Entertainment Maven

Hot Docs 2013: Downloaded Review (Kirk Haviland)

Downloaded

In 1998, teenage hacker Shawn Fanning cracked the code that enabled peer-to-peer file sharing online. In 1999, he partnered with his friend and fellow teen Sean Parker (later of Facebook fame) to launch a little service known as Napster. The music-sharing website transformed not only the music industry, but technology as a whole. It sparked a revolution and became the touchstone of a new, digital generation. Filmmaker Alex Winter is granted near unlimited access to Fanning and his collaborators, as well as to a roster of famous musicians including Henry Rollins, Snoop Lion, Beastie Boy Mike D and Public Enemy Chuck D, who are only too happy to give their opinions and insights on free downloading and copyright infringement.

It’s hard to imagine how much the music industry was affected and changed with the Napster technology, especially for the children of this digital age. The music store in the local mall used to be the busiest place to shop as it was the only way to get music. Director Winter takes us back to the ground-breaking first days of Napster through to the eventual demise and the impact the site has had on the industry as a whole. For once in music history, Napster tipped the scale in the favor of the consumer and has affected massive change. Fanning and Parker serve to be engaging subjects, and meeting the real Fanning will help you appreciate Justin Timberlake’s turn in the “Social Network” even more.

With a sharp and brilliant sense of humor, Downloaded dissects the story and the people behind it. With extremely fascinating material and one of the funniest final products of the festival, Downloaded is sure to be a crowd pleaser.

Screens

Sat, Apr 27 9:00 PM Isabel Bader Theatre	Rush Tickets
Sun, Apr 28 3:30 PM Scotiabank 3	Buy Tickets
Fri, May 3 9:30 PM Fox Theatre	Buy Tickets

The Sapphires Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

The Sapphires

Starring Chris O’Dowd, Deborah Mailman, Miranda Tapsell, Jessica Mauboy, and Shari Sebbins

Directed by Wayne Blair

The Sapphires begins with title cards writing the context of Australia’s anti-Aboriginal poilicies, including the separation of light skinned Aboriginal children from their parents. This movie portrays a family’s daughters trying to heal each other’s wounds. Then it focuses on the personal, loosely based on the true story of four Aboriginal cousins who sang folk and country music but eventually branching out to soul music, the dominant genre of the volatile late 1960’s. They have overcome race and class-based oppression, both from outsiders and even from within the group or family.

One of the group’s real life members, Laurel Robinson, is the mother of this movie’s sscreenwriter, Tony Briggs, whose script is adapted from his award-winning play of the same name. That said, here I am, as one of the last people who will point out the bad parts of the movie. Because I must, as much as it pains me to do so.

This group, in whatever capacity and perseverance that they had, performed in Australia and war-torn Vietnam. There was the group’s big sister Gail (Mailman), the kitteny Cynthia (Tapsell), the young mother Julie with the booming voice (Mauboy), and the Kay, (Sebbins) who is ambivalent about her race. We can already imagine the personalities clashing.

For dramatic purposes, the movie adds a homeless band manager Dave Lovelace (O’Dowd, who gets first billing), the groups’ matriarch, a band member’s child and love interests to the mix. I’m all right with this handful of characters, but I can’t say the same about their dynamic. Name two characters and I guarantee that they are going to air out a grudge against each other at least in one of many fighting scene.
I understand, as a person belonging to a ‘minority’ group, that it’s not easy to face racial tension. While encountering these obstacles, I also understand the group members’ instinct is to fight back or fight each other, as some people do in real life. Their instincts are better than dismissing and permanently suppressing their emotions and needs, which is what many female characters unfortunately are written to do.

But I’m sure fictional characters or real life people in the most challenging of situations aren’t always yelling at someone. Blair and Briggs’ only weapon to counter the combative dialogue is the blaring music. These frenetic elements become slightly unpalatable in a movie that desperately needs its quiet moments.

But despite of calling the music ‘blaring,’ I have to admit that the musical numbers are the film’s most moving segments. It didn’t matter which genre the girls were singing in. Some songs made me cry and others made me dance in my seat, as they are meant to do.

This movie also belongs to the roster of musicals that the Weinsteins pick up once every few years. I acknowledge the numerous sins that they have committed, but at least they love modern spins on so-called ‘dated’ genres. They also like great leading female performances, like the one that Mailman executes with such versatility.

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Oblivion Review (Kirk Haviland)

Oblivion

Starring: Tom Cruise, Andrea Riseborough, Olga Kurylenko, Zoe Bell, Melissa Leo and Morgan Freeman

Written by Joseph Kosinski, Karl Gajdusek and Michael Arndt

Directed by Joseph Kosinski

New in theaters this week is the new Science Fiction action/thriller from the director of Tron: Legacy starring Tom Cruise, Oblivion. The first of many apocalyptic earth films to be unleashed in theaters this year, this summer’s After Earth and fall’s Snowpiercer still to come; Oblivion is a beautiful looking epic that despite a small cast is very grand in scale. The question is will the film be original enough to outshine its competition?

2077: Jack Harper (Cruise) serves as a security repairmen stationed on an evacuated Earth with his partner Victoria (Riseborough) who monitors his action from their own command center. Part of a massive operation to extract vital resources after decades of war with a terrifying alien threat who still scavenges what’s left of our planet, Jack’s mission is almost complete. In a matter of two weeks, he and Victoria will join the remaining survivors on a lunar colony far from the war-torn world he has long called home. Jack’s soaring existence is brought crashing down though after he rescues a beautiful stranger named Julia (Kurylenko) from a downed spacecraft. Drawn to Jack through a connection that transcends logic, Julia’s arrival triggers a chain of events that forces him to question everything he thought he knew.

Oblivion is the blended offspring of “Prometheus” and “2001: A Space Odyssey”, with copious amounts of “Independence Day” and “Moon” also in the mix. The film features all the gorgeous imagery of Ridley Scott’s epic from last year mixed with a literal interpretation of HAL from 2001 and a ‘mothership’ straight out of Independence Day. The first hour of the film, while establishing our breathtaking setting, does not feature a lot of action or plot as it is used for world and character building almost exclusively. The second hour marks the arrival of Julia and the film shifts dramatically to a more intense action piece. The film features more than one area where the story could have finished but continues past these on its way to the eventual ending,

Cruise is decent here in typical Cruise ‘good guy’ fashion, closely resembling his “Minority Report” John Anderton mixed with a bit of his “War of the Worlds” Ray Ferrier. Point is we’ve seen this performance from Cruise before and its good enough without pushing any boundaries. The real star of the film may be Riseborough and her performance as Victoria. Riseborough maintains a meticulous, calm and by the book outside veneer, but the audience cannot help but feel an underlying menace in her tone and actions. Kurylenko is decent, and other than the occasional appearance of Melissa Leo via a video com and Morgan Freeman appearing as a survivor, the rest of the cast is merely window dressing as most have next to no dialogue.

The film has a lot of green screen CGI vistas mixed with some real locations to create some stunning visuals. The setting is captivating, with devastated cities and barren wastelands surrounding the planet to Jack`s own ‘garden of Eden’ type getaway, the camera gives the audience plenty of lush imagery to watch as the film proceeds. The effects and stunt work is also very well done as the ships and drones Jack work with and the home that Jack and Victoria live in feel very tangible. The setting and surroundings are by far the biggest reasons for audiences to experience the film in the grand scale that a movie theater provides.

Oblivion is a pure joy visually to watch, but the story is a smorgasbord of other films that have come before. Borrowing liberally from other material, Oblivion plays all of it straight up without any nods to the audience that they may have seen this material before, which may have helped play off the `déjà vu` nature of the viewing experience. Still the stunning visuals on display here make the film worthy of a recommend.

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To The Wonder Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

To The Wonder

Starring Olga Kurylenko, Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams and Javier Bardem

Written and directed by Terrence Malick

The debate-engendering reception of Terrence Malick’s films continues with his new movie To The Wonder. The festival crowd like the ones in TIFF (including Dustin) and Vencie hated it, Roger Ebert loved it. I see both sides. Since there are more detractors against this new movie than fans, it’s tempting to play the devil’s advocate.

To The Wonder makes for an interesting companion piece to Malick’s earlier work in The Tree of Life. The latter coherently shows the conflict between nature and grace. The former works like an opened door. The characters dizzyingly pirouette into the endless possibilities of nature and its duplicitous, volatile and corruptible qualities. We get the title from the words of our protagonist Marina, a happy Russian-born Parisian. She embraces nature and new experiences, falling in love in Mont St. Michel with a journalist named Neil (Ben Affleck), eventually deciding to move to Oklahoma and bring her young daughter with her. But Malick eventually sledgehammers her optimism.

Marina could have easily ended up as a madwoman trapped in an alienating relationship and country. Neil is equally powerless, endlessly investigating environmental pollution caused by exurban infrastructure, and it doesn’t help that half of the people he’s interviewing are uncooperative and afraid of scandal and change. His on-and-off lover Jane (Rachel McAdams, unfortunately playing the least developed character of the four) might have to sell her ranch to pay for its debts. Their parish priest, Father Quintana (Javier Bardem) is distant, unable to find God’s transcendent love in the helpless faces of his community’s welfare class. They might be as normal and practically nameless as Malick’s other characters but here he approaches these on such a personal focus.

If anything, what Malick does best here is finding a new way to capture loneliness. And not the cuddly kind where we watch someone express his brooding pathos through mundane tasks. The depictions of these characters are devoid of intimacy, an approach that could have been so exhausting had it not felt as daring.

Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography help engender this tone. Malick’s subjects feel like boulders captured through low or high angles, panning like the camera was a bumblebee. His close-ups are invasive, his long shots occasionally blocked by nature or man-made fortresses. The characters turn their backs to the camera, they converse in places that are surprisingly not easy from which to eavesdrop. There’s also an epistolary method to the script. The characters speak more clearly to themselves or to their lost God than they do to each other, their alienation clouding their attempts towards interpersonal contact.

Malick toes the line between depicting frustration and offering a frustrating product itself. And as strange as this might sound, even in times that the movie makes me hate myself, I respected how Malick can deliver such raw and genuine emotions.

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The Place Beyond the Pines Review (Paolo Kagaoan)

The Place Beyond the Pines

Starring Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, Dane DeHaan, Emory Cohen, Ray Liotta, Ben Mendelsohn, Rose Byrne and Bruce Greenwood

Written by Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio and Darius Marder

Directed and Derek Cianfrance

The first publicity stills for Ryan Gosling’s new vehicle (sorry) The Place Beyond the Pines worried me because just like everyone, I thought that the teardrop tattoo and the bleached hair has temporarily ruined Gosling the male ideal. This look was even worse than the two movies where he looked like Jason Lee – those movies being Lars and the Real Girl and Blue Valentine. But he surprisingly never looked better, his face glowing and more symmetrical. Gosling’s character, Luke Glanton, dominates the first act of this triptych. His performance is captured by most suitable hands, with director Derek Cianfrance’s lo-fi aesthetic combined with cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s fluorescent, brutal artistry. Mike Patton’s haunting Lynchian score also enforces this aura that Luke is this impossible phantom, a character more important that Luke himself realizes.

Luke is a motorcycle stuntman famous within the circus crowd. He discovers that he has a child with a Cuban-American Schenectady native named Romina (Mendes). At first pride sets in but instead of regular employable skills, one of his colleagues (Mendelsohn) suggests that his abilities has the makings with that of a bank robber. Gosling’s finest moments are in these scenes, his voice squeaking to suggest that he’s not perfect at this gig. The movie also promises this crime to affect generations and that it does.

For some of the audience who are looking for more facets in this story, we can chew and bite on its depiction of Luke’s family as well as Avery Cross (Cooper), the man who has to stop Luke’s robbing spree. Families, after all, seems to be the theme of choice for Cianfrance, who is becoming one of our generation’s prominent tragedists. His earlier movie Blue Valentine portrays a rocky marriage. This new movie, however, uses a bigger canvas to show more elements that help families break apart.

Luke’s family is a diverse one, with Romina married to a man named Kofi, Romina bearing two children from different fathers. On the other hand, Avery deals with his ex-politician father, a wayward son named AJ (Cohen, the movie’s second MVP) and a wife named Jennifer (Byrne) who wants him to quit the force after the catastrophic fallout of his involvement with Luke’s case. Cianfrance’s delicate wisdom in co-writing this script is clear by showing both the families’ diversity and dysfunction without necessarily showing the connections within both.

That said, as thrilling and magnificently shot as Gosling and his scenes are, I feel like I’m the only crazy person who thinks that Cianfrance sets Luke’s story arc in stone. While watching the movie, my questions instead were about the other two sections of this triptych. What will Avery do after the fallout of Luke’s case? What kind of relationship will AJ have with another boy named Jason (DeHaan), the latter having his own past to deal with? I’m thus more interested in the slow burn of the other two sections because anything can happen in those scenes, those scenes belong to one heart-pumping movie.

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