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Uptown Magazine - Winnipeg's Online Source for Arts, Entertainment & News

May 15, 2008


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2008-05-15

Good intentions, average film

Yes, it was shot in Manitoba - but that doesn't make The Stone Angel a great movie, Walter says

(The Stone Angel, now showing)

B-

Look, don't get me wrong: it's great that the film adaptation of Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel was shot in Manitoba and was produced by local producing herd Buffalo Gal Pictures. Lots of my friends had jobs for part of the summer, Buffalo Gal can be assured of the financial lebensraum to produce more great authentically local films like Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, and I'm able to drive my car around thanks to the coat-hanger-wrangling talents of the production crew's Beaconia security detail.

But all of that doesn't make it a great movie.

(As I write this, Manitoba mothers are likely being driven to the theatres in hordes by their loving children to watch the extended life-reminiscence and reverie of Hagar Shipley, anyway.)

The original novel's vastness, I think, is a principal problem - something confirmed during my phone interview with the film's writer and director, Kari Skogland, a few weeks back. Skogland admitted that there had been several previous efforts to adapt the novel to the screen, obviously none of which were successful.

Skogland's script really goes for a surface treatment of Laurence's dense plot, trying to pack everything in, even if it means that the looming incest amongst unbeknownst offspring, or Shipley's cancer, only get a minute or two of screen time. Towards film's end, the barrage of startling Hagar-revelations approaches absurdity and feels like a rush-job after the first two reels are spent without a whole bunch of conflict - a reality finally shifted by the disapproving of Hagar's father over her choice in a husband.

Skogland has elsewhere described her adaptation as a "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll" version, but her mere inclusion of a much-touted (yet tame) stairway sex scene doesn't make the rest of the film very daring.

The acting in the film is merely average. As Hagar, Ellen Burstyn does a good job at playing old and confused, but this is hardly among her most memorable roles. As the younger Hagar, Christine Horne's performance is uniquely good, and she will undoubtedly be met with big offers for future roles, but Ellen Page's supporting role is vastly exaggerated and her talents (after what we've seen elsewhere, already) are under-utilized.

Most irksome is that it was Skogland who won the right to direct - an experienced TV director whose prevailing uninspired visual tone makes one think that this feature might have worked better as a mini-series.
— Walter Forsberg

Real-life video game

Cullen Hoback's doc Monster Camp takes you into the nerdy world of Live Action Role Playing

(Monster Camp, May 16-19, Cinematheque)

B+

"It's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons - but for real."

That's how Cullen Hoback describes his new documentary Monster Camp - an introduction to the world of LARP (Live Action Role Playing) and a game called NERO.

NERO is an elaborately plotted role-playing game that was made by some New England nerd and franchise-licensed across the United States before it got caught up in legal wrangling over authorship. Essentially, though, it calls for participants to dress up in Val Vil-adapted medieval costumes and run around bonking each other with foam bats for one weekend a month.

Hoback's chronicle follows the Seattle NERO chapter on a couple of its weekends, introducing viewers to the players and the lifestyle, etc.

The franchise owner, Shane, works for Office Depot and devotes most of his spare time to the game as the principal of the Plot Team. (Plot Team NERO members no longer play; laptop-side, they control the story of the game from inside a state park bunkhouse.) Like most of the characters Hoback introduces us to, he's a 'normal' person who is simply obsessed and enthralled by game-playing in a bunch of forms.

To some of the characters, gaming is an addiction: "It becomes unhealthy when it begins to hurt you and the people around you." To others, "It's making up worlds so you don't have to be in your own one," and a good way to not get bored.

These are the kinds of insights that Hoback presents about the denizens of obscure gaming worlds like this one - a somewhat fresh, 'they're-just-like-us' angle that only rarely indulges itself with some auto-ridicule of the sort the subject matter inspires.

Witnessing NERO players earnestly cast spells ("I call upon chaos to cause critical wounds") and yell kill-spells (such as, "19-Silver! 14-Disease!") in Hoback's film is interesting, and where the climactic tension built by a secret announcement at film's end proves weak, the documentary poetry of a few fly-on-the-wall moments makes Monster Camp really pay off.
— Walter Forsberg

Tales of a Grade 10 outlaw

Jennifer Venditti's doc Billy the Kid an innovative coming-of-age flick

(Billy the Kid, May 16-19, 7 p.m., Cinematheque)

Jennifer Venditti is a New York casting director - the kind of person who spends a lot of time just looking at people. That's why it's no great surprise that in making Billy the Kid, she has authored one of the most fun, charming and heart-wrenching bio-docs on eccentricity (that isn't an Errol Morris film) since Grey Gardens.

Gossip-mongering sensationalists - the kind that originated 19th-century Western dime novels, as well as Hollywood filmmakers - have long exploited the myth of William H. Bonney, but Venditti's BTK reference only infers the outlaw invocation in depicting the life of Grade 10 outsider, Billy.

Billy is a somewhat-troubled youth, beset by early family problems (though his mother seems like the nicest person) and what some pediatricians apparently diagnosed as emotional and developmental abnormalities. Others, however, (and Venditti's aim is to make you one of them) see Billy as a brilliant young mind, out of place simply because of his advanced intelligence - "borderline genius," according to his mother.

"I saw him in some ways as a young Don Quixote," explains Venditti in a press release. "Though I conducted several interviews with teachers, students, family members and specialists, I ultimately threw them out in favor of Billy's voice. All we have to do is experience Billy while he responds to a painful and intense childhood, first-time love, and life as an outcast."

Indeed, over the principal eight-day shoot in small-town Lisbon Falls, Maine, Venditti and cameraman Donald Cumming capture the gamut of pained teenage experience: everything from the politics of lunchroom seating, to inexperienced courtship and rocking out with your guitar to AC/DC. The unbridled honesty and eloquent earnestness of Billy often makes for tough and awkward viewing (I was accused of being "heartless," as the only member of the press with dry eyes post-screening), but it's never boring. Billy's nervy physicality and furtive beady eyes are fishhooks of endearment and empathy, no matter what the situation.

Ultimately, Venditti's documentary film project is certainly anything but objective and distanced (isn't it amazing that Billy obtains his first girlfriend during Venditti's visit?), but many great docs aren't. Ethicists might prefer to look at the resultant effect of Billy's teenage-celebrity status on his life (please, watch the dialogue-less video of Billy's visit to New York City on the film's MySpace page) to find fault with this terrific film portrait. As a converted Billy-fan, the spike in his cool factor couldn't make this reviewer happier.
— Walter Forsberg

'Uh... what?'

Morgan Spurlock's latest documentary lacks direction and insight

(Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, Opens Friday)

D+

For some reason, everyone I talk to knows the name of the guy who directed 2004's McDoc, Super Size Me. I think that this strange trivial matter has something to do with the fact that Morgan Spurlock (you got it) possesses an odd, disgusting, troll-like quality (at least in his onscreen persona) that is weirdly memorable. It worked great for Super Size Me, where Spurlock's gross factor drove the narrative of his McDonalds-exclusive diet. But in his new film, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?, Spurlock's un-charming charm dies a fiery death onscreen - just like those victims of the World Trade Centre attack.

The premise for this, Spurlock's second (and inevitable) doc, is that he is soon to become a father and, upon reflecting on the world he will bring a child into, decides he should find out where Osama is hiding. Uh. what?

Judging from the Indiana Jones-style poster, and the computer game-like formal structuring of his search (with various journey legs serving as levels), it's clear that Spurlock's effort is confused from the get-go. Add to that the sappy and irrelevant mini-intrigue of his wife's pregnancy, and there's the chance that Osama might sue for character defamation-by-association.

For most of the film, Spurlock visits Arab/Muslim/Middle-Eastern countries (Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the West Bank and Afghanistan), gushing with idiotic glee and pride each time he asks a random stranger his titular question. It's a totally dumb approach, and even though his obvious intent is to show that the majority Muslims are just like the majority of us - completely normal and rational - it would be surprising if it didn't annoy the hell out of you.

When, at film's end, he finally discovers the purported whereabouts of Osama (in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border - isn't that common knowledge?), he dramatically decides the danger, "is not worth it," to go on. Again: Uh. what?

Spurlock's quest is rife with pussy-footed, ranty, liberal rhetoric about why the USA is bad and George Bush is a terrorist himself, and repeatedly includes the ubiquitous foreign opinion that the American people are great, but it's the government that's bad. No great insights, these. Furthermore, Spurlock's "big adventure" is so terrible that its mere existence is a great disservice to any serious progressive cause he could be construed to identify with. It's getting to be the same problem for Michael Moore, but at least Moore has made a good film before.
— Walter Forsberg

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