A.V. Club Blog

Days Nine and Ten

Okay, the festival is over and my plane lands in about 45 minutes, leaving me

roughly half an hour before all electronic devices must be turned off. (Incidentally,

why is this such a big deal? If listening to my iPod on descent could legitimately

threaten the planes navigational system, perhaps I should consider alternative

forms of travel.) So unlike the lugubrious slog of my previous blog posts, this

will be an exercise in speed. Without further Apu:

Tristram

Shandy: A Cock And Bull Story: Michael Winterbottom’s

riff on one of the world’s earliest post-modern novels (“written before

there was even modernism to be ‘post’ about”) is loaded with

funny lines, mostly commenting on the filmmaking process. I’d have liked

it to go deeper, but the Steve Coogan that ran off with the funniest segment in

Coffee & Cigarettes is in full effect here.

Wallace

& Gromit: Curse Of The Were-Rabbit: The Wallace & Gromit

shorts are still the perfect length for their adventures, but the eagerly awaited

feature version sustains the fun and invention for longer than you might expect.

Oddly enough, director Nick Park comes up a bit short in the sort of Rube Goldberg

finale that he usually nails, but that’s a minor complaint when he turns

out such hand-crafted delights.

Hostel:

Eli Roth made a big splash a few years ago when his goofy debut film Cabin

Fever closed the festival. Roth returns to the same midnight slot with Hostel

and offers more of the same frathouse humor and gore, but it seems less charming

this time around. There’s something funny about the idea of three all-American

buddies who wind up in Slovakia after finding Amsterdam not sufficiently debauched,

but then again, that same scenario popped up in Eurotrip.

Midnight

Movies: From The Margins To The Mainstream: If I had time, I’d

write a whole essay about why this frivolous documentary shouldn’t be in

the festival (short take: It’s not good enough. It’s in the Dialogues

section, which is usually reserved for filmmakers presenting older films that

are not their own. It’s based on the Midnight Movies book by J. Hoberman

and Jonathan Rosenbaum, both of whom were at the festival and yet weren’t

asked to participate in the discussion.) In any case, a diverting enough look

at the midnight phenomenon, but the film only spends about five minutes on the

latter half of its subtitle and some crucial questions are left unexplored as

a result.

Pusher,

Pusher

II, Pusher

III: I reviewed the gritty Danish crime movie Pusher

several years ago and I mostly stand by my review, though I appreciated its seedy

look, dark humor, and highly charged lead performance more on a second viewing.

The sequels, produced one after another, offer more of the same, each following

a different character in the drug scene. It would have been better if the movies

interacted more closely—the stories are told in straight chronology, and

information from previous films rarely bleed from one film to the next—but

the film strikes me as an ideal HBO series in the making. The half-series on display

here is well worth a renewal.

No

Direction Home: Bob Dylan: Martin Scorsese’s 220-minute

opus on a decade in Dylan’s career has been labeled “definitive,”

and for awhile, it wears that definitiveness like an iron weight. But the film

picks up in the second half, when Dylan becomes the highly reluctant figurehead

for the peace movement and all things leftist. To that end, his decision to “go

electric” is as punk rock as it gets, and Scorsese nicely captures the extraordinary

(and extraordinarily misguided) outrage that followed. Better still, Scorsese

is interested exclusively in the development of Dylan’s craft and its relationship

to the culture, so not a minute is wasted on the personal trivia that clutters

most screen biographies.

Thank

You For Smoking: The runaway success of the festival, this satire

on the spin industry sparked a bidding war between Paramount and Fox Searchlight

that was nearly as comical as the movie itself. (One had a verbal agreement, the

other had a written one. Guess which prevailed?) Jason Reitman, son of comedy

maestro Ivan, works in broad strokes as he follows a tobacco lobbyist (played

by Aaron Eckhart with the full force of his oily charm) who gets hung up in political

controversy. Many big laughs here and a surprising lack of sentimentality: The

presence of Eckhart’s impressionable son sets off some alarm bells, but

it doesn’t necessarily stiffen his “moral flexibility.”

So that’s my festival. Look for a formal wrap-up by Noel and myself in an

upcoming issue. For now, I leave you with a festival Top Five:

1. Brokeback Mountain

2. A History Of Violence

3. Hidden

4. Sympathy For Lady Vengeance

5. L’Enfant