Birmingham Film Festival - R. Culpepper & SCJ. Simmons

A podcast by my good friends Rob Culpepper and Jacob Sim-City Jesse Simmons. Check it here.

The Eclipse - JAK

Full Disclosure: this review exists solely to make you watch this movie. Anything else you get from this (diversion, chuckles, etc.) is incidental. Kyle told me that I’ve failed if The Eclipse isn’t on your Netflix queue by review’s end. Firstly and secondly: this movie will not ‘change your life’ and it is, from what I know (but what do I know?), not groundbreaking cinema. It is, however, a good movie. And those are rare. It also encourages thought and discussion—rarer still.

Like Martin McDonough’s In Bruges, The Eclipse is the work of a young, talented Irish playwright, Conor McPherson. McPherson has earned a reputation for crafting top-notch stage dramas featuring the supernatural acting within everyday situations. Think Ghostbusters in drama form with a greater emphasis on the inner Slimers and Zules. But maybe that’s a stretch because while McPherson’s plays create a space for devils and ghosts, they are never about devils and ghosts. Rather they focus on the regular people who must confront literal manifestations of the same ghosts who haunt us all.

The everyman in The Eclipse is Michael Farr: good father, recent widower, former boxer, and present volunteer at the Cobh literary festival. Ciaran Hinds plays Farr as a kindly, vulnerable man who is set in opposition to the type of supernatural troubler that Hinds himself devilishly embodied in McPherson’s most successful stage production, The Seafarer. Farr’s first haunting comes in the form of a late-night sound from downstairs. Farr awakens to investigate and sees what appears to be the darkened form of his father-in-law move quickly, eerily, and downright scarily across the room. What makes the scene effective is its simplicity; without the special effects, it looks like an unsettlingly plausible kind of haunting. His father-in-law is neither in the house nor in the grave, but rather in a local nursing home—sad and embittered at the loss of his daughter and the perceived neglect by his son-in-law. His living ghost will visit Farr several more times in increasingly violent confrontations.

The following day the festival begins and Farr meets the visiting novelist that he’ll be chauffeuring around the city. The novelist, played with loveliness and depth by the Norwegian Iben Hjejle of High Fidelity fame, writes about the ghosts that haunt her own life. Farr turns to her for help and a mostly platonic romantic interest develops. Farr’s rival for her attention is another visiting novelist played by Aiden Quinn. Whiny, pretentious, insecure, and allergic to shellfish, Quinn’s Nicholas Holden provides some nice moments of levity. When he, for instance, challenges Farr to a boxing match, we get a breather from the earlier emotional intensity by witnessing the yippy Pekingese (http://tiny.cc/9j9ac) of an author get his comeuppance. If Farr’s relationship with Holden helps alleviate the building tension, then his role as a father ratchets that intensity up to the breaking point. The trauma of Farr’s ordeal shows most poignantly on his daughter’s face; which, frowning with a distress and heartbreak beyond her years, reaffirms that the film’s focus is on human loss, not supernatural warfare. After all, as Hjejle’s character tells us, it’s often us who keep the ghosts present; we can’t let them go.

So, don’t expect a young priest and an old priest for any exorcisms here. Instead of being typical horror movie props, the ubiquitous crosses and Mary statues instead suggest the hope of a much more subtle form of deliverance. Rather than a flashy, final confrontation, the exorcism of Farr’s ghosts requires a process as natural, and indescribably difficult, as grief itself.

Che -KDJ

It takes some energy to make it through parts one and two. However, the energy output matches the goodness intake. Mainly, because of Benicio Del Toro. But also because of the straightforward movie making going on. Soderbergh is more known for coolness yet this movie is not about coolness as much as it is telling the story of a mythic character, as understood by the actors, directors and producers. Che ‘stuff’ is always interesting because its appeal is understood so differently. Soderbergh makes sense of these bunches of ways of seeing and talking about Che. And Del Toro has an arrogance about him that matches how I think of Che, an absolutist mother effer, but still able to meet folks on a human first level.

Che’s appeal and life is super interesting. I’ve read a bunch of crap about Che and by Che. I’m not a Che scholar but I’m really interested in the dude. There are a few things that pique my skull. A.) Che was able to justify killing people. B.) The dude wrote while crazy, exhausting crap was going on around him. C.) He was an incredibly intense dude but he still seemed to, in my way of reading him, relate to people.

A.) Che killing people in order to ‘make things right’ moves Che into another category. Often, Presidents and dictators or politicians or decision makers or whomever, don’t actually, themselves, take someone out. Che took people out. He believed in revolution and he believed in ‘a political system’ enough to substantiate one way of doing stuff over another. His way of doing stuff had the same end goals that Ghandi and MLK had, yet he wanted change quicker than they did. He was an extremist like Paul was an extremist. If every human on earth was not a Christian by the time Paul died then he was going to consider himself a failure. Che wanted every human soul to experience absolute freedom in his lifetime or else he was going to be a failure. The fastest way to gaining converts was to pull up those that needed pulling up and to take down those that needed taking down. In this way, Che killing people separates him and makes everything he writes about truth, virtue, goodness, and freedom really unique and interesting.

B.) On this idea of writing, Che freaking wrote while he was stompin through jungles, while he was cruising around south America, while he was chilling before speaking to the U.N. and while he was surrounded by enemy troops. They make a big deal about this in the movie and I am glad they did. Because it is pretty incredible that he did this. What is more is that what he wrote was really good stuff. He wrote crap that was not so much revolutionary but it was always pertinent and it was always written to make a clear point. It wasn’t as much rambling as it was him trying to make sense of himself and what he was doing and thinking. What comes through in his writings and journals and speeches is an intense love for other people. In the movie, they have him talking to a reporter about how the most important quality for a revolutionary fighter to have is an intense love. He wrote a lot about and to his mother. There is an epic picture of Che hugging his mother in Havannah after they had overthrown the capital. As the voyeurs that we are once a mythic idealogue dies and his/her journals are published after death, we can imagine how much that hug meant to the dude because we know how honestly he encountered his mom in his letters. Che just really connected with people.

C.) The movie makes the point to show Che being about people first and revolution and medicine and whatever else second. He wanted the best for people. Whatever best was, he often questioned the idea of best, he wanted it. He did so much crap but he always did it with people as the end goal. The movie shows him always introducing himself to new people. It also shows him embracing all the guerillas like they were brothers and sisters. I think this is interesting and I think the movie was good for showing this because often super intense people are unable to come back down and just kick it with folks around them. I don’t know for sure if Che truly kicked it with people but it seems that he at least tried to. There is a big difference between trying and actually doing it but the movie made it seem that he did and I liked this about the movie. At least it recognized how necessary this was for the characterization of ‘Che’ and all the possible versions of ‘Che’.

The characterization of Che and Fidel and their fight was seen through a really simple picture, motion picture that is. The simple results as seen by the viewer had to come from a lot of work and doing crap right. The production of this movie really surprised me. It surpised me because it had this appearance of old school movies but it did it well and it did it for a reason. There are a lot of logistics to telling the story of Che from the build-up to leaving the mainland and sailing for Cuba, to battle scenes to the development of Che’s idealogy and mythic figure-ness to his death scene and whatever else. Soderbergh did really well with all this. What he did even better was the orchestration of scenes where Che was meeting new recruits and locals and peasants and then dignitaries in New York. There are a thousand ways to invoke ‘Che’. I think Soderbergh didn’t pick just one way of doing so. I think he used all the ways that it has been done and meshed them all together. In this way you get one way of seeing Che, but I think it is a more informed one way of seeing Che. I don’t think he was trying to prove all the Che lovers and Che haters wrong. I think he just wanted to make a movie about the coolnes of Che’s story.

Benicio is the best actor alive, in my opinion. I think he is in that category where you forget that you are watching a character. He dominated this movie. He even looked like Che. I spoke with my Cuban roommate and my friend from Buenos Aires and both said that he did an Agentinian accent and a Cuban accent perfectly. My Mexican friend told me that his accent in 21 grams was also perfect. What is more, is how cool his accent was in the Usual Suspects. I am all for any movie with this dude in it.

Che parts 1 and 2 are both really great movies. I think it will not ever be noticed as a game changer or anything like that. But it is just a really good movie that was shot well and had some great actors and has a great story.