Kung Fu Elliot

Dear Matthew Bauckman and Jaret Belliveau, Directors,

As Kung Fu Elliot came to (what I suppose are) it’s shocking final moments, I was left with a few questions. Two questions, really. Neither of them particularly charitable towards your film: (1) Was this alleged documentary even real? And, (2) How much of Elliot ‘White Lightning’ Scott’s story did you know before filming his story?

Regarding the first question: I just can’t help but feel that the resolution of Kung Fu Ellliot was a bit… staged. A little too action movie-ish. Sure, it’s fitting considering Elliot Scott, the subject of the film, has fashioned himself to be “Canada’s first action hero”. In scene after scene in the movie’s first half, the zero-grade movies he makes with his partner Linda Lum are based entirely on cliche and contrivance (and incompetence). Scott claims to be a seven-time all Canadian kickboxing champion, and he wants to bring his expertise and love of martial arts movies to the possibly make-believe audience he constantly refers to as his “his fans”. Kung Fu Elliot finds Scott and Lum working on their latest – and what Scott hopes to be their most successful – film, Blood Fight.

You guys both know that what he’s making is terrible, and you seem to get a lot of joy from showing terrible scenes from his derivative, lesser films as he explains his grand plans for these opuses.

Which is more than a little ironic, since your own film is so clearly based on the model of American Movie—a previous, better work. That comparison was at the top of my mind as I watched Kung Fu Elliot, and it it did your film no favours. You do your best to fill the screen with a motley cast of goofy, enthusiastic characters, including Scott’s “method-trained” (he read a book) best friend,who plays Blood Fight’s villain, and the music composer whose title song is clearly not the anthem he believes it to be. But even though these elements are all present, the personalities are so dead when they’re onscreen, the pacing is so lazy, and the staging of the interviews so awkward (you seem to favour two shots of Scott and Lum together staring at the camera as Scott explains his dreams), it all lands with a thud instead of a pop.

For a person so obsessed with turning himself into an action star, so focused on creating a fan base through Facebook, so happy to brag that he has starred in such homegrown travesties as They Killed My Cat, I found it hard to believe that Elliot Scott would have an IMDB page that listed only one credit: your film.

That, mixed with Kung Fu Elliot’s bizarre, too-perfect twist-ending, made everything feel… I don’t know, a little off.

But perhaps my gut reaction is a bit hasty; maybe truth can be stranger than fiction. And one should never underestimate some people’s consuming hunger for fame. After the humiliation Scott endures in his film, it’s entirely reasonable to believe that he removed any internet presence my meagre research uncovered.

The question of research, though, brings me to my second question: how much of this story did you know going in? This is important because it speaks to your objective’s as documentarians: what were you trying to accomplish with this film? Kung Fu Elliot moves from its dull-but-goofy first two acts – the bungled filming of Blood Fight and a trip to China – eventually lead to a dark turn. Secrets are revealed, lies are uncovered, Scott starts to change from well-meaning (possibly brain-damaged) enthusiast to narcissistic manipulator.

I keep asking myself, how could you two have not known any of this going into filmmaking? All of Scott’s claims, with the exception of his “one-fifth Japanese” heritage, can be proven or disproven extremely easily. And even without any additional research, it doesn’t take a martial arts expert to see that Scott’s fighting skills are laughably amateur (a fact that becomes even more painfully obvious when a Shao Lin monk admonishes Scott for his poor form). This means you either didn’t bother to research your subject before committing a year to documenting him, or that you went into filming knowing everything, with plans to ridicule this pathetic character, then eventually tear him down completely.

One of these is simply bad filmmaking. The other is sociopathy.

When the secrets start coming out, they don’t happen organically, as part of the film. Linda Lum, Scott’s long-term partner, discovers most of this information off-screen. Did you inform her of all this simply to give your film a better narrative arc? It certainly seems that way. I might have assumed you had better intentions — and wouldn’t even go down the route of questioning a filmmaker’s motives, which is a specious strategy — if it wasn’t for Kung Fu Elliot’s conclusion, in which you force yourself into the action (while remaining off camera), egging Scott and Lum on as their relationship falls apart, adding fuel to an already volatile situation and breaking the holiest of journalistic rules.

Because of this, when the situation finally explodes it‘s not shock it should be. Yes, Scott might had a lot of this coming – he is the architect of this house of lies – but it’s all mitigated and corrupted by the fact that you showed up with a wrecking ball and asked the audience to take that same smug satisfaction in these two lives being destroyed.

It kind of makes me wish you had just made it all up.

Casey

Rating: Return to Sender (2/5)

Just Eat It

Dear Thomas Miller of Cineflex, Aerial Cinematography,

As your camera pans dramatically over a patchwork of rural fields, I was reminded of the “Oh Canada” video clip TV stations used to play right before they signed off for the night. While our national anthem swelled in the background, the camera swept high over our home and native land: waves crashing in the Maritimes, an eagle soaring over the Rockies, and a triumphant vista of bountiful farmer’s fields. Before turning off the TV and turning in for the night, this video was a reassuring reminder of how fortunate we are to live in a country of such abundance. But, as the documentary Just Eat It reveals, abundance has a dark side.

Director Grant Baldwin and his partner, producer Jennifer Rustemeyer, know first-hand that the world has a food waste problem. To prove just how out of control food waste has become, they spent six months living – and living well – only on food they ‘rescued’ from dumpsters. Perfectly good food that was discarded because retailers only want to provide the best-looking, freshest product. What most consumers don’t realize is the serious impact this waste has on our environment. In their film, Grant and Jennifer set out to expose the dirty secret the food industry doesn’t want us to know: that approximately one third of all food produced worldwide is not eaten.

Atop your aerial perch you probably couldn’t quite make out the swimming pool-sized dumpster filled with unexpired containers of hummus, the slightly blemished yet still succulent peaches bouncing off a conveyor belt into a bin marked ‘rejected’, the boxes of expensive organic chocolate bars, a year from expiring, that fill Grant’s Subaru. From your bird’s-eye view you might have seen the field of celery strewn with perfectly edible outer stalks—but you wouldn’t have heard the farmer lament that he was standing in 2 pounds of waste per square foot that costs more in labour to save than it does to toss. The problem, we learn, is that supermarket standards for food are higher than those set by the government. In short, with our demand for the perfect apple and the freshest bread, we the consumers have brought this upon ourselves.

In one particularly clever time-lapse sequence, we see the life of a bell pepper from its early days growing large on the stalk, to the factory process as its picked, washed, and deemed worthy of human consumption. After being loaded onto a transport truck, you and your flying camera take over, showing us the truck rambling like a child’s toy down a British Columbia highway towards its temporary home at a grocery store, where, finally, its purchased and left to rot in a refrigerator crisper. This little example of how we take food for granted was adorably set to the classic 80s pop ballad “(Don’t You) Forget About Me.” More sobering, however, were the accompanying facts: the amount of water required to maintain just the food we throw away could meet the needs of 500 million people. Tristram Stuart, author of the book Waste, puts it more bluntly: “We’re trashing our land to grow food we don’t eat.”

Just curious; did you wear a mask the day you filmed that massive bulldozed landfill? We learn that 97% of U.S. food waste ends up here, mostly still in its packaging, which makes biodegradation next to impossible and contributes to the production of harmful greenhouse gasses. Sadly, most food banks lack the resources to recover this food.

But before you get depressed, the film also takes us to more progressive places, like the pig farm outside Las Vegas that feeds its livestock 1000 tons of food waste every month (I’m guessing after the landfill, you’re pretty thankful the script didn’t call for an aerial shoot there).

Just Eat It is more a call to action than a chastisement. After all, we’re all guilty of throwing away food. What saves this film from being another gimmicky Super Size Me or No Impact Man is Grant and Jennifer’s modestly charming Canadian-ness. They present some pretty frightening statistics, but they also offer some helpful solutions, from meal planning, to gleaning (volunteer outings to collect unharvested crops for food banks), to volunteering at grocery stores that ‘rescue’ the food supermarkets won’t sell, providing it at bargain prices to those in need. You make a great team: from the sky, you’re able to show us the sweeping agribusiness landscapes as far as the eye can see, while Grant and Jennifer are the boots on the ground, putting the food and food retail industries under the microscope.

Let’s hope it’s all enough to give us the big picture.

Try not to look down,

Di

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

The Theory of Happiness

Dear Cattle, Background Artists,

The Theory of Happiness opens on you guys. A whole herd of you cooling off in a stream. The scene is an idyllic agrarian tableau, something right from a Tolstoy novel. As you stand knee-deep in the water, your tails swish and you low contentedly. That’s a luxury most cows don’t have in the Western world, where factory farming and mass food production means most of your brethren and sistren have short and miserable lives. But on this small farm in the Ukraine, your keepers are in pursuit of something you seem to already possess.

Director Gregory Gan takes the viewer to your collective outside Khiarkov, Ukraine, where in exchange for filming the documentary he agrees to adhere to the strict rules imposed upon the members of P.O.R.T.O.S. (Poetic Association for the Development of a Theory of Universal Happiness). For his two-plus month stay he gives up tobacco, alcohol, sex, swearing, and joins the other members in working long hours at the farm. P.O.R.T.O.S. was founded in the late 1980s by Yura Davidov, who believed that there exists a mathematical formula to happiness that, in its most basic form, adds up the good deeds a person performs and subtracts the mistakes they make.

If this all seems like a whole lot of horse-feathers, you should consider yourselves lucky; all you  have to do is provide milk and graze all day.

You should also be thankful that you can’t read. Every surface of the farm, known as SPARTA, is cluttered with layer upon layer of slogans and teachings seemingly borrowed from the Se7en school of interior design. Sitting amongst the dogma and numerous clocks is the ‘idiot meter’, essentially a large plastic water with a timer affixed by duct-tape that ensures no thought lasts less than ten minutes. Part of Greg’s work includes filling out a 1500 point questionaire and writing poetry, all in hopes that he can rise up the ranks of the pyramid P.O.R.T.O.S uses to gauge member’s progress towards becoming a ‘real person’.

I bet spending your day chewing cud seems pretty good right about now.

Although it would be easy to write these people off as crazy (which their government already has, incarcerating several members in prisons and psychiatric hospitals), it’s hard not to get swept up in the congenial regimentation at SPARTA. They seek happiness not for selfish reasons, but for the betterment of all humanity—and by extension, cow-manity. Current leader Tamara Kostiuk (who could effortlessly pass for figure-skater Evgeny Pleshenko), takes happiness perhaps a bit too seriously, to the point where she seems to undermine her own pursuit. She struggles to maintain P.O.R.T.O.S. with the same level of intensity that came so easily to founder Yura. Or maybe it’s Greg’s ever present camera that amplifies the cracks. 

Greg himself admits that he doesn’t like the person P.O.R.T.O.S. is turning him into, and he spends time with the itinerant farmhands who work at SPARTA for three dollars a day, sneaking off with them to share cigarettes and curse-filled fables. These ‘practicants’ (as they are known) have no days off and are encouraged to attend meetings and write poetry to improve their rank. They lose wages if they are caught smoking or swearing. Many, like the matronly Tamara, outwardly defy the P.O.R.T.O.S. ways. At one point, while she rants about the farm, one of you – perhaps offended, or perhaps showing solidarity –kicks over a bucket of milk, sending her into a curse-laden rage. Afterwards, she and another worker discuss the state of the Ukraine. They were promised that with independence she would blossom, and, as Tamara angrily observes: “Twenty years and she is blossoming into a hole.”

The Theory of Happiness shows us how a group of people raised under the hammer and sickle are aiming to create a society free of violence and enmity. But I wonder, is their system of neo-Communism any better? This film was shot it 2010, long before the contested elections, violent protests, and Putin’s Crimean invasion. It gives us an opportunity to witness a group of impoverished Ukrainians struggling to better their situation without the filter of current events to taint our perception. On the farm things move a little slower. Your world is a little smaller. All of which makes the tragic culmination of Greg’s social experiment even more poignant. We know the worst is yet to come.

In adding and subtracting good deeds and bad, it’s difficult to surmise if anyone at SPARTA will end up happy. But if Orwell was right, you guys probably leave the tough questions to the pigs while you bask in the sunshine. 

Remember, four legs good, two legs bad,

Di

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

The Overnighters

Dear Charlotte Moore, Bidding and Scheduling at Skywalker Sound,

When the final credits rolled on The Overnighters at Hot Docs in Toronto, murmurs of disbelief rumbled through the audience. Some were still reeling at the film’s final act, while others were buzzing over the pending Q&A with director Jesse Moss and the “special guest” he’d promised. I, however, was most struck by seeing Skywalker Sound listed in the film’s credits. Why? Because it’s a testament to the power of this tiny documentary – about an unknown North Dakotan preacher – that it was able to attract such a high-profile studio partner.

Based on your credit, you must have been the one who convinced the suits at Skywalker to take a break from polishing their 18 Academy Awards and testing new lightsaber sounds to carve out a little time for this Midwestern gem. Clearly, your argument didn’t hinge on money—budgets don’t exactly swell for films about the collapsed American dream, told through the lens of ex-convicts and aspiring oil-riggers. No, you must have done it out of love. After all, whatever magic you might work in that studio, it’s almost impossible to make a film like this sound appealing to a mass audience. But, like you and your team did, I’m going to try.

To be honest, the first three-quarters of the film is only a moderately above-average documentary. The cinematography is clean, competent, depicting the desperate conditions of men who abandon their families and drive cross-country for a chance to share in the fortune of the oil-boom and end up living like homeless men in Pastor Jay’s parish. The director’s unobstructed access to everyone is admirable, achieving a level of intimacy that is only given to the most trusted of documentary filmmakers. The storytelling itself, which weaves together an enviable assortment of characters and backstories, never loses focus on the main thread: the community’s threat to close the parish over Pastor Jay’s open-door policy to vagrants (apparently, there’s such a thing as being too Christian),

That last quarter of the film, however, is truly remarkable.

Those final confessions and confrontations that your sound team finessed are the real achievement of this film.  People open up, exploring their fears, exposing their secrets, all with an honesty that’s rarely seen. We don’t just hear about bonds between family and friends being broken, we see these moments captured in heart-breaking detail. Pastor Jay’s own story is the most compelling of them all. No matter how overwrought his first foreshadowing monologue was, it didn’t prepare me for where the film would go.

And no, I don’t mean Skywalker Sound studios.

Sounding off, 

Christopher

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5)

The Secret Trial 5

Dear Sophie Harkat, Subject,

I saw you once, but I doubt you saw me in the sea of faces at Parliament Hill in late 2004. I was one of the fifteen thousand who came out to protest George W. Bush’s visit to Canada and I got to hear you tell your story first-hand. From a podium under the Peace Tower, you spoke of your husband Mohamed Harkat, and how he had been incarcerated since December 2002 without any charges laid against him. I distinctly remember you telling us how much you loved him, and that he was ‘really cute’. I smiled and thought of my husband and quite selfishly realized how lucky I was not to be in your position.

Watching the documentary, The Secret Trial 5, about the detention of your husband and four other men (Adil Charkaoui, Hassan Almrei, Mahmoud Jaballah, and Mohammed Mahjoub) on suspicions of terrorism, I was disturbed by and ashamed of my government’s actions. It’s difficult to reconcile their Draconian measures with the just and fair Canada I was raised to believe in, and this is precisely the response The Secret Trial 5 seeks to elicit.

It must have taken an enormous leap of faith for yourself, Mohamed, and the other men and their families, to trust that your stories would be told without hyperbole by director Amar Wala. With the exception of Mahjoub, you all shared the horror, uncertainty and despair of dealing with the complete upheaval of your existence and your future. That five men living quiet lives can be arrested without cause or warning should be the stuff of dystopian fiction, and the question I asked myself was, “how can this happen in Canada?”

The answer is ‘security certificates’, an immigration measure whose validity is the central focus of the documentary. I’m sure you could explain security certificates in your sleep by now, but thankfully the doc uses animation to define it for those of us fortunate enough to have less familiarity. Simply put, a security certificate is a piece of immigration legislation that only non-Canadians are subject to, which is a means of doing national security law without using the criminal justice system. This starts with CSIS developing a file on someone they consider suspicious enough to jeopardize Canadian security. This file is brought before the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration and the Minister of Public Safety who, if they deem the suspicions are warranted, put the file before a federal judge. The judge decides if the suspicions about this person are ‘reasonable’ or ‘not reasonable’ with the goal being deportation for those deemed a ‘reasonable’ risk to Canadian security. Meanwhile, those under suspicion have no idea this is happening. Until they are arrested.

I can’t even begin to imagine how you explained your husband’s situation to your family and friends. Because the five men feared torture in their birth countries should they be deported, they were incarcerated in Canadian prisons instead. Since none of the men were ever formally charged with a crime, they were not subject to the same privileges as other prisoners. Even more frustrating is the fact that the men (and their lawyers) were forbidden from seeing the evidence against them, making it nearly impossible to defend themselves. How do you deal with the prospect of your husband simply rotting in jail with no end in sight? Hassan Almrei staged several hunger strikes, the longest lasting 156 days to protest the conditions of his freezing cell. He was awarded a pair of slippers. When the men were moved to a hastily constructed detention centre in Kingston dubbed ‘Guantanamo North’, how did you reconcile their treatment by the country in which you were born and raised? You did what any loving wife would do, you fought back.

You and the other families shared resources, staged protests, and grew a network of experts and concerned citizens to assist in proving that security certificates were unconstitutional. By the time the men were released into house arrest in 2007 they had spent a combined 50 years behind bars without ever being charged with a crime. Ahmad Jaballah, was a child when his father Mahmoud was arrested and is now a father himself. He dedicated his life to fighting for justice for The Five and tells us, “our strength is in our humanity”.

Most Canadians were aware of these suspected terrorists being detained, ostensibly to protect our security. But Wala refreshes our memory using print and tv news footage that shows how our collective attitudes towards the detainees changed since the peak of our anxiety immediately following September 11, 2001. Juxtaposed against the stories you tell us of the hell that is house arrest (conditions too ludicrous and numerous to name here); it’s an embarrassing reminder of the measures a frightened society will abide in the name of public safety. Wala aims to show us that the opposite is true; when a government can circumvent the criminal justice system in the name of national security, it puts all of our liberties at risk.

Like the The Central Park Five, The Paradise Lost trilogy, and TheThin Blue Line before it, The Secret Trial 5 doesn’t need to rely on gimmickry or sentimentality to present its case. And like those other films, once the facts are presented in the court of public opinion, a welcome by-product may indeed be exoneration since of the five men, three are still fighting to clear their names, your husband among them. The Secret Trial 5 presents us with an uncomfortable reality; that maybe this isn’t the country we thought it was. This should make a society long mocked for its politeness very angry. Because as you well know, angry people get things done. 

With much respect and admiration, 

Di

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

Shifting the Blame

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Darko Lovrinic, Produktionsleiter,

You can recognize a European film by the fact that most everything is made out of people. The heroes, the antagonists, the monsters, innocent bystanders—each one a person. I could not detect any CGI. There were no talking animals or extraterrestrials. And there’s something compelling about that these days.

Because of these unusual decisions, Shifting the Blame (Schuld sind immer die Anderen)* feels stripped down, raw, and genuine. But never easy. Though all the parts are played by people, the standard roles themselves were thrown out, and everyone simply is. The story revolves around uncomfortable layers of revealed…people.

This is a first film by director Lars-Gunnar Lotz, and all the more impressive for it.  It’s an intimate work: the camera keeps close, the sky hangs heavy and grey, and the whole thing takes place in and around a single geography, Stuttgart. People are trapped and bound, even in the open country. Screenwriter Anna Prassler has wrought a balancing act with the script that I don’t even totally understand. The acting always makes sense and feels honest, even as the actors play to multiple layers of tropes that flirt with becoming clichés.  It almost doesn’t matter what the movie is about. The style of telling and the skill of the script make the people and what they do fascinating.

The plot itself revolves around the anger, actions and resulting imprisonment of young Benjamin (played by Edin Hasanovic). He finds himself an unorthodox outpatient-style prison run by a complicated couple—Eva (Julia Brendler, brilliant) and Niklas (Marc Benjamin Puch, very very good). Benjamin’s past is a secret, and like all movie secrets, it is truly terrible. People lie. Others are tormented. And yes, it totally sounds like a made-for-TV movie. If you watch the trailer, you will probably doubt every true thing I have ever written (don’t watch the trailer). But despite, and because of all this, it is indeed an awesome little film.

Managing the production of a movie that doesn’t go far into space and has no detectable animatronics or scale models probably makes your job a little easier, too. You probably just had to worry about getting everyone on set so they could do their thing. And such things they did! Well done sir.

Sincerely,

Cory

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

I’m an Old Communist Hag

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Nicolae Ceausescu, Former Dictator,

Your specter looms large over modern-day Romanian life in Stere Gulea’s new film I’m an Old Communist Hag. Televisions buzz and chatter with impending news of a DNA test that will determine whether the bodies buried in your gravesite indeed belong to you and your wife. Meanwhile, a documentary is being shot about life during The Golden Era of Ceausescu (as you, yourself, so demurely christened it), requiring hundreds of volunteers to recreate the scenes of state-orchestrated adoration that used to greet you each time your helicopter alit or your motorcade zipped through the streets. Thankfully, this film doesn’t have to strain nearly as hard to make an impression.

One of those volunteers is Emelia, a sixty-something woman living modestly in a Bucharest suburb with her vendor husband. When she receives word that her daughter and soon-to-be son-in-law will be visiting from Canada, she seeks a small loan to feed her guests for the week. And it’s at one of these dinners that Emelia is revealed to be the communist hag of the title; pressed by her daughter, she admits that, yes, she preferred your good old days of communism to the shaky free market that threatens each day to swallow her family up.

This is a surprisingly common sentiment. Democracy hasn’t been a cakewalk for Romania. And neither has membership in the European Union. Many who lived through your rule are nostalgic for its security and steadiness. Romania always seemed to be the most progressive of Eastern Bloc nations (at least from the West’s point-of-view), but while you were careful to distance yourself from Russia’s geopolitical influence, you were, perhaps, the leader who carried forth Stalin’s style of authoritarian rule most vigorously—what with the crippling economic policies and the brutal suppression of dissenting viewpoints and all.

Those aren’t necessarily the things Emilia is pining for in this film. Even she isn’t sure what she misses exactly. For all the talk of the halcyon years of stable housing and employment, Emilia recalls, in a series of flashbacks, being kept away from her family in the days leading up to one of your factory visits. The reason? It’s never clear whether it was your phobia of germs or your sense of paranoia that required her to be quarantined before shaking your hand, which makes the situation even more disturbing. There is no reason. But Emilia nonetheless complies.

As played by the renowned Romanian actress Luminita Gheorghiu, Emilia is stout and strong-hearted and also completely adrift in the contemporary world; she frets over the worldwide financial crisis; she goes to get her hair cut and comes back with a bright-red punkish do. This sort of incarnate performance is deserving of no small number of superlatives, though what those superlatives might be, I can’t quite say. All of the adjective and metaphors typically used to describe great acting all seem a little too pompous. And if there’s one thing her performance isn’t, it’s pompous.

See, that’s the problem with epithets, Nicolae: they don’t aggrandize a person; they obscure. You may have created around yourself the most impressive cult of personality in Eastern Europe when that part of the world was replete with big personalities, but the names you gave yourself – genius, demiurge, titan, Prince Charming – are heavy with their own meaning, and do nothing, today, to define what kind of man you were. They do, however, shed a bit of light on what kind of leader you were.

Director Stere Gulea is a survivor of the lean artistic years under your rule – he made several films in the 70s and 80s, during the Communist studio system – and whether or not he shares Emilia’s conflicted feelings about Romania’s past, this much is for certain: he knows better than to give you credit for her wistfulness. It’s herself that she misses. The innocence of her daughter. The simplicity of youth. But not you. Sure, your specter looms large over this film. But that’s all you are, anymore: a ghost.

Sincerely,

Jared Young

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

Living Images

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Tambet Tasuja, Editor

As an editor, you probably appreciate a film with a solid organizing principle. An idea to which you can return, a theme that keeps things cohesive when dramatic events threatens to pull everything apart. Fortunately for you, Living Images  keeps all of its action well-contained. Literally contained. The entirety of this multi-decade story is told from within the confines of a large estate in Tallinn, Estonia.

That’s not to say the house itself is the main character. As the narrative traverses the 20th century, it’s used to create different microcosms of Estonian society. The actual main characters are Julius and Helmi, both born in the old house to servants of the Baltic nobles who own it (each both played by a number of actors who depict them at various ages). Their stories weave through history as the house changes owners (and purposes) while Estonia is occupied by Germany, becomes an independent state, is once again occupied (this time by the Russians), and, finally, gains its independence once again, only to fall under the spell of capitalist greed.

That greed is the framing device for the film: Estonia’s estates have become valuable in the new economy, and Helmi’s grandson Paul wants to sell the old house to a foreign investor. Also valuable is the old cinema attached to the house, which Julius runs until its final showing (ominously enough, of the apocalyptic blockbuster Terminator 2: Judgement Day); the various owners of the house always find ways to use the small theatre as it suits them.

As an editor, this aspect of Living Images must have appealed to you; the history of cinema informs the style of the film itself. Director and co-writer Hardi Volmer shoots each episode of the story in a style representative of the era we find ourselves in: from scratchy silents, to silky black and whites, to garish technicolor. I can only imagine how fun it must have been to splice together and age  the elements to achieve this effect. And it’s a good thing Volmer decided on this technique, because storytelling-wise, Living Images is a bit of mess. Relationships (apart from Julius’ unrequited love for Helmi) are not always clear, and this creates confusion as the years stack up. But maybe this isn’t unintentional; these memories are codified by the popular storytelling medium of the time, and memories don’t always adhere to logic.

At times,  Living Images threatens to break under the weight of its story. There’s a lot of Estonian history crammed into these past hundred years—so much that characters are sometimes simply describing what’s happening outside the house. But Julius’ two loves – Helmi and the movies – creates a foundation that is strong enough to support it all, and adds an emotion that, unlike the tumultuous events heap pending around them, snuck up on me in the final moments of the film.

To editors, the idea that “the whole is greater than the sum” is more than a cliche. But worse than using a cliché is not using the right words. And here they certainly fit.

Checking my math,

Casey

Status: Air Mail (3.5/5)

Miracle

2013 European Union Film Festival coverage

Dear Kamila Zlatusková, Associate Producer,

There’s no murkier job description on a film set than that of the Associate Producer. How you personally earned this title, and what your responsibilities included, are anyone’s guess. Maybe you’re an up-and-coming big shot, or a bona fide number cruncher, or a valued creative partner, or a local string-puller, or someone the director just needed to pacify by slapping a label on you. If it’s the latter (as is often the case), I’m going to imagine you as a troubled Slovakian 15-year-old girl willing to do terrible, terrible things to get that title you desire – be it “associate producer” or simply “girlfriend”.  

I really hope I’m wrong. Drawing that parallel between you and Ela (Michaela Bendulova), the main character in Miracle, is far-fetched, right? Surely you would be smarter than selling yourself to human traffickers just so some asshole guy that you like can get himself out of debt. Because – spoiler alert for idiots – that might not go so well. Even if your plan is just to eventually “escape”.

Luckily, the way co-writer and director Juraj Lehotsky tells the story, I couldn’t help but feel sympathetic to Ela’s plight. Much like his main character, we as audience members are taken straight to a female re-education centre without any proper explanation. The resulting friction between the girls we meet there reveals more than enough for us to piece together what’s ailing Ela. Her father is not in the picture, her mother (Katarina Feldekova) is tired of dealing with a troubled teen, and there’s a mysterious man whose name is tattooed on her knuckles named Roby (Robert Roth). When Ela finds out she’s pregnant, she runs away to find Roby, but he’s hardly happy to see her, even before she breaks the news. In fact, she seems more like a forced-upon intern pushing for a full-time position than she does an actual girlfriend. 

Still, my sympathy rested squarely on Ela’s shoulders, since few other characters even register. And as the story skips quickly between scenes and seasons, brevity may be the film’s greatest virtue. At 78 minutes, Miracle manages to make a strong enough impression to recommend it as at least a cautionary tale to young stubborn women. Which, again, I’m sure you’re nothing like.

Making false associations,

Christopher

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

Behind the Candelabra

Dear Greg Fusak, Best Boy,

Liberace was, by all accounts, a fabulous man. Fab-u-lous. A stage diva of the highest order; an incredibly gifted pianist, an absurdly lavish dresser, and a proudly flamboyant performer. For a period, he was also the world’s highest paid entertainer. But like the subjects of all great American tragedies, that wasn’t enough. He was missing something. A lover. A friend. A son. All of which he found in Scott Thornson – a simple Massachusetts’s animal lover who became the “best boy” to the brightest lightshow in the Vegas.

You know what I’m talking about. 

To the outside world, “best boy” is a pretty funny title. Not unlike the “best man” at a wedding, the description of “best” is actually second to one other. In your case, it’s the second-in-command of the lighting department, the person in charge of coordinating people and schedules. A similar relationship, in some ways, that Scott has with Liberace. And for both of you, I imagine it’s sometimes hard never being in the spotlight – especially when you’re always so close to the stage.

Matt Damon, looking more boyish at age 42 than he ever has, plays the doe-eyed Scott who meets Liberace (a fab-u-lous Michael Douglas) backstage at a Vegas show in 1977. From there, an unconventional relationship blossoms outside the prying eyes of a deeply homophobic world. They’re also contending with a major age difference, and a confusing professional relationship – Scott being bisexual and Liberace being sexually demanding. But the actors do a great job of stripping away the extravagance and focusing on the simple, relatable experience of people initially swooning over one another and then growing apart. Just with a lot more drugs and plastic surgery.

This is a film that Hollywood studios believed couldn’t find a theatrical audience and was therefore produced for television by HBO, after premiering at Cannes. Such a grand stage seems befitting of the man who inspired the film, I’m sure you’d agree. Even if Steven Soderberg’s staid direction never indulges in all of the lightshow around the candelabra the way I’m sure you would have liked.  Instead he’s more interested in the shadows and quiet nooks of the story.

Was it the best approach? Maybe not, but then again, that depends on your definition of best. 

Sincerely,

Christopher

Status: Air Mail (3.5/5)