Hugo Dillon and Molly Ryman in "Things I Don't Understand"

Someday, everyone you know won’t exist. Tomorrow doesn’t matter until it’s today. No one makes it through life unscathed, in one way or another.

These are just a few of the lessons found in “Things I Don’t Understand,” a small indie rumination with big pretensions. In his follow up to his debut feature “…Around” (2008), director David Spaltro gets ambitious and tackles life’s essential questions: what happens when we die? why are we here? what does it mean to love? how can we accept death?

Violet is an aloof grad student hoping to discern life’s indiscernible mysteries through her study of death and beyond. Along the way she’s befriended, challenged and enlightened by a terminally ill woman and a cagey bartender, and faces the realities of adult life with her boisterous artist roommates.

As in his debut “…Around,” Spaltro again focuses on the volatile, transient period of uncertainty so commonly associated with young adulthood. These characters are on their own, several years removed from mom’s basement, yet they have neither the wisdom nor the perspective that comes with age. They’ve just begun the journey of self-discovery and existential examination that will last the rest of their lives.

Aaron Mathias and Grace Folsom, the mysterious bartender and terminally ill patient, respectively, anchor a strong supporting cast, which adds flavor and dynamics to Violet’s quest. Molly Ryman, who also starred in “…Around,” has the face of a star. Her portrayal of the intrepid, sporadically abrasive protagonist holds the entire enterprise together. She is ready for the big time.

The film, though visibly low-budget, is nevertheless technically accomplished. Small nitpicks such as a too-wide shot in the therapy sessions, the occasional acting misstep, and a dull, homogenous lighting scheme aren’t enough to overshadow its refreshing earnestness and relatively low-key approach to decidedly high-key themes.

Though he occasionally overreaches, or makes too obvious an observation, Spaltro generally handles the weighty material deftly. “Things I don’t Understand” smartly avoids the preachiness plague, and serves as the audience’s companion rather than its teacher. Too often, burgeoning writer/directors pour the bulk of their energy into the craft of filmmaking, getting bogged down in blocking, framing, lighting, etc., and neglect the emotional side of storytelling. Spaltro has sidestepped this problem and seems poised to have a big impact on indie film in the coming years.

Maria Sødahl has made an assured feature debut with Limbo (2010) at the Cinema City film festival, Novi Sad, Serbia. The film was previously screened at Montreal and Thessaloniki. Set in the 1970s, Limbo centres on a Norwegian woman named Sonia who, with her two children, goes to Trinidad to join her husband Joe who is working for an oil company. She receives a warm welcome from the expatriate community, especially the Swedish wife of one of Joe’s colleagues who is happy to find someone who speaks her language.

But Sonia is ill at ease with their new lifestyle, from the uncomfortable décor of their house, with its formal, overbearing housekeeper Mrs. George, to the superficiality of the wives who follow their husbands wherever their temporary contracts lead them. Although her children seem to enjoy the novelty of living on a tropical island, Sonia worries about the strict discipline and all-English instruction at their local Catholic school. Also, while she is happy to be reunited with her husband, he spends much of his time at the office (with his pretty Trinidadian secretary) or on business trips, so she and the children are often left to cope on their own.

The film’s theme could be described as ‘culture shock’, as it focuses on the combination of enjoyment and stress of moving to a new country, and how people react to it. There is also the theme of colonialism: although the film is set in the 1970s, when Trinidad is no longer a British colony, the island nation is subject to the economic imperialism of foreign companies that have moved in to exploit their natural resources. But Trinidad is pushing for nationalization of their oil industry, so the expatriate party may soon be over.

There have been many other films, Claire Denis’s Chocolat (1988) for example, that have explored the experiences of European women and children who move to quasi-colonial circumstances. Such films, Limbo included, often highlight the natives as a sexual threat to the unity of the European couple. This is because the natives are typically seen as more powerful and sexually attractive than their European counterparts. Limbo does not romanticise or fetishise the locals, but treats all of its characters as people, with problems and prejudices which transcend ethnicity.

Trinidad provides Limbo with a visually interesting setting and an excellent source of tensions as Sonia and her family attempt to cope with their new environment. The film’s real focus, though, is human relationships: husbands and wives, mothers and children, and female friends. Refreshingly, Sødahl is not afraid to show female characters portraying raw, visceral emotions, and knows just when to apply the brakes. A wag might call this film ‘Scandinavian Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, but this is a drama, not a comedy, and the women’s reactions to their circumstances are normal when seen in relation to their feeling of powerlessness.

Živojinović receives his lifetime achievement award

Last night the opening ceremony took place for the 4^th annual Cinema City film festival in Novi Sad, Serbia. The festival introduced the members of its three main juries, who will award prizes to films from three of the festival’s sections: ‘National Class’ (Serbian films), ‘Exit Point’ (international auteur cinema, this year showcasing films about women) and ‘Up to 10,000 Bucks’ (low-budget, predominantly short films from around the world).

The highlight of the opening ceremony was the presentation of two of the festival’s signature Ibis awards to Polish director Dorota Kędzierzawska for Contribution to European Film and to prolific Serbian actor Bata Živojinović for lifetime achievement.

The ceremony was followed by a screening of the festival’s opening film, Kędzierzawska’s most recent feature, Tomorrow Will Be Better (Jutro będzie lepiej, 2010). The film is about three homeless Russian boys and their journey to escape across the border to Poland. Moving at a stately pace, this humorous and touching film shows a rare sensitivity to everyday detail and texture. This fits well with the children’s relationship to a world that is still relatively new to them, and which they explore primarily through touch. Although the young boys’ vulnerability can be wrenching at times for the audience, their youth also makes them resilient: they can switch from despair to laughter in the space of a few seconds. Kędzierzawska tells me that although it is not really for children, as a film about them it tends to be featured at children’s film festivals. At this year’s Berlinale, it won two special awards: the Deutsche Kinderhilfswerk Grand Prix for best feature film and the Peace Film Award.

Prominent jury members at Cinema City include European Film Market head Beki Probst, film critics Philippe Azoury and Sergey Lavrentiev, and Serbian director Vladimir Paskaljević, son of the renowned Goran whose work was the subject of a recent British Film Institute retrospective. The presidents of the National Class and Exit Point juries, respectively, are directors Sharunas Bartas from Lithuania and Kęziersawska, and the festival includes homages to both of their oeuvres.

I’ll be here at Cinema City all week as a member of the jury for FEDEORA (The Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean). My fellow jury members are Tonči Valentić and Blagoja Kunovski, and we will be awarding a prize to the best film chosen from two of the festival’s sections: National Class and ‘Balkan Box’ (contemporary cinema from the Balkans).

Kim Soo-hyun’s distinctive way of looking at the world shines through in bursts of comic dialogue and unexpected visual twists in Ashamed (Chang-Pi-Hae, 2010). For the most part, the film is mildly engaging, rather like a teenage movie you might see on TV, but with some added moments of artistry.

The film’s central narrative is a love story between two young women, Yoon and Kang. Yoon is a wide-eyed beauty with an idiosyncratic approach to life. Kang, meanwhile, is a jaded pickpocket. They meet after a strange coincidence involving a collision between a department store mannequin and a getaway car, and despite their differences, the two women are gradually drawn to each other. Their doomed love story is told in flashbacks framed by a present-day narrative. Now, Yoon is single again, and her mysteriously melancholy air intrigues people and draws them to her. First, an art student becomes her friend; then, her art teacher wants to use Yoon as a model. But the teacher wants more than that: she is fascinated by Yoon’s past, and wants to know her story.

During a Q&A following the film’s screening at the Berlinale, the director said that he wanted this film to be a meditation on themes of love and memory. The film’s title reflects the mixed feelings of those who are in love. On the one hand, they are happy and proud about their relationship, and want to tell everyone about it; on the other hand, they would prefer to protect the relationship by hiding it from the world, a secret shared by the couple. These mixed feelings result in the shame of lovers, and it is not necessarily a feeling confined to young love. The one time that feeling ashamed is explicitly mentioned in the film is by a peripheral character: a middle-aged married woman in a little restaurant that Yoon goes to alone. After her husband briefly drops by the restaurant, the woman shares her bashful feelings with a colleague, wondering if her boss saw them together and what he might have thought: she feels ashamed to have been seen with the man that she loves.

The director uses a number of devices to explore the theme of memory, most obviously the flashback structure. Many different layers of time are explored in the film, but this is done in such an organic way that it never disorients the audience. There is the present-day story of the art teacher and her project, and Yoon’s recounting of her love story in the past. There are also flashbacks to an interim period: at her teacher’s insistence, the art student tells the story of how she met Yoon. Within Yoon’s love story, there are also flashbacks to two different periods of Kang’s past: her childhood, and her young adulthood before she became a pickpocket. Even the memories of minor characters are seamlessly introduced. Following the collision that first brings them together, Yoon and Kang are arrested by a policeman, and the audience soon becomes acquainted with his personal problems: his mother calls him on his mobile phone, telling him off for getting divorced. Then, when the policeman and the girls end up at a Chinese restaurant for an impromptu snack, the chef is a friend of the policeman, and he moves from complaining about problems with his family life to accusing the policeman of an affair with his wife.

Within the dialogue, philosophical observations about memory are introduced: Kang, for example, says that she purposely forgets the past and looks only to the future, while Yoon protests that the past continues to exist, and says that our memories make us who we are. The director plays on these two competing attitudes to the past with his aesthetic approach: when Kang recounts events from her past, flashbacks of made-up events take place against a plain white background, emphasizing their unreal nature. In other flashbacks of Kang’s childhood, Yoon appears as an observer, as though the recounting of Kang’s past allows her to take part in its persisting presence. In terms of the narrative, too, Kang’s past interferes with her present with Yoon: although her background is never made clear, there is a sense that something from her past is preventing her from forming lasting relationships.

Summarised in this way, the director’s approach to his themes sounds rich and profound but at 129 minutes the film on the long side, and the effect of his devices is diluted. Although the fluid way that he switches from one story thread to another, and from one layer of time to another, make for easy watching, this fools the audience into thinking that the film itself is quite simple. The occasionally flippant humour may also give an overall impression of foolishness, again belying some of the film’s more serious themes. Of all the films that I have seen at this festival, this one has left me with the greatest sense of ambivalence. It is perhaps one that needs to be watched twice to be appreciated, but I would still recommend seeing it once if you have the opportunity.

Susanne Bier is one of those filmmakers who you hear about once in a while but nobody ever lists them among their favorite directors or talks about their work at watercoolers outside film schools. This is not to say that she is overlooked – her previous “After the Wedding” was nominated for an Oscar and gave us slinky Bond baddie Mads Mikkelsen – but that she is under-remembered. It’s a shame really, because her fine, febrile pieces deserve rapt attention and robust discussion from an audience placed very squarely in the scape she sets about realizing. After “Brothers” and “After the Wedding”, this is her third drama about dislocation and domesticity against backdrops of violence and crisis. Her films occupy themselves with the task of tracking displaced individuals across the geography of home and globe, elementally interrupted by concrete, worldly trauma and morally compromised thereof.

“In A Better World” is about a boy whose mother dies of cancer, who then moves to a new school in Denmark from the UK, proceeds to protect and subsequently instigate into violence a weaker kid and suffers penitence. Or it isn’t. It is about a doctor working in Africa whose marriage is breaking down and whose son is being bullied and is ultimately severely hurt. Or it isn’t about that either. It is about two damaged kids trying to be friends, failing miserably and discovering their bond in a crucial act of crime and forgiveness. Perhaps it is about a man who prefers solitude in anarchy to company in peace. Maybe it is about none of these things and is a very simple, obvious and straight tale of mayhem across continents, overt and covert. Hell, it could be about the possible perils of single parenthood! The most liberating thing about films like “In A Better World” is their origami openness. By this I do not mean that everyone can walk off having taken away their own interpretation of the film…that is something perhaps only the most bland works of supposed art can provide. What I mean by origami openness is how many shapes can be devised from the same piece of paper. The filmmaker offers a scrumptious bit of colored card and the viewer twists it into any number of forms that he or she is able to latch onto. A film almost becomes a delightful object of play, a stimulating puzzle, not because of any cheap mystery contained in its storyline but simply as an exercise of the mind when contemplating. The essential ideas are of having the comfort of a normal family collide with the discomfort of not having one, of the latency of violence being as much a repressive cultural disorder as its activity is an self-perpetuating one, of adulthood and childhood talking over each other even as they sometimes say the same things, of friendship and lack of it being mediated by aggressive power and of revenge and regret managing the morality of human beings.

The film is classically handsome, symmetrical and harmonious in its formation and overlaid with a marble-cold sense of winter. The Scandinavian color scheme is offset occasionally by the vivacity of Africa, the desert beige sharpened and tribal rainbow divulged. Many films these days are set in multiple locations with linkages or juxtapositions, a “testament” to our post-national world, but “In A Better World” is too good for such banal join-the-dots. Like in her earlier work, Ms Bier is bothered with the specificity of the itinerant white protagonist and the conflict or confrontation with the exotic that sculpts his sense of the familiar (the family). Here too, Swedish doctor Anton and Danish enfant terrible Christian are reacting to the alien from a place of loss of stability of the basic unit of family and then consolidating the dysfunction with inversely mirrored responses to offers of friendship, acts of violence and commitments of regret. In a sense, they are the same person. And they choose in ways that change each other’s lives.

Mikael Persbrandt (Anton) is a revelation, with his passivity almost paralyzing him and his emotional staidness communicating grave, vital silences. For a man so huge and lively, to reign his size in like that is an important effort in service of a character who must only fleetingly allow the actor’s natural physical presence. But the real star of the film is William Johnk Nielsen (Christian), second only to perhaps Brian De Palma’s Carrie among cinema’s creepier offspring. His convincingly cold-blooded attitude can completely throw someone as they realize how young he really is to be contributing this amount of maturity to his role. Expect good things.

“In A Better World” deserves a serious viewing; its nomination among Best Foreign Films at the Golden Globes should certainly help that cause, if only in terms of getting one’s hands on it! That, and “The Hobbit”.

]]> http://www.themovingarts.com/h%c3%a6vnenin-a-better-world-is-oscar-worthy/feed/ 0 http://www.themovingarts.com/peepli-live-important-not-excellent/ http://www.themovingarts.com/peepli-live-important-not-excellent/#comments Sun, 29 Aug 2010 05:07:49 +0000 Kamayani Sharma http://themovingarts.com/?p=3126
”Peepli Live” has been the toast and tea of town for the better part of this past year. A Sundance selection and Berlinale screening, it has been picking up favor and five star reviews across the Prime Meridian, becoming the focus of India’s annual interest in evaluating its culture through the Western eye. Unlike the last time though, when the bland “Slumdog Millionaire” rubbed most of the country wrong, “Peepli Live” is an intelligent look at an India desperate to put together its own sense of self and struggling with its most absurd internal contradictions on a daily basis. There is the specter of overestimation about the film, directed by debutant Anusha Rizvi, and the hype surrounding it has more to do with its political overtones and how well it has been received everywhere else. To be fair, that last bit is criticism one can level at anything even remotely decent these days. But it has its flaws and let’s not forget them in the excitement of a top film festival’s felicitation.

The premise of the film is straightforward: a farmer decides to commit suicide so that  the government will compensate his family, thus enabling them to retain their ancestral land which is in danger of being auctioned off to pay a debt. One of the most igneous issues in India in the past 20 years has been that of farmer suicides, a phenomenon wherein thousands of desperate farmers have been pushed to kill themselves under pressure to return money they’ve borrowed at ridiculous interest rates from unscrupulous moneylenders or barely-any-better banks. Crops fail, fertilizers, pesticides and myriad other chemicals are necessary, irrigation is a bitch, foreign corporations are raping them all while the State twiddles her thumbs. Bottomline: in a country where more than 65 percent of the economy depends on agriculture, most of its workforce is driven to off itself because it seems like the legitimately best option. This movie seeks to headline its satire of India’s most troubling issues with this basic plot, which is a good idea because two decades worth of problems can be summed up in the foreground of this suicidal wave wreaking havoc across the nation.

As the farmer’s decision breaks in the news, the titillated media descends onto his small, nondescript village to get a piece of the action.  And that’s the chief conflict that clasps the film’s many stories. The way the powerful urban, educated middle-class encounters the impotent rural heartland, declining to learn its language. The bravado of the free market, bombast of the federal government and the spiels of the media are constituted by a lexicon controlled by, and created for, the bourgeois elite who have nothing in common with their basement-dwelling agricultural compatriots, invisible and ignored like servants in an aristocratic household, their identity subsumed by the food they put on the national dinner table.

All the players in this ongoing drama are lampooned and lambasted in “Peepli Live” — the suits, the politicos, the ministries, the hacks — and there is a good description of the complicated tensions that the story is built around. There are subtle nods to all the attendant issues of socioeconomic power games and the mutual discomfort that city and village, State and citizen, producer and consumer and object of information and its subject all have with each other. As an intellectual project, “Peepli Live” has many merits and its deadpan delivery of the truth, done up in just the right shades of humor, is the sort of political film that needs to be made for mainstream audiences and certainly provides fodder for watercoolers and college campuses. These are all admirable corollaries to making a smart, smirking and honest account of a real problem. It’s as level-headed and entertaining a cinematic comment on such a huge crisis as one is likely to get, and certainly warrants at least a watch.

The trouble is that most of the time, the film feels like a documentary. The development of character, narrative and emotional texture is mostly absent, cheating the viewer of the experience he or she signed up for when expecting a feature film. The lack of these elements does not so detract from involvement with the events on screen that one loses complete interest, but the film does feel longer than it is because the pace is mismanaged by the tent-pins of storytelling. It feels more like a brainteaser than a heart-warmer.  I’m not saying that’s necessarily an awful thing, but as a viewer, I was anticipating a different film from the one I got, and I suspect a different film from the one the filmmaker intended to produce. There is an aesthetic mismatch that leaves the viewer interested in the issue but unmoved by the story. I want to read up on farmer’s suicides but I struggled to invest myself in this particular farmer’s comic tale of woe; I laughed hard at the parts that tickled the cerebral points of my funny bone, even as the poignant hilarity of such a miserable situation never touched my heart.

At times, the satire seems to tire in its assault and the climax seems rushed and forced, if realistic at all. There is a sincerity to crusade that is compromised by the need to entertain and this ultimately makes “Peepli Live” a stiff if sporadically amusing yarn. Even some of the sequences are a little too handheld-video for comfort and while this grounds the film in the real world, it also takes away from the fictive vehicle used to explore this real world that must be as evocative as the bigger picture is provocative. The moral indignation which impelled the directors to take on this topic persists too strongly throughout and sometimes veers into a slightly condescending shoulder-shaking territory, lessening the impact of the tale.

The acting is very good all round and Raghubir Yadav heads a solid cast of virtual unknowns, except for Naseeruddin Shah. Omkar Das’s protagonist is appropriately browbeaten and slow, egged on by his resourceful older brother (Yadav) and henpecked by his foulmouthed wife and mother. The euphonious ensemble does a great job as a unit but without any single stand-out performance. The cinematographic palette is imbued with the bright, vivid colors of Indian public life, drawn from painted trucks and village women’s sunny costumes, and offset by the more monochromatic spaces of newsrooms and government offices, which is a thoughtful contrast to have sustained throughout the movie. As with all Indian films, the soundtrack is a character in its own right and Indian Ocean’s rustic ragas are pleasant companions on the journey, especially the loving lament of “Desh Mera.”

An earnest change of scene from usual Bollywood fare with a very healthy sense of satire but dimmed by a vague sense of overbred righteousness, I nevertheless urge people to watch the film. It is a rare Hindi movie that takes stands and breaks down the status quo. This one does. “Peepli Live” may not be big on heart, what it does have is in exactly the right place.

So begins director Brian Ackley’s micro-budget bittersweet romance debut “Uptown,” shot guerrilla style with a skeleton crew in only nine days in various locations around New York City and New Jersey.  The premise is familiar.  Star-crossed romances makeup a large contingent of independent film.  They’re cheap to shoot and just about everyone can relate to falling head over heels for that forbidden fruit.  A new kind of hyper-realism, typified by the growing mumblecore movement, is also flooding the low-budget film world.

“Uptown” is neither a mumblecore film nor a stock doomed-romance picture, though it does exhibit properties of both.  It is shot on location, natural light is the dominant mode of lighting, a sizable portion of the dialogue is improvised and Hollywood clichés are deliberately spurned in the pursuit of honesty.  The result is an original piece of work that portends an uncommon maturity in the filmmaker.

First time directors are often overeager to showoff their skills and tend to pack every stylization, trick shot or effect in their repertoire into their first film.  Ackley wisely allows the story to unfold organically, giving his characters time to sit with their emotions and develop firm attachments.  This slow build of ordinary human interaction gives the narrative real stakes and adds weight to the inevitable conflict.  It is remarkable that such a hurried shoot can produce such a contemplative, quiet film.

Where “Uptown” betrays its low-budget status is in its production values, particularly in its cinematography and sound design.  Filmed on MiniDV, “Uptown” reflects that medium’s tendency to perform poorly in low light.  Exterior scenes filmed at night suffer the most.  The sound is also noticeably irregular.  Dialogue is loud and clear and easy to understand, but doesn’t always sound like it was recorded simultaneously with the video.  And ambient noise is sometimes disproportionately loud compared to the actors’ voices.  But technical flaws, mostly thanks to budget restraints, can be forgiven as long as a human core is powerful enough to shine through.

Luckily, “Uptown” has that core and delivers an intelligent, unique and honest narrative about desire, maturity, monogamy and the most elusive commodity known to man — true love.

To learn more about “Uptown” visit the official website.

Susan (Drea Pressley), grieving and aimless after the loss of her newborn daughter, thoughtlessly seeks out a rogue animal-cloning geneticist (Dr. Alan Rice) to reverse, or subvert, the most inevitable of human events — death.  Along the way she encounters mysterious illegal immigrant, Javier (Jaime Estrada), and the two run away from their respective troubles together, forging an unlikely friendship of circumstance and innate understanding.

Running parallel to this central storyline is a tandem of narratives: one, following a down-on-his-luck Native American pottery artist (David Paytiamo) scrambling to find money to send his daughter to college, and the other, a hapless FDA agent (Jason Rosette) tracking down the clone-doctor to break up his illegal operation.

The narratives are eventually entwined quite nicely, although the characters aren’t necessarily aware when this happens, which makes it all the better.

Rosette’s direction is mostly adept.  He employs a number of small touches that bring the film’s mise-en-scène to life. The Southwestern setting properly reflects the desolation and intense desire to seek, which drives virtually every character in the film.

The script is surprisingly consistent, with incrementally more substantial setups and payoffs plotted steadily throughout the unfolding story making it clear that a lot of care was taken in the writing process.

Although the setting couldn’t be more apt for the players and their stories, the visual composition is noticeably lackluster.  This is understandable and quite common in micro-budget films, but minor adjustments in color correction, framing and maybe even different shutter speed, lens filter and video rendering choices may have increased the film’s overall visual appeal.

Sub-professional equipment can also artificially diminish an actor’s performance, which may have been the case here. No one stood out as particularly magnetic, though no one was bad enough to the point of distraction either. It would be interesting to see Rosette’s obvious abilities supported by a professional cast and crew and studio-grade equipment.

The hook of “Lost in New Mexico” is its human cloning element and the ethical questions that very real dilemma raises. While controversial issues like this are certainly compelling, the film really shines when it explores the emotional implications of such drastic thinking.  ”Lost in New Mexico” wisely steers clear of the minutiae of genetics and cloning, using that hook as nothing more than a portal into the intimate and heartbreaking sphere of a mother’s loss. Everything else is merely ancillary to that central internal conflict. And though it could have used some minor tweaking, “Lost in New Mexico” is a unique and interesting take on the fluidity of technology versus the recurring commonality of the human condition.

In Matthew Vaughn’s ambitious comic-book adaptation, “Kick-Ass,” Cage plays an ex-cop-turned deranged masked vigilante called Big Daddy, bent on exacting revenge on crime boss Frank D’Amico for killing his wife and framing him for drug possession.  Cage’s performance is a gem of inane wackiness, punctuated by a baffling voice change that sounds like a poorly executed Adam West impression as soon as he dons his Batman look-a-like hero suit.

I was encouraged by Cage’s fantastic performance in Werner Herzog’s hilariously weird “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” last year, but “Kick-Ass” solidifies his return from the purgatory of generic, uninteresting acting.  Unfortunately, Nicolas Cage isn’t the star of this story leaving the vibrancy he lends the film fleeting.  The rest of this nerd wish-fulfillment fantasy falls well short of its ambitions.

The story follows a comic book nerd named Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson).  Girls don’t like him, he’s not especially talented or funny and he’s more-or-less a non-factor when it comes to the hierarchy of high school popularity.  During a discussion with his foul-mouthed buddies he wonders why, with the prevalence of superheroes in popular culture, no one has ever undertaken the task of masked-vigilante-ism in real life.  (Never mind the fact that New York alone is home to dozens of costumed crime-fighters and do-gooders prowling the streets in real life).  As a product of his own fantasy and as a reaction to repeatedly being mugged, Dave decides to take justice into his own hands and becomes the masked crusader, Kick-Ass.  And thanks to a terribly botched attempt at serving justice he winds up with damaged nerve endings and a body full of metal plates that allow him to fight (badly) for extended periods of time without the hindrance of pain.

The premise of a true-to-life superhero, bound by the laws of physics, is a familiar one.  Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins” being a prime example attempting to approach the comic world as practically as possible.  But what promise “Kick-Ass” begins with, grounded in some version of reality, it quickly abandons and becomes an exercise in absurdity.  Why go to such great lengths to establish your story in reality, even taking great pains to devise a feasible biological excuse for Kick-Ass’ ability to fight without getting hurt, and then introduce Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz), an 11-year-old who can run on walls and annihilate an army of grizzled, heavily armed criminals in mere minutes?  Hit-Girl’s existence renders the entire first half of the movie pointless, and the film on the whole utterly devoid of internal consistency.

Some will probably argue that the film isn’t meant to be taken seriously and is therefore not subject to the same scrutiny as a typical drama set in reality.  But the flaw in this argument is exposed by the film itself, which elaborately establishes the rules of its own universe.  Why hasn’t anybody in real life become a superhero?  “Because they’d get killed,” according to one of Dave’s buddies.  Furthermore, Dave’s first encounter with the muggers as Kick-Ass ends exactly how it probably should have — with our would-be hero lying in a bloody, unconscious heap on the pavement.

Is this nitpicking?  Irrelevant to the broader goals of the film?  Hardly.  Internal consistency is absolutely crucial to sound storytelling.  It doesn’t matter whether the film is set in Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland where virtually anything is possible or in Martin Scorsese’s New York where only the grittiest realism resides, a film must conform to the laws of its own reality.  “Kick-Ass” feels like the work of two entirely different directors with wildly different ideas and tonal styles.

Does this mean the film isn’t enjoyable?  Not entirely.  Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn do a fine job of retaining the spirit of the comic in places and “Kick-Ass” is genuinely funny in short bursts and will probably be at least mildly entertaining for the casual fan. But Aaron Johnson’s terribly didactic and unrelenting narration stifles the natural flow of the story. It’s baffling inconsistency, under-use of Nicolas Cage and troubling tendency to indulge in fanboy pandering destroy any hopes “Kick-Ass” had of becoming a satire of the superhero film and render it just another mediocre entry into the already saturated genre.

Now for a second set of names: Wilson, Griffin, Mouse, Kelley, Singer, Moscoso, Loren, Sherraden.  Any of those ring a bell?  If not, drop whatever you’re doing and grab a copy of Merle Becker’s fascinating documentary, “American Artifact: The Rise of American Rock Poster Art,” right away.  As important as penetrating sonic innovations were to establishing a new paradigm in American pop-culture, their visual arts counterparts may be equally responsible for the transformation of the cultural landscape.

Becker, intrigued by the other-worldly psychedelia and unfettered creativity oozing from the concert posters of the aforementioned rock ‘n’ roll pioneers, delivers a sorely needed document of the captivating history and method of the art of the rock poster.  Through entertaining and insightful interviews with the luminaries of the art form, sparing voice-over, and some amazing stock footage, “American Artifact” effectively fleshes out and contextualizes the unique craft as a key player in every alternative music movement of the last 60 years, eventually becoming a movement unto itself.

Chronicling every stage of the form from the legendary Jim Sherraden & Hatch Show Print, to the “big five” of psychedelia, Victor Moscoso, Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse, Alton Kelley and Wes Wilson, and their cutting edge posters for acts like Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Sparrow, Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, Steppenwolf, Quicksilver and the Miller Blues Band, to the lo-fi punk of the 80s with Art Chantry and Winston Smith, to the current indie revolution led by Tara McPherson, Steve Walters, Chris Shaw, COOP, Scrojo, Leia Bell, Jermaine Rogers, Jay Ryan & Mat Daly, Lindsey Kuhn and Stainboy, “American Artifact” is at once a crash course and an in-depth dissertation on the history and methodological nuances of a lawless art, a stylish and imaginative film that does its subject matter justice.

By the end of the film, it’s not implausible that you may begin to pay that second set of names the same heed as you do the first.  And rightfully so.

“American Artifact” Official Website