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Tribeca Review: Departures
Thanks to PopSugar, who is attending some Tribeca Film Festival screenings and writing reviews for me this week!
Departures won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar this year, and when I caught it last Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival, I quickly saw why it deserved the honor. The Japanese film centers around a man named Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a cellist who moves back to his rural hometown with his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) after his orchestra in Tokyo is forced to shut down.
Tribeca Review: Lioness
I was compelled to see the documentary Lioness at the Tribeca Film Festival because the basis is so intriguing. In the press notes for the film, this is the description: "Despite written policy banning women from direct ground combat, military commanders have been using women in direct ground warfare as an essential part of their operations since 2003. Though official policy forbids this operation and publicly denies its existence, this initiative and company of women have a name: they are called Team Lioness.
Tribeca Review: Gotta Dance
OK, that's it. I think I'm tapped out on the ridiculously heartwarming documentaries about elderly folks doing things like singing Coldplay songs or learning hip-hop to perform during basketball games. It's not that I'm sick of them, it's that they reduce me to an overemotional puddle on the floor.
Tribeca Review: Tennessee
Here's the good thing I can say about Tennessee: The effort behind the film is commendable. "A" for effort. "D" for most everything else.
Tribeca Review: Bart Got a Room
Bart Got a Room isn't high art and it's not fall-down funny, but it's easily the sweetest of all the Tribeca films I caught and the one movie I would wholeheartedly recommend. It's silly and goofy and fun, all the while washed in bright hypercolor Florida shades of pink and turquoise. It trots along quickly to swinging, squealing Big Band tunes, which is a funny juxtaposition of the old timers' Florida retirement community with the painfully hilarious adolescent experience at the center of the plot.
Tribeca Review: Savage Grace
As is the case with many movies, you can kinda tell how you'll feel about Savage Grace from how you feel watching the trailer. For me, I thought the trailer was tense, dark and disturbing. Julianne Moore looked powerfully off-kilter, exhibiting that magnificent control she utilizes with every role she takes on, but ultimately the trailer left me with a bleakly ominous feeling.
Tribeca Review: Trucker
Trucker largely reminded me of another indie movie titled Come Early Morning, which was written and directed by Chasing Amy's Joey Lauren Adams (who, incidentally, also stars in Trucker). The tone of both movies features a kind of weary, weathered fondness for the southern American landscape (in Come Early Morning it's the South, in Trucker it's the dusty deserts of southern California). At the heart of both movies, too, are hard-edged, tough-talking women in jobs that others in the movie ridicule for not being "women's jobs": Ashley Judd's character in Early Morning worked in construction, while the main character of Diane in Trucker, played by Michelle Monaghan, is a truck driver.
Tribeca Review: The Wackness
Previously, I'd mostly known The Wackness as that weird-looking Sundance movie in which an Olsen twin makes out with Ben Kingsley and which features a ton of pot smoking. While those things are true, I also gotta say I really liked this weirdo pot-smoking movie. I can easily see why The Wackness won the audience award at Sundance this year: it's funny, it's got that tender boy-grows-up storyline, and there's plenty of sex, drugs and a ridiculously awesome, rap-heavy soundtrack.
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