Category: Film

El Ratón Pérez (The Hairy Tooth Fairy) (Argentina/Spain, director Juan Pablo Buscarini): I don’t think I can write a substantial review of this film since I was so sleepy during it. The week is catching up to me, and because I was with my wife and sitting in such a comfortable and dark environment, I dozed off a few times. The film itself was quite good, though. A combination of CGI and live-action, El Ratón Pérez is the story of what happens to children’s teeth when they place them under their pillows. Unlike in North American and northern European culture, the Latin American and Spanish legend is that a mouse named Mr. Perez takes the tooth away and replaces it with a coin. Nothing terribly original about the film, but it was well-made and charming, and the many children in the audience seemed to appreciate it. One distraction was that they had someone reading the English subtitles into a microphone for the younger viewers. Having that competing with the Spanish-language soundtrack as well as the subtitles made watching the film more difficult.

Visit the film’s web site

(7/10)

Exiled (Hong Kong/China, director Johnnie To): Among lovers of Hong Kong cinema, Johnnie To is legendary. He had three films showing in this year’s festival (Election (2005) and Election 2 (2006) screened together, as well as this film) and this was my first experience seeing one of his films. I’ll be seeking out some others. Exiled is an incredibly well-constructed film. It’s like a Swiss watch, with every scene precisely set up and choreographed and nothing wasted. To has created a self-contained world and set his characters loose in it. Set just around the time of Macau’s reversion to the Chinese government, it concerns a group of hit men who come together when their boss orders a hit on one of them. Two pairs of men arrive at the target’s new home. The first to warn him, the second to kill him. After a kinetic set piece involving three shooters, precisely 18 bullets, and the target’s wife and infant son, the group ends up helping still-alive Wo move furniture into his new place, before settling down to eat.

The mixture of action, comedy, and sentiment is probably a staple of Hong Kong gangster films, but I found it fresh. The plot continues when the assassins agree to give Wo some time to carry out one last job to make some cash for his soon to be widowed wife and orphaned child. Things don’t go as planned, however, and the film bumps along from set piece to set piece until an inevitable but satisfying end. Each choreographed set piece is set up in such a way as to heighten the anticipation, and you almost don’t mind that none of these trained killers seems to be a very good shot. It’s enough that they’re all ludicrously macho, swilling scotch from the bottle and smoking as they fire bullets at each other.

Seeing this one on the big screen is a must, just for the sound. The musical score, by Canadian Guy Zerafa, veered between James Bond and spaghetti westerns, with a bit of mournful harmonica thrown in. It worked perfectly, as did the fact that the viewer can hear every single shell casing hit the ground throughout the film. Even the gunshots themselves seemed different from those in American films, with less blast and more metallic sounds. It certainly helped create atmosphere. While this and the choreographed gunplay never let you forget you’re watching a created thing rather than any semblance of reality, that actually made me more appreciative of the creator. He’s certainly created another Johnnie To fan.

Visit the film’s web site

(8/10)

Blindsight (UK, director Lucy Walker): I loved this, and not just for the obvious reasons. Blindsight is a documentary about a group of blind Tibetan teenagers who attempt to climb one of Mount Everest’s sister peaks. Now, this kind of thing is usually a can’t miss. Inspirational. Moving. Pretty standard, right? And even if the film were just that, I’d still have liked it. But it was so much more. Blind herself, German Sabriye Tenberken established a school for blind children in Tibet, in a culture that sees blindness as a curse, as evidence that a person did bad things in a previous life. Many of the children at the school have been shunned their whole lives, and at best, are a burden to their families. As part of their education, Tenberken shares with them the story of American Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. She sends him a letter inviting him to come and visit her students. Instead, he comes up with a plan. He’ll arrange an expedition for them to climb 23,000 foot Lhakpa Ri and provide all the guides and equipment. Sabriye finds six willing participants and this is when the fun starts.

Erik’s team are mostly American, mostly male, and mostly sighted. As experienced mountaineers, they’re Type-A personalities, very gung-ho and goal-oriented. Sabriye is European, female, and blind, and the students for her are more than a “project,” no matter how well-intentioned. Additionally, the students are Tibetan, and not old enough or confident enough to always stand up for themselves. As the expedition unfolds, they become pawns in between the two adult “sides,” wanting to please both, while at the same time wanting to gain the confidence that comes from accomplishment. As an additional obstacle (other than being blind, that is), they are speaking English as a second or in most cases, a third language, and struggle to understand and make themselves understood.

When it turns out that none of the students have any climbing experience, and that some are much more coordinated than others, it begins to unravel Erik’s original plan for them all to reach the summit together. As both students and teachers begin to suffer the effects of high altitude, decisions must be made as to whether to continue on or to send some down the mountain. Among the effects of high altitude is increased irritability, and you can see how this feeds the conflict between the adults. At the risk of oversimplifying, on one side are those for whom the destination is all, and on the other are those who just want to enjoy the journey. I won’t tell you how it all turns out, except to say that this was one of the most surprising and thought-provoking stories I’ve seen in a long time.

The film also weaves bits of each climber’s story into the narrative, and this was sorely needed, since once on the climb, the kids tended to keep their heads down and their mouths shut. With all the drama going on around them, that wasn’t surprising. The backstories are by turns charming and heartbreaking, and I found it very strange that I found myself closer to tears at the beginning of the film than at the end. This was contrary to my expectations, and another pleasant surprise.

In addition to all the human drama to cover, director Walker and her small crew had to contend with the frigid and oxygen-deprived conditions herself, lugging equipment up the mountains and hoping it wouldn’t break down. As with all great documentaries, the filmmaker was just lucky enough (or smart enough, or prepared enough) to be at the right place at the right time, and she’s captured a very special story that has as much to say about people who want to do “what’s best for the kids” as it does about the kids themselves.

Visit the film’s web site

Braille Without Borders (Sabriye Tenberken’s organization)

(10/10)

The Sugar Curtain (Spain/Cuba/France, director Camila Guzmán Urzúa): Strangely and almost unintentionally apolitical, this film is a personal remembrance of growing up in the 70s and 80s in Cuba. The director seems to have shot all of the footage herself, making it more like a home movie. And it’s incredibly nostalgic, with lots of comparisons of old photos with the present. But the film’s thesis, if I can use a word that strong, is impossible to prove in this context, even if it’s correct. The director seems to be saying that life in Cuba in her childhood was good, that Castro’s revolution was achieving positive results and that the end of the Cold War was disastrous for Cuba. But this is pretty self-evident. We see a lot of run-down or abandoned buildings that were in good repair thirty years ago. We hear interviews with her classmates who agree that things aren’t as good anymore. I don’t want to sound facetious, but I could probably make a pretty similar film about my own childhood.

When she talks to students at her old high school, about the only privation she can uncover is that they no longer get snacks. In the director’s childhood, they got chocolate biscuits and fizzy drinks. But in a society where the government provided so much (and still does, compared with the rest of the world), these examples seem a bit forced. I’m sure life in Cuba is difficult for many, but from the evidence of the film, it still seems to be doing pretty well. For a society that has withstood a trade embargo from the world’s richest nation for more than fifty years, and whose biggest benefactor cut it off more than fifteen years ago, it’s doing remarkably well. Its children are literate and fed, and it seems to have avoided the extremes of poverty seen in many parts of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Unfortunately, I think the director’s complaints are fairly universal. The idealism we feel in our youth turns into disillusionment as we age. The forces of globalization and capitalism are affecting Cuba, even as Castro tries to hold them at bay. The fact that the director and many of her classmates left Cuba in the 1990s (during the “Special Period” that followed the end of the Cold War, a time of tremendous economic hardship for Cubans) also clouds the picture. How does her memory of Cuba as a socialist paradise differ from the memories of the anti-Castro crowd in Miami, who remember pre-revolutionary Cuba as a different kind of paradise? Both are unreliable and nostalgic.

While the film was enjoyable as a window into one person’s experience, and it was great to see the modern footage of life on the island, overall I found it unsatisfying.

(6/10)