There may not be a better film this year about adult sibling jostling, rivalry and affection than Tom Berninger’s extraordinary Mistaken For Strangers. The fact that it’s also a meta-documentary about life on the road with the ascendant indie rock group The National, whose lead singer Matt Berninger is Tom’s older brother, is completely incidental. This is an engaging work of many colors, at once funny and heart-piercing, that taps into the rich and often conflicting veins of feeling that only loved ones can elicit.
The younger Berninger is a Cincinnati roustabout — a sensitive, wayward creative soul and aspiring indie horror director who comes off a bit like a cross between Feast director John Gulager and Mark Borchardt, the subject of Chris Smith’s American Movie. When The National — a quintet made up of two other sets of brothers, plus Matt Berninger — prepares to go out on tour, they hire Tom as a roadie, affording him his first chance at international travel. Tom brings along his cameras, filming the entire experience, and in the process often ignoring his official job duties. Tension, arguments, reflection and self-discovery ensues.
Mistaken For Strangers has a multitude of ideas, emotions and themes — enough for about a half dozen different films. In its own facile way, it’s a wry rock ‘n’ roll tour document, a peek behind the curtain of a brooding-cool critics’ darling whose hard work and doggedness have finally paid off with commercial punch-through, and the attendant dressing room catering riders that entails. Of course, it’s refracted chiefly through the prism of the 34-year-old Tom, whose awkward questions (“Does the motion of the tour bus cause weird dreams?” and “Do you have a wallet when you’re onstage?”) recall the late Chris Farley’s famous Saturday Night Live talk show sketch, where his nervousness around whatever celebrity guest habitually got the better of him.
The film is also about fraternity, obviously, but all the component elements of sibling relationships as well. There’s love, exasperation, shame, jealousy, pride and so much more. And it’s all captured in such a disarming, entertaining style that’s steadfast and true to the commingled nature of those feelings. (“Am I fired?” asks Tom at one point. “Technically, yes, but don’t put it through that filter,” replies Matt.) Finally, Mistaken For Strangers is about the ethereal nature of creativity and the weight of depression too, summoning up memories of The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which is both a good and bittersweet thing, for anyone who’s seen Jeff Feuerzeig’s superb 2006 documentary.
It’s a completely different film than Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell, of course, but part of the miracle of Mistaken For Strangers lies in the amazingly instinctive editing by a party so tied up and personally invested in the knotty familial relationships on display, just as in that movie. The younger Berninger crafts a portrait of himself that is knowingly unflattering in some respects, but also enormously sympathetic. Taut and moving, Mistaken For Strangers does right by the complexity of all of its characters’ feelings, its knowing self-commentary (at one point Tom talks about filming himself crying before actually showing that footage) never dipping into conceited self-satisfaction. One needn’t know or care a whit about The National to enjoy this stirring film, indisputably one of the year’s best, nonfiction or otherwise. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, Mistaken For Strangers is also available on VOD platforms. For more information, click here to visit its website. (Starz Digital Media/Abramorama, unrated, 74 mintues)
Monthly Archives: April 2014
Cavemen
Lest one think that all the playboy comedies tangentially inspired by 1996’s Swingers, about entertainment industry aspirants and the “beautiful babies” of which they’re in hot pursuit, had finally dried up, witness Cavemen, a blockheaded, sigh-inducing retread that evinces neither any particular originality nor freshness of telling.
Written and directed by Herschel Faber, Cavemen unfolds in mostly downtown Los Angeles, where would-be screenwriter Dean (Skylar Astin) lives in a loft with his three best friends: Jay (Chad Michael Murray), Pete (Kenny Wormald) and Andre (Dayo Okeniyi). Dean is a sensitive mope, but still has a no-strings-attached sexual relationship with Sara (Megan Stevenson), who likes things that way. Pete has an on-again-off-again girlfriend, Beth (Amanda Jane Cooper), but the other two guys are bar scene prowlers who enjoy holding forth with theories on sex and dating and generally lecturing Dean about getting his head out of his ass and enjoying the single life.
Dean, though, pines for something a bit more substantive. And naturally, wouldn’t you know it, there’s also a girl he went on one date with in college, Tess (Camilla Belle), who works with both Dean and Jay. Ergo, much awkward and unconvincing sidestepping of latent attraction ensues, prior to the requisite scene of running, flowers in hand, to intercept a departing taxi.
Films which take writers as their central characters always exist on a somewhat slippery slope, because they run the risk of either unduly venerating the creative process or coming across as indulgent. Cavemen, though, is just lazy, and stocked with female characters so offensively undersketched that Gloria Allred might well want to consider legal action. Faber, making his directorial debut, most likely fancies Dean as some sort of stand-in — a fact which makes the utter lack of convincing depth to his characterization all the more perplexing. Faber has an agent (Jason Patric) magically drop into Dean’s life to confirm his talent to viewers, but doesn’t provide any compelling sense of who he really is as a writer or a person, except by way of the arc that experiencing requited love will magically provide the missing piece for Dean’s screenplay.
The rest of Faber’s screenplay, meanwhile, simply oscillates between wild derivativeness and plodding contrivance. When not cycling through inane nudge-nudge banter, Faber throws in phony romantic impediments and scenes in which Dean gleans wisdom through his nine-year-old nephew. Left to play only lurching, scene-specific motivations, the actors all fall back on predictably declamatory choices. If there’s any bright spot at all, it’s in Cavemen‘s soundtrack — inclusive of Mathclub, Names of Stars, Golden State and more — which manifests more insightful feeling than anything in Faber’s script.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a complementary cardboard slipcover, Cavemen comes to DVD presented in 16×9 widescreen, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional English subtitles. Apart from chapter stops and a clutch of trailers for other Well Go USA Entertainment titles, however, there are no supplemental bonus features herein, further denting any collectible value for those outside of diehard fans of the genre, or some of the actors. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Half, click here; to purchase via Amazon, click here. D (Movie) D (Disc)
Goodbye World
Most apocalyptic thrillers exist in large measure for the sizzle, or are at least invested in paying off some fantastical doomsday conceit. But Goodbye World, in which a group of old college friends and lovers of the idealistic and liberal persuasion (including Adrien Grenier and Kerry Bishé, above) find shelter at a remote country cabin in the days and weeks after a crippling cyber-attack, is something quite different. An unusual hybrid of The Big Chill, The Trigger Effect and Into the Wild, director Denis Henry Hennelly’s film exists largely apart from the investigation of cause, arguments about culpability or even the trials of survival. It’s kind of an incidental apocalyptic drama. So even if the movie unravels in the end, there’s still enough that’s stirring and original here to capture and hold the interest of adventurous indie filmgoers.
A low-budget, distinctively character-rooted work that premiered at last year’s Los Angeles Film Festival, Goodbye World was never going to be confused with any of the raft of other apocalyptic movies that have hit the big screen over the past year-and-a-half. But while it doesn’t become completely overblown, suffice it to say that the manner in which the film resolves its exploration of a community riven by fear comes off as unrealistic, and halfhearted to boot. Certain bits feel designed to pay off and salve investor anxieties — to bend and twist Goodbye World into the shape of the very movies that it otherwise consciously avoids aping. And that’s a shame, really, because it’s the other, smaller stuff that sticks with you. Just as in life. For the full, original review, from Paste, click here. (Samuel Goldwyn/Phase 4 Films, unrated, 101 minutes)
Amy Ryan Talks Breathe In, Birdman, What Gifts She Likes
A Tony- and Oscar-nominated actress, Amy Ryan has played tough, tender, damagingly self-involved and everything in between. In real life, though, her persona runs closer to Holly Flax, the lovably good-natured if somewhat dorky romantic interest to Steve Carell’s Michael Scott on The Office. Ryan is self-effacing and peppers a conversation with laughter, but also all sorts of jokey tangential asides. In her latest film, writer-director Drake Doremus‘ Breathe In, she plays Megan Reynolds, the wife of frustrated music instructor Keith (Guy Pearce), the latter of whom develops a slow crush on Sophie (Felicity Jones), an exchange student the couple takes into their upstate New York home. I recently had a chance to speak to Ryan one-on-one, about the movie and Doremus’ unusual collaborative process, what sort of gifts she likes, and one of her fall projects, Alejandro Iñárritu’s Birdman. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the read.
In the Blood
If we’re keeping tabs on the evolving filmography of ex-mixed martial arts fighter and future The Expendabelles centerpiece Gina Carano, In the Blood, from director John Stockwell, slots considerably below Haywire, her at once lithe and bruising collaboration with Stephen Soderbergh. And yet there’s still a certain ramshackle appeal to the film, a starchy, Taken-meets-Turistas revenge picture which could just as easily be titled Woman on Fire. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Anchor Bay, R, 109 minutes)
A Farewell to Fools
An extremely low-boil wartime farce that contents itself to wring quiet smiles and silent laughs from viewers, A Farewell To Fools unfolds in Nazi-occupied Romania in 1944, where a group of pious townspeople try to prevail upon the town idiot to sacrifice himself for their benefit after a German soldier is discovered murdered. While it doesn’t exactly pull any muscles reaching for unerring period-piece credibility, director Bogdan Dreyer’s film, starring Gérard Depardieu and Harvey Keitel, more or less works as a sort of lightly affected, darkly comedic parable. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Monterey Media/Shoreline Entertainment, PG-13, 84 minutes)
Errol Morris on Donald Rumsfeld and The Unknown Known
Is Donald Rumsfeld, the charismatically cantankerous and contrarian former Secretary of Defense who, under President George W. Bush, presided over disastrous Iraq War policy and the torture of enemy combatants and other foreign prisoners, a dyed-in-the-wool military adventurist or a cog-in-the-machine bureaucrat and incidental prosecutor? Documentarian Errol Morris spent more than 34 hours interviewing him for his superb new film, The Unknown Known, and he still isn’t sure. I recently had a chance to chat with the Oscar-winning filmmaker and, wearing a light green sweater and a wry smile, Morris spoke deliberately, as is his wont, about his movie, its elusive subject, the art of interviewing and his first foray into fictional narrative filmmaking, set to star Bryan Cranston and Naomi Watts. The conversation is excerpted over at Paste, so click here for the read.
Alien Abduction
There will be a time when young, aspiring indie filmmakers return predominantly to shooting what they know, which will give us a surge in chatty, beer-soaked navel-gazing — a quality that in many ways would seem almost radical in today’s cinematic environment. This is not yet that time, however, as the extraordinarily derivative, forthrightly titled and essentially pointless Alien Abduction confirms. Eschewing more sophisticated and higher-degree-of-difficulty moodiness for lots of panicked thrashing about, this found-footage horror tale is an exercise in well-intentioned tedium. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Midnight, unrated, 82 minutes)
Big Men
A kind of true-life, slow-motion disaster flick for the NPR set, director Rachel Boynton’s Big Men is an engaging documentary that roots down into the very human and relatable effects of the discovery of a huge African oil deposit upon a disparate variety of characters, from the penthouse to the pavement. Assaying the mores and motivations of all these dreamers and schemers, the film throws a spotlight on human fallibility, and all the shades of grey that color the geopolitical world. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Abramorama, unrated, 99 minutes)
Walking With Dinosaurs (Blu-ray)
Impressive animation is undercut by a steady stream of insipid chatter in Walking With Dinosaurs, an animated family adventure adapted rather awkwardly from a more academic-minded BBC Earth small screen series of the same name.
The film is bookended by the superfluous wrap-around story of a bored teenager, Ricky (Charlie Rowe), who’s glued to his iPhone while his paleontologist uncle (Karl Urban) tries to get him interested in The Learning. This is no fanciful The Princess Bride, however. For starters, Walking With Dinosaurs simply ignores the fact that its set-up runs counter to the fact that most kids are fascinated by its titular subjects. Then there’s the fact that its writing is, well, not as clever as it fashions itself.
The story within the film is filtered through Alex (voiced by John Leguizamo), a cocky prehistoric parrot who relates the story of Patchi (voiced by Justin Long), a runt-of-the-litter pachyrhinosauras who lives in the shadow of his brother Scowler (voiced by Skyler Stone) and pines with some obviousness for Juniper (Tiya Sircar). When the future of his heard is threatened, however, Patchi is forced to mature, and make some big decisions.
Long, who has a playful and expressive voice and plenty of experience with voiceover work, tries his best to keep audience sympathies at a steady boil. And Leguizamo… well, one basically knows what they’re getting when he’s hired to lend voice to a headstrong bird. But the incessant banter of John Collee’s script — its self-satisfied and self-conscious qualities, and penchant for scatalogical jokes — handcuff and cap its age-appeal, turning Walking With Dinosaurs into a very bland and unsatisfying work. This is a shame, since visually the movie is on occasion quite striking, blending together computer-generated animated creatures with practically photographed landscapes from New Zealand and Alaska. If only its filmmakers trusted in its potential audience a little more, and respected their intelligence, instead of trying to spoon-feed them bromides and dumb jokes.
Housed in a regular plastic Blu-ray case with a complementary cardboard slipcover, Walking With Dinosaurs comes to home video in a two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, inclusive of a digital HD copy of the movie, playable on smart phones, computers, tablets and televisions. Its DTS-HD 5.1 master audio track captures a nice range of foleyed effects work, and its 1080p, 2.39:1 widescreen presentation gives nice platform to some vivid, striking visuals. Optional subtitles are also included in a robust array of 10 languages — including both Russian and Ukrainian, which could conceivably bring together some Eastern Bloc bootleggers, right?
In addition to the requisite chapter stops, bonus features include an “ultimate dino guide,” which provides overviews of almost a dozen different dinosaur species featured in the movie, each running a couple minutes long. There’s also an interactive map, which allows for youngsters to click and identify different species, and (presumably) test their learning. A trivia track and trailer are included too, along with a rather wince-inducing “Orange Carpet Dino Rap,” featuring Benjamin Flores, Jr., of The Haunted Hathaways. To purchase the combo pack via Amazon, click here; to purchase via Half, click here. Or if a local brick-and-mortar establishment is still your preferred retailer, by all means, go that route. C- (Movie) C+ (Disc)
Happy Camp
An indie horror movie that makes decent use of its real-life setting, but otherwise runs aground fairly early in its already concise running time, unable to come up with enough incidents to generate any legitimate sustained suspense, Happy Camp represents one of the particular perils of a low-budget, calling card-type film. Piecemeal, the scene-to-scene work of young multi-hyphenates Josh Anthony, Anne Taylor and Michael Barbuto is fine. But absent a story that generates any sort of clearly defined stakes or rooting audience interest, the movie elicits more of a yawn than any lasting impression. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Gravitas Ventures/Flower Films, unrated, 74 minutes)