At the screening I attended of Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010), there were two walk-outs. I was tempted to follow, but my love of the great Czech animator’s previous work won out, making me want to experience, if not enjoy, every minute of his latest film.

Newcomers to Švankmajer would do best to start with his shorts from the 1960s and 80s, live-action Surrealist animations of everyday objects. Some people find them disturbing, but if you embrace their sheer creativity and magic, these films can take you right back to childhood, evoking its fear of the unknown, love of repetition, and sense that anything might happen.

If I hadn’t already seen two of Švankmajer’s feature-length films, having seen Surviving Life I would have said that the director should stick to short films. His tendency towards variations on a theme arguably works best in small doses, so the theme never has a chance to become tiresome. Alice (1988) and Little Otik (2000), despite being 86 and 132 minutes long respectively, work superbly, perhaps because both are based on children’s stories, and find the right balance between live action and stop-motion animation.

Surviving Life, in contrast, incorporates childhood themes, but is a decidedly adult story which, at 109 minutes, is boring in its repetition. It tells the story of a happily married man in late middle-age. One night, he happens to dream of a beautiful young woman, and subsequently becomes obsessed with dreaming in order to keep seeing her. The tune of a waltz associated with his dreams is repeated ad nauseum. The dreams don’t include enough variation to make them interesting, and the secret behind them is not much of a surprise.

The film’s biggest problem is its claustrophobic style, which combines with the repetition to make the audience feel trapped. Instead of using the live-action animation for which he is renowned, Švankmajer animates photographs of his actors, allowing for the easy introduction of Surrealist elements such as giant eggs, priapic teddy bears, and Ernst-inspired women with the heads of birds. This approach lacks the compelling originality that usually characterises Švankmajer’s films: instead, it seems a regurgitation of 1930s Surrealist collage and Monty Python’s Flying Circus animation. The live action elements are much shorter, and confined to close-ups and extreme close-ups of objects and characters’ faces.

Surviving Life begins with a message from Švankmajer himself, as an animated photo standing in the middle of a photo of a street that serves as one of his film sets. He explains that he animated photographs of his actors in order to save on production costs. This sounds like a reasonable explanation, but the director goes on to say that he is giving this introduction in order to draw the film out to an appropriate length. The introduction can be justified as meta-film, and it is a treat to see Švankmajer in his own film. However, even as a joke, the idea of throwing in an introduction to make the film longer seems like an insult to the audience, especially in light of the repetitive narrative that follows. The audience at the screening I attended clearly wanted to go along with the director, and made a few attempts at ironic or appreciative laughter throughout this pseudo-comedy, but it sounded weak and hollow.

Confirmed fans of Švankmajer’s work won’t want to miss this film: the work of a confirmed master is always of interest, even when it’s not his best. Surviving Life still features recognisable elements of the Švankmajer we know and love: giant tongues, huge appetites, and a general enthusiasm for the earthy side of life. Švankmajer also deserves praise for attempting to carry on the project that the French Surrealists abandoned after Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or: that is, to use communicate Surrealism’s message via film.

Surviving Life demonstrates how dreams and reality overlap and does so in a straightforward manner, not by tying narrative knots so that the audience simply confuses real and imagined worlds (as in Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry, for instance). At the same time, while Švankmajer’s message is more meaningful than Woody Allen’s, the Surrealists would have disapproved of the fact that Surviving Life only demonstrates their point, rather than putting it in action: the audience remains an audience, simply observing how one man’s dreams relate to his waking life. As a result, the film becomes egocentric: the audience may have trouble relating to the character’s obsession with his own inner life. Ultimately, rather than showing that dream life is relevant to waking life, and is on the same plane, Surviving Life shows a man who becomes increasingly detached from his present life through dreams which are more relevant to his past.

Have you ever wondered what it was like for spectators watching their first sound film? Michel Haznavicius’ latest feature brings home just how strange it would have been. For the most part, The Artist (2011) is a close imitation of silent film from the late 1920s: black and white, the only sound a piano or orchestral accompaniment, with inter-titles to convey dialogue and essential information about place and story developments. During one scene halfway through the film, and at the film’s end, voices and sound effects are suddenly introduced: the effect, after so many minutes of silent cinema, is dramatic.

The Artist is a self-conscious film in many ways: a silent film set at the end of the silent era, its protagonist is silent film star George Valentin, who will see his career sink with the introduction of sound. Meanwhile, his beautiful former protégée, Peppy Miller, replaces him as the sweetheart of the talkies. The cleverest scene in the film is Valentin’s nightmare, in which the world around him becomes sonorised while he remains mute. It begins when he sets his glass down on the table, and it makes a noise. Sound effects and voices begin to crowd in unbearably, until a leaf hitting the ground sounds like a bomb. In this, and the film’s closing sound scene, a modern audience is suddenly able to appreciate that sound could initially have felt like intrusive noise, rather than an enhancement of the film experience.

Haznavicius’ previous two films were also period pieces: OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117 – Lost in Rio (2009) were both 1960s James Bond spoofs starring Jean Dujardin as the suave, unreconstructed secret agent who always manages to save the day (by accident). While The Artist is set some 30 years earlier, and in the world of Hollywood rather than international espionage, protagonist George Valentin is a similar character: a somewhat oblivious, old-fashioned charmer, again played with comic perfection by Jean Dujardin. As Peppy, Bérénice Bejo (who co-starred with Dujardin in Cairo, Nest of Spies) is less believable: there is a general lack of restraint in her movements and facial expressions which marks her as characteristically modern.

The Artist makes fun of silent film conventions (the style of acting, the dramatic exposition, the trusty dog), just as the OSS films made fun of the Bond franchise. But The Artist is neither as funny nor as exciting as the OSS films. There are a few innovative comic set pieces, such as Peppy’s use of Valentin’s blazer to act out a romantic fantasy about him (included in the film’s trailer). Much of the comedy in OSS relied on dialogue, though, which is necessarily restricted in a silent film. Plot-wise, The Artist is also limited: the audience must watch Valentin become increasingly depressed as he realises his career has ended, while Peppy expresses her love by trying to help him as he once helped her. While you do expect a certain level of predictability in genre films (whether a pre-sound romance or a spy film), there is an overall lack of surprise in The Artist that deadens its effect: unlike the OSS films, it’s not one that you could watch again and again.

The Artist was screened at the 2011 BFI London Film Festival.            

Jude Law and Rachel Weisz star in Fernando Meirelles's "360"

This year’s London Film Festival launched with a damp squib in the form of 360, Fernando Meirelles’ latest feature. How far Merielles seems now from City of God (2002). Set in Rio’s slums which force children to grow up fast, City of God was urgent, both socially and stylistically. Children taken from the street played roles which they knew all too well, and one particular scene of gun violence between children was heartbreaking and unforgettable.

360, by contrast, seems to have been inspired by two banal observations: first, in an age of easy international travel, there are a lot of opportunities for us to cross paths with people—so much so, everyone may be connected to everyone else. Hence the film’s title, though in truth the characters’ relationships do not form a circle: it is more a case of degrees of separation from a central character (a prostitute). The film’s second observation is that small choices made by different people every day must influence who meets whom, so a different choice on the part of just one person could alter events significantly. The notion of different paths to choose from is introduced early on by an appropriately goofy quotation from baseball player Yogi Berra: ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it!’ As if once were not enough, the quotation is repeated at the end of the film, when a new prostitute appears on the scene, apparently starting a set of branched relationships all over again.

There have been a number of films about overlapping lives and the impact of small decisions: Babel (2006), for instance, and Sliding Doors (1998). The former film had a powerful social message about globalisation, while the latter was interesting for playing out in parallel the two different lives a character could live, as the result of catching a train or missing it. 360 just doesn’t justify itself in the same way.

Meirelles’ style does offer a few surprises, though they mainly come across as quirky or baroque rather than compelling. There is some snappy editing and sudden transitions that recall City of God, but with less motivation for the level of speed. More innovative flourishes include an airplane which takes off in one shot, then continues to fly through following shot, circling the head of a character obsessed by one passenger on the plane. There is also a shot which cleverly incorporates a split screen to make it look as though a sinister character on the phone is present in the apartment of the woman he is speaking to.

Without spoiling the suspense that is one of the mild pleasures of this film, I can say that 360 is a story of love and lust, as well as a tale of crossing paths, making decisions, and seizing the day: it is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1897 play La Ronde. The film boasts a strong cast of international stars from Britain (Anthony Hopkins, Jude Law and Rachel Weisz), France (Jamel Debbouze) and Austria (Mauritz Bleibtreu), but the script gives them little to work with and, as a result, it is difficult to become genuinely involved in the story. Most of the characters live in affluent or somewhat less affluent EU capitals (London, Paris, Vienna, Bratislava) and are by and large bourgeois. A pimp, a gangster and a sex offender are thrown into the mix for some much needed tension. Unfortunately, all of the characters are clichéd and one-dimensional. What clear traits they do have are routinely undermined by stupid decisions, which aren’t easily justified by the film’s other banal mantra: ‘You only live once: how many chances do we get?’ When poorly defined characters make such obviously idiotic choices, it is difficult to care what happens to them. Worse for the viewer, these bad decisions never have the exciting consequences they would normally have in other films (Thelma and Louise, for example).

Blink and you’d have missed it: the Barbican’s New Zealand Film Festival 2011 took place over just 3 days in London last weekend. Although it is a nice idea for every country, however small, to have its own festival, it might have been a better to hold one combined festival for Australia and New Zealand, allowing audiences a slightly longer time frame to catch several films, rather than having to fit everything in during the space of one weekend. What’s most important, though, is that the event took place, as it gave audiences a chance to see the first feature film ever made by a New Zealander of Chinese background: My Wedding and Other Secrets (2011).

In this romantic drama-comedy, awkward twenty-somethings Emily and James fall in love. The problem: James is white, and Emily’s parents, immigrants to New Zealand from Hong Kong, have forbidden their daughters from dating anyone outside the Chinese community. Emily decides to marry James in secret, but can’t work up the nerve to confront her parents: she dreads being forced to make the terrible choice between her family and the man she loves.

Described in this way, the film’s storyline may seem a little short on comedy, but the film is indeed as funny as it is poignant. The comedy begins with the aforementioned awkwardness of the two lovers: Emily, who still lives with her parents, is a film student with an unabashed love of popular cinema; James is a fan of Dungeons and Dragons, and shares a flat with two similarly nerdy male friends. They meet at a fencing class where Emily, thrilled to have found a partner in James, ends up knocking him over. Flat on his back, he invites her for dinner, and they click over a conversation conducted through mouthfuls of Chinese food. This is a film that embraces the unpretentious and embarrassing parts of life, turning them into a cute and quirky form of romance.

The film’s aesthetic also contributes to its idiosyncratic comedy: it is characterised by frequent frontal shots where characters stare earnestly into the camera as they speak to each other, and close-ups which emphasise Emily’s enormous glasses. The style mirrors Emily’s own playful approach to filmmaking as she works on two films of her own during the course of My Wedding: first, a hybrid horror/kung-fu movie, which proves too ambitious, later a documentary about her relationship.

My Wedding gets a certain amount of comic mileage out of cultural misunderstandings: James’s excruciating efforts to learn basic Mandarin, for example, or his horrified reaction to the Chinese delicacies that Emily offers him. There is less emphasis on cultural difference than you might expect in a film about intermarriage, and this is a positive sign for a multicultural society. The main point of difference between Chinese and white families is generational relationships: Emily becomes exasperated as she tries to explain to James that ‘being disowned isn’t like being sent to your room!’ Ultimately, though, the barrier to Emily and James’s relationship is not cultural difference but parental prejudice: Emily and James have so much in common that it is no wonder they fell in love.

My Wedding is based heavily on director Roseanne Liang’s own life. Like Emily in the film, Liang began by making a student documentary (Banana in a Nutshell, 2005) about her own experience trying to persuade her parents to accept her chosen partner. This documentary was screened at the New Zealand International Film Festival, and subsequently a producer approached Liang to ask her to turn it into a fiction film that would appeal to a wider audience.

Much of My Wedding‘s power may stem from details and emotions lifted directly from real life. Lest anyone suspect Liang of being a one-trick pony, relying too heavily for inspiration on one episode from her personal life, the screening of My Wedding was preceded by her 2008 short film on a rather different topic. ‘Take 3′ was a spirited and ironic exploration of the stereotypes that New Zealand born actresses are pushed to conform to, simply because their ancestors happen to be from East Asia. The film’s thematic novelty was matched by an innovative aesthetic approach: Liang began by splitting the screen into three to show all three actresses at once; then, the actresses were shown separately in auditions with three different directors, each with their own stereotype about what Asian girls are like; finally, the girls were brought together in an ensemble piece, where they gleefully took the director’s ridiculous demands ad absurdum.

My Wedding and Other Secrets was one of the funniest and most moving films I have seen in a long time. There were a couple of comic set pieces that were overused and not so funny. Equally, some of the film’s most emotional moments veered into melodrama, which felt calculated to wring tears from the audience. This latter impression may have been due to the director’s own emotional investment in the story, and it is more admirable to have invested too much of oneself than not enough.

The cross-cultural appeal of My Wedding does not just reflect the increasing prevalence of inter-cultural marriages in a globalised world. While the Western tendency is to be independent from family, deep down most still care very much what their parents think of them. The ideal, however elusive it can be, is to find harmony between family expectations and personal priorities. This is an uplifting film because Emily dares to chase after this ideal, and obtains it against the odds.

Philosophers have wrestled with variations of this problem for centuries. Philosophies like incompatibilism, dualism, hard determinism and compatibilism have arisen to explain the nature of our autonomy, or lack thereof.

“The Adjustment Bureau,” George Nolfi’s loose adaptation of an early Philip K. Dick story, removes the internal struggle altogether and places control of human behavior in the hands of other, more advanced beings tasked with saving humans from our own stupidity and irrationality.

This makes for an interesting view of the age old debate. The film shifts the question away from the biological and metaphysical and toward the moral. In effect, humans don’t have free will because they haven’t earned it yet. It’s a fascinating paradox, to be sure, and one that makes for good post-viewing conversation.

But the philosophical and science fiction elements of the film are mere garnishing on the plate of the real meat — an old fashioned love story.

David Norris (Matt Damon) is a young, trending politician known for his energy and authenticity. After losing his bid for a US Senate seat he has a chance meeting with Elise (Emily Blunt), a beautiful, charismatic ballerina. They fall for each other instantly, almost as if it was meant to be.

Unfortunately for David and Elise, a longterm relationship is not in “the plan” for them. So members of the mysterious bureau, dressed like hardboiled 1940s film noir detectives, make slight alterations of reality and tweak their reasoning processes just enough to keep them apart. You see, everything must go according to “the plan.” Whose plan? The Chairman’s plan. He’s the big boss, the guy (literally) upstairs. God is never mentioned in the film, and the tone is decidedly non-religious, but the metaphors are obvious.

After David repeatedly refuses to follow “the plan” he is given a choice. If he continues to pursue Elise he’ll ruin her chance to become one of the world’s greatest choreographers. And he’ll also destroy his own path to the White House. If he truly loves her, the bureau says, he’ll let her go so they can both live out their dreams according to “the plan.” I won’t reveal his decision here, but the film’s tone gives away the ending from the beginning.

At its core, “The Adjustment Bureau” is a breezy, optimistic romance. The film’s only real philosophy is that love conquers all. Take that however you like.

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.

If “Monsters” is any indication, first-time director, Gareth Edwards, will be dazzling audiences for years to come. Shot on less than a shoestring budget, with a cast and crew totaling only five, Edwards managed to create a fully realized post-alien invasion world more believable than the one in “District 9,” and more emotionally mature than many of Hollywood’s so-called Oscar-bait dramas.

The story kicks off six years after embryonic samples of a race of giant cephalopodic aliens were brought back to earth by a NASA probe from somewhere in our solar system.  The probe crash landed in Central America and the samples began to reproduce and take over the larger part of Mexico.  US and Mexican military forces were able to contain the rapidly spawning invaders in a quarantined area just south of the US border known as the Infected Zone.

Andrew (Scoot McNairy), an American photojournalist in Mexico, is called upon to escort his boss’s daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) back home to America.  After their several attempts to buy their safe passage home by way of ferry are foiled, the pair is forced to make the long and dangerous trek on land through the Infected Zone.

Bucking the troubling trend of increasingly video game-like movies, Edwards supplants first-person shooter carnage with meandering calmness. The menacing creatures are gargantuan — several stories tall — but are rarely seen. Violence is encountered sparingly and is treated with seriousness. The threat of violence, however, bleeds through every frame with a chilling effect.

Just beneath the artfully crafted central relationship is a poignant and timely commentary on the absurdity that is America’s immigration policy. Edwards aggressively attacks human irrationality and the plaguing frailty that leads us to be so frightened of “the other.”

If there is a weakness in this gorgeous little film it lies in the performances.  McNairy and Able have little chemistry and don’t quite possess the chops to deliver some of the film’s more weighty lines.  But Edwards and his team do everything else so well it’s easy forgive minor imperfections.

It’s not often that a debut film is this controlled, intelligent and measured, making this director’s outlook more than promising.

So goes a heap of criticism hurled at Edgar Wright’s hipster-drenched comic book adaptation, “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.”  Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera), a mousy, disinterested, sarcastic early twenty-something hipster, is the bassist for the self-aware and self-proclaimed awful garage band, Sex Bob-omb.  He represents the shifting romantic zeitgeist from macho, leather jacket-wearing, beer can-crushing types to sensitive, artistic, pseudo-intellectuals who know a thing or two about fashion — or at least live close enough to an American Apparel to keep up with the latest indie trends.

Cera, who would’ve been laughed at as a romantic lead as recently as a decade ago, plays something of a heartthrob.  There is scarcely a shoe-gazing damsel in his extended social network who hasn’t felt the power of Scott Pilgrim’s irresistible dry wit and boyish charm.  After his most recent breakup he’s even resorted to tapping the high school dating pool, hooking up with a hopelessly naive 17-year-old, Knives, who worships the ground he walks on.  This type of devotion from a too-young rebound girlfriend is a bore.  It takes the withdrawn gaze of Ramona Flowers, the new kid in town and possibly the coolest girl in the world, to get Pilgrim’s amorous juices flowing.  But before these two can commence their too-cool-for-school courtship, Scott must fight and defeat Ramona’s seven evil exes in fantastical, video game-style mortal combat.

Why?  A symbology detailing the seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing modern, post-sexual revolution relationships seems to be the common interpretation of these well-choreographed, often hilarious battles.  That may very well have been the intention, but I think the film is a helluva lot more fun without the psycho-analytical subtext.  Whether these prolonged fights to the death are meant to be going on in Pilgrim’s mind or in the new reality of the video game age is irrelevant, as far I’m concerned.  They’re funny.  Very funny.

“Scott Pilgrim” may just be the movie to convert Michael Cera skeptics.  The 22-year-old actor is despised by some for his over-reliance on blank stares and barely audible mumbles.  His loose association with indie culture enrages others.  But his performance here, while not as wildly different from his previous roles, a la Daniel Day-Lewis, is still recognizably a unique and separate characterization.  Compared to roles like he had in “Juno” Michael Cera has grown leaps and bounds as an actor.

Ubiquitous video game references, including music directly from popular titles, 8-bit sight gags, villains transforming into coins upon defeat and even the use of an extra life when the going gets a little too tough, would have normally annoyed this critic to no end.  When Uwe Boll cut away to actual video game screen shots in “House of the Dead” (2003), giving up on film altogether didn’t seem like such a bad option.  But the way Wright unabashedly, skillfully and quite sincerely incorporates the general culture of gaming and comics into film just works.  It’s exciting, funny — even graceful.

No, today’s youth culture doesn’t stand fast and defiant for any particular cause, but is that such a bad thing?

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.

Bad Blake (Bridges), the spitting image of Kris Kristofferson, but with a persona more akin to Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, David Allan Coe or Hank Thompson, is a country music legend.  A legend fallen on hard times.  His influence still courses through the sonic veins of the now slickly produced pop-riddled industry, but Blake, now a heartbroken drunk resigned to playing drab bowling alleys and depressed honky-tonk bars, survives on mere scraps from the very table he helped build.

The story is about as stock as they come.  Blake, tormented by heartache, alcoholism and an anti-climactic bookend to his once glorious career toils in the bedraggled underbelly of life until he meets a girl (Maggie Gyllenhaal).  Their star-crossed romance endures the myriad struggles of life on the road but meets its ultimate test in Blake’s nagging drinking problem.  The ex-star must swallow his pride for a chance at personal redemption and one last shot at resurrecting his career.

Cooper’s first foray into feature films does a lot of things well.  Barry Markowitz’s gorgeous photography sets Blake’s tale of inner strength and triumph against nature’s breathtaking landscapes and simplistic beauty.  The narrative, while at once derivative and meandering, manages to find a certain of air of authenticity in the well-trodden path of its lead player.  And Cooper displays uncommon stylistic restraint for a first-time filmmaker.

But the bad has the edge over the good.  The romance just doesn’t work.  It develops far too quickly and rings almost entirely false.  The usually stellar Maggie Gyllenhaal can’t seem to settle in to her role as the single mom and journalist who falls for the aging outlaw.  We never get a sense of what exactly she sees in Blake  — or what he sees in her for that matter.  And the false endings drive a dagger through the heart of several would-be poetic and fitting ends for the old cowboy.  Chalk it up to inexperience, but Cooper could have, and should have, ended the film about ten minutes before he finally does.

Taking a cue from that shamelessly Hollywood ending, let’s not end this review on a sour note.  Jeff Bridges is an American institution.  It’s criminal that he’s never taken home any hardware from the Academy, and with any luck “Crazy Heart” will change that.  The Dude’s performance is as true and powerful as any I’ve seen all year.  His transformation into Bad Blake is so effortless you could probably convince me that that’s the real Jeff Bridges and everything else is just acting.  A commanding and nuanced performance in a pedestrian film.

Score:  3.5/5