Mad Dog: Inside the Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi

Muammar Gaddafi was responsible for the mass murder of man and camel alike. Never shy about executing those unfortunate enough to have their loyalty questioned, Gaddafi also once ordered the wholesale extermination of all camels within Tripoli, believing they were incompatible with his vision of a modern city. Yet, during his final years, Gaddafi traveled internationally with representative camels along with his ostentatious, bullet proof tent, and extensive entourage of female bodyguards. Even the animals never knew where they stood with the Libyan tyrant. The cruel and erratic nature of his dictatorship is documented in shocking detail throughout Christopher Olgiati’s Mad Dog: Inside the Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi, which premieres on Showtime this Friday.

It was President Ronald Reagan who dubbed Gaddafi a “mad dog” and history has vindicated him once again. Gaddafi initially charmed his neighbors and the regional media, but as the years progressed, his grandiose ambitions to become a modern day Saladin were largely derided within the Arab world. Instead, he tried to “re-brand” himself as the once-and-future “King of Africa,” launching a good will offensive aimed at Africa’s crowned royalty, despite his explicitly racist beliefs. At least, he always maintained mutually cordial relations with just about every terrorist group operating around the globe, including Carlos the Jackal, the PLO, and the IRA.

Nearly everyone will go into Mad Dog with the general understanding that Gaddafi was a bad guy, but the depths of his sadistic perversity are truly shocking. Olgiati thoroughly exposes Gaddafi’s crimes as a sexual predator, targeting young girls and boys alike, in a manner befitting Uday Hussein as immortalized in Lee Tamahori’s The Devil’s Double.

Indeed, Mad Dog uncovers many more truly bizarre revelations that are mystifyingly macabre (you could say he had a habit of keeping his political opponents on ice). To his credit, director-producer-cameraman Olgiati pushes his interview subjects to be precise and supply specifics. He never accepts vague implications, forcing them to spell out each and every incident under discussion. While most of the talking heads are surviving Libyan dissidents, there are a few hidden camera sequences with former regime insiders that are highly illuminating.

Perhaps the least substantiated passages within Mad Dog are the rather gossipy charges of CIA support for Gaddafi during his early days as a mini-mart for terrorists. However, Olgiati is on solid ground criticizing the overly optimistic campaign to rehabilitate Gaddafi (who by the way, was sitting on top of vast oil reserves). He also notably details ways in which Gaddafi exploited Islam to serve his propaganda purposes.

Olgiati paints a comprehensively damning portrait of Gaddafi, but it is also a well paced, compelling viewing experience. He certainly appreciates the spectacle of Gaddafi’s flamboyant vanity, but never loses sight of his brutal despotism. Recommended for anyone seeking insight into the Libyan revolution, Mad Dog: Inside the Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi airs this Friday (4/11) on Showtime.

Panorama Europe ’14: Honeymoon

Usually, couples keep the wedding simple for second marriages, but not Radim Werner and his fiancée Tereza. At least when you keep a low profile, it makes it harder for unwelcomed guests from the past to crash. There will be no ex-spouses arriving uninvited, but one mystery guest will thoroughly destabilize the celebration in Jan Hrebejk’s Honeymoon (trailer here), which screens during the rechristened Panorama Europe at the Museum of the Moving Image.

As fate would have it, Werner’s thirteen year-old son Dominik breaks his glasses seconds before the wedding ceremony. Fortunately, there is optometrist-in-the-box right on the church plaza. Werner does not think much of the man behind the counter, but he instantly recognizes him. Calling himself Jan Benda, the mystery man crashes the ceremony and hitches a ride to the reception in the country. He claims to be Werner’s old boarding school friend, but the groom pretends not to remember him. The kids take to Benda, but he unnerves both bride and groom.

It will become obvious the lens crafter is not really Benda, but he shares some complicated history with Werner and the real Benda. The truth is pretty ugly, especially when the newly married bride is forced to confront it. Honeymoon is considered the third installment of Hrebejk’s loosely thematic trilogy, begun with the excellent Kawasaki’s Rose, examining how the sins of the past continue to influence the present. While not explicitly political like Rose, it is worth noting Werner’s boarding school indiscretions indirectly involved his teenaged lust for Natassja Kinski during the height of her international superstardom, suggesting the 1980’s, perhaps thereby implying he was the privileged child of Party elites.

Regardless, Hrebejk successfully taps into viewers’ deep ambivalence regarding weddings and similar conventions. Somewhere deep within our inner Mr. Hydes, we resent having to dress up and be on our best behavior for people we only share an accidental relationship with. Like a Wedding Crashers from Hell, Honeymoon delivers the chaos we secretly yearn for at such times.

Indeed, Hrebejk deftly plays a dual game, creating suspense through not-Benda’s unsettling behavior, while dropping clear hints that he is more worthy of our sympathies. He rather risks undoing the balance act late in the third act, but he certainly keeps us on our toes. Ultimately, the messiness lends Honeymoon further credence.

As the respective nemesis-classmates, Stanislav Majer and Jirí Cerny play a dynamite cat-and-mouse game. They invest both men with sympathetic moments, as well as profound flaws, making it impossible to reflexively align with either one. Anna Geislerova initially seems to be problematically passive as the newlywed bride, but she more than holds her own during a pivotal confrontation with Cerny’s crasher.

Honeymoon is a mature film, in which karma packs a real punch. On one hand, Hrebejk challenges how well one can ever know a prospective spouse, while also questioning whether we can ever out live the moral statute of limitations for our mistakes. Good luck coming up with satisfying answers, but the resulting drama is quite compelling. Recommended for discerning adults, Honeymoon screens this Friday (4/11) at the Museum of the Moving Image, as part of Panorama Europe.

Panorama Europe ’14: Cinematic Inclusions (including The Black Box)

The Lithuanians did not take to Soviet domination, culturally or politically. In strange ways, they cultivated their rugged, taciturn image to help sustain their distinctive national identity. One can see this strategy at work in a series of short documentaries restored to commemorate Lithuania’s EU presidency. Collected under the title Cinematic Inclusions, these often abstract films screen together for adventurous viewers during Panorama Europe.

In observance of strict chronology, the most accessible (and longest) Inclusion is the final film of the program. Not so surprisingly given their non-conformist nature, hundreds of thousands of Lithuanians were deported to Siberia during the Communist era. The exile experience was especially painful when family members passed away, because Lithuanian customs highly value burial in one’s homeland. As the rotten Communist system started to crumble, many repatriated Lithuanians returned to Siberia in hopes of smuggling loved ones’ remains back home. Algimantas Maceina followed his father on one such mission in The Black Box.

In part, Box is like a time capsule of the early days of newly independent Lithuania, but it is also an ethnographic record of Lithuanian funerary customs. However, it is not included in Inclusions merely to represent the mid 1990s. While Maceina faithful records the trip, as well as the subsequent wake and funeral for his grandfather’s recovered remains, he plays the footage as if on an accelerated fast-forward. At least, you cannot say he does not respect the audience’s time, as he documents a significant phenomenon largely particular to Lithuania.

Before going further, it is worth remembering American experimental film icon Jonas Mekas is Lithuanian. Indeed, he would most likely appreciate the avant-garde aesthetic of the rest of the Inclusions. As much cinematic essays or visual tone poems as they are documentaries, they are remarkably consistent in tone and subject matter, despite spanning twenty-seven years of frustrating national history.

In the 1960s, Robertas Verba established a template with The Old Man and the Earth and The Dreams of Centenarians, celebrating the salt-of-the-earth while explicitly rejecting Socialist Realism. Poring over every wrinkle and imperfection, Verba’s films have a clear inclination towards grotesque fetishism. Not very doc-ish, they present a rather surreal perspective that becomes even more pronounced in films like Almantas Grikevičius’s Time Passes Through the City. The ambivalent attitude towards industrial “progress” reflected in Henrikas Šablevičius’s A Trip Across the Misty Meadow is also clearly out of step with Socialist propaganda. Yet, it is hard to get any less Soviet than the jazzy interludes that make their way into several of the films’ soundtracks.

Its execution might be a bit eccentric, but just about any viewer will get something out of Algimantas Maceina’s The Black Box. While the rest of the constituent films are decidedly more demanding, they represent a fascinating episode in cinematic history. It is good to know Lithuania values its heritage enough to preserve them for posterity. Recommended for hardcore fans of experimental film, Cinematic Inclusions screens free of charge this Wednesday (4/9) at Bohemia National Hall and Saturday (4/12) at the Museum of the Moving Image (free with regular admission), as part of this year’s Panorama Europe.

Take Two ’14: The Reborn of Beichuan (short)

They are not “Reborn” in a physical or spiritual sense. This is strictly a bureaucratic designation for the “substitute” children born to parents who lost their first and legally only child in the horrific Sichuan Earthquake. They are already a sizeable and growing demographic. U.S. based Beichuan native Zijian Mu follows the lasting repercussions of the Sichuan quake for one set of parents fortunate enough to have a Reborn child and one anguished mother who does not in The Reborn of Beichuan, which screens in New York during the 2014 Take Two Film Festival.

The exact death toll remains unknown because of government censorship, but the province’s children died in disproportionally high numbers due to shoddy graft-laden school construction (as muckraking artist Ai Weiwei and others have documented). Many surviving parents have tried to plug the holes in their hearts with an allowable “Reborn” child. Jiang Hongyou and Fu Guangjun were duly blessed with a little girl whom they understandably dote upon. She is now old enough to recognize photos of her big brother, but they are waiting until she is a few years older to explain his heartbreaking fate. It is the kind of tricky parenting question luckier parents of New Beichuan will grapple with more and more. In contrast, they have no problem grilling nonplussed kindergarten officials with safety questions. Well, they had better get used to it.

Yang Jianfen would dearly wish to be a similar position. Still grieving her teen-aged daughter, but no longer able to conceive, she yearns to adopt. However, her increasingly cold and passive aggressive husband Fang Yanggui will not cooperate with her efforts, particularly when it comes to the requisite fees. (Old Fang probably did not expect to get called out for being a jerkweed in outlets around the world, but that is what he gets). Still, his concerns about money are not completely unwarranted. After all, the Communist government only loaned the 8,000 Yuan down-payments for displaced residents’ replacement flats in shiny New Beichuan. So much for: “to each according to their needs.”

Sadly, Mu’s family was also touched by the Sichuan tragedy, so he well understands the raw emotions at play. His treatment of surviving parents is unflaggingly sensitive, but still acutely penetrating. Culled from a larger documentary project (with the help of co-editor David Barreda), Reborn serves as a teaser and a bite sized introduction to the issues it addresses and has been released to the world for web and festival viewing (it can be seen here via the Asia Society).

Mu leaves aside the wider political context (at least for now), so Reborn is probably best seen in conjunction with films like Ai Weiwei’s Disturbing the Peace and So Sorry, both of which are also findable online. Nevertheless, the twenty-two minute documentary packs a powerful punch. Highly recommended, The Reborn of Beichuan screens conventionally this Wednesday (4/9) at the Take Two Film Festival, with an opportunity for Q&A with Mu afterward.

Brothers Hypnotic: The Family that Plays Together

One would expect the sons of a Sun Ra Arkestra veteran would naturally take to music. Their somewhat unconventional upbringing is hardly surprising either. Yet, the members of the eight-brothers strong Hypnotic Brass Ensemble both honor and reject their father’s musical legacy in ways that generate real tension throughout Brothers Hypnotic (trailer here) Reuben Atlas’s behind-the-scenes look at the brassy jam-band, which airs this Monday on PBS, as part of the current season of Independent Lens.

After early stints with the Jay McShann and the U.S. Navy bands, Phil Cohran signed up with the Arkestra while it was based in Chicagoland. When Sun Ra continued on his galactic journey, Cohran helped co-found the AACM. For a while, he was also the director of the Phil Cohran Youth Ensemble (which could have passed for the Arkestra’s children’s auxiliary), but as soon as one Cohran brother left the fold, the entire ensemble deflated.

In a sense, they were reborn as Hypnotic, a jazz and funk influenced jam-band somewhat in the tradition of the Hot 8 Brass Band and their New Orleans contemporaries, but utilizing a strictly brass-only instrumentation. They have a great sound (particularly when they are not incorporating just okay raps into the mix). You can hear a bit of their father in there, but there are plenty of other elements in the mix as well.

Atlas does an excellent job documenting the ironic realities of a jazz (or jazz-ish) musician’s life. One minute you are eating cold Spaghetti-O’s out of the can, but the very next day you might be off on a seat-of-the-pants European tour. The filmmaker caught the Ensemble at a fortuitous time, when they were still giving street performances (which are highly cinematic), but were also fielding offers from legitimate labels. Musicians who tune in might get a nasty case of heartburn when they turn down Atlantic Records, but you have to give them credit for staying true to the convictions they inherited from their father. Unfortunately, the broadcast edit of Brothers H never allows a musical performance to continue long enough to give viewers a truly vivid sense of the ensemble’s full force.

Atlas captures some intimate moments with a band that is on the way up, but shrewdly trying to avoid a harsh burn-out. The Brothers must have seen their share of music docs before appearing in their own. It is nice to know some musicians are trying to learn from others’ mistakes. While Atlas also includes enough intra-family drama to avoid accusations of PR flakery, the film never feels intrusive or gossipy. Recommended for fans of funky brass (and who isn’t?), Brothers Hypnotic debuts this coming Monday (4/7) on PBS’s Independent Lens.

Under the Skin: Scarlett Johansson vs. Scotland

Sixty-some years after the classic Twilight Zone episode, aliens are still devising ways to serve man, with a little butter and garlic. However, viewers of Jonathan Glazer’s much anticipated new film will be forgiven if they do not realize this is the extraterrestrials’ reason for visiting Scotland. Mood and composition take precedence over petty bourgeoisie concerns, like narrative and pacing, throughout Glazer’s Under the Skin (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

Fortunately, Skin is ostensibly based on the novel by Michel Faber, so we can infer some exposition from the original source material. It seems aliens have a taste for human muscle, so the woman visitor has been sent to harvest some from the brawniest knuckle-draggers she can entice into the back of her van. Sometimes she appears to have a counterpart escorting her on his motorbike, but he disappears for long stretches (probably because he gets bored).

At first, she seems ruthlessly efficient, but as she encounters the less fortunate, she starts to change. Yet, becoming more “human” leaves her increasingly vulnerable to man’s inhumanity towards his fellow man. Or something like that.

There is not a heck of a lot of plot in Skin, but what there is manages to be both slow and confusing. About the third or fourth time she lures another man-dog into her cosmic pool of black goo, you start to wonder how this film ever got made without Tangerine Dream on-board. There are more wide shots of cloud draped forests than both seasons of Twin Peaks combined. Frankly, it is hard to believe this is the work of Glazer, arguably the most lauded television commercial director of our time and the man who helmed the breakout hit, Sexy Beast.

It is also hard to get one’s head around the wildly unflattering wig Scarlett Johansson sports as the primary alien. Frankly, this is Johansson as we have never seen her before: naked, yet boring. There is no question Skin is more closely akin to experimental cinema than science fiction genre films, but it sounds deceptively commercial: “nude alien chick puts men through the interstellar meat-grinder.” It will surely attract a loyal band of critical champions who will defend it with terms like “hypnotic” and “trance-inducing,” which sounds seductive, but really means you will be paying fourteen dollars to fight off the head-nods.

In many ways, Skin feels like a throwback to the sort of weirdly cerebral 1970s science fiction forays (such as Robert Altman’s Quintet and Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth) that were green-lighted by clueless studio heads caught flat-footed by the Star Wars phenomenon, but Skin is more openly contemptuous of mainstream sensibilities. For a while, Daniel Landin’s gauzy cinematography is rather effectively dreary, in a way befitting Scotland’s backwoods, but the film simply becomes a chore to watch. Not recommended for anyone except Johnasson stalkers and the most pretentious hipster cineastes, Under the Skin opens today (4/4) in New York at the AMC Empire.

Panorama Europe ’14: Dream Team 1935

Evidently, they come pretty tall and well coordinated in the Baltics, considering their success in the European Basketball Championship (now known as EuroBasket). Lithuania won twice in the 1930’s and took gold again in 2003, but the very first champion was Latvia. Profoundly unheralded, the scrappy long-shots shocked the continent in 1935. It was a great Latvian triumph on the eve of great tragedy for many nations, Latvia included. With Russia once again menacing its neighbors, it is a fitting time to revisit one of the greatest moments of Latvian sporting history in Aigars Grauba’s Dream Team 1935 (trailer here), which screens during Panorama Europe at the Museum of the Moving Image.

It was a different game in 1930’s Europe. A jump ball followed every successful bucket and free throws were shot granny-style, but it was still handy to have an enforcer on the team. Vlademars Baumanis understands this only too well. Initially, the player-coach loses the Latvian championship because of some thuggish play. However, the victorious coach declines to take his team to the European championship, because the corrupt national sports committee has already squandered the ear-marked funds. While protesting to anyone who will listen, Baumanis accepts an instantly regretted dare to cobble together his own national team, trading in his uniform for a suit and tie.

Bitter rivals from both the Army and University Clubs will come together to represent Latvia, but it will take time to congeal as a true team. At least they will be in the best shape of the careers, thanks to relentless conditioning coach Rihards Deksenieks. Baumanis is a master strategist (at least by 1930’s standards) and the Latvia team has considerable skills, but just getting to Geneva will be an adventure thanks to the obstructionist sports committee.

Dream Team is a reliably entertaining underdogs-triumphant sport story, with some nicely rendered period details and a peppy big band soundtrack. Many basketball fanatics will probably be amused by the decidedly less glamorous style of play. Yet, Dream Team features one of the most devastating series of what-happened-to post-scripts of nearly any film. It turns out nearly every coach and player met a tragic end either as Soviet or National Socialist conscripts (sometimes both) during the war or in Soviet gulags afterward. (Nearly eighty years later, history threatens to repeat itself, as Russia once again casts a covetous eye on the Baltic Republics.)

Janis Amanis is a bit stiff as Baumanis, but he certainly looks earnest. In contrast, Vilis Daudzins plays Deksenieks with hardnosed charisma, while Marcis Manjakovs convincingly portrays the maturation of Latvia’s star player, Rudolfs Jurcins. Unfortunately, there is not much for Inga Alsina to do as Baumanis’s wife Elvira, except sitting around, having faith in him.

As a sports film, Dream Team is more successful than most. Despite the end never being in doubt, it moves along briskly and captures the tenor of the game as it was then played. It also suddenly feels uncomfortably topical given the ultimate fate of most of the team. It would make a good narrative companion to Marius Markevicius’s uplifting documentary, The Other Dream Team, chronicling the 1992 Olympic run of newly independent Lithuania’s men’s basketball team. Recommended for basketball fans and those who closely follow political and cultural developments in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Dream Team 1935 screens this Sunday (4/6) at MoMI as part of Panorama Europe.

Goodbye World: A Talky Apocalypse

Rat race dropouts James and Lily live in the place where hippies and survivalists intersect. Given its strategic hilltop position and the well-stocked freezers full of food and medicine, their Mendocino County home will provide refuge to a number of their long lost college friends. Unfortunately, human nature keeps doing what it does in Denis Henry Hennelly’s Goodbye World (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Nick and Becky were already en route for an awkward weekend visit to his estranged college pals. He was once engaged to Lily and business partners with James, until the hypocritical hippie forced him out over a philosophical disagreement. That is a lot of shared history, but surely they ought to be able to put it aside once the apocalypse hits, right?

Of course, it is hard to get reliable reporting on the freshly minted end of the world. Fortunately, they can rely on the analysis of Laura, another college chum, who was recently an aide to the chairman of the Homeland Security committee, until a leaked sex tape ruined her career. To further increase tensions, their Bill Ayers-lite college professor pal and his latest coed conquest also make their way to their Northern California refuge. To round out the cast of problematic houseguests, their weirdo hacker pal Lev Berkowitz turns up in state of near catatonia, openly inviting viewers to suspect he might have had a role precipitating the cyber attack.

Somehow, millions of smart phones simultaneously received the same cryptic text: “goodbye world.” Then systems started failing left and right, leading to riots in the street. James believes they can sit tight for several years, presuming they can stomach each other, until ominous outsiders start showing up and making demands.

Frustratingly, the sketchy details Hennelly and co-writer Sarah Adina Smith dole out on the early process of Armageddon are far more intriguing than the post-apocalyptic melodrama. For the most part, they are shallow, self-absorbed creeps. Even James & Lily’s daughter is an entitled princess. Still, making the scandal-tarred Laura an American Revolutionary War re-enactor is a nice bit of character detail.

As in the nearly unwatchable First Winter, the end of the world and the widespread casualties that result do not seem to cause anyone much lasting sorrow. Instead, they are preoccupied with their own petty jealousies and resentments. It is one thing to compartmentalize, but that is just cold. Logically, Gaby Hoffman fares the best amid the large vanilla ensembles, since she is blessed with the most distinctively limned character.

To be stuck in the same house as these people would be a fate far worse than any urban anarchy. The special effects team nicely evokes the end times with some subtle but clever bits of business, but Hoffman cannot single-handedly compensate for the massively boring characters her Laura must deal with. Although it gets out of the blocks quickly, Goodbye World soon loses steam. Best saved for fanatical hippie survivalists, it opens this Friday (4/4) in New York at the Village East.

In the Blood: Gina Carano Misplaces Her Husband

You would think two recovering addicts would go to a tightly controlled “Club Med” environment for their honeymoon. Instead, the Grants visit the most corrupt island in the Caribbean. They stay on the wagon, but even more serious problems develop. When the new Mr. disappears, the new Mrs. will unleash all her street-fighting skills to find him in John Stockwell’s In the Blood (trailer here), the newest vehicle for MMA star Gina Carano, which opens this Friday.

Ava’s father Casey was an original hardcase, who taught her how to fight good and hard. Even during her strung out days, following his untimely demise, she could take care of her would be predators. She cleaned up when she met the well-heeled Derek Grant in rehab. His father is not exactly thrilled with their union, but has stopped fighting it. Aside from a little dust-up in a club, their honeymoon is all very sweet and romantic—until the zip-line accident.

Unfortunately, that is not even the worst of it. Mysteriously, the ambulance carrying Grant to the central hospital never arrives with the patient. Of course, the fat and lazy police chief is happy to shift suspicion onto his ex-junkie wife, finding a receptive ear in old man Grant. Determined to find her husband, Ava Grant sets out to give the Jack Bauer treatment to every lying witness and corrupt cop in her path.

In the Blood is a pretty straight forward martial arts programmer, but it maintains Carano’s viability as an action star. There are several down-and-dirty fight sequences that nicely showcase her chops. She also gets nice support from a colorful cast of supporting characters, including Luis Guzmán and Danny Trejo (who kills it in his final scene). It is also impressive to see Stephen Lang continues to get rougher and tougher with age during his brief flashback scenes as dear old dad. As a Twilight alumnus, Cam Gigandet does not inspire much confidence, but he manages to scratch out some okay chemistry with Carano.

For genre fans, In the Blood could be considered the rough equivalent of early Van Damme films. The plots were never extraordinary, but they were serviceable enough to build up his credibility as an action star and a romantic lead. In the Blood serves the same function for Carano, even with its unfortunate and potentially spoilery title. Stockwell does an okay job framing the action, but he is no Isaac Florentine, let alone a Dante Lam or Wilson Yip.

Still, Carano delivers on her end. She has screen presence and chops. In the Blood will not take her to the next level, but it will keep her existing fanbase engaged and ready for more. Enjoyable as a quality B-movie with serious MMA aptitude, In the Blood is recommended for genre enthusiasts when it opens this Friday (4/4) in New York.

The Galapagos Affair: What the Tortoises Saw

Even halfway around the world, Germans had trouble playing nice during the early 1930’s. A small handful of German expats tried to establish new homes on Floreana, an island in the Galapagos archipelago. What they lacked in numbers they made up for with sheer prickliness. What exactly happened on Floreana remains a mystery, but Dana Goldfine & Dan Geller document the rivalries and resentments that presumably led to several premature ends in The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Some of the Galapagos Islands have a long history of human tenancy, but Floreana was not one of them. That was part of the appeal for Dr. Friedrich Ritter and Dore Strauch. They were married, just not to each other. Ritter assumed the remote and exotic locale would be the perfect place to openly cohabitate with his mistress while he wrote his grand philosophical treatise (which sounds like it would have been a warmed over synthesis of Nietsche’s Superman and Rousseau’s Noble Savage). Much to their consternation though, they attracted unwanted press attention as a modern day “Adam and Eve.” They also had to deal with unwanted neighbors.

First, the Wittmers arrived hoping to build a new life as Twentieth Century homesteaders. Ritter and Strauch found them insufferably middle class, but they still stomached their presence as best they could. The Austrian Countess Eloise von Wagner Bosquet was a different matter. Her high handed manner and plans to develop a luxury hotel made her highly unpopular on Floreana, but the locals on the neighboring islands appreciated her charms. Although not a radiant beauty by contemporary standards, she had enough allure to simultaneously ensnare two considerably younger lovers. In retrospect, this arrangement was probably inherently unstable.

The exact fate of the Countess and her preferred lover remain unknown, but it is presumed they met with foul play. Initial suspicion quickly fell on the remaining boy toy, especially given the speed with which he vacated Floreana. However, the discovery of his desiccated body on a desolate islet years later only raises more questions. In fact, death would return to Floreana after the Countess’s disappearance, but the memoirs of Dore Strauch and Margaret Wittmer paint very different pictures of the incident.

Sort of like a Teutonic documentary analog of Michael Radford’s White Mischief, the scandalous drama of Brits behaving badly in 1940’s Kenya, Galapagos is fully stocked with vague hints of infidelity and presumed murder. In this case, the persistent mystery heightens the fascination with the case (or cases). By doc standards, it is unusually cinematic, particularly through its in-characters readings of the Floreana residents’ journals and letters by an all-star voice-over cast, including Oscar winner Cate Blanchett as Strauch, Diane Kruger as Margaret Wittmer, and The Lives of Others’ Sebastian Koch as Heinz Wittmer. Goldfine and Geller also discovered and restored a wealth of amateur film shot on Floreana, including a would-be feature film, shot by the Countess and some of the local sailors, showcasing her as a prospective adventure heroine—for real.

Goldfine and Geller chronicle an intriguing story and provide a good deal of useful historical context regarding the European expatriate experience on the Galapagos. However, they never directly address the concurrent rise of National Socialism in Germany (whereas Radford’s film pointedly contrasts the hedonism of Happy Valley with the resolute sacrifice of Londoners during the Blitz). Ironically, the Floreana expats would probably compare well against their countrymen in this limited respect.

Still, Goldfine and Geller set the scene remarkably well and even build a degree of suspense as they recreate alternate versions of this murky business from some eighty years ago. Highly recommended for fans of strange-but-true documentaries and historical mysteries like Heat of the Sun (British Kenya again), The Galapagos Affair opens this Friday (4/4) in New York at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

Lost in Thailand: They’re Off and Bickering

It out-grossed Titanic in China, but Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio still make a way funnier couple. Sort of, but not really a sequel to Lost on Journey, China’s hit answer to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, it blew the doors off the Chinese box office, but it probably will not travel so well for American audiences. Co-star Xu Zheng’s directorial debut, Lost in Thailand (trailer here) is here nonetheless, available on DVD, BluRay, and digital platforms from Well Go USA.

Xu Lang has been so busy developing his revolutionary “Supergas” formula, his exasperated wife has finally decided to file for divorce and claim sole custody of their daughter. This is a real bummer for him, but he has bigger fish to fry. To administer the Supergas project as he sees fit, Xu needs Zhou, the firm’s majority shareholder, to sign-off on a power-of-attorney. However, weasely Gao Bo has his own underhanded plans. We know he must be the villain, because he wants to do business with the French, which also requires that power-of-attorney up for grabs. It turns out Zhou is ensconced in a temple in Thailand, so Xu heads out to find him, with Gao in pursuit.

To accommodate his last minute travel needs, Xu’s assistant books him into a tour group that also includes the extraordinarily annoying Wang Bao. One thing inexorably leads to another, separating both travelers from the tour. It is not that they are lost per se—they just do not know where to go.

Yes, Lost rang up over a billion yuan during its theatrical release, but it is baffling for outsiders to understand why. For the most part, it is a goofy, harmless film, even though the “Thai ladyboy” references are embarrassingly cringey. Even so, it has a decent heart overall, clearly embracing family values over go-go materialism. Perhaps that slow-down-and-reconnect-with-loved-ones message just hit a nerve with local audiences. There is also a notable cameo from a major superstar (yep, that's her) that is more substantial than her weird drop-in shot for the Chinese cut of Iron Man 3.

It is hard to believe the same Wang Baoqiang who plays the rubber-faced Wang Bao was also so chilling as the motorcycle-riding sociopath in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, but such is the case. Needless to say, the latter film is a better showcase for his skills. Still, you cannot say anyone in the ensemble lacks commitment to the material. In fact, the broad slapshticky humor is not any sillier than what you might find in Dom DeLuise or Don Knotts films from the early 1980’s.  It is not appreciably smarter or wittier either. A local phenomenon that will only interest those who closely follow Chinese popular culture, Lost in Thailand is now available for home viewing from Well Go USA.

ND/NF ’14: The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears

Sometimes you have to wonder if Fifty Shades helped normalize some downright dangerous behavior. This is one of those times. Sex and violence are intimately linked in Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani’s latest Benelux giallo pastiche, but it is not clear whether this is intended to horrify or titillate the audience. Fasten your restraints, because The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears (trailer here) will be a heck of a bumpy ride for most viewers when it screens during this year’s New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.

Dan Kristensen is in for it. Returning from a business trip, he finds his creepy Brussels flat is chained from the inside, but his wife Edwige is missing. When the cops finally show up, he has roused all his neighbors and heard a rather unhelpful story from the old lady in number seven, explaining how her presumably late husband also disappeared under similarly murky circumstances. Naturally, the flatfoot suspects Kristensen, especially when he subsequently wakes up in bed, next to her severed head.

So, Tears would be downright plotty compared to the Grand Guignol memory play, Amer, Cattet and Forzani’s previous valentine to the giallo genre, if it were not for their myriad excesses. Repetitive cycles are a really big deal for them, but it is hard to feel much suspense or dread when the same crummy things keep happening to Kristensen, with only mild variations that make matters progressively worse for the poor slob each time.

There is no question the filmmaking couple has quite the eye for composition and cinematographer Manu Dacosse gives it all a lushly lurid look. Even though they are not original, the musical hat-tips also set quite the mood. However, their constant jump cuts, violent expressionistic interludes, and is-this-a-dream game-playing hobble the film’s pacing, narrative cohesion, and basic sense of flow.

Frankly, despite all the stylistic madness going on around him, Klaus Tange still gives an admirably presentable performance as Kristensen. Nonetheless, it is production designer Julia Irribarria’s team that takes the honors, creating a truly creepy, yet luxuriant backdrop, like the Belgian (or pseudo-Italian) equivalent of the Dakota in Rosemary’s Baby. With its marble floors, gold paneling, and Mucha-esque screens (much like the awesome one-sheet), it might just be worth losing the occasional spouse to live there.

On a technical level, Tears is quite polished. Cattet and Forzani accomplish everything they set out to do, but the resulting film is deathly static. Masterful visuals are all very nice, but they cannot compensate for ill-defined characters and muddled plot points. Instead of a sensationalistic indulgence, it becomes a rather taxing chore to watch. Recommended for fans of the Maria Beatty fetish films John Zorn scored, The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears screens again tomorrow (3/30) at the Walter Reade, as the 2014 edition of ND/NF comes to a close.

Fateful Findings: Midnight Movies Get New Agey

Prepare to have all your suspicions about the New Age mindset confirmed. We might be poised on the brink of the Age of Aquarius, the Harmonic Convergence, or whatever, but it comes bundled with some of the stiffest performances and clunky dialogue you will ever feast your previously jaded eyes and ears upon. Self-financed by writer-director-producer-lead actor-craft services Neil Breen, Fateful Finding (trailer here) blows into town tonight for a weekend of ‘round midnight screenings at the Landmark Sunshine. Let the “magic” commence.

Any attempts to describe Fateful must be approximate. The link between cause and effect is often rather tenuous in this world and the exposition is more confounding than explanatory. We can say with certainty, eight year-old Dylan and Leah were once inseparable. On the last day of their final summer together, they discover a magic rock that he will keep with him as a talisman. We know it was a “magical day” because that is what she wrote in her diary, underlined multiple times for effect. Shortly thereafter, her parents whisked her away, perhaps because they were concerned about that creepy Dylan kid.

Flashing forward, Dylan is now a successful novelist with a devoted wife, but he never got over Leah. However, when a Rolls Royce plows into him, spraying red food coloring everywhere, Dylan makes a remarkably speedy recovery thanks to that cosmic stone. Finding himself in a spiritual crisis, Dylan chucks in his writing career, resolving to use his hacker skills to expose all the corrupt collusion between the government and big business. You see it’s actually believable, because he has his masters in computer science.

Meanwhile, he also facilitates his wife Emily’s addiction to the meds refuses to take, perhaps because she read the script and figured she would need pharmaceutical help to get through the shoot. Eventually, he completely loses interest in Emily once he realizes the physician consulting on his case is none other than his long lost love, Leah, who did not recognize him under the Invisible Man bandages and evidently never bothered to read his chart.

Right, so there is some kind of plot afoot to get Dylan as well as some kind of paranormal agency at work, but you would hardly know it, because Breen devotes far more time to the marital travails of Dylan’s next door neighbors, Amy and Jim. As far as the shadowy conspiracy goes, it seems to consist solely of an underachieving henchman, who conveniently leaves his written instruction behind at the scene of the crime.

Indeed, Breen has a maddening habit of getting bogged down in the most mundane details at the expense of his big picture concept. Occasionally, we see visions of Dylan leafing through a big glowing mystical book (probably an old heirloom dictionary bought at a garage sale), but he painstakingly establishes whether or not Amy wants to try the wine at Dylan’s dinner party.

Be that as it may, just like fellow cult favorites The Room and Birdemic, it is sheer folly to apply any sort of rational critical standard to Fateful. These are passion projects that come from an indescribably bizarre aesthetic plane of existence. Logic is completely out the window from the get-go in nearly all respects, starting with the fact Breen looks about twice as old as the adult Leah. More importantly, there is able space for vocal audiences to insert their own commentary (such is the advantage of a talky film with frequent awkward pauses). 

Frankly, some of Breen’s choices will mystify even experienced screen-talking midnight movie patrons. Still, it amply lives up to the singular reputation it developed on the festival circuit. Recommended for those who appreciate a healthy dose of communal cinematic lunacy, Fateful Findings screens tonight (3/28) and late night Saturday (3/29) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.

ND/NF ’14: Trap Street

It is the street where Guan Lifen works, but young Liu Qiuming’s attraction to Forest Lane is still a lot like the old Lerner & Loewe standard. However, this side street is mysteriously invisible to GPS systems. Infatuation will lure him back to Forest Lane, but it will also bring him to the attention of China’s security and surveillance apparatus. That will not be a happy turn of events in Vivian Qu’s Trap Street (clip here), which screens during this year’s New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.

Liu has had some bad luck, but he is chipping away at his debts through his jobs as a digital surveyor and a surveillance system installer (and sweeper on the side). Then he saw Guan Lifen walking along Forest Lane. Much to his delight and his older partner’s displeasure, they must redo the sleepy side street the next day, because the system disallowed their data. Liu’s lingering pays off with the opportunity to give Guan a lift home. Better still, the business card holder she left in the back seat gives him an excuse to contact her again. Unfortunately, it will be her condescendingly gracious boss who comes to retrieve it.

Of course, Liu is not ready to abandon his strategy of loitering on Forest Lane. For a while, it appears his efforts might bear fruit, until things go very wrong indeed. Small fries like Liu simply are not equipped to defend themselves when the state lowers the Kafkaesque boom. Frankly, he lacks the sufficient confidence or vocabulary to even protest his situation.

Right off the bat, Trap earns points for not indulging in clichéd as-seen-through the grainy black-and-white CCTV lens sequences. In fact, the surveillance and paranoia motifs are introduced relatively slowly and subtly. Likewise, Liu’s history of victimization extends beyond his immediate problems with the secret police, giving the film even wider significance.

Like many independent Chinese films, Trap does not exactly move at the speed of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but there is quiet power in the scenes shared by Liu and Guan. Lü Yulai (looking maybe two thirds of his youthful thirty one years) and He Wenchao (a filmmaker in her own right) develop some genuine screen chemistry together, while the latter still maintains an alluring air of mystery.

Even if you consider them a guileless patsy and his femme fatale, nearly every viewer will get pulled into their predicaments. Previously known as an indy producer, Qu shows an impressive command of mood and tension in her feature directorial debut. Granted, the epilogue might be too ambiguous for its own good, but Trap still offers up a compelling mixture of intrigue and social criticism, all of which cinematographers Tian Li and Matthieu Laclau give an appropriately noir luster. Highly recommended for China watchers and discerning cineastes, Trap Street screens tomorrow (3/28) at the Walter Reade and Saturday (3/29) at MoMA, as part of the 2014 edition of New Directors/New Films.

ND/NF ’14: Fish & Cat

Even in Iran, you can find sketchy backwoods types out in the provinces. In one true-life incident, a provincial restaurant actually served up human flesh. That is what you call rustic. It is also easy to see how this sensationalistic episode could easily be adapted for the big screen. However, Shahram Mokri takes his lurid inspiration in a cerebral art-house direction with the marathon one-take, circular narrative, Fish & Cat (trailer here), which screens during this year’s New Directors/New Films, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and MoMA.

There seems to be a lot of offal and detritus littered about Babak and Saeed’s greasy spoon. They also act highly suspicious when a carload of college students stops for directions. Deciding there are “too many of them,” they send the kite festival goers on their way. Instead, they start hassling Kambiz (another festival entrant) and his emotionally stunted father. For all viewers know, they eventually kill the old man. Kambiz just leaves him there and he is one of the few characters Mokri never revisits.

Making his way to the campsite, Kambiz starts interacting with other students participating in the festival. Mokri will move from one character to another Slacker-style, periodically doubling back to an early to an episode or conversation we have already seen, but showing it from a different perspective—all within the same continuous tracking shot. In addition to the intersecting narrative, Mokri also plays games with characters’ interior monologues that often obscure as much as they illuminate.

Yet, F&C is an oddly tense film, ever mindful of its macabre elements. Mokri deliberately plays on the sense some serious slasher business is always about to erupt, particularly during the nerve-wracking sequence in which Babak lures one of the young women into the woods on a dubious pretext. There is no question F&C is a highly accomplished work. Mokri just pushes his luck, taking one too many spins around the narrative track. The film clocks in at one hundred thirty-four minutes, but it really should have been twenty minutes shorter. Frankly, some of the characters Mokri introduces right before the final “pay-off” are not nearly as compelling as those we have been following since the first and second acts (roughly speaking). The unbroken chain of crisscrossing narratives also just gets exhausting over time.

Still, you have to admire Mokri’s ambition and his execution. The whole thing hangs together remarkably well and his cast (mostly drawn from the stage) rises to the challenge quite commendably. Ostensibly, there is nothing of a political nature for state censors to object to in F&C, but it is still somewhat surprising it has not been run afoul of the authorities, who have been known to object to any “negative portrayal” of Iranian society. A film about hillbilly cannibals would not exactly fit their Lake Woebegone vision of contemporary Iran, where everybody is above average.

Of course, nobody would wish him trouble and we should all be glad to have F&C screening openly for international audiences. Combining elements of We Are What We Are and Before the Rain, Fish & Cat is rather highly recommended for patient and adventurous viewers. It screens tomorrow (3/27) at MoMA and Friday (3/28) at the Walter Reade as part of the 2014 ND/NF.

Chinese Zodiac: Jackie Chan, Relic Repatriation Specialist

Jackie Chan’s Asian Hawk character from Armour of God is back—sort of. He is known as a “JC” now (a heavy set of initials if ever there was), but he is in the same treasure hunting business. Such details hardly matter. Either way it is Jackie Chan giving his all to please audiences as action star, action choreographer, co-writer, and director of Chinese Zodiac (a.k.a. CZ12, trailer here), which releases today on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital platforms from Universal Studios Home Entertainment.

During the Second Opium War, the French and British largely razed the Old Summer Palace. (Time, civil wars, and the Cultural Revolution would eventually finish the job.) On that day of Imperialistic excess, twelve Chinese Zodiac statues were indeed plundered. Lost for well over a century, they have suddenly hit the market one-by-one. At least, that is the MacGuffin that swings JC/Hawk into action. The antiquities holding firm MC Corp hires JC and his team to track down the seven heads they have not yet auctioned. They are also the bad guys. No, it does not make much sense, but it gives Chan plenty of opportunity to scamper across roofs, get chased by dogs, and fight pirates.

Whatever, nobody is going to watch CZ12 for the intricate plotting. The whole attraction is the acrobatic action and elaborate stunts Chan can evidently still pull off at a youthful fifty-eight years. He may have slowed down a little, considering most of the painful outtakes shown during the closing credits come from previous films, but he still looks like the real deal leaping and fighting.

The opening sequence, involving JC’s getaway from a Russian military base through the use of a luge-like human roller-ball suit, might sound a little goofy, but the execution is extremely cinematic (and suddenly timely). It also memorably introduces former Chinese taekwondo champion turned actress and model Zhang Lanxin as CZ12’s secondary action figure. There is also plenty of cat burglary, a huge action spectacle involving a massive shipwreck that serves as the centerpiece, and a climatic skydiving throwdown that looks cool but ends a bit precipitously. However, the best sequence is a good, old fashioned rumble between JC and a small army of henchmen.

When Jackie Chan mixes it up, CZ12 is on solid ground, even though the villains (led by Oliver Platt) are a bit weak. Since they frequently assure JC they have no intention of killing anyone, it rather minimizes the stakes (but at least as movie businessmen go, they are only mildly nefarious). Chan’s periodic soap-boxing to advocate restitution of national relics is somewhat more distractingly problematic. It all seems a little ironic considering his notorious assertion that the Chinese people are too anarchic and “need to be controlled.” In that case, would not China’s dynastic treasures be better off in a stodgy western institution, like the British Museum?

Regardless of Chan’s muddled politics, he remains a ridiculously likable screen presence. He clearly wants to entertain and continues to take a fall to do so. Frankly, he is probably the one man on Earth who takes more back pills than Chevy Chase, but he still does his thing with verve. Shu Qi also looks radiant but understandably confused in her blink-and-you-missed-it cameo, while Zhang definitely earns her shot at a leading action role in the future. Recommended for Chan fans, Chinese Zodiac is now available for home viewing from Universal.

Jews of Egypt: Censored by the Temporary Morsi Regime

Why would a supposedly democratically elected government prohibit any public screening of a film with absolutely no violent or sexual content? In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohamed Morsi administration, a documentary describing how a sizable Jewish community once peacefully coexisted with Egypt’s Muslim majority was evidently not considered fit for public consumption, despite slavishly hewing to an “anti-Zionist” line. Arriving as a modest cause célèbre due to the fallen Morsi government’s misadventure in censorship (they eventually relented), Amir Ramses’ Jews of Egypt (trailer here) opens this Friday in New York.

During the first half of the Twentieth Century, a number of Egypt’s leading citizens happened to be Jewish. To this day, Laila Mourad remains one of the nation’s most popular recording artists, though many are apparently unaware of her Jewish heritage, judging from the brief man-on-the-streets interviews that open the film.

According to surviving members of the community, nearly all Jewish Egyptians self-identified with their country first and foremost, whereas their Jewish religion and culture was of secondary concern—if that. Everyone goes to agonizing lengths to distinguish between Jews and Zionists, clearly pre-supposing there is something fundamentally problematic about the latter. Yet, despite the vehement anti-Israeli sentiment expressed by many prominent Jewish Egyptians, they collectively found Egyptian increasingly inhospitable following Nasser’s ascent to power.

Ironically, the experience of the unflaggingly loyal anti-Zionist Jewish Egyptians dramatically proves the Zionist point. Despite their Communist, anti-colonialist political affiliations, they were still arm-twisted into immigrating and, most painfully, renouncing their Egyptian nationality. Some were even imprisoned on the scantest of charges, solely because they were Jewish.

Nonetheless, Ramses and his assembled talking heads are not particularly inclined to ironic self-awareness. As far as historical accuracy goes, JOE is also highly suspect. Frankly, the film works best when examining the interrelations between the various members of the loose-knit Jewish-Egyptian society. Who knew whom and where they all wound up is rather engaging stuff.

The Orwellian impulse to erase all trace of Egypt’s considerable Jewish population is depressing, but not especially shocking. At least Ramses plants a flag that says these people existed. Considerably better at painting a picture of a unique cultural milieu than explaining the wider geo-political forces at play, Jews of Egypt is still a decidedly mixed bag. Viewers should go in already well grounded in the history of the region and Israel’s constant battle for survival. For those intrigued by its rocky pre-release reception, it opens this Friday (3/28) at the Quad Cinema in New York, via Art Mattan Productions.