short film reviews, criticism, and occasional musing.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Rare Exports (2010, Finland)

Possibly the best evil Santa film I’ve seen, and definitely one of the better films, period, that I’ve seen this year, Rare Exports is a delightfully nasty little package of holiday treats. Clocking in at a brief 84 minutes, it keeps the action moving briskly along, never wearing out its high-concept welcome. The conceit? Santa is real, and he’s real mean. Instead of the holly, jolly fat man most Western children are told about from the time they can crawl, this Father Christmas is an evil spirit, held captive deep in an icy prison along the Finland-Russia border until some unwise industrialists release him . . . and his hoards of naked elves (that must have been a fun casting call). And who can stop Santa from rampaging throughout Scandinavia? A young boy named Pietari – the only villager who’s bothered to do his research – aided by three of the town’s rough reindeer hunters.

That’s Rare Exports in a nutshell, but in reality, it’s much more – a clever black comedy, an effective thriller, and a surprisingly touching portrait of a boy and his father seeing one another through tough times. It’s a bit more than a little cracked-out, too – a must-see for anyone even mildly interested in watching dozens of naked old Finnish men with shovels and clubs chase people through the forest on Christmas Eve.

(If all of this doesn’t sound completely insane, don’t forget to check out the two “prequel” shorts to Rare Exports, available on the Woodpecker Films website. I would recommend saving them until after seeing the feature, though, as I found that some of the funniest bits of the first short are pretty heavily recycled in the longer version.)

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

True Grit (2010, USA)

I am an unabashed Coen fan, even if I’m not a completist (speak to me not of The Ladykillers, for not even J.K. Simmons can entice me). They are almost unrivaled in contemporary American cinema for their attention to detail when evoking a particular time and place – and while this talent works to the benefit of True Grit, I can’t help but wonder if it doesn’t hold the film back a bit, too. Everything in True Grit feels real, from the performances – Jeff Bridges disappearing almost entirely into Rooster Cogburn, Hailee Steinfeld standing up admirably to both Bridges and Matt Damon, the almost unrecognizable Barry Pepper (possibly dirtier than in Battlefield Earth) – to the costumes, the whiskers, and the stark environs of where the Southwest meets the Midwest (with Texas standing in for Arkansas). But as much as I liked True Grit – and it was one of the more enjoyable couple of hours I’ve had at the movies this year – I couldn’t help feeling that it was missing something propulsive, something that would break it out of its shell. The fault I find most frequently with the Coens is not that they are mean-spirited towards their characters, which I’ve never really beleieved, but that their filmmaking style sometimes leans towards the clinical, the academic. Perhaps if they were a little sloppier, their films would have a bit more passion.

Monday, December 06, 2010

Knight & Day (2010, USA)

Knight & Day is a lot of things – a throwback romance-action film, an opportunity for Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz to show off their dental work, a chance for Paul Dano to reflect on the poor career choices he’s made since There Will Be Blood – but did it have to be so creepy, too? Here’s the thing that got under my skin – a major plot device in Knight & Day has Cruise’s rogue spy knocking Diaz’s high-strung bystander out every fifteen minutes or so. I mean, at least he does it with drugs and not his fists, but come on, people – am I the only one who finds this fairly disturbing and not a little bit rape-y?

In order to better illustrate my point, let’s take a great example of a romance-action film, one that Knight & Day so badly wishes it could be – Romancing the Stone. Did the main characters fight? Yep. Did it seem like Michael Douglas’s character occasionally wanted to knock Kathleen Turner out? Sure. Did he actually do this at every conceivable turn, to better drag her around the globe with him? Not so much. In order to have real chemistry between your leads, both of them need to be conscious the majority of the time.

Turner’s Joan Wilder was as much an active part of Stone as Douglas’s Jack T. Colton was (in fact, I’m pretty sure her character name has better recognition factor than his, and despite what the opening credits say, she’s totally the main character), and she helped get the two of them out of as many scrapes as he did. That’s one of the things that made Stone so fun. And I wouldn’t blame the stray little girl (ahem) who would occasionally imagine herself as Joan Wilder. Sure, she’s a little high-maintenance, but the lady has guts, a brain, and ends up being so cool that a guy drives a boat through the middle of the Upper East Side for her. All I remember about Diaz’s character was those teeth.