Showing posts with label Elias Koteas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elias Koteas. Show all posts

2 October 2013

Raindance Film Festival 2013 Review - Jake Squared

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Rating:
15
Release Date:
27, 28th September 2013(Raindance)
Director:
Howard Goldberg
Cast:
Elias Koteas, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Virginia Madsen

With one of the most innovative set-ups on show at this years Raindance festival, Jake Squared comically questions the importance of certain life decisions, and the part they play in defining the self when all is said and done. The easiest reference point for the conceptual narrative of writer/director Howard Goldberg’s feature is Charlie Kaufman’s mind-melting Synecdoche, New York, casting as it does, the lead role within his own film portraying varying aspects of his own life. Fortunately tone is somewhat easier to determine, pitching itself somewhere between a meta-comedy and faux philosophical questioning.

The eponymous lead in question is a 50 year-old part-time film director and (slightly more than) part time real estate agent. A hopeless romantic at heart, Jake is at a loss as to how he has ended up alone bar the two teenage children resulting from his previous marriage. On a mission to make sense of everything he embarks on an ambitious film project casting himself as a hunky twenty-something as the host of a sprawling house party where guests will come and go and somewhere in amongst the endless rolls of footage will lie answers. Any answers will do.

The fourth wall not so much broken as well and truly obliterated, we float alongside actor Jake while being guided by real Jake as he interjects and interrupts various scenes offering his own direction and pieces to camera. Before long Jake’s film set spirals out of his control, gatecrashed by a host of uninvited guests. There’s 40 year-old Jake joining a drum circle, a perma-chilled bandana sporting Harley Davison fanatic; playboy Jake from his 30’s casually eyeing up female guests, and even a sprightly 17 year-old hippy Jake insistent on being called by his stage name Damien. To add to the disarray he is joined by girlfriends of the past mingling with family members long since passed in real life.

If this all sounds head-scratchingly difficult to work out then that may just be the point. Jake Squared attempts to take in a whole life to make sense of their place, and a whole life is a big sprawling, pattern-less maze which cannot be self-edited or escaped - there’s even a neat gag about the past catching up with you to prove just this.

Holding the film up and keeping it steady is a tight script acted with conviction by Elias Koleas who flitters between Jake through the ages bringing believability to each phrase of his life. It’s a clever trick making physical the psychological changes a person goes through in time, complete with lost loves, lost hair and lost ideals.

At times over-reaching and arguably naval-gazing (the many inserted quotes offer little to the overall film), Jake Squared is none-the-less an admirably ambitious film and a laudably inventive one.

★★★☆☆

Matthew Walsh

21 September 2013

TIFF 2013 Review - Devil's Knot

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devilsknot-reece-witherspoon
Rating:
15
Release Date (TIFF):
8th & 9th September 2013
Director:
Atom Eyogan
Cast:
Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon, Dane DeHaan, Mireille Enos, Bruce Greenwood, Elias Koteas, Stephen Moyer,

Back in 1993, 3 boys wandered into the woods of a small Arkansas town and never came out alive, their bodies were found hog-tied and dumped in the river, apparent victims to a satanic murder. Quickly, but with little actual evidence, the crimes were pinned on three teens aptly labelled ‘The West Memphis Three’.  The media circus that erupted around this small-town murder escalated to a witch hunt which called for the boys to be charged and punished as quickly as possible. Suitable doubt has been raised in recent years as to the validity of the prosecution and a frankly unsettling question as to who the real murderers are. The case has been the subject of numerous documentaries and novels, Atom Egoyan’s feature Devil's Knot  is in fact based on one such novel of the same title by Mara Leveritt and partly adapted by Scott Derrickson (Sinister) and Paul Harris Boardman (The Exorcism of Emily Rose).

The story itself is compelling in the most disturbing way, so the film has a great base to work from; a haunting tale of savage murder and hysteria shrouded in a dense mystery wrapped in incompetence and small-town politics. Egoyan has a keen eye for tone and mood, setting both with a masterful control over colour, image, and creeping camera movements. But under its pretty thriller façade, there’s not a huge amount to bolster this as anything more than a visual representation of a well-written book.

Reece Witherspoon stars as one of the murdered boys mothers and spends all of her time doing just that; sobbing and looking panicked, whilst Colin Firth is perhaps a little more grabbing as the inquisitive George Lux, but not much more. There’s a superb supporting cast here, but not enough solid story to work from. Sure the courtroom sequences are great in their totally maddening lack of reason; the hysteria of a community demanding blood over-takes the true desire for justice. And there are a few scenes that are truly distressing, but again that’s down to the subject matter and rarely the way it’s relayed, bar a grim and cruel first twenty minutes that are deeply upsetting. The strongest element of Egoyan’s feature is its ability to present a mystery without spoon-feeding, thus allowing the audience to do a bit of the work and realise just how shoddily the case was handled.

Devil’s Knot is grim and torturous, dark and cynical. It skips the happy ending, start and middle, instead grappling with concrete mystery. At its heart it’s a court drama thriller, but the story surpasses the execution rendering this a dubious venture. If you've read the book or seen one of the documentaries, there’s little need to watch the film.

★★★☆☆

Scott Clark