Even I give up on some films. James White is about a listless, goal-less, waste of a human being, who I’m sure turned it around by the end, or at least I hope he did. I wouldn’t know, as I quit about 30 minutes into this one. I get that it is an art film and not for everyone, but it is damn hard to watch, even for someone like myself that typically likes independent films. The scenes are choppy and show moments in James’s life over a couple months, after his dad has died and his mom is seriously ill, but there is no coherency and very little to get behind. Maybe it eventually turned a corner, but that corner was too long in coming.
Life is one of those films where the acting outshines the movie. Semi-biographical, it is about the weeks leading up to the East of Eden premiere, when photographer Dennis Stock followed James Dean around taking photos for a story about this new up-and-comer. Robert Pattinson as Stock and Dane DeHaan as Dean are equally brilliant in this film, and though the film itself is solid but not extremely compelling, film buffs will want to see this for those two alone. If you only think of Twilight when you think of Pattinson, you are missing out on his last few outstanding showings, and relative newcomer DeHaan channels the ultra-cool but seriously haunted Dean as few probably could.
I didn’t get this one, but it is a foreign film (Romanian) so perhaps something is lost in reading the subtitles. The Treasure is a comedy (I think?) about two men, down on their luck, digging for treasure in one of their’s great-grandma’s old houses. The two say and do fairly ridiculous things, the least of which is digging for treasure basically on an old passed down legend, and putting all of their remaining funds into said search. A really low-key film, and delivered throughout in a deadpan fashion.
Entertainment is anything but. It stars Gregg Turkington and is sort of based off his persona of Neil Hamburger. If you’ve ever seen his schtick, he’s the comedian that does terrible one-liner jokes, and is unfunny on purpose. This film is basically 1 ½ hours of that. The comedian is on the road, going to increasingly worse and worse venues (bars), to fewer and fewer patrons, while his jokes are getting worse all the time. It seems to blend into his real life too, as during the day his trips around the towns he’s visiting just get more strange and he seems more depressed. In the end, Turkington is the only one laughing, and the movie can’t be anything more than a joke he’s pulled on the viewer for self amusement.
And finally, after a series of so-so to terrible films, I got a good one in Of Mind and Music. Dr Cruz is a neuroscientist researching to find a cure to Alzheimer’s, of which is mother is suffering. He returns home from a long international trip to find she has progressed rapidly and no longer remembers him. When he stumbles upon a local street performer, Una Vida, he makes it his goal to help her in some way since he wasn’t there for his own mom. He finds that even as Una Vida gets worse, she is brought back to coherency by her music. A very touching film about trying to find hope in a situation where none exists.
Jons Movie Takes 