Quick take: Were the World Mine

A lot of movies start out with appealing gimmicks but then wear out their welcomes, failing to make good on what looked so promising or come up with anything else. Were the World Mine, a low-budget independent musical homegrown in Chicago, works the opposite way. Its flaws, namely uneven acting and a screenplay that's sometimes too obvious, are glaring as the movie gets started. But after the story of a prep-school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream starts to pick up steam, those shortcomings mostly fade into the background. The fusing of the play and film, along with world-class songs by Chicago-based newcomer Jessica Fogle, lifts Were the World Mine on a magic carpet. The key actors, including Archie-like lead Tanner Cohen, Christian Stolte as the gruff rugby coach, and especially Wendy Robie as the ultimate drama teacher, are excellent. The production values are impressive for such an independent film, showing what a difference a few touches like good sound mixing can make. Unabashedly gay yet capturing Shakespeare's universal themes, Were the World Mine is funny, often moving, and ultimately uplifting.

Review: La Leon

Even if there were nothing else to recommend La Leon, an eerie drama by Argentine director Santiago Otheguy, it might be worth seeing just for its gorgeous monochromatic tone. It's nominally a "black and white" movie, but in fact there isn't a spot of black in it. Everything, from the rippling water to the lush vegetation and the weathered main characters, is a sort of bronze or gunmetal. It's fascinating to look at throughout the 85-minute running time and a great example of the creative possibilities presented by digital video.

But there's so much more. The cinematography is beautiful, contrasting off-kilter close-ups with languid shots of boats going up and down a river. A distinct plot keeps the movie on course even as it drifts between vague moods of gloom and doom. The main actors are excellent.

Quiet Alfaro (Jorge Roman) lives on a stretch of river that time seems to have forgotten, quietly helping elderly Iribarren (Jose Munoz) harvest reeds. He's wiry and middle-aged, with deep lines in his face and a look of resignation. The opposite pole of the movie is the bellicose, barrel-chested El Turu (Daniel Valenzuela), who pilots La Leon, a riverboat seemingly from another age. As the modern world encroaches on the island where they've lived all their lives, the changes draw them toward each other and their fates.

La Leon is like a combination of Tropical Malady, The Last Picture Show, and Touch of Evil. Though it never crosses the line into the supernatural, there's enough social isolation, shadowy motivation, and colonial detritus to draw the viewer in like a bottomless swamp. Some elements of the story will be familiar to fans of queer cinema, but, at least for a South American film novice, the lion's share of this movie is exquisitely strange.

Quick take: Before I Forget

The old song says "When the end comes I know / I'll be just a gigolo / Life goes on without me." David Lee Roth (after Louis Prima) sang it in less than five minutes, with room left over for "I Ain't Got Nobody." In Before I Forget, writer/director/star Jacques Nolot takes a full 108 to get the same points across. But stories about The End should drive slowly and inexorably to their conclusions, and it's weirdly intriguing to watch Nolot's character, Pierre Pruez, talking... talking... talking... about his life and regrets. At 58, he's a writer and former gay gigolo living in Paris, now hiring his own young partners. He sees his analyst three times a week and hangs out with his aging friends, also ex-gigolos. And it turns out that the bonds with their old "clients" are still there, though just hanging on. They worry out loud about wills, priceless art, blood relatives coming out of the woodwork. But the beauty of this very particular film about a very particular man is that it's also universal. In the end, all the riches of the world can't really be ours, and all we have is our memories and what we've become.

Review: The Visitor

For me, Tom McCarthy's The Station Agent was almost like Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape all over again. While the earlier movie opened my eyes (and I wasn't alone) to how fresh and different an American independent film could be, McCarthy's film 14 years later revealed a sweet sensibility that seemed to have been missing in the independent movement Soderbergh had inspired. Let's face it, Sex, Lies was kind of a creepy movie at times, and however much quirky character-driven comedy/dramas such as Heavy and Ghost World may have been suffused with humanity, the genre tends to be more than a little dark. The Station Agent threw all that out the window, creating almost a fantasy world of human relationships that, while refreshingly realistic on one level, was also a bit like a train set. And who doesn't love a train set?

McCarthy's new film, The Visitor, is something like The Station Agent in reverse. Instead of leaving the city for a rural town where he doesn't seem to belong, the main character in the new film, Walter Vale, heads into New York City from the tidy Connecticut town where he teaches college economics. But like Finbar McBride in The Station Agent, Vale needs a change and finds it unexpectedly in his new surroundings.

The story is set in motion when Vale discovers someone has rented out the apartment he owns in Greenwich Village to a struggling immigrant couple. This isn't the first movie in which a WASPy middle-aged character has been caught up in the drama and joy of a world more "colorful" than his own, but the inevitable has seldom felt so emotionally honest and believable. As in The Station Agent, writer-director McCarthy builds up his characters slowly but surely and makes us cringe occasionally as they struggle to accommodate one another. What's refreshing about both films is that the stories don't really rely on great, reverberating confrontations. That leaves room for a lot more small observations of the sort that get drowned out in too many current films.

Like the diminutive Finbar in the earlier film, Vale isn't a typical lead character. So longtime character actor Richard Jenkins, who comes off like one of the less dynamic middle managers you might find at an office supplies company, is well suited to the role. He's a good foil for the energetic Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), the beautiful Zainab (Danai Gurira) and other indelible characters.

As befits a movie that sends a suburban recluse into the urban maelstrom, The Visitor is much more engaged with the outside world than was The Station Agent. That's both a strength and a weakness, as it gives a little more heft to McCarthy's storytelling but sometimes feels forced. Still, the focus here is on individual relationships, and there are no cardboard characters. The Visitor may not have quite the magic of McCarthy's earlier film, but he's given us another small gem with much the same sweet tone -- something the eclectic Soderbergh, for all his impressive achievements since Sex, Lies, has never done.