luca Mosca

Editors: Derek Ambrosi, Jill Savitt

PG-13, 90 minutes

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Hip Movements: Locarno Review

LOCARNO - A broody young woman resorts to desperate measures to become pregnant in this dark comedy from the actor-director Herv-Pierre Gustave, aka HPG, who also co-stars. A former porn star who later crossed over into directing, Gustave is a maverick figure in French cinema, with a spotty track record mostly consisting of experimental shorts and narcissistic documentaries. All the same, his second narrative feature is far more watchable and conventional than his dramatic debut We Should Not Exist, which made a minimal splash at the Directors Fortnight in Cannes six years ago.

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Hip Movements is an uneven affair, with a tone that lurches between caustic humour and surreal melodrama, but it also has an irreverent charm and a strong authorial voice. Opening in France next month following its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland two weeks ago, Gustaves unorthodox comedy could appeal to more open-minded members of the established worldwide audience for Francophile cinema. The presence of football legend Eric Cantona and his off-screen wife Rachida Brakni in the cast may also boost the films modest commercial prospects.

Brakni plays Marion, a fiery young woman who leaves her husband when he refuses to collaborate in her motherhood plans. Her subsequent clumsy attempt at becoming pregnant via a drunken one night stand leads her to an unlikely lesbian affair, a sperm-stealing raid on a hospital and a fateful encounter with Herv (Gustave). An intense loner and martial arts obsessive recently fired from his zookeeper job for depressing the animals, Herv now works as a night-watchman at a warehouse. Cantona gives an edgy comic turn as his boss, a sentimental sadist with a lucrative sideline pimping out his monstrous wife, played by the busty transsexual Marie dEstres.

There are distant echoes of vintage John Waters and Pedro Almodovar here, but Gustave is less of a self-conscious stylist than either, his excursions into campy excess appearing more accidental than artful. He also lightens the mood with some zippy visual flourishes, punctuating longer scenes with recurring footage of martial arts quick-step exercises that are both dainty and hilarious. Though its plot may be heavy-handed and its characters cartoonish, Hip Movements still skips along with an agreeably goofy, cultish energy.

Venue: Locarno Film Festival screening, August 9

Production companies: Capricci Films, HPG Production, Le Fresnoy

Cast: Rachida Brakni, Eric Cantona, Joanna Preiss, HPG, Marie dEstres, Jrme Le Banner

Director: HPG

Producer: Thierry Lounas

Writers: HPG, Thomas Wallon

Editor: Isabelle Prim

Music: Gry Petit

Sales company: Capricci Films

Rating TBC, 86 minutes

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