Blogs by Empire contributing editor Damon Wise (@yo_damo)
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Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Sundance Film Festival 2011: Hobo With A Shotgun, Sound Of My Voice, Another Earth, Take Shelter, Terri, Margin Call, The Son Of No One
Well, you can't say Hobo With A Shotgun (pictured) doesn't do what it says on the tin. Conceived as a grindhouse trailer and expanded to feature length, Jason Eisener’s blood-soaked genre offering just about passes muster as a well-intentioned homage. Unfortunately, I have a slight problem with the films it pays homage to; after a neat tip to Italian giallo with its inappropriately melodic opening theme, Hobo... quickly reveals itself as belonging to perhaps my least favourite horror subgenre: gross-out dystopian-future splatter. The opening sets up Rutger Hauer's kick-ass drifter as he rides the railroads into a lawless urban hellhole where gangster mogul Drake and his two sons rule the roost. From here, Eisener's films takes a turn into Troma territory, from which it never really emerges, and though there are some nice sight gags, and Hauer slums it with a surprising relish for the material, this was more Street Trash/Class Of 1999/Toxic Avenger than I was hoping for.
After Elizabeth Olsen emerged last week as a likely 2011 Sundance heroine with roles in Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House (which I missed), her pole position was quickly challenged by Brit Marling, star and co-writer of two of the year's buzziest films. The one I saw first was not the one that generated the most column inches, or snagged the Fox deal, but I think I preferred it. Called The Sound Of My Voice and directed by Zal Batmanglij, it focuses on a pair of filmmakers, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicious), who have stumbled on a millennial cult led by the charismatic Maggie (Marling). Maggie purports to be from the future, a claim the couple find ridiculous, but as his commitment to the film starts to get out of hand, Peter, the more sceptical of the two, makes some surprising discoveries. Filmed in a elliptical, blocky style, with numbered chapters and a tantalising rationing of the information that the director and his co-writer are prepared to share, The Sound Of My Voice may not be for everyone. It's a gripping, atmospheric New Age drama nonetheless, and I've heard rumours that it's part of a trilogy, which would explain some of its more oblique passages and makes me very excited about the next two, if they exist in Batmanglij and Marling's imaginations.
The other Brit Marling project was called Another Earth, directed by Mike Cahill, which, as I write about it now, I realise sounds totally preposterous. Here, Marling plays Rhonda, a promising MIT student whose life is changed the day a mirror planet, exactly the same as Earth, is discovered. Trying to see “Earth 2”, the drunken Rhonda crashes her car into that of a composer, killing his wife and child instantly. Four years later, and freshly out of prison, Rhonda begins to visit her victim in a bid to make amends, but can't bring herself to reveal who she is and why she is cleaning his house for nothing. To reveal why the film is so absurd would spoil things, since it creates its world so perfectly, it doesn't seem so strange at the time. I didn't much care for its pondering on themes of guilt and redemption – John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole is much better at articulating that – but the twin-Earth conceit is well executed and, visually at least, certainly haunting.
Take Shelter appealed to me since it's a vehicle for the wonderful Michael Shannon, who, with his brooding, blank and always somewhat sinister expression, seems a natural fit for a film about obsession and mental illness. He plays Curtis, a manual worker from Ohio whose day-to-day life is suddenly plagued by ominous, apocalyptic visions. Though painfully aware of his mother's history of schizophrenia, and open to getting treatment, Curtis can't help giving into his urges, remortgaging his house to create a survivalist storm basement in the back yard. Shannon is great, as ever, but I found Jeff Nichols' film perhaps a little too slow-paced and worthy for my liking.
Terri was much more of a classic Sundance package: a dry, misfit comedy in which an overweight high-school student (Jacob Wysocki) comes to terms with his isolation. Directed by the Tim Burton-haired Azazel Jacobs, Terri plays like a more rarefied Terry Zwigof comedy of the grotesque. Like Zwigof's Ghost World, there's a lot of adolescent embarrassment here, but the film makes some interesting tonal transitions throughout that keep the viewer guessing. The introduction of the avuncular Principal Fitz (a great turn by John C Reilly) suggest a Rushmore-style unlikely buddy movie, but Jacobs' film is more concerned with his leading man, who is the focus of its extraordinary, almost real-time climax. Terri has a lot of things you've seen before, but it has a heart and a thoughtful energy that make it surprisingly memorable, despite some familiarity.
Speaking of familiarity, dear God, can nobody in America make a decent fiction film out of the 2008 financial crisis? In the vein of last year's Company Men, Margin Call is another turgid Wall Street Crash drama, based loosely on the Goldman Sachs farrago, that invites us to feel sympathy for those greedy self-serving alchemists who turned the western economy into shit. Stanley Tucci, not playing it camp for once, plays a market analyst who catalyses the events that follow by being made redundant just as he's about to crack a series of calculations that will determine his company's future. Picked up by his assistant (Zachary Quinto, who produces and plays, ahem, a genius), these projections reveal that the company is on the brink of meltdown, and so drastic action must be taken to avert a total apocalypse. Achingly star-laden (support comes from Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany and, er, Demi Moore) and equally po-faced, Margin Call forgets one key thing: these are vile, ruthless scumbags who earn millions by betting on our industries, squeezing global markets, churning money through the sleazy stock exchanges of the world and – oh no! – we're being asked to sympathise with them because, in an off-the-Richter-scale earthquake that's shaking up their alpha male (and female) lifestyles they're about to lose their jobs. Boo-fucking-hoo.
The festival closed with Dito Montiel's The Son Of No One, which, like his debut, A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, is a two-timescale drama about a man coming to terms with his edgy, streetwise youth. Starring Channing Tatum as a cop haunted by a terrible secret – he accidentally killed two men in his teens, which is good going even by New York standards – Montiel's plodding thriller deals with the fallout when, 16 years after the crimes were hushed up, a whistleblower sets out to raise fresh interest in these “murders” (I've put the word in inverted commas since one killing is in self-defence and the other is an accident, as the film plainly shows but nobody ever comments on). The film gained notoriety at its press screening, where it was supposedly jeered at and rounded on, but Son Of No One isn't that bad. In fact, it's only half as bad as the 2009 festival's ghastly Brooklyn's Finest, which barely raised a snigger. It is, however, fatally self-serious, which is odd, because Montiel, at the film's public screenings, revealed himself as a likeable man with a good sense of humour. I can only hope he'll find a way to parlay that dry, sharp wit into his next movie.
Well, you can't say Hobo With A Shotgun (pictured) doesn't do what it says on the tin. Conceived as a grindhouse trailer and expanded to feature length, Jason Eisener’s blood-soaked genre offering just about passes muster as a well-intentioned homage. Unfortunately, I have a slight problem with the films it pays homage to; after a neat tip to Italian giallo with its inappropriately melodic opening theme, Hobo... quickly reveals itself as belonging to perhaps my least favourite horror subgenre: gross-out dystopian-future splatter. The opening sets up Rutger Hauer's kick-ass drifter as he rides the railroads into a lawless urban hellhole where gangster mogul Drake and his two sons rule the roost. From here, Eisener's films takes a turn into Troma territory, from which it never really emerges, and though there are some nice sight gags, and Hauer slums it with a surprising relish for the material, this was more Street Trash/Class Of 1999/Toxic Avenger than I was hoping for.
After Elizabeth Olsen emerged last week as a likely 2011 Sundance heroine with roles in Martha Marcy May Marlene and Silent House (which I missed), her pole position was quickly challenged by Brit Marling, star and co-writer of two of the year's buzziest films. The one I saw first was not the one that generated the most column inches, or snagged the Fox deal, but I think I preferred it. Called The Sound Of My Voice and directed by Zal Batmanglij, it focuses on a pair of filmmakers, Peter (Christopher Denham) and Lorna (Nicole Vicious), who have stumbled on a millennial cult led by the charismatic Maggie (Marling). Maggie purports to be from the future, a claim the couple find ridiculous, but as his commitment to the film starts to get out of hand, Peter, the more sceptical of the two, makes some surprising discoveries. Filmed in a elliptical, blocky style, with numbered chapters and a tantalising rationing of the information that the director and his co-writer are prepared to share, The Sound Of My Voice may not be for everyone. It's a gripping, atmospheric New Age drama nonetheless, and I've heard rumours that it's part of a trilogy, which would explain some of its more oblique passages and makes me very excited about the next two, if they exist in Batmanglij and Marling's imaginations.
The other Brit Marling project was called Another Earth, directed by Mike Cahill, which, as I write about it now, I realise sounds totally preposterous. Here, Marling plays Rhonda, a promising MIT student whose life is changed the day a mirror planet, exactly the same as Earth, is discovered. Trying to see “Earth 2”, the drunken Rhonda crashes her car into that of a composer, killing his wife and child instantly. Four years later, and freshly out of prison, Rhonda begins to visit her victim in a bid to make amends, but can't bring herself to reveal who she is and why she is cleaning his house for nothing. To reveal why the film is so absurd would spoil things, since it creates its world so perfectly, it doesn't seem so strange at the time. I didn't much care for its pondering on themes of guilt and redemption – John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole is much better at articulating that – but the twin-Earth conceit is well executed and, visually at least, certainly haunting.
Take Shelter appealed to me since it's a vehicle for the wonderful Michael Shannon, who, with his brooding, blank and always somewhat sinister expression, seems a natural fit for a film about obsession and mental illness. He plays Curtis, a manual worker from Ohio whose day-to-day life is suddenly plagued by ominous, apocalyptic visions. Though painfully aware of his mother's history of schizophrenia, and open to getting treatment, Curtis can't help giving into his urges, remortgaging his house to create a survivalist storm basement in the back yard. Shannon is great, as ever, but I found Jeff Nichols' film perhaps a little too slow-paced and worthy for my liking. 
Terri was much more of a classic Sundance package: a dry, misfit comedy in which an overweight high-school student (Jacob Wysocki) comes to terms with his isolation. Directed by the Tim Burton-haired Azazel Jacobs, Terri plays like a more rarefied Terry Zwigof comedy of the grotesque. Like Zwigof's Ghost World, there's a lot of adolescent embarrassment here, but the film makes some interesting tonal transitions throughout that keep the viewer guessing. The introduction of the avuncular Principal Fitz (a great turn by John C Reilly) suggest a Rushmore-style unlikely buddy movie, but Jacobs' film is more concerned with his leading man, who is the focus of its extraordinary, almost real-time climax. Terri has a lot of things you've seen before, but it has a heart and a thoughtful energy that make it surprisingly memorable, despite some familiarity.
Speaking of familiarity, dear God, can nobody in America make a decent fiction film out of the 2008 financial crisis? In the vein of last year's Company Men, Margin Call is another turgid Wall Street Crash drama, based loosely on the Goldman Sachs farrago, that invites us to feel sympathy for those greedy self-serving alchemists who turned the western economy into shit. Stanley Tucci, not playing it camp for once, plays a market analyst who catalyses the events that follow by being made redundant just as he's about to crack a series of calculations that will determine his company's future. Picked up by his assistant (Zachary Quinto, who produces and plays, ahem, a genius), these projections reveal that the company is on the brink of meltdown, and so drastic action must be taken to avert a total apocalypse. Achingly star-laden (support comes from Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Paul Bettany and, er, Demi Moore) and equally po-faced, Margin Call forgets one key thing: these are vile, ruthless scumbags who earn millions by betting on our industries, squeezing global markets, churning money through the sleazy stock exchanges of the world and – oh no! – we're being asked to sympathise with them because, in an off-the-Richter-scale earthquake that's shaking up their alpha male (and female) lifestyles they're about to lose their jobs. Boo-fucking-hoo. 
The festival closed with Dito Montiel's The Son Of No One, which, like his debut, A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, is a two-timescale drama about a man coming to terms with his edgy, streetwise youth. Starring Channing Tatum as a cop haunted by a terrible secret – he accidentally killed two men in his teens, which is good going even by New York standards – Montiel's plodding thriller deals with the fallout when, 16 years after the crimes were hushed up, a whistleblower sets out to raise fresh interest in these “murders” (I've put the word in inverted commas since one killing is in self-defence and the other is an accident, as the film plainly shows but nobody ever comments on). The film gained notoriety at its press screening, where it was supposedly jeered at and rounded on, but Son Of No One isn't that bad. In fact, it's only half as bad as the 2009 festival's ghastly Brooklyn's Finest, which barely raised a snigger. It is, however, fatally self-serious, which is odd, because Montiel, at the film's public screenings, revealed himself as a likeable man with a good sense of humour. I can only hope he'll find a way to parlay that dry, sharp wit into his next movie.
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