Creatures, laughs, babies, lies and big jumps
There’s nothing terribly scary about the late pop-art icon Hans Rudolf Giger, creator of the terrifying titular beastie from Alien and countless other painted and sculpted works of morbid, “bio-mechanoid” beauty, as he’s portrayed in Belinda Sallin’s reverent and ultimately rather touching biopic Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World.
He’s an unsteady old man at the end, puttering about a jungled-in, cluttered house in Zurich clearly aware the last of the three entwined obsessions that have haunted his art since the1960s — birth, sexuality and death — is staring him in the face. The spectre of imminent mortality thus adds a layer of poignancy to what might otherwise have been a more prosaic, if still totally interesting, portrait of an eccentric creator.
Quiet, pensive and not unlike a 90minute stroll through a Giger gallery,
Dark Star does a good job of presenting its subject’s oeuvre in the context of his life story without heavy handedly connecting the dots for you all the time, more often simply letting the camera linger over the details in his paintings long enough for you to ponder what has just been revealed in conversations with friends, former lovers, appreciators and, of course, the master himself.
That said, a sequence that makes explicit the loss Giger suffered in life and in art when his one-time partner and muse Li Tobler killed herself in 1975 is devastating.
Ben Rayner As America’s answer to Monty Python, NBC’s Saturday Night Live was born to “destroy TV” and to mock institutions rather than praise them.
Originally known as the Not Ready For Prime Time Players, the show’s cast had rebellion built into their name, introducing such brilliant and irreverent comedians as John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, Tina Fey and Jane Curtin to a vast and appreciative audience.
Bao Nguyen’s earnest doc Live From New York! prefers adulation to anarchy. Everybody goes on a little too much about how the show is an American institution, as SNL celebrates its 40th anniversary.
There’s ample discussion of the show’s colour and gender deficits (it’s mostly white and male) and the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks. Valid concerns, to be sure, but they command much of the film’s scant 82-minute running time, less than the 90 minutes of a single SNL episode. The doc zips through many of SNL’s signature bits and controversies, including Radner’s querulous Roseanne Roseannadanna, Murphy’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood parody and musical guest Sinead O’Connor’s “Fight the real enemy” anti-Pope protest.
The doc is more of a sampler of 40 years of SNL than a full serving, and everybody gets awfully close to taking themselves too seriously. Peter Howell An abandoned toy doll grown to human adulthood seeks out his “mother,” in director Craig Goodwill’s ambitious feature version of his 2011 fantasy short.
Blending a bleak Soviet-style factory setting with the Island of Misfit Toys, folklore, hints of Elf and even a musical number or two, Goodwill throws everything into his first fulllength film, which won best feature at the 2014 Canadian Film Fest.
Rob Ramsay is cherubic Jon, who works on a dreary toy manufacturer Patch Town’s assembly line, freeing squalling babies from cabbages. Creepily, the infants are destined to be turned into dolls and delivered to waiting kids who are destined to tire of them.
Jon has managed to sneak one of the babies home, saving her from dollification while avoiding the menacing Child Catcher (a perfectly evil Julian Richings) and his pint-sized henchman Kenny (pleasing improviser Ken Hall).
Jon realizes he has something in common with those cabbage-born kiddies and yearns for his missing mom (Zoie Palmer), now grown to adulthood. He and wife Mary (Stephanie Pitsiladis) break out of Patch Town to find his family.
Suresh John hits all the right comic notes as driver Sly while Ramsay nicely captures Jon’s naïve, fish-outof-water confusion as he navigates the unfamiliar world. Linda Barnard No word of a lie, you’re going to learn alot from this film and enjoy yourself along the way.
That’s due in large part Israeli-American Dan Ariely, a bright and funny psychology professor at Duke University, who’s work — the Matrix Experiments — provides fascinating insight into the many reasons why pretty much everybody lies about something at some point.
Filmmaker Yael Melamede starts with an address Ariely gives to a university audience and weaves all kinds of thought-provoking statistics, ideas and interviews around it.
In addition to the usual suspects — e.g. disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff — there are some powerful testimonials from ordinary people whose lives have been ruined in the aftermath of getting caught lying, including a mother sent to jail for lying about her address so her daughters could attend a better school. (Only in America!)
The experiments are both ingenious and hilarious and the insights provided are revelatory, e.g., the bigger the brain, the greater capacity to lie. One sobering truth emerges, that lying leads to corruption and corruption has a dangerously corrosive impact on every society where it’s endemic.
Social scientists and armchair psychologists alike will find a lot to like and learn from this film. Bruce DeMara It doesn’t take long to realize there’s something missing, or rather someone. You hear his voice, you see him in old footage. But you don’t ever really meet Carl Boenish (rhymes with Danish), who with a small group of friends back in the early 1980s, invented the daredevilishly dangerous sport of BASE jumping, (i.e. parachuting off buildings, aerial towers, spans and Earth).
The documentary by filmmaker Marah Strauch spins an engaging portrait of Boenish, an engineer turned filmmaker and avid skydiver, who through his recorded words and present-day interviews with family and friends, emerges as a quirky, accomplished and interesting fellow.
Warning: some of the skydiving footage — particularly off Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan — is so harrowingly well done, it may give you butterflies.
The second half of the film is devoted to Boenish’s fateful decision to journey to Norway in July, 1984, where he and wife, Jean, made a world record-setting skydive from a mountainside. A day later, he attempted a similar feat off the forbidding Trollveggen with tragic results.
While Strauch’s story never quite answers the question of why Boenish, usually so responsible and intelligent, made such a terrible miscalculation, her tale is story-telling at its best: engrossing, tension-filled and utterly fascinating. Bruce DeMara