The Los Angeles Film Festival is already over. It hardly feels like it’s began, though I was there for five nights. The Los Angeles Film Festival was a tad shorter this year, and spanned a Wednesday to the following Thursday, rather than the usual two weekends and the week in between. You’ll hear more about the big galas like Snowpiercer and Earth to Echo in the coming weeks, but I did see a few more films I want to tell you about. The really standout ones, I’ve reviewed in full, but there was some good stuff in the weekday shows, and a few I need to warn you about too.
Jossy’s
Jossy’s is a Japanese spoof of “Power Rangers” type shows. The sensibility is a bit more like Austin Powers than Airplane, but Jossy’s is not irreverent so much as childish. I was thinking how the camera lingers on Dr. Evil laughing maniacally for way too long, so does Jossy’s show us too much of the Jossy’ses real lives to lend them badass credibility. The joke is pretty obvious, but then if I loved “Power Rangers” as much as I love buddy cop movies, then I might’ve loved Jossy’s as much as I love 22 Jump Street.
Five everyday women are chosen to form a superhero team to fight phantoms. Every phantom battle takes place in the same rock quarry, and it’s probably the same guy wearing every phantom costume. The Jossy’s are five distinct colors (except Blue and Navy are kind of similar, that’s one of the jokes) and all five together form a super tornado weapon.
The joke is basically how the Jossy’s dilly dally and get distracted from actually fighting the phantoms. There’s a lot more talking than fighting and it’s cheesy on purpose, maybe a little too precious when it comes to slapstick and preening. It takes a long time to explain the Jossy’s, something we already pretty much know if we know the genre, but once it gets going the silliness is kind of infectious. They complain about the silly name Jossy’s (it’s just as meaningless in Japanese as it is in English translation). Their reactions to the more outrageous phantoms are more indignant than fearful.
If you love Japanese team superhero shows, Jossy’s will be a treat. If you have no idea what I’ve been talking about for the past three paragraphs, it’s probably best to just keep it that way.
Land Ho
Any movie that got into Sundance has my interest, but there’s always the chance it’s another I Melt With You too. I missed Land Ho in Park City this year, but now that I caught it at LAFF, I’m glad I didn’t waste any of my precious Sundance time on it.
The basic premise of Land Ho is that a foul mouthed old man who smokes pot is cute, and I disagree. He is not cute. Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) talks about pussy and tits and it’s just as sexist as when a young guy says it. His friend Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) is just silent, along for the ride, so Mitch has to fill every second with some nonsense talk.
This is no Lemmon/Matheau duo here, but now that the real Grumpy Old Men are no longer with us, this is all we’ve got. Mitch and Colin go on a vacation in Iceland, and they kind of come to terms with their unspoken issues. I think. Honestly, there’s not much attention paid to it. Every chance they get, Mitch holds court over some young people telling them his awful “wisdom.”
Land Ho isn’t shot with a handheld camera so much as it looks like the camera was on a tripod but someone was jiggling it. It’s just enough that the picture isn’t steady but not intense enough to even have an effect. It made me antsy seeing the frame jiggle while the characters sat at the dinner table. Come on, just lock it down.
This is an indie film that is definitely not meant to be seen in a big theater with state of the art sound. The bass of Nelson and Eenhoorn’s voices gets irritating as it rumbles your seat for 90 minutes. Maybe I could have tolerated it on VOD but probably not, so at least it went down in a blaze of glory.
Nightingale
Nightingale is a one man show, and David Oyelowo is great as the only character in the film. As such though, his story is rather predictable, and the whole premise is kind of a gimmick. Bravo to the filmmakers for really committing to one actor only. We never hear the other end of his phone calls, we see the back of just one other character’s head, and only one other voice when someone actually comes to the door.
At the beginning of the movie, Peter Snowden (Oyelowo) admits to killing his mother. He records vlogs to give him an excuse to talk to us, and there are plenty of phone calls in which he makes excuses why his mom can’t come to the phone, and reveals other information to us. Writer Frederick Mensch and director Elliott Lester don’t rely on that completely though. Peter is just as happy to speak out loud to himself.
So this is a portrayal of a man’s descent into madness, or the portrayal of someone who’s been mad for quite a long time already. It’s very accurate as far as that kind of self-justifying spiral, but Peter is quite annoying to watch. He’s disturbing, but listening to him sing and watching him dance makes me just want to shake him to make him stop. This is someone who, when he’s alone, needs to fill the silence with something, and that’s obnoxious regardless of his darkness.
The Road Within
I think it’s great that a filmmaker chose subjects like Tourette’s Syndrome, OCD and anorexia about which to make a film. Drama can illustrate these conditions for audiences who have no firsthand experience, who may have otherwise been dismissive until they saw a human face on it. The actors are phenomenal at portraying these conditions with sensitivity and a light touch. It is, however, a bit of a gimmick to send these three characters on a road trip.
Vincent (Robert Sheehan) is committed to an institution for his Tourette’s Syndrome. His roommate Alex (Dev Patel) has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and he meets Marie (Zoe Kravitz), a woman suffering from anorexia. When Zoe steals a car from the staff, Vincent and Alex come along for the ride.
The road trip story does everything you expect from a road trip, only with characters whose psychological conditions create additional obstacles. Vincent wants to spread his mom’s ashes at their destination, but narratively it’s just to give everyone something to do. A more contained story at the institution would have been more honest, if more difficult to slip into a three act structure. Sorry to keep bringing up Short Term 12, but that’s the high watermark for institutional drama. It might be scary when there’s no clear end point like the final destination, but that makes it more powerful when you just have to resolve something without clear indicators.
That said, the performances of Sheehan, Patel and Kravitz are the reason this movie exists, and rightly so. It is wonderful to see characters with Tourette’s, OCD and anorexia portrayed as people, not case studies or acting vehicles. There are moments of absurdity and moments of heartbreak all around, and it is so valuable to give these characters a showcase, that is enough to recommend The Road Within.
Supremacy
Supermacy is a solid drama about a racially charged hostage situation. It is an unflinching portrayal of white supremacist bigotry and desperation, though some of the coincidences make me question how close it follows the true story on which it is based.
On the day Garrett “Tully” Fuller (Joe Anderson) is released from prison, he shoots a policeman during a routine traffic stop. He and his Aryan Brotherhood groupie (Dawn Olivieri) take refuge in the home of an African-American family and hold them hostage. Any hostage story has plenty of dramatic material, as both the aggressor and the victims figure out how to deal with each other. Supremacy is even more volatile because of all the baseless insecurities and conspiracy theories Tully wholeheartedly believes.
I could not find anything online about the real Robert Tully on whom the film is based, so this must not have been a well documented case. The film even states that the real Tully is scheduled for execution this month, and still no news of the case! That leaves me with a few questions to which I couldn’t even locate answers.
The film can be a valuable message to show the futility of subscribing to a hateful ideology. Not only are Anderson and Olivieri frighteningly ugly in their portrayal of hate crime, but all the “brotherhood” Tully was counting on disappears when he can’t serve them anymore. So, hate is not the answer, and Supremacy is a dramatic exploration of that theme. Hopefully it can bring a little more light to the situation.
The Two Faces of January
Screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut is very well made, but it’s not very well written. Considering the source material is acclaimed author Patricia Highsmith, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. Was it the adaptation, or an unfilmable source?
Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife Collette (Kirsten Dunst) are on vacation in Athens when a con artist Rydal (Oscar Isaac) targets them. Rydal’s got eyes for Collette but gets involved with a crime Chester committed. This leads to a surprisingly slow, uninvolving crooks-on-the-run story.
The crime Chester has committed is topical, so I imagine it was added for the movie, yet it’s so vague that it’s just generic. There’s murder, lies and jealousy, all overwrought and melodramatic. The perfect crime goes wrong and yadda yadda yadda. The film fails to establish any of the characters as worthy of audience identification, let alone sympathy. So as suspense is constructed on the side of the bad guys, why bother? Let ‘em get caught. Assholes.
Okay, there are a few clever aspects. Only Rydal speaks Greek so he’s at an advantage when he hears news reports. The locations are beautifully shot, and suspense sequences get the Hitchcock establishing elements right. It’s just if it weren’t based on a book, I wouldn’t believe the clichés in The Two Faces of January.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
