LYT at LAFF: Monsters, Foreigners, and Us

As of yesterday, the Twi-hards setting up camp were herded into a new pen. I like to imagine that actual sheepdogs were involved. Now there is a big, elaborate black carpet area for the celebs to run the gauntlet, and fans without tents are already staking out their spaces by the railings. It’s like the “hands on a hard body” contest where the last person to keep standing up while touching a truck wins. Except you don’t win anything here, save a glimpse of the film stars, whose hard bodies would probably prefer to avoid those grubby hands of yours.

TWILIGHT is...well, you know.

But in other news of cheesy romance against a pseudo-horror backdrop, the fest gave us MONSTERS, one of those horror movies where all involved take pains to point out that this is a horror movie that isn’t really about horror, but about the issues, man! Or should I say, “about the issues, MATE,” because the director’s name is Gareth, and only English people have that name.

Other things are irritating about MONSTERS – it kicks off with something that’s become an irritating cliché in my world: the sound of ominous news reports on a black screen. This is a big tip-off, in fact, that the film is going to be full of potentially ominous sound while not showing much. Now, I hated when BLAIR WITCH came out and every critic went on and on about how great it is because it’s all implied and you never see anything...I love implication, but I need to believe I might see something. In MONSTERS, you do see stuff...but the movie’s not really ABOUT that, mate!

Are you ready for the loaded allegory that is the movie’s plot? Pay particular attention, Arizona. In the future, the whole area around the Mexican border has become an infected zone filled with alien monsters that look like giant, land-dwelling octopi. Caught in South America, a journalist (Scoot McNairy, yes, Scoot) finds himself thrown together with his boss’ daughter (Whitney Able), and must help her get across the border back to the U.S. But of course, they find out that getting into the U.S. from Mexico is HARD! (Do you get the point yet?) They get ripped off, they lose passports, and ultimately have to cross monster territory with the aid of some dubious-looking Mexicans with guns. When they get close, they find out that there’s a massive, forbidding wall on the border. “It’s different looking at America from outside,” they say, just in case we missed the metaphor.

At a certain point, I realized that we really weren’t going to see much monster action in the movie, and at this point I became fed up. Without monsters, the primary tension becomes “can our American protagonists trust scary Mexicans?” And since most of the time they can, this isn’t really what you’d call tension. The monsters do show up in time to give us a climax of sorts, and I suspect that there wasn’t enough of a budget to show a full-on glowing octopus in every sequence...but couldn’t our heroes have battled a few non-CG tentacles that implied a larger attack? Oh, wait, then we might have forgotten for a few moments that this is actually a movie about immigration.

MONSTERS, which will be released by Magnolia in October, would like to be DISTRICT 9, but it isn’t even SLEEP DEALER...now THAT was a movie that combined sci-fi and illegal immigrants in a nifty way.

From south of the border to behind the former Iron Curtain, STREET DAYS is a pleasantly dark bit of entertainment from the republic of Georgia, and a director named Levan Koguashvili. First impression, looking at the opening credits, is that the Georgian language as written looks similar to Armenian, all circles and curves. Second impression: of COURSE one of the first people we see on camera is wearing an Adidas tracksuit top! What is it with Eastern Europe and ‘80s tracksuits?

At first, the movie seems random, and dull, but gradually, things cohere around the story of a disheveled dude named Checkie (Guga Kotetishvili), who’s addicted to dope and trying to score, but he keeps having mishaps that cause him to lose his money and his stash. The local corrupt cops up the stakes on him by trying to get him to finger the school-age son of one of his friends – in return for which they’ll cut him in on their bribes and drop charges against him – but when Checkie finds out that the boy has never actually done drugs before, he feels pangs of conscience and doesn’t want to be the guy that starts him off. Instead, he and the kid embark on a series of hare-brained and ill-fated schemes to make money, but as every option comically fails, Checkie is given one last chance to set things right for himself and his family by setting the kid up again.

The movie’s mix of farcical humor and dark subject matter is a unique and compelling one – Checkie’s plans are thwarted by, among other things, a kid’s unexpected diabetic coma, and a sudden balcony-plunging suicide. This kind of tone doesn’t always play well in the U.S., but it should knock audiences dead in Europe.

As I exited the screening, I overheard David Ansen saying, in what seemed like praise, that the lead guy isn’t even an actor. Well, tru dat – he certainly isn’t great at acting. He’s fine when doing deadpan, but towards the end of the movie, when everyone else comments how awful and obviously drug-withdrawn he seems to be, he’s the same as he always was. The guy could at least have gone method and moistened his forehead a bit for that cold sweat look. Minor issue, as the film will either have won you over by that point or never, but still.

From nearby Russia comes VLAST (POWER), a documentary by American entrepreneur Cathryn Collins on the topic of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Don’t know who that is? Then you’re part of the reason she made the movie, I guess. Though I’m not sure by film’s end I particularly know “who” he is as a person.

As far as what he was known for, that’s another story; Khodorkovsky was one of the first of the major oligarchs to spring up in post-Soviet Russia, after Yeltsin sold off a bunch of the nation’s energy assets to bribe businessmen into voting for him. Putin, who succeeded Yeltsin, then told the oligarchs to stay out of politics. With former KGB men in power, old grudges resurfaced, and people like and including Khodorkovsky were arrested, often on spurious charges, even though there is plenty of dark and corrupt stuff in the guy’s past, including at least one mysterious and convenient death.

VLAST is a useful primer, but there’s a big elephant in the room named Vladimir. Putin the complex villain is a far more compelling subject than Khodorkovsky, and the more I watched, the more I wanted it to be about him instead. That’s not the movie Collins wanted to make, so I can’t really blame her for not doing it. The movie she did make, however, doesn’t give me much of a sense of the personality of Khodorkovsky: he was rich, driven, and ultimately defiant...but I could have read that in the papers. Watching VLAST made me feel like I was being forced to do homework, rather than told a fascinating story.

Finally, a family movie, of sorts. The movie being entitled A FAMILY. Not entirely unexpectedly, it’s part of that subgenre which is seemingly far more common in foreign-language films than in Hollywood: the “Daddy’s dying, let’s start arguing about his inheritance now” drama. Done well, they usually work, and so it is with Pernille Fischer Christensen’s film, despite one major annoying factor: this Danish movie embellishes its drama with English-language wuss-rock of the sub-Elliott Smith variety, especially at the very beginning, when archival footage, home movies, and seemingly chalked captions show us the history of the Rheinwald family, bakers honored by royalty.

The father, Richard (Jesper Christensen, who as far as I can tell is not related to the director or any of the other Christensens involved) has just been given a clean bill of health from cancer, and so decides to marry his longtime companion (and mother of two of his children) Sanne (Anne Louise Hassing).

Meanwhile, eldest daughter Ditte (Lene Maria Christensen, again no apparent relation to anyone else here) has had a job offer to work in New York, which is exciting...but she’s also pregnant, and will have no time for motherhood if she takes the assignment. After some tough thinking, she opts for abortion, which is handled remarkably easily, since I guess the home abortion pill is available in Denmark. That potential obstacle thusly taken care of, she must deal only with her father’s desire that she one day succeed him running the historical family bakery. “I just don’t get bagels,” he says, upon hearing about the New York plans, “too hard and dense. And donuts – what a sorry excuse for pastry.”

Lo and behold, the urgency gets upped on that score when Dad gets seizures, and inoperable tumors are found in his brain. This not only makes him an invalid again, but it also brings out the nastiness in him. Can you help a dying dad if he won’t let you? They certainly try to figure out how.

Jesper Christensen strikes the right balance here between curmudgeon and grandpa, genuinely frightening and hissable when the moodswings hit, but a doting – if occasionally intolerant – patriarch the rest of the time. Lene is equally strong as his daughter, and her arguments with her boyfriend over tough-to-reconcile personal dilemmas ring very true.

And then that goddamn music kicks in at the end to let you know it’s time to be sad. Less would have been more in that one particular area.

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.