White Reindeer (2013)

Directed by: Zach Clark
Country: USA

Movie Review: Zach Clark’s “White Reindeer” is a cheerless drama labeled as comedy that depicts the terrible Christmas of real-estate agent Suzanne Barrington (Anna Margaret Hollyman). After her husband has been brutally assassinated during a house breaking, Suzanne will find out some of his hidden dirty secrets, including Internet pornography and frequent sexual encounters with his lover Autumn (Laura Lemar-Goldsborough), a striper whom she gets curious to meet. In a visible depressive state, Suzanne becomes friends with Autumn, often attending night parties and getting into the world of drugs and alcohol. To worse even more the situation, her parents decide to split up after long years of marriage, while financial crisis is inevitable once she starts compulsively shopping online. The strangest situation comes when she invites herself for a swinger party in her neighbor’s, which was depicted with some interesting scenes, increasing even more her psychological degradation. To culminate in beauty, she realizes she's pregnant and the nightmare seems not to have an end. Thus, if you think that there’s nothing better than a good comedy to enhance Christmas’ spirit, don’t be mislead by this unfunny dramatic comedy, that goes exactly in the opposite way. Despite its degrading darkness, the film presents some hope in the end, but nothing more than that, since all the rest are just feel-bad situations and sad occurrences that don’t take Suzanne, or us, anywhere.

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La Playa DC (2012)

Directed by: Juan Andrés Arango
Country: Colombia / others

Movie Review: Drugs and racism are addressed without any special feature in this drama focused on Tomas, an Afro-Colombian teenager who tries to survive in the streets of Bogotá after leaving home due to incompatibility with his mother’s white boyfriend. When he learns about the disappearance of his traumatized and drug addict younger brother, Jairo, he starts beating the streets, joined by his other brother Chaco whose dream is to leave for north. An opportunity to work as barber will be given to Tomas, but the good winds don't blow to his side, since he lost the confidence of his employer, all to save his brother from the drug dealers’ hands. Observant yet somehow bashful, “La Playa DC” seems to accept too easily the fate of these brave kids, painting a too bland and softened picture of a reality that requires some more stimulating vibes to be distinguishable. Debutant writer/director and former cinematographer, Juan Andrés Arango, despite the good intentions, lingers too much in stories about hair and haircuts instead of putting a bit more anger and frustration in the scenes. This way the film loses the additional strength that the drama needed to be placed above similar works. With moments of real tension being just a mirage, “La Playa DC” turned out to be another volatile, low-key exercise on street survival and broken family. Nonprofessional actor Juan Carlos Guevara did a competent job.

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The Last Days on Mars (2013)

Directed by: Ruairi Robinson
Country: UK / Ireland

Movie Review: Created with the expected limitations of a low-budget film, “Last Days on Mars” relies more on the suspense of its story than anything else. Ruairi Robinson’s debut on direction was too modest and conventional to impress. The film, based on a short story and mainly shot at Jordan’s desert, follows a crew of astronauts who become exposed to a dangerous bacterial threat in the last days of their six-month mission to Mars, leading to tragic consequences. Victimizing one by one, these mysterious bacteria show strong resilience when tested with other substances. In the first half-hour I had to make an extra-effort to remain focused on what was happening, since the plot looked pretty familiar with its mediocre execution, tense score, and visuals that weren’t so creative. A big obstruction factor to a more acceptable result was that the ones infected became a sort of raging spatial zombies. When I compare “Last Days on Mars” with “Europa Report”, another low-budget sci-fi film released this year and reviewed in this blog, I came to the conclusion that the latter’s approach gains in terms of mystery and technical execution. I guess dead men turned into zombies in space just asphyxiated all the curiosity that could come out from a somber story of this type. The uncertain finale still tried to tease us somehow, but even that aspect wasn’t particularly new. It felt short with the lack of positive ideas.

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Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013)

Directed by: Michel Gondry
Country: France

Movie Review: After the realism of “The We and The I” and the surrealism of “Mood Indigo”, the multifaceted Michel Gondry embarks in a unique conversation with Noam Chomsky, a renown American linguist philosopher, politic commentator and activist. Shot with an old mechanical Bolex camera and adorned with animation, “Is the Tall Man Happy?” reveals an interesting approach and presents a very didactic conversation about themes such as evolution, development, science, traditional vs. modern, religion, astrology and life's coincidences, generative grammar, holocaust and death, among others. Therefore, and for quite some time, the film seems like a philosophical lecture that encompasses Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and David Hume, just to mention a few. The interesting here is that Chomsky also enters in the personal field, telling us about past memories, from childhood to high school and college, and elucidating us about his professional path and the education given to his three children who grew up surrounded with political tension and took different directions in life. The simplistic animation was carried out on top of images with an antique look, like a simple room, streets, places, or occasionally the interview itself. Hard to be absorbed immediately, this instructive animated-documentary, narrated in English with a strong French accent by its filmmaker, requires to be seen more than once to be fully apprehended. If you’re interested in philosophy and science, this is a film for you; otherwise you may find it too dense and puzzling.

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Cutie and the Boxer (2013)

Directed by: Zachary Heinzerling
Country: USA

Movie Review: “Cutie and the Boxer” is a legitimate documentary focused on the turbulent life and 40 year marriage of Japanese neo-Dadaist artist Ushio Shinohara, also known as boxing painter, and his wife Noriko, also an artist. Debutant director Zachary Heinzerling, also cinematographer and producer, captured in a simple and efficient manner the peculiar relationship and constant struggles of Shinohara family while living in New York City. Through animation sequences painted by Noriko, we get to know more of her story after she has come alone to New York with her parents’ money, at the age of 19. In that time, she met 41 year-old Ushio who got completely fascinated by her beauty. Since then, the couple sacrificed everything in favor of art, which always has been their priority, but continues living in a constant struggle to balance their relationship, pay the rent, and control their alcoholic son Alex, who according to his mother didn’t grow up in a healthy environment since his father was always drunk before until suddenly become allergic to alcohol. Noriko’s complains and regrets are genuine, and we can glimpse sadness in her eyes when she talks about her discontinued artwork or the inferiority complex in relation to her teacher and successful husband, who exhibited his works in famous museums and galleries of New York and Tokyo, among others. More intense in the last part,  “Cutie and the Boxer” competently represents a slice of real life, and a masquerade love story of coldness and resentment, everything for the sake of art.

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Jin (2013)

Directed by: Reha Erdem
Country: Turkey / others

Movie Review: So far, speaking of Turkish filmmaker Reha Erdem means interesting cinema, and “Jin” is here to confirm that. It tells the journey of a 17-year-old Kurdish girl who tries to leave a delimited and well-guarded mountain region in Turkey where she hides, in order to reach the border and get to her family. In a strange, almost supernatural communion with nature and animals along the way, Jin decides to move from her permanent hideaway among the rocks and rob a house where an old woman was bedridden. She steals food, clothes, money, and a book from the woman’s granddaughter to practice her reading. But fate will make her fall into the hands of several irascible men who wanted to take advantage of her. Jin will manage to escape and show her good heart in two occasions and in two different ways: when she kills a suffering Kurdish man at his request in prison, and when she saves a wounded Turkish soldier. Having walked in circles, it was with huge sorrow that Jin returns to her origin place, the hideaway cave, just to find more devastating bombardments and a sad scenario of misery and war. Throughout the film, I got fond of Jin and her good nature, excusing every little misdemeanor she was compelled to do in order to survive. With a superb cinematography by the habitual Florent Herry, the grim story of “Jin” gives us a totally different morality depicted in an astute and articulate manner, and showing to have more to give than a mere observation of the conflict.

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Touch of the Light (2012)

Directed by: Rong-ji Chang
Country: Taiwan

Movie Review: “Touch Of the Light” is a soapy drama based on true events that constantly tests your patience with its sweetness and all-smile characters. The story follows two teenagers who are searching for recognition in what they love most. Siang (played by himself), blind since childbirth and with a special ear for music, is trying to adapt himself to his new school where he studies piano, while Jie (Sandrine Pinna) is unhappy working in a drink shop and wants to dance professionally. The two will bump into each other by chance and the encounter will be fruitful for both. Nothing stood out in this romanticized melodrama filled with manipulated tensions and encased in the same music and dance sequences. It was clear that Taiwanese director Rong-Ji Chang’s debut on fiction was aimed to reach the masses, creating an uninteresting atmosphere of frustration and personal struggle that completely put me off. The tedious pastiche that comes out of the story, written by Nyssa Li (director’s collaborator in two previous documentaries), only aggravates its lack of originality and monotone tones. Despite its numerous critical problems, the film won the PIPRESCI prize at Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei, place where director Chang was also considered best new director. To finish, I must say this sentimental flick is totally dispensable.

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