Battleship Pretension

Winter in the Blood

Back in 2002, Alex and Andrew Smith made a film called The Slaughter Rule. That movie – about an angry teenager processing the death of his father while balancing the struggles of his replacement paternal figure, his football coach, and the peculiarities of becoming a man himself – made a deep impression on me. I consider it to be the among the best and most frustratingly underseen films of its decade. So it was with great eagerness that I jumped at the chance, eleven years later, to see the Smiths’ follow-up, Winter in the Blood.

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Shoes (writer/director George Griffith) works as a bathroom attendant in a strip-club. His goal is to be just clever and polite enough to get a sizable tip from every man who sets foot into his tile-lined kingdom. It’s a living, and Shoes has been doing it for three years now, a fact which, tonight, nobody will let him forget.

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In this episode, Tyler and David discuss the films playing at the Los Angeles Film Festival, along with several tangents.

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For the past few years around Halloweentime my wife and I have attended 24-hour horror marathons — though I thoroughly enjoy myself, she usually has a tougher time with many of the films. It’s not just an adverse reaction to jump scares, gore, or other general horror conventions, but also because the genre is typically quite misogynistic (especially the types of horror films that end up at 24-hour marathons). Women are often only seen as sexual objects or victims of brutality, some are allowed to survive but only after hours of being terrorized. Though there are obviously exceptions, many a “final girl” survive not because of any talent or intellect, but because the genre needs a survivor. Perhaps as direct opposition to the male driven genre, most of the feminist horror films we’ve seen work as revenge flicks with their heroines preying on the men who marginalize them. American Mary isn’t different in that respect, but it does a particularly good job of creating a sympathetic figure and a surprisingly adept dramatic story.

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With all the hullabaloo about J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek franchise reboot, I feel like it is just a matter of time before somebody decides to reboot The Next Generation.  It could be a fun prospect, incorporating the more modern sensibility of the show and its characters with latest cutting edge special effects could make for a very entertaining film.  The characters of the show are, in many ways, just as interesting and distinct as those from the original series, so casting them correctly is key.

Let’s see what we’ve got.

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Being a medium that exists in the fourth dimension, cinema is particularly well-suited to detailing process. Philippe Béziat’s Becoming Traviata details the process of rehearsing a production of Verdi’s Traviata. It does more than that, though. In focusing on the energy, commitment and passion of individual human beings, the film not only shows us how an opera staging is assembled but how it is art.

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Carlo De Rosa’s new film Finding Joy tells the warm story of a family of eccentric characters in a strangely charming tale of love and loss. Kyle Livingston (Josh Cooke) effectively loses his friendships, home, car, and confidence in an efficient five minute introduction, and the author of “Portrait of a Frozen Family” retreats back to his childhood home to live with his father, his father’s new girlfriend, brother, sister-in-law, and niece. Except his bedroom has been converted into a bathroom. So, Kyle sleeps uncomfortably in the bathtub, staring at his laptop, while haunted by an impending deadline for his next book. He catches the eye of Joy (Liane Balaban), his attractive neighbor across the street who takes an interest in him that builds to an unusual request. She is dying and asks Kyle write a “classy, sassy obituary” for her. To get to know each other for the ostensible purpose of writing the obit, Joy takes Kyle on zany adventures volunteering with the seniors at the local retirement center, donating to the homeless, and having him wear a costume that represents her greatest fear. As he accompanies Joy and develops feelings for her, Kyle also begins thawing the ice at home with his grieving father and conflicted brother.

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The new Superman film Man of Steel ultimately betrays itself by not being sure what it wants to be. The two names attached to this film suggest two different movie-making philosophies: director Zack Snyder of 300 and Watchmen and producer Christopher Nolan of the recent Batman trilogy and Inception. The resulting film is promising, uneven, and frustrating.

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Anyone who’s tried to make a student film will tell you that a movie’s sound, no matter how imperceptible, is what stands between amateur and professional. The amount of artificiality that goes into making a movie sound realistic is truly staggering, from foley to ADR to specially recorded and mixed ambient noise. In some cases, the film’s sound can be what truly makes it effective, and if it’s a horror film, those sounds can elicit cringes and shrieks, even if all they are are melons being stabbed or steaks being malleted. It is this premise that takes Toby Jones into a world of nightmares in the dreamily eerie Berberian Sound Studio, written and directed by Peter Strickland.

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Julian Polsler’s The Wall is a simple enough film.  A woman gets trapped alone behind an invisible- but very real- wall in the middle of nowhere.  Cut off from the rest of humanity, she finds solace in local wildlife and pets, chiefly her dog.  Like I said, pretty simple.  But it is in that simplicity that we find a creeping dread that slowly envelopes the film.  This is not the dread of impending death, or even loss or injury, but of total isolation.  And the film is so beautifully and efficiently mounted that I wish it were more engaging.

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