Your Brooklyn Film Festival Consumer's Guide
by Elina MishurisPage 2 of 2
If Only We Could Manage à Trois
Mary Marie
Directed by Alexandra Roxo
Five Days Gone
Directed by Anna Kerrigan
After her father's death, Camden (Brooke Bloom) finally meets Alice (Kerrigan), her half-sister, in a bar. She immediately invites the much less enthusiastic Alice, with boyfriend Crane (Sam Rosen), to the family country home, where the sisters and their significant others (Austin Lysy plays Camden's preoccupied, WASP-y husband) can get to know each other. Bloom and Lysy together bear an uncanny resemblance to Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Defoe, and the film, entirely lackluster except in their rapport, could have benefited from some vonTriersian self-awareness, or some talking foxes.
Summer Known Directed by Jan Seemann
This German short quickly strips to its point—or, rather, lures its point into the woods and then bashes it in the head with a rock, all of which is curiously pleasant, even if shot in the same sunkissed Urban Outfitters blur that often functions as shorthand for sensuality and stand-in for meaning. Brevity and a trio of attractive, vaguely European actors, however, give Summer Knows the edge.
Animate Inanimates
Moonfishing
Directed by David Michael Friend
The first few shots of this gorgeous short look like Tim Burton's doodles, but the rest redeem themselves mightily, with a puppet-peopled folk tale narrative of a crescent-faced man who brings light to his pointy town.
Love Patate
Directed by Gilles Cuvelier
More casualties than you'd perhaps expect from a French animated tale of love and cooking, but when a much-abused potato finally finds its soulmate (a gangly biker who hits it in a dangerous meet-cute), it won't surrender the boy to his original intended without bloodshed.
Revenge of the Lord
Some Guy Who Kills People
Directed by Jack Perez
A pleasant, predictable feature about a loser-loner, recently discharged from an institution, whose high school torturers are being mysteriously killed... As Ken, the unfortunate in question, Kevin Corrigan is pleasant as always, and Karen Black and Barry Bostwick pop up as his mother and the crazy-like-a-fox town sheriff she's sleeping with, but the biggest mystery remains unsolved: What are they doing in this film?
W Zappatore
Directed by Massimiliano Verdesca
A monosyllabic death-metal guitarist with a pious mother and a wacky grandmother, Marcello is understandably disconcerted to find that a wound is forming in his side—followed the by other marks of stigmata, which neither his Satanistband mates nor his groupie girlfriend appreciate. Like Marcello, torn between his religious considerations, this Italian feature's plot vacillates between the standard buildup to the big concert at which all shall be resolved, and instances of honest-to-God, unclassifiable weirdness, more tempting than it by any rights should be. Amen.
