In the bleak tundra where China and North Korea meet, refugees pour over the border daily. If caught by the government, either Chinese or North Korean, they face immediate deportation back to the isolated Communist country. Officials in China are searching for a way to ebb the flow of refugees from North Korea, though they fight not only sympathizers but human traffickers as well. The problem of North Korean refugees is further complicated by China’s tenuous friendship with North Korea, a friendship that China is struggling to hold on to, while faced with mounting global pressure to drop the devastated country and join with other world imperialist powers to remove the regime.

Dooman River depicts life in a bordertown in Jilin province, China, near what is commonly known as the Tumen River. Though set entirely in China, the film’s dialogue is almost entirely in Korean, with snippets of Mandarin from the Chinese border guards. Though slow-paced and ultimately anti-climactic, the film follows Chang-ho, a young Chinese boy who lives with his ever-smoking grandfather and mute sister. He befriends a North Korean child who has fled from his country, bonding with him over soccer. Soon after, however, his sister is assaulted by a North Korean refugee, and views toward the refugees soon turn from humanitarian to suspicious. A friend of Chang-ho’s uncle is arrested for helping refugees cross the border into China; meanwhile, the mayor’s mother, who suffers from dementia, is determined to recross the Tumen river and return to North Korea.

Static cameras, framed shots, and haunting scenery make Dooman River worth seeing. The imposing mountains, bleak snowscape, and frozen Tumen river add striking definition to the many wide contextual shots. The bleakness of the landscape is familiar to those who have spent the whole winter in Minneapolis, though it remains a striking image that would likely be amplified when viewed in a warmer climate. Life in rural China is already fraught with difficulties, but adding refugees and border patrol brings it to a new level that makes Dooman River an incredibly effective film.

 

Chris Kraus, the director of the pre-WWI drama, The Poll Diaries, knows how to use film to create powerful scenes, but falls short when it comes to pulling it all together.

Paula Beer plays 14-year-old Oda von Siering, a quick-witted girl who, after her mother’s death, moves into her father’s grand estate on the Estonian coast. In this decaying mansion live her stepmother, stepbrother, and an assortment of German and Russian aristocrats.

Oda quickly discovers that the father she has missed all these years is not the esteemed doctor she remembered, but a power-hungry surgeon obsessed with medical oddities and death. Upon meeting an injured Estonian anarchist on the property, she must decide who she should listen to—her father or herself.

This film takes place on the cusp of World War I, in a setting that combines people of German, Estonian, and Russian descent, and the tension is palpable from the second the film begins. The addition of familial and sexual strain brings moviegoers to the edge of their seats. Unfortunately, Kraus chose to draw out the scenes that the film could have done without and shorten the scenes that were the most compelling. As the film built up to its climax, I started to truly feel the characters and their emotions. But the next thing I knew it was over, and it ended in a way that can simply be described as slow and unsatisfying. The acting, the setting, the cinematography, the music—all of it was more than I could have hoped for. I just wish Kraus had a better eye for editing.

At MSPIFF, nestled between the serious documentaries and world cinema dramas is Canadian filmmaker Jody Shapiro’s How to Start Your Own Country, a comical documentary that examines what exactly it is to be a country. While Shaprio spends some time at the U.N. trying to get an official explanation from bureaucrats, most of the film focuses on small micro-nations, often no bigger than a farm, and their eccentric leaders. They include the Republic of Molossia, a small speck of land in Nevada with a population of six, the Hutt River Principality, whose leader, Prince Leonard, claims it is the second largest country on the Australian continent, and Sealand, a country formed on an abandoned WWII-era artillery tower in the North Sea.

Although many of these world leaders are goofy enough to make Mike Gould blush, Shapiro does treat them and their independence with respect. Why are these nations any less legitimate than major nations? Is it because they are not widely recognized? Yet there are plenty of nations around the world not recognized by others (Israel and Taiwan to name a few; the movie pints out that the Czech Republic does not recognize Liechtenstein). In the end, the title question remains unanswered, but that doesn’t mean How to Start Your Own Country is a failure. Shapiro plays to the film’s strengths (depictions of the wild and funny characters that decided to secede from their respective nations) and though the film isn’t as successful at going serious, its length (only 70 or so minutes) means it doesn’t spend a great deal of time on parts it doesn’t do well. All MSPIFF films are at St. Anthony and Main and the second showing is on May 2 at 9:30.

When I saw a trailer for Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void I immediately thought it was the next step in cinema, a revolution. I thought wrong. This film is what you would get if you took a disturbingly perverted high-school dropout who smokes too much weed and gave him an unlimited budget to make a movie. The amount of repeated shots, the unacceptably weak acting, and the fact that Noé must have missed the lesson on “leaving things up to the imagination” make the film seem like a void that repels anything that could be deemed artistic, much less revolutionary.

The drug use portrayed isn’t even the worst part; a sixth of this movie is basically porn. I’m not being sensitive either, for I’ve seen Requiem for a Dream and Teeth, both graphic and disturbing films, and found some merit within both of them, but not here. The extent to which Noé goes to show so many sex scenes negates any meaning they could have held. I would say this is joke, that Noé is trying to pull a fast one, but then there are all the references to Freudian theory (i.e. psychosexual development, Oedipus Complex).

You know what, maybe there is some merit here! Oh wait, that’s right, these subjects have been so heavily discussed for that last 100 years that this film centering around them, and bringing nothing new to the table, shows just how worthless and uninspired this film really is.

In the 1994 World Cup, tournament favorite Colombia faced the United States. Aided by an own goal by defender Andres Escobar, the United States beat the Colombians 2-1 and shocked the world. But this was no “Miracle on ice,” as Escobar was murdered days later in retaliation for his mistakes on the pitch. The Two Escobars uses the incident to reflect on Escobar and the golden age of Colombian soccer, as well as the cocaine trade and the life of history’s most notorious drug lord, Pablo Escobar.

The film does an excellent job connecting Andres and Pablo, whose humane traits (a love of soccer and a genuine compassion for the poor and underprivileged) are given as much focus as those more insidious. Using interviews with family members, teammates, underworld associates, and government officials, the film chronicles two tragedies: the death of Andres and the state of violence in Colombia. A powerful sense of dread lingers over the segments involving Andres, as the audience knows his fate and how his dreams of starting a family, playing in Italy, and of a peaceful Colombia will remain painfully unfulfilled. The other tragedy involves Colombia itself, as it was dying with Pablo; rival cartels, the government, and the paramilitary group Los Pepes were all locked in a brutal and ruthless war. Colombians could take pride in their national team, but with laundered drug money and gambling funding it, not even sport could provide escape.

Capable of portraying tragedies and complexities small and large, The Two Escobars is a remarkable documentary.

To the joy of Facebook fans, Friday October 1 marked the opening night of the film The Social Network. Full of quick-witted dialogue and energetic film sequences, the plot sweeps the viewer along with its characters as they embrace the challenging task of founding the now world-wide website, Facebook, while navigating fame, friendships, and a legal battle that put the entire cultural phenomenon into debate.

There is drama, humor, obvious bad guys and subtle good guys, a distinct moral overtone, sex, greed, and enough emotional angst to rival the hormonal output of a junior high school. And it’s made all the better through compelling performances from a great cast and a sharp director. Did you notice Winklevoss Two was a body double? It seems David Fincher found the CG techniques from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button worthy of another go-around.

As with most films, the characters and scenes are surely a heightened representation of reality. I can’t say I’ve ever been to a frat party quite like those in the film, and the real Zuckerberg is actually smiling in his profile picture on his Facebook page, so his face must not be made of stone. However, of all the potential misrepresentations of real life in The Social Network, I’d say Sean Parker should worry most. Justin Timberlake plays a neurotic partier pretty well. Still, I suggest viewing any minor details like these with a grain of salt. This is entertainment after all.

The real star in this film is the wordplay. All the sarcastic quips you’d love to say out loud but don’t are a staple in the script for The Social Network. I heard audience members shouting, “Winklevi” and laughing about, “Oops, I just broke your 350-year-old door handle,” long after I’d crossed the parking lot from the theatre entrance.

Courtesy of scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing, the witty dialogue in the film makes sure the viewer’s intelligence isn’t left wanting. Sorkin has brought the competitive conversation of twenties’ and thirties’ films back to the silver screen. The first seconds of dialogue in the opening scene set the pace for the entire film’s conversations. Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg verbally barrages the audience as it’s thrown into the hyperactive argument playing out between Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Erica Albright.

As my fellow theatre goers remarked in unison, “Whoa.”

If you want to keep up, this film is going to require your attention.

Beginning to end, The Social Network is an enjoying piece of entertainment. Escalating drama, a snappy dialogue, and an intriguing flash back and forth between legal meetings and the story of Facebook’s founding function well in a plotline that could have easily been bogged down by jargon and slow moving boardroom sequences.

So the real question is what has this film left me with?

Cultural products have a lot of power in our society. They spark debate; they fill conversational voids; they build relationships and can define societal groups; they even teach lessons and morals. The Social Network is a cultural product, about a cultural product. As such, the film can be used to examine everything from the impact of online social networks on communication in today’s society to the dangers of unbridled ambition. I won’t go as far as calling The Social Network my generation’s Citizen Kane, but it’s true there are overt messages about the loneliness of fame and the fall of those consumed by greed and power.

I could expand any of these topics, but what most sparked my interest while watching this film was the imaginary line drawn around intellectual property. For Mark Zuckerberg, toeing this line led to million dollar lawsuits over a simple idea.

Protecting intellectual property has frequently been something in the forefront of my mind as both an artist and journalist. The two facets have sometimes found themselves at odds with each other in my experience. Plagiarism is quite easy to find, and to punish. But theft of intellectual property? It’s simply not as easy to define. During my journalistic education, I’ve been taught the basics. Don’t copy. Cite sources. Search for accuracy. End of story. In an art department, the same rules don’t strictly apply. Artists borrow ideas and techniques from each other, dead or alive, all the time. So when is it appropriate, or not, to share recognition with someone from whom you’ve gained inspiration or shared in a brainstorming session? How far can borrowing an idea go before it’s no longer yours? For me, The Social Network brings to life one of the greatest cautionary tales today of sharing and owning creative ideas.

Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg is, in certain ways, a competition between its two leading characters for the director’s attention. The film opens with Florence, an LA maid whose life consists only of the things she’s been pushed into through necessity or indifference. She goes to a bar, drinks herself into a stupor and sleeps with a guy because she could almost have a conversation with him and, well, he wanted to. She likes playing with the Greenberg family children and dog—incidental perks of a job inherently lacking dignity. As her disinterest in her own life becomes more apparent, she becomes more compelling. Or maybe frustrating. But at least imbued with potential.

Roger Greenberg is introduced as he comes to LA to house-sit while his brother’s family goes on vacation. This is how Roger and Florence meet and begin an awkward, temperamental affair. Yet from the moment Roger is introduced, he becomes the film’s focus; it loses interest in Florence except insofar as Roger is interested in her. This is the film’s tragedy. Roger Greenberg is 40 years old, selfish, washed up, neurotic and irredeemably mean, in particular to Florence, who he abuses as blatantly as her past flings, but with more regularity. In the competition for Baumbach’s attention, Roger Greenberg, as the film’s title indicates, unambiguously wins. Ben Stiller’s performance, reaching squirm-inducing heights of awkwardness and awfulness, is commendable, and the film is consistently entertaining. Yet Greenberg is never made adequately sympathetic. This is problematic because the film seems to trace his attempt to redeem himself, implying some sort of achievement on the part of Roger Greenberg at the end that isn’t believable and is, by this point, even unwanted. His worst characteristics stubbornly remain throughout the film, which watches him alienate his few remaining friends. Florence becomes static as Greenberg moves into the spotlight, which is a shame. She is the real protagonist in this story, but in the film, as in her life, she is relegated to second place.

“Which would be worse, to live as a monster or to die as a good man?” This encompassing theme spoken by Leonardo DiCaprio’s main character Teddy Daniels is just one of the mysteries audiences are left with in Martin Scorsese’s latest film aptly titled Shutter Island. The plot focuses on two detectives in 1954, Teddy and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo). They travel to an insane asylum on Shutter Island near Boston to investigate the disappearance of a patient who is considered extremely dangerous.

As the detectives dig they find that all may not be what it seems, and Teddy has secret personal motives he is slow to reveal. The film twists and turns as the investigation grows and things become strange. The search is intercut with visions of Teddy’s back-story from World War 2 and his family. It culminates with a shocking reveal from the main psychologist on the island, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley).

The film begins as a crime drama but becomes very creepy quickly. The patients have all committed violent crimes and act like zombies, making every encounter chilling. As the film becomes more about Teddy’s inner demons and less about the original investigation, the truth is revealed.

The actors carry this movie and in some spots are absolutely brilliant, never tipping their hand as to what is really going on. The screenplay is well written but the pacing in the middle of the film becomes slower and arduous. The CGI is unfortunately cheap.

Overall Shutter Island is a good movie but not great as expected from Scorsese. It holds interest but drags on a little long and drives too deep into the human psyche. The twists become too much and the focus of the film becomes lost until the dramatic final minutes. If you want some thrills, this is worth seeing but don’t expect to be blown away.

Eric Brew

It may simply be my aversion to any discussion of morality that marks my distaste for The Machinist. It could also be the high hopes I had for its’ seemingly intricate and inquisitive plotline. Even until the end, despite the better part of my ego telling me precisely what the protagonist’s reality was, I refused to accept the obviousness of the resolution. I was set on a conclusion that I still couldn’t decipher—something I was waiting for the film to show me. Instead the film gives an overdone facsimile of the psychology of guilt, one that questions both the continuity of experience and the ability of the mind to harbor illness.

If I were to concern myself primarily with what The Machinist contemplates, in regard to morality, I would ask myself: is the guilt experienced by the protagonist, Trevor Reznik, a guilt birthed in fear or compassion? Unfortunately, I think it is the former—another idea that repels any preference for the film. The constant depiction of restrictions on life—the hostile workplace, Trevor’s materialistic notes (“Buy more bleach”), paying for sex, portrayal of a faulty police state—tell me perhaps there is nothing more than fear to Trevor’s delirium. Where is the humanity?

The subject matter is not the basis for all my dislike of the film. Perhaps both actors and writers are to blame for several careless, poorly-delivered lines sprinkled through the film. These lines took me from the cinematic moment and continuity that The Machinist requires to get across the relatively lackluster imagery. If the viewer is pulled from the harsh blues that the film is predominately shot in, the few scenes that do not immediately depict these tones (they’re outside, usually on suburban tree-lined streets) lose their effect.

Deniz Rudin

The thing that is the strangest about looking at a person whose skin is stretched so tight around their head that it is basically like looking at a skull is the bits of a human face that are not made of bones: the nose and the ears. Imagine a skull with a nose and ears. It’s eerie.

The brain pan curving up out of the back of the neck, arms like a snowman’s arms and legs long and sharp, the ribcage like lungs, spine running up the back like a lizard’s, like a stegosaur, and from it sprout shoulderblades like wings. Tiny bird’s bones. The uppermost tips of the pelvis clearly visible above the waistline of the pants. And the way it moves: this thing you’re used to seeing held up by a plastic stand in the science classroom moving under its will, like in a video game. The cheeks like big flat blades. This bizarre, otherworldly machinery somewhere down inside most people shown as clearly as it can be shown on a living person.

The body is obviously the star here and if Christian Bale would just keep his mouth shut and let the camera stay silently on him like a fly on a sideshow freak we might have a decent short film on our hands. If only his palms were thin and his fingers long and skinny, his hands like daddy longlegs.

But it is wrong to place the blame on Bale, for he was given words to speak and he did them justice. Though the film claims a Dostoyevsky novella as its main inspiration, the truth is that it borrows so heavily from Fight Club that a convincing plagiarism case could be made, and compared to either piece of source material it is poorly written and constructed, downright idiotic. And though the direction and cinematography are decent and at times better than decent, I feel like the director should not get off without punishment; he chose to shoot this script.

This movie is a passing well-shot work of dimestore existentialism and hollywood surrealism that succeeds only briefly in disguising its essential triteness, and its ending retroactively unravels anything that might have been interesting about what went before.

And the fucking music:
They tried to soundtrack “bleak” with oboes.

On Friday, Nov. 20 the Nordic community of Minneapolis lifted the cinematic curtains to unveil some of the best films from the region. It showcased films from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Greenland that chronicled Nordic culture, people, and politics throughout the weekend. In between screenings, presenters gave synopses and introduced the audience to the background milieu of the particular film. Taking place in the Parkway Theater, the atmosphere buzzed with foreign chatter, Cognac, and Swedish buns.

The premiere was entitled Prostitution Behind the Veil, in which an Iranian woman who fled to Sweden goes back to report on the lives of oppressed women who have no other way of sustaining themselves. Drugs, little children, and condoms scatter the house of two women who struggle to preserve their health and happiness.

The bitter documentary was followed by more cheerful Nordic shorts to conclude the Friday evening on a brighter note. These buoyant shorts were illuminated with friendship and love, focusing in on the varied nature of relationships people tend to have. In The Lake, two women search for a lost artifact in a slow-moving rowboat. As they keep fishing, young lads take their bait and wind up on board, until it gets too crowded. Then one of the ladies jumps into the lake to take her own chance of finding a love boat.

Mr. Mustache, another favorite, is a lovely narrative depicting the quirks of men with facial hair and its importance in their everyday lives. In Little Man, we meet a boy who studies and composes a journal that documents the art of seduction, only to be outsmarted by his female counterpart.
An evening at the Nordic Film Festival left guests feeling appreciative and elated. The heartwarming ambience, however, was counterbalanced by the chilly auditorium. Leaving high expectations for next year, I hope to see Nordic Lights return in 2010. .