Art and Craft

Opens Fri., Oct. 31 at Varsity. 
Not rated. 89 minutes.

Somewhat contrary to expectation, this is not a documentary about a master art forger. Exposed as a fraud in 2011 by Financial Times and The New York Times, meek, mentally ill Mississippian Mark Landis didn’t try to sell fake works by big names to prestigious galleries or gullible collectors. That sort of criminal enterprise would make for a Hollywood thriller or documentary expose. Instead, filmmakers Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman simply gain access and trust with their shy, eccentric subject—now clearly pleased to be a demi-celeb—and follow his recent activities. They watch as he gathers art supplies at Hobby Lobby, sometimes photocopies his source images at Kinko’s (later to paint over them), dresses as a Catholic priest, and drives his dead mother’s red Cadillac to regional Southern colleges and museums to make donations. There, the cash-strapped curators and officials are only too happy to receive a gift horse and not look it in the mouth. (Whether they have the sophistication to look, Cullman and Grausman are too polite to say.)

Eventually, as was well reported at the time, Ohio museum official Matthew Leininger wised up to Landis and his 30-year pattern of ersatz philanthropy. Art and Craft tries to set up a kind of detective-and-quarry dynamic between the two, but this is a case of the bland pursuing the blind. Leininger can’t get real lawmen very interested (where’s the real crime, the real harm?), and Landis is a deluded old recluse, a frail mamma’s boy living in his late mother’s apartment. The museum curators interviewed here are all embarrassed about being duped, but they don’t want to see the sad, Gollum-like Landis go to jail. (Leininger is the one who ultimately suffers for his zeal, not his prey.)

Meanwhile, at the University of Cincinnati, curator Aaron Cowan decides to put together a show on Landis and his fakery. He does the best job here of questioning the serial copyist, whose young imagination was formed by TV, movies, art history books, and museum visits with his globetrotting military family. As opposed to famous outsider artists like Henry Darger (profiled in 2004’s In the Realms of the Unreal), he’s a savant whose gift is entirely imitative. (At the concluding museum show, there’s precisely one artist-signed drawing—based on a photograph of his beloved mother, Landis admits.) Like its subject, who never claims to be an original talent, Art and Craft is modest yet engrossing affair. Here is a guy on a harmless ego trip who craves a little public recognition. Getting busted for his small deceptions is the best thing that ever happened to him. Brian Miller

PCitizenfour

Opens Fri., Oct. 31 at SIFF Cinema Uptown. Not rated. 114 mInutes.

Edward Snowden sits on his hotel-room bed, about to keystroke a password into his laptop. Without looking particularly sheepish about it, he drapes a blanket over his head and upper body, so he can comfortably input the information without being observed. This gesture evokes many things: a kid reading a book under the covers at night; the Elephant Man disguising his grotesqueness; a conspiracy theorist muttering warnings about cosmic rays coming through his skull. None of these associations is unjustified, and all underscore the absorbing character study that Citizenfour presents in you-are-there fashion.

There’s a layer of irony to this moment, too: Snowden has invited documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (The Oath) and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald into his Hong Kong hotel room precisely so he can be observed. Much of what we see takes place during a week in June 2013, when Snowden first spilled information he took from his job at the National Security Agency. The biggest bombshell (to date) was evidence that the U.S. government was doing much more spying on ordinary citizens than it admitted. In this context, clicking the SEND button carries as much weight as Bob Woodward meeting Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. This straightforward documentary may be smaller-scaled than a political thriller, but it has similar suspense: Everybody in the room realizes the stakes—and the dangers—of exposing a whistleblower to public scrutiny.

One man’s whistleblower is another man’s traitor, a debate that Poitras doesn’t pause to consider, so confident is she of Snowden’s cause. The question is worth another documentary, if only to lay out Snowden’s rationale to people who might be on the fence about all this. Having this access to Snowden in the exact hours he went from being a nonentity with top-secret clearance to a hero/pariah is a rare chance to see a now-historical character in the moment of truth. He emerges as hyperarticulate, careful, nerdy, paranoid, and concerned with the amount of mousse he puts in his hair. His vocal delivery is oddly reminiscent of Seth Rogen’s. He might be just a little hollow at the core, or he might be so principled he actually doesn’t care how his actions will make his life uncomfortable. And at the end of the film, we get a scene that suggests that Snowden is not alone in his whistleblowing status—a tantalizing hint (scribbled by Greenwald on pieces of paper, that secure system of passing secrets) of another story to come. Maybe it’s best to think of Citizenfour as the first of many films on this affair. Robert Horton

PSundance Shorts

Opens Fri., Oct. 31 at Sundance Cinemas. Not Rated. 94 and 90 minutes.

Quick, can you name the short-film Oscar winners from this past March? Me neither. Instead of belatedly parading the nominees around the country, Sundance is featuring eight live-action entries from its own January festival—some possibly to figure in the coming fall awards season. (The separate animation package is a sampler from several recent years.) Impressively atmospheric and murky, suggesting both folklore and fairy tale, Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts imagines a fanciful 1969 effort to compete with the American space program. Tin cans and scrap are improvised into a rocket with more symbolic import, or possibly totemic power, than any chance of reaching the moon. The astronaut is to be a teenage albino girl, which further pushes Afronauts into the realm of wishful magic and myth. (Bodomo is from Ghana and trained at NYU.)

I also liked I’m a Mitzvah again (having seen it during SIFF), the humorous tale of a poor schlemiel trying to retrieve his friend’s body (and dignity) from Mexico. Drunk on tequila, pondering his pal’s strange adventures, he has to look up the Hebrew prayers on the Internet to sit shiva with the deceased. Part of the comic charm here is that, as our hero lugs the coffin with him wherever he goes, his flight home delayed, the locals are utterly accepting of their gringo guests—the living and the dead are treated with equal courtesy.

From Germany, another standout has an awkward title, even in English: MeTube: August Sings Carmen “Habanera.” That famous aria gradually expands like a Transformer, visually and musically, undergoing an electronica remix launched from the breakfast table of what seems to be a sad, lonely lip-syncher (with a portrait of Maria Callas nailed to the wall behind him, like an icon). It’s a giddy, silly five-minute paean to Bizet, Carmen, and the transformative power of music. Seattle Opera should play it on a monitor in the lobby of McCaw Hall during intermissions.

Among the eight animated efforts, the ratio of keepers to clunkers is also fairly high. The English Belly has a storybook aspect suggesting Maurice Sendak, with an elephant-headed young hero exploring mortality, a journey that takes him to the bottom of the ocean. There’s a petite surrealism at work as human and animal identities blur. Limbs are lopped off and entrails spill, yet a friendly talking whale provides reassuring words to young Oscar.

Speaking of violence, the early stick-figure animations of Don Hertzfeldt were known for bloody, sadistic humor. Yet his 23-minute It’s Such a Beautiful Day reaches for a kind of peace and acceptance of suffering. Poor afflicted Bill has had a stroke, so his past and present fuse into a transcendent synesthesia, Hertzfeldt’s primitive pencil work combining with swirling CG effects, like looking through one of those old View-Masters to childhood and beyond.

Finally, by apt coincidence, the paranoid Cold War collage animation of Voice on the Line warns of a new surveillance state. It was made back in 2009, before Edward Snowden and his NSA revelations. Yet prophetically, with Citizenfour also opening today, the narrator grimly declares, “It was the beginning of times to come.” Brian Miller

PWhiplash

Opens Fri., Oct. 31 at Pacific Place, 
Guild 45th, and Lincoln Square. 
Rated R. 106 mInutes.

“There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘Good job.’ ” The scornful speaker is Terence Fletcher, a music teacher and jazz-band leader who knows a thing or two about harm. And the pupil listening to him, a driven young drummer named Andrew Neiman, certainly knows what it is to be harmed. Their conversation comes late in this intense, brutal, and often comical tale of mentorship gone amok. By that time we’ve seen how the bullying relationship between master and student, both intent on excellence, carries a severe personal cost.

Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) is an unbridled asshole for art’s sake, a petty Stalin figure inside the Juilliard-like music academy that greets the innocent Andrew (Miles Teller of The Spectacular Now, in his finest work to date). Andrew has fled Long Island and his kindly, weak mensch of a father (Paul Reiser) to be the best drummer in the best studio band at the best school in the country. That means pleasing the imperious Fletcher, a man who seems endlessly displeased with the world’s lax standards. His sadist-perfectionist putdowns of Andrew and other musicians have the savage fluency of a drill sergeant’s; they’re too funny to quote at length, but his icy “Not my tempo” is like a mortician’s calm, formaldehyde drip—any drummer who hears it knows he’s dead.

How Andrew responds to such abuse—quite calculated, as we shall learn—is the heart of this thrillingly propulsive drama by Damien Chazelle, based on his prior short and rooted in his own high-school drumming agonies. (Made as a Harvard undergrad, his jazzy retro musical Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench played Northwest Film Forum three years ago.) Just as I could say Raging Bull isn’t about boxing, but male ego, the convulsive Whiplash is less about jazz than the codependent conflict between Andrew and Fletcher. Chazelle, a genuine new talent, has compared his Sundance prizewinner to a war movie or a gangster picture; yet it’s a battle where the two antagonists share the same musical goals. (The title tune, “Whiplash,” is full of fiendish shifts of meter and key, though the movie’s centerpiece number turns out to be the old Duke Ellington standard “Caravan.”)

The Oscar-worthy Simmons, who originated this role in Chazelle’s short, doesn’t oversell the villainy or froth at the mouth. Like any dictator, his Fletcher thinks he’s being quite reasonable about obtaining his objectives. Simmons, a veteran character actor recognizable from Law & Order to Juno to Spider-Man, understands that a true tyrant never has to shout (well, rarely . . . and sometimes cymbals must be thrown).

At some moments in Whiplash, including its long onstage finale, Chazelle pushes past realism into the fugue state of practice and performance. Apotheosis or psychosis—what’s the difference? (Black Swan comes to mind.) By the end we realize that losing an arm in a chainsaw accident would be a favor for poor Andrew, yet we cheer him on. He’s a young man finding a home within the white padded walls of his obsession. Brian Miller


Young Ones

Runs Fri., Oct. 31–Thurs., Nov. 6 at 
Grand Illusion. Rated R. 100 minutes.

The old postapocalyptic shuffle is alive in Young Ones, but this catastrophe is more credible than most such speculations. The problem here is water, which has evaporated, at least in this corner of the world. Patriarch Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon, apocalypse vet from Take Shelter) trades trinkets in exchange for supplies, and just manages to keep hold of his “farm”—a patch of brown desert—in hope that the soil needs only the rain to come back. But the film’s real attention is on the next generation, played by a trio of child stars aging into young adulthood. Holm’s patient son Jerome (Kodi Smit-McPhee, the kid from The Road) and resentful daughter Mary (Elle Fanning) must negotiate their future with the ambitious Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult of Warm Bodies, soon to appear in the Mad Max reboot). Ernest isn’t crazy about Flem hanging around with Mary, for reasons that turn out to be pretty well-founded.

Young Ones nods toward science fiction with its Mad Max fashion sense, its filling stations—for water, not gasoline—and its four-legged robot/beast of burden. Beyond that, writer/director Jake Paltrow is content to rely on the traditions of the Western and a visual approach that seems to be aiming somewhere between the worlds of Terrence Malick and Paul Thomas Anderson. The tone is grim and the look is arty; the storylines stick out in random directions. Overall, it’s a mess, with its biggest fault the failure to color in the sole female character of significance—an especially unforgivable failing with Fanning coming off the remarkable Ginger & Rosa and Maleficent.

If it’s a misfire, though, Young Ones at least conjures some haunting stuff along the way. The bleak dystopian landscape (shot in South Africa) helps, as does an intriguing and sometimes stirring score by Nathan Johnson. Hoult’s streak of smiling untrustworthiness—currently flowering in Jaguar commercials—is put to good use here, and Paltrow photographs Smit-McPhee as though he were the young Abraham Lincoln, all gangly limbs and soulful eyes. Left unexplored is the brother/sister relationship that the film only belatedly comes around to. (Speaking of that, yes, Jake Paltrow is the brother of Gwyneth.) It’s not quite odd enough to be a future cult film, but at least this movie lingers in the mind. Robert Horton

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