The Calanander: For Your Consideration

Friday, November 20, 2009

For Your Consideration - Fresh Blood Edition

For Your Consideration is a weekly round-up of upcoming indie limited releases. The idea is to either expose you to or remind you of films that can't afford to plaster their posters on the sides of buildings or accompany your Happy Meal in toy form.

This week is headlined by a bunch of auteurs authoring very uninspiring things. Pedro Almodovar has opted to go with the greatest hits approach for his latest offering, Broken Embraces. Early reviews are positive, but not stunning so it’s probably not a great entry point, but if you like him, it’ll be worth a gander. Meanwhile, Werner Herzog decides to film a resequelmakespinoff of Bad Lieutnenant to prove once and for all that not even Abel Ferarra is crazier than him. Long-time Swedish art-house director Lukas Moodysson’s English-language debut Mammoth is being hailed as a ‘career killer’ and ‘a film that speaks only in an Esperanto-like mixture of the bad-humanism from Babel and Crash’. And, let’s not forget to mention The Fantastically Banal Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s latest retread that opened last week. The animated nature of the film exposes all of Anderson’s weaknesses. Visually, Wes Anderson's strength has always been his unerring dedication to mise en scene - he fastidiously controls every aspect of production design to create a heightened reality for his specifically dressed characters to interact in. In a way, what makes him so unique in film is the way he blends an animator's sense of aesthetic control to live-action film – a medium that has been trended towards realism for years. Unfortunately his theatricality isn't a novelty in animation, it's a necessity. Mr. Fox is simply him taking an animator's eye to animation, and the results are mundane. So with all of the old guard striking out, what do we have to look forward to this week? Why the debut feature of Scott Teems of course – That Evening Sun.

THAT EVENING SUN

What: The first feature film from newcomer Scott Teems, That Evening Sun is the story of an aging Tennessee farmer who just wants to enjoy his final days. When he returns to the family farm after staying in a nursing home for years, he learns that his son has leased the farm to his nemesis, who refuses to leave. Hal Holbrook shines as the old man in a film that won numerous festival awards.

Where: LA - Sunset 5, Playhouse 7, NY - City Cinemas 1, 2, 3

Why: A story of an aging man that decides to push back against a world that wishes he would just fade away. This premise caught my eye as something interesting and unique with last year’s Gran Torino. Unfortunately, Clint Eastwood’s predilections for melodrama and blunt messaging left me cold. Luckily, the premise is the only common thread between That Evening Sun and Gran Torino; where Gran Torino was blunt, That Evening Sun is subtle. Where Clint Eastwood was little more than an aged Dirty Harry, Hal Halbrook is an emotionally rounded man that just wants the world to give a damn. Where Gran Torino was a racist film about tolerance, That Evening Sun is multi-dimensional look at a region of the country that is often off-handedly labeled as being a zone of racists. If nothing else, this film is worth seeing for what will almost certainly be the final time for the always phenomenal Hal Holbrook to shine in a leading role.