Dir - Enrique Buleo
Overall: GOOD
This episodic anthology comedy serves as the full-length debut from Spanish writer/director Enrique Buleo, Still Life with Ghosts, (Bodegón con fantasmas), taking a look at the La Mancha region where people nonchalantly deal with various aspects of the supernatural. A co-production between Spain and Serbia, each of the five tales takes place in the same locale, three of them dealing with ghosts who have visited the area to either change the name on their tombstone to that of their identified gender, get a priest to get them out of purgatory, or warn people of otherworldly hoaxes. The other two vignettes spliced in between are more indirectly linked to the afterlife as one man tries to assure that he will return from the grave by leaving a toothpick hobby project unfinished, and a woman goes to obscure lengths to find love. Most of the characters are middle-aged or elderly, and everything touches upon societal aspects and superstitions in a matter-of-fact way where the scenarios are ridiculous, but nobody seems excitedly phased by them. In this sense, to say that the humor is "dry" would be an understatement, and nothing is laugh-out-loud funny. Yet Buleo's arid tone is deliberate, showing us people who are entrenched enough in their ways, their beliefs, and their desperate hopes of what lies beyond that when some evidence befalls them, they take it in stride, sigh with relief, or just get frustrated.
Dir - Casper Kelly
Overall: MEH
A direct sequel to the previous year's absurdist Adult Swim Yule Log, Adult Swim Yule Log 2: Branchin' Out does a commendable job of keeping itself as randomly wacky as its predecessor while trying to expand into further silliness. That said, it is also inevitably less successful than the first movie which was so peculiar and unreadable that it got by more on its boldness than anything else. In other words, we know the "no rules apply" universe in which these films exist now, and writer/director Casper Kelly mostly offers up yet another stream of arbitrary goofiness where some of the characters are deliberate cardboard cutouts, others behave as if they are real people, and none of the events that happen to them have any semblance of reality. The now tested and successful formula works as much as it can, and Kelly picks up the narrative exactly where it left off, finding Andrea Laing inexplicably surviving what happened in the first movie, having PTSD from it, and hilariously winding up in a holiday Hallmark movie. This wisely gives Kelly another genre to make fun of, and he goes full nod-and-wink meta by even switching the aspect ratio and color grading to different extremes depending on how horror or non-threatening romantic comedy the situation is. He often does this in the exact same shot where Laing picks up on the fact that she has stumbled into one more bizarro movie within a movie. All of the humor is purposeful and most of it is worth a chuckle, but the shtick fails to strike lighting twice, or at least strike lighting as much as it did the first gobsmacked round.
Dir - Zeshaan Younus
Overall: MEH
Mislabeled as both a horror film and found footage film, (it is neither), Zeshaan Younus' crowdfunded, full-length debut The Buildout is well-shot and well performed, but it meanders frustratingly. While the protagonists, (Jenna Kanell and Hannah Alline, respectively), bring along a camcorder on their bonding quest into the desert where both of them are grieving the loss of a close friend/sister, one of them has gotten sober and joined a religious cult that we learn virtually nothing about, and the other is skeptical yet supportive, otherworldly elements are nearly non-existent. The movie opens with a random woman spouting long-winded poppy-cock about finding a spiritual hotbed after years of searching, we occasionally cut back to her and another presumed cult member doing even more vague and inconsequential things, all the while the main trajectory of Kanell and Alline reveals little of interest. This is through no fault of the actors, both of whom have a natural chemistry with each other and exhibit plausible emotional struggles when things rise to the surface. The problem is that Younus has an unfortunate sense of pacing, peppering the film with lingering shots, cutaways to scenery or more vapid montages of the two cultists doing whatever, and both Kanell and Alline taking their sweet time going over what we already know they are going over from the onset. No mystery is built up because the entire movie feels like a first act, and what minuscule amount of curious occurrences happen, (enough to count on less than one hand), are never followed up, nor do they convey any sense of atmosphere or spookiness. Naturally, the whole thing ends abruptly which is to be expected after such wheel-spinning, and it is clear that Younus failed to flesh out any of her ideas before she hit the evocative-on-paper, rural California landscape.
No comments:
Post a Comment