Dan Eberle wrote, directed, coedited, and stars in Brooklyn gangster flick
THE LOCAL (Dan Eberle, 2009)
Available on DVD (October 20, 2009)
www.insurgentpictures.com/thelocal
An official selection of the Brooklyn Film Festival, THE LOCAL is a gritty crime drama set in parts of Brooklyn not usually shown in the movies. Dan Eberle (JailCity) wrote, directed, coedited, and stars in the film, playing Noname, a man searching for a new life, trying to escape from his past. But the streets are all he knows, and soon he is working at the bottom of the ladder for dirtbag drug dealers he could chew up and spit out in his sleep, but he decides it is better to play the game at least for a while as he regains his footing. And soon he’s hired by a detective to rescue the man’s daughter from the gang, but she’s so drugged out she doesn’t know what’s going on. Noname is a charismatic character, his eyes boring through whatever or whoever gets in his way, but Eberle can’t decide whether he’s hero or antihero. One moment Noname is kicking the crap out of people, and the next he is getting the crap kicked out of him, so it’s often difficult to figure out which character is going to show up in the next scene. And the supporting cast, which includes Maya Ferrara, Karl Herlinger, Paul James Vasquez, and Beau Allulli, is never fully developed either, upping the confusion. But there’s still something about Eberle that keeps you watching to the very end.
After playing film festivals around the world, Philippe Diaz’s THE END OF POVERTY? opens a one-week run at Village East, bringing its critical take on the global financial crisis. Speaking with Nobel Prize winners, economists, writers, politicians, researchers, and other experts, Diaz attempts to get at the heart of international poverty – particularly by tugging at the audience’s heartstrings. He intercuts shots of talking heads discussing slavery and colonialism, the World Bank, the free market, the International Monetary Fund, and government bailouts with portraits of men, women, and children living in squalor in Africa, Latin America, the United States, and elsewhere. He supplements the film with a barrage of statistics that, individually, are infuriating but, taken as a whole, get lost in a whirlwind of numbers. Adding to the overkill is Martin Sheen’s over-the-top narration, which piles up yet more information and outrage. But even as the film sometimes feels like a Sally Struthers save-the-children infomercial, its crucial message does manage to pull through and take root – the money is out there, but its incredibly lopsided distribution in a warped system is basically set up to keep the imbalance that has led to such a tragic situation.
Malaysian-born Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang’s WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? is one heck of an existential hoot. When his father dies, Hsiao Kang, who sells watches on the street in Taipei, becomes obsessed with a strange woman who insists on buying Hsiao’s own watch and then leaves for Paris; with Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS (Tsai’s “all-time favorite film”); with urinating in whatever is near his bed instead of going to the bathroom; and with changing clocks to Paris time. Meanwhile, his mother is determined to follow ridiculous rituals to bring her husband back, and the woman in Paris goes through a number of bizarre events as well. There is not a single camera movement in the film (except for in the 400 BLOWS film clips); the scenes are shot by Benoît Delhomme in long takes, often lingering before and after any action – when there is any action. The dialogue is spare, ironic, and hysterical. If you like your movies straightforward and linear, then this is not for you. But we loved this riot of a film, so we suggest you give it a shot. And yes, that person sitting on the bench in the cemetery is exactly who you think it is.
“Life is not easy for everyone,” Olga Bowman says about midway through Andrew Jacobs’s spectacular cinéma vérité documentary, FOUR SEASONS LODGE. “But life can be beautiful even when it’s not so easy.” For twenty-five summers, a group of Holocaust survivors, mostly Polish Jews, would meet at the Four Seasons Lodge in the Catskills, where they would talk, dance, argue, eat, hug, discuss their latest aches and pains, and primarily revel in life despite the horrific things they suffered through and witnessed at such concentration camps as Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Jacobs discovered this heartwarming community while researching a series of articles for the New York Times; when he heard that the lodge was being sold and that the 2006 season might be the group’s last, he decided to make a movie about it. Seeking advice from the legendary Albert Maysles, Jacobs actually landed the master documentarian as his chief cameraman, giving FOUR SEASONS LODGE the feel of such classic Maysles brothers’ works as SALESMAN and GREY GARDENS.
While the truth might be out there somewhere, it’s not exactly going to be found in this very strange venture. Playing more like IN SEARCH OF . . . A LOST EPISODE OF THE X-FILES, director Olatunde Osunsanmi’s THE FOURTH KIND combines actual audio and video taken by psychologist Abbey Tyler in October 2000 with fictional re-creations by actors to try to lend believability to this story of possible repeated alien abduction in Nome, Alaska. Milla Jovovich, who really needs a new agent, stars as Dr. Tyler, whose husband has just been brutally murdered. Dr. Tyler is investigating a series of odd cases in which local men and women are having trouble sleeping, waking up every morning at 3:33, seeing a white owl, and suddenly speaking in Sumerian. Under hypnosis, the patients relive frightening scenes that lead to real-life violence. Osunsanmi (WITHIN) ups the ante – and complicates the narrative – by intercutting actual footage from Tyler’s studies, often playing them on a split-screen against the reenactments to prove how real this must all be. He also includes segments from an interview he conducted with Tyler at Chapman University as she details what happened to her and her family. Will Patton is annoying as the sheriff who thinks Tyler’s study is too dangerous to continue, while the solid Elias Koteas is Tyler’s mentor who refuses to believe no matter how strong the evidence might be. When THE FOURTH KIND tries to just be a horror movie, it’s not wholly awful, but when it strains and strains to assert that these close encounters are real, it borders on the edge of the ridiculous and just plain silly.
After getting a biopsy taken and drawing the death card while consulting a fortune-teller, popular French singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begins looking back at her life — and wondering just what’s left of it — while awaiting the dreaded results. The blonde beauty talks with old friends, asks her piano player (Michel Legrand, who composed the score) to write her a song, and meets a dapper gentleman in the park, becoming both participant and viewer in her own existence. As Cléo makes her way around town, director (and former photographer) Agnès Varda shows off early 1960s Paris, expertly winding her camera through the Rive Gauche. Just as Cléo seeks to find out what’s real (her actual name is Florence and that gorgeous hair is a wig), Varda shoots the film in a cinema verité style, almost as if it’s a documentary. She even sets the film in real time (adding chapter titles with a clock update), enhancing the audience’s connection with Cléo as she awaits her fate, but the movie runs only ninety minutes, adding mystery to what is to become of Cléo, as if she exists both on-screen and off, alongside the viewer. A central film in the French Nouvelle Vague and one of the first to be made by a woman, CLÉO DE 5 À 7 is an influential classic even as it has lost a step or two over the years. Varda, now in her eighties, has also made such well-regarded films as LE BONHEUR (1965), VAGABOND (1985), THE GLEANERS AND I (2000), and THE BEACHES OF AGNÉS (2008), among others.