#ciff40

Werner Herzog certainly doesn’t seem like the most likely candidate to team up with a network systems company like Netscout for an examination of the digital world but of course being one of the world’s greatest living documentarians never hurts matters. Instead of what could have been a bumbling catalogue of an old man’s misunderstandings about technology Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is a thoughtful, if somewhat scattershot, essay on connectivity and its impact that never fails to enlighten and entertain throughout its ten chapters. Grounding the audience with the knowledge that a single day’s worth internet data if burned onto disc would produce a stack of CDs so large that it would reach to Mars and back, the director explores the history of the internet as well its future and what it all means for people. Starting from the UCLA computer lab where the first internet connection was made before moving on to to robotics the film flits around the digital landscape exploring subjects as diverse as gaming addicts, radio signal enthusiasts, digital signal sensitivities and even Elon Musk’s plan to colonize Mars. Of course there’s also plenty of Herzog’s quirky sensibility to go around such as his “the corridors here look repulsive” description of UCLA, asking a a robotics engineer who builds soccer robots if he loves his best “player” and most strangely his interview with the family of “Porsche Girl” Nikki Catsouras whose fatal accident photos were sickeningly turned into internet meme. Herzog frames the family, dressed in nearly all black, standing behind three large, full trays of baked goods. “I think the internet is the manifestation of the Antichrist . . .” His camera watches as a woman goes from sympathetic grieving mother to tragically obsessed fanatic with a large selection of muffins and scones on full display. It isn’t one of Herzog’s best but it’s still a Herzog film and that alone makes it better than most of the rest.       

When New Zealand-based journalist David Farrier came across a FaceBook ad offering all-expenses-paid trips to Los Angeles and hefty compensation, to young male athletes for the purpose of participating in competitive ticking events, he thought he had found perfect fodder for his “News of the Weird”-style TV segment. After contacting the company responsible for the ad, Farrier was subjected to a barrage of harassment over his homosexuality and threats of lawsuits for reporting on the company and the sport of competitive tickling. Tickled is the kind of documentary from which the primary pleasure is derived by the blindsiding nature of many of the unexpected twists and turns so to describe more of it would be to spoil it. Farrier and his co-director Dylan Reeve do their best to keep the mood and tone of the film tongue-in-cheek and the pace brisk while doing their globe-trotting sleuth job buts it’s clear that they swing from the instinct to just laugh at these guys to being scared shitless to pure outrage. Tickled is much more about the journey than the destination and there isn’t much of a takeaway other than that people can be deeply strange and access to large amounts of money can exacerbate and enable those eccentricities in some pretty scary ways.   

Bourgeois romantic comedies aren’t really in my personal wheelhouse but the use of the phrase, “ . . . within the framework of a record album, Gala & Godfrey tracks the classic moments . . .” was enough to pique my interest. Unfortunately the use of this of poorly thought out conceit is limited to the opening scene and few quick shots of a spinning record inserted throughout the film. When the film opens, nineteen-year-old Ava is reminiscing about her parents. Her father, she tells the audience, used to be a musician and believes that kids her age have the wrong approach to music because they care only about singles and not deep cuts (of course this makes little sense in combination with film’s subtitle, The Classics). With this she puts on record and we flashback 19 years to the moment her parents first met. Gala (Molly Pepper) attends an approximation of a punk rock club show that careens of the rails when guitarist and lead singer Godfrey (Adam Green) leaves the stage to fight an audience member. Other than the aforementioned record player inserts, that’s basically the extent of the film’s connection to music. What’s left is nearly two hours of a couple that just can’t quit each other. In fairness, Green and Pepper are very good in their roles and the film does manage to hit its stride for a stretch in the middle. Curiously, the film ends twelve years after the initial flashback on hopeful note, which is fine except for the fact that it supposes that nothing significant happened in the lives of young Ana or her parents between her twelfth and nineteenth year. Life works that way, right? From a technical standpoint, Gala and Godfrey: The Classics seems as if it might still be a work in progress. Sound recording and mixing issues are one the biggest bugaboos of low-budget filmmaking and it’s a major problem here. The credits list two cinematographers, with three others getting additional cinematography credits, which may be the root cause of some of the resolution and color correction issues at play and is surely to blame for the general visual inconsistency. Having said all of that, it’s possible that there’s a releasable indie rom-com hiding inside of Gala and Godfrey: The Classics but it will take some pretty severe cutting and another round of post-production work to find out.

Without specific knowledge of the Swedish legal system, it’s difficult to gauge the plausibility of the setup of The Here After, but no such specialized information is needed to question the behavior of many of the film’s characters. Scandinavian pop star Uilrik Munther makes his film acting debut as John, a teenager who is being released from a youth detention center after serving time for the murder of his girlfriend. Without the good sense to get out of town, his parents bring him back home to the same house and send him right back to the very same school. As one would expect, John is immediately ostracized by his peers but strangely, rather than reacting in fear and horror, they make him a target for their abuse. The whole thing plays out like a Bizarro World version of a typical school shooting narrative with getting picked on coming before the murder. The main character is mostly a blank void and the film withholds crucial details of his crime before heaping one dubiously motivated contrivance on top of another. The film’s saving grace is Lukasz Zal’s (Ida) carefully composed, elegant cinematography in hues of gray and green. Stylistically, it appears the director Magnus von Horn is attempting an edgier version of what made the Dardenne brothers masters of world cinema but instead he ends up with a mediocre, if beautiful, bore.