Philadelphia Film Festival: Week Two Reviews

Twenty-nine reviews from the second week of the 17th annual PFF.

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Published: Apr 9, 2008

Following are reviews of movies premiering in the second week of the Philadelphia Film Festival, April 10-15. Up to the day of the show, tickets may be purchased in person at TLA Video locations (11 a.m.-10 p.m.), by phone at 267-765-9700, ext. 4 (10 a.m.-9 p.m.) and online at phillyfests.com. Same-day tickets are available only at the screening venue. Single-ticket prices are $7-$10. Service fees may apply.

Bad Habits | Beautiful Loser | Body of War | Buddha Collapsed in Shame | Chop Shop | Deep Sea Blues | Deficit | Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde | Fados | Holler Back | Jack Brooks: Monster SlayerJames Castle: Portrait of an Artist | Land of Confusion | The Last House in the Woods | The Mugger | Nothing to Lose | Patti Smith: Dream of Life | The Pope's Toilet | Rocketman | Song Sung Blue | Stranded | Timecrimes | Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North | Triangle | Violent Saturday | What We Do Is Secret | Where Are You Going Moshe? | The Year of the Nail | You, the Living

When young Matilde watches her father choke on a piece of his dinner, she whispers the Lord's Prayer, and miraculously — or coincidentally? — he survives. Twenty years later, Matilde joins a nunnery, her delusions of salvation intact, convinced that food and faith are inextricably linked. Meanwhile her skeletal aunt Elena, who suffers a far more selfish eating disorder, smokes cigarettes for dinner and cruelly forces her sweet daughter Linda to join the Mexican equivalent of Weight Watchers. Linda's father, oblivious to his daughter's growing shame, is driven slowly away from his bony wife's icy touch. In the end of Simon Bross' lush gem of a film, one woman perishes, another carries lifelong guilt and the third is set free — but not necessarily in that order. —Carolyn Huckabay (April 10, 2:30 p.m., RE; April 13, 7:15 p.m., R5)

An incomplete thought of a film, John Nolte's Beautiful Loser centers around unfortunately named Reginald Regineld, or "Ditto," whose vaguely bad family life underlies his lack of ambition and inability to get girls — that is, until Tracy. Told backhandedly with bizarre, inconsistent religious undertones, the story goes: Boy meets girl, girl shuns boy, boy eventually wins girl over until boy does a very bad (undisclosed until the very end) thing, girl shuns boy forever, boy becomes the nothing he always feared. But when we find out this very bad thing Ditto has done, we are wholly underwhelmed, and any pity Ditto had built for himself crumbles quickly, replaced by confusion: Why aren't these accomplished working actors (Keith David and John Schneider, among them) getting better offers? —C.H. (April 11, 7:15 p.m., RE)

Self-righteous and one-note, Phil Donohue and Ellen Spiro's doc about a disabled Iraq veteran struggling with disillusionment squanders a worthy subject. As Thomas Young comes to terms with the gunshot that has paralyzed three-quarters of his body, he is also reckoning with the feeling that he has been used and discarded by a government more interested in fighting wars than dealing with their consequences. Embittered and depressive, Young is a tricky central figure, and the movie doesn't spend enough time with him to get under his thick, scarred skin. Instead, it returns again and again (and again) to a list of every senator who voted for the Iraq war resolution, ticking off their names one by one as if their ignominy needed no further explanation. Body of War doesn't just preach to the converted; it pounds on their skulls with a dull mallet. —Sam Adams (April 10, 7:15 p.m., RE)

Hana Makhmalbaf's film is, on the surface, about a girl and her attempts to go to school, but we are all too aware of the bigger issues at hand: the Taliban's effect on Afghanistan. Along her journey, she experiences obstacles similar to those facing modern-day Afghanis — from trying to sell eggs to being waylaid by a gang of boys, who mimic the Taliban by "capturing" her (along with other girls who are wearing lipstick and chewing gum with a male footballer on the wrapper). Buddha is a chilling tale of the effects of war and desolation on young minds, but ultimately, it is also a tale of perseverance and hope. —Wadzanai Mhute (April 11, 5 p.m., PMT; April 12, 7:45 p.m., TB)

Iranian-American Ramin Bahrani brings the poetic simplicity of neorealism to working-class Queens in his second feature. In the Iron Triangle, a cluster of auto-body shops in the shadow of Shea Stadium, a young Dominican boy (Alejandro Polanco) and his older sister (Isamar Gonzales) live on cunning and bluster, scraping out opportunities wherever they can. Bahrani's direction is gentle, but his characters aren't; even at 12, the boy is tough and hardened, or at least has to appear so. Without an ounce of false sentiment, Chop Shop creates a riveting but understated drama that lives up to its neorealist forebears. —S.A. (April 11, 2:30 p.m., R5; April 12, 9:30 p.m., R5)

Robert Mugge has more than a quarter-century of music docs under his belt, including profiles of Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins and Al Green. Maybe he just needed a vacation, but his record of the 2007 Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise is little more than a feature-length infomercial. Mugge gives the cruise's director free rein to offer his spiel, even letting him do his own self-serving interviews of performers. Some of the performances, which include Buckwheat Zydeco, Lil' Ed and the Fabulous Thunderbirds, are electrifying, but they still seem engineered to entice more middle-aged Hawaiian-shirt wearers for future events. —Shaun Brady (April 12, 4:30 p.m., PMT; April 14, 7 p.m., IH)

Although the title of Gael Garcia Bernal's directorial debut makes reference to Latin America's economic woes, the movie's main subjects are the beneficiaries of neoliberalism's windfall. The spoiled rich kids who converge on Tepoztlán for a house party thrown by Bernal's trust-fund baby have little on their mind beyond procuring their next ecstasy hit. But the world outside the gates keeps creeping in, as larger cultural dynamics play out on a one-to-one scale. Bernal concentrates on texture rather than incident, letting complications bubble to the surface while his hot-bodied twentysomethings lounge by the pool or idly boot a soccer ball. Although many of its characters are insufferable, Deficit is constantly engaging, perfectly balancing social observation and political subtext. —S.A. (April 11, 7:45 p.m., RE; April 12, 2:30 p.m., RE)

Directed by John S. Robertson, this 1920 version of the classic story is purely a vehicle for John Barrymore's titanic turn. The first half-hour suffers from a general lack of interest in the virtuous but priggish Jekyll, a philanthropic and self-righteous scientist whose arrogance is his only vice. But once he unleashes his alter ego in an attempt to purge his more human desires, Barrymore goes to town. More frightening than his shadowed visage are his hands, which seem to swell to monstrous size, his fingers lengthening like fearsome tendrils. Jekyll is hardly a lost classic, but Barrymore's performance is awe-inspiring. —S.A. (April 13, 9:30 p.m., PMT)

Beautiful music performed by beautiful people in beautiful settings, Carlos Saura's latest bit of musicology transplants the 19th-century Portuguese song form Fado from the slums of Lisbon into a series of his typically stylized sets. The gorgeous formality strips the raw edge from the music, and the visuals never quite reach the delirious heights of the director's collaborations with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, but Fados is nonetheless a vivid celebration of beauty for beauty's sake. —S.B. (April 11, 9:30 p.m., TB; April 13, 12:15 p.m., R5)

How many excuses does one need not to vote? That's the central sentiment of Lulu Fries'dat's documentary, which focuses on non-voters in Allentown, just four days before Bush versus Kerry. Even though the cinematography includes too much filler B-roll and clip-art-style graphics, it's still a clever, and at times maddening, take on an old topic. By the halfway point, Fries'dat pushes back at typical non-voter whining with sharp questions. That's when the interesting answers come out. Daniel, a non-voter, said he sits election out because "what I'd really like to see is a black candidate run for president." Well, man, now's your chance. —Tom Namako (April 12, 7 p.m., PMT)

Jon Knautz's movie is a shameless, bloody cross between Lost Boys, The Faculty and a Sunday afternoon Sci-Fi Channel original movie. After witnessing a monster devour his family on a camping trip, Jack Brooks has some anger-management issues. Twenty-some years later, struggling to get his GED and life together, he gets the chance for revenge when more (unexplained and unrelated) monsters begin to surface. Once a plumber, Jack now finds himself battling cannibalistic zombies, tentacled Jabba-the-Hut look-alikes, jungle Cyclopes and possessed science teachers for an incredibly gory 90 minutes. Awesome. —Monica Weymouth (April 11, 9:30 p.m., RE; April 14, 7:15 p.m., RE)

Born deaf and in Idaho, James Castle was almost completely cut off from the art world, which makes him an interesting subject through which to examine the creative process. It's hard to say what was going through his mind all those years he was using saliva and ash to draw curious little scenes on flattened matchboxes. The talking heads in Jeffrey Wolf's 54-minute documentary — which include relatives, artists and John Ollman of Philly's Fleisher Ollman Gallery — can only shake their heads and speculate while Castle's dazzlingly primitive sketches flicker across the screen. —Patrick Rapa (April 12, 5 p.m., RE)

In 2004, Penn State film student Jeremy Zerechak was a Pennsylvania National Guardsman deployed as part of the second rotation of troops in Iraq, relieving the invasion force. He decided to film his experience, inviting commentary from his fellows — from their training at Fort Dix to their missions in the Green Zone. Insightful and engaging, the film makes clear the troops' lack of preparation, equipment and direction, points underscored by guardsmen's complaints, but even more by their desire to do right when U.S.-ordained circumstances make it nearly impossible. —Cindy Fuchs (April 13, 7:15 p.m., IH)

What happens when a young, attractive couple drives into the woods and makes out, then gets ambushed by thugs, rescued and tormented by their rescuers? Italian horror has a rich pedigree, thanks to the prolific '70s director Dario Argento, and Gabriele Albanesi's latest entry seeks to join that canon. From synthesizers to crazed rednecks, references to classic horror films abound. But if you think slaughter-in-the-woods films — of any era — are vapid and misogynistic, this one is not going to make a believer out of you. —Joel Tannenbaum (April 12, 10 p.m., RE; April 13, 5 p.m., PMT)

An engrossing character sketch of a sketchy character, Pablo Fendrik's 70-minute debut is a marvel of efficient storytelling. After robbing the admissions office at a school, the titular criminal (Arturo Goetz) — who looks more like an elegantly graying humanities professor than a stick-up artist — is given the Greengrass treatment, with intimate, kinetic handheld shots exploiting his self-satisfied expressions as he bounces to the next bureaucratic fleecing. (It's probably also the only crime drama that lets the audience in on a robber depositing loot into an ATM — least glamorous post-heist chore ever?) Those hoping for a trim, revelatory conclusion will leave with a grudge, but Goetz's high-low performance is still one of the most fascinating of the young year. —Drew Lazor (April 10, 5 p.m., RE; April 13, 12:15 p.m., TB)

Holland has no life sentence, but the government places the criminally insane in mental clinics until doctors determine they're cured, which rarely happens. Criminals escape nearly as often as they're freed. The bulk of the Pieter Kuijpers' fictional film follows one of these escaped criminals, convicted for murdering his father with a hammer, on an international car chase with a captive 13-year-old girl. In its native Holland, the film might have political undertones, but here in the U.S., home of the electric chair, it comes off purely as a cheap psycho-thriller. —Sam Tremble (April 12, 7:30 p.m., RE; April 13, 2:30 p.m., R5)

If you've ever wanted to hang with Patti Smith, now's your chance. Steven Sebring spent 10 years shadowing the sharp-featured punk poet, but his lengthy tenure doesn't seem to have cracked her shell. Shot in grainy black and white, the movie follows Smith on stage and off, finally pinning her down for an uncomfortable interview in her apartment. But apart from a visit with her parents, who reminisce about driving in to see Smith at the Trocadero, there's nothing revealed that Smith hasn't bared more eloquently in her songs. —S.A. (April 15, 7:15 p.m., PMT, sold out)

Set in 1988 Uruguay, The Pope's Toilet focuses on the small, impoverished border town of Melo as it prepares to host a visit from Pope John Paul II. Seeking to capitalize on business from tourists, everyone in the community prepares to sell food, drinks and trinkets on the big day. Beto, however, wants to offer a truly unique service to the guests — a proper, private ceramic toilet. While the film's eye-catching title pulls off a cute mix of reverent and crude, the actual story has a difficult time reconciling the whimsy of Beto's idea with his occasionally abusive behavior and the harsh, devastating realities of poverty. Something is uncomfortable here, and it's probably how a few dollars means life or death to the residents of Melo. —M.W. (April 10, 7:15 p.m., R5; April 12, 12:15 p.m., R5; April 14, 2:45 p.m., TB)

Jerry Burrus lives for his music. Blind and 72, the Chester County-based blues guitarist and singer doesn't do much besides play songs and go to the hospital. What he lacks in health, Burrus makes up for in personality — his wonderfully corny, self-deprecating sense of humor charms everyone he meets. So it's downright moving to watch his late-in-life career blossom in John Dorchester's documentary. With the help of a persistent manager, he records an album and gets gigs in and around Philly (including World Café Live and DelStock bluegrass and folk festival); an unexpected setback late in the film only makes his story more captivating. Forgiving some awkward framing devices and turtle-paced tangents, Rocketman goes far, fueled by its affable, talented subject. —Tami Fertig (April 11, 7:15 p.m., IH)

Yes, this is a the story of a swaggering Neil Diamond impersonator named Lightning and his one-legged, angel-voiced wife, Thunder — but don't expect some kitschy, post-modern mockumentary. This is a true and tragic love story, two doomed, poofy-haired dreamers persisting against all odds. Director Greg Kohs rarely aggrandizes and never belittles his subjects, choosing instead to have them narrate and letting the camera roll and roll (even when all you're getting out of it is that Thunder's kids are brats). Song Sung Blue is inspiring only in the longview; mostly it's a series of soul-sucking heartaches and letdowns. We're talking about a relentlessly harsh world where bad luck keeps swooping in for cheap shots and Eddie Vedder turns out to be the only angel of mercy (seriously). I think you're going to cry. —P.R. (April 11, 9:30 p.m., PMT; April 13, 7 p.m., RE)

"It was like working with marble," recalls a survivor of the Andean plane crash that claimed 29 lives in 1972. The rest survived nearly three months on a frigid glacier by carving the icy flesh of those who perished before them. Gonzalo Arijon, a childhood friend of several survivors, convinced them to recount their ordeal on camera, and the result is a sobering account of how the barriers of civilizations can be peeled away by exigency. Over-stylized reenactments prove something of a distraction, but the movie's mere existence is miraculous. —S.A. (April 11, 4:45 p.m., IH; April 13, noon, RE)

In Nacho Vigalondo's time-jumping brain-twister, a middle-aged husband (putty-faced Karra Elejalde) happens on a time machine while fleeing a scissor-wielding madman. Escaping backward through time, he is caught in a series of concentric circles, engineering what he's already seen so as not to rupture the fabric of space-time while at the same time trying to undo his past mistakes. There's too much tautology in Vigalondo's temporal puzzle, but its conclusion makes a darkly satisfying (if not entirely) earned point about the collateral casualties of marital harmony. —S.A. (April 11, 10 p.m., RE; April 13, 7:15 p.m., TB)

Katrine Browne retraces her family's ties to the American slave trade in this provocative documentary. The DeWolfs are enshrined as the first family of Bristol, R.I., but the fact that their prominence came from triangle-trade wealth is more obscure, or, more to the point, obscured. The resistance to Browne's investigation occurs mainly off-camera, but of the 200 relatives she contacted, only nine agreed to join her as she followed her family's footsteps to Ghana, where enslaved Africans were marched into slave ships, and to Cuba, where the slaves worked farming sugar that became the colonies' greatest source of wealth. Browne's family ties to the country's original sin become a microcosm of the nation's foundational debt to slave labor, and their attempts to confront their guilt, or lack thereof, are as awkward, painful and occasionally maddening as you might expect. But a documentary on this subject that didn't provoke strong feelings, positive and negative, would hardly be worth watching. —S.A. (April 24, 8:30 p.m., NCC)

Hong Kong action legends Tsui Hawk, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To take turns telling the story of three small-time criminals who luck into a long-buried treasure. Working without a common script, each director was responsible for a half-hour segment, picking up where the previous one left off. The movie's disjointed feel, then, is not only inevitable but deliberate, with each 30-minute mark presaging a sudden shift in tone. That the three conspirators spend more time bickering with one another than planning their crimes is the movie's way of winking at its too-many-cooks approach, but the touch of self-consciousness can't knit the disparate parts into a satisfying whole. —S.A. (April 12, 10 p.m., TB; April 13, 7:15 p.m., RE)

Although it builds to a climactic bank heist and features big lug Victor Mature in the lead, Richard Fleischer's 1955 beauty is a woman's picture in action-movie duds. As the robbers (including a young Lee Marvin) hatch their plot, the camera keeps drifting off around the small town of Bradenville, whose problems run deeper than imminent larceny. From its Peeping Tom banker to its larcenous librarian, the townspeople are shot through with moral rot. Fleischer's masterful Cinemascope frames chart the interactions between Bradenville's residents and its temporary visitors, connecting their petty miseries until you feel dirty just for watching. If that's not enough to sear your eyeballs, try Ernest Borgnine as an Amish farmer. Really. —S.A. (April 10, 9:30 p.m., R5; April 12, 12:15 p.m., TB)

Rodger Grossman's long-in-gestation Germs biopic is by turns electr