Ten Canoes, Mala Noche

Ten Canoes ***
Directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr
90 Minutes
Not Rated-Inoffensive Nudity, Sexual References

"Ten Canoes" is the perfect film to see if you are tired of the same old thing. This is a fascinating piece of culture, told in a way that all audiences could find enjoyment from. "Ten Canoes" is the first Austrlian film to be filmed all in Indigenous Aboriginal language, and shot all in Australia's remote Arafura Swamp. The film is a fable of patience, intersecting a present day story with one from the past. A man who has three wives tells a story to another man that covets his youngest wife. The story is about Ridjimiraril, an elder who also has three wives-one smart, one jealous, and one beautiful-and his younger brother that wishes to run away with the beautiful one. Eventually there is an encounter with a stranger, an accidental murder, a possible war, and a strange ceremony. But at the core of the film, "Ten Canoes" is all about learning to have patience. The story does not really have much flow, but a recurring theme that is brought up is the divide within each section of the story. The only portions of the film that are in English are the narration by a man credited as "The Storyteller." As The Storyteller tells us a story about a man telling a story, he assures his audience that the story will come slowly, as in these tribes some stories must take days before they are told just right. And as Dayindi, the man listening to the elders story, grows patience, so does the audience, even if The Storyteller reminds us that we want to hear the rest, and not narration about a group of men building canoes.

All filmed in the remote swamp, "Ten Canoes" has brilliant and breathtaking cinematography, which really does make this a true experience. More so than Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" I really felt like I was observing a group of Aboriginals at the time, giving us insight into their traditions, their language and the way they speak. They were actual people, and not action hero's like in the Gibson version. It's funny, gritty, and always entertaining to the very last frame. This is a riveting and fascinating piece of cinema that is certainly a unique experience.

Mala Noche ***
Directed by Gus Van Sant
78 Minutes
Not Rated-Sex, Language, Brief Violence

I'll admit, I pretty much despise the newer films of Gus van Sant. I have only seen two-the last two-"Elephant" and "Last Days." I hated them both. I just think that van Sant makes these films about subjects that are pretty much outdated, and yet he finds them "daring and cool" probably because this young crowd he wants to attract would find them "daring and cool." It's really "daring" of him to make a film about Columbine years after the fact, and then a film about Kurt Cobain's suicide nearly a decade later. And lets not ever mention the words "Columbine" or "Kurt Cobain" in the film, and instead just get people and situations that are similar to a "T." And so when IFC Center in downtown Manhattan was reviving "Mala Noche," the first film by Gus van Sant, I was a little apprehensive about seeing it. But seeing how Janus went through the trouble to fund this revival, and the fact that this is pretty much a rare screening because nobody has access to a print except van Sant himself, I figured it was worth my ticket price. And while "Mala Noche" is not a perfect film, and does have slight traces of van Sant being full of himself, there is this fresh taste of innocence in the film, and a promising start to a film maker whose career I could seriously live without sometimes.

"Mala Noche" is a simple story of a store owner named Walt, (played by a man named Tim Streeter, who after this only did a single episode of "Twenty One Jump Street") who meets a Mexican immigrant named Johnny and does everything that he can to try and sleep with him. When that fails he ends up in a little affair with Johnny's friend Robert Pepper. These are basically little vignette adventures that the three have, as well as some with Walt's friend Betty. This is an extremely minimal film-no plot so to speak, not much background on any of the characters-but it does stay with you to a point. Van Sant has always been a minimal film maker, especially in characters, and while he seems to think that less is more, in "Mala Noche" I could actually see what he means. This is a believable coming of age tale more so than any of his recent work pretends to be. It also helps to have the photography of John J. Campbell, who manages to make every single shot look like a different piece of art. The choice of black and white was probably because of the ten dollar budget, but this works in black and white more than it would in color, and Campbell really does take advantage of this. I was impressed that I did not hate "Mala Noche," and I feared that I would be dying to leave the screening room because it was an 11:45pm showing, but it does stay with you and it is even fun to watch. The tragic part is that van Sant showed that he had a certain amount of promise-and the innocence and care that seems to have gone into every shot is missing from all of his newer work which just anger me with their unoriginality, pretentiousness, and "poser" qualities. Van Sant needs to stop making films about topics that do not need to be mentioned anymore, and make something more personal, something more like his first film.