SONITA - HOT DOCS 2016 Review By Greg Klymkiw - Teen Rapper Tale veers into jingoism

Sonita (2016)
Dir. Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami
Starring: Sonita Alizadeh

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It's not surprising that Sonita won the Audience Award during the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, playing to rapturous applause. Even within the rarefied conclave of American Liberalism, the thing that's most troubling about the film would have skipped right over the heads of most Americans.

First, the positive. The film is a superbly made story about the title subject, a teenage Afghani refugee living under the aegis of a charitable organization in Iran which provides shelter and schooling to kids who were hustled away from Taliban rule for a better life. Sonita and her siblings have lived in safety, but have done so at the expense of being separated from the rest of their family who've remained in Afghanistan for many years.

Director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami not only paints a vivid portrait of life in Tehran, but manages to do so with slicker than usual production value. Both the cinematography and sound are first-rate, delivering an extremely palatable presentation of life in a repressed country like Iran - one which seems like a bastion of free speech compared to Taliban-influenced Afghanistan.

Sonita's music is a real treat also. It often dazzles and moves us with her passion, skill and promotion of both social justice and equal rights for women. (There's a music video, which Sonita essentially directs, which will inspire considerable happy gooseflesh.)

Sonita is a hugely talented singer-songwriter who has found her calling in rap music. She sings about women's rights with verve and passion, but even Iran (as seen in this year's Raving Iran) strictly forbids music which is not government sanctioned, nor does it allow women to sing. Sonita must pursue her dreams in secret.

The most urgent conflict occurs when Sonita's family in Afghanistan is appalled that she's singing and they begin the process of bringing her back home in order to be sold into the slavery of a forced marriage. This sequence is nail-bitingly suspenseful. Though there is some talk that director Maghami's financial intervention to buy Sonita some time crosses over into "journalistic" heresy, this hardly seems to matter since we're dealing with the life of a deeply passionate and extraordinarily talented young artist.

Though the suspense ratchets up even more skillfully during the final conflict in which director Maghami again intervenes, a very sour taste begins to foul the proceedings since it involves Sonita potentially being saved by the evil corporate imperialism of a country that has caused all her problems to begin with, and in fact, all the problems associated with extremist middle eastern terror that plagues the world.

For anyone who accepts that America has dug its own grave and continues to dig graves for the rest of the world, much of the goodwill the film builds up has far too much potential to render it as little more than lunkheaded Argo-like American propaganda.

I can see why American audiences lapped this up. Alas, it left me cold as ice.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3 Stars

Sonita is a FilmsWeLike (FWL) release, its Canadian Premiere is at Hot Docs 2016

THE KEEPING ROOM - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Precious, Pretentious "Feminist" Western

The Keeping Room (2014)
Dir. Daniel Barber
Scr. Julia Hart
Starring: Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Manu Otaru,
Sam Worthington, Kyle Soller, Nicholas Pinnock, Ned Dennehy, Amy Nuttall

As Sherman marched through the South, decimating everything in his path, he placed considerable trust in his scouts to sniff out what lay ahead that could be burned and/or pillaged. Given that the menfolk on the Rebel side were off being slaughtered by the Yankees in a bloodthirsty, unevenly matched war, those left behind in the South were women, children, the old and infirm. One can't exactly place much in the way of heroism in Sherman's deeds, nor according to this movie, in those of his scouts who only had one thing on their minds - and we all know what that was.

Julia Hart's screenplay focuses upon those women left behind and her earnest efforts certainly exemplify the old college try, but for all its female bonding, attention to detail and attempts at putting a revisionist feminist spin on things, the whole affair comes up short - partially due to the too-lean script and Daniel Barber's precious direction.

The picture is finally little more than a Straw Dogs wannabe crossed with Kelly Reichardt's astonishing Meek's Cutoff.

Three women, comprised of two Southern belle sisters (TV stalwart Marling and True Grit's Steinfeld) and their female slave (Manu Otaru) live a hard, lonely life without the menfolk around to handle the heavy lifting. In addition to all the womanly household chores, they're out in the fields trying to yield what they can from the earth - Marling even ventures into the woods with her shotgun to try hunting.

Goldurn it, these ladies is never goin' hungry agin.

Just a ways down the road, a pair of Yankee scouts (Sam Worthington, Kyle Soller) are having one grand old time: pillaging, stealing, drinking, cussing, killing and most of all, raping. Yes, these boys just loves to rape. They spend so much time sniffing out prime flesh and then raping and killing it, one wonders when they have any time to do what General Sherman needs them to do.

Soon enough, these randy rapists will be coming to call upon our trio and we spend a good chunk of the movie watching the womenfolk defending their virtue and home. Along the way, the movie provides some passing nods to race relations and sexuality, but the name of the game is rape and revenge. Curiously, there's not much in the way of rape - there's one attempt upon the feisty Steinfeld, followed by plenty of prowling around and eventually the inevitable extraction of vengeance.

One can't quarrel with any of the solid, try-as-they-might performances and the gorgeous visuals, but this is one dull, precious and pretentious movie. It carries itself with an elegiac lope, but there's no real heft to its pseudo-arty rambling. It wants to have its cake and eat it too by taking a good wallow in girlie-girl concerns and some good old fashioned ultra violence, but just in case we'd mistake it for an exploitation item, everything is paced like that snail Col. Kurtz talks about in Apocalypse Now, slooooooowwwwwwllllllyyyy "crawling along the edge of a straight razor".

By the time the relatively modest running time unspools towards its "surprise" (not really) killing and the fake solidarity of womanhood as the ladies destroy everything before the Yankees can destroy it, we've felt like the movie has gone on forever and we're delivered one final sickening blow, the trilling of a mournful song whilst our trio disappear into the vastness that will become a new America. (Hmmm, I think I'm making it sound better than it is.)

The only real revisionism here is taking a potentially drama-charged setting and scenario, then slowing it down to a molasses ooze to fool some people into thinking they're seeing art. If there was a good screenplay here, director Barber hasn't done it any favours by applying a bargain basement Kelly Reichardt Meek's Cutoff contemplative approach to the proceedings. What was great there, is a big snore here. And, by the way, if you are hankering for a great revisionist western with a solid female character and perspective, you'd be better off with that film than The Keeping Room.

It's the real thing. This one's a fake.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ** Two Stars

The Keeping Room is in limited release via FilmsWeLike. In Toronto it unspools at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

CEMETERY OF SLENDOUR - Review By Greg Klymkiw *****TIFF 2015 TOP PICK*****

Cemetery of Splendour (2015)
Dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Starring: Jenjira Pongpas Widner, Banlop Lomnoi, Jarinpattra Rueangram,
Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw, Bhattaratorn Senkgraigul, Richard Abramson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A seemingly incurable sleeping sickness overtakes several Thai soldiers. Unresponsive to the usual treatments, they're dumped in a makeshift hospital in the northeastern provinces to receive what care can be dispensed. Jenjira (Jenjira Pongpas Widner), a crippled volunteer nursing assistant, spends endless hours and days tending to the needs of Itt (Banlop Lomnoi); giving massages, repositioning his body, applying wet cloths and even talking to him as if he was completely alert.

And then, he wakes up.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour is compulsively fascinating, dazzlingly beautiful and deeply moving. Much of the film pulsates in a neo-realist tradition; the cast and locations always feel like the real thing. Equally astonishing are the spiritual moments, rooted in a reality that's never beyond the natural order of the film's mise-en-scene, and the natural order of the world as it should be. Weerasethakul's film is an ode to life, love, death and understanding in a world where change, more often than not, has a devastating impact upon the inner peace, spirituality and environment of a place, people and ghosts. Yes, ghosts!

Writer-director Weerasethakul dapples the film with odd bits of his trademark humour and delightful perversities (a la previous works like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) which meld with the film's more cerebral and elegiac qualities. At times, it's a visual feast (especially the haunting coloured light treatments used upon the sleeping soldiers at night).

Most notable is the character of Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), a psychic who can read the thoughts and dreams of the men. She's the lynch-pin of the film's formal trinity of central characters and is indeed responsible for taking us into the deep, often impenetrable places of the heart, making them literal and as such, all the more real. It's a magic we believe in wholeheartedly.

Cemetery of Splendour resonates the way great art should. It is an exquisitely wrought tapestry that allows us to step inside it and then, soar. This, of course, is what also makes for great cinema!

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

Cemetery of Splendour is in the TIFF Masters program at TIFF 2015. For dates, times and tix, visit the TIFF website HERE.

EDEN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Tedious look at life of Paris D.J. still oddly compelling.

Eden (2014)
Dir. Mia Hansen-Løve
Scr. Mia Hansen-Løve, Sven Hansen-Løve
Starring: Felix de Givry, Pauline Etienne, Greta Gerwig, Golshifteh Farahani,
Vincent Macaigne, Roman Kolinka, Hugo Conzelmann, Vincent Lacoste, Arnaud Azoulay, Arsinee Khanjian

Review By Greg Klymkiw

Whilst watching all 131 minutes of Eden, at least forty-one of them unnecessary, I kept asking myself if a rambling dramatic immersion into twenty years in the life and career of a D.J. was something I really needed to see. After it was over and done with, I had to grudgingly conclude that yes, it was.

In spite of its longueurs, the picture has so many evocative sequences which capture an indelible sense of time and place and yes, introduced me to a world I'd otherwise have had absolutely no interest in knowing anything about. Yeah, okay. I was glad I stuck with it. It's not a bad picture and I suspect that those who actually care anything about house music might even love it.

In a nutshell, it's the Inside Llewyn Davis of the dance club scene. Though that's a perfectly appropriate encapsulation of Eden, I hope nobody thinks I'm suggesting it's even a public hair as great as the Coen Brothers masterpiece. It's not. It barely registers half of a crab louse in those particular sweepstakes.

What we have is the not-so-inspiring story of Paul (Felix de Givry), a promising young literature student who should really be listening to Arsinee Khanjian who plays his continually disappointed and disapproving Mom. She keeps encouraging the lad to finish his thesis, especially since his academic advisor is so high on him. Alas, Paul is far too high on electronic music as well as the drugs and sex that go along with it, that he pretty much wastes two decades of his life instead of getting an early jump on his writing career. (Though at least he does garner enough life experience to actually write about something, no matter how empty it is.)

Ah, such is the folly of youth. Paul does, however, have one hell of a good time. He has several main squeezes (Pauline Etienne, Greta Gerwig, Golshifteh Farahani) amongst the bountiful pickings of babes in the dance club scene and he certainly creates some cool sounds in the Parisian garage tradition along the way, including a très cool tour of America.

Paul also has the fellowship of his best friends and collaborators: brooding visual artist Cyril (Roman Kolinka), the good-natured D.J. partner Stan (Hugo Conzelmann), the often hilarious Arnaud (Vincent Macaigne), a baby boomer club impresario who also has an obsessive penchant for Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls and, of course, Paul's friendly contemporaries in the scene, Thomas and Guy-Man (Vincent Lacoste, Arnaud Azoulay). The latter duo go on to stage their own music as Daft Punk, the brilliant pair of real-life music-makers who find the kind of world-wide fame which Paul gets brief tastes of, but never truly attains. The Daft Punk characters are also used to great effect in the film's one and only running gag (and a pretty funny one at that).

Eden often has a pleasing spirit of free-wheeling, not unlike some of director Hansen-Løve's French New Wave predecessors, but for every glorious dash through the streets of Paris and New York, every tumble in the sack with a bevy of babes, every snort of coke, as well as a myriad of party/club scenes, there are an equal number of them which feel like over-indulgent wheel-spinning. Clearly some of the elements of realism can be attributed to the screenplay co-written by the director's brother Sven Hansen-Løve, a former two-decades-long D.J. in real life.

Alas, so much of the film straggles about in a kind of self-importance within a musical, social and cultural scene that's notable only because it did (and continues to) inspire a generation of young people within a relatively slight blip on the overall radar of music history. The entire scene finally feels utterly inconsequential and the film makes virtually nothing of the political and historical backdrops which surely had some effect upon driving people into this world of thump-thumping partying.

Maybe ignoring the turbulence of the outside world is the point, but if so, it says a lot about the young people immersed in it and/or the missed opportunities for the film to have genuinely earned its 131-minute running time by scratching below the surface of its pseudo-neo-realist tendencies.

Personally, I've never been able to comprehend the "joys" of any club, bar, party, restaurant or celebratory event which played music so loud that one was forced to shout sweet nothings into people's ears. Some might argue it's all about the "physical" connection, but most of the denizens/fans of this crap are so hopped up on drugs, the only connections they're really making, are with dealers to buy more drugs.

Before you assume I'm some old grump, I can assure you my wayward youth was spent in many a punk, hard rock, heavy metal and jazz club, but between live sets, taped music was dialled down so one could actually converse with one's fellow party-hearty partners in crime. To me, house is like elevator music, only it splits your eardrums.

By the end of Eden and certainly in retrospect, all I kept/keep thinking about are the seemingly endless scenes in the movie of Paul's Mother forking over money into his empty, outstretched palms because he's unable to earn a proper living in his chosen art.

The real moral of the story is thus: Kids, listen to your Mothers, for Christ's Sake!

They're usually right.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***

Eden begins its theatrical release in Canada at the TIFF Bell LightBox via FilmsWeLike and will widen out across the rest of the country in specialty venues.

A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron) - Review By Greg Klymkiw - The third in Roy Andersson's "Living" Trilogy is a fond, sad and funny farewell to a world of muted existence, of deadpan whimsy (Swedish-style, of course). @ TIFF BellLightbox & rest of Canada via FilmsWeLike

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2015)
Dir. Roy Andersson
Starring: Nils Westblom, Holger Andersson

Review By Greg Klymkiw

How much you'll enjoy Roy Andersson's A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence will most likely depend upon how much Roy Andersson you can take, if at all. He is, to be sure, either an acquired taste or one who is immediately embraced by those who experience his unique vision for the first time. Though he made his first feature in 1970 (the acclaimed A Swedish Love Story) and his sophomore effort in 1975 (the unjustly reviled Gillap), most of his contemporary followers discovered him with the first in his astonishing "life" trilogy, Songs from the Second Floor in 2000, then the second, You, the Living, in 2007 and just this past year with the final instalment which won the Grand Prize at the Venice International Film Festival.

If you've never seen his previous work, never fear. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence can easily be enjoyed without having experienced any of his films, including those first two instalments of the trilogy. What you might have to first get over - I know I did - are the touches of whimsy permeating the work. If there's anything I can't stand, it's whimsy. Happily, this is neither French nor Belgian whimsy, so it doesn't immediately land like so many globs of bilious chunks blown into a vomit bucket.

It's Swedish - THANK CHRIST! - which immediately takes it into the territory of deep, almost unrelenting sadness. Not that you won't laugh, though. Andersson is a veritable knee-slap-inducer of the highest order. Some have idiotically linked him to the grotesqueries of mid-to-late Fellini, but for me, he's always been a curious amalgam of Chaplin (albeit on heavy doses of lithium) with splashes of De Sica/Rossellini neo-realism and, best of all, the deep ennui of Ingmar Bergman and the pathologically insane reliance upon tableaux so rooted in most of Carl Dreyer's canon (post-The Passion of Joan of Arc and notably in Ordet and Wrath of God).

Andersson creates images and situations which are often deeply sublime and the laughs he wrenches from you must be paid for in dire, often endless moments where you're shedding tears - often due to the universal truths of humanity which he brilliantly exposes, but just as often because one is simply blown away by his virtuosity as a film artist.

Set in the major sea port city of Göteborg, one would immediately think the place is utterly bereft of the joyous cultural and historical touchstones that make it one of the most vibrant cities, not just in Sweden, but the world. I can't recall a single instance of sun peeking through the heavy clouds, nor any interior that wasn't splashed in fluorescent light and a kind of spartan decor which borders on a complete lack of anything resembling warmth, taste or style. In fact, there are only two instances in the entire film where we see anyone smile. One involves an ever-so brief moment involving children and the other, so heart-rending I refuse to spoil it for you (and, you might even miss it altogether).

Gotta love Roy Andersson! There's nobody out there like him in contemporary cinema, though I'd argue that Austrian Ulrich Seidl or bad boy Lars von Trier are not unlike a Roy Andersson who train their lenses upon the most vile aspects of human ugliness and moral decrepitude.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is as episodic as they come. Andersson presents several mini-playlets (he's happily all-too-in-love with a kind of skewed proscenium quality to his compositions) in which we observe slices of life involving numerous characters who are only connected by virtue of living in the same city. Andersson affixes his camera in one position, usually in a slightly off-kilter angle from some discrete corner viewpoint as he almost sneakily seems to be spying upon the action of the scenes. All 100-minutes of the picture is comprised of - I kid you not! - about 35 single shots and they are beautiful, as much as for the dramatic content as they are for their compositional qualities. Somehow, Andersson manages to make the harshly bland quality of the settings as pulchritudinous as all get out.

The movie begins with a series of short snappers which are presented with the inter-title "Three Meetings With Death" and they are exactly that. From a man suffering a fatal heart attack in his dining room after unsuccessfully attempting to uncork a bottle of wine while his wife continues to putter about the kitchen, through to an absolutely hilarious sequence involving a dead man on the floor of a cafeteria aboard a ferry as the cashier wonders what to do with the meal and beer the man ordered and paid for, before keeling over, of course. The middle vignette is as heartbreaking as it is funny - a self-contained mini-masterpiece within the larger whole as a woman on her deathbed refuses to part with her handbag full of jewels and money, hoping to take it with her to the afterlife.

Throughout the movie are several other vignettes - one involving a chunky flamenco teacher and her obsession with a lithe, beautiful young man in her class, a befuddled military officer searching for a lecture, an inexperienced barber filling in for his infirm friend (and scaring away customers as he describes that he hasn't cut hair since his military days), several sequences involving different characters engaged in telephone calls in which they all utter similar pleasantries of the “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine” variety.

There are moments of out and out surrealism. My least favourite involves a bar which keeps receiving visits from King Charles XII and his army and my "favourite", though that's not quite the right word to describe it, is a horrific dream sequence involving stiff-upper-lip British Colonial soldiers forcing a huge lineup of African slaves into a humungous copper drum, locking them in, setting fires underneath and rigidly observing as it revolves like a spit and roasts the people alive.

There is one narrative thread which ties the movie together and involves two sad-sack door-to-door salesmen specializing in wholesale novelty items to mostly uninterested or payment-welching shopkeepers. Both men seem fraught with the mental illness of depression, though it's poor Sam (Nils Westblom) who appears to suffer the most, especially since his partner Jonathan (Holger Andersson) is an inveterate bully who keeps referring to his old pal as a "crybaby" (which, he actually resembles since he's prone to breaking out into painful sobs at the drop of a hat).

Their scenes are the funniest and saddest in Andersson's film (and perhaps up there with some of the funniest and saddest moments in all of film history). When Sam, with dour deadpan, oft-repeats his sales pitch, "We want to help people have fun," it's clearly obvious these men are ill-prepared to sell vampire teeth with extra-long fangs, a laugh-bag (described by Jonathan as guaranteed to "bring out a smile at parties, either at home or in the office") and their "new item" which they place a lot of faith in, a grotesque rubber mask called "Uncle One Tooth" which crybaby Sam is forced to repeatedly demonstrate, an item so horrific it even terrifies a store clerk upon first viewing it.

Of all the characters in this kaleidoscope of humanity, Sam and Jonathan are a perfect pair for us to follow as Andersson takes us on this genuinely exquisite journey. It's a world most of us would never want to live in, but we're grateful for the experience of living it in the film. Indeed, like Bruegel's 1565 oil on wood painting "The Hunters in the Snow", Andersson's chief influence here, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence works on a similar plane as those birds in the 14th Century masterpiece looking down upon the weary, downtrodden men trudging through snow under grey skies. Andersson's a sly one, though. We'd like to think we're the pigeons, but ultimately, we're all the dupes.

Andersson uses his film to hold up a mirror to all of us.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is in theatrical release via FilmWeLike. It plays in Toronto at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and throughout the rest of Canada soon after.

GREG KLYMKIW INTERVIEWS THE ZELLNER BROTHERS on KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER

FARGO gives Kumiko hope that one day, she will be happy.

KUMIKO THE TREASURE HUNTER
starring Rinko Kikuchi
opens theatrically across Canada

An Interview with the Zellner Bros.

by Greg Klymkiw

Kumiko travels from Tokyo to Fargo in search of treasure.

Kumiko, an office girl in Tokyo, is obsessed with the movie Fargo by the Coen Bros. She has been studying it so intently that her VHS copy eventually wears out. Convinced it's a true story, she creates a meticulous series of maps to find the treasure of riches Steve Buscemi hides in the snow - IN the movie. Eventually, she embarks upon a very strange, funny and harrowingly emotional odyssey.

American cinema, more than anything, has always exemplified the American Dream. Brilliantly responding to this notion, director David Zellner and his co-writer/producer brother Nathan, have created Kumiko The Treasure Hunter. It's one of the most haunting, tragic and profoundly moving explorations of mental illness ever made - especially within the context of the dashed hopes and dreams, at first offered, then reneged upon by the magic of movies and the wide-open expanse of a country teeming with opportunity and riches.

There isn't a false note to be found in this gorgeously acted, directed and photographed movie. It is not without humour, but none of it is at Kumiko's expense and when the film slowly slides into full blown tragedy, the Zellners surround Kumiko in the ever-accumulating high winds and snow under the big skies of Minnesota. We get, as she does, a bittersweet taste of happiness - a dream of triumph, a dream of reunion, a dream of peace, at last.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

THE ZELLNER BROTHERS

GREG KLYMKIW: When I first saw Kumiko I had this fantasy that you guys were born and raised in either Minnesota or North Dakota, but you were born in Greeley, Colorado. I know you guys are in Austin, Texas these days, but how long did you actually live in Greeley?

DAVID ZELLNER: 
We lived in Greeley until Nathan was 9 and I was 10. We loved Greeley and Colorado in general. We were very much into the outdoors there, camping, etc. It was our formative years, and it left a big impression on us. I was sort of obsessed with the state, probably idealized it a bit, but all throughout my youth I had a Colorado state flag on my wall, the prettiest of the US state flags in my opinion.


GREG KLYMKIW: Yeah, it IS a gorgeous flag.

NATHAN ZELLNER: 
Greeley is just north of Denver, in the plains. Sort of rural. Our parents were professors before they retired, so they taught there and then later moved to Texas when we were teenagers.


COLORADO STATE FLAG

GREG KLYMKIW: When did you move to Austin?


DAVID ZELLNER: I moved to Austin to go to film school at UT. Nathan got a computer science degree at Texas A&M and then joined me in Austin afterwards.


GREG KLYMKIW: 
I'm curious, living on the plains of Colorado can't be much different that living in Winnipeg or North Dakota or Minnesota. What did all that open sky do to you guys as little nippers? Was it something you drank in like really tasty soda pop or didn't it make much of a difference until later?




DAVID ZELLNER: 
We had fond memories of winter growing up, from the first fall of the fresh pristine snow, to the end of the season when the sides of the roads were caked with stacks of oily frozen sludge. We'd never been to Minnesota prior to making Kumiko, though we had been to Japan, but the idea of a winter-set film full of snowy vast landscapes was appealing to us at least in part on a nostalgic level.

THE ZELLNER BROTHERS

GREG KLYMKIW: Where in Texas did you guys move to after Greeley? Was the terrain/topography similar? I only know Dallas/Fort Worth areas, so I'm not sure what other regions of the state look like except from westerns.

NATHAN ZELLNER: 
We moved to a university town called College Station.
 Texas is pretty big and diverse, the major difference was the weather and lack of snow. Like David said, we missed the four seasons.

GREG KLYMKIW: Aside from being, uh, American, what was your family's ethnic background?


DAVID ZELLNER: A mix, our mom's side is mostly Irish, our dad's side had a lot of folks from Transylvania.


GREG KLYMKIW: When did you guys fall in love with movies?


NATHAN ZELLNER: We grew up as VHS kids, but always going out to see movies in the theatre - a lot of the early 80's blockbusters and further expanding our film-knowledge by reading the covers of VHS boxes in video stores. We've always gone to see movies in theatres, though.


GREG KLYMKIW: Did you guys always work together creatively?

DAVID ZELLNER: We've been making films since we were little kids with VHS and Super 8 cameras. Initially it stemmed from wanting to act/perform particular characters. Not knowing what a director or producer or cinematographer was liberating. It's fun at that age because you're just blindly creating things.


GREG KLYMKIW: So I assume film school is where you might have gotten a taste of the fact that maybe filmmaking WASN'T blindly creating things? I'm also interested in Nathan's academic background in computer science - is that something that brought anything to bear upon your film collaboration with David?


DAVID ZELLNER: Film school was great, but it was one of many elements of my education. The best part was access to 16mm equipment and meeting likeminded folks, many of whom I'm still close to.



NATHAN ZELLNER: We each have different strengths, David is the primary Director/Writer and I'm the primary Producer/Editor, but because of how we have worked since kids, everything overlaps. My background is more technical, and that has helped as filmmaking has evolved with the digital age. We ended up editing this film on the same computers it was written on.

GREG KLYMKIW: Kumiko floats around like a stranger in her own land. Or am I being too much of an egghead here?


DAVID ZELLNER: It's not something we really intellectualize or even discuss with one another, we just are drawn to outsider stories on some visceral level I guess.


GREG KLYMKIW: Why do you think you are attracted to stories about outsiders?


DAVID ZELLNER: I guess because we are outsiders.

NATHAN ZELLNER: Something about viewing the world from a different perspective seems to speak to us.


GREG KLYMKIW: How did you guys come up with this story? It's based on an urban legend, right?

NATHAN ZELLNER: We first came across a blurb about it on the internet, this story everyone assumed was true about this Japanese woman who went from Tokyo to Minnesota looking for the lost fortune from the Coen Bros. Fargo. It was before social media is like today, just a small bit of information on a message board that was being passed along like the telephone game. Maybe the lack of information made us more obsessed with it, but to satiate our curiosity, we started writing a script and developing a backstory and character to solve our own curiosity about the kind of person who would go on such a quest. Years later, after a couple drafts of the script, we checked back and more info was available, debunking the original story as an urban legend. At first we were taken aback, but because we had been living with our version of the "truth" for so long it was just as valid. We liked it even more, our addition to the myth, that is.



Reported in the April 7, 2002 issue:
Takako Konishi died looking for FARGO treasure.

GREG KLYMKIW: When did Rinko Kikuchi come into the picture?



DAVID ZELLNER: We met her in 2008, we'd seen her in Babel and a few Japanese films, including a great one called Funky Forest. 

We hit it off with her right away and she immediately dialed into the tone of what we were going for, the balance of humor and pathos
.

GREG KLYMKIW: Was her involvement tied to financing the film?

DAVID ZELLNER: Her involvement helped there, for sure, but it wasn't necessarily the crux. We seriously didn't have a close runner up for the role really. Once we met her, we knew she was perfect for it.


GREG KLYMKIW: You said you had visited Japan. When? Why? (Other than making the movie obviously). Do either of you speak Japanese? 


NATHAN ZELLNER: We love Tokyo, it's an amazing city. We had visited Japan as tourists a year before we initially heard the story which, in hindsight, was probably one of the reasons we were drawn to it. We don't speak Japanese. We tried to learn it but failed.

GREG KLYMKIW: What was it like for a couple of boys from Greeley, Colorado to work in Japan?

NATHAN ZELLNER: We had a great relationship with the crew over there and they got the tone we were going for. They were on the same page and so excited to help make the same film. They helped us with some cultural questions and the language barrier. We did a ton of homework before too, especially since we didn't want to film a tourist version of Tokyo.


GREG KLYMKIW: What were some of the aspects of Fargo that inspired you guys in the writing/making of your movie?

DAVID ZELLNER: We like Fargo and the Coens' work in general, but the whole Fargo thing was inherently part of the original urban legend that we wanted to turn into a movie.


GREG KLYMKIW: Did you guys have to make contact with the Coens to get the movie made? I assume they've seen it. Have they said anything to you guys about it?

NATHAN ZELLNER: The negotiations mainly went through the studio. We had to convince the powers-that-be there that this wasn't a sequel or wanker homage or spoof, but that the film was part of the legend and a conduit to her journey. I don't think the Coens have seen it. Hopefully they will see it some day.


GREG KLYMKIW: It kinda shocks me they haven't seen it yet. Oh well. Guess they're busy or something. By the way, 
Fargo is part of a strange little group of movies I call the most Canadian movies never made in Canada and not made by Canadians. Growing up in Winnipeg seemed identical to the world of Fargo. The movie felt like it was made in my own backyard. It's something I never feel with other American movies, except movies in this weird, little sub-genre I've conjured up for myself in order to temper my inherent Canadian inadequacy. The other movies in this sub genre are Slap Shot and, of course, your movie, Kumiko.


NATHAN ZELLNER: I love hearing that feedback about Canada. We enjoy how different people have different points-of-view on the film, usually based on where they are from. I'm happy Kumiko connected with you in that way. I've always wanted to visit Winnipeg.

GREG KLYMKIW: I haven't lived in Winnipeg for 20 years, but I go back every chance I can. There's nowhere like it in all of Canada. It was, in its heyday, considered "Little Chicago". Now, it's not much of anything, but I kind of like its current state of utter decrepitude.
 It was also, of course, a cool place to be when I produced Guy Maddin's early movies.

DAVID ZELLNER: I have to say that Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel and Careful were a massive influence on us. Seeing those films for the first time in the early 90's was a really formative experience. They really blew my young impressionable mind. I remember seeing Gimli Hospital, not knowing what or where it came from, other than that it had to be some ancient artifact from long ago and far, far away, and then a few minutes into the movie I see a Super Big Gulp cup in a shot. I was hooked from that point on.

GREG KLYMKIW: I'm sure Guy and his screenwriter George Toles will love Kumiko. It's opening in Winnipeg, so I'm going to insist they see it. By the way, not only are Big Gulps popular in our neck of the woods, but Winnipeg is the Slurpee capital of Canada. Anyway, one last question. Do you guys, like, live in the same house in Austin or do you indeed have separate lives?


NATHAN ZELLNER: We used to live together, but that was along time ago. We have separate lives, now. It helps to keep perspective with our work. Of course, we talk and see each other often though.


GREG KLYMKIW: 
Sorry that was, I guess, a semi-joke-question. I do, however, have this image of you two living in some kind of Austin version of PeeWee's Playhouse.


NATHAN ZELLNER: I wish we worked in a replica of PeeWee's Playhouse
.

Kumiko The Treasure Hunter is being released theatrically in Canada via FilmsWeLike. You can read the full version of my original review from its premiere at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival HERE.

Here are the venues and playdates across the country:

TIFF Bell Lightbox (Toronto, ON)
Starts Friday, April 3, 2015

Vancity Theatre (Vancouver, BC)
Starts Friday, April 3, 2015

Regina Public Film Library (Regina, SK)
Starts Thursday, April 3, 2015

Broadway Theatre (Saskatoon, SK )
Starts Saturday, April 4, 2015

Globe Cinema (Calgary, AB)
Starts Saturday, April 4, 2015

Bytowne Cinema (Ottawa, ON)
Starts Monday, April 6, 2015

City Cinema, (Charlottetown, PEI)
Starts Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Cinema du Parc (Montreal, QC)
Starts Friday, April 10, 2015

Hyland Cinema (London, ON)
Starts Friday, April 10, 2015

Revue Cinema (Toronto, ON)
Starts Sunday, April 19, 2015

The Royal (Toronto, ON)
Starts Thursday, April 23, 2015

Metro Cinema (Edmonton, AB)
Starts Friday, April 24, 2015

The Vic (Victoria, BC)
Friday, April 24, 2015

Winnipeg Film Group Cinemathque (Winnipeg, MB)
Starts Thursday, May 14, 2015

FORCE MAJEURE - DVD Review By Greg Klymkiw - Domestic Drama fromFilmsWeLike

Just in time for Valentine's Day long weekend is the DVD release via FilmsWeLike of Sweden's FORCE MAJEURE. It's a perfect film for young lovers (especially those considering marriage) and certainly, it makes for fine family viewing since it presents a superb mirror image for Moms, Dads and the little nippers of their own lives.

At press time, I was unable to assess the Blu-Ray, but the DVD (especially if you play it on a Blu-Ray player with a high-def monitor) will look absolutely gorgeous - the snowy whites of the Alps, blasting your eyeballs and the well composed and apportioned dollops of glorious colour will massage your oculi to put you and those you love in a state of blissful complacency before the film's inner, roiling power explodes into the true savagery inherent in love.

Added bonii include a superb interview with  writer-director Ruben Östlund and star Johannes Bah Kuhnke in addition to an AXS TV featurette: A Look At Force Majeure. Below is the full review of the film and ordering information - you can conveniently purchase the picture directly from this website via Amazon.

Perfection is in the eye of the beholder.
Disaster, however, is always looming.

Force Majeure (2014)
Dir. Ruben Östlund
Starring: Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Kristofer Hivju, Fanni Metelius

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A perfect nuclear family from Sweden - gorgeous, physically fit and full of smiles - pose for holiday snaps on the slopes during a ski vacation in the French Alps. They appear, for all intents and purposes, to have a perfect existence.

Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) are such peas in a pod they perform nightly ablutions together with vigour and their two children actually get along with each other, happily playing like little piggies in a mud pen.

All four of them even wear stylish matching pyjamas as they nap together after a few hours of exercising their ludicrously lithe bodies in out-of-doors family-fun-frolics. How could anything go wrong?

From the very opening frames and onwards, filmmaker Ruben Östlund has us believing that nothing could be this perfect. His miss-en-scene is rife with gorgeously composed, almost perfectly symmetrical shots with long takes and very judicious cutting. The pace is so meticulous, so strangely mannered, that something, anything, could happen. Sure enough, whilst they all happily dine on an outdoor terrace, a huge avalanche crashes down and everyone in view of the fixed position of the camera disappears in a spray of snow.

False alarm.

As the fog of snow dissipates, it's clear the avalanche fell with considerable force, but at a great distance away. Ebba and the children, still at the table, gather their wits about them. Tomas enters the frame and the four sit down to eat. Little does Tomas know, but he's in big trouble - or rather, his actions during the false disaster have placed a seed in Ebba's mind that's only going to grow - a seed of doubt. It's going to produce a sharp thorn in Ebba's craw that she's going to rip out and then, repeatedly plunge into Tomas with until she creates open wounds that will fester into gooey, viscous clumps, like some rapid flesh eating disease.

Does Tomas really love his family? Does he love Ebba? Does he care about anyone other than himself? If he did, why would he leave his family behind and run like a coward when disaster seemingly struck?

These are questions that come up again and again and yet again. Hell hath no fury like a woman who believes she's been scorned - it's usually worse than if she had been genuinely decimated. Ebba not only casts aspersions upon her husband's manhood, but begins to construct a belief that their marriage is in serious jeopardy.

If she'd only keep it between them, it would be one thing, but she hurls her accusatory doubts in front of the children, strangers and even close friends who join them on the trip. Her construct becomes an inescapable reality and over the next five days in the Alps, Östlund serves us domestic fireworks - Swedish style, of course - as things get intensely, harrowingly and even hilariously chilly.

Force Majeure is, for most of its running time, a tour de force of domestic drama dappled with mordant wit amidst a snowy backdrop. With sharp writing, gorgeous, controlled direction and performances that are quite perfect, it's too bad Östlund's screenplay hands us a major copout during the final third when he manufactures a false, forced symmetry to the aforementioned situation - one that's so predictable we can't actually believe it's happening.

When it does, indeed, unfurl, the almost inept balancing of the conjugal power dynamic feels painfully didactic. In a movie where we're normally on the edge of our seats, wondering what could be lurking round every corner, we do suspect Östlund could well take us in this particular direction, but we assume he never would.

We assumed ever-so mistakenly.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Force Majeur is currently available on DVD from FilmsWeLike. Feel free to order directly from the Amazon links below and in so doing, contribute to the ongoing maintenance of The Film Corner.

In Canada - BUY Force Majeure HERE, eh!

In USA and the rest of the WORLD - BUY Force Majeure - HERE!

In the UNITED KINGDOM - BUY Force Majeure - HERE!

Greg Klymkiw picks The Film Corner's Top 21 Documentaries of 2014 - Stellar Year 4 DOCS - Many of these films were first unleashed at such film festivals and venues as TIFF 2014, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Hot Docs 2014, Toronto After Dark 2014, FantAsia 2014, FNC 2014, BITS 2014, NIFF 2014, Planet Out 2014, The Royal Cinema and the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas

Documentary cinema in 2014 was so powerful that it seems almost ludicrous to even attempt a list honouring only 10 movies, so I've decided to include a few categories here that are comprised of a variety of films within them which I've chosen to bundle together and furthermore present my picks as the Top 21 Documentaries of 2014. The list will be in alphabetical order by category and title.

Documentaries on the Artistic Process:

Greg Klymkiw, presents the The Film Corner Awards (TFCA) in this the year of Our Lord 2014 - Many of these films were first unleashed at such film festivals and venues as TIFF 2014, TIFF Bell Lightbox, Hot Docs 2014, Toronto After Dark 2014, FantAsia 2014, FNC 2014, BITS 2014, NIFF 2014, The Royal Cinema and the Magic Lantern Carlton Cinemas

THE FILM CORNER AWARDS (TFCA) 2014, 
AS SELECTED BY THE REV. GREG KLYMKIW

This will be the first in a series of year-end Film Corner round-ups of cinema in 2014. Below, you will find the citations of excellence from me, Greg Klymkiw, in the form of my annual The Film Corner Awards (TFCA) for 2014. The most interesting observation is that ALL of these films were first screened within the context of major international film festivals which is further proof of their importance in presenting audiences with the very best that cinema has to offer whilst most mainstream exhibition chains are more interested in presenting refuse on multi-screens of the most ephemeral kind. All the citations here came from films unleashed at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF 2014), the Toronto After Dark Film Festival (TADFF 2014), Hot Docs 2014, Montreal's 2014 FantAsia International Film Festival and the 2014 Montreal Nouveau Cinema Festival (FNC 2014). In Canada, only two of the films cited have been released theatrically within the hardly-visionary, downright lazy mega-plex chain Cineplex Entertainment and even those films are being allowed to play on a limited number of screens in an even-more limited number of cities while ludicrous numbers of awful movies are draining screen time at the aforementioned chain's big boxes. It's not as if all the films the chain allows to hog screens are doing numbers to justify this combination of piggishness and laziness. Keep your eyes open, though. The films cited here are all astounding BIG-SCREEN experiences, which will hopefully find BIG-SCREEN exhibition before being relegated to less-than-ideal home entertainment venues. And now, here goes, The Film Corner Awards (TFCA 2014) as selected by your most Reverend Greg Klymkiw. Included are brief quotes from my original reviews  and links to the full-length reviews from the past year (just click on the title).

American cinema, more than anything, has always exemplified the American Dream. Almost in response to this, director David Zellner with his co-writer brother Nathan, have created Kumiko The Treasure Hunter, one of the most haunting, tragic and profoundly moving explorations of mental illness within the context of dashed hopes and dreams offered by the magic of movies and the wide-open expanse of a country teeming with opportunity and riches.

Best Feature Film
Kumiko The Treasure Hunter

THE OVERNIGHTERS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - FilmsWeLike opens great doc @TIFFBellLightbox

Williston, North Dakota
has no affordable housing.
Williston, North Dakota
refuses to help the homeless.
Pastor Jay's church
becomes a homeless shelter.
Williston, North Dakota
is not amused.

The Overnighters
Dir. Jesse Moss

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The fine, God-fearing, deeply religious citizens of Williston, North Dakota, do not extend Christian charity to the homeless. They just want to run them out of town. Most of the supposed miscreants and criminals are, in actuality, dirt-poor men of all ages who've left their families, friends and hometowns behind to combat their poverty by taking advantage of the huge fracking oil boom in this otherwise dull, closed-minded little community. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in Williston never bothered to address what would obviously have become and indeed is an affordable housing shortage. Hundreds of men from all over America have descended upon the bucolic, middle-of-nowhere burgh of Christian fundamentalism and even those who can get jobs, cannot afford to live in Williston. The citizenry do not want outsiders in their community. Outsiders might, after all, be criminals.

But, never fear, these men have a champion in the form of Pastor Jay Reinke, a caring, intelligent and deeply committed man of God who decides to open the doors of his parish to the homeless. With the assistance, though mostly support of his wife and children Reinke transforms the Concordia Lutheran Church into a massive homeless shelter.

The Overnighters is the title the powerful, moving, often harrowing and at times, deeply disturbing feature documentary by Jesse Moss. It also happens to be the name of the program Reinke runs, for by day, as many as 60 men are either working or looking for work and overnight, they're sleeping on floors, in pews, in storage rooms and for the many who can't get in due to Reinke's desire to avoid overcrowding, they sleep outside in their cars in the church parking lot. The idiots on the Williston municipal council have banned overnight parking on ALL city streets. Gotta love that down-home Christian charity.

Director Jesse Moss leaves no stone unturned in telling this amazing story. The central conflict is Reinke's head-butting with the municipal council, other citizens and even his own parish. The local daily newspaper hates his guts and places stories everyday that directly or indirectly slam the existence of the homeless shelter. The council even begins to dredge up all manner of legislation to make life miserable for Reinke and his overnighters. The good Pastors's family supports him, but they're also on the short end of the stick since Reinke is working everyday for long hours. He even has conflicts with some of the men.

Still and all, he's passionate and committed to extending Christian charity. Though he does extensive criminal background checks on all potential clients, he realizes that desperate men in desperate times might well have criminal records. Reinke's desire is to simply get to know the men and the circumstances which led them to commit the crimes. One of his overnighters is a registered sex offender. Fearing this will cause controversy, the Pastor removes the man from the church and, with his family's unreserved support, allows the man to sleep in the Reinke family home. Besides, the sex crimes registry in the USA is so Draconian that this middle-aged man, who now finds himself sleeping in the family's basement, has a weighty stigma attached to him because of the fact that, at the age of 18 (!!!) he was having sexual relations with his 16-year-old girlfriend (!!!).

Moss's commitment to this very long story, which transpired over a considerable period of time, is admirable. In fact, the film is ultimately a harrowing, character-driven story and we follow Reinke as he slowly begins to lose it. Shockingly, a secret is soon revealed that devastates the Pastor, his family, the community and certainly us. The sad reality exposed is that Christian charity really doesn't extend beyond fundamentalist lip service. A Pastor, a Man of God, is after all, a Human Being - deserving of both respect and forgiveness as much as any man.

It's just not in the cards. Most Christians, it seems, are the biggest hypocrites of them all.

Especially in Williston, North Dakota.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4 Stars

The Overnighters is a FilmsWeLike release at TIFF Bell Lightbox. For further info, visit the TIFF website HERE.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

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FORCE MAJEURE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Swede Domestic Drama @TIFFBellLightBox

Perfection is in the eye
of the beholder.
Disaster, however,
is always looming.

Force Majeure (2014)
Dir. Ruben Östlund
Starring: Johannes Bah Kuhnke, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Kristofer Hivju, Fanni Metelius

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A perfect nuclear family from Sweden - gorgeous, physically fit and full of smiles - pose for holiday snaps on the slopes during a ski vacation in the French Alps. They appear, for all intents and purposes, to have a perfect existence. Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) are such peas in a pod they perform nightly ablutions together with vigour and their two children actually get along with each other, happy playing like little piggies in a mud pen. All four of them even wear stylish matching pyjamas as they nap together after a few hours of exercising their ludicrously lithe bodies in out-of-doors family-fun-frolics.

How could anything go wrong?

Well, from the very opening frames and onwards, filmmaker Ruben Östlund has us believing that nothing could be this perfect. His miss-en-scene is rife with gorgeously composed, almost perfectly symmetrical shots with long takes and very judicious cutting. The pace is so meticulous, so strangely mannered, that something, anything, could happen. Sure enough, whilst they all happily dine on an outdoor terrace, a huge avalanche crashes down and everyone in view of the fixed position of the camera disappears in a spray of snow.

False alarm.

As they fog of snow dissipates, it's clear the avalanche fell with considerable force, but at a great distance away. Ebba and the children, still at the table, gather their wits about them. Tomas enters the frame and the four sit down to eat. Little does Tomas know, but he's in big trouble - or rather, his actions during the false disaster have placed a seed in Ebba's mind that's only going to grow - a seed of doubt. It's going to produce a sharp thorn that Ebba's going to repeatedly pierce Tomas with until she creates an open wound that's going to fester like some rapid flesh eating disease.

Does Tomas really love his family? Does he love Ebba? Does he care about anyone other than himself? If he did, why would he leave his family behind and run like a coward when disaster seemingly struck? This is a question that comes up again and again and yet again. Ebba not only casts aspersions upon her husband's manhood, but begins to construct a belief that their marriage is in serious jeopardy. If she kept it between them, it would be one thing, but she hurls her accusatory doubts in front of the children, strangers and even close friends who join them on the trip. The construct becomes an inescapable reality and over the next five days in the Alps, Östlund serves us domestic fireworks - Swedish style, of course - as things get intensely, harrowingly and even hilariously chilly.

Force Majeure is, for most of its running time, a tour de force of domestic drama dappled with mordant wit amidst a snowy backdrop. With sharp writing, gorgeous, controlled direction and performances that are quite perfect, it's too bad Östlund's screenplay hands us a major copout during the final third when he manufactures a false, forced symmetry to the aforementioned situation - one that's so predictable we can't actually believe it's happening. When it does, indeed, unfurl, the almost inept balancing of the conjugal power dynamic feels painfully didactic. In a movie where we're normally on the edge of our seats, wondering what could be lurking round every corner, we suspect Östlund could take us in this particular direction, but we assume he never would.

We assumed ever-so mistakenly.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: *** 3-Stars

Force Majeur is playing theatrically via FilmsWeLike at the TIFF Bell Lightbox.

ALTMAN - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Legendary Ron Mann serves up Legendary Robert Altman

The idea that there are people who have not seen all or most of  Robert Altman's films fills me with sadness and EMPTINESS.

Altman (2014)
Dir. Ron Mann
Starring: Robert Altman, Christine Altman, Kathryn Reed Altman, Robert Reed Altman, Stephen Altman, Michael Murphy, Paul Thomas Anderson, Robin Williams, James Caan, Keith Carradine, Elliott Gould, Philip Baker Hall, Sally Kellerman, Julianne Moore, Lily Tomlin

Review By Greg Klymkiw

It's the most, about the most, by the most.

Allow me to elucidate.

Robert Altman is one of the ten greatest American directors of all time. I furthermore insist that Robert Altman is one of the ten most important American artists of all time.

If anyone has any doubts about my lofty proclamations, they need to view Altman, the new picture by one of the ten greatest doc directors in North America, Ron Mann, who's also the most astonishing archivist-as-storyteller-as-director in the world - of, like, all time. If you don't believe me, just eyeball Mann's dazzling array of cooler-than-cool contributions to the art of cinema like Comic Book Confidential, Twist, Tales of the Rat Fink, Grass and Go Further.

Mann's herewith delivered a genuinely important bio-doc of the genius maverick director and I'll, uh, go further (pun only intended upon rereading this piece for editing) and happily admit that Altman is a picture that exceeded all my expectations by being the most perfect film biography of Robert Altman that I could ever want. You see, there are three things that always drive me up a wall in most bio-docs about artists and Mann avoids all of them.

They are as follows:

1. No eggheads telling me why Altman is important. I know already.

2. No bullshit celebrity interviews with adoring actors being actors and acting out their feelings about why they loved, or even hated, working with Altman. Who needs it? Besides, Mann gives us something a hell of a lot better.

3. The movie includes just enough biographical information that doesn't have to do with his filmmaking career. What's included on this front is there, to be sure and from the most ideal perspective. What isn't, is inadvertently, or perhaps, intentionally addressed by virtue of how Mann has so exquisitely sculpted the film. And you know, if I wanted to know more about Altman's non-film-related life, there are plenty of places to find it. There's no reason for any such details to clutter this sleek, impactful 96 minutes.

Mann has always been a master of research and he continues this tradition by painstakingly scouring every available visual and audio interview that Altman ever gave and ingeniously selecting just the right nuggets so that we get his biography in his own words. Mann supplements the filmmaking journey with poignant interviews with Altman's family (and private home movie footage) to reveal the more intimate aspects of Altman's life. He takes us through Altman's entire filmography from early screenwriting efforts, short films, industrial films, his first feature film (that I genuinely love, but Altman professes to hate), his brilliant television directing career (wherein he addressed issues of import that drove his sponsors and bosses crazy) and then, through each and every film he ever made - replete with generous film clips and terrific tales of butting heads with the studios, inventing whole new cinematic storytelling techniques and ultimately settling into a variety of independent modes of production which eventually yielded one of his richest periods prior to his honorary Oscar and death.

One of the most inventive aspects of Mann's approach is to offer up a definition of the word "Altmanesque" and then assemble what might be one of the most impressive lineups of guest stars for any such film and present each and every one of them in exquisitely composed and gorgeously lit shots, reminiscent of the Vittorio Storaro-photographed "witness" sections of Warren Beatty's Reds. Instead of submitting us to tried and true interviews with his witnesses, Mann asks each and every one of them one question - to define "Altmanesque". The answers range from almost-predictably mundane or obvious to exquisitely ideal and in the case of the late, great Robin Williams, short, sweet and perhaps what might be the ultimate final word on what it means to be "Altmanesque."

Each one of these sequences are astutely inserted throughout the picture as intros to the various segments of Altman's life as a filmmaker and indeed, act as marvellous bookends to each section.

The biography proper begins, ever-so briefly, with Altman's life in the military. It is here where I'd hoped the film might elaborate and, indeed, occasionally touch upon throughout the recounting of his filmmaking life. While it's not a hard and fast rule, I've always felt that some of the greatest American films and filmmakers have brought a wealth of life experience to their work, and none more so than those who experienced the horrors of war.

Given Altman's early Jesuit education (nothing can beat this in my humble opinion), his turn in military school and, at age 18, flying in over fifty WWII bombing missions seems to fit his talent for filmmaking like a glove - especially in terms of the subject matter he was drawn to and the various techniques of naturalism he either outright invented or expanded upon.

I've often placed Altman in the same sphere as John Ford, George Stevens, Frank Capra, Sam Peckinpah, Samuel Fuller and Oliver Stone, et al - those men who were directly exposed to the horrors of war in a wholly American context. It's an experience that led to films, from all of them, that will not only last forever, but continually broke with cinematic storytelling conventions. While these thoughts occasionally crossed my mind in the early going of Altman, they soon dissipated as Mann began taking us through Altman's filmography, including, but not limited to MASH, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye and Nashville. These are films that will live forever because they capture the essence of humanity in ways that most pictures never do and it's not just Altman's groundbreaking techniques at play here, but something far deeper and rooted in a perspective that's very personal and wends its way in to the work itself.

At the end of the day, the very structure of Mann's film addresses this in a subtle, but very real way.

Though I'd not like to dissuade anyone from seeing Altman for any reason whatsoever, I do think it's important, if not even incumbent upon its viewers to have experienced Robert Altman's important canon. To think that anyone has not seen all, or most of his work fills me with a strange kind of sadness, and, if you will, emptiness. Altman is a film that will no doubt inspire whole new generations to seek out the man's films. This can't be discounted in any way, shape or form.

I will declare, though, that knowing, loving and feeling like my own life would have been incomplete without the joy of growing up with Robert Altman, is the kind of added value that allows the deepest core of Mann's film to move me beyond words.

In that sense though, Mann's film is, in and of itself, the true added value.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: **** 4-Stars

Altman is in limited theatrical release in Canada via FilmsWeLike, including a run at Toronto's TIFF Bell Lightbox. In America, it can currently be seen via Epix. It will eventually be broadcast in Canada via TMN and Movie Central.

PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ORDER ANYTHING FROM AMAZON BY USING THE LINKS BELOW. CLICKING ON THEM AND THEN CLICKING THROUGH TO ANYTHING WILL ALLOW YOU TO ORDER AND IN SO DOING, SUPPORT THE ONGING MAINTENANCE OF THE FILM CORNER.

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