list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around You Kill Me on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/You_Kill_Me/280256/default.aspx Title: You Kill Me
Year: 2007
Director: John Dahl
Plot: In this smart, darkly funny drama by John Dahl (The Last Seduction) about addiction and recovery, Ben Kingsley delivers a bravura performance as Frank, an alcoholic contract killer forced to go through a twelve-step program and become a funeral home assistant. Also starring Tea Leoni and Luke Wilson. An IFC Films Release. ~tribecafilmfestival.org
Times Tagged: 11
Number of Lists: 6
Number of blog posts: 5
SpoutRating: 3
]]>Sun, 20 Apr 2008 13:28:05 GMTYou Kill Me2007John DahlIn this smart, darkly funny drama by John Dahl (The Last Seduction) about addiction and recovery, Ben Kingsley delivers a bravura performance as Frank, an alcoholic contract killer forced to go through a twelve-step program and become a funeral home assistant. Also starring Tea Leoni and Luke Wilson. An IFC Films Release. ~tribecafilmfestival.org11Tag Target (>10)653http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s280256.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/You_Kill_Me/280256/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/shaunhuston/archive/2007/10/20/21013.aspx Post By: ShaunHuston
Post To: ShaunHuston filmblog
Post Date: 10/20/2007 4:01:06 PM
Body: I have a review of the DVD for You Kill Me up at PopMatters. Read my "One thing" post about the seeing this film in theater here. Originally posted on:ShaunHuston's blog
]]>Sat, 20 Oct 2007 20:01:06 GMTShaunHustonShaunHuston filmblog10/20/2007 4:01:06 PMI have a review of the DVD for You Kill Me up at PopMatters. Read my "One thing" post about the seeing this film in theater here. Originally posted on:ShaunHuston's blog http://www.spout.com/blogs/moviebabe/archive/2007/7/25/16212.aspx Post By: MovieBabe
Post To: MovieBabe Blog
Post Date: 7/25/2007 5:25:00 PM
Body: By Tricia Olszewski Forget everything that Cops has taught you—according to John Dahl’s You Kill Me, drinking and homicide actually don’t mix. At least not when you’re Frank Falenczyk, an alcoholic hit man who once prided himself on his murderly precision. When his Buffalo-based gangster family forces him to go to San Francisco and dry up, Frank resists, but he eventually takes the 12 steps to heart. Particularly the one about making amends: “I don’t regret killing them,” Frank tells his girlfriend of the victims he’s listing on paper. “Just killing them badly.” And so, the next of kin of the woman whose eye he sliced instead of her throat gets a $50 gift certificate to Macy’s. The monster-with-a-sensitive-side premise has been done before, mined for laughs (Analyze This and That) or melodrama (The Sopranos). Here, the premise is spun as nearly intolerably cute. Ben Kingsley’s Frank isn’t a sexy beast—he’s a compact, well-dressed package of charming tics and few, funny words. He’s initially appalled by the AA meetings he attends, but he’s soon sharing ’n’ caring, and when he meets Laurel (Téa Leoni), a—naturally—beautiful Californian whose tongue is as sharp as his knives, she wants to love him. But, darn it, she’s got boundary issues. They meet, by the way, in a funeral home: Frank was strong-armed into taking a temporary job as an embalmer, and one day he was working on Laurel’s stepfather when she brought in bowling shoes for the deceased to wear. Now that’s a story to tell your grandkids. Thanks to a delicately woven, genre-crossing script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (who, in a departure, also worked together on The Chronicles of Narnia) and the strength of its leads, You Kill Me keeps its potential wackiness in check. (Though the Polishness—and drunkenness—of Buffalonians is emphasized so heavily that the city, represented by Winnipeg, Manitoba, becomes a caricatured character itself.) Much of its humor is culled from Frank’s AA experiences, whether it’s his introduction to the process (his look of subtle alarm every time someone introduces himself and is quickly accosted with “Hi, [Blank]” is terrific), his blossoming candor (“The only way I’m going to get to [kill] again is to stop drinking”), or the members who share their stories (“You know, it’s a whole lot easier fucking girls you don’t like when you’re drunk”). The film doesn’t just poke fun, however: There’s a quite uncomfortable scene where a merry family at the funeral home, laughing the whole time, is trying to force a drink on Frank, as well as heartbreaking consequences whenever he does give in. Kingsley is a font of dryness as Frank, making his character bug-eyed and uncomfortable in his own skin when he’s sober. His exquisite comic timing and expressiveness is impressively matched by Leoni, who on more than one occasion makes too-sly jokes work with great physical follow-through. (Also notable is Bill Pullman as a real-estate agent/babysitter, schlubby in an ill-fitting raincoat and bad haircut—he’s tasked with watching Frank but looks like he can barely keep it together himself.) And just when their scenes together start to get too lovey, the filmmakers know how to cut the sugar: The expected new-couple montage, for example, features shots of them practicing knife-wielding on a head-shaped watermelon. You Kill Me doesn’t completely abandon its gangster roots, though, while it’s vacationing as a romantic comedy. There’s tension and violence as Frank’s family deals with a rival that the hit man had failed to whack because he was drunk; Dahl, who also balanced similar moods in The Last Seduction, switches between locations and plotlines smoothly. The only surprise as the pieces come together is that you’ll likely have enjoyed the movie more than you might have thought. The creators of Brooklyn Rules abided largely by only one: If anything mob-related was popular enough to become cliché, it was good enough for their movie. The film opens in a church as the main character narrates, talking about his boyhood in the titular borough and how it affected him and his two best buds as they grew up. Fast-forward to 1985, when one’s working in a butcher shop and going to college, one’s a bumbling, directionless innocent, and one’s flirting with the local family. Cue conversations about whether being feared is the same as being respected, as well as plenty of whatsamatta-you banter full of “da”s, “foockin’”s, and “douchebag”s. Alarmingly, this amateurish story was written by Terence Winter, a veteran Sopranos scribe—apparently he’s saved his first-draft scraps for the big screen. Alec Baldwin is billed as a star, but his slightly over-the-top yet effective turn as the boss, Caesar, is minor—the kids are allowed to run the show. Freddie Prinze Jr. is Michael, the cartoonishly accented, responsible lead character who’s studying pre-law and adjusts his personality for his WASPy classmates and Brooklyn friends accordingly. Michael has big dreams but tries to keep his lives separate, confessing in voice-over that “in my neighborhood, it was better to keep ambitions like water polo to yourself” and acting reluctant when his buddies want to accompany him to a party in the city for Ellen (Mena Suvari), a fellow student Michael’s trying to date. (For good reason: The mixing doesn’t go so well.) Meanwhile, baby-faced Bobby (Jerry Ferrara) is religious and good-natured, wanting nothing more than to start working for the post office so he and his squeeze can settle down. Carmine (Ocean’s Thirteen’s Scott Caan) is the troublemaker: Smart but vain—both about his looks and in feeling indestructible—he begins doing small jobs for Caesar, seeing it as the only agreeable way to make a good living in his ’hood. He dismisses Michael’s concerns. Of course, trouble is waiting, and Carmine’s antics start to involve his two friends as well. The three young actors do have a likable presence onscreen, but Michael Corrente directs them to extreme Brooklyn-isms—such as those awful accents—that make the work at times skirt parody. The film is interesting mostly when it integrates the real-life rise of John Gotti with Carmine’s story, and its inevitable tragedy is heartbreaking, even if you see it coming from practically the start. But like the mob life, none of its perks is enough to make Brooklyn Rules worthwhile.
]]>Wed, 25 Jul 2007 21:25:00 GMTMovieBabeMovieBabe Blog7/25/2007 5:25:00 PM By Tricia Olszewski Forget everything that Cops has taught you—according to John Dahl’s You Kill Me, drinking and homicide actually don’t mix. At least not when you’re Frank Falenczyk, an alcoholic hit man who once prided himself on his murderly precision. When his Buffalo-based gangster family forces him to go to San Francisco and dry up, Frank resists, but he eventually takes the 12 steps to heart. Particularly the one about making amends: “I don’t regret killing them,” Frank tells his girlfriend of the victims he’s listing on paper. “Just killing them badly.” And so, the next of kin of the woman whose eye he sliced instead of her throat gets a $50 gift certificate to Macy’s. The monster-with-a-sensitive-side premise has been done before, mined for laughs (Analyze This and That) or melodrama (The Sopranos). Here, the premise is spun as nearly intolerably cute. Ben Kingsley’s Frank isn’t a sexy beast—he’s a compact, well-dressed package of charming tics and few, funny words. He’s initially appalled by the AA meetings he attends, but he’s soon sharing ’n’ caring, and when he meets Laurel (Téa Leoni), a—naturally—beautiful Californian whose tongue is as sharp as his knives, she wants to love him. But, darn it, she’s got boundary issues. They meet, by the way, in a funeral home: Frank was strong-armed into taking a temporary job as an embalmer, and one day he was working on Laurel’s stepfather when she brought in bowling shoes for the deceased to wear. Now that’s a story to tell your grandkids. Thanks to a delicately woven, genre-crossing script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (who, in a departure, also worked together on The Chronicles of Narnia) and the strength of its leads, You Kill Me keeps its potential wackiness in check. (Though the Polishness—and drunkenness—of Buffalonians is emphasized so heavily that the city, represented by Winnipeg, Manitoba, becomes a caricatured character itself.) Much of its humor is culled from Frank’s AA experiences, whether it’s his introduction to the process (his look of subtle alarm every time someone introduces himself and is quickly accosted with “Hi, [Blank]” is terrific), his blossoming candor (“The only way I’m going to get to [kill] again is to stop drinking”), or the members who share their stories (“You know, it’s a whole lot easier fucking girls you don’t like when you’re drunk”). The film doesn’t just poke fun, however: There’s a quite uncomfortable scene where a merry family at the funeral home, laughing the whole time, is trying to force a drink on Frank, as well as heartbreaking consequences whenever he does give in. Kingsley is a font of dryness as Frank, making his character bug-eyed and uncomfortable in his own skin when he’s sober. His exquisite comic timing and expressiveness is impressively matched by Leoni, who on more than one occasion makes too-sly jokes work with great physical follow-through. (Also notable is Bill Pullman as a real-estate agent/babysitter, schlubby in an ill-fitting raincoat and bad haircut—he’s tasked with watching Frank but looks like he can barely keep it together himself.) And just when their scenes together start to get too lovey, the filmmakers know how to cut the sugar: The expected new-couple montage, for example, features shots of them practicing knife-wielding on a head-shaped watermelon. You Kill Me doesn’t completely abandon its gangster roots, though, while it’s vacationing as a romantic comedy. There’s tension and violence as Frank’s family deals with a rival that the hit man had failed to whack because he was drunk; Dahl, who also balanced similar moods in The Last Seduction, switches between locations and plotlines smoothly. The only surprise as the pieces come together is that you’ll likely have enjoyed the movie more than you might have thought. The creators of Brooklyn Rules abided largely by only one: If anything mob-related was popular enough to become cliché, it was good enough for their movie. The film opens in a church as the main character narrates, talking about his boyhood in the titular borough and how it affected him and his two best buds as they grew up. Fast-forward to 1985, when one’s working in a butcher shop and going to college, one’s a bumbling, directionless innocent, and one’s flirting with the local family. Cue conversations about whether being feared is the same as being respected, as well as plenty of whatsamatta-you banter full of “da”s, “foockin’”s, and “douchebag”s. Alarmingly, this amateurish story was written by Terence Winter, a veteran Sopranos scribe—apparently he’s saved his first-draft scraps for the big screen. Alec Baldwin is billed as a star, but his slightly over-the-top yet effective turn as the boss, Caesar, is minor—the kids are allowed to run the show. Freddie Prinze Jr. is Michael, the cartoonishly accented, responsible lead character who’s studying pre-law and adjusts his personality for his WASPy classmates and Brooklyn friends accordingly. Michael has big dreams but tries to keep his lives separate, confessing in voice-over that “in my neighborhood, it was better to keep ambitions like water polo to yourself” and acting reluctant when his buddies want to accompany him to a party in the city for Ellen (Mena Suvari), a fellow student Michael’s trying to date. (For good reason: The mixing doesn’t go so well.) Meanwhile, baby-faced Bobby (Jerry Ferrara) is religious and good-natured, wanting nothing more than to start working for the post office so he and his squeeze can settle down. Carmine (Ocean’s Thirteen’s Scott Caan) is the troublemaker: Smart but vain—both about his looks and in feeling indestructible—he begins doing small jobs for Caesar, seeing it as the only agreeable way to make a good living in his ’hood. He dismisses Michael’s concerns. Of course, trouble is waiting, and Carmine’s antics start to involve his two friends as well. The three young actors do have a likable presence onscreen, but Michael Corrente directs them to extreme Brooklyn-isms—such as those awful accents—that make the work at times skirt parody. The film is interesting mostly when it integrates the real-life rise of John Gotti with Carmine’s story, and its inevitable tragedy is heartbreaking, even if you see it coming from practically the start. But like the mob life, none of its perks is enough to make Brooklyn Rules worthwhile. http://www.spout.com/blogs/shaunhuston/archive/2007/7/15/14710.aspx Post By: ShaunHuston
Post To: ShaunHuston filmblog
Post Date: 7/15/2007 3:00:34 PM
Body: One thing that makes You Kill Me one of the best movies I've seen so far this year is Jeff Jur's photography.You Kill Me is shot in cool tones (notice how strong the blues are in dusky interiors). In bright light, the image flirts with overexposure. The first choice underscores the cool, hardbitten nature of the film's characters, most of whom have spent their lives in literal and metaphorical shadows, away from others, a quality connoted by the near washing out of the image when they are drawn into the light.Jur also makes selected use of rack focus to bring the audience into Frank's (Ben Kingsley) point of view. There are three shots in particular where this device is put to use: one where Frank catches his reflection in a window while talking to his soon-to-be AA sponsor, Tom (Luke Wilson), one where Frank looks up at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge while talking to Tom about “accepting a higher power,” and one where he fixes on one of his fellow alcoholics, Becky (Katie Messina), whose confessional moves him to speak. In each of these moments the shift in focus from Frank to what Frank is looking at pulls the audience, briefly, into his way of viewing the world and his place in it. Very subtle, but effective and not at all jarring.(It would be very wrong to write about this movie without mentioning the performances, particularly Téa Lenoi as Laurel. Watch how she uses the smallest of facial expressions and shifts in posture to convey her character's reaction to Frank's self-introduction to his San Francisco AA group. As for Kingsley's Frank, it would be easy to write this character off as a version of Don Logan, but beyond their superficial similarities, the two men are very different. Logan is a force of nature. Frank Falenczyk is all scarred humanity. Bill Pullman's Dave is far more complicated than he has any right to be, and Philip Baker Hall and Dennis Farina are exactly what they need to be. I'm not one to measure a film's worth by such things, but, seriously, at Oscar time You Kill Me will get no recognition, not even Leoni, and that will be a shame). Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs
]]>Sun, 15 Jul 2007 19:00:34 GMTShaunHustonShaunHuston filmblog7/15/2007 3:00:34 PMOne thing that makes You Kill Me one of the best movies I've seen so far this year is Jeff Jur's photography.You Kill Me is shot in cool tones (notice how strong the blues are in dusky interiors). In bright light, the image flirts with overexposure. The first choice underscores the cool, hardbitten nature of the film's characters, most of whom have spent their lives in literal and metaphorical shadows, away from others, a quality connoted by the near washing out of the image when they are drawn into the light.Jur also makes selected use of rack focus to bring the audience into Frank's (Ben Kingsley) point of view. There are three shots in particular where this device is put to use: one where Frank catches his reflection in a window while talking to his soon-to-be AA sponsor, Tom (Luke Wilson), one where Frank looks up at the top of the Golden Gate Bridge while talking to Tom about “accepting a higher power,” and one where he fixes on one of his fellow alcoholics, Becky (Katie Messina), whose confessional moves him to speak. In each of these moments the shift in focus from Frank to what Frank is looking at pulls the audience, briefly, into his way of viewing the world and his place in it. Very subtle, but effective and not at all jarring.(It would be very wrong to write about this movie without mentioning the performances, particularly Téa Lenoi as Laurel. Watch how she uses the smallest of facial expressions and shifts in posture to convey her character's reaction to Frank's self-introduction to his San Francisco AA group. As for Kingsley's Frank, it would be easy to write this character off as a version of Don Logan, but beyond their superficial similarities, the two men are very different. Logan is a force of nature. Frank Falenczyk is all scarred humanity. Bill Pullman's Dave is far more complicated than he has any right to be, and Philip Baker Hall and Dennis Farina are exactly what they need to be. I'm not one to measure a film's worth by such things, but, seriously, at Oscar time You Kill Me will get no recognition, not even Leoni, and that will be a shame). Originally posted on:Short-Circuit Signs http://www.spout.com/blogs/laraemeadows/archive/2007/6/23/11791.aspx Post By: laraemeadows
Post To: laraemeadows Blog
Post Date: 6/23/2007 3:42:46 AM
Body: You Kill Me is a nearly brilliant comedy. Surprising honesty and acceptance is the catalyst for humor in this off kilter comedy about an alcoholic hit man banished to San Francisco. Hit man Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley) is ordered out of the state, Buffalo, NY to be exact, by his mob boss employer, Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall) when his drinking makes him screw up an important hit. Sent to San Francisco to attend AA, keep a job in a funeral home and only allowed to return when he has made sufficient steps in recovery. Tom (Luke Wilson), the good natured toll taker becomes his sponsor, guiding him through alcoholics anonymous, sober life, and dating. Uptight professional Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni) finds something enchanting about him. Just to make sure he is on track with his recovery Roman sends a crazy and quirky accountant, Dave (Bill Pullman) to keep an eye on him. While Frank is away, his criminal family starts to go downhill. Sure, the drinking is funny, but the sobriety is even funnier. The alcoholics anonymous scenes are the best. Frank is so honest; you don’t know what to think. If you have ever been to an AA meeting, some of the stories are riveting, most drone on much longer than a human attention span, with the occasional straight up snore fest. Frank says stuff so stunning everyone is awake, with their mouths open, unable to speak. The entire group sits in stunned wonder, not even able to squeak out a single word! I will say it is disappointing to see another movie “in San Francisco.” The toll booth scenes are so obviously not shot looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn’t spend enough money to make one of the most recognizable land marks in the world look believable. The director makes almost a fetishist point of street signs. Sure, the geography is all wrong, and it wouldn’t bother me so much if he didn’t practically draw red circles around the street signs. I get it, San Francisco is an expensive place to shoot a movie, but at least film the bridge and read a map! If you aren’t familiar with San Francisco, this probably won’t even bother you. Ben Kingsley is a perfect ice cold hit man with personal problems. He is stone faced through most of the movie. It is Kingsley’s voice that gives the character’s emotions distinction. He kind of wrings his hands with the treble of this voice and the patterns of his speech. His interactions with the funeral home owner, Brenda (Lorraine James) are classic. Luke Wilson, who plays Frank’s sponsor, is the biggest surprise in the movie. He lets go of previous roles and steps into a more subtle character. Wilson not only does funny but he does subdued too! I was fond of Bill Pullman in this movie. He kind of plays both the devil and the angel on Frank’s shoulder. I don’t think even Dave knows if he is good or bad. If the film maker and writers of a movie were to draw a line in the sand dictating the border between humorous harmony and monstrous madness, Tea Leoni would jump back and forth between them. So often in You Kill Me Leoni makes you laugh. Just as often, though, she makes you want to ring her neck. The most frustrating thing about it is that it is almost fantastic when she botches a scene. It is like the man who dies just before the finish line at a marathon. Dennis Farina, who plays rival mob boss Edward O’Leary, is dead to me. You Kill Me is the most original premise for a movie I have seen in years. It answers a lot of the questions I personally toil with when it comes to hit men. Oh yeah, it is pretty damn funny!
]]>Sat, 23 Jun 2007 07:42:46 GMTlaraemeadowslaraemeadows Blog6/23/2007 3:42:46 AMYou Kill Me is a nearly brilliant comedy. Surprising honesty and acceptance is the catalyst for humor in this off kilter comedy about an alcoholic hit man banished to San Francisco. Hit man Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley) is ordered out of the state, Buffalo, NY to be exact, by his mob boss employer, Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall) when his drinking makes him screw up an important hit. Sent to San Francisco to attend AA, keep a job in a funeral home and only allowed to return when he has made sufficient steps in recovery. Tom (Luke Wilson), the good natured toll taker becomes his sponsor, guiding him through alcoholics anonymous, sober life, and dating. Uptight professional Laurel Pearson (Tea Leoni) finds something enchanting about him. Just to make sure he is on track with his recovery Roman sends a crazy and quirky accountant, Dave (Bill Pullman) to keep an eye on him. While Frank is away, his criminal family starts to go downhill. Sure, the drinking is funny, but the sobriety is even funnier. The alcoholics anonymous scenes are the best. Frank is so honest; you don’t know what to think. If you have ever been to an AA meeting, some of the stories are riveting, most drone on much longer than a human attention span, with the occasional straight up snore fest. Frank says stuff so stunning everyone is awake, with their mouths open, unable to speak. The entire group sits in stunned wonder, not even able to squeak out a single word! I will say it is disappointing to see another movie “in San Francisco.” The toll booth scenes are so obviously not shot looking at the Golden Gate Bridge. They didn’t spend enough money to make one of the most recognizable land marks in the world look believable. The director makes almost a fetishist point of street signs. Sure, the geography is all wrong, and it wouldn’t bother me so much if he didn’t practically draw red circles around the street signs. I get it, San Francisco is an expensive place to shoot a movie, but at least film the bridge and read a map! If you aren’t familiar with San Francisco, this probably won’t even bother you. Ben Kingsley is a perfect ice cold hit man with personal problems. He is stone faced through most of the movie. It is Kingsley’s voice that gives the character’s emotions distinction. He kind of wrings his hands with the treble of this voice and the patterns of his speech. His interactions with the funeral home owner, Brenda (Lorraine James) are classic. Luke Wilson, who plays Frank’s sponsor, is the biggest surprise in the movie. He lets go of previous roles and steps into a more subtle character. Wilson not only does funny but he does subdued too! I was fond of Bill Pullman in this movie. He kind of plays both the devil and the angel on Frank’s shoulder. I don’t think even Dave knows if he is good or bad. If the film maker and writers of a movie were to draw a line in the sand dictating the border between humorous harmony and monstrous madness, Tea Leoni would jump back and forth between them. So often in You Kill Me Leoni makes you laugh. Just as often, though, she makes you want to ring her neck. The most frustrating thing about it is that it is almost fantastic when she botches a scene. It is like the man who dies just before the finish line at a marathon. Dennis Farina, who plays rival mob boss Edward O’Leary, is dead to me. You Kill Me is the most original premise for a movie I have seen in years. It answers a lot of the questions I personally toil with when it comes to hit men. Oh yeah, it is pretty damn funny! http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/archive/2007/4/25/7614.aspx Post By: TheReeler
Post To: The Reeler on Spout
Post Date: 4/25/2007 1:01:03 AM
Body: A scene from Kirill Serebrenikov's Playing the Victim By Vadim Rizov "Russian cinema is in the ass," announces Valya (Yuri Chursin) at the beginning of Playing the Victim, Kirill Serebrenikov's third feature and second adaptation of a play by the Brothers Presnyakov. Then the film vigorously sets about disproving him. The first 20 minutes caused numerous walk-outs at the press screening, understandably so. The Brothers seems hellbent on being as shocking as a 13-year-old as his characters say "piss" and "shit" repeatedly, to generally unpleasant effect, and it's hard to tell whether they mean it or just want to put his viewers through an endurance test to kick things off and make us earn the good stuff. Somewhere along the line, things settle down into a compelling routine. Valya -- ostensibly an actor -- has the bizarre day job of re-enacting the role of the victim in murders. The killer is brought in to re-create the whole thing for the cameras while Valya does his best to play dead, leading to an increasing number of logical absurdities. These absurdist set-pieces provide the comic fuel necessary to get through some of the more pretentious bits, like Serebrenikov's black-and-white animated inserts whenever Valya undergoes a particularly intense emotion or bad David Fincher-lite CGI shots through tiny crevices. Like seemingly every contemporary Russian movie ever made, the main public service performed by Playing The Victim is demonstrating to the world once again what an awful place it is, with a particular emphasis on the country’s inescapable racism. The most quotable example is at a sushi restaurant, the police chief yells "Shit! This isn't food, this is some kind of weird mindfuck." There’s also a persistent loathing of the country at work: When told that a murderer is repenting and wants to be sent to Siberia, the chief explains that he won't necessarily be sent there: "We have lots of places like that in Russia." Fans of this kind of morbid humor should check it out; everyone else might find it too shrill and consistently abrasive to handle. Par for the Russian course, really, but a definite highlight of the narrative feature competition.Pascale Ferran's nearly three-hour D.H. Lawrence adaptation Lady Chatterley (cut down, frighteningly enough, from a 220-minute TV version) starts off impressively austere and, at some point in the duration, slumps into inconsequentiality. The story's no shocker -- the quiet, repressed title character (Marina Hands) discovers her sexuality and regains control of her life by fucking hubby's gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch) -- but Ferran avoids a lot of obvious traps. For example, the husband (Hippolyte Girardot) may be bourgeois, a repressive capitalist, and both symbolically and literally crippled, but he's not an abusive Restrainer of Sexuality, which prevents the movie from lapsing into rote Free Woman v. Society territory. Ferran gets a lot of mileage from her extremely understated sound design and nature photography, and she throws in a lot of sex scenes which manage to convey characterization via thrusting more successfully than 9 Songs could. Still, Ferran is unable to smother Lawrence, and the film eventually becomes both redundant and self-righteously hippie-esque. By the time Lady Chatterley and her animalistic lover are running free-spirited and naked in the rain, the spell has lifted. Still, for a good spell Lady Chatterley is a period piece that avoids the twin traps of fetishizing and/or reviling an era. If Ferran learns not to sprawl out and choose better source material, she might be brilliant. Imagine Rushmore as a drab Swiss crowdpleaser minus Bill Murray and you'll get the rough idea of Vitus. Instead of Max Fischer there's the titular boy (Fabrizio Borsani as a 6-year-old, Teo Gheorgiu as a 12-year old), who nurses a genius IQ and a boner for classical piano instead of theatrical schlock. Saddled with cookie-cutter parents -- castratingly caring and stifling mom (Julika Jenkins), loving but not particularly attentive, career-oriented dad (Urs Jucker) -- Vitus turns instead to the obligatory cuddly grandpa (Bruno Ganz) for attention. The parents want the boy to be a prodigy, pushing him away from normal childhood, and therein lies the rub: For about an hour, Vitus is pretty insufferable -- visually indifferent, prone to every dramatic cliche on tap -- but it eventually digs into the ways parents can convince themselves that pressuring a kid to "live up to their potential" (the most loathsome phrase on the planet) can make them oblivious to when the kid's totally miserable. It's undeniably kind of a sluggish crowdpleaser of the blandest sort, but it got to this reviewer, who spent 11 years slogging through classical piano and nearly as many through the ludicrous concept of being "gifted and talented." Better yet, Borsani and Gheorgiu can actually play the piano -- Gheorgiu's a real-life junior prodigy -- making this the rare film to show hands playing the correct keys rather than cutting around them or using a stunt double. Like The Namesake, the value of the film as a formal object (minimal) will be outweighed by feeling of recognition for anyone who's been there. Sony Pictures Classics will probably make a minor killing on release. The latest disappointment from once-promising director John Dahl, You Kill Me situates itself at the presumably edgy intersection of alcoholism, gang wars and ethnic rivalry; remarkably, it comes out as bland as a family comedy (maybe something called Are We Dry Yet?, with no disrespect intended to Ice Cube). Ben Kingsley is a hitman whose increasingly crippling drinking problem makes him of no use to his Polish employers; sent to dry out in San Francisco, he discovers strength through AA and love interest Tea Leoni. Kingsley is too dour to do deadpan without killing the joke, although in combination with either Leoni or AA sponsor Luke Wilson the cast has the ability to sound better than the script, even if the sole joke behind Wilson’s character seems to be how hilarious it is that this paragon of frat-boy straightness is playing someone gay. The crappy digital lensing fails to impart snowy noir gravitas (a la The Ice Harvest) to the Buffalo gangland of the poles or any kind of distinct texture at all to San Francisco. The results are zippy enough and forgettable even while you're watching. Perhaps it's time to start treating the increasing "treasure trove" of rediscovered Soviet films as camp classics instead of trying to pretend that formal accomplishment trumps the ludicrously didactic ideological content. Shot by Sergei Urusevsky -- most famous for his undeniably stunning work on I Am Cuba -- The Forty-First does about the best possible job of filming the desert in Academy ratio, despite the undeniable, after-the-fact proof provided by Lawrence of Arabia that CinemaScope is a must. Urusevsky plays with the desert by itself and in contrast with fire and water (Tarkovsky would've been thrilled). Still, Grigori Chukhrai's film is a mostly ludicrous attempt to graft USSR propaganda onto a fairly basic story about an army unit marooned in the desert. Hero Martyushka (Izolda Izvitskaya) is a Red Army sniper in the days of the revolution who's bagged 38 kills already as the film opens. Left to die by the White Army, her straggling unit picks up a high-ranking White officer (Oleg Strizhenov), who Martyushka guards and eventually falls in love with. Vistas can't obscure howlers like an officer yelling at his soldier (after the man crosses himself) "There is no God! How many times do I have to tell you?" See also: Martyushka rejecting the lovelorn officer's offer of life on his country estate with: "You want me to lie in bed and eat chocolates with you. Chocolates smeared with blood!" Play this at the Sunshine at midnight and watch the crowds roll in. The Tribeca catalogue talks up Gerard Blain's second feature The Pelican -- apparently never before screened in the U.S. -- as in the rigorous realm of Dreyer and Bresson. Aside from the simple fact that Blain cuts more often in the whole film than those masters might've in their entire bodies of work, he's not nearly as cogent a thinker. The simple story of a jazz pianist (Blain) who goes to jail for nine years while his son is only two years old and comes out trying to connect with him again is visually expanded to somehow include musings on obsession, voyeurism, economic jealousy and memory. Unfortunately, the impressive master shots only serve to bring out the film's latent shallowness rather than helping create depth. It doesn't help that the whole thing is redolent of '70s cheese (were the '70s or the '80s the most unfortunate decade to try to film in without succumbing to dated fashions?); it's hard to take a villain seriously when he's sporting a thick Burt Reynolds mustache and a gaudy bathrobe. The best sequences find the pianist peering over the fence into the yard of his wife's new family, complete with rich husband; the creepy P.O.V. shots observe the banal routines of bored rich people as they play cards and listen to their 8-track recorder (it's 1973, after all). Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout: Playing the Victim Lady Chatterley Vitus The Pelican You Kill Me The Forty-First Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler
]]>Wed, 25 Apr 2007 05:01:03 GMTTheReelerThe Reeler on Spout4/25/2007 1:01:03 AMA scene from Kirill Serebrenikov's Playing the Victim By Vadim Rizov "Russian cinema is in the ass," announces Valya (Yuri Chursin) at the beginning of Playing the Victim, Kirill Serebrenikov's third feature and second adaptation of a play by the Brothers Presnyakov. Then the film vigorously sets about disproving him. The first 20 minutes caused numerous walk-outs at the press screening, understandably so. The Brothers seems hellbent on being as shocking as a 13-year-old as his characters say "piss" and "shit" repeatedly, to generally unpleasant effect, and it's hard to tell whether they mean it or just want to put his viewers through an endurance test to kick things off and make us earn the good stuff. Somewhere along the line, things settle down into a compelling routine. Valya -- ostensibly an actor -- has the bizarre day job of re-enacting the role of the victim in murders. The killer is brought in to re-create the whole thing for the cameras while Valya does his best to play dead, leading to an increasing number of logical absurdities. These absurdist set-pieces provide the comic fuel necessary to get through some of the more pretentious bits, like Serebrenikov's black-and-white animated inserts whenever Valya undergoes a particularly intense emotion or bad David Fincher-lite CGI shots through tiny crevices. Like seemingly every contemporary Russian movie ever made, the main public service performed by Playing The Victim is demonstrating to the world once again what an awful place it is, with a particular emphasis on the country’s inescapable racism. The most quotable example is at a sushi restaurant, the police chief yells "Shit! This isn't food, this is some kind of weird mindfuck." There’s also a persistent loathing of the country at work: When told that a murderer is repenting and wants to be sent to Siberia, the chief explains that he won't necessarily be sent there: "We have lots of places like that in Russia." Fans of this kind of morbid humor should check it out; everyone else might find it too shrill and consistently abrasive to handle. Par for the Russian course, really, but a definite highlight of the narrative feature competition.Pascale Ferran's nearly three-hour D.H. Lawrence adaptation Lady Chatterley (cut down, frighteningly enough, from a 220-minute TV version) starts off impressively austere and, at some point in the duration, slumps into inconsequentiality. The story's no shocker -- the quiet, repressed title character (Marina Hands) discovers her sexuality and regains control of her life by fucking hubby's gamekeeper (Jean-Louis Coullo'ch) -- but Ferran avoids a lot of obvious traps. For example, the husband (Hippolyte Girardot) may be bourgeois, a repressive capitalist, and both symbolically and literally crippled, but he's not an abusive Restrainer of Sexuality, which prevents the movie from lapsing into rote Free Woman v. Society territory. Ferran gets a lot of mileage from her extremely understated sound design and nature photography, and she throws in a lot of sex scenes which manage to convey characterization via thrusting more successfully than 9 Songs could. Still, Ferran is unable to smother Lawrence, and the film eventually becomes both redundant and self-righteously hippie-esque. By the time Lady Chatterley and her animalistic lover are running free-spirited and naked in the rain, the spell has lifted. Still, for a good spell Lady Chatterley is a period piece that avoids the twin traps of fetishizing and/or reviling an era. If Ferran learns not to sprawl out and choose better source material, she might be brilliant. Imagine Rushmore as a drab Swiss crowdpleaser minus Bill Murray and you'll get the rough idea of Vitus. Instead of Max Fischer there's the titular boy (Fabrizio Borsani as a 6-year-old, Teo Gheorgiu as a 12-year old), who nurses a genius IQ and a boner for classical piano instead of theatrical schlock. Saddled with cookie-cutter parents -- castratingly caring and stifling mom (Julika Jenkins), loving but not particularly attentive, career-oriented dad (Urs Jucker) -- Vitus turns instead to the obligatory cuddly grandpa (Bruno Ganz) for attention. The parents want the boy to be a prodigy, pushing him away from normal childhood, and therein lies the rub: For about an hour, Vitus is pretty insufferable -- visually indifferent, prone to every dramatic cliche on tap -- but it eventually digs into the ways parents can convince themselves that pressuring a kid to "live up to their potential" (the most loathsome phrase on the planet) can make them oblivious to when the kid's totally miserable. It's undeniably kind of a sluggish crowdpleaser of the blandest sort, but it got to this reviewer, who spent 11 years slogging through classical piano and nearly as many through the ludicrous concept of being "gifted and talented." Better yet, Borsani and Gheorgiu can actually play the piano -- Gheorgiu's a real-life junior prodigy -- making this the rare film to show hands playing the correct keys rather than cutting around them or using a stunt double. Like The Namesake, the value of the film as a formal object (minimal) will be outweighed by feeling of recognition for anyone who's been there. Sony Pictures Classics will probably make a minor killing on release. The latest disappointment from once-promising director John Dahl, You Kill Me situates itself at the presumably edgy intersection of alcoholism, gang wars and ethnic rivalry; remarkably, it comes out as bland as a family comedy (maybe something called Are We Dry Yet?, with no disrespect intended to Ice Cube). Ben Kingsley is a hitman whose increasingly crippling drinking problem makes him of no use to his Polish employers; sent to dry out in San Francisco, he discovers strength through AA and love interest Tea Leoni. Kingsley is too dour to do deadpan without killing the joke, although in combination with either Leoni or AA sponsor Luke Wilson the cast has the ability to sound better than the script, even if the sole joke behind Wilson’s character seems to be how hilarious it is that this paragon of frat-boy straightness is playing someone gay. The crappy digital lensing fails to impart snowy noir gravitas (a la The Ice Harvest) to the Buffalo gangland of the poles or any kind of distinct texture at all to San Francisco. The results are zippy enough and forgettable even while you're watching. Perhaps it's time to start treating the increasing "treasure trove" of rediscovered Soviet films as camp classics instead of trying to pretend that formal accomplishment trumps the ludicrously didactic ideological content. Shot by Sergei Urusevsky -- most famous for his undeniably stunning work on I Am Cuba -- The Forty-First does about the best possible job of filming the desert in Academy ratio, despite the undeniable, after-the-fact proof provided by Lawrence of Arabia that CinemaScope is a must. Urusevsky plays with the desert by itself and in contrast with fire and water (Tarkovsky would've been thrilled). Still, Grigori Chukhrai's film is a mostly ludicrous attempt to graft USSR propaganda onto a fairly basic story about an army unit marooned in the desert. Hero Martyushka (Izolda Izvitskaya) is a Red Army sniper in the days of the revolution who's bagged 38 kills already as the film opens. Left to die by the White Army, her straggling unit picks up a high-ranking White officer (Oleg Strizhenov), who Martyushka guards and eventually falls in love with. Vistas can't obscure howlers like an officer yelling at his soldier (after the man crosses himself) "There is no God! How many times do I have to tell you?" See also: Martyushka rejecting the lovelorn officer's offer of life on his country estate with: "You want me to lie in bed and eat chocolates with you. Chocolates smeared with blood!" Play this at the Sunshine at midnight and watch the crowds roll in. The Tribeca catalogue talks up Gerard Blain's second feature The Pelican -- apparently never before screened in the U.S. -- as in the rigorous realm of Dreyer and Bresson. Aside from the simple fact that Blain cuts more often in the whole film than those masters might've in their entire bodies of work, he's not nearly as cogent a thinker. The simple story of a jazz pianist (Blain) who goes to jail for nine years while his son is only two years old and comes out trying to connect with him again is visually expanded to somehow include musings on obsession, voyeurism, economic jealousy and memory. Unfortunately, the impressive master shots only serve to bring out the film's latent shallowness rather than helping create depth. It doesn't help that the whole thing is redolent of '70s cheese (were the '70s or the '80s the most unfortunate decade to try to film in without succumbing to dated fashions?); it's hard to take a villain seriously when he's sporting a thick Burt Reynolds mustache and a gaudy bathrobe. The best sequences find the pianist peering over the fence into the yard of his wife's new family, complete with rich husband; the creepy P.O.V. shots observe the banal routines of bored rich people as they play cards and listen to their 8-track recorder (it's 1973, after all). Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout: Playing the Victim Lady Chatterley Vitus The Pelican You Kill Me The Forty-First Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/alcoholism/MemberTagFilms.aspxalcoholism
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