Surviving Progress (Mathieu Roy, 2011, Canada)

Apparently based on the book A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright, this documentary looks largely at the inherent dark side of progress. If you're a thinking person, you've probably thought about most of this stuff already, but I did learn one interesting concept from the film: the progress trap. Essentially, progress has a tendency to lead to a saturation point past which dire consequences occur.  A primitive example is native people driving herds of mammoths over cliffs and driving the extinction of their main food source. The film features people such as Margaret Atwood and Jane Goodall talking about primates and progress and the ecological dangers facing us today. It's interesting, but I often found it difficult to pay attention to because it's so distressing. I think I will probably endeavor to read the book, and I may watch the film again when I'm feeling more emotionally robust.
B

Now streaming on Netflix, btw.

The Last Friday / Al Juma Al Akheira (Yahya Alabdallah, 2011, Jordan)

This was a dour, somewhat depressing movie. A cab driver, likable enough, but deep in hock following a failed attempt to make it big by going abroad, deals with cancer (or some testicular problem) of some sort and a juvenile delinquent son. He's also got all kinds of issues about his wife being married to a wealthy man, we discover. He also doesn't seem interested in telling anyone that he has this serious health condition. I don't know, most of the characters are likable enought but the film, like the city it takes place in, is stark and somehow painful to watch. This movie and I may have been doomed from the start because men annoy me so much, but for whatever reason, I had trouble really connecting to this one. The acting is good; Ali Suliman deserves the praise he's gotten for a good performance. The film is probably really real. People are probably too cold and unhelpful and self-defeating. It's probably just hard for me to watch sometimes, because it reminds me that I might not like people too much. It's funny though that people in this movie seemed so fond of dogs because we're all the time hearing that Arabs don't like dogs. It's funny how little we know about each other.
B-

Coming of Age / Anfang 80 (Gerhard Ertl & Sabine Hiebler, 2011, Austria)

This was supposed to be my light palate cleanser of the festival, and being a film festival, this pretty much was, is the funny thing about that. Right before it started the lady next to me said something about it being sad or something, and I was like, what? I guess what I failed to glean from a trailer or anything before seeing this movie are two key facts of the film that are presented upfront in the film, but not so much in the trailer, as I recall. First, the man in the story is already married to another woman. Secondly, the woman has cancer. That said, it's still a pleasure to watch. It's half comedy, half tearjerker, and more or less 100% crowdpleaser. The cast is great, it's beautifully filmed, and the story hits in all the right places. Anyway, I ate it right up.
A-

On a bit of a side note, the lady from Paradise: Love appears in a supporting role in this film. It's not a huge role, but it was a fun surprise, having just seen Paradise: Love a few days prior to seeing this.

The Weekend / Das Wochenende (Nina Grosse, 2011, Germany)

It's unfortunate, but I think that my experience of this film was largely contaminated by the extreme annoyingness of the audience with whom I saw it. It turns out this film is too subtle for a large swath of elderly viewers who couldn't seem to figure out what was happening and were scandalized by anything they could understand. Nevermind that this film is neither particularly hard to follow nor particularly scandalous.

The film is based on Bernhard Schlink's fictionalized novel about the release of an RAF member in 2008. The RAF (Red Army Faction), aka Baader Meinhof Group, may be familiar to you if you've seen The Baader Meinhof Complex, which was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar a couple of years ago. They were a domestic terrorist group in Germany during the 1970s, mostly, and many of the members went to prison and the ones who didn't myseriously die there have been gradually released over the past few decades. I haven't read the book, but the director said that she made major changes in adapting it because the book is predominately a philosophical treatise and therefore not particularly cinematic. In this film, Jens, played by Sebastian Koch from The Lives of Others, is released from prison after 18 years and his sister (Barbara Auer) arranges a weekend to celebrate with some of his old friends. Never mind that nobody seems to feel like celebrating, least of all Jens. He seems preoccupied with discovering who tipped of the police all those years ago. There is a lot of drama as well about the woman he had loved then (Katja Riemann) and the child they had together. The child is namely a son whom the father never really acknowledged and who is now an angry young man.

The film is interesting in some ways. There is suspense about who called the police back then, for example, and some of the dialogue is sharp. It's well filmed and the actors mostly have a great rapport. That said, the film is, as is typical for many a German film, loaded with family melodrama that gets to feeling a little schmaltzy. Additionally, the discussion of the movement and the crimes that brought them to this place are vague and superficial. Still, whatever weaknesses I recognized in this film, I imagine that I will probably watch it again if I get the chance.
B

Black Pond (Will Sharpe & Tom Kingsley, 2011, UK)

Out of the ashes of disappointment arising from a canceled screening of Garrone's Reality arose the small triumph of Black Pond. In this pseudodocumentary, which doesn't actually seem to be based on a true story, a family reenacts and deals with the fallout of the events resulting from an encounter with a strange man in a  nature area and his eventual death at their dinner table. If the fracturing of a family is less than entirely novel, I did find the treatment to be original. I found the film very funny and often quite moving as well. I really enjoyed it and would watch it again.
A-

happythankyoumoreplease (2011) / The Illusionist (2010)

happythankyoumoreplease reminded me of those indie comedies from the 90s that dealt with various creative New York people and their romantic goings on. It's about a short story writer who wants to be a novelist but who lacks the maturity for that and he finds a lost boy on the train who doesn't want to go back to foster care and ends up keeping him for a while. He also picks up this bartender named Mississippi and they amble towards couplehood while his best friend and his cousin (stepsister?) work through their own emotional hangups. It's not groundbreaking and its pretty slight and periodically very cheesy but it was generally entertaining. C


I found The Illusionist to be a film of real grace and a beauty that was at once complex and simple. An elderly French magician in what I assumed to be the late 50s travels around the UK working thankless jobs for an audience that has moved on from his old-fashioned amusements. A young girl attaches herself to him and she seems to believe he's a real magician who can supply her with all the things she desires. They live together. He tries to please her. Life goes on. There was this intense authenticity running through every scene and watching it was an experience of aching beauty and wonder. It's really amazing how affecting all the little details and background characters are. It's definitely the best animated film I've seen in the last year. Maybe in the last ten years. One of the best I've ever seen, I think. It's a little sad that Toy Story 3 is going to win this year just like whatever bogus nonsense beat The Secret of Kells last year. A