I’ll start with a short disclaimer: I fully recognize the potential arrogance in claiming to know the four most misunderstood films of the year. To say that I have some supreme viewing power that allows me to see these films for what they truly are reeks of a high and mighty attitude that I’d rather stay away from. However, as many critics are preparing their final tallies of what they loved and hated in 2008, I simply feel the need to put into print a positive perspective on four films that seem to be frequently criticized or overlooked.

That being said, there is a certain irony in the fact that all four of these films deal with a kind of misunderstanding. Whether it be a mix-up between characters or a challenging thematic element that dares the viewer to reevaluate the way they approach the subject matter, I feel each of these films does something particularly audacious with the concept of false impression.

One other quick side note: It is impossible for me to get to the core of these films without spoilers, so if you haven’t seen them and would like to view them blind, please return to the article after watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s Burn After Reading, Mary Bronstein’s Yeast, Johan Renck’s Downloading Nancy and Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs.

Burn After Reading

It’s not hard to see how one could dismiss the Coen Brothers’ follow-up feature to their Oscar winning Best Picture, No Country For Old Men, as slight. Leaving behind a good deal of the bold, cinematic gestures in the interest of making a moody, screwball, comedic thriller seemed like a step backwards. But let’s consider for a second the actual thematic make-up of the Coen Brothers’ career, with particular focus on No Country For Old Men. That film is, without a doubt, incredibly derivative, packed with constant nods to cinema history spanning everything from Hitchcock to John Ford. This is nothing new for the Coens: from day one, with Blood Simple, they’ve been pulling names out of classic 30s movies and making mockeries out of literary references with a kind of self-conscious, self-reflexive wit used to cleverly undercut classic stables of dialog that could otherwise potentially come across as overdone. They even point the harshest of mirrors on themselves with the arrogant character of Barton Fink, a self-obsessed, self-important playwright, who pontificates on “the common man.”

But this time the joke is on us. No Country, with all its ingenious directorial decisions and memorable sequences, holds very little thematic weight. The film is great genre fare, but in its snarky treatment of Javier Bardem’s unintelligible lessons it still mocks any viewer who dares look for a message to take seriously – not unlike Barton Fink. When stacked up against films like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, the beloved cinematic stylings of No Country seem to pale in comparison. And this is where we get to Burn After Reading: for two guys who have been horribly self-aware their entire careers, it doesn’t seem like such a stretch to mock the audiences that put their work on such a high pedestal.

It’s no small piece of irony that Reading is set around the story of an arrogant ex-fed whose laughable memoir, spawned out of his self-proclaimed sense of individuality, gets assigned a false importance when put into the hands of an image-conscious aerobics instructor with a taste for the norm. As if that wasn’t metaphorical enough, the film builds itself like any other Coen production, one plot device at a time, and resolves with the same sense of hopelessness we get at the end of No Country –– except this time it’s capped by J.K. Simmons stating, “What have we learned? … I don’t fucking know.” As Josh Rothkopf pointed out to me, even the title dares you to throw it away and not pay it so much mind. Have fun with it while it’s there. Everything past that is just silly. In their own light-hearted way, Joel and Ethan Coen are having the last laugh at us for taking them so seriously, but with a gentle smirk that lets the audience play along to a much greater extent than any of this year’s other challenges.

Yeast

I think it’s safe to say that Yeast was the most divisive movie of SXSW 2008. Bronstein’s abrasive, low-budget, pitch-black comedic view of deteriorating female friendships left some wholly satisfied and others wholly uncomfortable. Perhaps the jerky, handheld aesthetic that we’ve come to recognize as the “realism” of mumblecore was part of what threw viewers off from grappling with the true originality of Bronstein’s work: The characters in Yeast exist in a world in which one externally expresses their internal emotions. They hold nothing back from each other and, as a result, we feel the queasiness of being inside their heads.

I’ve heard some critics say that Yeast is a film that wants you to hate it. I think that’s too simple. Yeast wants to plunge you into the darkest places of the human soul, it wants you to revel om your own pent up internal aggression by forcing it in your face for eighty minutes. It’s possible Bronstein wants us to hate the way the movie makes us feel, but she also wants us to recognize that we only feel that way because of our discomfort with that part of ourselves. As one friend pointed out to me, “It really plays on the new age of friendship with Myspace and Facebook.” Indeed, this is an age where you stay friends with someone much longer than you are supposed to because you believe that disrupting the natural ebb and flow of staying in touch with people that you grow apart from says something positive about your character. No one wants to believe that their close friends can change in incompatible ways to them, and Bronstein’s film shocks us with this harsh reality.

Downloading Nancy

Garnering a very similar reaction to Yeast at SXSW 2008, was Sundance 2008’s Downloading Nancy, Johan Renck’s haunting true story of a grown-up child abuse victim who seeks comfort to her trauma, via an internet friend, through S&M and suicide. Audiences fled the theater mid-picture as Nancy and her new companion engaged in depressingly violent sexual activity, padded with an icky sensitivity that makes each viewer feel like they should go home and shower after just being present at the screening.

I’ve found that when you break all the elements of Downloading Nancy down one by one for someone who hates film, it’s impossible for them not to admit that all the ingredients are pitch perfect. Maria Bello’s performance is a tour de force, backed by stand out supporting acting from Jason Patric as the sympathetic fetishist who helps Nancy end her life, and Rufus Sewall as her neglectful and confused husband. Shot by infamous cinematographer Christopher Doyle and beautifully scored by Krister Linder, the film captures an eerie tone that stays with you weeks after the first viewing. But the subject matter is what makes viewers shy away. “Why would I want to see something that makes sex look awful?” one acquisitions exec exclaimed to me after the press and industry screening. Well, quite simply, because to Nancy, sex is awful. Much like Paul Greengrass’ United 93, Renck’s film pays incredible respect to the real life story that is its source material. It’s not sensationalistic or sugar coated. It’s not constructed as a desperate plea to make you understand where its tormented protagonist is coming from. It forces you inside the last days of her troubled life, blemishes and all, and makes you feel what she feels. It is gross and unsettling and that’s exactly what makes it so tasteful and honest.

Martyrs

2008’s true statement on sensationalism really came with the Cannes premiere of what is perhaps the most daring film I’ve seen in the last ten years, Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs. With the brute force of the new wave of French horror (High Tension, Inside), Martyrs manages to rapidly catalog through all forms of terror within the first forty-five minutes. There are supernatural beings and human torturers, conspiracies and quests for vengeance, and certainly enough blood and creative ways to destroy the human body to go around. But the real shocking twist comes at around the sixty-minute mark when the film drastically changes tone, from fast-paced, pop sensationalism to long, realistic shots of the bare-knuckle beating of a fourteen-year-old girl.

When I first saw the film, I was struck by the visceral impact of the shift, equating it very much with the feeling of watching films like Downloading Nancy, as if Laugier had pulled the rug out from under me and I was now face to face with the real horror of violence in the world. And that certainly still rings true as the first level of why Martyrs is so brilliant and daring an experiment. But I think it goes deeper than that.

It took me three viewings to process what seemed like awkward choices, including a searing score over the beatings, and fades in and out to signify the passing of time. These took me out of the supposed realism for a minute.  And then I realized what I was actually watching was a blow by blow (no pun intended) cinematic equivalent of what a naysayer would claim to be torture porn: Long takes, painstakingly detailing the violence which are absolutely devoid of tension despite their cliché filmic techniques. With one fell swoop, Laugier pulls back the curtain and reveals the nature of what makes something cinematic, proving once and for all that timing is everything and that films like Hostel, Saw and even the first half of Martyrs itself rely on cutting, clever camera work and negative space to build the strong visceral reaction that they incite, and something simply pornographic has the distinct, and undesirable, feeling of realism.

Given the discomfort drawn by audience after audience with these other films, Laugier’s point clearly does not come a moment too soon. Just try to remember, it’s only a movie.

This just in: there are actually some great movies in Tribeca this year. As a festival programmer, I sympathize with Tribeca’s plight of being the third US premiere festival in the calendar year, and I wish I didn’t continuous hear complaints from other journalists about their programming. However, in an unfortunate turn of events for both the filmmakers and their publicists, I can’t really tell you about all the great movies, due to Tribeca’s embargo on reviews of all world premieres before the films screen publicly for the first time. Perhaps the embargo was a reaction to all the negative criticism, a move made in an effort to help ticket sales for movies that could possibly get bad press, but vicious cycles are the worst thing in the world and they make me sad for all the parties involved.

So, here we are now with nothing to cover but the program itself (and the embargo, of course). And instead of reviewing the quality of the films in the midnight program, I’m just gonna review the section as its own entity.

Surprisingly, this is an activity that isn’t without merit. Traditionally, the midnight program in a festival is reserved for genre titles – horror, action, science fiction. However, recently (and it should be noted that this is much more the case with Sundance than it is with Tribeca), an increasing number of other types of films that might play well at the witching hour have crept in to midnight schedules. Graphically sexual movies like James Westby’s porn comedy The Auteur, which is premiering in this year’s Tribeca Midnight program, are horrific in concept only.

Meanwhile, strict genre films have been placed in non-Midnight sections of the festival. Placing an exceptionally artful piece of genre cinema in competition is a welcome curatorial statement, as this is a completely valid form of filmmaking that does not be deserve to be ghettoized into just its own section. Such is the case with Tomas Alfredson’s Scandinavian child vampire tale Let the Right One In (trailer embedded above), which has generated so much positive buzz both out of its premiere in Rotterdam and following Magnet’s purchase of the film in Berlin that it’s sure to become one of the foreign genre hits of the year. Reviewing the film at the European Film Market, Todd Brown from Twitch called it “An exceptional piece of work…not shy in indulging in graphic imagery and laying on the blood.”

When films like Justin Meeks and Duane Graves’ 70’s horror homage The Wild Man of Navidad are placed in Discovery while Steve Saporito and Zach Saffer’s rock and roll drag queen documentary SqueezeBox! are placed in Midnight, things may get a little confusing. Seriously, though, it’s not such a bad thing. I, for one am excited for all that genre films like Let the Right One In have to offer. Let the complaints cease and let’s praise Tribeca for elevating Midnight-style fare to a higher status.

For those of you who don’t know, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a series of race riots broke out in major cities all over America. On one night in April of 1968, James Brown put on a show at the Boston Gardens. The televised broadcast of his performance is said to have kept the streets quiet that evening, giving citizens a distraction from looting and unifying the city in peaceful memorial to one of history’s great professors of peace itself. In his new documentary for VH1, director David Leaf wanders around the happenings of that evening, retelling the story of how Brown became a savior to the people of Beantown.

It’s hard not to think of The Night James Brown Saved Boston as failing on many levels. It’s trite, pandering and not terribly informative. What could be a fascinating account of a legendary concert turns into kind of a mess when Leaf tries to grasp too much extra James Brown history within the 1 hour plus running time. Can you really blame him? He can’t really seem to make one of the most electric stage performances of all time come alive with his bland cinematic rhetoric. The pieces of the concert itself that are in there are overrun by incredibly run of the mill interviews by important figures of the time (Rev. Al Sharpton comes to mind) explaining what’s happening in the footage instead of letting it speak for itself.

Leaf then both front and back loads the film with Brown’s career before and after the event itself, making for a wishy-washy viewing experience in which we are unsure what direction the doc is going in. What little sense it does make as the lead up to the event itself (though it’s hard not to just scream, “Just get on with it”) goes away afterwards with the portrayals of the supposed aftermath that really just wanders off with Brown down another path as that fateful night in Boston fades away in the distance.

The film’s one saving grace is the pseudo-insistence on portraying the reality of Brown’s greed. Many stories surface about how he didn’t specifically want to martyr himself for the sake of keeping riots out of Boston. Turns out, he demanded large amounts of money from the city (which, depending on who’s asked, may or may not have been paid) in compensation for the numbers he was going to lose because of the general public’s fear of traveling the streets at night. He also, apparently, demanded more money when he discovered it was going to be televised, but in retrospect plays it off as him doing a good thing.

All in all, in much the way Scorsese does in Shine a Light, this could have been summed up in a well-played intro and the real power of Brown’s performance could speak for itself. I don’t know Leaf’s distribution plans, but I suspect that this will become a DVD extra on a re-release of the concert, much as it should be.

Starting with the a brief history of how the so-called “chiptunes” scene was born in New York City, filmmaker Paul Owens captures with nostalgic excitement a musical movement starting before our very eyes, through the help of a few keys artists who call themselves Nullsleep and Bitshifter. Using a program called LSDJ, they compose dance music on a set of original Gameboys. Finding a home in a NYC space called The Tank and set of artists creating similar sounds using a variety of devices – Nintendo samples in a techno program (Tugboat) and DOS built Nintendo cartridges playing 8-bit sequences over two guitars, a bass and drums (Anamanaguchi), just to name a few – Nullsleep and Bitshifter put together a community of nostalgic gamers and music-makers alike. After building several years of momentum, The Tank was able to gain enough popularity to put on the film’s titular showcase – one that isn’t likely to die out in years to come.

The rest of the film toggles between a series of performances from the festival itself – all of which prove to vary in the most unexpected ways – and artist interviews where they wax poetic on “the meaning of the scene” and the ways in which they predict it will develop. Notable insights include one artist sighting that chiptunes might be the new form of music that elders call noise that will one day turn into standard. Another ponders that in the future, the generation that grew up with Xboxs and PS2s will be making interesting music when taking apart that hardware.

The film could use a little more of the artists’ personality and a little less concert footage to flesh out its 82-minute running time, but that’s a small complaint when the beautifully shot, kinetic performances are so mesmerizing – the pop silliness of Japanese artist Hally’s live show or the pulse pounding power of the Stockholm disco scene as seen through the eyes of Random – especially to a viewer who is discovering chiptunes for the first time. Once it has its claws in you, Reformat is a hard movie not to love, just for the sheer innovation of the content itself. Informative, engaging and, most importantly, fun to listen to, both the musical genre and the film have carved out their own special little niche that they hold steadfast to, inviting others to come along and join in the fun.

When I was about eleven or twelve, my mother took me to see a Rolling Stones concert on the Omnimax screen at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I remember the sheer power of the size of the screen itself – us laughing about seeing Mick Jagger’s lips, each fifty feet tall. Now, year’s later, when Scorsese himself decides to make a Rolling Stones concert film, the memory of that experience ingrained in my mind allows me to compare and contrast how far we’ve come in IMAX technology over the years. And, for all our advances, Shine a Light certainly pays off, providing the full concert film experience to viewer from the new millennium.

The film starts out small. Populating only the center section of the giant screen, Scorsese begins with a mini documentary about his collaboration with the band and the process of organizing the filming of these shows. Boasting some great 16mm camerawork by Albert Maysles, this short film unto itself is a highly entertaining piece that could work on it’s own. So, to come out of that, you can imagine he has to step it up a notch. Suddenly, and without warning, the film captures the explosive intro to the concert with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” From there, it’s full speed ahead, fluctuating between quick close-ups and long takes, based on the rhythm of the music of the feeling of the performance.

One of my favorite things about Scorsese’s piece is the sound work. Not only does it come blaring at you in full force through the powerful IMAX system, but also the instruments are mixed and isolated so that you can really get the full concert experience. If one guitar breaks and let’s the other guitar fill the space, you can hear through the sound mix. During duets with the likes of Christina Aguleria and Jack White, Jagger is heard harmonizing from one side of the theater while the other respective singer is working it on the other side. The medium is utilized to full power that it should be. This is not a concert experience. In a concert experience, you would view it from a distance. When you comprise the film with so many tight close-ups, it’s more like being on stage and the sound reinforces that.

There’s a few cute pieces of archival footage cut-in as transitions between songs and I will be the first to admit: it is a little long. The 125-minute running time doesn’t bode well for those who find this kind of film repetitive. But, bloated as it may be, Shine a Light is still a powerful reminder of the strong performances the Stones are capable of and the absurd climax is also a reminder of how playful they can be too. Captured all by Scorsese with extreme gusto using a complex multi-camera set-up and a lighting design that overheats even the season Jagger himself, the film is a must-see for biggest to the smallest Rolling Stones fans.

Stop Loss - or UKPP as most locals call it around here in Austin (short for The Untitled Kimberly Pierce Project) – was easily one of the most anticipated films of SXSW 2008. Written by a native, shot in and out of town and pertaining to residents of the area, the film generated so much interest that when festival producer Matt Dentler introduced the film as being, “the movie I got the single most calls about saying, ‘You have to play this.’”

The title comes from an unfair clause in a soldier’s contract that acts as a loophole in wartime that states the army can keep you even after you’ve served your tour of duty. This clause has been commonly exercised under the George W. Bush regime and has, in some ways, been the lifeblood that allows America to stay at war in Iraq.

The story is simple. A group of friends comes back home from war and reunites with their loved ones, for better or for worse. When memories of their final, particularly painful combat mission send them all mentally into different dark tortured places, their home lives fall apart and they desperately try to help each other out. But when the leader of the pack Brandon King (played by Ryan Phillippe) is stop-lossed and faces the decision whether to flee his country and his army, their lives might never be the same.

The acting is weak – particularly Ryan Phillippe, whose more striking moments make you jolt back a bit because they seem so insincere. It’s a pity too, because the direction is pretty good and the film could hold some solid ground as one of the first Hollywood films to discuss the war so pointedly…that is until it chickens out in its frighteningly patriotic, unrealistic climax, which left me pretty much dumbfounded. But the outlook for three quarters of the film is appropriately grim, and the tones are hit correctly when the acting doesn’t get in the way.

The abrasive SXSW pre-show presentation that Pierce chose to use served as a little window as to where the film went wrong. We were greeted with blaring rock music and stills from the battle flashbacks in the film. Pierce, the sibling of an army-man herself, detailed in her intro the images and sounds she would get back from her brother over IM while he was away in combat. She said she wanted to make the film through the perspective of the soldiers, using their music, etc. Perhaps the performances and plotting would’ve worked better as less of an unbiased study of aggression and more of a critique of the current political situation, as the script seems to be. It’s as if the two things are working against each other and the actors are veering off in a different direction from the themes.

The pieces that do work are the individual moments that remain intact and true to themselves. But, on the whole, it’s not so hard to come out of Stop-Loss with that uncomfortable feeling of not knowing where it stands.