Vitus's Recent Activity

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Title: Vitus
Year: 2007
Director: Fredi M. Murer
Plot: A child prodigy yearns for a "normal" life with his parents and eccentric grandfather in this charming family drama, starring the great German actor Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire; Downfall). While his parents plan a future of piano competitions, Vitus would rather learn to fly. He just needs to find an adult who'll let him. A Sony Pictures Classics Release. Presented by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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2007 Tribeca Film Festival - Vitus

Times Tagged: 16
Number of Lists: 3
Number of blog posts: 2
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 15:43:41 GMTVitus2007Fredi M. MurerA child prodigy yearns for a "normal" life with his parents and eccentric grandfather in this charming family drama, starring the great German actor Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire; Downfall). While his parents plan a future of piano competitions, Vitus would rather learn to fly. He just needs to find an adult who'll let him. A Sony Pictures Classics Release. Presented by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. <center> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://blip.tv/scripts/pokkariPlayer.js"></script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://blip.tv/syndication/write_player?skin=js&posts_id=215901&source=3&autoplay=true&file_type=flv&player_width=&player_height="></script><div id="blip_movie_content_215901"><a href="http://blip.tv/file/get/Vanairsdale-ReelerTV03VITUS798.flv" onclick="play_blip_movie_215901(); return false;"><img src="http://blip.tv/file/get/Vanairsdale-ReelerTV03VITUS798.flv.jpg" border="0" title="Click To Play" /></a><br /><a href="http://blip.tv/file/get/Vanairsdale-ReelerTV03VITUS798.flv" onclick="play_blip_movie_215901(); return false;">Click To Play</a></div> </center><div class="blip_description">2007 Tribeca Film Festival - <i>Vitus</i><br /></div>16Tag Target (>10)324http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s293548.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Vitus/293548/default.aspxFilm Spout Post: Vitus - My Best Friend http://www.spout.com/blogs/moviebabe/archive/2007/7/26/16607.aspx

Post By: MovieBabe
Post To: MovieBabe Blog
Post Date: 7/26/2007 7:17:00 PM
Body: By Tricia Olszewski Vitus asks you to believe in a myth that pops up in film from time to time, usually in the most melodramatic of family dramas: the precocious little boy who prefers to dress like Tucker Carlson. The tiny vests and ties denote a type, to be sure. This kid is gifted. Serious. Far smarter than the adults who are nurturing him. And he knows it. If you’re familiar with this particular personality, your first glimpse of the latest incarnation will likely give a good indication whether you’ll love him or hate him. Vitus’ titular character is introduced in a way that may not win him fans immediately. A boy of 12 is wearing a suit and shuffling on a sunny morning toward the runway of a small airport. The gate is padlocked shut, so he climbs over and hops into a plane. No one notices until he turns on the engine, at which point an employee waves his arms frantically and pleads with the boy to shut it off. Instead, Vitus gives a thumbs up, and away he goes. Away he goes? Please. Mercifully, writer-director Fredi M. Murer immediately turns back the clock to when Vitus (Fabrizio Borsani) was a much more darling tyke of 6. His parents, Helen and Leo (Julika Jenkins and Urs Jucker), are just realizing how gifted their son is—he’s a natural on the piano, terrifically bored in kindergarten, and takes it upon himself to look up words that Dad doesn’t have time to define for him. They feel pressured to nurture Vitus’ talent, but, you know, it’s not so bad. After all, the kid can be trotted out at dinner parties to show up snooty co-workers who expect that Leo’s boasting means that the boy can play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Vitus’ grandfather (Bruno Ganz), meanwhile, is more of a salt-of-the-earth type and has his grandson help with small construction projects while Gramps talks about his own dreams of being a pilot. Metaphor alert! Vitus is being piano-benched by one generation and receiving hushed odes on the beauty of flight from another. For a while, it’s captivating. Vitus isn’t quite enough of a smartass to be irritating at this stage (see the recent Joshua or 2002’s Valentín for good examples of how exasperating these characters can become), though, admittedly, it’s mostly because Murer focuses more often on the boy’s incredible performances instead of, say, his arrogant ways with a babysitter. The awe of—and sympathy for—the child who is too smart to fit in anywhere dissipates, however, when the film skips ahead a few years. Vitus is now 12 (played by real-life pianist Teo Gheorghiu) and rebelling against whatever the world’s got. He’s sick of his mother’s stage-momness and those teachers who think they know everything. But really, he just wants to be normal. Vitus, co-written by Peter Luisi and Lukas B. Suter, devolves into a ridiculous adolescent fantasy from this point. Try to keep liking the kid as he pulls off an act of supreme manipulation after deciding he no longer wants to pursue a career in music. Or becomes a whiz at the stock market. Or woos his former babysitter, going so far as to buy her a diamond ring and using statistics about death rates and peaking libidos to argue his case. This downturn is a terrific disappointment considering the film’s achievements: The acting, particularly Jenkins’ turn as Vitus’ cool, aristocratic mum and Ganz’s charming grandfather, is excellent, and the score (all piano, naturally) remains enjoyable even when the story goes downhill. It’s nearly enough to fool you into believing you’re watching one fine film—but like its main character, Vitus tries so hard to be intelligent that it forgets to be likable. My Best Friend suffers from nearly the opposite problem: Its main character spends the movie trying to figure out the secret to being liked, but it’s unclear why those around him think he’s a git in the first place. François (Daniel Auteuil) is a French antiques dealer who owns a gallery with his partner, Catherine (Julie Gayet). François isn’t exactly the bleeding-heart type—he attends a former client’s funeral only to procure one final piece of furniture from the man’s estate—and at an associate-attended birthday dinner later that night, his colleagues accuse him of not having any friends. Now, you’d think such a charge would be made lightheartedly, especially considering that the discussion begins not a minute after François smilingly joins them. But these people are rather serious: You don’t bother to notice anyone, they say. No one’s going to come to your funeral. Catherine goes so far as to guess that François doesn’t even have one close friend. In fact, she bets on it. If he can’t present a best bud to her within 10 days, a valuable Greek vase that the dealer impulsively bought that afternoon will be hers. So François spends the evening struggling to come up with a list of pals, shooing away his loving, obviously devoted girlfriend (Elisabeth Bourgine) as he works. Writer-director Patrice Leconte’s film (co-written by Jérôme Tonnerre) has two major strengths. One is the uniqueness of the script. It’s not often you see stories that are strictly about friendship—sure, there’s guy-love in plenty of films, but its portrayal is inevitably accompanied by explosions, sexy women, or other devices that are distracting enough to show grown men liking each other without making it seem as if they like like each other. The other plus is its leads: Auteuil, always a charming presence from such fluff as Après Vous… and The Valet, is—in what will prove to be the film’s undoing—also quite likable here, as is Dany Boon (also from The Valet), playing Bruno, an easygoing, trivia-obsessed cab driver sought out by François for advice on how to make friends. The problem with My Best Friend, however, is that its execution is as strained as its idea is unusual. After that first, mean-spirited dinner—at which point we’ve yet to see any red flags regarding François’ personality—the writers never bother to layer their main character, instead showing him approaching people from his past, all of whom act like he’s murdered their families. Even his college-age daughter tells Bruno that her dad “stinks.” (François’ sin against her? He thought she had a dust allergy, when really it was pecans.) Meanwhile, François’ predicament is played for laughs. He’s thrilled about his apparent instant rapport with salespeople and goofy when he asks two gentlemen in a restaurant how they cultivated their relationship. In other words, he’s funny and personable. Not exactly what the script ordered. Worse, the plot takes turns contrived enough to get a sitcom canceled. Bruno and François develop a friendship, of course, but just as predictably things get strained—because François, you know, just can’t help screwing up. But the film wipes its hands of all plausibility in its final chapter. Let’s just say it involves Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and those lifelines. Against all odds, there are a few chuckles in this predictable arc, and the sentiment expressed about true friends is touching. But My Best Friend is ultimately a trifle that's too labored to be sweet.
]]>Thu, 26 Jul 2007 23:17:00 GMTMovieBabeMovieBabe Blog7/26/2007 7:17:00 PM By Tricia Olszewski Vitus asks you to believe in a myth that pops up in film from time to time, usually in the most melodramatic of family dramas: the precocious little boy who prefers to dress like Tucker Carlson. The tiny vests and ties denote a type, to be sure. This kid is gifted. Serious. Far smarter than the adults who are nurturing him. And he knows it. If you’re familiar with this particular personality, your first glimpse of the latest incarnation will likely give a good indication whether you’ll love him or hate him. Vitus’ titular character is introduced in a way that may not win him fans immediately. A boy of 12 is wearing a suit and shuffling on a sunny morning toward the runway of a small airport. The gate is padlocked shut, so he climbs over and hops into a plane. No one notices until he turns on the engine, at which point an employee waves his arms frantically and pleads with the boy to shut it off. Instead, Vitus gives a thumbs up, and away he goes. Away he goes? Please. Mercifully, writer-director Fredi M. Murer immediately turns back the clock to when Vitus (Fabrizio Borsani) was a much more darling tyke of 6. His parents, Helen and Leo (Julika Jenkins and Urs Jucker), are just realizing how gifted their son is—he’s a natural on the piano, terrifically bored in kindergarten, and takes it upon himself to look up words that Dad doesn’t have time to define for him. They feel pressured to nurture Vitus’ talent, but, you know, it’s not so bad. After all, the kid can be trotted out at dinner parties to show up snooty co-workers who expect that Leo’s boasting means that the boy can play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Vitus’ grandfather (Bruno Ganz), meanwhile, is more of a salt-of-the-earth type and has his grandson help with small construction projects while Gramps talks about his own dreams of being a pilot. Metaphor alert! Vitus is being piano-benched by one generation and receiving hushed odes on the beauty of flight from another. For a while, it’s captivating. Vitus isn’t quite enough of a smartass to be irritating at this stage (see the recent Joshua or 2002’s Valentín for good examples of how exasperating these characters can become), though, admittedly, it’s mostly because Murer focuses more often on the boy’s incredible performances instead of, say, his arrogant ways with a babysitter. The awe of—and sympathy for—the child who is too smart to fit in anywhere dissipates, however, when the film skips ahead a few years. Vitus is now 12 (played by real-life pianist Teo Gheorghiu) and rebelling against whatever the world’s got. He’s sick of his mother’s stage-momness and those teachers who think they know everything. But really, he just wants to be normal. Vitus, co-written by Peter Luisi and Lukas B. Suter, devolves into a ridiculous adolescent fantasy from this point. Try to keep liking the kid as he pulls off an act of supreme manipulation after deciding he no longer wants to pursue a career in music. Or becomes a whiz at the stock market. Or woos his former babysitter, going so far as to buy her a diamond ring and using statistics about death rates and peaking libidos to argue his case. This downturn is a terrific disappointment considering the film’s achievements: The acting, particularly Jenkins’ turn as Vitus’ cool, aristocratic mum and Ganz’s charming grandfather, is excellent, and the score (all piano, naturally) remains enjoyable even when the story goes downhill. It’s nearly enough to fool you into believing you’re watching one fine film—but like its main character, Vitus tries so hard to be intelligent that it forgets to be likable. My Best Friend suffers from nearly the opposite problem: Its main character spends the movie trying to figure out the secret to being liked, but it’s unclear why those around him think he’s a git in the first place. François (Daniel Auteuil) is a French antiques dealer who owns a gallery with his partner, Catherine (Julie Gayet). François isn’t exactly the bleeding-heart type—he attends a former client’s funeral only to procure one final piece of furniture from the man’s estate—and at an associate-attended birthday dinner later that night, his colleagues accuse him of not having any friends. Now, you’d think such a charge would be made lightheartedly, especially considering that the discussion begins not a minute after François smilingly joins them. But these people are rather serious: You don’t bother to notice anyone, they say. No one’s going to come to your funeral. Catherine goes so far as to guess that François doesn’t even have one close friend. In fact, she bets on it. If he can’t present a best bud to her within 10 days, a valuable Greek vase that the dealer impulsively bought that afternoon will be hers. So François spends the evening struggling to come up with a list of pals, shooing away his loving, obviously devoted girlfriend (Elisabeth Bourgine) as he works. Writer-director Patrice Leconte’s film (co-written by Jérôme Tonnerre) has two major strengths. One is the uniqueness of the script. It’s not often you see stories that are strictly about friendship—sure, there’s guy-love in plenty of films, but its portrayal is inevitably accompanied by explosions, sexy women, or other devices that are distracting enough to show grown men liking each other without making it seem as if they like like each other. The other plus is its leads: Auteuil, always a charming presence from such fluff as Après Vous… and The Valet, is—in what will prove to be the film’s undoing—also quite likable here, as is Dany Boon (also from The Valet), playing Bruno, an easygoing, trivia-obsessed cab driver sought out by François for advice on how to make friends. The problem with My Best Friend, however, is that its execution is as strained as its idea is unusual. After that first, mean-spirited dinner—at which point we’ve yet to see any red flags regarding François’ personality—the writers never bother to layer their main character, instead showing him approaching people from his past, all of whom act like he’s murdered their families. Even his college-age daughter tells Bruno that her dad “stinks.” (François’ sin against her? He thought she had a dust allergy, when really it was pecans.) Meanwhile, François’ predicament is played for laughs. He’s thrilled about his apparent instant rapport with salespeople and goofy when he asks two gentlemen in a restaurant how they cultivated their relationship. In other words, he’s funny and personable. Not exactly what the script ordered. Worse, the plot takes turns contrived enough to get a sitcom canceled. Bruno and François develop a friendship, of course, but just as predictably things get strained—because François, you know, just can’t help screwing up. But the film wipes its hands of all plausibility in its final chapter. Let’s just say it involves Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and those lifelines. Against all odds, there are a few chuckles in this predictable arc, and the sentiment expressed about true friends is touching. But My Best Friend is ultimately a trifle that's too labored to be sweet. Spout Post: A Not-So-Innocent Victim 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 Spout Tag:movie http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/movie/MemberTagFilms.aspxmovie
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]]>Wed, 19 Aug 2009 16:09:46 GMT363114187Tag Spout Tag:excellent http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/excellent/MemberTagFilms.aspxexcellent
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]]>Sat, 31 Jan 2009 06:45:00 GMT444346Tag Spout Tag:piano http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/piano/MemberTagFilms.aspxpiano
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]]>Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:56:22 GMT4893252Tag Spout Tag:very http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/very/MemberTagFilms.aspxvery
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]]>Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:14:48 GMT191920Tag Spout Tag:unexpected http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/unexpected/MemberTagFilms.aspxunexpected
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]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:03:05 GMT161517Tag Spout Tag:parentchildrelationship http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/parentchildrelationship/MemberTagFilms.aspxparentchildrelationship
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]]>Tue, 23 Jun 2009 13:08:16 GMT3961427Tag Spout Tag:prodigy http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/prodigy/MemberTagFilms.aspxprodigy
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]]>Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:26:43 GMT63810Tag Spout Tag:grandpa http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/grandpa/MemberTagFilms.aspxgrandpa
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]]>Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:59:19 GMT377Tag Spout Tag:tender http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/tender/MemberTagFilms.aspxtender
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]]>Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:26:54 GMT11711Tag Spout Tag:his http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/his/MemberTagFilms.aspxhis
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]]>Mon, 19 May 2008 18:00:49 GMT666Tag Spout Tag:grandfather http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/grandfather/MemberTagFilms.aspxgrandfather
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]]>Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:11:49 GMT36257Tag Spout Tag:impressive http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/impressive/MemberTagFilms.aspximpressive
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]]>Tue, 07 Aug 2007 03:44:47 GMT656Tag Spout Tag:aviation http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/aviation/MemberTagFilms.aspxaviation
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]]>Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:02:37 GMT18435Tag Spout Tag:role http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/role/MemberTagFilms.aspxrole
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