Everybody Has a Plan (Todos tenemos un plan)

Everybody Has a Plan (Todos tenemos un plan)

Everybody Has a Plan (Todos tenemos un plan) (Director: Ana Piterbarg): This marks the fourth Spanish-language film for Viggo Mortensen, who spent a number of years in his youth living in Argentina. His latest project finds him playing identical twin brothers in this film noir from Argentinian first-time feature director Ana Piterbarg, who also co-wrote the screenplay.

The premise: Agustín (played by Mortensen) appears to have the ideal life. He’s a pediatrician with an attractive wife (Claudia, played by Soledad Villamil) living quite comfortably in Buenos Aires. The couple’s plan to adopt a baby derails when Agustín changes his mind at the last minute, leading to a huge rift that brings to the surface the true unfulfillment that Agustín feels with his life. In the midst of a depressive episode where Agustín decides to lock himself in a room, Claudia leaves for some time away and Agustín soon receives a visit from his estranged twin brother, Pedro (also played by Mortensen), a beekeeper who reveals he has terminal lung cancer. Certain circumstances lead to Agustín eventually escaping his obligation-filled existence and assuming his brother’s identity, taking up residence in Pedro’s rundown shack in Argentina’s Tigre Delta island region where the brothers grew up. A romance develops with one of Pedro’s much younger bee farm helpers (Rosa, played by Sofía Gala Castaglione), while Agustín becomes caught up in the fallout from Pedro’s past criminal affairs with some shady locals.

Mortensen is solid as the brothers, who only share a few scenes simultaneously. Sometimes it’s difficult telling them apart, although the Pedro character tends to be a little more rough around the edges and frankly, I couldn’t distinguish the subtle differences in the characters’ accents that Mortensen talked about during the post-screening Q&A. Regardless, his comfort level with the Spanish language is certainly never an issue. Villamil and Castaglione turn in quite fine supporting work, but Daniel Fanego as the proverbial villain is a definite weak link in the film. Other than looking rather creepy, I found the role underwritten and the actor lacking in screen presence.

Piterbarg and cinematographer Lucio Bonelli do a nice job of capturing the dank and swampy atmosphere of the isolated delta area, which not surprisingly is a magnet for criminals and outcasts and makes for a nice backdrop for the malfeasance that drives the narrative. The director also specifically lets a number of questions hang, adding to the film’s mystery, but occasionally there are some befuddling story choices. Most glaring is the ease with which Agustín passes himself off as Pedro, as well as the fact that he doesn’t bolt after being beaten by locals who mistake him for his brother just shortly after his arrival in the Tigre Delta.

Everybody Has a Plan‘s flaws, not the least of which is its overly languid pacing, result in a decidedly unremarkable viewing experience.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8RZUFrLzqU
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The Color of the Chameleon

The Color of the Chameleon

The Color of the Chameleon (Director: Emil Christov): Based on the novel Zincograph by noted Bulgarian academic and novelist Vladislav Todorov, this spy thriller pastiche is the sort of go-for-broke filmmaking that seems increasingly rare in risk-averse Hollywood these days. Jam-packed with literary, cinematic and political jokes and allusions, The Color of the Chameleon will definitely not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it an exhilarating and wild ride that by the end takes just a few too many twists.

Batko Stamenov (played by the very charismatic Ruscen Vidinliev, who is a pop singer in Bulgaria) seems born into a world of secrets and lies. On her deathbed, the aunt who adopted him after his parents’ death confesses that she’s actually his mother, but later on a doctor informs him that she died a virgin. Recruited to work for the secret police in Communist Bulgaria, Batko seems to have found his calling. He’s assigned to spy on a group of intellectuals called the Club for New Thinking who are studying a novel called Zincograph. The novel is about a man who works as an engraver of zinc plates by day and who spends his evenings creating a fictional web of subversives to deceive the secret police. You might be able to see where this is going.

Batko takes a job at Royal Zincography and begins spying and sending his reports. But after a slip-up caused by his landlady, he is fired from his spying job. Without missing a beat, he uses his inside knowledge of the intelligence business to set up his own fake department and continues his assignment. When communism falls in 1989 and many of his targets rise to positions of power in the new “democratic” Bulgaria, he uses his archive to blackmail them. And when his former spymasters discover his game, he outwits them to take his revenge.

The Color of the Chameleon is at its best when exploring the Kafkaesque environment of the Communist regime and the film gleefully pokes fun at just about everyone. It’s clear that nobody has clean hands when the old system crumbles, and Batko’s self-interested spy seems no worse than anyone else, just smarter. The film seems to move from the 50s to the present, when in fact it covers only the tumultuous years from 1989 through 1992 or so. It’s a credit to the art direction that Communist Bulgaria in the 1980s could look so grim, but it actually means that the post-Communist scenes are less successful for me. It’s a too-sudden jolt into a more standard Hollywood spy thriller and it lacks the novelty of the rest of the film.

One exception is the montage where Batko meets with each of his targets in the new Bulgaria, informing each that he represents a foreign spy agency. To one, he’s the KGB’s man in Sofia, to another he is CIA, and to a third he’s with MI6. Brilliantly staged (including a bowler hat, umbrellas, and typically English rain in the MI6 sequence), these show Batko’s true nature. He’s not a communist or even really a capitalist (though he stands to profit from his information). Instead Batko is that oldest of all character types, the trickster.

The one subplot that fails to really work is the romantic one. While working at Royal Zincography, Batko meets a beautiful young woman who works as a projectionist at the local film archive. She shows him Western films including Casablanca, which based on a small subplot, she considers a story about Bulgarians escaping to America. It’s a great way to include some cinematic references, but the romance never feels real (maybe it isn’t?) and the final scenes in black and white aboard a luxury ocean liner seem imagined. In a film as full of imagination and deception as The Color of the Chameleon, it’s quite possible that they are.


oehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWgNvD3R0gk
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The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines

The Place Beyond the Pines (Director: Derek Cianfrance): The Place Beyond the Pines derives its title from the English translation of the Mohawk name for Schenectady, New York, where the film is set. Director Derek Cianfrance’s third feature is the follow-up to 2010’s widely praised Blue Valentine, a movie whose supposed magnificence was lost on me. Cianfrance reteams with one of that film’s stars, Ryan Gosling, for one of The Place Beyond the Pines‘ three segments, unfolding over a 15 year period with interconnected storylines, mixing elements of crime drama, teenage angst, questions about fate, and the complexities of father-son relationships.

The first segment is unquestionably the film’s strongest, with Gosling further refining the brooding anti-hero character that seems to have become his stock-in-trade. His Luke character is introduced in the film’s great opening scene which employs an extensive single tracking shot, as the audience views his heavily tattooed body and carnival motorcycle stunt rider profession, conveying Luke’s societal fringe elements without saying a word. Luke’s white trash status is also reinforced by the repeated wearing of a Metallica Ride The Lightning muscle tee and a ratty white t-shirt worn inside out in public, tag and all (I love that the latter is never addressed by any characters Luke meets). A reconnection with a woman (Romina, played by a solid Eva Mendes) with whom he had a quickie fling the last time his job brought him to town reveals that he’s the father of her two-year old son. The news awakens Luke’s paternal instincts and he attempts to insert himself back into the pair’s lives, despite the complication of another man in Romina’s life. Desperate to prove he can provide for Romina and his son, Luke ends up robbing banks, with the assistance of a scruffy auto mechanic he’s met (an excellent Ben Mendelsohn providing some understated comic relief). Aspects of Luke and his deeds immediately bring to mind Gosling’s role from last year’s Drive. Despite the similarities in roles surprisingly played so close to each other, Gosling’s unpredictable, violence-prone character commands the screen for the approximately hourlong length of his segment. His storyline does admittedly benefit from the best writing of the three segments, courtesy of screenwriters Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, and Darius Marder.

Gosling’s dynamism and that first segment’s brilliance are only highlighted by the significantly diminishing returns that follow it. Segment two features Bradley Cooper as a rookie cop who finds himself involved in Luke’s story, with other subplots involving police corruption, morality, and an unhappy marriage also playing out. I’ve always found Cooper to be a rather dull actor and his performance here hasn’t changed my opinion; that, combined with the segment’s derivative story, managed to effectively kill my segment one buzz. The writing is also too uneven – Cooper’s character is set up as a smart, moral person, yet those qualities are a little too conveniently discarded when he’s presented with a career-altering decision. Bruce Greenwood is memorable in a small role as a high-ranking cop, while Ray Liotta’s turn as an intimidating, crooked cop feels like the kind of role we’ve seen from him dozens of times already.

Segment three completes The Place Beyond the Pines‘ downhill slide, focussing on the teenage sons (played by Dane DeHaan and Emory Cohen) of Gosling’s and Cooper’s characters. As the snoozy storyline featuring bratty behaviour from the screwed up high school students developed, I could never get past the fact the segment hinged on their chance meeting and eventual friendship. That meeting, considering the inextricably linked history they share via their fathers, was simply far too coincidental for me to suspend disbelief. Also distracting: a time jump of 15 years reveals Cooper’s character and that of his wife (played by Rose Byrne) to have seemingly not aged at all, while Mendes’ Romina looks to have aged about 25 years.

I respect the fact that Cianfrance took some risks with The Place Beyond the Pines, which had its world premiere at TIFF – he throws in a major plot twist relatively early on and the movie’s segmented structure is definitely a gamble and somewhat unconventional, but unfortunately, the loosely connected narrative and performances don’t hold together over the course of the film’s too-long 140 minute running time. The disappointing ending shouldn’t come as much of a shock to anyone who has just witnessed the decline from the first-rate quality of the riveting opening segment to the progressively inferior chapters that follow. As the last third plays out, that swing has been so dramatic that it almost feels like we’re watching an altogether different movie.

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Eat Sleep Die (Äta sova dö)

Eat Sleep Die (Äta sova dö)

Eat Sleep Die (Äta sova dö) (Director: Gabriela Pichler): Grounded in the director’s own experience growing up in a working-class immigrant family in a small Swedish town, Eat Sleep Die is a gritty and affecting debut. Using a non-professional cast (including her own mother), Pichler paints a portrait of working-class life that feels documentary-like in its realism, but with real warmth between its characters.

Raša lives with her father in a working-class town and works at a vegetable processing plant. She’s a hard worker and well-liked by her colleagues, but when the plant announces layoffs are coming, she’s keenly aware that her Montenegrin background may make it difficult for her to find other employment. When her father is forced to relocate temporarily to Norway to find work, she hides the news of her layoff from him as long as possible.

Nermina Lukac’s performance as Raša is remarkable. Playing this rough tomboy with a herculean work ethic, she’s nothing short of magnetic, especially in her reactions to the drudgery of unemployment and the inanity of the local job centre’s efforts to help. But the film’s best scenes are the ones portraying the tough but tender bond between father and daughter, and between Raša and her friend Nicki.

Pichler’s film reminds us of the dignity of work, no matter how seemingly menial it looks. It also illustrates the dignity of working class communities, and how the decisions of businessmen have a real effect on individual families and communities. There are parts of the film that tend to drag, but I’m glad that Pichler ends the film as she begins it, with a party. Raša is surrounded by family and friends singing, drinking and toasting to her success. It’s a small but needed measure of hope for a person we’ve come to admire.

Here is the Q&A with director Gabriela Pichler from after the screening.


Duration: 11:11



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The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

The Pervert's Guide to Ideology

The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (Director: Sophie Fiennes): It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since Sophie Fiennes put Slovenian philosopher and “cultural critic” Slavoj Zizek into a rowboat and filmed him in a facsimile of a scene from Hitchcock’s The Birds. The truth is that the visuals have stayed with me much longer than Zizek’s passionate but convoluted theories about cinema. But I’m back for more. Why? Because Fiennes’ brilliance in situating Zizek within the films he’s discussing make this the very best kind of film school, whether you agree with his conclusions or not.

This second installment finds Zizek extending his reach to the larger themes of ideology, challenging our ideas about democracy, consumerism, hedonism, and even the existence of God. Though some of his choices are provocative (using Scorsese’s The Last Tempation of Christ to argue that Christianity is a perfect religion for atheists, for instance), others seem obvious after the initial novelty has worn off. His use of Jaws to explain the rise of German anti-Semitism seemed like a very basic explanation of scapegoating, but it was fun to see him bobbing around on the boat like some kind of Balkan motormouth Robert Shaw.

As always with Zizek, too much of a good thing can be exhausting, and the film would work much better divided into one-hour episodes. In fact, the first film was organized this way (with Parts 1, 2, and 3). This time, director Sophie Fiennes seems to have had a harder time shaping the material, and the ending, in which Zizek declares his optimism for the future based on things like the Occupy movement, felt unearned and hastily added.

Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining ride, especially the after-the-credits scene in which Zizek re-enacts a pivotal scene from James Cameron’s Titanic.

After the screening, Zizek and Fiennes were interviewed (or at least it was meant to be an interview) by British journalist Danny Leigh. You can hear how that went here:


Duration: 31:15

I couldn’t find a trailer for the new film yet, but enjoy this one for The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema:



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