H2N Reviews: Family Life; The Transfiguration; Score: A Film Music Documentary

Family Life (Vida de Familia)

Chilean directors Alicia Scherson and Cristian Jimenez teamed up for this tragicomedy about a trainwreck of a man who is ill-advisedly hired by his distant cousin to housesit for the family of 3 while they’re in Paris for several months. The script deftly hits on several beats including a satire of married life with a small child, the weird things people do when they’re alone in a house, and the trope of misunderstandings getting out of hand. Jorge Becker shines as the emotionally stunted house sitter who falls into a relationship with a single mother based on a fleeting ruse in this entertaining, dark, and occasionally poignant film.

Score: A Film Music Documentary

Matt Schrader wrote and directed this auditory treat about how music went from simply a distraction from the noise of a projector during silent film screenings to an indispensible part of the movies we love. You can’t think of Jaws, Psycho, or Star Wars without humming the score. Instrumental Gods like John Williams, Hanz Zimmer, and Danny Elfman discuss the nuances of their work and the process behind composing the most iconic music in film history. It’s lots of fun revisiting favorite emotional cinematic moments and also noting the vastly different outfits that score orchestra musicians choose to wear to work, from business suits to sweats.

The Transfiguration

Just when you think you’ve seen every possible take on vampires, Michael O’Shea presents a story that’s both genre subversion and a love letter to other subversive bloodsucker tales. Milo (Eric Ruffin) is a bullied teenage orphan living in the projects with his older brother. Whether or not his bloodlust is supernatural is left ambiguous, but he’s certainly studied. When he hangs with a similarly down-and-out neighbor girl, he ranks the realism of vampire iterations (his favorite being Let the Right One In). Dramatic irony meets urban allegory in a bleak but compelling story that will certainly resonate with fringe audiences.

These 3 films played at the 2017 San Francisco International Film Festival.

Reviews originally posted on Hammer to Nail! 

 

 

 

 

June 23, 2017
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

H2N Review: A Date for Mad Mary

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Irish writer/director Darren Thornton’s feature, A Date for Mad Mary, is an outstanding debut. After serving 6 months in prison for assault “Mad” Mary McArdle (Séana Kerslake) finds that she remains grandfathered into the “Maid of Honor” position for her childhood best friend’s impending nuptials. Charlene (Charleigh Bailey) wants her big day to be perfect, and she repeatedly lets Mary know that she doesn’t trust her to do the job right. She all but strips Mary of her title, in the feigned interest of not wanting to put too much pressure on her. After all, Mary has enough on her plate what with finding the one man in her small town that hasn’t been scared off by her reputation and would be willing to be her plus one for the wedding.

A Date for Mad Mary is a comedy, but it’s not exactly a romantic comedy. It’s more about how changing friendships can sometimes be as painful as a breakup. It’s also about the challenge of overcoming your demons when everyone you love believes that you can’t. Most of all, it’s a film about forgiveness and how incredibly hard a thing that is. Despite having done her time, everyone in Mary’s life seems to hold some resentment for her past misdeeds. She can smell it on them. And so she repeatedly gives them the Mary they expect, even as she realizes that it’s not who she is anymore…

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June 23, 2017
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

H2N Review: The Incredible Jessica James

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The Incredible Jessica James could just as well be called The Incredible Jessica Williams, because it’s basically a feature-length reel for the talents of the effervescent former Daily Show correspondent. Williams has got the dramedy chops and the charisma to sell what would otherwise be a medley of romantic comedy/self-exploration tropes. Netflix picked up this Sundance favorite, written and directed by Jim Strouse expressly for Williams. She played a supporting role in his last film, (the comma defying People Places Things) with such aplomb that he wondered why she hadn’t yet helmed a film.

Jessica James is a mid-twenties playwright living in Brooklyn. The thing about Jessica (both James and Williams) is that she doesn’t do anything half-assed. She boogies her way through the opening credits, celebrating life and immediately luring in the audience with her awesomeness. That’s not to say that she’s devoid of challenges. She struggles with a recent breakup. (Though she initiated the split, she continuously fantasizes about run-ins with her ex [LaKeith Stanfield, TV’s Atlanta] wherein he begs for her to take him back before being abruptly killed in a variety of freak accidents.) She papers her walls with rejection letters from theater companies, paying her bills with a job mentoring kids in the (read with British accent) art of theatre at a non-profit. She desperately wants her students to match her passion for the craft, and she gets a little overbearing when it seems like her favorite kid isn’t trying hard enough. Jessica is lovable but she’s also flawed and complex. That’s just not something you see very often in female-driven comedies…

Read the rest at Hammer to Nail!

April 27, 2017
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H2N Review: World Without End (No Reported Incidents)

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I had forgotten all about Counting when I started watching Jem Cohen’s latest, World Without End (No Reported Incidents). But after just a few minutes, it all came flooding back. Cohen has a distinctive documentarian voice that’s all about observation. He goes light on titles and completely eschews narration. He simply enters a place and takes a good look around. He lets the place tell the story. And it’s the story that the place would be telling whether or not you were there to see it…

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April 26, 2017
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H2N Review: The Most Hated Woman in America

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It doesn’t take much for a woman to become the recipient of scorn in America. Usually, just pointing out any sort of inequality between the genders will get a girl in trouble. So it was especially easy for the outspoken atheist and “non-conformist”, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, to earn the title of “Most Hated Woman in America” in 1963, when she won a lawsuit that resulted in banning scripture from public schools. Tommy O’Haver’s identically titled biopic, stars Melissa Leo as the brazen woman in question, framing the story around the true crime ending to her life. In 1995, O’Hair was kidnapped, along with her youngest son and granddaughter, and held for ransom. Perhaps it’s because of this that O’Haver and co-writer Irene Turner visited the Coen tonal wellspring in their script. It doesn’t quite succeed in emulating its influences, but it does effectively tell the story of a woman who deserves to be remembered…

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April 26, 2017
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H2N Review: Little Sister

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Zach Clark’s follow up to 2013’s White Reindeer, shares plot points with some rather trite films. In Little Sister, Addison Timlin plays Colleen, a woman in her early twenties who returns to her childhood home and her troubled, semi-estranged family in order to tie up emotional loose ends before making a major life change. If this were a Cameron Crowe or Zach Braff joint, the protagonist would meet a manic pixie dream person, dance quirkily to indie music, and do something cathartically impulsive, all while falling in love with said pixie. A blow-up with family members would trigger a revelation about her impending life change, and she would rejoin her life-in-progress with renewed hope and a new relationship basket containing all of her eggs.

Fortunately, Zach Clark is neither a Braff nor a Crowe. His protagonist, once a full-fledged Goth, has rebelled against her troubled family by joining a convent. She is only one rite away from cementing her lifetime commitment to God. Because of Colleen’s cultural roots, the soundtrack contains barely an acoustic guitar or crooning sad sack (we’re instead, serenaded with deep cuts from Gwar). Better still, because of Colleen’s vows, there is no manic pixie anyone. Colleen interacts only with her parents, her childhood pal, and her older brother, Jacob (Keith Poulson). Jacob is an Iraq war vet who recently returned home after an explosion disfigured him and fried his lungs. Colleen’s stoner parents are the ones doing most of the drugs…

Read the rest on Hammer to Nail!

April 26, 2017
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Hammer to Nail Review: Mustang

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When watching Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Turkish film, Mustang, one cannot help but recall The Virgin Suicides, Sofia Coppola’s haunting fable about a father’s fear of his daughters’ burgeoning womanhood. Only, in the case of Mustang, things are much worse for five orphaned sisters who are imprisoned in their own home by their oppressive uncle. Though they couldn’t see it, the Lisbon sisters of Suicides, could have waited out their childhood until adulthood emancipated them. The only escape for Mustang’s Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma, and Sonay is to be married off. They would merely be replacing Uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekan) with a new patriarch. To achieve true independence in their world means literally risking their lives and running as far away as possible. If only it were that easy…

Read the rest at Hammer to Nail!

September 29, 2016
Categories: Filmpinions . Tags: , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail Review: Tickled

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I don’t know about you, but I hate being tickled and always have. There’s something insidious about a person forcing uncontrollable laughter out of you despite not enjoying how they’re doing it. Inexplicably, both my children love being tickled and will even request it. If they ask me to stop, I do so immediately. Their laughs are genuine, though I can’t imagine why. Even as a child, I detested it and would become furious when subjected to it. On more than one occasion, my brother received a bloody nose in response to his non-consensual tickling. So when I heard about “Competitive Endurance Tickling” – the subject of New Zealand directors David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s documentary, Tickled – my first thought was, “DEAR GOD, WHY?!” The easy answer is the same as the reason people do anything unpleasant – money. A lot of money. But, as Farrier and Reeve soon discover, there’s a lot more to the story than that…

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September 29, 2016
Categories: Filmpinions, Uncategorized . Tags: , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

Hammer to Nail: The Complete History of Seattle

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The Complete History of Seattle doesn’t just eschew the band documentary formula. Nick Toti’s film, which is mainly about 90s Christian experimental punk group, Raft of Dead Monkeys, binges on the genre and then simultaneously craps and barfs it back up. Believe it or not, this is not a criticism. It’s quite refreshing and exciting to watch something from a typically formulaic genre and not have any clue where you’ll end up.

Part of the reason the film is structured this way is due to Raft of Dead Monkeys’ wholly unique stage show. The band rose from the ashes of 90-Pound Wuss and Roadside Monument – two popular Christian punk bands that were darlings of the faith-based Seattle indie label Tooth & Nail. Taking their name from a throwaway joke in an Adam Sandler SNL skit, they were not your garden variety Christians. Raft’s music was particularly profane and noisy, and their performances invoked many provocative images including bloody crucifixions, fascism, monkeys barfing bananas, male and female go-go dancers, and sexy junkie nurses (played by their wives and girlfriends). At the time of their formation, the band members were feeling disillusioned and alienated from both their fellow Christian musicians and the secular punk scene at large. According to their manifesto, they were attempting to create the music that would usher in the apocalypse. In response to feeling shunned, they basically became Christian anarchists…

Read the rest on Hammer to Nail!

September 29, 2016
Categories: Filmpinions, Seattle . Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

SIFF 2016 Wrap-Up

Another SIFF has come and gone. This year, the Seattle International Film Festival ran from May 19th to June 12th and featured 421 films from 85 countries. I have to say this was one of my favorite years. With so many options, it’s always hard to narrow down one’s itinerary. Plus, even when most of the films are great, seeing so many in such a concentrated period of time tends to make them all blur together. But I loved so many of the films I saw this year, that when I receive the inevitable question, “what’s good?” I have a long and enthusiastic answer. If you’re reading this, I assume you would have asked me the same question. So here it is…

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Read on Hammer to Nail!

September 29, 2016
Categories: Seattle . Tags: , , . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment

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