Category: Reviews

CIFF Review: Like Someone in Love

There seem to be a lot of times in Abbas Kiarostami’s “Like Someone in Love” that the characters ignore their phone. When they do answer, there’s something lost in translation.

I point out this minute detail because at times it seems to be the only thing to hold our attention in this film about communication between people. The film follows a narrative structure so stripped down that it is at once baffling, boring and beautiful.

It starts inside a bar of people talking and having fun, but the voice we hear is Akiko’s (Rin Takanashi) arguing with her boyfriend Noriaki (Ryo Kase). Akiko is a call girl in Tokyo about to be sent out of town to spend the night with Takashi, an elderly, lonely and retired college professor (Tadashi Okuno). Takashi’s interest in her isn’t sexual, instead looking only for an evening of romance. But he doesn’t make that completely clear, and she falls asleep in his bed.

The next day, Noriaki mistakes Takashi to be Akiko’s grandfather and asks for his blessing in marriage. Suddenly the focus seems to shift to Noriaki and how he struggles to keep his fractured relationship built on lies together. He doesn’t know Akiko is a call girl, and when someone suggests that a photo in an ad looks a lot like her, he lashes out. He’s a scrawny kid capable of intense violence and anger.

Like Ozu, Kiarostami’s films have always been a modern example of deeply personal, slow cinema. And now this Iranian auteur completes his transformation by taking this trip to Japan for “Like Someone in Love.” Unlike his most recent masterpiece “Certified Copy,” Kiarostami is exploring mismatched relationships, philosophy and human nature not through a jumbled, experimental narrative, but a movie that bucks narrative altogether.

It is at times a maddeningly empty film. We sit and watch characters sleep in cars or wait on doorsteps, but Kiarostami surprises us with the new interactions and the new hints at backstory that come from nowhere, something that becomes even more obvious in the film’s captivating and undeniably abrupt ending.

One of the film’s finest scenes shows Akiko listening to voicemails in the backseat of a cab. They’re messages from her grandmother, who has come into town to see her but has been neglected and waiting all day. Now as Akiko is forcefully sent out on a job without time for her to rectify her mistake, we get an understanding of just how lonely her day has been. In her last message, she says she’ll wait patiently in front of a statue before the last train home departs. The cab circles a roundabout at the station at that moment, and there waiting under a streetlamp just as she said is a little old lady holding a suitcase. The image is sad enough, but Akiko asks the driver to go around once more so she can get another look.

It’s a heartbreaking moment, and one that just hints at the many flaws and depths of these characters. And yet it is perhaps a film I’ll have to see twice, one that is regrettably unclear about its intentions and its structure, requiring picking up on nuance on a second pass.

Perhaps that’s why Akiko asked to drive around again; we just need a better look.

3 stars

CIFF Review: Holy Motors

There’s a photographer in “Holy Motors” shooting pictures rapidly and blindly of a lifeless model dressed in gold as played by Eva Mendes. “Beauty! Beauty! Beauty,” he says in complete cartoonish astonishment.

At that moment, a hideous man dressed in a green leprechaun’s suit and no undershirt pushes his way to the front of the crowd and stands silently biting his decrepit fingernails. The man has long red hair plastered to the side of his head and speaks only gibberish. He’s made a scene.

The photographer turns to him and starts shooting photos of him. “Weird, weird. Weird!”

Is this how one should watch “Holy Motors,” the absurdist French drama by the cult French director Leos Carax? It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year and wowed audiences by being completely nutzo and was heralded as an underappreciated cult film because this year’s particular jury led by Nanni Moretti couldn’t possibly “get it.”

I saw it in a sold out screening at the Chicago International Film Festival Sunday night, where it was received by an audience that was half stunned and confused and half ecstatic.

I found myself in neither crowd, frustrated by this repugnant mishmash of a film that either has no point or all too much of one. If you’re going to make a surrealist masterpiece, my advice would be to not be disingenuous about it.

Luis Bunuel or David Lynch Carax is not, try as he might to put his star in a wig that shares the bizarre Lynchian swoosh. He’s made a film that revels in its own spontaneous style, modeling its half-baked ideas and genre spoofs only for us to gawk. The result is a series of avant-garde and art house shorts that have no commonalities, with the exception that its hero seems to smoke in every one. For every moment of “Holy Motors” that is tearful, erotic, giddy, suspenseful or chilling, Carax almost always has a way of ending each with a cheap visual gag. For all its visual flair and profundity, these segments resound as little more than stylized forgeries.

The film does not have a conventional narrative, if any at all, but it does have a protagonist, Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant). We first see him walking out of a mansion and into a limo where he is followed by bodyguards in black sedans. His driver, Celine (Edith Scob), informs him he has nine appointments today.

In preparation for these, he dons wigs, face putty and makeup in front of a brightly lit dressing room mirror. When he steps out of the car, he has made a complete transformation into another person.

First we see him as a hobbled street beggar, unrecognizable and hopeless. Next he dons a black motion capture suit and performs martial arts for a dark, empty room full of infrared lasers. A tall, slender, faceless woman walks out and is bathed in red by the lights, and the two slide across each other’s bodies in sexual acrobatics. The resulting animation is two snake-like monsters having sex. In another segment we meet the leprechaun, who kidnaps Eva Mendes and takes her to a cave, gouges at flowers and her hair, tears her clothes to make a gold burka, then strips down himself to reveal a full on boner and falls asleep to the sound of her lullaby.

Now after all this, is there any part of you that could believe a segment with Oscar picking up his daughter from a party and driving her home in disappointment could be considered genuine?

Don’t all these dramatic segments, like when he’s talking to his daughter on his death bed, or when he’s dragging himself helpless to the limo after being stabbed in the neck, feel like a lie? Maybe all movies are kind of a lie, which leads to what I think “Holy Motors” is actually about.

Now, let me preface this analysis by saying that “Holy Motors” may not be about anything. If watching Bunuel has taught me anything, it’s that two images back to back might not have anything to do with the other, and that anyone tying their brains into a pretzel to figure it out is either embarrassing themselves or projecting.

What I gathered is that this is a movie about performances. It’s about cinema and actors, and Denis Lavant should be applauded for tackling and embodying so many roles so convincingly. Here we have a guy who is such a method actor that for a moment he quite literally becomes someone else. If he were the same person when he got in and out of that limo, then each appointment would be impacted by the one that came before it. He’d be tired, if not dead several times over.

But that’s a plot analysis. The film’s opening shot is of a darkened movie theater audience, acting almost as a mirror looking back at us. This immediately makes us consider our own voyeurism and establishes the implication that it’s all a movie where anything can happen. Carax also includes glimpses of footage from the birth of cinema, like a naked man stretching or a hand clapping, to reference a time when the camera was so omnipresent that actors were aware of their performance, enabling them to embody anything on screen because there was no clear definition for what cinema was.

There are more subtle hints as well. One segment references names like Theo and Vogan, both of which are used in earlier appointments, suggesting that Oscar is an actor who has past traits seep in to his work. Each segment also seems to reference a particular genre, be it character drama, melodrama, gangster, art house or musical.

Maybe I’ve unlocked the film’s riddles and its brilliance, but it doesn’t excuse quite a lot. It doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s a mean spirited movie where violence and sex seem to occur without reason. It doesn’t lend for future viewing where more details can be unlocked because certain moments like the accordion ensemble, Celine’s green mask or the film’s final shot, are nothing more than one-off absurdist jokes, if not just Easter eggs. And it neglects the fact that directors like Bunuel and Lynch have a much stronger control over the tone of the audience. You know if you’re being duped, you know if a moment is supposed to be heartbreaking or beautiful and you know how you feel even if you don’t know what you’re seeing.

Carax’s film misses these marks. It often puts more exotic things on screen than actually compose them in a dynamic way, and Lavant’s performances should not be overstated because the film doesn’t give us much of a base ground from which to gauge his transformation.

I think claims that Carax’s film will be remembered as a classic years from now are exaggerated. It’s a movie that stands out only for its weirdness and little else.

1 ½ stars

CIFF Review: The Central Park Five

In 1989 five black teenage boys were convicted of raping a white woman while she was jogging at night in Central Park in New York. Their trial achieved national attention, and the boys were put in jail for the maximum time allowed to juvenile offenders. But the case was a farce, the boys were innocent, and in 2001, a man came forward and admitted his guilt. The boys, now grown, have since been cleared of all charges, but the state of New York has not recognized their own wrong doing by way of compensation.

The documentary “The Central Park Five” does so much more than exonerate these five people. It holds a scathing light up to our system of justice and our society.

“The Central Park Five” screened Sunday at the Chicago International Film Festival and was followed by a brief Q&A with the directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon, as well as one of the five subjects involved in the case, Raymond Santana. The three of them explained how they are still fighting, how this film has prompted New York State to subpoena the film’s footage to further prolong the Five’s deserved trial and how this film must be seen to allow society to reconsider their human nature. The film opens in Chicago in December at the Music Box.

The film starts by animating 1980s New York, a place filled with rampant racism and crime, with the same anger and frustration as “Do the Right Thing.” Hatred, death, violence and drugs were a part of daily life. “We were supposed to be afraid,” one historian says. “It would’ve been irrational to not be.”

In this town, society had dictated unspoken safe havens. Central Park was one of them. For this to have happened there changed the realm of our mental security, and society needed a way to rationalize this intrusion.

We assigned a label to the crime, “Wilding,” to help define this act of aggression. We diverted to defensive instincts, calling for the Death Penalty and demanding revenge in the way we did in the time of Jim Crow laws. We ignored evidence and rationality because we so believed in our outrage. This was not a war for justice but a fight for our subconscious peace of mind.

Directors Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon make a point to recreate all the details of the case with vivid accuracy. By splicing together and even repeating similar points by each of the five men interviewed, we get a broad picture of the events of those days, one even more stirring thanks to the metaphorical images on display here.

It shows how the police interrogation system is flawed. It shows how the news media behaved with massive oversight. It shows how a parole board can doom the innocent.

But more importantly, “The Central Park Five” gets at the human nature that caused these kids to condemn themselves, that caused society to persecute them with vitriol and that still prevents the police force from admitting their wrong doing.

For all these people, they too were acting out of defense and confusion. They confessed because they were told it would help. They just wanted to go home. They had no clue of the severity of their actions. After full days of interrogation, they caved. They admitted to something they did not believe in because the broader society did. The culture has enabled an inability for them to succeed.

One kid, Korey Wise, displayed the worst case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When the cops came for his friend Yusef Salaam, they said his own name was not on the list, but he could come down to the precinct if he wanted to stay with his friend. Because he was 16, he got upwards of 25 years in prison.

When the film turns to the trial, it speaks to Juror #5. He kept the jury sequestered for days because he didn’t believe their guilt with a lack of hard evidence. Eventually he too caved under the pressure of the other jurors who had enough in seeing the video confessions. He just wanted to go home.

Upon seeing this film I questioned my own actions. When was I so convinced of something that I called for blood? What did I miss and could not be told out of my own rage? For me to say the cops should now be held responsible misses the film’s point, that we look for an easy villain, a scapegoat, to put our own mind at ease. Justice is more complex than that.

It’s hard to call “The Central Park Five” inspirational. I left the film vindicated at the Five’s freedom, but broken at the sight of our oppressive culture.

4 stars

Argo

“Argo’s” images of people rioting in Iranian streets look startlingly similar to the ones we see coming out of the Middle East today. The fact that this movie’s opening scene is an attack on an American embassy gives it an even more disturbing modern day resonance.

Ben Affleck’s film speaks to the power of images and the strength of Hollywood movies to impact the culture around the world.

Thankfully, “Argo” is exactly the arresting genre picture a movie about movie making (even fake movie making) deserves. It’s a multi-layered thriller laced in Hollywood bravura and whip smart cynicism, and it does this remarkably true story proud by letting its heroes and storytelling shine.

“Argo” is based on a recently declassified CIA mission from 1979 to 1980 in which six American diplomats hiding out in the Canadian embassy were snuck out of Iran during a several month long American hostage crisis. The plan to make their escape was organized by Tony Mendez (Affleck), who admits that this was the best bad idea they had. That’s because it does move into that ever-so-common movie territory of “too good to be true.”

We’ll set up alibis for the six Americans as a Canadian film crew making a science fiction movie named Argo. The script is a sprawling “Star Wars” ripoff set in an exotic location, and Iran just might be the perfect place to shoot. We’ll sell ad space in Variety, attach producers and make this fake movie a fake hit.

Well there’s your movie right there.

Affleck takes this farfetched story that would only be good enough for movie magic and makes it a true-to-life reality. It’s an accurate account of how Mendez enlisted help from an Oscar winning make up artist, John Chambers (John Goodman), got a curmudgeonly producer, Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), and established an elaborate cover story.

What makes “Argo” such delicious catnip to movie lovers is its strong insider mentality. Every idea brainstormed is a hopelessly bad one, no one has any faith in the plan or even this movie that actual Hollywood execs think to be real, and yet the movie magic pluck that the good guys will make it in the end always seems to win out.

It does so in the last minute chases at the Iranian airport or the cynical sparring battle between Arkin and a producer over what project he’s going to finance next, and it happens when two Iranian border agents are struck silly by storyboards for even the idea of this fake movie.

And yet Affleck acknowledges that the movies only work because of their images, not their words. So much of his story is told through TV screens and archive footage, and the rest is captured in grippingly immersive suspense scenes often free of score or even much dialogue.

His subtle way of explaining how much images matter come when an American protester quotes “Network” in saying he’s mad as hell, or when the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) says to Mendez, “I expected more of a G-Man look.”

These are moments and ideas that come from the movies, and in this way “Argo” is a powerful zeitgeist movie that is set in the early ‘80s but can resonate in our modern, media driven world.

3 ½ stars

CIFF Review: Beyond the Hills

“Beyond the Hills” attacks religion in a draining film that explains how faith and commitments can be destructive. It’s an interesting film in pointing out that sometimes the most damaging words are “we were only trying to help,” but over the top depressing when we realize those helpers are never going to learn.

The Romanian film by Palme D’Or winning director Cristian Mungiu (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) premiered at this year’s Cannes, taking home acting prizes for its two female leads and a Best Screenplay award, but it made its Chicago debut Friday night here at the Chicago International Film Festival. The movie will have a second screening Monday, October 15 at 8:30 at the AMC River East.

The film begins with the reunion of two best friends who once lived together in an orphanage. In the years that they’ve been separated, one remained in Romania and joined a monastery while the other went to Germany to work. The nun, Voichita (Cosmina Stratan), has invited her friend Alina (Cristina Flutur) to stay at the monastery for a few days, but Alina intends to return to Germany and this time have Voichita come with her.

Alina has an intense attachment to her friend, a commitment to remain with her always and an inability to function without her. But Voichita no longer feels the same. Her love belongs to God now, and no one else.

This is the strict culture established in Voichita’s monastery by her orthodox priest (Valeriu Andriuta). “One must forget one’s love for other people to allow room only for Him. Other desires are sins,” he says, and Alina realizes that Voichita now seems to parrot the Priest’s every sentiment blindly.

What “Beyond the Hills” ultimately concerns is how this woman who can never fully give herself to God will try regardless in an attempt to win back her friend, only to be destroyed in the process.

It’s all told as a subdued character drama, staged with a cinematic simplicity and narrative authenticity that’s common to many Romanian films. You’ll notice how the film has no internal edits within scenes. Each shot takes us to a new location, and the extended long takes that remain affixed in a room reveal the film’s layers, scenes within scenes of out of focus characters animating the frame to provide an elegant subtext.

Take one of the film’s most jaw dropping scenes. A nun is reading aloud a list of over 400 sins for Alina to copy down so she can confess them later. She rattles them off furiously, and all the while, another nun sits quietly and knits as though this were a daily routine.

These are the sorts of cinematic gifts that elevate Mungiu’s work, but the film’s tone comes back to bite him when watching this blunt, bleak third act becomes absolutely torturous.

The scary thing about this monastery is that they’ll never see that there are more problems to life than God. If Alina is acting disturbed, surely it must be because there is a sin she has not yet confessed. The devil is still inside her. In a panicked moment Alina contemplates suicide, but just as the nuns calm her down, one waves a cross in her face and she goes berserk in a nervous fit.

It becomes clear from virtually the film’s onset that Alina’s deep problem with her relationship with Voichita is one that will never be matched by the church’s spiritual solutions. At first “Beyond the Hills” sets up more and more tests of faith for Alina to face, despite the pitiful realization that she’ll never get closer to the monastery’s strict standards. And before long, we’re forced to endure Alina’s pain at the church’s attempt at an exorcism. These people will never grow because they were acting on the will of God, and time and time again Mungiu makes this more than abundantly clear.

In a way then, “Beyond the Hills” exists as an extended shriek of pain. Over its 150 minutes the snow mounts and the subdued tension gets ever more uncomfortable. Perhaps the film would work better if it operated more as a genre horror film, one that clearly delineated these priests and nuns as truly nothing more than monstrous.

2 ½ stars

Summer Hours

When you walk through a museum and see an ornate piece of furniture on display, you read the caption and walk past, forgetting about it as soon as it leaves your sight.

But consider that this desk, vase or armoire used to sit in someone’s home. It used to hold treasured belongings and tie up the room. It used to mean something to someone.

“Summer Hours” finds meaning in our possessions. It’s a film about a family attempting to split up their mother’s belongings after her passing, and it gets at the subtle nostalgia, plans, bonds and emotions that exist in every family.

This particular French family has gathered for their mother Helene’s (Edith Scob) 75th birthday. They talk quaintly and the children play, but Helene needs to talk business. She pulls aside her son Frederic (Charles Berling) to discuss what to do with her belongings after she dies. This is never an easy conversation topic.

The big problem is that Helene is a wealthy art collector living in a massive French villa. She had a deep friendship with a famous French artist long ago and acquired many of his paintings and valuables. Frederic is the only one still living in France and the only one equipped to truly maintain the house after she’s gone.

But how do you get someone to care about an older person’s relics? Frederic has enough problems with his own kids, and now he has to look over the estate of a French artist he hardly knew. Despite her massive collection, the saddest truth is that Helene can’t give away everything. “There are a lot of things that will leave with me,” she says. “There are stories no one is interested in and things no one wants.”

Shortly after, Helene dies, and the family gathers again to manage her estate. Jeremie (Jeremie Renier) is starting a new job in China and is short for cash, and Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) is getting married to her American boyfriend and living abroad. Neither has the time or money to keep the house or many of the treasured belongings, and Frederic can’t buy them out. Most of it must be sold or donated to museums that are interested.

It’s a fight between nostalgia and necessity, between past and present desires. Everyone has their own plans, and in such closely knit families, it can be difficult and awkward when they don’t meet.

Director and writer Olivier Assayas finds that awkward tension in everything that is not said. In one pivotal scene, Adrienne admits she’s getting married, but the news lands like a dull thud because it casts the deciding vote in selling the house. We can sense so easily that Frederic is biting his tongue out of respect, but at the same time he has to show his enthusiastic, happy support.

“Summer Hours” has an elegant, episodic quality to it that encourages these actors and stifles any melodrama. It finds authenticity and meaning in even the most simple of moments.

3 stars

The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson is a very gifted filmmaker, but he might be completely lost if it weren’t for Bill Murray.

The title character of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” is an oafish, selfish, narcissist who is impossible to like, and yet Murray, as he’s done before in films like “Groundhog Day” and others, makes the character palatable, funny and even just a little relatable.

It’s the story of a nature documentarian trying to fund and make the second part to his most recent film, in which a mysterious creature he calls a jaguar shark eats his longtime friend and companion. Now he intends to document the hunt for the shark out of revenge. At the premiere of his film, he meets Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson), a man who claims to be Zissou’s illegitimate son. He and a pregnant journalist (Cate Blanchett) accompany Zissou on his most recent nautical quest.

Anderson’s films have been criticized as cold and without emotional entry points, and “The Life Aquatic” may be the start of that. It’s a film obsessed with its colorful kitsch, the regal mixed with the cartoonish. It has acoustic covers of David Bowie songs performed in Portuguese as its soundtrack, it has stop motion animation done by Henry Selick (“The Nightmare Before Christmas,” “Coraline”) to provide unexpected visual gags and it has dry, uptight characters not making jokes but acting as self-parodies.

When Anderson pans across an intricate set with the fourth wall removed in “The Royal Tenenbaums” or in “Moonrise Kingdom,” he does so to provide context of the depth of family or the spirit of fantasy and discovery. Here, Zissou’s boat looks especially like a movie set, and it’s used as a one-off joke. Like Zissou’s own corny, dated documentaries, he uses it to make a statement about how this nostalgia has lost its kitschy charm and appeal over time and become just a joke.

That’s because for how colorful “The Life Aquatic” is, all of it feels so flat. None of the colors are bright, only soft yellows and blues, and none of the frames have depth, just strikingly picturesque framing in two dimensions.

And yet Anderson’s control over framing and tone is consistently and surprisingly brilliant. He can invigorate the film with a completely nuts scene of Bill Murray going badass on a group of pirates that have invaded his boat. He can make time stop in a nearly Kubrick-esque sequence of a helicopter crash.

All of these moments too scream Anderson. It goes without saying that every Wes Anderson film is so Wes Anderson-y, and no director does it quite the same.

3 stars

Anvil! The Story of Anvil!

If “This is Spinal Tap” were true, it might be a very sad movie. Considering that, “Anvil! The Story of Anvil,” must be a ballad.

Anvil is an early ‘80s hair metal band that is so obscure that this documentary is now a pivotal part in their history. Although they toured with Bon Jovi, Twisted Sister, Poison and other up-and-coming metal acts and inspired many more, they were one of the few bands who failed to hit the stage of super stardom.

Now their lead singer, Steve “Lips” Kudlow” and drummer Robb Reiner are 50 and still together after 30 years and 12 albums (they’ve hit 14 since). They refuse to quit, and this rockumentary commissioned by VH1 and made by Sacha Gervasi, a former Anvil roadie, documents one disastrous tour and the production of their album “This is Thirteen.”

Consider just how pitiful their career as musicians is 30 years after their prime. Anvil is booked on a European tour in tiny bars across the continent, losing their way to the club, not getting paid by the owner and playing to sometimes as few as a dozen people, one caught sitting in a plush arm chair and headbanging in comfort.

If the movie didn’t make fun of them a little bit, this could be tough to watch. But Gervasi has some fun with the Spinal Tap comparisons. While at a festival, Lips spends the day glad-handing more famous rock stars backstage as though they should remember him. Then he realizes that the traffic of people leaving the festival sold out the train, leaving them stranded.

Gervasi even puts Reiner and Lips in a dingy diner together and asks them to reminisce about one of their first songs they wrote together. The two of them start singing and humming the tune in perfect harmony, so in sync with one another. It’s a beautiful moment. The song however is called Thumb Hang, named for the Spanish Inquisition torture technique.

The key thing to take away from “Anvil” however is that these are nice guys trying really hard. Yes they wore bondage outfits and played guitar with dildos once, but the way an AllMusic review described their sound was not innovatively aggressive but just overwhelmingly excited. Lips and Reiner are trying so hard to keep this dream alive, and it is a bit crushing to see them have to take telemarketing jobs to support it. In a way, this isn’t a rockumentary but a coming-of-age story 30 years in the making.

3 stars

Sweetgrass

Have you ever looked a sheep in the eye before? Has it ever looked back?

In “Sweetgrass,” one of the more peculiar documentaries I’ve ever seen, there’s one sheep that does suddenly notice our presence, and we become all the more aware of how it lives.

Sheep have this dumb, blank, clueless look on their faces, strikingly different from any childlike impression of them. Their “baaa” noise is a repulsive belching noise and their wool hides are stained an ugly brown with the exception of the painted on tracking number in green.

We see them making gigantic pilgrimages, traveling in a sea of white or a barrage of hooves past the Radioshack in town or down a Montana mountain that looks like it belongs in “Aguirre, The Wrath of God.”

They’re aggressively manhandled as ranchers sheer their fur, drag and whip around their newborns and force feed them milk through a syringe.

What are they doing? What’s their purpose? You look at them and then back at the herders taking them out to pasture, and you wonder if the human actions have any more meaning than these dumb animals.

Few of their words are put into any sort of context. Because these people are never identified or never asked any questions, all that we hear from them is just noise. One herder swears profusely at his sheep, his dog, his horse and this mountain, and he doesn’t get anywhere. “Fuckin’ dog. You’re as worthless as tits on a fuckin’ bull hog.”

One guy sits and struggles to put four short pipes together to make one longer one. What’s it for? Why does this task look so aimless?

These are the sights and sounds of “Sweetgrass.” It doesn’t seem to have a point, and it is very much a cinephile’s film, one that inspires meandering thought through its visuals, its sound and not much else.

And yet this is not some cinema verite movie. It gets in the face of these sheep, putting the camera in places that no human perspective can achieve. One long take is perched on the back of a truck pulling a wheel of grass and sod, laying it out randomly so the animals can feed. Another seems to be attached to the head of a sheep, in the midst of thousands and nowhere in particular to go.

Like the sheep at the start, you sit and watch with a blank stare, and it looks back.

3 stars

End of Watch

The most obvious thing to notice about “End of Watch” is that the whole movie looks like it was put through a tumble dryer. Even in calm, dialogue driven moments, the found footage cinematography is as erratic, lopsided, messy and claustrophobic as any movie I’ve ever seen.

But “End of Watch” is an interesting film, one that rings true in its shoptalk and streetwise mentality. It’s a shame director David Ayer had to add this cinematic gimmick to a story and characters that already feel very real.

“End of Watch” is a buddy cop drama that plays more like behind the scenes vignettes in the vein of “COPS” than a typical genre picture. It follows two beat officers in South Central Los Angeles, Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Pena), on their day-to-day patrol as they slowly become the unsuspecting enemies of a prominent Mexican drug cartel.

Their immediate difference from most movie cops is their honor. The pair of them are exemplary officers, and an opening monologue by Gyllenhaal gives the job a new level of profundity that deems them more than protectors of the law. They go about their job with a love for their work, explaining how paperwork is the lifeblood of their career or showing respect for their superior officers. They address the camera directly about the procedure of a house call to the point that the film feels like a training movie. It is so much a movie about respecting an officer of the law that when Zavala fights someone man to man and lets him off easy, the movie gives us a scene of the same gangbanger saying that these cops are “straight up gangsta.”

And yet the common tropes associated with cop movies, like justice, honor and morality: all these things take a backseat to the idea that being part of the police is like being part of a family, a brotherhood.

More so than a cop movie, “End of Watch” is a bromance. Its best moments are casual, joshing conversations in the front seat of the cruiser between Taylor and Zavala about girls, the difference between Latinos and whites, sex stories and whatever else might come up between two bros. Gyllenhaal and Pena have such wonderful chemistry together. When they get in that cop car, they’re brothers. No one understands them better.

I think cops might see themselves in the camaraderie of these two characters, even if they don’t believe the extent of some of their crime scenes. Not all of the film is badassery. There are the moments inside the station and waiting for hours as the detectives wrap up that pepper these officers’ lives.

But then there’s that damned camera. Taylor pins two spy cameras to his shirt pocket and to Zavala’s, but the movie has cameras everywhere, on the dashboard, in Taylor’s hand, in the criminals’ hands, and all of them are jostled upside down and in every direction to no end. Later the film turns into a lame POV, first person shooter video game, and we’re denied a single, coherent wide shot or proper lighting. I hate that this is what digital cinematography has become. It’s not getting us any closer to reality by turning the camera on its head and not showing us what’s going on.

That’s what is so irritating about “End of Watch.” Ayer’s pacing is delicate and suspenseful, but he spoils the moment with his vigilante journalism style. His characters are likeable and true, but they’re occasionally insufferable frat boys without something more interesting to say than a string of four letter words (the movie probably sets a new record for f*ck and motherf*ckers). It’s the honorable cop story we should have but the indecipherable movie we shouldn’t.

2 ½ stars