YOU'RE A PIECE OF WORK, CHARLIE BRANASKI

Oh my, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, but incredibly funny and dead-on: Charles Schulz's Peanuts, if it were written by Charles Bukowski. As a lifelong fan of the former, I can appreciate a parody as long as it's this sharp.

"TO BE CONTINUED..."

Very little on this green Earth excites me as much as a new Wes Anderson film. It opens the New York Film Festival on September 29 and is scheduled to hit theaters a week later.

Here's the trailer. It looks like textbook Wes Anderson goes to India. Haters won't find anything new to love; I can't wait to see it.

OUT WITH THE OLD...

I've just had way too much caffeine and decided it was time for a name change.

BEATLES SMILE TIME VARIETY HOUR

Check out Nathan Rabin's hilarious essay on SGT. PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND (the 1978 movie, not the 40-year-old album) in The Onion's AV Club blog. This sentence alone is (as they say) worth the price of admission:

The closing number is a maraschino cherry of awfulness atop a ten-scoop Sundae of pure crap.

Although I've made ample time to watch such notorious flops as XANADU and CAN'T STOP THE MUSIC, I haven't seen this film and I'm a little afraid to. Even I have a threshold that can't fully support the idea of Peter Frampton and The Bee Gees slaughtering and trivializing Beatles songs with the bloated excesses of an era not immune to laboriously bad taste... I'd probably have to get liquored up first.

And yet, I can watch this over and over again. At least with SGT. PEPPER'S, I have a feeling you could discern what kind of audience it tried to court (no matter how misguidedly), but THE APPLE is just flabbergasting with its futuristic world of "1994", over-the-top musical extravaganzas (including one full of synchronized sex and a Donna Summer sound-a-like) and many, many sequins. It's worse than its two brethren (mentioned above) in the 1980 post-disco, pre-new wave, all-camp terrible trio, but it's fascinatingly bad, and that's the difference.

FOUR RECENT FILMS

Two of these could likely end up on my year-end Top Ten list, and they couldn't be more different from each other.




THE BRAND UPON THE BRAIN!
This initially seems a tad less accessible than Guy Maddin's previous best work, THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD. The story is as deranged as ever, involving a marooned orphanage, a gender-bending teenage detective/harpist, and a sinisterly-derived fountain of youth nectar, among many other quirks. With intertitles and voice-over narration (by the incomparable Isabella Rossellini) in place of any spoken dialogue, it proceeds at a hallucinatory pace: the images often bleed into one another, the intertitles fly by rapidly and occasionally repeat as if we were watching remnants of long-buried film reels (at times resembling a cubist painting come to life), and the lurid action reaches multiple crescendos.

It's no coincidence Maddin recently wrote about underground auteur Kenneth Anger in Film Comment—here he repeatedly injects his own sensibility into Anger's style, but the effect is neither tribute nor copy but its own excitable, idiosyncratic creation. Simultaneously pushing and pleasing his audience, Maddin reaches a great apex here: BRAND is far more involving and relatively easier to follow than his earlier films but thankfully, it doesn't compromise or dilute what made them so delightfully eccentric. (5/5)

BROKEN ENGLISH
Here's a tale we've heard before: Nora (Parker Posey), a woman in her mid-30's, is in pre-midlife crisis mode. Her administrative hotel job neither challenges nor fulfills her and she has yet to truly fall in love. Substitute a few words and you have the plot of a dozen other art-house chick flicks. So, how does BROKEN ENGLISH stand out from them? First, Posey is well-cast and well-tempered, fully expressing Nora's complexities and neuroses without overplaying them. Second, the situations director/writer Zoe R. Cassavetes places her in seem real and relatable without feeling clichéd, from an impulsive, disastrous affair with a narcissistic actor (a perfectly fatuous Justin Theroux) to an impromptu trip to Paris with her best friend (a nicely curt Drea De Matteo). When Nora finally meets a potential romantic partner in Julien (Melvil Poupaud), we watch all the little details accumulate in the subsequent affair and get a vivid sense of character, place, chemistry and conflict. Cassavetes doesn't even come close to attaining the weight and originality of her father John's maverick work, but she doesn't talk down to her audience, either. She's the third Cassavetes sibling to make a film, and by far the most promising one. (4/5)




RATATOUILLE
Brad Bird’s first two animated features (THE IRON GIANT and THE INCREDIBLES) heightened my anticipation for his third, which has an unlikely premise: a rat with an enhanced sense of smell longs to be a great chef in a Parisian restaurant and realizes his goal with the help of a klutzy human friend. Fortunately, RATATOUILLE is a fine, rich dish. The gorgeous, detailed computer animation makes earlier Pixar films seem like embryonic sketches, the cast of voices is pitch perfect without being too celebrity fueled and thus distracting (most recognizable is Peter O’Toole as a deliciously snooty food critic), and a few sequences approach Rube Goldbergian levels of intricacy.

None of that would matter, of course, if it all wasn’t in service of an excellent, unexpectedly affecting narrative. The story not only speaks volumes about how talent and drive go hand in hand to create great art, but also dissects what an audience’s role is in consuming and comprehending it. While entertaining and populist, Bird’s films have always operated at a level of sophistication higher than most of his peers, and this may be his most lithe, ingenuous creation yet: it bursts with creativity and passion and is refreshingly devoid of cloyingness and cynicism. My compliments to the chef. (5/5)

SICKO
To paraphrase an expression one of my colleagues loves to use, I am so over Michael Moore. His earlier movies and TV shows were amusing and unsettling in equal amounts, but he jumped the shark with FAHRENHEIT 911, a film that I liked at the time but now remember as a well-intentioned but clumsy diatribe that's more propaganda than anything resembling artistic merit. Fortunately, SICKO has more of the latter. Pushing for universal health care, Moore makes his most convincing, provocative argument since ROGER AND ME. It helps that he's picked a cause most people can champion and it's to his advantage that he spends less time on camera. Still, I'm having trouble with little things I could overlook before: his condescending voiceovers, his one-sided examples and reasoning, the stunts that don't seem ingenuous as they once did. I appreciate what Moore's trying to do, and the film simmers to a fine boil of outrage and enlightenment; it also hints, more than ever, that the guy is a one-trick pony. He needs to make a different type of film next time out—perhaps one that shows more than it tells. (3/5)

MID-YEAR FILM REPORT

Here's my Top Ten Films of 2007, mid-year:


01. AWAY FROM HER
02. THE HOST
03. DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT
04. PAN'S LABYRINTH
05. MONKEY WARFARE
06. THE LIVES OF OTHERS
07. AUDIENCE OF ONE
08. LINDA LINDA LINDA
09. PAPRIKA
10. CLIMATES

Two of these are festival films still without American distribution, two are from Japan, one is from Korea, one is from Turkey, two have already won Academy Awards. That leaves two other films, both of them directed by women. I'd elaborate further, but I really must go to bed.

PIFF '07

Reviews from this year's Provincetown International Film Festival...

AN AMERICAN CRIME
Tommy O'Haver's film raises a question I rarely ask of cinema (unless I'm screening shorts, of course): "Did this really need to be made?" It's based on a true story: in 1965, single mother Gertrude Baniszewski (Catherine Keener) not only kept a teenage girl, Sylvia Likens (Ellen Page), locked in her Indianapolis basement and tortured her, but also encouraged her own children to do the same. Framed by a recreation of the subsequent trial against the Baniszewskis, the film recounts how Sylvia first came to live with the family, and brutally details how a combination of jealousy, drug abuse, and maybe even some mental illness resulted in a shocking, landmark child abuse case.

Keener gives a magnificent, understated performance that intriguingly teeters on the brink of nearly making Gertrude a sympathetic figure. Page also continues to show she's a young actress to watch. In fact, the entire film is competent and seems artful, but it's also exceptionally difficult to sit through, at times coming this close to being a snuff film. Some will argue that it has worth as a cautionary tale to the horrors of torture and abuse, but I don't completely buy that—what we get out of AN AMERICAN CRIME is a great performance, a haunting story and an exhaustive litany of atrocious behavior that proves…some people are capable of horrendous things? See the film once for Keener, but only true masochists will want to sit through it a second time. (2.5/5)

THE GREAT WORLD OF SOUND
The title is actually the name of a small record label in the film that bills itself as a "talent search company". Salesmen are hired as "record producers" and trained to audition aspiring musicians whom they encourage to sign up, make a CD and become a star. It also sounds too good to be true, especially when the musicians themselves must put up 30% of the production and distribution costs.

We follow two freshly minted producers: Martin (Pat Healy), who's nebbish, agreeable, young and white (sort of resembling a Gen-X Bob Newhart), and Clarence (Kene Holiday), who's black, older, and far more gregarious. The label sends them to second-tier cities like Birmingham, Alabama to audition hopeful amateurs; naturally, they have to do this in their own hotel room and often without any financial support from the label. The film's hook is that the people auditioning are, with at least two exceptions, the genuine articles—they're actual musicians who responded to a facetious ad placed by the filmmakers. It's a novel idea that plays out beautifully: the actors get to flex their very capable improvisational skills, while we get to explore the parallels between the scams perpetrated within the film and those by the filmmakers.

Pairing up Healy and Holiday seems like an obvious ploy for yin-yang interaction, but both actors successfully enliven their characters. Holiday, in particular, evolves from a sitcom-rote figure to a thunderous, near-tragic entity: his climactic speech to Healy is highly affecting, far-reaching and unsentimental in how it pauses to consider the world beyond the film, not to mention the necessity of some scams. The film drags when the focus shifts to Healy's relationship with his artist girlfriend, but THE GREAT WORLD OF SOUND is mostly enjoyable and more than merely clever: an abiding sense of melancholy favored over cynicism gives it its soul. (4/5)

BORN AGAIN
Markie Hancock's middle-class childhood in Altoona, PA was typical in every way except for one: she was raised as a Fundamentalist Christian. Later, as an adult, she came out as a lesbian and renounced her faith. This documentary is an autobiography of sorts and for the first half, it's your standard low-budget, self-indulgent video essay, combining voiceover narration with ancient home movies, diary entries read aloud to the visual accompaniment of stock footage and the like. Hancock's story takes an interesting turn, though, as she begins to incorporate interviews her family. Her older sibling has also renounced his faith, while her parents and her younger sibling are still devout. What emerges is a portrait of a family ideologically divided, yet one that struggles to uphold a semblance of unity despite that rift. Lucky for Hancock, her family is mostly willing to be candid about how they feel. While making this film is clearly therapeutic and validating for her, for us it's nearly as insightful to watch this dynamic play out and feel its repercussions, both positive and negative. (3/5)

FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND
Sterlin Harjo's first feature arrives nearly a decade after SMOKE SIGNALS promised a wave of Native American cinema that never really amounted to much. It's another coming-of-age, leaving-the-Reservation tale, this time set and filmed in Oklahoma. The main character, Cufe (Cody Lightning) has just buried his father who had committed suicide. After the funeral, Cufe visits Miri (Tamara Podemski), his estranged older sister, who moved away to Tulsa a few years back. Predictably, he discovers a whole new world in the big city, although he also learns more about the difficulty his sister has had distancing herself from her past.

Workshopped at the Sundance labs, this strikes me as a prototypical Sundance film, particularly one from the days before the festival overflowed with big business and hype. It's sweet, earnest, a little dull but honest. Lightning is an adequate if not all too charismatic lead. However, Podemski deservedly won an acting award at Sundance this year and Jeri Arredondo, who plays Cufe and Miri's mother, is just as good. (3/5)

DEATH AT A FUNERAL
This dyspeptic British comedy regarding a family funeral for a deceased patriarch shouldn't work at all. It has too many characters to respectfully consider, an abundance of outlandish plot twists, and a steady current of lowbrow humor. And yet, it averts disaster (and occasionally soars) simply because it's funny, and consistently so at that. Frank Oz can be hit-and-miss as a director (for every gem in his discography like the underrated WHAT ABOUT BOB, there's a STEPFORD WIVES), but here he's completely suited to the zany pace, nimble construction and delightfully dark tone of Dean Craig's screenplay. The large ensemble cast features a bevy of Brits young and old, but the most inspired work comes from American actors Alan Tudyk (FIREFLY) and Peter Dinklage (THE STATION AGENT): to reveal anything more about their characters would spoil the fun. DEATH AT A FUNERAL is certainly a crowd-pleaser, and I could ramble off a long list of smarter and more nuanced comedies I've seen—but I couldn't tell you the last time I've laughed so hard watching one of them. (3.5/5)

DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT

It's ideal to go into Julia Loktev's remarkable debut feature not knowing anything, but it's also damn near impossible to write about it without disclosing key information. (However, basic knowledge of the plot did not seriously lessen the film's impact for me, so SPOILERS AHEAD).

We follow a 19-year-old girl (Luisa Williams), her character only referred to as "She" in the credits. She seems to be on an important mission, training to do something. We watch her receive instructions to carry out, first via phone, then from mysterious figures whose faces are sheathed in black masks. Dropped off in a hotel, She obsessively bathes every crevice of her body and recites cryptic mantras to herself.

It (very) gradually comes into focus that She is a suicide bomber and her instructions are to self-detonate herself in a random crowd of people in congested Times Square. We never fully learn what organization She's doing this for, or even whether its affiliation is religious, political, or other. She also seems to deliberately be a blank slate, devoid of determinable ethnicity or accent. As She reaches her final destination, the film gains intensity and insight as both She and the audience come to terms with the complexity and consequences of what She has set out to do.

The film's methodical pace, muted expressiveness, abundance of close-ups and concern with one's own fate earn the Dreyer and Bresson comparisons it has received; the influence of Iranian cinema is also felt throughout, especially in the oblique and not entirely conclusive narrative. All of these ambiguities may frustrate many viewers, but Loktev has created an original, assured, involving, uncompromising film. It may have a bare-bones style, but there's so much going on here.

MIX: MYSTERIES

October 2006: CD-R

01. Paul Giovanni, “Lullaby”
02. Belle and Sebastian, “Dress Up In You”
03. The Zombies, “A Rose for Emily”
04. Calexico, “Crumble”
05. Sun Ra, “Space Loneliness”
06. TV On The Radio, “A Method”
07. Luscious Jackson, “Take a Ride”
08. Brian Eno, “The Big Ship”
09. Kings of Convenience, “Summer on the Westhill”
10. Nancy Sinatra, “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)”
11. The Velvet Underground, “Jesus”
12. Stereolab, “Metronomic Underground”
13. PJ Harvey, “The Life and Death of Mr. Badmouth”
14. Space Needle, “Never Lonely Alone”
15. Laura Nyro, “Billy’s Blues”
16. John and Beverly Martyn, “Auntie Aviator”
17. Animal Collective, “Loch Raven”
18. Beth Gibbons and Rustin’ Man, “Mysteries”
19. CAN, “Spoon”

Some mixes are tossed off in a week or two (or one particularly obsessive evening); others take much longer to finish. I started this one on a Greyhound bus bound for Manhattan in late April of last year and completed it nearly six months later for a friend’s birthday. Since then, I've played it often, mostly on road trips.

I wanted to craft something that would be ideal for listening to after dark, preferably in the wee, deep hours of the night. I thought back to the 11:00 PM to 3:00 AM shift I worked as a residence hall desk receptionist in the summer of ’95; I also remembered when I used to drive all over Milwaukee at night just to listen to music in the car. My working title for this mix was “Subterranean”, which I thought aptly described the groove I was going for: moody, subdued, hypnotic, chill.

“Lullaby” is a suitably mystifying minute-long snippet from THE WICKER MAN soundtrack (the original, not the negligible Neil LaBute remake); here it’s a prelude, an opening theme song. “Dress Up In You” gently fades in from some seemingly secret, special place, and so it goes, its indie pop bleeding into The Zombies' chamber psychedelia, Luscious Jackson’s stretched-out jam barely separate from Brian Eno’s momentous crawl, the quietly dramatic, a capella finale of VU's “Jesus” giving way to Stereolab’s blips and bleeps. While some mixes are aptly just that—a true blend, all over the map—here I aimed for something coherent, a simmering whole with more flow.

I was in no rush to finish it, knowing I had the time. I'm glad I let it gestate; otherwise, I never would've included the title song, which I owned but barely noticed until it appeared, quite strikingly, in the film RUSSIAN DOLLS; nor would I have ever heard the Space Needle song, which popped up at the last minute in an episode of VERONICA MARS. The final track, "Spoon" also re-entered my consciousness via a movie soundtrack. It carries a little jolt that's somewhat out-of-character for the mix, but I get excited every time it comes on—it's a respite, a diversion, a space to suddenly awaken after nearly dozing off.

SIGNS OF LIFE

I began working on a review of AWAY FROM HER last week for this blog, but I'm not sure I'll ever finish it. After many false starts--about why Sarah Polley is such a good actress (turned director), why what she's touched upon in the film is so rare and messy and graceful and significant, stumbling to articulate what makes Julie Christie's performance astonishing--I've put it aside. However, I can say that the final shot of two sets of skis, dutifully sloshing through the snow, followed by k.d. lang's version of the old Neil Young song "Helpless" over the closing credits, moved me more than any ending of a film I've seen in ages.

Until the pen starts flowing again, here are some pix I took on a day trip to Gloucester and Rockport over Memorial Day weekend.

GOODBYE, GIRLS

Soon, my Tuesday nights will be free for the first time in years. GILMORE GIRLS wrapped up a seven-season run last week and tonight a cancelled VERONICA MARS signs off after three.

I watched GILMORE GIRLS from the very first episode: intrigued by a few positive reviews and the promise of incidental music from Sam Phillips on the soundtrack, I was immediately smitten. At its best, the show was steeped with whimsy, yet wry and intelligent. It took place in the small town New England of our wildest dreams, yet it rarely felt false (especially in its earlier seasons), so enticing and rare was its hard-to-pull-off blend of female-bonding/coming-of-age drama and fizzy, screwball humor. I didn’t even particularly notice the trademark, rapid-fire dialogue until someone pointed it out to me in the fourth season; I just naturally took it in as part of the show’s overall allure.

Originally airing on Thursdays against FRIENDS and the still-fairly-new SURVIVOR, I gave GILMORE thirteen episodes to live, at most. However, it survived and prospered (pretty miraculous when you consider the fates of other likeminded low-rated series), moving to Tuesdays the following year and eventually becoming one of the WB’s top-rated shows.

It wasn’t always perfect—one could argue that the rot set in at the start of season six when Lorelei and Rory stopped speaking to one another for eight episodes, and no one could argue that the show didn’t seriously decline a year later when creator Amy Sherman-Palladino abruptly left. But even the final, much-maligned season wasn’t all that bad; on occasion, the simple endurance and resonance of these characters and storylines we had grown to know and love was enough, especially in the show’s sweet, melancholic, true-to-itself finale. Although it was sad to say goodbye to Stars Hollow, the timing was right (lest the show drag on and on past its sell-by-date). Sherman-Palladino has a promising new sitcom premiering in January on Fox starring Parker Posey and Lauren Ambrose; it had better be at least half as good as GG was at its peak.

I didn’t see VERONICA MARS until the first season made its way to DVD. Admittedly, the first few episodes left me a little skeptical (and how could it not with Paris Hilton appearing in the second one?). Midway through the season, however, I was suddenly, absolutely hooked. VM’s first round was a masterful tapestry of teenage noir, father-daughter comradeship, class differences, boy troubles and a nagging, complex (and continually perplexing) mystery. It may have superficially looked like an average WB show, but it sure didn’t feel like one.

The second season let those complexities develop into convolutions (somewhat diminishing the visceral impact that was so integral to the first) while the third season nearly did away with them altogether, struggling along with its heroine to adapt to a different setting. But the show was still always worth watching for the potential of its great, flawed characters. Unfortunately, it was a little too unique to get any more support from its network, hence its inevitable demise. Tonight, I will watch VM’s final two episodes with the friend who initially encouraged me to check out the show, and languidly wish that Veronica, Keith, Wallace, Logan and Mac will all live on tomorrow somehow… perhaps as a comic book?

IFFB WRAP-UP and more

I've been focusing my attention on the Chlotrudis blog, which I've neglected as of late. Here is my IFFB wrap-up; over there is a list of ten independent films I'm looking forward to seeing this summer.

On the latter post, there's one film I forgot: Gregg Araki's SMILEY FACE. His follow-up to the great MYSTERIOUS SKIN, it sounds about as far away from that film in tone and spirit as one can get: a stoner comedy starring the always-amusing Anna Faris. It apparently comes out in July, although it was originally scheduled for last month, which may be why I missed mentioning it.

TWO DANISH FILMS

When did the word "melodrama" acquire such a negative connotation? One of the worst things you can currently say about a movie is that it feels melodramatic. In fact, I've praised many a film for not containing a hint of melodrama. However, there have been great, intelligent transcendent melodramas from Sirk to Bergman and beyond; it's just a difficult genre to master.

Danish director Susanne Bier's latest, AFTER THE WEDDING is unabashedly a melodrama but don't let that deter you. Despite a somewhat predictable, occasionally clumsy screenplay, this is far from a made-for Lifetime TV production. All you need to know about the story is that it involves Jacob (Mads Mikkelsen), a manager of an orphanage in India, Jorgen (Rolf Lassgard), a wealthy Copenhagen entrepreneur whom Jacob is seeking a grant from, and a flurry of revelations that come about when the two men meet; prior knowledge of anything else will seriously diminish the film's impact.

It all works because Bier tempers the story's soap opera tendencies with a charged yet intimate style and pace. The camera breathlessly swirls around the action, offering many close-ups of faces (with a particular, peculiar emphasis on the eyes) to the point where it feels like you're watching a less cerebral and austere but just as thoughtful (and wrenching) Bergman film. Mikkelsen and Lassgard are both excellent, as are Sidse Babett Knudsen as Jorgen's wife Helene and Stine Fischer Christensen as their daughter, the youngish, adorably mousy Anna. AFTER THE WEDDING is a lesser, more conventional film than Bier's previous one, BROTHERS, but it's also a good, accomplished melodrama made by people who know what they're doing.

Bier's longtime co-screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen is director in his own right, but his exceedingly black comedies have very little melodrama in them. The narrative of ADAM'S APPLES sounds like a sick joke (and that's exactly what it is): Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a paunchy, middle-aged Neo-Nazi, is released from prison and sent to do community service in a rural church presided over by his opposite in temperament, Ivan (Mikkelsen again). The latter is a cheery priest who suffers from grand delusions that all of the bad things happening to him are a test from God. It's a rather silly, broad film, but at the very least, Jensen creates a delightfully absurd tone, whether he's needlessly killing a somnambulant cat or daring us not to laugh at a brain damaged child. Someday he may even make a great, biting satire. This isn't one, but it has a lot to recommend it: gorgeous scenery and cinematography, a deft, brave comic turn from Mikkelsen, and some inspired lunacy here and there—much of it involving a cover of a certain Bee Gees song. Oh, those wacky Danes.

EMPIRE

C.R.A.Z.Y.

In the last decade or two we've seen so many coming out stories on film (and coming of age stories in general) that we shouldn't expect any new ones to tell us something we don't already know. Jean-Marc Vallée's C.R.A.Z.Y. (the title is an ingenuous pun spelt out at the closing credits), a French-Canadian production that's finally been released in the U.S., really shouldn't work: its main character, Zac, is the fourth of five boys (and the only gay one) in a Catholic Montreal family. Opening with his birth on Christmas, 1960, and spanning the next twenty-odd years, the film is about Zac's struggle with his sexuality and his yearning for acceptance and understanding from his cool but rigid father, Gervais (Michel Côté), whom he idolizes.

And yet, despite the overly familiar sounding premise, C.R.A.Z.Y. is actually a refreshing, marvelous film that gets nearly every detail right. It expresses an uncommonly vivid sense of Zac's evolving persona and the internal and external conflicts it causes. Unlike others tales of this ilk where accepting one's own identity (sexual or otherwise) is executed with all the grace and profundity of a neatly tied-up sitcom punchline, this one incorporates pivotal moments in the protagonist's search for himself (getting caught dressed up in his mother's clothes by his father at age six, for instance) with smaller, less showy incidents (a teenager's slight change of hairstyle or wardrobe) to present a character that's always growing, sometimes regressing, and often questioning who he is and what he wants to be. It sounds like the simplest thing in the world, but few films dig this deep and remain so consistent and involving.

While Zac's sexuality is the film's central narrative strand, it's far from the only one. C.R.A.Z.Y. works primarily because it considers so much else. It explores the dynamics of a large family from a distinctively Quebecois Catholic perspective—father/son, mother/son, husband/wife and brother/brother are all given their due. It also lovingly (and from what I've read, most accurately) recreates suburban Montreal of the 1960s and 1970s, nailing the period style and kitsch without seeming secondhand. And speaking of style, Vallée has fashioned a world via cinema that feels like a truly fabulous cross between a David Sedaris childhood essay and a Todd Haynes film (particularly VELVET GOLDMINE). He fluidly mixes the surreal (you've only previously imagined of hearing The Rolling Stones' "Sympathy For The Devil" in such a context) with a textural sense of place and sets it all to a thrilling, expansive soundtrack (including Patsy Cline, Pink Floyd, Charles Aznavour, The Cure, and a reoccurring, goosebump-raising chorale piece) that always belongs to the scene it scores, never feeling intrusive nor like an afterthought.

The film also benefits from a solid cast. Côté, perhaps, leaves the strongest impression as Gervais, a fantastic yet flawed father, utterly humane and sympathetic in wanting the best for his boys but tragically stuck in his old-fashioned, machismo-driven perception of what that is. As Zac, Marc-André Grondin convincingly articulates the subtleties of his character's journey from a somewhat green, goofy 15 year-old to a more confident (and far more conflicted) young adult. Danielle Proulx is simply wonderful and winning as the mother, a housewife who becomes as Zac's co-conspirator, champion, and spiritual conduit.

Despite the language barrier, the numerous cultural differences (do they really eat ironed toast in Quebec?) and its straight-to-DVD release in this country, hopefully C.R.A.Z.Y. won't have difficulty finding an American audience (no matter how cultish). It never condescends to its viewers, nor does it have any of that "this is my important life story" self-indulgence. The plainspoken, disaffected narration throughout perfectly compliments what is essentially a humble film, a celebration of being different by emphasizing how normal it is that we're all individually unique. It has a tender soul beaming through all of its quirky humor, especially when the teenaged Zac says, a little mournfully, "I just want to be like everyone else"; the person he confides this to wisely reassures him,"Thank God, you never will."