first the good news and then the bad. the newport film festival continues through the 29th and seems to be growing in quality and confidence. the film song of tibet, for instance covers with music and beautifully edited images of an important international crises of chinese oppression of the tibetan people and culture. this one is a must see documentary, and remember i was the one who told you not to miss the cove last year (a film that was featured at the newport film festival).
however, as we all know film festivals are experimental by nature. there are bound to be some duds. below is a bifocal review of a film that barbara and i saw together yesterday.
son of the sunshine
(b) there were four possible selections for the movie son of the sunshine that i saw tonight as part of the film as literature class that my husband teaches. we went on a field trip and the movie we chose to see was this. this is the result of trying to juggle schedules. the only feature length that was playing at the time we arrived at the theater, turned out to be just a little slice of crazy, with a big side of disturbing.
the festival winners are actually picked, in part by the audience (just like dancing with the stars) and we in the audience had four choices, excellent, good, fair or poor. i needed a fifth choice, “train wreck” for this one. it was so convoluted and twisted in plot and purpose that potentially “good” performances were completely overshadowed by technical absurdity. i cannot begin to tell you all the reasons that i hated this movie. let these little tidbits speak for themselves: 1) this is a movie about a guy with tourette’s syndrome, that sometimes goes away and sometimes comes back, 2) the main character also has the ability to heal the sick and raise the dead, sometimes (only when he has tourettes, i think), 3) it’s a movie about incest, between brother and sister, 4) it’s a movie that glosses over addiction to heroin (i think) and alcohol and 5) i really don’t know what the movie was about. the lenses are capped on this one. i don’t think it even deserves a monocle.
(g) i used to have a standard for the worst movie of all time. it was called, the retrievers, which i reviewed several decades ago. it was so gory and gruesome that, in the first five minutes of fifteen grisly murders i coined the phrase, “so bloody it would make a butcher gag.”
son of the sunshine is now my new “lead” standard in films and also made me queasy, but for other reasons. the convoluted plot and cheap tricks were poorly presented as the film is also a cinema graphic disaster. there is one scene of our protagonist walking on a train track that mixes (completely unnecessarily) camera angle and styles to such a degree that it actually made me a little sick, especially at the end of the shot when to depict an earthquake the cameraman merely shakes the camera!
the movie also shows us the importance of picking the right (or in this case wrong) music. a kind of depressing unmelodious drone is punctuated by punk rock or intrusive (out of left field) narration of the hallmark poetry variety. why do anything simply when you can do it artsy? why shoot a medium one shot when you can shoot the same thing with a handheld camera in a mirror, for instance?
speaking of punk, i never quite knew if this was a student film gone awry or if aston kutcher was going to jump out at some point and the whole thing was some kind of “punked” joke. kutcher never appeared, so i am left to assume that the few poeple who walked out were just more perceptive than i and that someone thought this was somehow a good idea. it isn’t.
apparently this has won some awards for the actor and the film’s director and producers. i don’t get it. however, if you want to have something new to compare “good” film with, this may be your film. just take a dramamine before viewing. one binocular as a reward for making it into a regular theater is all i can award.
