SUCK MY DISC

Guest Edition!

DVDs and Blu-Rays for the week of September 13, 2011

Incendies

*** ½ out of ****

“Incendies” is going to be a hard movie to write about, and harder to attempt to poke fun at. It broke my emotional neck, and left me just staring into space for quite sometime after the credits rolled by. I’m not used to feeling human emotions, and it took awhile to wrap my mind around them. I’m going to try as hard as I can not to spoil this film, which goes against my nature of loving to spoil things. “Incendies” is based on the play Scorched, which was the English translation of the play Incendies. Circle of life. It came out of Quebec in 2010, and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2011 Academy Awards. At the Genie Awards (Canada’s Oscars) it took Best Motion Picture, Best Actress (Lubna Azabal), Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Editing, Overall Sound and Sound Editing. That’s a dick load of awards, all justly deserved, and don’t scoff just because it came from Canada. Canada is awesome- visit once, and then try to make fun of it.

“Incendies” follows the story of twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette) after the death of their mother, Nawal (Lubna Azabal). They receive her will from her notary and former boss, and it contains the request to track down an unknown brother and the father they thought dead and deliver two letters. Only then can she be properly buried. From there movie switches between the twins’ journey into the lands of their mother’s past and Nawal’s life she had hidden from her children. It represents on a much heavier scale the realization all kids have at some point that their parents had a life before them, and it’s not always what is expected.

Director Denis Villeneuve wrote the movie as well, and three of his films have won Best Picture and Best Director at the Genies. The dude has talent, and his style is immediately recognizable as not-American. There’s a subtlety to the camera work that takes you directly into the emotional turmoil of the scenes, without the use of shaky cam antics. The shots switch between long views capturing vast landscapes and giving an almost detached feel to the action at times, to being uncomfortably close to the characters, so there’s no way to escape the emotions roiling over their faces. Villeneuve makes the viewer feel as trapped by the situation as the characters, it took me half way through to figure out why I felt so ill at ease, even during less intense scenes.

Coupled with the direction to create the atmosphere of the film was the scoring. This is one of the least-scored films I have ever seen, and normally that gets under my skin, but it helped build the tension and gravitas of the world perfectly. We don’t get to escape the violence or emotion with music, just like in real life, we’re immersed. Two Radiohead songs are used during the movie (the only two songs throughout the whole thing) and Thom Yorke’s haunting vocals are an amazing counterpoint to the deafening silences of the rest of the film.

The cast is phenomenal. The relationships between all the characters are only hinted at, but are fully realized. We know the twins grew up close by shared looks and quick hand squeezes, but have grown apart from the physical distance at which they stand; we know that Nawal was a hard mother to deal with by their different reactions to her death. Simon had a more strained relationship with their mother than Jeanne, who had left to pursue her studies in mathematics, and we get that from a sentence or two. Volumes are spoken in tone and word choice, and it’s a testament to the skills of Melissa and Maxim, as well as the script. In an American movie, scenes would’ve been wasted trying to hammer home the points this movie subtly whispers throughout. The only one I knew before this film was Belgian actress Lubna Azabal (the mother) from her work in Paradise Now (check this flick out if you haven’t seen it). She was great in that movie, and absolutely destroys in this one as a woman forced to the extreme by the dire situations of a world falling apart around her. I hope to see all of these actors gain success here in America, where it actually matters.

I threw out the word subtlety throughout this review, which is pretty un-subtle. There’s just no other word to describe the film as a whole. Moments that would have been highlighted and screamed about in an American film were handled so perfectly understated. In a film dealing with Middle Eastern conflict, honor killings and sectarian violence, it pays to be understated- the emotions hit harder when not wrapped in explosions, both figurative and metaphorical. Most American films that have attempted to explore this region fail for numerous reasons- The Hurt Locker is a very different kind of movie plot-wise, but apart from a couple of scenes it’s just a slightly smaller than average action film with far too many cowboy moments, even as it attempts to be a character piece. Being over the top ruins the gravitas of a film, turning it into popcorn shoveling fodder. I honestly think Incendies could not have been made as an American movie and held the same weight. The running theme of math would have either been taken out, or been taken to an annoying degree. Also, for everyone saying math is the language of the universe, it’s refreshing to see a movie deal with that. Don’t be afraid of subtitles. Don’t be afraid to think for a movie.

I have to reiterate, do not do any research into this film. No reviews, no additional trailers, they all give things away. Go in blind, and your socks will be knocked off like a ton of bricks.-MG

ALSO RELEASED

Thor

2 Stars

Thor comes out today, Marvel Studios early summer blockbuster and by far the weakest of the steps leading up to the Avengers movie. The movie attempts to be an epic space-Viking tale and a romantic comedy and fails at both. There’s a full cast of characters on both worlds, and you don’t get time to care about any of them. Thor goes from arrogant douche to big softie for no reason other than he likes making eggs. So many good actors wasted…

X-Men: First Class

We reviewed this DVD on the last episode of the podcast! Take a gander with your ears!

https://popfilter.co/2011/09/popfilter-s02e01-in-which-the-friends-chat-amicably-about-topics-of-some-import/