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Jean-Claude Van Damme. The Three Stooges. A Milwaukee couple who impersonate Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline.
You can't get much more diverse than that, and the Three Rivers Film Festival also spotlights movies from Israel, Germany, India, Poland, Spain, the States and elsewhere around the globe. A sampling of movies playing in the next week:
Movies made in Pittsburgh might have a bit of a home-field advantage, but programmers won't give a coveted spot to a film just because it was shot here -- by a Filmmakers alumnus and Robert Morris University grad.
No, director-writer Thomas Dixon earned his slot the old-fashioned way: with talent, hard work, (perhaps overly) ambitious Quentin Tarantino-like story, and a terrific cast of new and familiar faces.
The new comes in Josiah D. Lee in the title role and Jack Erdie as a sidekick who riffs on such topics as refinement in America; the familiar in Izzazu stylists Emilio Cornacchione and Arnold Zegarelli, who have cameos as diplomats transacting business with a contessa and others in a hotel room.
"The Korean" is a complicated crime story that starts toward the end and then, for the linear thinkers in the crowd, spins the clock back to 1987 and tells us everything "From the Beginning." The title character is a two-fisted gunslinger and "cleaner" working at the behest of his crime boss.
Dixon, with a crew that includes cinematographer Andrzej Krol and composer Jace Vek, makes Pittsburgh and its suburbs look fresh and versatile. Some dialogue is delivered with too much vigor and "The Korean" raises "The Pope of Greenwich Village" one thumb, but the movie shows a filmmaker with great promise.
-- Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette movie editor
Forgive me, but the only thing I'd like less than seeing Neil Diamond is seeing a Neil Diamond impersonator -- or so I thought before seeing "Song Sung Blue."
Mike Sardina of Milwaukee isn't even a very good Diamond impersonator (though he looks like him). And his wife, Claire, does a pretty mediocre Patsy Cline. But together -- as "Lightning" and "Thunder," respectively -- they'll break your heart in this strange, touching, 87-minute documentary directed by Greg Kohs.
My opinion of their mimickry skills is irrelevant. In their heyday, Thunder and Lightning were a regional phenomenon, performing as a warm-up act for Pearl Jam, et al., and even as headliners before 20,000 fans at a crack. They took their karaoke fantasy and lived it to the heights -- with sequins forever, and "Forever in Blue Jeans."
Then came the depths: a crippling accident that silenced Thunder and took the electricity out of Lightning.
Director Kohs incorporates some amazing home-movie footage, whose impact alternates between hilarious and heartbreaking: There are arguments over whether to go to Denny's or Ponderosa for dinner, followed by confessional words of wisdom: "Animosity comes from depression." There's Thunder's mother and Lightning's daughter -- all of them more like Diane Arbus characters than American idols, but honest to a fault.
They never made it to Vegas. They fuss and fight. You'll be fighting, too -- the tears -- by the end of this extraordinary character study of an odd couple who loved and remained strangely devoted to each other's American dream.
-- Barry Paris, Post-Gazette film critic
Time is much on the minds of the characters in Doris Dorrie's film "Cherry Blossoms," whose title is a reminder of the fragile, fleeting beauty of the trees that bloom just once a year and then shed their pink and white petals.
In an all-too-familiar refrain, adult children privately grouse they have no time for their visiting parents. As one so vividly puts it: "Yeah, I hate myself for it, but they drive me crazy. I go wacko in seconds." Those parents, a couple in their 60s, wonder how much time they have left and speculate about the validity of the saying "Live every day as if it were your last."
Trudi (Hannelore Elsner) is charged with a heavy secret as the movie opens: Her husband, Rudi (Elmar Wepper), is seriously ill. His doctors suggest a trip, something adventurous. She replies, "My husband hates adventure" or change or travel, but she convinces him to leave their home in the Bavarian countryside and head for Berlin and the Baltic Sea, but she never realizes her dream of seeing Japan, where one of their sons lives.
"Cherry Blossoms" shows a mate who navigates grief as if it were a foreign land. No one speaks the language, a newcomer easily gets lost and disoriented, and yet death gives the survivors a chance to embrace beauty and to reassess their lives, which can be as ephemeral as the petals of the telltale trees.
In German, Japanese and English, with subtitles.
-- Vancheri
If you want to be transported -- and I mean literally -- to a sweetly innocent world totally unlike your own, Polish director Andrzej Jakimowski will take you there in "Tricks."
Six-year-old Stefek (Damian Ul) and his 17-year-old sister, Elka (Ewelina Walendziak), live with their mother but yearn for the father who abandoned them years ago. Their favorite hangout in this provincial Polish town is the local train station where, one lazy summer day, Stefek spies a man he's convinced is his father. What follows is a series of tricks and games by which the boy tries to control the movements -- and engineer the return -- of his lost dad.
Elka helps. But she's got her own issues, including a problematic car-mechanic boyfriend (Rafal Guzniczak), a lousy dish-washing job, and a desperate desire to get an office position with a big company in town. Faithful, serious Stefek throws lucky coins on the train tracks and keeps his fingers crossed for hours on end as she awaits her job interview.
The possible father will eventually be led to the impossible mother's doorstep, but the best-laid tricks are not necessarily any more successful than the best-laid plans of mice and little men.
This wistfully evocative slice of smalltown Polish life comes equipped with gorgeous cinematography, a perfectly moody score, a gentle, lyrical sensibility from start to finish, and two terrific performances from the two beautiful blond siblings.
Keep your fingers crossed for their happiness -- and for director Jakimowski to make more such charming films in the future.
In Polish with English subtitles.
-- Paris
Mikey (Matt Boren) cannot climb back into the womb or his boyhood, so he does the next best thing: He bunks with his parents in their Tribeca loft. Lest you're thinking open and airy and occupied by the nouveau riche, his parents' rental is jammed with stuff vertically, horizontally and emotionally.
Mikey, whose wife and infant daughter are in California, enjoys the pampering and indulgence of his folks, especially his mother. She leaves him a Thermos of coffee, reminds him to add fruit to his cereal and makes the salad dressing the way Mikey, not her husband, likes it.
What started as a stopover during a business trip and then a reluctance to go home turns into Mikey being unable to return home or, at one point, to even leave the apartment in a bout of instant agoraphobia.
"Momma's Man," written and directed by Azazel Jacobs and starring his real-life parents, gives us precious little information about Mikey's world in California. We get a glimmer of his life in high school, courtesy of a notebook of angry, juvenile song lyrics, and encounters with a couple of old friends.
Jacobs' parents are wonderful and Boren makes the most of an underwritten role but the movie becomes repetitive. If Mikey's not going to act, you root for his parents to call his wife, grab him by the lapels or get a counselor on the phone.
The filmmaker reminds us you can go home again and thumb through your comic books and photo albums and play your acoustic guitar but we and Mikey know, you can't really go home again.
-- Vancheri
