SUNDANCE '11

BEING ELMO.

A look behind the man behind the puppet who is one of the most cherished characters watched by millions of kids every day on Sesame Street.  This fascinating story is of how Kevin Clash went from awkward teenager growing up in dilapidated area of Baltimore and ended up as part of Jim Henson’s team of Muppeteers and eventually taking over artistic control of Sesame St. itself.  Kevin the man is as likeable as Elmo the puppet; a determined workaholic who damaged his own home life by his relentless drive to perfect his art and bring joy to so many kids around the world.

Despite the fact that there are far too many strands of stories to follow, this movie is unreservedly truly delightful. If only US (or UK) Reality TV was half as natural and real as this,  it may even be worth watching.

As the title suggests this is a very campy take on all those wonderfully dreadful Sci-Fi ‘B’ Movies.  The Aliens are convinced that their over-active emotions will destroy the ozone of their planet and the only way around this is go to earth and have their hearts broken.   One Alien finds a lesbian stationary clerk who is so out of it she never grasps the fact that she is dating someone from another planet, while another two Aliens realizing how needy earth women are decide to settle with each other and an abundant supply of cheesecake.

This movie opens with two Iranian gay men who are fleeing their country (to avoid being executed as is the norm for homosexuals in Iran) and they have been dropped off at a railway line in the French countryside from where they can walk to the Station and catch a train, which will eventually get them into Paris.  Mohsen the older man thinks it best that they don’t appear to be together and so he sits on the train next to a woman who he has helped board and she starts chatting and by the time they have reached their destination  has offered him a few days work painting some rooms in her apartment. 

Morgan Spurlock who picked up an Oscar Nomination for his tongue-in-cheek documentary on fast food ‘Supersize Me’, is back on form with his take on the thorny subject of product placement, marketing and advertising in movies.  He naturally takes it one step further by getting this whole movie financed entirely by the subject he is examining.  A madcap but kind of very shrewd idea which when he explains it, all makes perfect sense.  In his steady hands, his very quick wit and more than a dash of his scathing humor he succeeds in not only getting the film made, but it is a superbly entertaining one too.
★★★★★★★★ 

This joyous wee movie tells the story of Sergeant Garry Boyle a member of the Irish Garda (Police) in a remote town in Galway.  Sgt. Boyle has a very subversive sense of humor, a confrontational personality, a dying mother, a fondness for prostitutes, and absolutely no interest whatsoever in the international drug-smuggling ring that has brought an FBI Agent to his door. What unfolds is an unpredictable and exhilarating sort-of-cops and robber story.

Enrique returns home to the Bronx after a lengthy spell in Prison to discover that Angela his wife is distant to say the least, and his son Michael is now a transgender woman and known as Vanessa. None of this sits well with headstrong Enrique who views these changes as a personal threat to his masculinity and to his position as head of the household. His only way of coping means that he soon slips back into his criminal ways and almost risks losing everything.

Set in the middle of winter in the middle of nowhere in the middle of Norway this very cold ‘comedy’ is about two couples  bored with each other and they try a bit of wife swapping to liven things up.  Well, it’s not exactly like that as one of the husbands hits on the other man, but when rejected has to make do with the other wife instead.  Two other memorable things : for some unexplained reason one couple has adopted an african child who looks even darker in this landscape, and secondly they eat moose meat at every meal which I guess makes sense.

P.S. It subsequently won the Grand Jury Prize for Best World Drama, so I could be in a majority of one this time, but somehow I think not.
★★★★
Click for original Norwegian Trailer

An unrestrained and completely over-the-top pansexual campus comedy by famed queer filmmaker Greg Araki.  Brilliant funny at first until ridiculous supernatural elements of the story totally lose the plot and ruin the last 20 mins, of a very promising movie.  

KNUCKLE

A Documentary shot over 12 years about 3 close-knit families of Irish ‘Travelers’ who aim to settle decades of long standing clan feuds with bare knuckle fighting. The language is as violent as the brawls themselves. Completely fascinating but spoiled by uneven editing that haphazardly mixes the chronological order that confuses the plot.

You Tube linked up with Academy Award winning director Kevin MacDonald and celebrated  producers Ridley and Tony Scott and invited the whole world to film whatever happened in their lives on one single day : July 24th 2010.  They were totally overwhelmed when some 8000 people from 192 different countries sent in over 4000 hours of footage, but somehow from all of that have constructed a rather brilliant 90 min movie.

Manuela is a teenager living with her dysfunctional family in a working class suburb in Sicily when a newly installed statue of the Madonna mysteriously loses its head. Manuela claims she had a visitation by The Virgin Mary who tells her exactly where the head is hidden. Word gets out and suddenly Manuela’s ‘miracle’ is the talk of the neighborhood and her apartment is overflowing with people demanding more miracles.

Martha escapes from an extreme Cult where she has been living and moves in with her newly married older sister and tries and live a ‘normal’ life again.  The trouble is that Martha was probably never ever ‘normal’ even before she suffered all the abuse from the members of the Cult, so her attempts at assimilating herself into her sisters new life risks all their happiness esp. when her paranoia kicks in, as it does often for no real rhyme or  reason.

Isadora and Enrique are an elderly couple living in a large comfortable apartment with their two old cats. The bane in their life is their highly strung daughter Rosario and her butch girlfriend Hugo who want them to bankroll their latest hare-brained money-making scheme.  However Isadora is in the early throes of Alzheimer’s and she does something quite unexpected, and everything changes.

A wonderful insight behind the scenes of one of the world’s greatest newspapers in a tumultuous period where it deals with its very own survival, as well as competing newspaper groups, in a rapidly evolving new world that has completely changed the landscape of the news media.  The other major news story the movie focuses on is the emergence of Wiki Leaks and its power-mad and somewhat unstable leader Julian Assange who proves to be as difficult to handle as the news he wants to process.

A brilliant coming-of-age story of a butch black highly intelligent teenage girl who struggles to reconcile being gay within the confines of her conservative middle-class home. Her meddlesome bible-thumping mother is in denial of both her husband’s infidelity and her daughter’s sexuality thus creating more angst. 

This excellent documentary on the B Movie Actor who became the 40th President of the US makes no bones of the fact that people either loved the man or absolutely hated all he stood for.  When you fall into the later group it is hard to be dispassionate about seeing a film about an enormously important figure in one’s own history that managed to make a privileged few extremely wealthy at the cost of so many other lives.  And tough to think good about a powerful man who stood and ignored the AIDS epidemic explode on his watch and wouldn’t even publicly acknowledge it’s very existence until it was far too late for many people.  Like another moving documentary we also saw at Sundance ‘We Were Here’, if nothing else we need these movies to remind ourselves of how the reality was, and not how history will re-write it in the future.
★★★★★★★

In 1987 two young men moved from Wisconsin for the bright lights of San Francisco and ended up leasing a dreadful apartment in a great neighborhood.  With paper-thin walls they soon heard every minute detail of the running battle between the two alcoholic middle-aged men who shared the next-door apartment.  One was a raging homophobe and the other a flamboyant queen. The constant screaming matches and viscous fights were scarily very entertaining so the young men hung a microphone outside their window and for the next 18 months taped all the abusive altercations.