FILMS OF THE WEEK: Tyson, Treeless Mountain

Just a quickie before I head back into Manhattan for tonight's Tribeca Film Festival screening of Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB... Two worthwhile films have just opened in limited release, so let me point my upward thumbs the right direction. First up is Tyson, which I mentioned in the Village Voice's spring preview:

Will Mike Tyson be remembered as the youngest heavyweight boxing champ in the world, or will that feat forever be weighted down by personal baggage—the publicly imploding marriage, the prison sentence for rape, the freaky face tattoo, and the animalistic threats of eating children? In this sobering, sympathetic doc, American cine-maverick James Toback (Fingers, When Will I Be Loved), a longtime friend of Tyson's, intercuts the requisite number of archive clips with new, candidly self-loathing interviews of this deeply bruised pugilist.

And here's an interview I did with Toback for IFC, who—and y'all can argue with me until you're mauve in the face—is an underrated and consistently fascinating auteur, even when he misfires. Did anyone actually see Two Girls and a Guy or Harvard Man? The latter may be the only worthwhile project Adrian Grenier has worked on beyond Cecil B. Demented. Relatedly, if you'd like the diametrically opposed viewing experience to another inanely materialistic episode of Entourage, check out Treeless Mountain, a truly little movie that needs all the love you have to offer:

Korean-American filmmaker So Yong Kim follows up her hauntingly beautiful 2006 debut In Between Days with this poignant, impeccably shot, semi-autobiographical tale of two resilient Seoul sisters, six-year-old Jin (Hee-Yeon Kim) and even younger Bin (Song-Hee Kim). Indefinitely abandoned by their mother at their alcoholic aunt-in-law's home, Jin and Bin find gently upbeat pleasures in what little they've been given. Deceptively simple, and more uplifting than heartbreaking, the film is brilliantly adept at capturing the world from a child's perspective.

Other weekend titles I've written about: Béla Fleck goes to Africa with his fancy banjo in Throw Down Your Heart (which may be slight and overlong, but the music's fabulous) and John Malkovich cameos in the trashy sci-fi/action/horror bore Mutant Chronicles, which isn't even a fifth as entertaining (unless maybe you've had a fifth of bourbon) as my interview with co-star Ron Perlman.

Posted by ahillis at April 24, 2009 4:04 PM