Angel of Nanjing (2015)

Directors: Frank Ferendo & Jordan Horowitz

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

Following one documentary with another, here's the picture that won the Best Documentary award at this year's Phoenix Film Festival, as well as the special Dr Sydney K Shapiro Humanitarian Award. The latter is more believable, as it does introduce us to an amazing character who has saved over three hundred lives in the last decade, but the former is a little harder to defend, given that it's a short seventy minute piece that focuses almost entirely on interviews with and footage of the man himself. He's Chen Si, who's a full-time employee at the Ping-An Logistics Co and a married man, but who has nonetheless spent a decade's worth of weekends patrolling the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China, attempting to stop people from jumping off it. This isn't an official position; he's just a good samaritan who doesn't believe that anyone has the right to take their own life. Yet he does so in an often high-handed manner that made me wish for some perspective from other sources, beyond his wife's restrained glances of disapproval.

There's no controversy in the background. The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and it's been a key part of Chinese history and culture for thousands of years. The bridge over it in Nanjing is also important, as it links by rail the largest Chinese city, Shanghai, with the country's capital, Beijing. It's huge, with a span of over 5,000 feet and a height of 150. It also functions on two levels, one for rail and one for road; it carries 200 trains and 80,000 road vehicles every day. More pertinent to this film, it took from the Golden Gate in San Francisco a dubious title: the most popular suicide spot in the world. It makes sense, given that China counts for a full third of the world's suicides, a massive 290,000 of them every year, and it's easy to take a bus into Nanjing, walk onto the Yangtze River Bridge and leap off it, hitting the river hard enough to die instantly. Most of the suicides here are not of locals but people travelling into Nanjing from outside, bent on adding themselves to those grisly statistics.

The controversy arrives with Chen Si, a stocky man somewhat like a Chinese William Shatner. A religious man with a simple outlook on life, he seems blissfully unaware of the irony that he refuses to accept that anyone has the right to kill themselves while smoking like a chimney. He has no official standing to save people but chooses to do so anyway in ways that would shock trained crisis negotiators. Sometimes it's as simple an act as walking up to them, but sympathy isn't the first thing on his checklist. First he has to confront them and he often does so vehemently. We watch footage of him literally hauling people down from the walls physically. Outside China, he could be arrested for assault! In one amazing shot, he's busy talking a young man out of killing himself when he sees an old man trying the same thing a little further down the bridge; he pauses his attempts to save the one to grab the other, pull him away from the edge and almost literally throw him onto a passing bus to get him out of there.

His confrontations aren't just physical; most are verbal. He may have 'cherish life every day' on the back of his jacket, but he can be vicious with his words to get his point across. He even tells some folk to give him a chance and 'die if I can't help you'. He's been at this calling for ten years and he saves three out of every four he engages. The 80 or 90 he's failed clearly haunt him, to the degree that he goes on periodic drunken karaoke sessions because, in his own words, 'the heart is too crowded.' I'd have thought that he would have sought some kind of training over the years so that he could improve his success rate, but he thinks he has it figured out. He believes that he can tell within twenty metres whether someone's there to die or not. He analyses faces because they let him in on the secret. On one patrol, he accosts a woman as 'she has a face full of death'. This is hardly scientific but he has done some rough analysis of the types of suicides he encounters and how successful he is with each.

What most of this boils down to is more important to modern China than it is to Chen Si. Most people he encounters are there because of some sort of drastic change in their lives, not surprising given how fast and irrevocably China is changing today. It's a country where people still living a peasant lifestyle share cities with technological trendsetters, so it's easy for the unemployed to feel lost. Then there are abused husbands, trafficked girls, sweatshop workers; China's leading edge is moving forward quickly but it will take a long time indeed to drag its most needy citizens along with it. Certainly we recognise names that are dropped during the news footage that's scattered liberally around this film. One example is FoxConn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer with notorious factories in China, such as the one in Wuhan where dozens of employees packing XBox 360 consoles threatened to commit mass suicide over poor working conditions. There's a story in the why behind these suicides, but this film avoids it for the most part.

What we get is Chen Si and his three stages of saving people. After the initial confrontation, which often shocks them into opening up or falling apart, he offers sympathy, which in many instances is all that he has to provide. The most amazing revelation in the film for me wasn't tied to his work on the bridge, but his work away from it. Every eighth grade social book in the whole of China carries his name and phone number. Needless to say he gets a lot of calls. This very concept stuns me. This is a country which has a population of well ove a billion people, more than four times that of the US, but one man, with a wife and a full-time job, not to mention a suicide patrol on the bridge every weekend, is on the hook whenever a kid gets bullied or breaks up with their girlfriend. Most countries have a massively staffed organisation like the Samaritans to cope with the deluge of people who need a ear. China apparently has Chen Si. Talk about a heck of a lot of responsibility to put on one set of shoulders. No wonder he needs karaoke.

However this isn't particularly addressed in this film either. Fortunately, his third stage is, which is to help. With only seventy minutes to play with, there's not too much opportunity to delve deep, but we do get to meet some of the people he's saved and see what he did to follow up. Some are new, such as the woman with the 'face full of death' and the young man he has to pause saving to throw the old man on a bus. He finds out why they felt suicide was the answer and then addresses the root cause of their problem. She's afraid her husband doesn't love her, so Chen Si takes her out to eat at a cafe he brings many such people to, then adds in the husband to talk it out. This Chinese William Shatner obviously has dreams of being a Chinese Jerry Springer too, but real people don't act like a television show. The young man wanted to end it all because he can't find a job, so Chen Si finds him one with a single phone call. He's an electrician, so Chen Si finds him work as one, with room, board and a wage. Now he's the Chinese Oprah Winfrey too.

Given that the film is shot with a loose, often annoyingly handheld camera, it's not surprising that it often feels like a reality show. I found that a little unworthy for a man with such achievements to his credit. This is clearly pro-Chen Si and doesn't want to raise concerns about his motivations or his methods, which is a shame, but I can't understand why the filmmakers didn't want to delve further beneath the surface even from his perspective. Surely they could have spent more time with the people he saved, especially given that he hosts a big meal at Christmas every year and a bunch of them show up regularly. One was saved back in 2006, struggling with loans to finance a new business while dealing with a daughter stricken with leukemia; Chen Si may have begun as his saviour, but became a confidante, a confessor and a ready and willing ear. I'd have liked more of their relationship and other similar relationships that he's cultivated. I'd have liked to find out how he can do frequent follow up on three hundred people in his spare time.

In fact, while I was entertained and educated by this film, it did leave me with a lot more questions than answers. It felt incomplete, not just because of its skimpy length (a minute shorter and it wouldn't count as a feature in many markets) but because there's so much that simply isn't here. Chen Si is showcased here like he's the star of a reality show, dominant through strength of charisma not only over the people he talks back from the edge but everyone else around him too. Bizarrely for a film about him, I wanted a lot less of Chen Si and a lot more of those others: his wife chief among them, along with the cafe owner, his boss and the other volunteers. How about the authorities who have to realise that an amateur does much better than they do. I especially wanted to hear from many more of the people he saved over the years, whether they show up for the Christmas party or not. The good news is that there are over three hundred of them; the bad news is that they're mostly not in this film and that's a big problem.

Blues by the Beach (2004)

Director: Joshua Faudem

This review of a documentary film was posted on 30th April, twelve years to the day since the event at the heart of its story, a suicide bombing of the blues bar of the title in Tel Aviv. This review is dedicated to the memory of the three who died, Dominique Hass, Ran Baron and Yanay Weiss, and with great respect for the Mike's Place family who refused to let this act define them, instead reopening their bar in a week to prove that terrorists cannot win in the face of love, peace and dedication.

I read an advance copy of a new graphic novel called Mike's Place for the Nameless Zine and was quickly caught up by its true story and its powerful message. While it's ostensibly about a terrorist act, a suicide bombing in which a British Muslim, Asif Muhammad Hanif, blew himself up outside a local blues bar in Tel Aviv, killing himself and three others and injuring fifty more, the story is surprisingly detailed because an American filmmaker happened to be shooting a documentary film there at the time. He's Jack Baxter and Blues by the Beach is that film. Over a decade later, Mike's Place tells much of the same story in graphic novel format, with many panels direct copies of film shots, but it adds other things to the mix. It's slower and more considered, due to the increased distance in time from the event, with a deeper exploration of relationships changed by it. It also, fascinatingly, adds the terrorists' perspective. I don't recommend one version over the other; I recommend both and suggest that people watch the film then read the book.

That's because the film is an urgent piece, full of observation, emotion and reaction, while the book is a more measured examination of the bigger picture. The film is an experience, as Baxter opens a portal to a surprising world that he didn't expect to find and beckons us through to join him. Oddly, for a film that wasn't about terrorism until the terrorists showed up, it really begins with terrorism. Told by experts that the 9/11 attacks were a response to America's support of Israel and Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, Baxter wanted to find a story that he hadn't heard before. His research suggested a story might surround Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic Palestinian leader then on trial in Israel, so he flew to the Middle East to find out. The Barghouti angle turned out to be a bust but, before Baxter could fly home, he found Mike's Place through unexpected blues music floating through the night to him, walking on the Tel Aviv beach. It was the story he had been looking for, a vibrant community where politics and religion are barred.

Baxter clearly felt immediately at home at Mike's Place. He found an odd extended family, a varied group of people from a variety of backgrounds on both sides of the bar. The book, perhaps inevitably, struggles with sound. It can't play the blues for us and it can't replicate the impressive diversity of accents flooding Mike's Place, but this film can and does. People flock to Mike's Place to eat, drink and dance, enjoying the universal language of music in a venue that conducts its business in English. We hear it spoken in a host of different accents: English, Scots, French, American and, of course, Israeli. This admirable diversity has a lot to do with why Mike's Place spoke to Baxter and why it works so well as the lead character in Blues on the Beach. Unfortunately, it's also why it was chosen as the target for a suicide bombing and, on 30th April, 2003, twelve years ago today, Avi Tabib the bouncer stopped Asif Hanif the bomber, who therefore detonated himself outside the venue instead of inside.

At this point, Baxter had shot forty hours of interviews at Mike's Place and was ready to wrap, expecting the entire story to be about the venue and its surprising international, secular and welcoming outlook in the heart of the Middle East. Gal Ganzman, the owner, was on board and hugely helpful. He even found Baxter a crew, as his new bartender, an old friend called Joshua Faudem, was a documentary filmmaker newly returned from a shoot in Prague with a new girlfriend, Pavla. With a snap judgement that matches the brusque, no-nonsense attitude we hear in his opening narration, Baxter hired them both on the spot to handle the camerawork. After the explosion hospitalised the producer and Faudem continued to shoot throughout its aftermath, Baxter upgraded him to director and Pavla to his assistant. Even if Mike's Place was the right subject for a documentary, it's hard to imagine that film today. The bombing transformed it into something else entirely: before, during and after coverage that hadn't been seen before.

Talk about being in the right place at the right time as a documentarian, but also the wrong place at the wrong time as a human being. The bomb goes off at one on a Wednesday morning in Tel Aviv, but right in the middle of a blues number for us, a startling and stunning edit with noise that rings in our ears like it must have done for the people unlucky enough to be there. Something else that the film does better than the book is record the aftermath. Confusion reigns supreme and it's palpable. There's news footage, of course, in subtitled Hebrew, but that's not what grabs us. It's everything else, as we try to fathom the scene. Faudem keeps his camera rolling, even though he clearly doesn't know what to point it at. People flounder around, asking about other who they know were there but can't find. One of the three victims, Yanai Weiss, started a band that evening with a man who didn't even know what name to ask about. The crowd piece it together for him and he walks away in shock.

And, with tragedy literally delivered to their door, the Mike's Place family are also in shock. What this film does better than any other I've seen is demonstrate how such a negative act can be turned into positive reaction to stop the terrorists winning. I remember 9/11 well, even though I was living in England at the time. When the word started to spread, we all stopped working and surrounded a small black and white television in the break room to watch the news. Even on that day, we wondered what America would do in reaction. The last fourteen years have shown us precisely what: the invasion of two countries and the War on Terror, with all the security theatre, mass surveillance and erosion of civil rights that came along with it. Terrorists want people to be afraid, hence their name. They want others to change who they are through fear, to spend their time, effort and money to placate that fear, to voluntarily abdicate freedom. The terrorists won the War on Terror by virtue that it exists. Mike's Place didn't make that mistake.

Instead, Gal Ganzman and the extended family that surrounded him, reopened Mike's Place in a week. It remains there today, doing exactly what it always did: providing a place for anyone to come and enjoy a beer, a burger and a live band, leaving religion and politics outside. The security is unchanged: Avi Tabib is still the bouncer, having recovered from his injuries and been released from hospital. In fact, there are no longer two Mike's Places, this one being the extension of the original in downtown Jerusalem. Now six bars and one pizza place comprise the Mike's Place family, which screen this film in the Tel Aviv location every year on 30th April in memory of the three who died, one of whom was a key player in the film as a waitress, bartender and cook. She's Dominique Hass, the first employee hired by Ganzman after starting up the bar, and her appearance in this film is chilling for a number of reasons, not least because nothing here feels staged, though the film was clearly carefully edited. It's loose and real and impactful.

And the reality of this film is why it's so immersive. Mike's Place appears to be a small club with cramped tables, a tiny stage and a portable television on top of the fridge. The music is local, Ganzman's brother's band a frequent performer. Yet the community spirit, the friendly atmosphere and the obvious cohesion, what Ganzman calls 'one big happy family', is infectious from the outset. By the time we get to the bomb, we're part of that family and it shocks us too. I'm sure it will change many of us as well, just as it changed many of the participants. One of the saddest angles was to see the break up of relationships through how people reacted to the bombing, even those who were shooting the film. There's more of this in the book, but the film deals with what was apparent at the time rather than what became so in hindsight. The loose video style aids this massively, because it places us right in the middle of the chaos. It's rarely handheld like a found footage movie, thankfully, but when it is there's good reason.

Blues by the Beach is a massively important film, a record of before, during and after a terrorist attack. It isn't always an easy film to watch, though it avoids some of the more gruesome details that surface later in the book. It also avoids a lot of basic detail that we might expect from a documentary; at no point are we told why Mike's Place is called Mike's Place, given that the owner is called Gal. Wikipedia fills in those gaps easily enough. What it does is make us feel at least a little of what Ganzman and his one big happy family feel on screen before, during and after the most impactful moment of their lives. It's the inclusion of all three of those stages that makes this so special. We see what this venue was like when everyone's blissfully detached from terrorism, what it's like when that unwelcome guest shows up and what it's like when they react in such a stunning way, reopening the venue in a week and celebrating peace, life and community. They refuse to be afraid and that's why they win. That's a lesson we should all learn.

Bread and Butter (2014)

Director: Liz Manashil
Stars: Christine Weatherup, Bobby Moynihan, Micah Hauptman, Eric Lange, Lauren Latkus, Sean Wright, Dawn Didawick and Harry Groener

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

It's always a brave move for a film critic to venture into enemy territory and make her own picture; it's an even braver move for that picture to be a romantic comedy, the safest and easiest genre of all to skewer by anyone with a grudge. However, Liz Manashil, most frequently seen talking about mainstream movies on Just Seen It, succeeded with Bread and Butter in making an indie romcom that would be very tough to badmouth. The only people who might fail to find something of themselves in at least one of the quirkily broken misfits looking for love in this film will be those who identify with the wildly unrealistic movie star leads in mainstream romcoms. This is emphatically and rather pleasantly not one of those. Nobody finds themselves stuck on a blind date with Jennifer Aniston, nobody accidentally bumps into Hugh Grant and nobody has to decide whether to make do with Cameron Diaz when their dream girl looks through them. Manashil loves those movies but but wanted to make one that was believable and realistic.

And so she populated her cast with the sort of characters who would usually play the awkward best friend type who serves mostly to make the romantic leads look even more unblemished. These characters never get depth enough to worry about sexual tension, because awkward best friends are always asexual blobs; it's only the beautiful people who get to torture themselves about whether Male Model #1 or #2 is better in bed. If you watch romcoms but look past the focal characters to those awkward best friends who suffer from terminal uncoolness but would be fascinating people otherwise, this may just be your movie. Amelia Karinsky is the lead here, a young lady who reads books and wears a helmet while cycling. She has fresh looks but there are no magazine covers in her future. She's very aware that she's about to turn thirty and would like to lose her virginity before she gets there. Her lack of a boyfriend merely means pressure from her parents and even her boss, a life coach with no conception of boundaries.

Christine Weatherup is not the most recognisable face in the cast, though she's adding up a varied set of credits, but she's a strong lead who manages to find just the right point on the scale. She's socially inept, acutely awkward and very aware of how these traits are holding her back, but she's a long way from the stereotypical unhygienic dork. She's not Comic Book Guy, Suckup Science Nerd or Basement Dwelling IT Geek. She's refreshingly unclichéd, meaning that there's no simple solution to her situation and so depth to her attempts to find one. She's not a damsel in distress waiting for Prince Charming and she's not the caterpillar who doesn't know she can be a butterfly. She doesn't just need magic and she doesn't need a makeover. She just needs to do, to try, to live and our story is what happens when she decides to allow a border expansion to her small private world and take a chance on possibility. Of course, she doesn't find what she thinks she will, but she does find.

What I liked most about Manashil's script was how it refused to be conventional and make it about choice A or choice B. It seems to phrase it that way, with Daniel and Leonard coming into her life almost at once, suddenly two men for a woman who never had one so she can compare. It seems to set us up to believe that it will be Amelia and Leonard all the way, at least to the point when she realises that it should really be Amelia and Daniel, but it's worth much more than that. It seems to be yet another destination movie, but it's really all about the journey. This is the anti-romantic comedy, remember, refusing to cater to the convenient. You're not going to see twin posters, so tweens can choose between Team Daniel and Team Leonard; if someone does PhotoShop that, please add Team Charles for Daniel's gecko and let me know! This isn't about good or bad, A or B, right or wrong. It's not about a message, beyond, 'Hey, it's OK, girl.' It's as much about being comfortable with who you are and what you can be as it as about romance.

Having raised Daniel and Leonard, I really ought to introduce them. We meet Daniel first, because he's a regular client at Dr Wellburn's, where Amelia is the receptionist. Eric Lange is gloriously inappropriate as Dr Wellburn, in his way even more inept socially than our lead. He played another doctor in the Phoenix Film Festival opening night movie, Danny Collins, and it's easy to see why he lands such parts. Wellburn sets up Amelia and Daniel to date and both pliant characters fall uncomfortably into those roles. Bobby Moynihan, surely the biggest star in this movie after his eight years on Saturday Night Live, has a lot of fun with Daniel, who is the most grounded main character: a combination of thoroughly nice guy, grown up kid and professional social pariah. Asked about his parents paying for his therapy, he calmly suggests, 'They broke it, they bought it.' Like Amelia, he wants to do things but doesn't do them, and there's a sad acceptance to him that resonates: 'Hanging out with weird people makes me feel better about myself.'

Leonard Marsh, however, is one of those weird people. Amelia discovers his name and address in an old book she buys second hand, along with a host of engaging notes pencilled into the margins. They're not annotations as they're nothing to do with the text; they're more like stream of consciousness anecdotes and sheer circumstance helps Amelia to connect strongly with the hidden person who wrote them. Next steps are clear: go to Leonard's address and meet him. Amelia's decision to do this, as uncharacteristic as it is, is really the beginning of her journey but it doesn't turn out remotely how she imagined. He's an awkward character too, but he's awkwardly dismissive, interpreting her tentative impulsiveness as an act of stalking. Then again, he's self-treating depression without any apparent science, which makes him an alive but often broken soul. His eccentricities are wild: nothing can be new because old equals relevant, he lives in a guest room but never touches its floor and he's unable to commit to anything.

Amelia stirs up their lives just as they stir up hers, but it's Amelia who's the catalyst for change. While we can't fail to compare Daniel and Leonard, especially when each of them gets a dance scene with Amelia, it's really Amelia who's pushing things forward. She starts to date both of them, just to see what happens, but of course they soon meet and the awkwardness ramps up from there. Given that the foundation here is awkwardness, it's bizarrely comfort that sells it most. Amelia is getting less comfortable with her life as she approaches thirty so decides to do something about it, but both Daniel and Leonard tell themselves over and over that they're comfortable with who they are. It's as we start to doubt them that this picture moves forward. Daniel is calm and stable in the extreme; he wants to do things but they're all outside his comfort zone. Leonard lives in the moment because he's afraid to live anywhen else; this makes Amelia comfortable because there's no pressure, but it depresses Leonard because he can't change.

How this all manifests itself in the film is a combination of well-written dialogue and capable acting, most obvious on the faces of all three leads. Christine Weatherup acts with her face far more than her body, as if she's always trying to show simultaneously what she feels and what she believes others want her to be. It's telling that this decreases as she becomes more comfortable in who she is. Bobby Moynihan, for the majority of the film, is the picture of calm, so accepting of everything in his life that he lets those around him provide the emotions. However there are points where Amelia stirs that pot enough that his face has to step in and join the fray; those moments are all the more magic because they have to be drawn from him. As Leonard Marsh, Micah Hauptman is great at smiling and looking both wrong and scared all at once. Everything he is shows through his face and that goes double for the inner conflict of a man who wants to change but has a phobia about doing so.

Bread and Butter was the first film I saw at this year's Phoenix Film Festival and it was a great way to kick things off. It's light and fluffy and easy to watch, but with depths for those who want to explore them. It's familiar in that it's a romcom with one girl and two guys, but it never settles for the usual way out of any situation, let alone the usual way in. It's well-written in the way that indie features should be but so often aren't. It's cast from faces both fresh and familiar; I've seen a few of these actors before and appreciated their work but didn't recognise any of them here. That holds true for Moynihan, who I know for The Brass Teapot rather than Saturday Night Live; but I heard his name often during the festival, even from people who hadn't seen the film. It's also a personal piece, with Manashil claiming 30% of it as autobiographical, with characters amalgamations of herself and friends. All this is good news and it leaves 70% left for her next film, which ought to be entirely expected after the success of this one.

Blood Punch (2013)

Director: Madellaine Paxson
Stars: Milo Cawthorne, Olivia Tennet and Ari Boyland

This film was an official selection at the 11th annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival in Phoenix in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

Winner of the Audience award at last year's Dances with Films and the Best Horror Feature award at this year's International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival, amongst a bundle of others, Blood Punch is a real peach of a movie, even if it didn't look like it should be on paper. There are a bunch of reasons why it shouldn't work, from the working title that stuck, even though it has nothing to do with anything; the clichéd setup (shenanigans at a hunting lodge on cursed tribal land); and the fact that almost everyone involved got to know each other on Power Rangers RPM: all three of the leads, many of the supporting cast, the director, writer and probably the kid who served breakfast every morning. Yet I haven't had this much fun with an indie movie in years. The title really doesn't matter, the clichés quickly fall away to expose a deceptively intricate story with a set of neat little twists and hey, who cares where they met? What matters is that it's as unlike Power Rangers as can comfortably be imagined, with drugs, death and bad language in droves.

In fact, it's not particularly like anything else. It's a horror feature, sure, but not primarily, however much blood gets spilled and however supernatural the concept. It's a black comedy long before that and it's a modern film noir first and foremost. In fact, it's a quintessential film noir, with almost the entire running time devoted to three characters stuck in a love triangle set up for criminal purposes and presided over by a sassy femme fatale. She's Skyler and she starts out the picture in rehab, not to get off drugs but to hire herself a capable cook to turn 110 pounds of pseudoephedrine into an insanely large batch of crystal meth in a single day, enough to make them rich before they can ever be raided. She leaps into bed with Milton, a bright student in rehab for running a meth lab out of college and he immediately falls hard for her. Only in the sack does she explain to him that the third and last in the gang is Russell, her 'pure 100% psychopath' boyfriend. Shenanigans immediately ensue and continue on for the rest of the movie.

Now, if that doesn't sound particularly supernatural, I should highlight that the very beginning of the film, before we even get to rehab, happens a day later, with Milton puking his guts up and finding a video tape containing a message for him from himself. He doesn't remember recording it, but it's definitely him and, to ensure that he listens to himself, he very deliberately chops off two of his fingers with a cleaver. Given that the present day Milton isn't missing any digits, it succeeds in grabbing both his attention and ours in the cheap seats. The script is by Eddie Guzelian and it's a real gem. He hooks us at the outset with Milton and his supernatural video on Tuesday morning, then jumps back to rehab on Monday to ground us in the basic crime and the dark but comedic tone of the piece and moves on carefully so that when we return to Milton in the bathroom we know a lot more than we did first time around. He's more than happy to set us up with odd little clues here and there, but waits 43 minutes to hit us with the big twist.

I'm in two minds whether to spoil that twist because it's hard to talk about the film without it, but I guess I should let you discover it for yourself. I can safely add that there are quite a few more twists to follow the main one too, because the entire script is a clever little set of puzzles, both for the three leads and for us, and we're all happy to try to solve them. Every time we solve one, and some of them are much easier to figure out than others, Guzelian emphasises another angle that means that we have to keep on puzzling for a little while longer. M Night Shyamalan made a career out of one big twist per movie; Guzelian gives us one great big twist here, then adds another three excellent little ones before the end credits roll. I'd be all over IMDb looking up what other movies he's written, but his long and respected career has, up to this point, been hilariously restricted to children's television, with his most adult work prior to this film being perhaps his three episodes of Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. Not a lot of blood in there!

Let's just say that this riffs on the old 'Indian burial ground' theme, but never in the usual way, as the low budget was never going to extend to zombie hordes and didn't need to. The majority of the movie follows only three actors in three locations, but never once even hints at getting boring. There's Milton and Skyler at the rehab clinic, picking up Russell the psycho state trooper on the way out. There's the three of them at the hunting lodge, with a wild collection of dangerous weapons on the walls which surely all get put to use sooner or later. And eventually there's the lair of Archer, the man to whom Skyler plans to sell all the crystal Milton will cook up at the lodge. That's not a lot of opportunity for cinematographer Neil Cervin to keep everything looking fresh, but he does a solid job, aided by the neat surreality that Guzelian conjures up with his Coen Brothers-esque take on Luis Buñuel. He's the big star here, not only for his ideas but for his dialogue too, which is plentiful and agreeably sardonic.

Olivia Tennet gets the best of that dialogue as Skyler. The first time through I wondered if she was a little too young for a character with such assurance and experience, but there are layers to what she does and she delivers her lines with panache. It helps that she plays an interesting character too, independent but under Russell's thumb, tough but submissive. She's manipulative in the extreme, as every femme fatale worth her salt has to be, and that could well include her classic battered wife syndrome dialogue, as she often repeats Russell's questions to her verbatim to underline his power over her. Ari Boyland has a blast playing Russell, even if he's too nice a person to nail as many of his psychoses as he'd like. He certainly has some strong moments but he's just not enough of a lunatic to be the devil that Skyler makes out. He also has the most limited part of the three, without real growth as a character, for very good reasons that I'm completely unable to go into without providing spoilers.

That leaves Milo Cawthorne as Milton, who is the character with the real story arc. He starts the picture as nobody but promptly becomes somebody, even if it isn't who he'd like. With Russell far from the brightest bulb in any pack, it falls to Milton to figure out what's going on and how to beat it. The unspoken question is always whether he'll get to outwit Skyler in the process, because she's no dummy and clearly looks out for number one under every circumstance imaginable. It's also telling that Cawthorne manages to garner a great deal of sympathy from us, even though he's a drug dealer when we first meet him and escalates from there into a callous and thoughtless murderer. Then again, Tennet manages to find a little sympathy for the sociopathic Skyler too by manipulating us as much as she does Milton, Russell and everyone else she meets. We really shouldn't feel for any of these characters but, by the end of the film, we can't quite help feeling just a little even for poor psychopathic Russell.

There are problems here, but they're mostly minor and ignorable. Director Madellaine Paxson does more with her limited budget than many would manage, but most will notice it at some point or other. For me it was most obvious in the cheap and cheerful credits and the public domain songs (and songs by members of the cast) which accompany the solid score by Adam Berry, not to mention the limited cast and location lists. I don't see any of these as a problem, but others might when the film inevitably makes it out beyond the indie festival circuit to the wider public. One detail that did annoy me was how much storage Russell's police car has for its onboard surveillance camera. I might kill for a hard drive like that and land myself in the same trouble these crooks find themselves in here; that could have been handled differently without losing any of the effect, but it's hardly important in the grand scheme of things. I certainly can't fault the progression at the heart of the story, even if I didn't see every cue first time through.

At the end of the day, this is one of those little pictures that could and I'll happily pimp it out to everyone who will listen. It's a twist movie but it's worth watching more than once. It's a dialogue heavy film with a dearth of characters but a lot of action. It's a low budget picture that looks far better than it should, given the cost. It certainly isn't remotely like what you might expect from a debut director whose previous work was on Peter Rabbit, the co-writer of Disney's Cinderella III: A Twist in Time and a cast of Power Rangers RPM alumni. It has more drugs than an Irvine Welsh novel, more bad language than a Steven Seagal flick and more death than a Lucio Fulci picture. And yet it's a film noir, brought up to date with blood like Sam Raimi's and dialogue like the Coen Brothers. Imagine an Ealing comedy remade by Takashi Miike. That's how out there this manages to go, but that clever script by Eddie Guzelian never loses focus. Hopefully the success of this will mean that he'll never have go back to the Mini Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

Playtime Strikes Back (2015)

Director: Adolpho Navarro
Stars: Gracie Dufresne, Zoey Cunningham and Adolpho Navarro

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

The name of Adolpho Navarro didn't show up on my radar until the Phoenix Comicon film challenge last year when his action packed superhero short, Fists in Flight, won top prize. Since then, it keeps cropping up at competition after competition and he's winning a lot of them too, such as this week's A3F 48 hour film challenge. I've discovered that Navarro and N'Raged Media have been making films for a long time and there are a whole slew of them online to check out, so they're a template for other local filmmakers in more ways than one. Another commonality is that these films often feature special effects that would seem to be far more ambitious than would be attempted by anyone in their right mind in a 48 hour film challenge. Isn't it tough enough to write, shoot and score a complete film, edit a trailer and put a poster together, all in 48 hours, without trying to add in special effects? Well, Project Daisy, the Beat the Clock winner last year, incorporated stop motion frickin' animation and Playtime Strikes Back uses puppetry!

And, of course, it uses a lot of puppetry. The story is almost entirely explained in the title, so there's little synopsis needed. Suffice it to say that little Gracie might look sweetness and light but she has a notable streak of brutality, not merely let loose on the deathmatches to which she challenges Ralph on the XBox 360 but also on some of her many soft toys. 'That little beast has a dark side that'll put Vader to shame,' explains the clown on which she vents much of her violence, accompanied with neat slow motion, a neat scream and some neat editing to make it all effective. There's also a raggedy creature hanged from her ceiling fan too, who memorably pleads, 'Please rid me of this harness of death!' Yet some of Gracie's other dolls must either have stuffing for brains or cases of Stockholm syndrome, because they stick up for the little psycho bitch when the clown picks up a knife and pledges bloody revenge. The fight is on with Gracie oblivious in her XBox Live headset and focused on her online carnage.

While the effects make the film viable, it's Gracie Dufresne, who the credits claim is playing herself, who steals the show. She's a natural on camera, her grin utterly appropriate for the circumstances, and she's more than willing to bring the smackdown on that burned and bloodied clown. She also voices Billy, the formerly forgotten dangling doll, though Navarro himself voices the rest. What makes this notable is that instead of merely voice acting over inanimate dolls, he uses an old technique known as Syncro-Vox, first used by Edwin Gillette to allow animals on TV commercials in the 1950s to speak with human mouths. It was popularised on shows from Cambria Productions like Clutch Cargo, Captain Fathom and Space Angel. It saved them a lot of money over regular animation, but I'm pretty sure they didn't work at the speed of Navarro, turning out effective Syncro-Vox work with a greenscreen and software rapidly enough for a film challenge entry. I see him as a mad scientist, doing these things purely because they can't be done.

Of course, the seams have to show eventually in this sort of film, because there are only so many hours in the day to make everything look pristine. Here, they show in the fight between the clown and the doll who sticks up for Gracie; it's great fun, to be sure, with comedic dialogue and decent action, but it's less effective puppetry than elsewhere in the film. Many of the large cast of puppets are of the hand variety and they're worked capably, just like those deemed worthy of the Syncro-Vox treatment, but attempts to manoeuvre the lead puppets through what can only be described as complex fight choreography in the background of Gracie's bedroom while she's playing a deathmatch are just a little too ambitious for this short. I'd say that there are only so many special effects that one man can do with such limitations but I feel sure Navarro would take it as a challenge! I bow to his ambition and his refusal to acknowledge the boundaries others assume. Mostly though, I just enjoy the heck out of how much fun he obviously has.

Playtime Strikes Back can be viewed for free at YouTube.

Sinking (2015)

Directors: Nathan Lawrence and Justin Ehlers
Stars: Justin Ehlers, Kim Gonzales and Berlin Ehlers

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

It could be argued that Sinking, the IFP Breakout Challenge entry from the joyously named Loneliest Yeti Productions, isn't a film at all; it's a music video. Perhaps the judges saw it that way, as the only award it took home was for its music, a song of the same name by a band called Blind Horse. I like the approach, as one of the traditional failings of film challenge films is the sound quality and that isn't a problem with a short that's entirely silent and backed by (or backing) a song that doesn't need any voice to be in sync. Unlike many music videos though, this one does tell a story with its visuals. It's a sad story, dealing with the loss of a child and the struggle of the parents to continue in their relationship after such a traumatic event, but what makes it really interesting is that it's told entirely in reverse. It begins at the moment at which this couple may have finally found a new start, as she rescues him from an attempted suicide by drowning in the bathtub, an act that we later discover has additional meaning.

Because the story is told in reverse, this is inherently a film to watch more than once. First time through, we wonder what the heck's going on for a while until we realise we're venturing backwards to discover a reason for such a drastic act. There are a few hints that the trigger isn't just a bad relationship, so we're not too surprised when the reason manifests itself but it's still a tough thing to watch when it does show up, even abstracted away from; this isn't aiming for in your face trauma. A second viewing solidifies the story and a third both adds nuance to the emotional impact of the piece and helps to highlight some of its flaws. One odd issue I found is that it took a fourth time through to actually realise how the words tie to the visuals, as each time I watched with the intention of listening I ended up merely watching instead. In the end I had to hide the visuals so I could listen without distraction. Is that the film doing something right or the song doing something wrong? I have to say that I don't know.

A more palpable flaw is in the inconsistency of focus. While the camera remains an agreeably loose thing throughout, not annoyingly handheld but staged well enough to not seem staged, it's loose enough that faces often find themselves out of focus. Perhaps that was a deliberate choice by writer/director Nathan Lawrence or his lead actor/co-director Justin Ehlers for artistic reasons, highlighting the lack of focus that plagues this couple after such a tragic loss, but it doesn't play that way and that feeling could have been accomplished, indeed was accomplished, through other visual elements such as the specific progression of events we're taken through. Ehlers and his leading lady, Kim Gonzales, seem capable enough in what they're doing on screen to warrant us seeing them properly, especially as the film's approach inherently deprives us of their voices. That choice I can live with, because it seems more fundamentally appropriate with each viewing. We really don't need words; this is a quintessentially visual story bolstered by music.

Sinking can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Half Measures (2015)

Director: J Schreck
Stars: Scott Nass and Larry Nass

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

Half Measures stood out among the early films screened at this year's Breakout Challenge because it was unlike anything I've seen at previous IFP challenges. It's wordless for the most part, an experimental take on camera placement and editing technique, all set within a very cool location, a junkyard for trucks, and with a charismatic but unlikely looking lead in Scott Nass. He's not young and he's not pretty but he does have a strong presence, even with very little dialogue, and I'm stunned that he hasn't got a single credit on IMDb. Based on these five minutes, right down to the very second, horror movie directors ought to be queueing up to hire him because he has the look and the feel that they need, whether as an antihero, a villain or an outright monster. I want to see his last thirty years of output but I'm presuming that's going to translate to searching YouTube for a few local films and making do. He does get dialogue here, though not a lot and only late on, but he's just as good delivering it, ably selling his character's confusion.

The story is so slight as to be almost non-existent. This unnamed character drives through a junkyard on a cart to work on an old green truck. We can guess he's searching for parts but we can't see that as he's mostly hidden under a jacked up cab and we're focused on other details throughout. Here's a panel and some rust, there are pistons, over here we get some more interesting angles. Eventually our attention is concentrated enough on leaking fluid that we know something's will go horribly wrong and, sure enough, the cab falls back onto his left arm. He fights for a while, still wordlessly, until he loses conciousness, or perhaps, dies. The only thing we're missing here is the bubbling of blood to match the bubbling of piston oil, but perhaps that seemed too obvious to director J Schreck, a cool abbreviation of Jeff Schreckler. Then this man just gets up and wanders off because he's moved out of the realm of reality and into something else entirely. Here's where we get some actual story, which could be read a few different ways.

That dominant performance by Scott 'Boss' Nass is what resonated with me most, complemented well by a supporting slot from his brother, Larry Nass, as a sort of gangster devil, but there's more to praise. The feel is built neatly by the combination of a memorable and sparse location, a lack of dialogue to heighten the isolation, imaginative camerawork from Carl Goodwin, an agreeably sun faded desert colour palette and notably strong editing from Schreck which deservedly won one of the film's two awards at Breakout, the other being for sound design. On the downside, I would have preferred a much steadier camera (this isn't shakycam but it's often handheld) and the lighting is inconsistent. Both are relatively minor concerns as they play into the surreal nature of the piece, as does the odd choice to shoot the first conversation in such a way that we assume the two actors were never together and it's only the product of editing. Are these flaws or aids to the freaky feel? Clearly I should watch more Edge Psychotic films to find out.

Fading Away (2015)

Director: Timothy Helmstadter
Stars: Julie van Lith, Maria Patti and Timothy Helmstadter

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

Another IFP film to run 4:59 and only just squeeze in under the challenge limit, Fading Away has a couple of major flaws but still manages to impress on a few counts, not least that it still managed to wring some emotional response out of me even though it obviously ached to do so. I find that most films which start out with the clear goal of plucking heartstrings and only think about character later in the process, tend to fail pretty miserably; that's especially true of short films, which don't have the luxury of being able to expand into appropriate space. This one is certainly a mixed bag but it does achieve its goal better than most because of the performance of Julie van Lith as Ruth. While this is technically capable, with decent audio and video, it still felt like a lesser piece until Ruth showed up and van Lith quickly drew me in with some believable Alzheimer's antics. I've spent time with people like this and, while many choose to stay quiet to avoid advertising their gaps, some just don't have a clue and sound precisely like Ruth.

She may be starting to come to terms with her memory loss or she may be doing it over and over, but it isn't a new thing for her daughter, Audrey, who is stuck dealing with all the fallout because her brother is in Albuquerque and can't rush over at the drop of a hat. Audrey is clearly fed up with shouldering all the responsibility but she just as clearly cares deeply for her mother. Maria Patti does well as Audrey when she's bouncing off Ruth, but clearly needed a few more takes during her solo scenes to let her monologue flow better. Her biggest problem though, and the biggest problem of the film as a whole, is that Ruth and Audrey aren't believable in the slightest as mother and daughter. Sure, those are clearly the roles they're playing but we don't buy it. Partly it's the ethnic difference, but mostly it's the age difference; sisters is a more believable sell. Unfortunately the script works better as mother/daughter, so that's what they were. Either Tim Helmstadter should have found better aging make up or he should have cast differently.

The other major flaw is the fact that Fading Away is so obviously a much bigger story and five minutes is merely a glimpse into it. The majority of the film is spent in Ruth's front room, as Audrey tries to convince her that she's a danger to herself and suggests that she needs to be somewhere where she can be taken care of. That's not received well, as you might expect, but Audrey has a point, given that her mum nearly burned the house down earlier in the day but can't even remember the fire department being there. Sure, this is a pivotal scene in the bigger story and, perhaps, we might buy into it being a story in itself if that's all we'd been shown. However the earlier scenes of Audrey arguing with her brother on the phone about who gets to do what force us into a much bigger picture and five minutes isn't remotely enough for us to explore that properly. Those scenes should have been cut to focus us in on the real story, with the added benefit of losing the lesser acting moments. Then reshots could be added back in for the feature.

Fading Away can be watched for free on YouTube.

Best Day of My Life (2015)

Director: Jeff Dykhuizen
Stars: Samuel Varghese and Heidi Johnson

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

There were fourteen films eligible for awards at this year's IFP Breakout challenge and fifteen awards up for grabs but, as sometimes happens, the judges chose to divvy those awards up amongst only five titles, so a few other worthies missed out entirely. The two such examples that stood out most to me bookended the big winner of the night, Flight Fright, which won five awards, if not the biggest prize, and I do wonder if its comedy and professionalism stole some of the thunder from the two films around it, Best Day of My Life and One to Another. In particular, Best Day of My Life is a film that needs space to resonate and that was the last thing it got stuck in the middle of a set of shorts with comedy following immediately after its brutal last line. It's neatly constructed, that last line also being its first but the two delivered in amazingly different circumstances. The shift in tone from blissful embrace to stark isolation in a five minute short is superbly handled, as is the juggling between one recurrent shot and a succession of flashbacks.

It's all about a couple, Freddy and Judy. At the beginning of the film, they're a young couple in love, very obviously so and very understandably so too, given that they're getting married. 'Best day of my life,' he tells her, the pair of them a grinning composition of red, white and black. We quickly move on, though, to the moment when she raises the idea of having a family. After all, it's been two years, eleven months and four days, the precision of her memory important given where we're going; he just knows that it's almost three years. And we keep moving forward, these brief flashbacks always returning to the most impactful moments of their life together, interspersed with Freddy driving through Phoenix suburbia. We're only a minute and a half in when the tone starts to change and it does so with emphasis. Suddenly we're not in Kansas any more, Dorothy, and everything starts to descend into darkness. That it does this so capably without resorting to the usual emphasis points like blood and swearing is very telling indeed.

I wish I knew who the two actors are, but this runs a second under the five minute challenge limit, so I'm sure they didn't feel that there was room to add credits. I presume Freddy is played by Samuel Varghese, who is also presumably the agreeably befuddled lead in Clutter, another interesting Breakout Challenge film from a year earlier. Both that film and this aim to tell unusual but believable stories with a message. Here that message is one that isn't heard often enough, because many filmmakers would shy away from material that could well raise accusations of sexism. Well, domestic abuse comes in many forms and it's not always delivered by a man to a woman; it's merely that society's take on gender roles makes it hard for men to reach out in such a situation and receive help instead of laughter. Varghese does very well in this difficult role, but his co-star is even better. She's Heidi Johnson, who has venom in her tongue and power in her stance and is dangerously believable in this role.

Technically it's a little inconsistent but I'm not convinced that there aren't reasons for that. The structure of the film in its progression of flashbacks is hindered by the restrictive five minute running time and I'm sure would breathe better with a little more room to do so. I'm especially interested to know if the lighting choices deliberately play to the changing tone of the story, as the score clearly does, or if they were, well, just inconsistent. Unfortunately each of these little vignettes is so inherently short as to make that tough to figure out and I really hope that Jeff Dykhuizen and his crew of Grand Canyon University film folk shot more footage that they can edit together into a longer version. This is strong as a five minute challenge entry but it could easily be a blistering ten minute short film. It wouldn't be easy to directly expand, so if there isn't any extra footage, it would probably need remaking to flesh it out fully. It would be worth it, as I know I wasn't the only one impressed by this film, even if it didn't win any Breakout awards.

Best Day of My Life can be viewed for free at Vimeo.

Flight Fright (2015)

Director: Jim Politano
Stars: Gerald Dewey, Swizyzinna, London Kim, Doris Morgado, Tony Bafaloukas and Eddie Deezen

This film was an official selection at the Phoenix Film Festival in 2015. Here's an index to my reviews of 2015 films.

This film was a submission to one of the IFP Phoenix film challenges in the 2014-15 season. Here's an index to my reviews of 2014-15 submissions.

Jim Politano really pulled out the stops for his 2015 Breakout Challenge short, partly because of lessons learned from an earlier film. Back in the 2012-13 season at Beat the Clock, Love Sucks won as audience favourite, deservedly because it's still one of the funniest IFP shorts I've seen. Within seconds, he made the audience laugh; within minutes, he'd offended every woman watching with panache; but he saved the day after the credits by bringing balance to the force. It was wonderful writing, but it couldn't have looked worse visually if he'd tried; without any decent equipment or any crew, it ended up in pixellated black and white. Screening in the IFP finals set at the Phoenix Film Festival against superb films like The Memory Ride, Screaming in Silence and La Lucha, it looked amateur. Flight Fright, by comparison, looks professional, at least once it was exported properly from the master copy. And I know how professionally it was done because, disclaimer, I was there as an extra watching it happen from inside the film.

Flight Fright may well be the first IFP Phoenix film challenge entry to be shot in Hollywood, because Jim booked Air Hollywood Studios for the day so he could shoot on an actual set. The smaller plane we shot on sits right next to the bigger one that was used for Airplane! and so many other films since, including Sharknado 2: The Second One. The cast and crew were predominantly sourced from Jim's previous film, the superb hard hitting science fiction short, The Class Analysis, and it surely wouldn't have taken the IFP judges long to vote Gerald Dewey and Swisyzinna best actor and actress respectively. They're the heart of the picture, even if neither is the most recognisable face on screen. No, that's not me; my left arm was once again my most prominent attribute. It's Eddie Deezen, who most may know from The Polar Express or the Grease movies, but I still remember from WarGames and Teenage Exorcist. He has a cameo sitting next to Jim's lovely wife, Karen, and I'm not saying any of this just so I can get into his next film. Honest.

What we hear of the story unfolds entirely within the plane, as it cruises above the ocean at 20,000 feet. Dewey and Swisyzinna are a couple named Gomez, bickering believably back and forth as he's afraid to fly and she can't believe it, given how tough he acts on solid ground. He's taken nerve meds to ease his anxiety but they're apparently having increasingly quirky side effects, as we see in a succession of shots of regular Politano jewel Tony Bafaloukas doing a succession of outrageous things on the wing outside his window. Both Dewey and Swisyzinna impressed me, and they dominate on screen, but I was even more impressed on set by Doris Morgado, playing the flight attendant to whom Mr Gomez explains, 'There's a man out on the wing having a barbecue!' She's racking up credits in Hollywood, in films as prominent as 2 Guns with Denzel Washington and Snitch with Dwayne Johnson, and I'll be working through a bunch of them ahead of her sure climb up the ladder to success. The rest of them are climbing too.

Of course, knowing Politano's penchant for classic sci-fi, both the good stuff and the truly godawful stuff, it won't be too surprising to discover that this has a consistent Twilight Zone sort of feel to it and he nails it pretty well. Bafaloukas, the inveterate improvising scenestealer from Love Sucks and The Sisters of St Mary's, does his level best to steal this one too but he's hindered by being stuck on the other side of the glass where we can't hear him. London Kim, like Dewey, Morgado and a bunch of extras, a key player in The Class Analysis, is excellent here too but doesn't get screen time enough to do justice to his role as the captain; Eddie Deezen gets much more in his cameo slot, with two memorable scenes with Morgado. Technically this is accomplished, the antithesis of Love Sucks, even if the version screened on the night was annoyingly dark; the strong score sadly not acknowledged in its five awards. It's really all about the idea though, which is what it is: funny and enjoyable but without the substance of The Class Analysis.