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Kargaran mashghoole karand (Men At Work) (2006, written and directed by Mani Haghighi; first story by Abbas Kiarostami) begins with four middle-aged men driving home to catch an important football match on television. Three of them are talking and joking around while the other naps. He wakes up and bugs them until they finally pull over and allow him to make a pit-stop on the side of the road on the edge of a canyon. While they are stopped they discover a tall, narrow rock formation sticking out of the ground. This film is about their attempts at trying to figure out how it got there, but ultimately how to knock it down.

It doesn’t sound like a very intriguing story, but somehow it is. And funny. The situation these men impose upon themselves can surely be a metaphor for any kind of obstacle that one may face in life, or it could really be about how difficult it is to dislodge a big rock from the earth.

Through alternating moments of silence, comedic and almost slap-stick antics, emotional outbursts and acts of desperation, we learn of these mens’ relationships with women (two of which conveniently show up, join the challenge for a while, and then leave) and each other, but mainly we see how differently they each deal with this “problem”.

I have seen a few Iranian films from the past few years, and most of them are about women and their struggles within their culture. This film, however, may focus on the possibly neglected point of view of the men, and perhaps this is why the offensive rock is quite, well, phallic. Is this a commentary on the different attitudes that some Iranian men may have about their male-dominated society? If so, then how does one explain the relatively passive attitudes of the women who show up? (One can make a metaphor of anything, I suppose.)

In the end, after periods of working together and then literally giving up and leaving someone behind, the four friends learn that sometimes problems can solve themselves.

In anticipation of getting my hands on a copy of Jesus Camp, I watched two loosely similarly themed documentaries last week. Here is a little bit on each of them.

Devil’s Playground (2002, directed by Lucy Walker) is about a period in every Amish teen’s life called Rumspringa (”running around”). During Rumspringa, adolescents are given the freedom to experience “English” ways of life, with the expectation that they will find a spouse and make the decision to be a part of the Amish religion, permanently. Walker introduces us to a handful of such youths, and we observe both mild and extreme examples of this new freedom.

I found this doc to be fairly objective, although some more input from Amish adults would have been insightful. There are a few interviews and comments from the adult Amish community, but I wanted to see more of how the subjects’ families were reacting to this period that I’m sure is pretty stressful to deal with. It was interesting to see how some of the teens had no questions at all as to what they would decide, and how others really struggled with the implications of either choice. Somewhere in the final third of the film it morphed from a documentary about this Amish period into a film more about the characters (Faran especially), which brought it down to a more personal level.

There’s some great footage and the tone is gentle while sometimes painfully revealing. Walker seems to really care about her subjects and I’m sure that this is how she was allowed to be present in so many of the situations we witness.

Hell House (2001, directed by George Ratliff) is about a suburban Dallas Christian church that puts on a haunted house each Hallowe’en, which thousands of people go through each year. The film was the church’s tenth annual Hell House, so if it’s still happening, they would have just had their fifteenth. This isn’t an ordinary haunted house, though: it’s very “real life” and depicts graphic dramas of situations where young people are seen either choosing God or not. The situations are pretty extreme, and range from suicide, homosexuality/AIDS, pregnancy/abortion, raves, rape, drugs to other pleasantries.

The people in charge of this event are very intense. Vigorous and competitive auditions are held for each of the parts. It’s a bit creepy hearing girls say that they want to be the rape victim or a guy saying that he wants to be the one that blows his brain out. They take extreme examples and present them as if the cause undoubtedly equals the effect. For example, one girl goes to a rave, takes drugs from a strange boy and ends up getting gang raped. Then she goes home and is taunted by a demon about how she is such a bad person. Obviously, then, rave = drugs = gang rape = feeling bad… just for example.

Ratcliff gives a little bit of insight and background into the leaders behind Hell House as well as some of the “actors”, but I felt that it was just to feel sympathy for them, and then maybe not so angry. There is no doubt as to to the passion that they feel for their project, but except for a couple of scenes, I don’t think we get enough specific responses to it. All-in-all, this is a so-so film that could have been much deeper, especially given the controversial subject matter.

Last week Ryan and I rented Rififi (1955) (written by Jules Dassin, René Wheeler and Auguste Le Breton, based upon a the novel by Auguste Le Breton; directed by Jules Dassin). It’s a really cool film noir about a jewelery store heist. In the middle of the film there is an incredible 32-minutes+ sequence with zero dialogue or music, as we watch the men perform the heist. It’s very intense and a brilliant piece of filmmaking. This was a great film with some cool insights as to how the “human element” can make any flawless plan fail.

Noteworthy is how this is the first film that Dassin started and completed after being blacklisted by Hollywood.

Ultraviolet (Kurt Wimmer, dir/wrtr) is pretty bad! I can’t say that I wasn’t surprised, but still, it was worse than I’d expected. Granted, some of it looked pretty cool so there were at least glimpses of some cool production happening, but overall, this was not only boring, but contrived, over-the-top and exhausting. (I fell asleep no less than six times, and I wasn’t even tired. I did rewind it each time, though, so I can still say that I legitimately suffered through the entire film.)

I’m not even going to bother recapping the story. Milla Jovovich barely effective as the lead and allows her hair, costume and weapons to out-act her. Her character was so inauthentic that I actually had no idea as to why she was protecting that kid, so how could I root for her?

Anyway, avoid this one! I heard that it’s actually worse than ?ɂĆon Flux. I haven’t seen it yet, but I think I might actually watch it, despite the warnings.

The Chumscrubber (Arie Posin) is a pretty weak film, despite a surprisingly good cast and some interesting promotional material. Some of the actors appearing in this film include Glenn Close, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Carrie-Anne Moss and William Fichtner. This is a film about suburban life, with the typical intersecting of characters and storylines. I think it was meant to be a satire, but watching it made me sa-tired. It’s a very nice looking neighborhood, and the people look very nice, but that is the irony… get it?

Jamie Bell does an excellent job of playing Dean, the main character of the main storyline, a young man who is your typical teenaged film character: unpopular, depressed and medicated. His best friend recently killed himself and instead of helping him to grieve and move on, his famous psychiatrist father (Fichtner) keeps him drugged up and feeling nothing. Dean hates that he is medicated and has some interesting anti-psychiatry posters on his wall (maybe he’s a scientologist, too!). His family is quite dysfunctional, but if they weren’t then this movie wouldn’t be around.

Enter the storyline involving drugs. Dean needs to get them from his recently deceased friend’s bedroom, which introduces us to the late friend’s mother (Close). She blames everybody for the death of her son. She’s a drunk and she is kind of coo-coo. Then Dean is forced to hang out with popular people. Some of them are mean, and then they kidnap a kid who plays the tuba.

Ralph Fiennes is the town’s mayor. He sees visions of dolphins. Carrie-Anne Moss is the hot mom of one of the people that Dean needs to hang out with now, Crystal. (Crystal is another unoriginal character: she’s in the cool group but she’s actually really deep and thoughtful!!! And after talking to loser Dean she realizes that he is a real person too!!! WOW!!!)

Lou Taylor Pucci, the star of Thumbsucker, is also in this film, and I was struck by how terrible an actor he is. I was a bit reluctant to watch Thumbsucker after seeing him here, but I thought that maybe this film came first and he learned how to act before starring in that indie hit; alas, I was wrong: first came Thumbsucker, then Chumscrubber. I guess one of these performances was a fluke - hopefully it was this one.

So, a typical “sad teenager” movie, with drugs, a kidnapping, silly dolphin visions and big names. I really wanted to like it but I just couldn’t. The worst thing was the whole “Chumscrubber” thing. It was a weird kind of video game parallell about some guy whose head gets blown off and then walks around town killing people, all while holding his head. I guess he is supposed to be the one who protects people from evil, which in this case is themselves and their completely clueless and self-indulgent lives. Maybe I totally missed something here, but it is possible that if I “got” what was supposed to be happening, I would have liked it even less.

The Arisocrats (Paul Provenza) was great. I ruined it for myself a bit, though: after a few minutes of watching, I realized that I wasn’t laughing and thought that maybe I was missing something. So, I looked it up and realized that the joke itself is not supposed to be funny, which was explained less than five minutes after I resumed watching.

Anyway, I couldn’t believe some of the things I was hearing. Bob Saget, especially, is a dirty, dirty man.

The whole process of watching this movie was possibly more interesting than the film itself. Ian got it in some odd format that I can’t even remember. We stopped it partway through because we were hungry, but shortly after resuming, it just stopped. Turns out he had an incomplete file!

Now the movie isn’t necessarily good, but in order to start what we had finished, we went to Queen Video. It was out, though, so we had to hold our breath and enter Blockbuster (actually, I’m the one with the Blockbuster hangup - Ian was able to breathe normally).

All of this to say, Final Destination (James Wong) is fine. We got the impression from the special features that its success as a film, and now a franchise, was a total fluke. They showed the test audience reactions and some of the scenes that they had to cut out - absolutely terrible stuff! It was great.

The Fog (Rupert Wainwright) is weak in every possible way.

I recently watched Jisatsu saakuru (Suicide Club) (Shion Sono) and it was weird. It’s about a strange phenomenon, where groups of teenagers get together and kill themselves. In true Japanese gore fashion, there are a bunch of scenes of fairly graphic violence which is always fun to watch. I don’t know, though - none of them were very shocking and I wasn’t too intruiged with the whole police-investigation part of the story.

Then there was this weird sequence where some radicals were trying to claim responsibility for the so-called “suicide club”, which was allegedly convincing these teens to kill themselves. At one point, perhaps at an intended pivotal moment of the film, the eccentric leader of this group breaks into an odd Bowie-like song that just made me laugh (but at least the filmmakers have good taste in what kind of music to rip off).

The mystery/investigation elements of the film include a strange website consisting only of coloured dots: I may be wrong on the colours, but I think it was red for girls and blue for boys. Anyway, an appropriately colured dot (or dots) would appear the day before the suicide(s) occured. Some girl finds this site and calls the cops, which doesn’t help much but at least gives them something to think about. Then this girl is kidnapped by “Bowie-san” and the aforementioned serenade is performed.

The detective, played by Ryo Ishibashi (The Grudge-USA version, Brother), has two teenagers who are really into the pop group called Desert/Dessert/Dessart/Dessret (the spelling of the name changes throughout the film). It’s no surprise that this group is spreading some kind of subliminal message which is influencing all of these kids to kill themselves. It’s also no surprise that something happens to his kids. By the time the musical group’ s performance occurs, though, I had lost interest and probably missed the twist and the silly morals that were possibly trying to be taught. Well, I either missed them, or they were as subliminal as the songs by Desert/Dessert/Dessart/Dessret. I haven’t seen any blue dots on my screen, though, so don’t worry.

There were some cool visuals in this film, and like I said before, some classic Japanese gore (I’m going to be very careful the next time I’m slicing bread). The picture was annoyingly letterboxed, which made for a slightly hampered viewing experience on my widescreen LCD TV. But still, at least I was able to check this film out, even though I wasn’t super into it.

I watched this DVD twice within a few days, I loved it so much. C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée) is at once a coming-of-age story, family drama, coming out story and religious fable. It centers around Zachary, born on Christmas Day in Montreal in 1960. He is the fourth of five sons and he is “special” in many ways, including that he is a sort of favourite of the father (Michel Côté) and is believed to have the gift of healing.

This film follows Zachary from a child into his teenage years, and then into his early twenties. He develops a passion for music, like his father Gervais has; this greatly pleases him and results in proud comments as well as an odd assortment of musical instruments as gifts. While his father’s pride is developing, however, it is also being tested by Zachary’s sometimes “strange” behavior: Zachary is “the sensitive one” and is the only son out of five who does not develop “typically” into male behavior such as sports, motorcycles and a slew of girlfriends. (An early desire to have a baby carriage as a gift is quickly dealt with.) This perceived conflict confounds and frustrates Gervais and Zachary both.

C.R.A.Z.Y. is a film about a man’s love for his sons, and one of the son’s undying love for his father. Zachary loves his father so much and wants so badly to make him proud that he buries his true self deep inside, even to a breaking point. Zachary was incredibly portrayed by both Émile Vallée as a child (he is actually the co-writer/director’s son) and Marc-André Grondin as the teenager/young adult. We see his childlike wonder and innocence slowly transform into an adolescent identity that is based on fear, confusion and a strong desire to please his father. Gervais, played by Michel Côté, is man who truly cherishes his family but has a sometimes rough exterior. He struggles with the idea that his children’s happiness may result from things that he can’t control, despite how badly he may want to. It is amazing to watch both characters grow into men who are mature enough able to let go of themselves and of each other. Vallée does an incredible job of keeping some of the characters at arm’s length (mainly the mother and the other brothers) while maintaining their believability and importance to Zachary and Gervais.

A standout characteristic of C.R.A.Z.Y. is its use of music. Vallée allegedly took a major pay cut in order to secure the licensing rights to the music of the period, both French and English. The use of original recordings by Patsy Cline, David Bowie, The Rollling Stones, Charles Aznavour, Jefferson Airplane, Pink Floyd and others not only authenticates the period but also communicates how passionate the characters were about music. Some of the sequences gave me goosebumps. Being a music lover myself, I can relate to how certain songs literally define specific periods of my life. It’s amazing how the careful selection of music and how it is subsequently worked into a film can have so much impact.

This film is truly a gem, and was Canada’s submission to the Foreign Language Film category at the 2005 Oscars. I picked up on a lot more with the second viewing, but I was totally sold after the first. C.R.A.Z.Y. is definitely one of my new favourite films.