He may be unknown in the United States, but David Fandila is a staple of the Spanish sports pages – and those in South America. A leading matador in Spain, he once fought six bulls in one afternoon – the final two after a 45-minute break to sew up his leg where he had been gored.
Director Stephen Higgins’ documentary, “The Matador” (not to be confused with the dark 2005 Pierce Brosnan comedy of the same name), is an intriguing entrée to the world of the man known to his fans as El Fandi – the top-ranked bullfighter in Spain. Higgins follows Fandila through the 2003, 2004 and 2005 seasons, as he attempts to reach the goal of completing more than 100 corridas in a single season. It’s a journey that takes him around Spain and even to South America.
Higgins’ bullring footage reveals Fandila as a fiery, inventive, fearless athlete, who tries to impart as much artistry as athleticism to his performance. There are breathtaking moments of daring (though, to be sure, some will be disturbed by the sequences in which he kills bulls with a sword-thrust).
Higgins doesn’t ignore the animal-rights opponents of bullfighting. He gives them their moment, shows footage of Fandila confronting them after a bullfight and lets them state their case. But this is Fandila’s film, so while the activists aren’t dismissed as kooks, their inclusion seems more pro forma than anything else.
Still, it’s always fascinating to look inside a world we otherwise wouldn’t get to see.
Fandila himself is something of a cipher: a handsome, well-toned young man (he turned 24 while this was shot) who seems to have few interests outside of staying in condition and plotting his schedule to further his career. But who can blame him for being so narrowly focused? As daredevil professions go, this is among the most dangerous, offering a confrontation with mortality everytime the matador steps into the ring. It’s also especially photogenic, a fascinating blend of old world ritual and pageantry that somehow continues to thrive in the modern era.
The controversy about “Zack and Miri Make A Porno” could have been predicted: the refusal by the priggish MPAA to allow posters that suggest – suggest! – oral sex. And now the outcry over the word “porno” in the title. (Luckily, Porno for Pyros no longer has much cultural currency.)
But the real controversy should be over the film itself: specifically, that Kevin Smith’s comedy suffers from the law of diminishing returns. The longer it goes on, the less funny it gets. (More…)
Kurt Kuenne’s “Dear Zachary: A Letter to A Son About His Father” is the most shattering documentary since “Capturing the Friedmans.” Kuenne takes an intensely personal topic and pulls the audience in, until they are as emotionally invested as he is in the story he is telling.
That story is about the murder of his best friend, Andrew Bagby, a medical resident at a hospital in Latrobe, Pa. Bagby was shot to death in a state park in 2001, just days before completing his residency in family practice medicine.
Kuenne knows he’s treading dangerous ground right from the start. We all have tragedies in our lives; to each of us, those stories have a universal quality that transcends the personal. But, in fact, most often they are of interest only to us and our friends – and not a general movie-going audience.
The story of Andrew Bagby – by all accounts a sweet, caring guy who would have made an outstanding physician – turns into something else, something almost incomprehensible in its ability to wrench the viewer. (More…)
It’s never the wrong time for an anti-war film – and the timing seems perfect for Rowan Joseph’s unique and powerful new version of Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun.”
Joseph, a theater director, has taken a one-man stage version of Trumbo’s novel – which had a legendary and short-lived off-Broadway run by Jeff Daniels in 1982 – and recreated it on a simple set with a single actor. His cast consists of Ben McKenzie, who completely sheds “The O.C.” to play a World War I doughboy caught in a hellish situation.
Simply put, he’s a living corpse: Hit by a shell on the last day of the War to End All Wars, he has been saved by doctors, surviving without arms, legs, eyes, hearing or the ability to speak. He is a doorstop of a human being, a brain trapped in an immobile lump of flesh, kept alive by tubes in a hospital bed.
Trumbo himself directed a film version in 1971 that was much more literal and viscerally horrifying. Trumbo was one of the legendary Hollywood 10, a screenwriter who served jail time for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify during House Un-American Activities hearings about communists in Hollywood. (Yet somehow Karl Rove, Harriet Miers and others thumb their noses at Congressional subpoenas with impunity.)
But Joseph’s version, while packing the same emotional power, is a more poetic, more imaginative version. Working on a bare stage decorated only with a chair and a plain wooden bench (and a few strings of lights), McKenzie conveys a mind that is alarmingly alive, trapped in a nightmare. He shows how we avoid reality by escaping into memory – and how a resourceful, vital young man can learn to grab a tiny measure of control over his existence: to rejoin the world, if only by figuring out how to tell time based on the schedule of nurses and by the feeling of the sun’s heat on a small, uncovered patch of skin on his neck.
When he makes that discovery, it is a moment of triumph that is genuinely moving – both for the accomplishment and for the audience’s realization of just how small a victory this is. By taking control of time, he has sentenced himself to an awareness of how long the rest of his life will truly be.
Using only lighting, camera angles and McKenzie’s full-bodied performance, Joseph blends horror and hopefulness and a muscular anti-war message. The particular conflict it depicts may have occurred almost a century ago but the message – that war kills young men, while sparing those who put them in harm’s way – remains current and vital.
For the first hour, you’ll think you know where Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” is going.
But then the film takes a dark and unexpected detour. In one sense, it moves the film to a whole new level, revealing layers you never guessed were there. But that twist also yanks the movie into the deep end and ultimately drags the film down with it. (More…)
It takes a compelling central character to make a story of police corruption resonate – someone with skin in the game, as it were, putting his life on the line for a principle. A Frank Serpico – or a Danny Ciello in “Prince of the City.”
Otherwise, you wind up with just another tale of betrayal and revenge, along the lines of last year’s overwrought “We Own the Night.” It turns into a kind of algorithm: Treacherous act (A) causes unexpected tragedy (B) revealing secret corruption (C) leading to an attempt at correction (D), which results in brutal act of violence (E) that leads to cleansing act of vengeance (F). Raymond Chandler meets Rube Goldberg via Charles Babbage.
So it is with “Pride and Glory,” Gavin O’Connor’s long-a’borning story of straight-edge New York cops chasing crooked ones, all under a layer of Irish family guilt. (More…)
When he appeared on the scene with the screenplay for 1999’s “Being John Malkovich,” Charlie Kaufman instantly emerged as a critical darling – inventive, quirky, sly, funny, heartfelt. He cemented his reputation with “Human Nature” (though the film itself was unduly maligned), “Adaptation” (the absolute model for meta-movie-making), “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (one of this century’s most overpraised movies).
Kaufman not only wrote but took up the directorial reins for “Synecdoche, New York,” a movie he had written for Spike Jonze (who apparently has problems of his own trying to wrestle “Where the Wild Things Are” to the big screen). Perhaps another director could have pointed out that this gauzily indistinct film is flimsier than a cobweb and that the script needed work before trying to capture it on celluloid. (More…)
It’s so easy to fall into the dancing-bear trap with “I’ve Loved You So Long”: Ohhh, she’s acting in French! Ohhh, a novelist directed a movie!
But that only obscures the real achievement here: that “I’ve Loved You So Long” is a rich, full-blooded, exquisitely crafted drama that pulls you in and refuses to let you go until its final, devastating scene. (More…)
Oh, those wacky Swedes – leave it to them to energize the always-popular vampire genre by setting it in an Arctic climate and making it a coming-of-age story.
OK – so vampire coming-of-age is already in the zeitgeist with the popular “Twilight” series. Or go back to “Buffy” – or to the current “True Blood” on HBO. And the mediocre “30 Days of Night” set the bloodsuckers in the deep freeze.
But Tomas Alfredson’s spirited, dark take on the topic still has a freshness that’s as bracing as a naked roll in the snow. (More…)
You can divide one-named artists into the cool (Bono, Prince) and the camp: Cher, Liza. I tend to lump Madonna in with the second group.
I’ve never been able to take Madonna seriously, which is fine: She takes herself seriously enough to make up for me and the rest of the known world.
She takes herself so seriously, it appears, that she believes it’s time to put her acting on hold to move behind the camera. Apparently she’s never actually watched her own films. (More…)
