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"Helter Skelter" Slices Open The Modeling World
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 11 July 2013 15:56
- Written by Renzo Adler
Sitting at a junction between Dorian Gray and Hello Kitty, Helter Skelter (directed by photographer Mika Ninagawa, and showing at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco and the JAPAN CUTS film fest in New York ), is about a supermodel’s candy-colored swath of self destruction. Based on the manga (Japanese comic book) by Kyoko Okazaki, Helter Skelter intersects the much coveted guilty pleasure of celebrity meltdowns with body horror and surgery reminiscent of David Cronenberg in a vibrant and storybook-like backdrop.
Helter Skelter follows Lilico, played by model and actress Erika Sawajiri, an ethereal supermodel that is the only thing on the minds of Tokyoites. Indeed, even other character’s lives have little meaning outside of their relation to Lilico. Lilico is addicted to radical plastic surgery from a black market clinic that is under investigation by a methodical detective (played by Nao Omori) that is also obsessed with her. Most of Lilico’s body is actually artificial or transplanted, and as Lilico’s mind starts to decay, so too does her body, and the film immediately places a scalpel of Damocles over her head. Desperately looking for some kind of control in her jaded life, Lilico uses her sexuality and desirability as a way to play with her doting assistants, but this only staves off decay and madness for so long as Lilico must compete with a new it-girl.
Lilico believes the world revolves around her, but where other films usually emphasize that this is only delusion, everything about Helter Skelter just affirms Lilico’s worldview. She’s everywhere in TV, movies, magazine, and the police that are supposed to be investigating the clinic where she’s getting her treatments spend most of their time as a Greek Chorus espousing on how beautifully tragic Lilico is. The movie sends mixed signals about whether Lilico is a sociopath or a victim by having the rest of the world be complicit with her egomania.
The camera spends it’s sweet time pouring over Lilico’s (often naked) body. Maybe the film wants to desensitize you to the idea of the human body being erotic and appealing by lingering over Lilico’s form so much that she just becomes a hunk of meat symbolic of the disposable nature of her profession. ...Or maybe it’s very easy to just fill time in the movie with shots of Lilico’s body rather than progressing the story.
A quick jaunt to the internet reveals that Sawajiri has courted popularity and controversy and expressed frustrations with the modeling world she is entrenched in. These parallels with Lilico are more than mere coincidence, Sawajiri stated that’s what attracted her to the role in the first place.
Helter Skelter also plays a precarious balancing act with it’s aesthetics, trying to decide between visuals grounded in reality, or a more garish appearance that keeps with the film’s manga roots. It creates a disconnect when you see everyday schoolgirls talking and milling about in regular old Tokyo, then shift to Lilico’s apartment, which look like a cross between A Clockwork Orange and a super villain’s lair. I appreciate these visual touches and at times they’re absolutely gorgeous, but I just wish the film would make up it’s mind about whether to tell a story grounded in reality, or set in a world gone mad.
Overall, Helter Skelter does bring up some interesting issues surrounding gender politics, identity, sexuality, and self image, but it only skirts around these issues, rather than trying to reach a point more specific than that things shouldn’t be this way, and that these are all part of a self-sustaining cycle of self loathing. Despite these shortcomings in it’s narrative, Helter Skelter still provides a very vibrant visual flair in it’s storybook approach to celebrity meltdowns that we see play out on TV all the time.
Helter Skelter is currently making the film festival circuit at the Japan Film Festival of San Francisco (July 27 - August 4, 2013), and New York’s JAPAN CUTS film fest (July 11 - 21, 2013). The original manga will be released by Vertical publishing in August, 2013.
Economics & the 24th Human Rights Watch Film Fest
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 10 July 2013 15:47
- Written by Nora Lee Mandel
The powerful and poignant documentaries and docudramas of the 24th annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival were welcomed in New York at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and, for the first time, at the IFC Center, June 13 to 23, after turns in Toronto, London, and Chicago. Look for selections from this year’s thought-provoking Festival as they travel throughout the year to: Dallas, TX; Durham, NC; Merced, San Diego, and San Francisco, CA; Mount Pleasant, MI; Philadelphia and Phoenixville, PA; Salem, MA; Washington, D.C., and, Zurich.
The Festival is organized around themes that match the program activities of Human Rights Watch, as an international monitoring and advocacy organization—“Traditional Values and Human Rights: for Women, the Disabled, and Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender (LGBT”); “Crises and Migration”; and, “Human Rights in Asia and the United States”. But the messages that come through from the brave, resolute, and determined people surmounting very difficult situations aren’t restrained by those categories.
Economic Inequality: Giving Voice and Face to the Poor
99% – The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film has a highly unusual provenance, but it tells a chronological and coherent story of the genesis and progress of protests around the world to the response to the global financial crisis. Using footage from almost 100 filmmakers, lead directors Audrey Ewell and Aaron Aites coordinated two other directors, five co-directors, additional shooters and media wranglers with almost a dozen editors. Keys to how absorbing this film is about a mass phenomenon are the interviews with individuals (and clips from the Guy Fawkes-masked “Anonymous”) who helped generate the idea of using (quasi) public spaces to publicize how the profits of private individuals (effectively promoted as the 1%) were countering the public interest, and the Direct Action Working Group that creatively and collectively kept the demonstrations going in downtown Manhattan for two months (yeah, it seemed like it went on longer).
Plus a sampling of the organizers they inspired to “occupy” central locales in over 92 cities across 82 countries and more than 600 communities in the United States. The Oakland participants, where the most violence resulted, are particularly insightful on how local social and economic issues, conditions, and police tactics affected the outcomes, especially by law enforcement that resulted in hundreds of arrests as local governments shared tips on suppression strategies. While journalists wryly admit they didn’t really understand what was happening (unmentioned here is that the BBC still mischaracterizes the movement as “anti-capitalist”), lawyers and academics provide ominous context for the impact of these citizen actions and the precedents of government over-reactions that provides perspective to keep all our eyes wide open as it all still unfolds.
So when rich people want to help poor people that should be a good thing, right? Not in Haiti, as vividly shown in renowned Haitian-born director Raoul Peck’s illuminating and instructive Fatal Assistance, the Festival Centerpiece presentation by Human Rights Watch’s past Lifetime Achievement Awardee. Going beyond the apocalyptic damage and death of TV’s disaster tourism since the devastating earthquake January 12, 2010, Peck over two years follows frustrated Haitians trying to help themselves and the conflicting, confusing, very condescending, and ultimately incompetent efforts of international aid organizations, ostensibly coordinated by committees of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, co-chaired by former President Clinton, interviewed as they try to re-make the country, amidst elections, hurricanes, and lots of bureaucracy. Besides the build-up of this damning evidence, culled from 400 hours of footage, two sorrowfully poetic first-person narrations reveal the hearts of the matter – one is from an (anonymous) woman aid worker’s e-mails home, representing the well-meaning young, and a few experienced, foreign workers who came with enthusiasm and packed up discouraged, and a male voice reading from Peck’s own, impassioned journals demanding Haitian empowerment.
Deepsouth also blames decades of poverty exacerbated by bureaucratic bumbling as the root cause of problems, here the growing scourge of HIV/AIDS in rural United States. The startling opening map moves through time to correlate the locus of slavery in the 19th century with rising HIV infections into the 21st century. Director Lisa Biagiotti travels over thousands of beautifully filmed byways of the Delta to follow people who are trying to reach out from the geographical, social, and religious isolation (sensitively portrayed) to provide education, friendship, substitute family, and lobbying (pedantically portrayed) for a convincing plea that this isn’t just the stereotyped urban crisis.
SIFF Review: "The Way Way Back"
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Wednesday, 03 July 2013 08:10
- Written by Matt Oakes
"The Way, Way Back"
Directed by Nat Faxon, Jim Rash
Starring Liam James, Sam Rockwell, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Robb Corddry, Amanda Peet, Maya Rudolph, Allison Janney, River Alexander and AnnaSophia Robb
Comedy, Drama
103 Mins
PG-13
While The Way, Way Back has a firm handle on its supporting cast, it leaves the plot to the dogs. It’s that strange breed of hybrid - commonly known as a dramedy - that refuses to settle with just being funny and in reaching for something more, comes up short. In a way, the experience is akin to hanging out at your parents’ beach house: you have to wait in suspended restiveness until the vacation is finished, pretending to enjoy yourself the whole time. At least the weird, beach-deserted manboy trying to be friends with you is actually funny here.
SIFF Review: "A Hijacking"
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- Parent Category: Film Festivals
- Category: Reviews
- Published on Thursday, 20 June 2013 21:03
- Written by Matt Oakes
