FILM REVIEW: AROUND THE BLOCK

Dino (Christina Ricci) in Around the Block.

Ab(out)original plays with the text

By John Esther

After a hiatus, American Dino Chalmers (Christina Ricci) has returned to Australia to be with her fiance, Simon (Daniel Henshall). A bright-eyed idealist, Dino takes a job at Redfern High School. Redfern High School is located in a particularly rough neighborhood in Sydney. 

In the first of the film's numerous too-convenient tropes, Dino notices one of the students, Liam (Hunter Page-Lochard), a teenager who she filmed in the streets the day before. He just happens to be in her class, too. 

Liam has troubles. He lives in a poor, violent neighborhood known as The Block. His Mum (Ursula Yovich) is unemployed; his father, Jack (Matt Nable), is in prison; and his older brother, Steve (Mark Coles Smith), plans to avenge his father's imprisonment and uncle's death. 

As the film points out in the beginning, Liam is headed down a similar path to that of his father and brother. However, Liam has a spark. If he can tap into his creative energies, Liam may just avoid a life of crime and despair (not that creativity does not often come with its own agents of despair).

This is where Dino comes in. She is the new drama teacher at Redfern and she wants the kids to learn and perform Shakespeare's Hamlet. Rather than instruct the old fashioned way of learning the world's most famous play by reciting the lines ad nauseum, Dino gets the kids to understand and appreciate Hamlet via comparing it to the lyrics of Tupac Shakur, examining the subtext, and how and why such an "old" English play could have relevance for the modern day immigrant living in Sydney.  

The existential themes of the play's protagonist strikes a chord in the heart of the Liam. To be or not to be in such a cruel world? Thanks to the former profession of Liam's deceased uncle, Liam was familiar with the words of Hamlet, but now he is beginning to understand something deeper.

Written and directed by Sarah Spillane, Around the Block may have its exasperating flaws, but it cannot be accused of not having its heart in the right place. Here is a film about a teacher who puts her energies into kids who society would soon just forget, even if it means giving up a comfortable bourgeois life with Simon. Meanwhile, the film lends an identity to those living in poverty and the dignity of struggle against it through art. 

Moreover, most of the cast is pretty good, especially Nable's subtle portrayal of a man who sees everything as he knows it disappearing. 

On the other hand, there are a few pretentious scenes involving standing on rooftops and incredulous "race baiting" over a meal at a restaurant. Was Dino just oblivious to the racism of Simon and his friends before she moved in with him?

Then there are the numerous, manipulative and insipid music selections that really grate on one's nerves. I realize the filmmakers are reaching for a younger audience here, but the songs are not only lousy, many of them are obvious attempts to manipulate the feelings and reactions of the audience. And the way Around the Block adapts and actually uses a cover of Mister Mister's "Broken Wings" is as banal and unwelcome as the original 1985 song (and video). 

Having written that, Around the Block is better fare geared for the youth than most movies out currently in theaters. At least Around the Block tries to address themes about adolescence, art and poverty. 

LAFF 2012: THE FIRST MAN

Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin) The First Man.

The rebel

By Ed Rampell

I have many lead sentence ideas competing in my feverish noggin to launch this review with, so I’ll begin by declaring: writer-director Gianni Amelio’s adaptation of philosopher-writer Albert Camus’ The First Man is the best picture I’ve seen so far at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2012. It is sort of Francois Truffaut’s 1959 The 400 Blows meets Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, with a little bit of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 You Can’t Go Home Again tossed in for good measure.

Like Wolfe’s posthumously published book, Camus’ novel was autobiographical and unfinished when he died an untimely death at age 46 in a 1960 car accident. Shortly after The First Man opens Jean Cormery (Jacques Gamblin), a Camus-like prominent writer in France, returns to his hometown of Algiers. Just as Wolfe received a hostile reception at his hometown of Asheville after his tell all about these secretive North Carolinians’ sins, scandals, etc., Cormery is plunged into Algeria’s bitter division, as Arabs struggle for independence against the French settlers and state. Although Cormery is one of the “pied noir” (the so-called “dark foot” settlers of French origin) he speaks out in favor of a “just” and “equal” Algeria during his return visit -- much to the chagrin of some settlers. (This was a very brave if dangerous thing to do, even back in France, where French supporters of Algerian liberation, such as Camus’ fellow Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, faced death threats.)

Despite being warned for security reasons to lodge in a hotel, Cormery stays in the family apartment with his loving if illiterate mother, played as an old woman by Catherine Sola. As a solo mom whose husband -- like Camus’ actual father -- was killed during World War I when her son (Nino Jouglet) was an infant, Catherine (poignantly played as a young woman by Maya Sansa) raises little Jean with the help of her simpleminded laborer brother (Nicolas Giraud) and the strict family matriarch (Ulla Baugue). In real life, Camus’ mom was a deaf mute, but although Jean’s screen mother isn’t, the difficulties of his Algiers childhood are movingly evoked. And like all the troubled children depicted in French cinema, he grows up to become a great artiste (Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature) and, in that motion picture Parisian tradition, is shown going to the movies.

The First Man alternates between 1950s Algeria and Cormery’s 1920s childhood. There is a seaside scene reminiscent of the ending of The 400 Blows and checkpoint and café scenes suggestive of The Battle of Algiers. (By the way, it bears noting that Algeria has played a distinguished if little commented upon role in film history, from Pontecorvo’s revolutionary masterpiece to the 1969 Oscar-winner, Z, to 2006’s Days of Glory,2011’s Free Men, and now this stellar feature, etc.)

The film’s denouement may seem abrupt or even disorienting, but this may be the filmmaker’s way of indicating that the source work, Camus’ novel, was cut short and incomplete. In any case, The First Man is excellently acted and co-stars Denis Podalydes as young Jacques’ mentor. In 2011 Podalydes portrayed the recently and happily deposed French president Nicolas Sarkozy in 2011’s also superb, The Conquest (offscreen the activist actor campaigned for the Socialist candidates, including the contender who just beat Sarkozy, Francois Hollande). Gamblin is reflective as Camus’ adult alter ego, and he appeared in another recent great film, The Names of Love, a personal favorite, wherein Gamblin romanced a part-Algerian woman played by sexy Sara Forestier. Jouglet does excellent work, too.

Of course, the greatest existential question of all time is: Would you walk a mile for a Camus? Indeed, when it comes to The First Man, not even a plague should stop you -- strap on your shoes and run, don’t walk, to go see this beautifully shot (by cinematographer Yves Cape) Camus biopic of sorts about coming of age and dealing with revolutionary upheaval in a dignified, honorable way. Don’t’ be a stranger to a movie based on the last novel by and about the author who wrote The Stranger and The Plague.


The First Man screens at the Los Angeles Film Festival: June 23, 2 p.m., Regal Cinemas.

  

 

  

  

 

FILM REVIEW: WRECKED

Man (Adrien Brody) in Wrecked.

Road same

By Don Simpson

There is a wrecked car and two dead bodies: one in the backseat, one laying outside the car. The lone survivor, a nameless character (Adrien Brody), is pinned in the front passenger seat of the vehicle. Visibly bruised and bleeding, he tries as hard as he possibly can to get out of the car. It begins to rain and he finds himself cold and wet and just plain scared. His right leg is pinned somewhere underneath the glove compartment; his head is riddled with amnesia. He cries. He mutters curses. He moans. He writhes in pain. There is a pistol underneath the front seat. A female hiker (Caroline Dhavernas) appears to him. There is a mountain lion and a rifle-wielding man (Adrian Holmes).

What is real? What are his dreams or hallucinations? What the fuck?

This is a man who is existentially crippled by unhappy memories and ghosts of a guilty conscience. He repeatedly tries to come to terms with his situation, trying his best to hold off his ever-encroaching insanity. This is his Sisyphean purgatory; he is truly suffering for past deeds that he cannot recall, in this absurdly nightmarish version of solitary confinement.

Director Michael Greenspan's Wrecked finds itself in the casual victim pile of unfortunate timing, as we have all too recently seen two far superior films featuring a character trapped in a claustrophobic location (Danny Boyle's 127 Hours and Rodrigo Cortés' Buried) -- so, in this case, three is most definitely a crowd. Not quite as sublimely claustrophobic as Buried, this near-dialogueless anti-thriller directed by Greenspan deserves a certain amount of credit for sticking with its guns. Unlike 127 Hours, it is not until the closing minutes that we are given the opportunity to briefly escape our anonymous protagonist's hellish predicament (unfortunately, this one fleeting moment redeems our protagonist far too quickly).

Similar to James Franco in 127 Hours and Ryan Reynolds in Buried, Wrecked gives Brody ample opportunities to flash his impressive thespian chops, but other than Brody's intensely inspired performance, Wrecked does not have very much to offer its audience. Even during its relatively short running time of 90 minutes, I often found my attention wavering. I guess watching Brody sit in a car -- then drag himself around the forest -- is not mentally stimulating enough for me.