*****************************************
Rachelle: Really?!!
Rachelle: Wow!! Having Lyle Lovett like one of your Tweets is amazing! That must be a real feather in your cap!
Rachelle: I’m proud of you, Pickle!
Rachelle: Yes, of course I do.
Rachelle: He’s one of The Avengers, isn’t he?
Rachelle: The Jewish one.
Rachelle: The one who could turn himself into a plane that’s also a tiger.
Rachelle: Oh.
Rachelle: I thought one of The Avengers could do that.
Rachelle: And that they embraced all religions, that they fought for freedom of religious expression and each hero represented a great faith.
Rachelle: Oh.
Rachelle: Well, I guess I don’t know who Lyle Lovett is then.
Rachelle: Hmm, a musician.
Rachelle: No, none of those songs are familiar to me.
Rachelle: Just before my time, I guess.
Rachelle: Not a dig, Pickle. You’re just a lot older than me.
Rachelle: No, I’d say 12 years is a lot. Anything double digits.
Rachelle: What??
Rachelle: He was married to Julia Roberts?
Rachelle: You mean the guy who looks like a scarecrow/funeral director is Lyle Lovett?
Rachelle: Wow.
Rachelle: It’s true, personality does counts for a lot.
Rachelle: And yes, it is almost as if Julia Roberts liked your Tweet!
Rachelle: Aww, that’s sweet!
Rachelle: Well, if I’m your Pretty Woman, you’re my little Lyle Lovett!
Rachelle: Yes, my power skating class is over and I’ll be home soon.
Rachelle: With the wings.
Rachelle: Extra mild. Sauce on the side. Extra wet naps. No carrot stick taller than the others. As always.
Rachelle: It’s a little bit of a serial killer kind of order, you know.
Rachelle: That was auto correct.
Rachelle: I wrote “You’re a sweet kind of order.”
Rachelle: Well, auto correct works in mysterious ways.
Rachelle: Through a glass darkly and all of that.
Rachelle: Yes, you probably will start getting ads in you Facebook feed for serial killer things now.
Rachelle: Well, they say technology knows you better than you know yourself, Pickle!
Rachelle: Oh, I’m kidding, honey.
Rachelle: You’re no serial killer.
Rachelle: In fact, you would be the worst serial killer in history.
Rachelle: Well, your allergies to start. Always blowing your nose and sneezing. You’d be detected straight away!
Rachelle: And then there’s your general physical and mental weakness. Serial killers have to be on the ball! I bet serial killers get 10 hours of sleep a night!
Rachelle: Ha Ha!! I know, I would kill for 10 hours of sleep, too!
Rachelle: But look, the fact that you could never be a serial killer is a compliment, not an insult.
Rachelle: I know, these are confusing times.
Rachelle: The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Rachelle: It’s from a poem.
Rachelle: I think the falconer is the person who dresses the falcon when they go hunting. Picks out the outfits. Not positive.
Rachelle: Anyway, see you in about half an hour! xo
]]>And so for first-time director Aaron Wilson, who debuted his film Canopy at the festival, it must have been a validating and exciting experience. The movie has a very simple premise. An Australian pilot gets shot down while battling the Japanese over Singapore and improbably bonds with a Chinese soldier similarly trying to elude capture.
The central characters of this film—which is almost devoid of dialogue—aren’t really the actors playing the roles, but the jungle in which the story unfolds and the hyper-accented soundscape that surrounds them. Wilson is trying to do something different here, but in so doing Canopy comes across as more of a concept of a film than a film itself, an interesting idea in theory, but in practice maybe not so much.
It’s impossible to see this movie and not think of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red line.
I don’t think that there’s a film on the planet that compares well to it, and Canopy is no exception. Although Canopy is beautiful to look at, it never establishes an emotional grip on the audience, relying too heavily on the mechanisms of filmmaking rather than the film itself. For instance, after a spell, the wordlessness of the movie becomes burdensome, a cinematic imposition rather than an organic necessity of circumstance and disparate languages. Clearly, the director wants us keenly focused on the canopy of sound covering the silent action, but he points us so intentionally in this direction it’s as if we’re following a neon-signs-lit detour route. The acoustics swiftly become a clumsy, almost naive contrivance that is master rather than servant to the film, pulling us away rather than in.
Perhaps if the actors were more expressive or physically compelling, the director’s reach wouldn’t have so exceeded his grasp. As it is, in spite of its lyrical flourishes and allusive passages, the movie has a constructed, almost humid weight. As we move from one poetic war trope to the next, as if in some theme park yet to be invented, Canopy does little more than ask you to like it.
When it ended, the near-full house applauded, as if in encouragement, it seemed, rather than appreciation. The director and his key people took the floor, ready for a Q & A, and the last amongst them to do so was the lead actor, Khan Chittenden. As is often the case, he was smaller and more vulnerable than you would have expected after having just seen him up there on the giant screen, and as he youthfully bounded down from his seat, he threw up an arm to the crowd, he too hoping for more than what was received.
]]>