In the introduction to the new anthology Film Noir The Directors, edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini, Silver quotes from the noir classic Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder. Walter Neff, the prototypical noir protagonist (played by Fred MacMurray) confesses into a dictaphone:

“I killed him for money—and a woman—and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman. Pretty, isn’t it?”

That pretty much sums up the noir attitude. As Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote in 1972, “Double Indemnity was the first film which played film noir for what is essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic.”

The same could be said of some of the directors profiled by various contributors in Film Noir The Directors. Many directors like Wilder who found their voice or also dabbled in noir throughout their careers went on to make big names for themselves: Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Huston, and Robert Wise, to name a few.

But there are plenty of directors who made seminal, lower profile contributions to the genre without ever making names for themselves. People like Gerd Oswald, Felix Feist, and John Brahm are in that category. Film Noir The Directors rectifies that situation, profiling these lesser-known directors right beside their famous contemporaries. This 476-page book discusses not only each director’s career trajectory, but also a brief summation of common themes in their work and their best noir titles. 28 directors are profiled in all.

It’s also filled with tons of publicity photos from the films—featuring both stills from the movies themselves and on-set behind-the-scenes stuff, all in glorious black and white.

For anyone looking to brush up on their knowledge of one of the more hotly debated of film genres (Are noir films defined by their lighting scheme and art direction or by their narrative themes?), Film Noir The Directors is a great place to start. Some of the contributors spend a little too much time on plot summaries, but discussing the specifics of a story is necessary to delve deeper into a movie’s subtext, so I get that.

In the editors’ section on director John Farrow, for instance, they compare the concept of control across his films The Big Clock and Night Has A Thousand Eyes, which was an adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich novel. They write:

“Like most of Woolrich’s work, the story revolves around images of darkness and time, images that threaten to swallow up the main characters fighting desperately for their lives against these two inexorable forces.”

Film Noir The Directors isn’t impenetrable for those brand new to the genre, but it is full or references and comparisons to other films and directors, as well as popular authors from the hard-bolied crime fiction world. In this way, the book can be used as an entry way into film noir and its origins as well as a never-ending recommendation list (although many titles in book are not readily available on home video or Netflix).

Reading Film Noir The Directors, I was constantly reminded that these post-war themes of cynicism and darkness were not even recognized as a film genre while most of these movies were in production. These stories sprouted up organically as reactions to a world that these screenwriters and directors saw significantly change in their lifetimes.

Certainly big-time movies that reflected hope and idealism were still popular at the box office after World War II, but the low budgets and tight schedules of noirs meant that there was also a steady stream of efficiently produced movies that reflected a more desperate side of humanity and didn’t always have happy endings.

 Film Noir The Directors is an alluring look at the people who created these movies and it is a great companion piece—using François Truffaut and Andrew Sarris’ auteur theory as a foundation of course—to the movies themselves. The essays do a consistently great job of pointing out common threads throughout each director’s work and connecting these to the director’s personal story and the bigger picture of the genre as a whole.

Warren Cantrell is at the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival seeing as many movies as he can and filing reviews and reports as he goes.

It’s an entirely common and acceptable practice within Hollywood circles to harvest Asian and European cinemas for the best and brightest ideas for adaptation and release into a domestic market that’s become a saturated, largely stagnant artistic pool.  And this is not to say that there’s a shortage of innovative ideas and/or talented storytellers in the States, it’s just that the people running Hollywood’s studios are a collection of glorified accountants and analysts who crunch numbers with more alacrity than what they experience when reading scripts.  And that’s fair.  For a statistician it’s far more reliable to put money into sure things: proven commodities.  This is why sequels, comic books, and literary franchises are getting so many green lights and blank checks these days, and why the waters of the aforementioned pool are growing darker still.

In this way, it’s entirely possible, nay, likely, that The Fourth State (German: Die vierte Macht) will find itself optioned or otherwise remade into an American franchise, one that will almost certainly try to squeeze every drop of exquisitely crafted suspense and intelligent intrigue into their adaptation. A German film, it follows Paul, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, an actor some will recognize as Manni from Run Lola Run. Paul is a celebrity journalist, and The Fourth State begins as he arrives in Moscow, about to begin his new job as the nightlife and culture columnist for a second-rate pop and fashion rag.

As Paul settles into his apartment, which is actually his deceased father’s old residence, the audience gets the sense that the journalist is dodging some emotional ghost.  Perhaps his dad? The movie modestly tosses out a few hints in the opening minutes that imply that Paul’s father, who once worked for the same magazine in Moscow, had been a serious journalist, a legacy Paul clearly (and somewhat defiantly) does not seem interested in. There’s a nagging emptiness to Paul, however: the scent of which is unmistakable due in no small part to a marriage of superb acting and astonishing directing. Early on, the shots have a shallow focus with a lot of shade, and present scenes built on expression with little dialogue, something that gives the picture a very Michael Mann feel (in a good way).

The Fourth State presents Moscow as a cold, busy, yet altogether empty place which is made all the more foreign due to Paul’s inability to communicate effectively in Russian. Speaking to those around him in English, and unable to decipher the quiet whispers of the natives around him, the audience is plunged deeper into the shadowy fog of Moscow right alongside the film’s protagonist as the plot’s various corners begin to unfold.

And boy, do they ever unfold! Tickled by his father’s legacy, and with one of Cupid’s arrows lodged firmly in his hip, Paul goes after a fiery journalist and activist, Katja (Kasia Smutniak) who gets the naïve journalist tangled up in a terrorist plot with teeth enough to make a shark flinch.  One thing leads to another, and before he can say “I am a doughnut,” Paul is looking down the barrel of a 20-to-life stretch in a Russian gulag, a prospect that makes the same duration at San Quentin look like a stay at the fucking Waldorf Astoria.

This reviewer is hesitant to proceed any further, plot-wise, for fear of ruining or otherwise spoiling so much as a fraction of The Fourth State, a movie so meticulously crafted that, as a 21^st century suspense thriller, it has few equals. The film actually begins with a disclaimer to assure viewers that the picture is entirely fictional, a telling caveat to a movie dealing with make-believe subject-matter that all seems frighteningly plausible.

And while the actors and director Dennis Gansel certainly deserve the majority of the credit for this, it certainly helps that the film takes place almost entirely in Moscow: a city within a country that’s got a long history of “misplacing” dissidents and prisoners. Again, though, this is further enhanced by the work of Gansel, whose lighting and set design is pitch-perfect in scene after scene. Everything from the clothing of the Russian Secret Service to the design of their interrogation room seemed to emanate intimidation and fear.

Attention to these sorts of details in conjunction with a haunting score and crisp performances from every member of the lead and supporting cast elevated The Fourth State into exclusive company, for in roughly 105 minutes, the picture presented a well paced, fully realized action thriller on par with anything released these last dozen years (in any country). In Paul, a man who isn’t a rogue spy, superhero, or vampire, the audience has a believable, identifiable protagonist who is at the center of a dizzying conspiracy that he’s uncovering in fragments right alongside the audience. The journalist’s confusion and vulnerability are a refreshing take on the Euro-amnesiac thriller, especially since Paul doesn’t ever snap-to, and start busting out wild Aikido moves all of a sudden.

The journey is a thrilling one, and is made all the more engaging because of the tightly wound plot put to perfect use by a director who clearly knows when and how much line to let out as the events progress.  There’s a lot of moving parts to this picture, and director Dennis Gansel makes sure all come together flawlessly as the pieces of Paul’s puzzle eventually fall into place.

It is for this reason that The Fourth State will almost certainly reappear in American cinemas with Shia LeBeouf as Paul, and Jessica Biel as Katja, for the outline of near-perfection is already in place, ready to be traced. This reviewer will almost certainly get back out to the Seattle International Film Festival, where this film is currently playing, to get a repeat viewing of The Fourth State in, for it will be hard to remember what once was after Hollywood’s analysts and accountants get their hands on this gem.

Experimental films function on a wholly different level than narrative films. Where most movies, fictional or documentaries, are focused on telling straightforward stories, experimental films aren’t necessarily concerned with that.

Many experimental films are self-reflexive, and force the viewer to consider the medium as much as the message. In the case of the 24 Hollis Frampton experimental movies from 1966 to 1979 included on the new Criterion Blu-ray A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, this is very much true. In fact, all the films in this retrospective set will bring to mind questions about how they were created. Pondering those questions—and the set of filmic limitations and possibilities—are the reason the films exist in the first place.

Hollis Frampton made close to 100 films and photographic series before his death at forty-eight from cancer. His avant-garde work would come to be considered “structural” by writer P. Adams Sitney, “in which the shape of the whole film is predetermined and simplified, and it is that shape that is the primal impression of the film.”

To view the films in A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, one must shut out outside influences and concentrate on the films themselves. For Frampton’s films to engage the mind, you must first be seduced by them. Almost all the works on this disc are minimal in nature and they begin asking questions the moment they appear on the screen.

Often times the films appear to be formalist puzzles, such as Zorns Lemma, an hour-long film divided into three parts that was the first feature-length experimental film shown at the New York Film Festival. A lengthy section in the middle is devoted to one-second handheld shots of New York City in the late 60s.

The rhythmic repetition of these shots is equal parts maddening and hypnotic. The viewer will figure out a pattern pretty quickly and come to count on the film to deliver that pattern—each shot contains a letter of the alphabet and arrives in a set of 24, representing the Roman alphabet.

This middle section of the film is silent, but it certainly isn’t wordless. The ever-reliable one-second cuts kind of become their own throbbing soundtrack as your mind fills in the blanks. Frampton is also filling in the blanks, replacing a different letter in the series each time out with an image without direct alphabetical correlation. There are more than a hundred cycles, which gives the viewer more than enough time to let their mind wander wherever it may take them or allow them to focus in on one minute detail of the pattern.

The last section of the film is a break for the eyes—a very long one. It’s a static shot of a couple walking through the snow with a dog with choral accompaniment. We’re out of the madcap bustle of the city and into a calm, serene landscape where life moves at a different pace. Zorns Lemma is perhaps Frampton’s most famous film, and it’s easy to see why. It engages on more than just an intellectual level and enters the realm of visual poetry that can be emotionally stimulating as well. His best work on A Hollis Frampton Odyssey, films like [nostalgia] and Gloria!, work on those levels too.

I won’t lie, though. Parts of this collection are a pretty tough watch. Frampton relies so much on single takes and repetition that your first instinct may be to reach for the remote. To get the full effect of films like Lemon and Peas and Carrots, they must be watched uninterrupted, as intended. It is the way that Frampton manipulates time that will leave the biggest impression.

As usual, Criterion’s disc is full of engaging special features and a booklet that talks about Frampton in the bigger picture of experimental film, but also goes through each work in specific. Selected films contain audio commentary and remarks from Frampton, an excerpted Frampton interview from 1978 is included, as is a 1968 performance piece and a gallery of his photographic works.

Here is a clip restored by Criterion for the new release of Surface Tension, a 1968 Frampton film:

We have advance passes to see MADAGASCAR 3: EUROPE’S MOST WANTED on Saturday, June 2 at Cinemark Merriam at 10:30 AM and we want you to have them!

All you have to do is fill out the information below and you’ll be entered into a random drawing for two passes to see the movie. Winners will be chosen on Tuesday May 29.

Synopsis: Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Gloria the Hippo, and Melman the Giraffe are still fighting to get home to their beloved Big Apple and of course, King Julien, Maurice and the Penguins are all along for the comedic adventure. Their journey takes them through Europe where they find the perfect cover: a traveling circus, which they reinvent – Madagascar style.

Good luck!

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To win THE DICTATOR prize pack, which features a wonderful assortment of essential items for any oppressive ruler trying to make it in the Western world, Scene-Stealers readers had to submit a photo of the greatest beard of all time.

We asked you for the best and we got ‘em! We chose 5 grand prize winners among all of the entries. Believe it or not, there were quite a few entries to come back more than once. The 5 grand prize winners were ones that were unique to their entry because General Aladeen believes in individuality now that he’s visited New York.

The winners have already been notified by email–thanks for playing!

Here are some of the winners and runners up!

We have advance passes to see SNOW WHITE AND THE HUNTSMAN starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth on Tuesday, May 29 at 7:30 PM at AMC Studio 30 and we want you to have them!

All you have to do is fill out the information below and you’ll be entered into a random drawing for two passes to see the movie. Winners will be chosen on Monday May 28.

Synopsis: Kristen Stewart plays the only person in the land fairer than the evil queen (Charlize Theron) out to destroy her. But what the wicked ruler never imagined is that the young woman threatening her reign has been training in the art of war with a huntsman (Chris Hemsworth) dispatched to kill her. Sam Claflin joins as the prince long enchanted by Snow White’s beauty and power.

Good luck!

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Coming off of publicity stunts at this year’s Oscars and Saturday Night Live, the most outrageous satirist in comedy has a new movie in theaters this week.

Sacha Baron Cohen, the man behind the prank-based satire of Borat and Bruno is back with The Dictator, a movie that contains all the shock humor and cultural skewering you’ve come to expect from him, but wraps it all up in a very different package.

Larry Charles is on board again as director, and Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, a  dictator from the fictional country of Wadiya. Like he did in his previous films, Baron Cohen relentlessly parodies hypocrisy with a fish-out-of-water character.

The difference is that The Dictator is fashioned in the style of the modern American romantic comedy. In this case, Aladeen falls for the least likely person ever—a short-haired, peace-loving owner of a green grocery store in New York, played by Anna Faris.

Does this shift in style mean The Dictator is more conventional than the reality-based Borat and Bruno? Or is it more subversive because it follows the romcom format while betraying romantic comedy sensibilities with a vicious mean streak and some sublimely shocking moments?

I think that will depend on how you feel about Baron Cohen’s style of humor before you see The Dictator. Some of the jokes in the movie are designed to make you cringe more than they are to challenge you to think, but I still believe Baron Cohen is a fresh and unique comedic voice and an equal-opportunity offender.  (The movie is co-written by Baron Cohen with Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer and is loosely based on Saddam Hussein’s bestselling novel Zabibah and The King– really?)

Even though the jokes in The Dictator don’t hit as consistently as his previous films, they hit a lot. For every joke that lands with a thud, there are three howlers right around the corner. If you are wondering, by the way, whether Baron Cohen tops himself in the shock humor vein this time out, I would say that he has. Is there another comedian out there willing to mine jokes from such potential landmines as human rights abuses, global terrorism, and 9/11?

More than one scene had me laughing about it for minutes afterward and at least one had me putting my hands in front of my face in a half-hearted effort to block the screen. Word of warning: You can’t unsee the baby-delivery scene in The Dictator. You just can’t. I’m afraid it’s scarred me.

The parody may be a little less focused than his previous movies, and the timing and rhythm of the film is a little off sometimes, but its fast-paced and often laugh-out-loud hilarious. Baron Cohen’s best onscreen collaborator (in a movie full of celebrity cameos and small roles) is Jason Mantzoukas. The pair have a natural chemistry and Mantzoukas is best suited for keeping up with what must have been an improv-heavy shoot.

Aladeen’s speech at the end of The Dictator is the funniest, wide-ranging political jab I’ve heard in a long time, and it makes me wish there were more of that—but I’ll settle for an uneven film that’s still full of side-splitting moments.

Trevan and Eric talk about Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s eighth collaboration Dark Shadows before moving onto a movie they actually want to talk about: The Avengers.

And check out Eric’s other project U.S. Air Guitar.

Subscribe to The Scene-Stealers Podcast on iTunes or our RSS.

This review originally appeared in shorter form on KSNT-NBC, KTKA-ABC, and KTMJ-FOX, Kansas First News.

The summer movie season continues with one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars and his director of choice working on another remake together.

Director Tim Burton and star Johnny Depp team up for the eighth time in the new movie Dark Shadows, based on the oddball gothic soap opera that ran in the late 60s and early 70s on ABC.

Depp is Barnabas Collins, an 18^th-century vampire freed from his coffin in 1972, and most of the film’s funny moments come from his extreme culture shock. Unfortunately for the nearly two-hour movie, most of those scenes appear in the two-minute trailer.

Dark Shadows has the talent behind and in front of the camera to be the lusty, campy drama it wants to be, but the movie has a lot of exposition to get out of the way first. Barnabas’ first true love is played by Bella Heathcote, who also plays her direct descendant Victoria 200 years later. Barnabas notices the similarity and falls in love all over again. Well, at least that’s what he says. It’s not very convincing, because he spends most of his time getting into funny out-of-time situations instead of romancing his dream girl.

When the movie finally does start moving forward, it lurches and sputters. Key characters (like Heathcote, family matriarch Michelle Pfeiffer, and patronizing uncle Jonny Lee Miller, who gets leverage on Barnabas but never uses it) disappear for long stretches of time.

The pacing of Dark Shadows is very awkward, and some scenes seem to exist in their own universe entirely, having no bearing on the rest of the plot. If this is supposed to be some sort of satirical comment on the original TV show, which was famously erratic, then it was a bad choice. A late-movie revelation from Chloë Grace Moretz‘s character is completely out of left field (and doesn’t serve any other real purpose than to be out of nowhere), as well as a finale that’s a pretty big letdown.

Eva Green steals the show, however, as a sexy and wicked witch who’s as cracked as her smile. Her obssession for Barnabas isn’t really explained, nor is the reason for her not aging, but Tim Burton clearly isn’t interested in a film with clear-cut rules. That’s easy to let slide.

As usual for Burton, the art direction is a treat (with less of a reliance on CGI than his last couple outings) and Depp does “weird” really well — but in order for soap operas to work, you have to want characters to get together and break apart.

Dark Shadows doesn’t accomplish that. In fact, it has almost no forward momentum at all. Now that’s really odd.

Warren Cantrell is at the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival seeing as many movies as he can and filing reviews and reports as he goes. 

U.K. artist and sculptor Andrew Logan has acted as the veritable nerve-center of England’s art scene since the early 1970s, a position he solidified after hosting the First Annual Alternative Miss World contest in ’72.  Archival footage in director Jes Benstock’s documentary, The British Guide to Showing Off, shows wonderfully grainy and scratchy footage of this first pageant, where wild eccentricity and bold transgender statements electrified a counterculture movement yearning for some sense of individuality following the MOD and hippie-drenched 1960s.

The British Guide to Showing Off is currently playing here at the Seattle International Film Festival, and is a celebration of Andrew Logan’s mutant beauty pageant, one that’s always rewarded its contestants for outstanding acts of courage and individuality.  As the film follows Andrew preparing for the 12th pageant in 2009, a brilliant series of collage-like montages unfold, assembled in a stop-motion picture animation style very reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python work (it is a British doc, after all).  These montages provide a wonderfully layered and surprisingly detailed presentation of the U.K. artistic scene as it evolved right alongside Andrew and the subsequent Alt. Miss World contests. 

As the documentary jumps back and forth between an investigation of the pageant’s development over the decades, and then back to Andrew’s struggles in 2009 to see that year’s contest arranged, there’s a refreshing honesty that might have been excised by a less skilled filmmaker.  Indeed, the documentary is made stronger by the quick flashes of candor that appear in the segments, like one showing Andrew lamenting the financial burden of the contest, and how each one effectively bankrupts him (a big reason why they aren’t held every year).  Another touching scene comes later on in the film, when Andrew talks about how he doesn’t want to exclude any contestant from appearing in the 2009 show, and that while certain considerations limit the number of people allowed in, that he “Wants them all in…’till the very end.”

When it is at its best, The British Guide to Showing Off demonstrates how the Alternative Miss World contest has pushed and challenged perceptions of beauty and spectacle in 20 and 21^st century art.  Some especially fun moments include a highlight from the 1981 contest, when the Provisional Irish Guard performed as part of an act, and a victory a few years later by a fabulous fashion robot.  Admittedly, these were shadows humbled by the sun, which came in the form of the 2009 winner: Miss Fancy-Chance-Likes-Burritos-and-Facial-Scars.  Just as a point of reference, his/her pageant application stated that, “she dislikes gang-bang porn, and her hobbies are fishing and shitting glitter.”  All of this history, from 1972 to 2009, represents a fascinating, living, breathing work of art that’s clearly had a visible (and positive) impact on the growth and development of British pop culture these last four decades.

As delightfully engaging and fascinating as it is, there is an insulated component to the documentary that leaves a non-European (this particular reviewer, for example) feeling as if they are on the outside looking in.  Clearly, the Alternative Miss World competition has had a profound influence on Britain’s evolving attitudes pertaining to music and fashion, something that clearly trickled out via the Glam and punk movements, yet how this affected the larger world is a question left curiously unanswered.

The Alt. Miss World competitions have been held intermittently since 1972, and have always acted as bold and defiant expressions of personal independence in the face of a stodgy British heritage that largely encourages compromise and conformity.  Enraptured as I was by the intriguing history of the competition and the gradual emergence of each new artistic movement, there seemed to be something missing: that magic bullet to connect all the wonderfully arranged U.K. dots to a larger LGBT or artistic movement outside of England. Though director Jes Benstock hauls out a number of important British mainstays like Brian Eno, Ruby Wax, Derek Jarman, and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, all of whom speak at length about Andrew Logan’s influence on the English art scene, this is the limit of the documentary’s scope.

And that’s too bad.  For a beauty pageant born amidst the turbulent waves of the 1970s LGBT civil rights movement, it seems only natural that there would have been some figureheads from the New York or San Francisco scenes testifying to the inspiration taken from Andrew and the Alternative Miss World competition across the Atlantic.  If nothing else, one would have expected to see leaders of the transgender, gay, and lesbian communities speaking to the influence Andrew and his contests have had on a new generation of artists and activists.  Clearly, as the film shows, this influence is felt in England; yet if this is something that hasn’t translated across the waters, why not talk about that a bit?

Though discussions about Andrew’s interactions with Warhol pop up at one point, this is the extent of such a discussion.  The documentary’s tight focus remains on Andrew’s grandest work of art (the competition), and the arduous nature of its development, both past and present.  In the end, the documentary successfully demonstrates how the Alternative Miss World contest is unflinchingly and wholeheartedly about art and spectacle, about the celebration of diversity and the inherent right of all people to express themselves freely. The fact that the pageant routinely crowns champions that are men as well as women, gay as well as straight, shows that the Alternative Miss World showcase is a truly special and unique event, one the documentary might have served a bit better if it had connected it to a larger, more global cultural web.

Still, like the Alternate Miss World contest, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

Warren Cantrell is at the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival seeing as many movies as he can and filing reviews and reports as he goes. 

At their best, film documentaries responsibly educate their audiences by presenting rounded, objective narratives that lead toward a conclusion illuminating a larger truth.  Even a truly exceptional one (for example, Ken Burns’ recent U.S. Parks documentary) which is admittedly biased towards a certain side of an argument (i.e., that our National Parks should be preserved) takes the time to present counterpoints to the thematic sequence, and demonstrates how any idea, however noble at its inception, can become corrupted.

What’s most surprising about We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, a documentary about the ‘Anonymous’ hacking collective, is its refusal to seriously acknowledge any other side to an argument whose outcome the documentary presents as a foregone conclusion.  The result is a lopsided film that is not only irresponsibly biased towards a specific end, but is also so horribly constructed that any message it might have wanted to convey gets lost in the frantic, unfocused shuffle.

We Are Legion, written and directed by Brian Knappenberger, starts by presenting one of the “hacktivists” later shown as a defendant in a major case by the U.S. government.  Her name is Mercedes Haefer, a cocky, self-righteous martyr wanna-be that speaks to the documentary’s central thesis: the powers-that-be are trying to suppress “the truth,” and hacker-heroes like Mercedes are successfully fighting the good fight. What the documentary inadvertently proves, however, is that the hacktivist movement is like a rudderless battleship: a big damn boat with huge guns yet no means to get them anywhere with any reliability.  Sure, every once in a while, some convoy is dumb or oblivious enough to pass by the crippled destroyer, and some damage is inflicted, yet the vessel can do little more but spin in circles and take pot-shots at the world. 

This directionless battleship analogy is an apt one, for the film that celebrates the hacktivists and their struggles also has little structure and a scatter-shot A.D.D. feel to it.  Though We Are Legion begins with a brief history of hacking, and the birth of Internet culture in the 1990s, it quickly shifts into what feels like a VH1 Behind the Music episode about various hacking sub-cultures and projects that leaves the audience largely confused.  This is but the first of several instances where the documentary seems to abandon its own narrative, seemingly for no purpose but expound on a new subject that quickly overtakes the original.

The talking-head interviews are interesting and do give some perspective about the growth of the ‘Anonymous’ movement through 4chan’s B-board, yet a lack of focus and the failure to provide any kind of a counterpoint to the documentary’s arguments cheapen the film as a whole.  Though We Are Legion succeeds at convincing its audience that the ‘Anonymous’ collective has taken up some noble causes and done some arguably good work, the payoff is almost always cheapened by the ham-fisted delivery of the message.  Still, it’s hard not to get behind a spontaneous hacker community that decides neo-Nazi pricks like Hal Turner need to be drummed out of the public spotlight; indeed, the documentary is at its most entertaining when showing the enthusiastic glee flashing behind the eyes of some of the hackers who got to wage a cyber-war against the Chruch of Scientology and PayPal.

Yet this is also where the film’s sharp and slippery slope is to be found.  Without any structure, leadership, or dogmatic stabilization, the ‘Anonymous’ hacktivist collective cannot be trusted or relied upon as a positive force for change. The movie repeatedly endorses patently illegal behavior which got several of the people in this film arrested, and dismisses these actions as forms of social activism.  At one point, perhaps the film’s cheapest, one of the hacktivists who was arrested for his Scientology mischief hauls out his mother to talk to the camera about how her son’s one-year prison sentence was a travesty of justice. She argues that her child has been victimized by the government simply because of a few clicks of his mouse. (He wrote a program that crashed the Scientology main page)

This attitude, one the documentary flaunts proudly throughout its breadth, is an implicit endorsement of illegal activity, something We Are Legion shockingly (and incorrectly) associates with the work of people like Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  This comes off as not only offensive, but as a blatant distortion of the facts, for while Gandhi and M.L.K. had purpose and clearly defined goals, ‘Anonymous’ has characterized itself by its nebulous agenda. This notion is proven when a hacktivist talking-head unapologetically admits that the ‘Anonymous’ movement began as a means to simply cause mayhem, saying, “Our goal was to wreak as much havoc as possible. Because it was stupid.”

Thus, by the time We Are Legion is finished, one gets the sense that what began as a bunch of computer-savvy cyber-buddies getting cheap thrills eventually evolved into a social movement with good intentions yet no direction. This inevitably devolved into a fiercely vindictive cyber-community with a mouth full of poison and an eye for a cause…any cause. It has defined itself as a social justice movement, but what it has really become is a nameless group of hackers who’ve won a few fights and are now addicted to the rush of big-time mischief.

We Are Legion tries to justify the hacktivist cause by allowing some of the masked, voice-altered interviewees to spout idealistic platitudes about the inherent right to free speech and information sharing.  One of these hacktivists says, “It’s important that we know such stuff, it’s important that we know what our governments do and if they don’t tell us, then somebody has to.”

Really? Why? Why do you deserve to know everything? The documentary never presents an answer to this question, yet perhaps what’s more disturbing is that it never tries to.

A shockingly simplistic take on a movement and group that deserves a far more serious, objective investigation, We Are Legion is a poorly made documentary that lets its opinion on the subject matter cloud its message.  This is a shame, too, for in better hands, this might have been a very engaging look at a spontaneous internet movement, one that represents a 21^st century Hobbesian social model that speaks to the human condition vis a vis power, community, and fear.

Warren Cantrell is at the 2012 Seattle International Film Festival seeing as many movies as he can and filing reviews and reports as he goes. 

Sports films are a tired genre with predictable characters and plot threads that can be (and often are) sketched out on the backs of cocktail napkins.

They keep circling back into cinemas because certain particulars exclusive to competitive contests never run out of steam. The last-second jump shot, the bottom-of-the-ninth home run, a goal finding the back of the net in a game’s waning moments — these are and always will be timeless and universal flashes of human glory, and will thus be celebrated in perpetuity. 

And then there’s curling.  A “sport” in only the strictest definition of the word, curling is lower even than bowling in the sacred sports fraternity, for the level of athletic prowess required to dominate the game is on par with what’s needed to compete in a Hawaiian beer drinking contest. Yet as the Norwegian comedy Curling King (aka Kong Curling) demonstrates, the sport’s enthusiasts and practitioners feel that the ancient stone-sliding pastime is a delicate and precise marriage between skill and art, and one to be taken very, very seriously.

This “game of millimeters” is certainly something the movie’s main character, Truls Paulsen (Atle Antonsen), takes seriously, so much so that the film begins by explaining that he’d assaulted a judge during a match, only to turn up days later half naked in a field, trying like all hell to construct a curling target using massive bales of hay.  Formally institutionalized because of this little incident, the movie picks up with Truls’ release.  Finally set free after10 years in the loony bin, Truls reenters the world only to find that his team’s disbanded, and that his childhood friend and mentor, Gordon, is dying of lung cancer.

Naturally, the familiar trappings of the traditional sports film emerge and inspire Truls to get the team back together for one last curling tournament, one whose purse will net enough money to pay for mentor Gordon’s operation (naturally).  What makes Curling King so entertaining isn’t its plot, which we’ve all seen countless times before, but rather its tender treatment of its lead character and the loyal friends that surround him. As an audience, we aren’t surprised when the familiar themes of believing in one’s self and persistence in the face of adversity bubble to the surface, but are when director Ole Endresen transcends these industry clichés via characters that are somehow frantically unstable yet unavoidably endearing all at once.

In this way, Curling King feels a lot like an Alexander Payne or Wes Anderson film, for its characters are fatally flawed yet endowed with a special purpose unique to that film’s specific universe. This is enhanced by stunning visuals that are rich and bold, yet never oppressively obtuse: Truls’ recurring yellow theme especially striking. Curling King’s distinct universe creates a very cozy pocket in which the film’s characters can thrive.  (Fans of The Life Aquatic will be especially delighted by the homage score heard during Curling King’s bird-watch scene.) 

That said, if you’re not a fan of Anderson or Payne, or of silly sports films like Dodgeball or Talladega Nights, you probably won’t like this movie.  In fact, if you hate everything about that last sentence, you’d do best to avoid this movie like it’s the clap-having office whore.  At its core, Curling King is an asinine sports comedy with an extremely dry sense of humor very much its own.  While it follows the basic thread of movies like Dodgeball (team in trouble, need to raise money, asshole rival, etc, etc), it sets itself apart by striving to be a film with enough style to both charm and humor.

There’s actually a few surprisingly touching and unique moments in Curling King, one a happily placated and amused viewer might assume belong in another movie: one with a far more impressive pedigree than the stock sports comedy.  One such moment involves the hilarious battle of wills between Paulsen team member, Espen (Jan Sælid), and a vending machine delivery man, one that leads to one of the most touching father-son moments this author has ever seen put to film.  Another comes when Truls decides that loyalty and friendship trump all other concerns, including notions of dignity that might have to be confronted when a person’s getaway is made on a scooter.

The picture’s funniest moments come out of Truls’ deadpan acting and minimalist approach to the material, for what could have easily been played up for slapstick humor was instead toned down for laughs far more rewarding.  The counterpoint to this was Truls’ sex-crazed teammate, Marcus, played by Jon Øigarden, an actor who practically steals the movie.

Tragically short at a meager 73 minutes, the only complaint that might be leveled against the film is its failure to give even more to its audience. Perhaps an extra five minutes early on to show a little bit more of Truls in the mental institution, or another five or so later on to outline the team’s training methods and preparations for the nationals?

Already generating a lot of buzz at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, this extra handful of minutes might easily have pushed this film over the top, where movies proudly displaying a Rock Fist Way Up live and prosper.

Our bi-weekly movie-reference-happy comic strip here on Scene-Stealers is back. Each week his characters recreate a famous scene from a familiar film. Can you guess which one this is?

Here’s strip number 29 of the original comic The Chicken and the Egg. The artist is Ben Townsend and he lives in the Southampton, U.K.

Click on the strip for a larger image!

Contact the cartoonist: thechickenandtheegg@hotmail.com

Click here for all of the Chicken and the Egg strips so far.

Now that Joss Whedon has had his say with what will surely be the top-grossing superhero movie of all time (Marvel’s The Avengers), it will be interesting to see where The Avengers will sit in the pantheon of the best superhero movies of all time.

Last year before the summer began, I published my list of the top superhero movies up to that point. This was before Thor, The Green Lantern, Captain America, and X-Men: First Class had come out. This summer, besides The Avengers, we’ll also see The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man, so this list of the best superhero films will most surely have to be updated in August.

Looking back at this list, I’m still very confident in each superhero movie choice on here. If I were going to add anything from 2011, it might be Thor and X-Men: First Class, while The Avengers would surely make the Top 10. My top three still don’t look like they’ll be touched anytime soon, however.

The superhero movie genre is still a pretty new one, and there haven’t been too many perfect movies yet, but at the rate they are being produced, this list could look very different in just a couple of years.

Without any further ado, please look at my list of Top 10 Superhero Movies. What would you add? What should have been left off? What are you looking forward to?

This review originally appeared on KSNT-NBC, KTKA-ABC, and KTMJ-FOX, Kansas First News.

An unusual action movie and a music documentary from one of the most respected filmmakers working today are out on Blu-ray and DVD now.

Haywire (2012)

Haywire is an interesting experiment from director Steven Soderbergh. By casting non-actor but real-life mixed martial arts star Gina Carano in the lead role, he has sacrificed dialogue and character for completely believable fight sequences.

Carano isn’t a convincing actor, but she’s mainly meant to glower and be tough anyway.

Ewan McGregor, Michael Fassbender, and Michael Douglas all acquit themselves capably in this low-budget action thriller, but the movie is really only bursting at the seams during its fight scenes. Instead of rapid-fire cutting to accentuate the danger, the camera just stops and pays witness to the action.

Since its Carano and her co-stars actually doing the stunts, Haywire feels more real than most action flicks.

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011)

George Harrison was often known as “the quiet Beatle,” but in the Martin Scorsese-directed award-winning documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, the mysterious singer/songwriter comes alive.

Originally airing on HBO last year, this insightful documentary finds that there was more to Harrison than his much-touted spiritual side.

He actually had an incisive sense of humor and although he didn’t share his feelings in public often, the songs he wrote for The Beatles and in his solo career were very personal.

This two-part nonfiction film is a little long, but it is full of great insight that Beatles fans will find fascinating—and of course the music is top-notch. The bonus content on the basic version of the movie is pretty fluffy and lasts about 10 minutes total.

A Deluxe Version of the Blu-ray and DVD, however, also contains a CD of rare Harrison tracks.