1776: Cool Considerate Men.

Not that we're ever overtly patriotic here on GreenCine, but certainly the 4th of July conjures up both a fondness for things Americana and thoughts (okay, brief thoughts) about our founding fathers. Sherman Edwards and Peter Stone's dated but still amusing musical, and its subsequent movie version directed by Peter Hunt, 1776 features some fine songs (who knew those founders could be so musically adept?) but one of the numbers from the film was excised from the theatrical version due to a complaint from then-president Richard Nixon (who soon would have a little less pull, but at the time was friends with producer Jack Warner). The "Cool Considerate Men" sequence was more recently put back in the restored version of the film, as seen on DVD. The song allegedly drew parallels between opponents of American Independence in 1776 and the modern conservative movement. It doesn't seem all that thinly veiled, even. "Never to the left, forever to the right," they sing.

With our land, cash in hand
Self-command, future planned
And we'll hold to our gold
Tradition that is old, reluctant to be bold.

[More on this on the LA Times from a few years back.] Happy Fourth! --craig phillips

PODCAST: Pablo Larraín

As Andrew Grant, David Fear and I discussed in our podcast last October, Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero was my favorite feature at the 2008 New York Film Festival, a marvelously unhinged study of pop-culture obsession in a suffocating environment (if I may crib myself). From All Movie Guide:

As Augusto Pinochet holds Chile in the grip of dictatorship, a fifty year old man obsessed with John Travolta's character from Saturday Night Fever imitates his idol each weekend in a small bar on the outskirts of Santiago. Each weekend, Raúl Peralta (Alfredo Castro) and his friends—a devoted group of dancers—gather in a small bar and act out their favorite scenes from Saturday Night Fever. Raúl longs to become a showbiz superstar, and when the national television announces a Tony Manero impersonating contest it seems like he may finally have a shot at living his dreams. But as Raúl is driven to commit a series of crimes and thefts in order to reproduce his matinee idol's persona, his dancing partners (also underground resistance fighters who rail against the regime) are persecuted by the secret police.

Calling in from Chile, Larraín and I got down! ... I mean, we got down to business over fascism, disco, the Chilean filmmaking scene, and why he agrees with one of his naysayers—with an appropriate smattering of cultural references throughout: Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, John Zorn and Felix Mendelssohn (?!).

To listen to the podcast, click here.

Tony Manero opens in New York tomorrow and in Los Angeles on July 17, with more dates to come. For showtimes and more info, visit the Cinema Village website.

NYAFF '09: Film of the Week

If you've got the guts, you adventuresome types need to check out the final New York Asian Film Festival screening (July 2, 2:00pm, IFC Center) of South Korean actor Yang Ik-June's writing and directorial debut Breathless—that ain't no joke of a title. In its first stressful, claustrophobically close-up scene, a woman is beaten senseless in the streets while loan-shark enforcer Sang-hoon (Yang) observes indifferently, then brutalizes the victimizer before unexpectedly smacking around the woman as well (all the while berating her for being a victim). Sleepy-eyed, gutter-mouthed, mustachioed thug Sang-hoon instantly makes for an unsympathetic protagonist, and as his actions soon prove, he'll turn feral on anyone who so much as breathes the wrong way. His violent outbursts are so relentless that even working as a guy who beats up people for a living, his co-workers have to worry about getting beat up by him, too. Could there be a less likeable character in a more unpleasant viewing experience? Would it have been an easier swallow if the filmmaking were flashy or stylized, instead of unadorned and handheld?

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INTERVIEW: Kathryn Bigelow

by Jeffrey M. Anderson

In the great tradition of tough-guy filmmakers like Howard Hawks, Don Siegel and Samuel Fuller, Kathryn Bigelow is one of the finest living crafters of male-bonding genre films. It may seem an odd fit, as the beautiful, elegant, highly intelligent 57 year-old woman was educated at the San Francisco Art Institute with a background in painting; she's hardly the eye-patch-wearing, cigar-chomping type like her Hollywood predecessors. When I asked her about this duality in 2002, she responded with genuine puzzlement. Why would a woman want to make muscular action films? Frankly, why not?

Bigelow's latest, The Hurt Locker—easily one of the year's best films, based on journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal's interviews and experiences—revolves around the lives of three Army bomb techs (Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, and Brian Geraghty) in the last days of their Iraq tour, circa 2004. Yes, it's yet another right-here, right-now Iraq film, but it doesn't hurl any messages in our faces about the horrors or futility of war. It's not dreary, somber or self-serving. It's not about politics or politicians, wives or families, insurgents or Iraqis. Rather, we're presented with a sturdy combat film with lots of thrills and explosions and summertime-friendly action. It dares to suggest that, sure, war is hell, but it's not without its pleasures.

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DVD OF THE WEEK: Last Year at Marienbad

Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad)
Directed by Alain Resnais
1961, 94 minutes, In French with English subtitles
Criterion

I don't eat red meat, so it gives me no pleasure to cook a sacred cow like Last Year at Marienbad, an incontestably iconic and beautiful curiosity that simply hasn't held up as the masterpiece it's gushed to be. Perhaps in the context of 1961, this legendary collaboration between twin titans Alain Resnais and nouveau roman writer-turned-filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet was then the epitome of formalist, modernist European film artistry; it's a highly reactionary pooh-poohing of traditional narrative storytelling, academically detached from the confines of space, time and meaning to a meandering extreme of icy impenetrability. (It would be easy to see any single scene replayed verbatim as a spoof of Euro-pretentiousness on The Simpsons.) That's not to say it's entirely plotless, as momentum and suspense build from a loosely centralized, simple drama: a well-dressed man credited as X (Giorgio Albertazzi) pursues stunning woman A (Delphine Seyrig) inside and out of a massive baroque hotel. Did she agree to rendezvous with him a year after their last encounter, as he asserts in an elliptically repeated but varied conversation, or have they even met at all? Are her hazy recollections real, or being seductively implanted by his silver tongue?

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PODCAST: Lloyd Kaufman

Last weekend, I was fortunate enough to be a guest at the deadCENTER Film Festival in Oklahoma City, where I sat on a panel following a screening of Paul Osborne's humorously revealing documentary Official Rejection. Chronicling the fulfilling highs and frustrating lows Osborne and filmmaker Scott Storm faced when their previous feature collaboration was taken to the festival circuit, the film debunks a few myths about the emerging auteur experience. Among the subjects sharing their two cents are Bryan Singer, Chris Gore, Traci Lords, Kevin Smith and the President of Troma Entertainment himself, Lloyd Kaufman—who also sat in on the panel, and showed characteristic dignity by doing his onscreen interview with dropped trou.

Kaufman, pictured here with his iconic star of the Toxic Avenger series, knows a thing or two about festivals and the evolution of independent cinema. As a filmmaker, producer and actor (and current chairman of the Independent Film and Television Alliance), Kaufman has been making cult indie movies under the Troma umbrella since the mid-'70s. Gleefully rife with debauchery, bloodshed, gross-out comedy, and other camp ingenuity, his work has been cited as influential by Peter Jackson, Quentin Tarantino and Takashi Miike.

Sitting down with the ever-affable Kaufman in his Manhattan home, our half-hour-ish chat was surprisingly more earnest than you might expect from a guy who had a cameo in Crank: High Voltage. ("The most serious interview I think I've ever done," he'd tell me later.) Broadly addressing the state of indie film in this desperate climate, Kaufman and I discussed TromaDance, net neutrality, why having his films bootlegged may not be such a bad idea, how his Chinese studies at Yale have helped him see the industry more clearly, and more tales of the devil-worshiping media cartels.

To listen to the podcast, click here.

[Kaufman's most recent directorial feature, the gonzo fast-food satire Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (a NY Times critic's pick!) is now on DVD, and his new book "Produce Your Own Damn Movie!" will be released on August 28.]

DVD OF THE WEEK: L'important c'est d'aimer

L'important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing is to Love)
Directed by Andrzej Zulawski
1975, 113 minutes, In French with English subtitles
Mondo Vision

The opening seven minutes of Polish iconoclast Zulawski's first French production—adapted with Christopher Frank from his novel La nuit américaine (no relation to Truffaut's Day For Night)—tease with such psychodramatic intensity that one might mistakenly brace for the button-pushing provocations of an exploitation flick. It opens with hard-luck actress Nadine Chevalier (Romy Schneider, who won a Best Actress César award in 1976 for the film) staring at the camera in someone's domicile, a woman's offscreen voice cueing her to back up, turn around and approach the body of a dead gunman leaning against a blood-splattered wall. We're on a movie set, and world-weary freelance photog Servais Mont (Fabio Testi) has just crashed the party, bribing anyone who questions him while taking unsanctioned shots of the movie star. The barking director demands Nadine mount the fake-bloodied corpse and profess "je t'aime," but in the moment, she can't perform, and Servais captures her vulnerable, tear-streaked visage before he's thrown off the set, his negatives taken, and a fistfight erupting with two crewmembers. Beaten, but not without getting in his blows, Servais escapes with a roll of undeveloped film hidden in his mouth, and takes off for another gig to shoot gay bodybuilder porn—a financial obligation to seedy loan sharks. Whether it's 1975 or 2009, sometimes we all have to whore ourselves out to get by in desperate times, so don't you go judging our ethically lax anti-hero. (Side note: will this new recession prompt for more characters sinking to the lowest of lows for a buck?)

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A Dangerous Shift in Iranian Cinema

by Vadim Rizov

A few weeks ago, some utterly clueless study was conducted showing that the Romanian films so popular on the festival right now were, shockingly, not box office successes in Romania. Why anyone was taken aback by this is hard to guess. Most country's festival films have always been persona non grata—commercially and sometimes politically—in the places they emerged. (Recall, for example, Tony Rayns launching his war against Kim Ki-Duk by pointing out that his financing was almost entirely foreign, as if that were an automatic demerit.)

From Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards

In the late '90s, Iranian cinema was the wave of the art-house future: Jafar Panahi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and (grudgingly conceded) Majid Majidi were all enjoying fair success. Their films, too, weren't necessarily commercial hits in Iran (Panahi is used to having his work banned), but then something else happened: the amount of foreign cinematic attention paid to Iran these past few years—with the exception of Panahi's Offside—has been almost null. Kiarostami is off doing art installation-type dares to the audience, Makhmalbaf hasn't seen American distribution since 2001, Majidi continues to tickle the middlebrows with allegorical children and Panahi has to fight to make a film every three years. There is, of course, nothing inherently sinister about a country's cinematic profile temporarily ebbing a bit; certainly, given how the cinematic country du jour seems to change every few years (Iran, Korea, Thailand, Romania), it might just seem like some kind of anomaly. Given current events, that's really not the biggest of concerns right now. But what, precisely, has been going on?

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Subways, Shitholes & Death Wishes

by Vadim Rizov

Released three months apart, Death Wish and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three are twinned images of the subway as a microcosm of 1974 New York City: Death Wish the urban hell variant, Pelham a dystopian playground. Both focus on people with guns infesting the transport system and start a general acceptance of the city being as violent and out-of-control as could be. (The next year, the city almost had to declare bankruptcy, leading to the infamous Ford to City: Drop Dead Daily News headline, which pretty much sums up the overall tenor.) Both have lasted far past their initial sell-by dates as basic programmers. On the occasion of Tony Scott's ill-advised remake of Pelham, it's worth thinking about the ways the films complement each other.

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PODCAST: Rutger Hauer

Internationally renowned Dutch actor and filmmaker Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner, The Hitcher) again lends his name and talents to the third edition of the Rutger Hauer FilmFactory (June 18 – 28), a Rotterdam-based workshop program that unites 30 budding auteurs for masters classes with such notables as Paul Verhoeven and Robert Rodriguez. (Both of whom will be teaching virtually via Skype.) Other notable coaches include Polish filmmaker and artist Lech Majewski (The Garden of Earthly Delights), Golden Bear-winning Peruvian director Claudia Llosa (La Teta Asustada), and Belgian cinematogpraher Walther van den Ende (Joyeux Noel). Funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science; the Rotterdam Film Fund and other cultural organizations, the program challenges directors, producers, cinematographers, editors and actors from all over the world to make 12 to 18 short films in only 10 days. "Victims," Hauer playfully calls them.

I called Hauer today at his hotel in the Netherlands to discuss this year's edition of the Rutger Hauer FilmFactory, why he hasn't collaborated with Verhoeven since 1985's Flesh + Blood, and the experience of doing love scenes for Nicolas Roeg with the director's then-wife Theresa Russell. If you notice that Hauer's voice begins to sound a little glitchy near the end, keep listening for the ironic explanation.

To listen to the podcast, click here.