GreenCine Daily: January 2008 Archives

January 31, 2008

Slamdance. Paranormal Activity.

"A couple decide to document poltergeist-like disturbances in Paranormal Activity," writes Dennis Harvey in Variety. "Oren Peli's crew-less debut feature is one of the best genre spins on the pseudo-nonfiction 1st-person-cam since The Blair Witch Project, with which it shares improvised performances, no explicit violence or 'solution,' and a gradual escalation of chills."

"Despite its miniscule production values and somewhat rudimentary concept, this intelligently paced ghost story creates a stripped-down intensity that the horror genre often sorely lacks," writes Eric Kohn in indieWIRE.

"Suffice it to say that it sufficiently freaked out those of us who watched the screener in my hotel room in the wee hours of a Sundance night, and that I ended up asking a coworker to crash in my room for the night because I was afraid I wouldn' t be able to get to sleep alone," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "Dreamworks just acquired Paranormal Activity, and we'll keep you apprised of when it might be coming to a theater near you. You'll want to bring a friend - this film is scary as all get out. In the meantime, you can watch the trailer on the film's official website."

John Horn profiles Peli for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. Dread Central interviews Peli.

Posted by dwhudson at 4:18 PM | Comments (1)

Park City Dispatch. 8.

Cathleen Rountree looks back on several docs she won't be forgetting anytime soon.

As in recent years, the documentaries once again stole the show at Sundance 08. Among the 41 films I crammed into nine days, 23 were nonfiction titles. Topics included: social activism, environmentalism, economic concerns, anti-war issues, the corrosion of democracy, world politics, displacement, gender identity, inspiring senior citizens, and entertaining biographies of Roman Polanski, Hunter S Thompson and Patti Smith.

One festival highlight was certainly the premiere of U2 3D, a genuine concert experience utilizing the technology of 3-D and surround-sound. Leave it to Bono, the Edge, Adam and Larry (all in attendance at the screening, along with Al Gore) to merge rock-and-roll with social activism. After the screening, Bono's response to an audience question about whether the band might consider doing a "deeper" show, inadvertently spoke to the festival's raison d'etre: "Underneath there is a narrative running: social activism, human rights, non-violence. Taking human rights on the road is not a flippant thing to do," he reasoned. "I think you might know that in this country."

IOUSA I marveled at many of the documentaries' timeliness and the prescience of the filmmakers, many of whom spent upwards of three, four, and five years in production. For example, I.O.U.S.A., Fields of Fuel, Secrecy, Flow: For Love of Water, Dinner with the President, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, Slingshot Hip Hop and Bigger, Stronger, Faster each address topics of immediate national and international concern.

In the wake of Bush's tax cuts and, even as the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates in an attempt to ward off recession or worse, I.O.U.S.A. (Patrick Creadon), looks at the history of the US economy: the over-burdened social security system, the national health crisis, the ever-expanding military-industrial complex and the growing debts to foreign interests, all of which foreshadow a future of national economic and spiritual bankruptcy. But Creadon, wisely moving beyond partisan entanglements, suggests sound solutions for a future fiscally sound nation.

With the price of oil having recently topped $100 a barrel, Fields of Fuel (Josh Tickell), winner of the Audience Award for Documentary, uncovers desperately needed alternatives which might lead to a decentralized, sustainable energy infrastructure: a new Brooklyn biodiesel plant serving three states, a miraculous Arizona algae-based fuel farm. Tickell's passionate and generous film tracks the rising domination of the petrochemical industry in the second half of the 20th century and, concurrently, summons citizens' action.

Flow Remember Frank Herbert's Dune? In Flow: For Love of Water, French director Irena Salina sounds the alarm: water, our most precious resource, is in peril, and, given the goal of privatization by billion-dollar water companies, impoverished nations could be headed for extinction. But people around the globe are fighting back (the Cochabamba protests of 2000, also known as "The Cochabamba Water Wars," were a series of triumphant protests that took place in Bolivia's third largest city in reaction to the World Bank's plans to privatize the municipal water supply. Salina interviews African plumbers who secretly reconnect shantytown water pipes to ensure a community's survival; a California scientist who exposes toxic public water supplies; and a "water guru" who promotes community-based initiatives to provide water throughout India. As both I.O.U.S.A. and Fields of Fuel point out, we have been fighting wars for oil for more than 100 years. But, as Flow demonstrates, unless we instigate change, we face a world in which water wars are inevitable and even more urgent.

Secrecy corrupts. From unprecedented rendition to warrant-less wiretaps and Abu Ghraib, we have learned that, under the veil of classification, even our leaders can give in to dangerous impulses. Secrecy (Peter Galison and Robb Moss) uncovers the vast, invisible world of government secrecy and explores the tensions between our safety as a nation and our ability to function as a democracy. This stylistically elegant and provocative film combines animation, installations, an effective score and riveting interviews with lawyers, CIA analysts and the ordinary people for whom secrecy becomes a matter of life or death.

Slingshot Hip Hop (Jackie Reem Salloum), one of my favorite docs, follows the Palestinian rappers - Tamer , Joker, and Suhell of DAM (the first-ever Palestinian hip-hop group) and PR (Palestinian Rapperz) - through Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank as these activists for (nonviolent) social change prove that a revolution of music, rising above decades of conflict, is as powerful as bombs. We observe their struggle to produce an album despite crushing poverty, walls of separation and internal checkpoints - and cheer as they progress to jubilant sold-out shows in Europe. And the triumphant female soloist Abeer challenges gender roles and cultural traditions.

After the December assassination of Pakistani presidential hopeful Benazir Bhutto, Dinner with the President (Sabiha Sumar and Sachithanandam Sathananthan) is a welcome entrée into a country with cultures as ancient and complex as Pakistan's. Projected to be the world's third most populous country by 2050, this nuclear-capable nation has stood at the crossroads of East and West for centuries. President Pervez Musharraf is the center of a tripartite that includes the Islamic theocracy, the military, and tribal leaders. Sumar and Sathananthan did indeed have "dinner with" Musharraf, his silent wife and doting mother. Dinner with the President is an in-depth look at one of the world's potential powder kegs.

The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (Lisa F Jackson), which won a Special Jury Prize for Documentary, regards Congolese women's bodies as a wartime battleground and recognizes rape as a key destabilizing method in a corrupt cycle. Jackson interviewed women who survived rape in war-ravaged remote villages of the Congo (where, since 1998, more that four million citizens have been murdered), thereby providing an intimate glimpse into the struggle of the lives of these survivors of rape. Jackson recounts her personal gang-rape experience to the women and fearlessly interviews the warring rapists themselves.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster (Christopher Bell). With Barry Bonds, Marion Jones and Roger Clemens in the news and, worse, Chris Benoit's "'roid rage" slaying of his wife and 7-year-old son, and subsequent self-hanging last year, Bell examines America's win-at-all-cost malady by exposing his two brothers' membership in (and his own brief flirtation with) the steroid subculture. The film opens with images of 1980s super-heroes: Rambo, Conan and Hulk Hogan, but then analyzes the extent of (even rappers and R & B stars admit to using steroids and human-growth-hormones) and deeper issues surrounding these drugs: ethics in sports and the ramifications in terms of both psychological and physical health. Bell takes on a serious topic and infuses hilarious archival footage into his study of America's love of winners.

For the stunningly beautiful and riveting Up the Yangtze, director Yung Chang spent five years chronicling the life transitions of families who live near the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam and, subsequently, must find a way to adjust to the rising waters in a dramatically changing China. During my interview with Chang, he mentioned that by now two million residents have been displaced. Then there's the destruction of countless cultural and archaeological sites. And the government anticipates an additional four million may be forced to leave their homes along the river's edge. But, by focusing on the stories of two teenagers who leave their families to work on a cruise ship that ferries primarily American tourists along the river, Chang humanizes a situation that contains apocalyptic overtones.

The three bio-docs ranged from superb - Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, to very good - Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson, to good - Patti Smith: Dream of Life.

In Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, director Marina Zenovich explores the infamous 70s case, in which acclaimed director (Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist) allegedly had unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and uncovers a very different story than the one that the legal system, fired by the media, sold to the public. Rather than face certain jail time, Polanski fled to Europe, where he remains to this day. This riveting investigative documentary dispels much of the myth and mystery that have haunted this professionally respected, personally reviled, controversial character for more than 30 years.

Gonzo Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson (Alex Gibney) follows on the heels of Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour's oral history of Thompson. Gibney (The Trials of Henry Kissinger, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and the Oscar-nominated Taxi to the Dark Side) creates an intimate and revealing portrait of the writer. Focusing on his work between 1965 and 1975 and using never-before-seen clips of Thompson's home movies, newly discovered audiotapes and passages from unpublished manuscripts, Gonzo creates a multi-faceted portrait of a true American icon.

Patti Smith: Dream of Life (Steven Sebring). The legendary musician/poet/painter/activist/wife/mother and sometime lover of Sam Shepard once wrote: "Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line. You have your own internal world, and it's not neat." Amen to that. Sebring - whose gorgeous black and white cinematography contributes to the dreamlike quality - tracked this punk pioneer and spiritual child of Rimbaud, Blake and Burroughs for 11 years, from the intimacy of her temporary home in the Chelsea Hotel to her mesmerizing public performances. Never having been much of a Smith fan myself, this insightful and often poignant film converted me.

Posted by dwhudson at 4:06 PM

Sundance. Anywhere, USA.

"Any festival you go to there's going to be one film that most people don't get and just spend their time discussing why they didn't like it and question why it was ever made," writes Jason Guerrasio at Filmmaker. "Chusy (Anthony Haney-Jardine)'s Anywhere, USA has become that film at Sundance 08... but I'm in the minority. I thought it was one of the most fun viewing experiences I had there."

"Anywhere, USA revolves around three separate stories - a torn relationship, a family born of crisis, an old man's journey of self-discovery - but those brief capsules can't possibly convey the loopy energy and bizarre brilliance Haney-Jardine splashes up on screen in strong, sloppy brush strokes," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "And I don't use that metaphor lightly; at times, Anywhere, USA feels more like a modern art project than a film."

Robert Koehler, writing in Variety, finds it "dressed up in postmodern smarty pants, only to resolve as an excessively overlong personal project that chases its own tail. A triptych on, respectively, a trailer-park couple, a bright child and her slacker relative, and a wealthy Anglo man runs on and on, even as each elaborately written and staged part amounts to little."

"On one level, Anywhere is experimental hokum, a parade of Southern stereotypes and trailer park jokes," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "Yet, beneath the trashy humor and broad-stroke characters, Anywhere claims striking visual beauty, a standout performance and pride in its Ashville, NC locations and residents."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:31 PM

4 Months..., 1/31.

In the New Republic, Richard B Woodward recalls meeting Cristian Mungiu when 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days screened at the New York Film Festival:

After the Romanian screening, women approached him and related one horrifying story after another. There was the fiancee who became pregnant and was promptly dumped by her husband-to-be before the wedding. "It was inconceivable to have a child out of wedlock then, as difficult as having an abortion," he said. She was lucky to find someone in a tiny village who agreed to do it. "He took her to the basement and showed her two large jars, one of water and the other of acid. He said that if the procedure went well, the fetus would go in the water. If it didn't, he would put her in the acid and no one would ever know what had happened to her."

Updated through 2/6.

"No surprise that, after winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes last year, Cristian Mungiu's brilliant and brutal record of a day in the life of two distraught women failed to make even the Oscar short list of 10 for Best Foreign Language Film," writes Peter Keough in the Boston Phoenix. "It embodies everything the Academy shuns, especially in that gelded category: ambiguity, lack of closure, a refusal to judge, and an uncompromising regard for reality." And he, too, talks with Mungiu.

So do Dennis Lim (Los Angeles Times) and Scott Foundas (LA Weekly) - and Anamaria Marinca joins in on that conversation.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes, Toronto, New York, LA, 1/16 and 1/23.

Updates, 2/1: "Although every member of the ensemble cast delivers a tone-perfect performance, the movie belongs to Marinca, who conveys a welter of emotions - sweetness, anger, shame - with flawless conviction, often in wordless glance or gesture," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "American audiences who have been treated to such consoling fictions as Knocked Up and Juno in recent months here finally have an example of filmmaking that dares to be honest about the high stakes of women's reproductive lives."

"First, this movie should be enjoyed," suggests Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. "Later, marveled at. And then, once the excitement has faded, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days really should be studied, because director Cristian Mungiu creates scenes unlike any ever filmed. Moreover, he builds and reinforces a mood with unexpected techniques that are simple, personal and resoundingly effective."

"[T]he tale is so compelling that it seduces viewers as a fairy tale does a child," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "They simply must know, as the plot knot coils tighter around the characters, What Happens Next."

Update, 2/6: "4 Months is a grinding, expertly crafted slice of Eastern European miserablism, an unquestionably overpowering experience that nonetheless left this reviewer with a nagging sense of unease," writes the Philadelphia Weekly. Also: Matt Prigge lists "Six Films That Deal With Illegal Abortion."

Posted by dwhudson at 11:45 AM

Fests and events, 1/31.

Good news from Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay: "On the 25th anniversary of the International Film Festival Rotterdam's Cinemart, the prize for the 'best project' has gone to Sophie Fiennes's The Pervert's Guide to Ideology, a follow-up to her The Pervert's Guide to Cinema which also features philosopher Slajov Zizek."

Oscarology, 1/31.

How's your Oscar history? Good? Good. Edward Copeland's conducting another survey and there're just hours to go before ballots are due: "In 2006, we did a survey to determine the best and worst of the Oscar-winning best pictures. Last year, we turned our focus to the best and worst of the leading ladies. This year, it's the leading men's turn."

Updated through 2/3.

Meanwhile, any suspense there might be over the questions of who'll win what is out-suspensed by the question of what sort of night Oscar Night'll actually be. David Carr has the latest: "The Oscar ballots went out yesterday, and contingency plans for the show are in the works, just in case Hollywood is still beside itself come Oscar time."

At the Film Experience, Brian Darr has an overview of the Oscar-nominated documentary shorts.

The San Diego Reader's Duncan Campbell is pulling for the Coen brothers.

In the predictions game: Ed Gonzalez.

Update, 2/1: "In a country where the ebb and flow of movie releases constitutes a kind of liturgical calendar (right now, we're in Lent), there's something profoundly destabilizing about the concept of a year without an Oscar ceremony," writes Slate's Dana Stevens. "The writers' strike... attacks the Oscars from the inside. It reminds us that the show is an artifice, an object created by human effort, and hence something that conceivably might not happen."

Updates, 2/2: Edward Copeland posts an annotated ballot for his survey. The Self-Styled Siren posts hers, too.

TCM has begun its "31 Days of Oscar" and the site for it is pretty fun. Jonathan Lapper picks out several highlights.

At Movie Morlocks, Jeff lists his "Favorite Oscar Embarrassments."

Update, 2/3: "Who needs the Oscars, anyway, other than the chosen few nominees and the hangers-on who love them?" asks Marc Peyser in Newsweek. "The fact is, the Oscar telecast (scheduled for Feb 24, assuming some sort of miracle) is the worst three hours and 27 minutes on television, and it has held that distinction for years and years and years."

Posted by dwhudson at 6:53 AM

Sundance. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson.

Reviewing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S Thompson for Cinematical, James Rocchi notes that Alex Gibney has "previously looked at greed (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and war's madness (Taxi to the Dark Side) in prior documentaries that combined journalistic integrity with artistic expression. Looking at the life and work of another journalist who gave what read like track reports for the four horsemen of the apocalypse must have seemed like a natural idea."

"When [Hunter S Thompson's son] Juan found him dead from a self-inflicted gun-shot wound, he went out an fired one of Thompson's guns, three times, into the air," writes kjolseth at Movie Morlocks. "It was my understanding... that Thompson had been dealing with a lot of pain from a personal injury and that this may have contributed to his suicide, but no mention is made of that in the film. Instead, what lingers is the feeling that Thompson saw things getting worse, not just for himself, but in the political landscape around us all, and felt it was time to check out."

"In retrospect, I think Thompson found what he was looking for in the outsized life he created for himself, but Gibney also clearly conveys Thompson's despondency that the dream was never shared by his fellow citizens," writes Tom Hall. "While Thompson embraced the fullness of experience and followed his interests with an unrivaled passion, he saw our America as a land of 'used car salesmen who... don't give a damn' about the suffering they inflict on others. Gibney clarifies Thompson's moral stance as being a true extension of the uncompromising life he lived, and as Thompson's suicide comes into focus, the film somehow manages to transform itself into a celebration not only of the maverick, but a longing to forge a society that embraces him."

The Reeler talks with Gibney; so does Sadia Latifi for New York's Vulture.

Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Gibney for Cinematical.

Online viewing tip. Zoom In Online's "Meet the Artists" video with Gibney.

Posted by dwhudson at 6:51 AM

Sundance. Savage Grace.

"Savage Grace is a quiet stunner, a reserved but engrossing psychodrama whose cumulative impact is devastating," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. It "builds to a series of incidents that would seem outrageous in another context. But without relying on reductive foreshadowing or pat psychobabble, [Tom] Kalin and screenwriter Howard Rodman earn the movie's final scenes, when what has seemed like a poisoned take on Edith Wharton suddenly becomes something out of Edgar Allan Poe."

"One of the more controversial films at Sundance, Savage Grace dramatizes the real-life story of Barbara and Tony Baekeland, a bizarrely intertwined high-society mother and son whose Oedipal relationship ended in tragedy," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "Tom Kalin, whose prior film Swoon re-told the 1924 Leopold and Loeb murder case, seems fascinated by exploring these unusual true-crime type stories, and Savage Grace, while frequently difficult to watch because of the nature of the storyline, is both intense and fascinating."

"I didn't love the movie, but I admired its precise dialogue - a lot of ingeniously worded lines like, 'My French reading skills are not what they will be,' and, 'She would've been happy to know that you would've been there' - and it gets absorbingly creepy in the final half hour," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "It's one of the few films I've seen at this festival that feels like an original."

"Howard A Rodman passes for the 'it' scribe of Sundance's opening days, as writer and co-producer on two debuts at Sundance, August, directed by Austin Chick (XX/XY, Sundance 2002), and Savage Grace, the welcome return of Tom Kalin to feature-making." And Ray Pride talks with him.

And so does the Oregonian's Shawn Levy.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Posted by dwhudson at 6:41 AM

January 30, 2008

Caramel.

"Beauty-parlor romantic comedy has been done to death and beyond, but what Caramel lacks in originality is redeemed by its exuberant sensuality and astute commentary on the way Lebanese women sit uncomfortably in the crosshairs of their country's clash between patriarchal tradition and Westernized modernity," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"It's a reassuring and delicious film, but in no sense an adventurous one," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Still, there's no doubt that [writer-director-star Nadine] Labaki gets extra credit for making a film in an Arab country that casually depicts friendship between Muslims and Christians, never mentions violence or political strife, and in its own gentle fashion sidles up against social issues that remain sensitive in that part of the world."

Updated through 2/2.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Labaki "about watching Dallas and Dynasty while the bombs fell, using an entire cast of non-actors, and believing she was Disney's Snow White."

More interviews with Labaki: Annsley Chapman (Vulture) and Dan Persons (IFC News).

Earlier: Joanne Nucho in Reverse Shot.

Update, 1/31: "For large portions of the story, it's like Sex and the City with prettier scenery," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "That's not a detriment to Labaki's intentions: She slightly alters a familiar genre to take into account the local setting, but these abnormalities quickly retreat behind the shield of homely conventions."

Updates, 2/1: "Caramel has an optimism born not of dreamy romanticism but of resilience and a degree of hard-headedness," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Life for these women is not easy or especially fair, and each of them faces moments of humiliation, loneliness and potential heartbreak. But in the best melodramatic tradition, their toughness, good humor and loyalty see them through. Those qualities, and Ms Labaki's evident affection for the battered panache of her native city, make Caramel hard to resist."

"From the regular power outages to the intrusive military checkpoints and variously deep-stitched religious divides, Labaki deftly and often humorously infuses her story of beauty, friendship, longing and constraint with that so painfully epitomized in the plight of her native Lebanon," writes Michelle Orange at the Reeler. Plus, a talk with Labaki.

"Caramel introduces lots of conflicts and subplots without resolving any of them, which is much of its meandering, laidback appeal," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "At its best, Caramel boasts a quietly engaging slice-of-slice casualness."

"It is sweet but not saccharine, an intimate film that doesn't stint on the desperation and anxiety that go along with the search for love," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Caramel (the title derives from the name of the preparation used for leg-waxing in the salon) testifies to the power of American popular culture at least briefly to override the endless traumas of our ever-more-violent political lives," writes Richard Schickel in Time.

Update, 2/2: "As expected, these women laugh and cry and talk about love; but while formulaic in structure, the film is actually quite lovely," writes Marcy Dermansky.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:19 PM

Sundance. Flow: For Love of Water.
"Much of Flow deals with the inevitable clash with capitalism as water supplies become privatized by corporations around the world and the poor are literally charged for what falls out of the sky or what they take out of the ground," writes James Israel at indieWIRE. "Critical of those who are beholden more to their stockholders than the poverty stricken people of parts of Africa and South America, Flow condemns this alarming trend and offers other alternatives to clean water, such as inexpensive, community owned water co-ops used in India, as well as other ways to conserve this essential element. A tight 83 minutes, Flow tackles a number of issues regarding what will be the 'oil' of the 21st century."
Updated through 1/31.
"Even the World Bank gets knocked in the film for funding massive water diversion projects that have displaced 80 million people, instead of smaller, cheaper and more eco-friendly community projects to bring fresh drinking water to the poor," notes the AFP's Michel Comte.
At Filmmaker, director Irena Salina writes a bit about what she learned making the doc.
Online viewing tip. At Zoom In Online, a "Meet the Artists" interview with Irena Salina.
Update, 1/31: "Far from the festival's most polished documentary but, by a hair, its most galvanizing," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. "Irena Salina's urgent and unsettling film is an unrestrained attack on corporations like Suez and Vivendi, who have privatized a substantial portion of the third world's water supply at the expense - and rarely to the benefit - of its poorest residents. In a remote South African hamlet, the villagers pay more per gallon than affluent city dwellers; those who cannot afford it drink standing or polluted water, and frequently die of it."

Posted by dwhudson at 3:16 PM | Comments (1)

Slamdance. Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father.
Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father is "one of the best documentaries I have ever watched in my entire life," writes Erik Davis at Cinematical. "And here's a note to any programmer from any fest reading this review: Play this film. And here's a note to anyone looking to purchase a doc to distribute and whatnot: Buy this film."
"Excuse the hyperbole, but Dear Zachary is one of the most alarmingly forceful documentaries in years," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE. Let's back up: Kurt Kuenne's "childhood friend, Andrew Bagby was shot under mysterious circumstances in 2001. Kuenne initially sets out to create a collage of testaments to Bagby's virtues so that his newborn son has a record of his lineage. A late act twist, however, upsets the innocence of Kuenne's intentions, darkening the tone and transforming the film from a cinematic scrapbook into an effective activist plea."
Much more at the site.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:26 PM | Comments (1)

Sundance. Man on Wire.
"On August 7, 1974, a French tightrope walker named Philippe Petit and a team of sympathetic raconteurs constructed a cable between the rooftops of the two towers of the World Trade Center," writes Tom Hall. "For 45 illegal minutes, Petit performed without the safety of a net, walking the wire, laying down on it and dazzling the crowds below.... In James Marsh's beautiful new documentary Man on Wire, Petit's walk, known among his collaborators as Le Coup, is examined in detail. Through detailed interviews with Petit and his collaborators, the entire planning and execution of the daring walk is shown. As such, the movie is a celebration of the beauty art (and the film leaves no doubt that Petit is an artist) and also a heist movie on par with, say, Rififi."
For Robert Koehler, writing in Variety, this is "one of the most wildly entertaining docs of recent years.... [and] an adventure tale that astonishes in every respect.... Petit's final walk - seen here mainly in still photos - is stunning enough, but the aftermath is unexpectedly emotional and overwhelming as human drama. The immediate effect on Petit of sudden, post-WTC notoriety mixes erotic comedy and personal loss that seems possible to be conveyed by only the best screenwriters."
"It's a story worth telling, yes - but maybe not for an hour-and-a-half," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray.
The Reeler talks with Marsh.

Posted by dwhudson at 1:46 PM

Sundance. Red.
"Even the most fervent dog-lovers don't generally believe in the death penalty for killers of canines," notes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "That's the dilemma at the heart of Red, an emotionally gripping if slightly over-wrought drama based on a novel by Jack Ketchum."
"Although [Brian] Cox does his best to sell it, I just didn't buy the story of the old man (Cox) whose dog, good 'ol Red, is senselessly shot by a roving band of wealthy punks... while he and Red are fishin' at the lake just outside of town, triggering a rash of outsized vigilante justice that grows more ludicrous by the minute," writes Rob Davis for Paste.
"Whereas many people might watch Red and dismiss it as a third-rate television movie, I find it to be an unexpected ante-upping of the revenge movie genre," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail. "The elements that make it feel like a third-rate television movie cannot be denied - classical camera set-ups, two-dimensional supporting characters, obvious dialogue, a Hallmarkian score - but in the case of Red, the Norwegian offness adds an unsettling dimension to the proceedings."
It's "pure pulp fiction," concedes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE, "a revenge tale, but one of dramatic substance and cinematic polish."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:35 PM

Sundance. Nerakhoon (The Betrayal).
"The wounds inflicted by the US military's covert Vietnam-era operations in Laos still run deep, as evidenced by The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), which details one Lao family's harrowing efforts to start a new life in America," writes Scott Foundas in Variety. "More than two decades in the making, this heartfelt debut docu feature by veteran cinematographer Ellen Kuras brings an affecting personal dimension to a sprawling sociopolitical narrative, intimately detailing how the agendas designed to advance the interests of nations can destroy individual lives."
"Even by the standards of independent documentaries, Ellen Kuras's Nerakhoon is the ne plus ultra of ultra-marathons," writes David D'Arcy in Screen Daily. "Kuras shoots the American Dream for one family as a collection of cases of survival and compromise, shifting from scenes of war, the stark sequences of Brooklyn squalor, to the Americanization of the younger generation.... Nerakhoon is a powerful work of anthropology. That should not be a reason to avoid seeing it."
"Thoroughly different in tone from the considerably more arch and self-conscious [The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins], Nerakhoon is another deeply personal story about the way nationality and a sense of place shape identity and how their lack can be distorting," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.
"POV correspondent Kris Wilton spent the day with cinematographer-turned-documentary-director Ellen Kuras at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, January 20."
IndieWIRE interviews Kuras; so does Sadia Latifi for New York's Vulture.
Online viewing tip. Zoom In Online's "Meet the Artists" video with Kuras and Phrasavath.

Posted by dwhudson at 1:26 PM

Sundance. Assassination of a High School President.
"For people who thought that Brick was too slangy and obscure, and Veronica Mars too... well, too awesome, I guess... Assassination of a High School President offers a shallower, more cliché-ridden gloss on the adolescent detective concept," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray.
"We'd liked Brick an awful lot, so seeing something that dances to the same beat is both fun - Brett Simon's feature directorial debut is funny and light on its feet - and a reminder that another film took the novelty set-up of noir teenagers and made it into something more than a clever teen movie," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "It's a gleeful cartoon and not much more."
"The movie's obvious comparisons, from Lord Love a Duck to John Hughes's cycle of high school comedies to more recently Heathers, Dazed and Confused and Rushmore, of teenage culture told from the perspective of a nebbish outsider, creates a glancing and off-beat quality that proves more appealing than ingratiating," writes Patrick Z McGavin in Screen Daily.
"All in all, director Brett Simon's film is a cute, fun little lark that produces its fair share of chuckles, but it's not going to break the genre mold," writes Jamie Tipps for Film Threat.
Online viewing tip. MTV has clips. Via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at 1:14 PM

Sundance. The Visitor.
Rob Davis for Paste on Thomas McCarthy's latest: "His previous film, The Station Agent, was - as others have said - completely in love with its characters, and the same is true of The Visitor, but the stakes are significantly higher this time.... "Like a title by the Dardennes, the title of the film shifts its object intriguingly from scene to scene, and McCarthy's sensitivity to class and culture is worthy of the same Belgian masters," writes Rob Davis for Paste. "It's a quiet, rich, and rewarding tale, with a wonderfully restrained performance by [Richard] Jenkins."
"There's a squick factor to any scenario in which vibrant, idealized people of color bring joy into the lives of the uptight and white, but The Visitor maintains a balance by keeping conscious of the complexity of its relationships," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.
"The film brims with anger over US immigration policy with characters that we can't help but feel for," writes Jeremy Mathews at Film Threat. "By the time the film abruptly switches from quiet understatement to overbearing didacticism, we already care enough about its characters that we don't mind."
"[I]f it isn't quite as fresh or as strangely moving as The Station Agent, it's still a damn fine film with a good heart and some really excellent performances," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "Kinda like The Station Agent."
Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Posted by dwhudson at 12:52 PM

Shorts, 1/30.
"Last year marked the tenth anniversary of Xiao Wu, a low-budget Chinese film that was never distributed in the United States. In 1997, few could have anticipated this work would usher in a new generation of Chinese filmmakers, or have guessed that director Jia Zhangke would become one of the world's leading auteurs while still in his early thirties," writes Andrew Chan.
In a related piece at the House Next Door, Andrew Schenker: "If Jia's four previous features trace the trajectory of a rapidly modernizing China by focusing on a group of young men and women who either bear direct witness to change (Platform) or who have already absorbed it (The World), then this latest feature, Still Life, offers an entirely different perspective by directly transplanting its unwitting central figure from the margins of history to its turbulent center."
Robert Elswit has won the ASC Cinematography Award for There Will Be Blood. Related online viewing: David Poland asks Anjelica Huston about Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, which many have noted bears at least some debt to her father.
Brainiac Joshua Glenn casts Spielberg's The Trial of the Chicago 7.
In the Los Angeles Times, Noha El-Hennawy talks with Khaled Youssef, co-director (with Youssef Chahine) of Heya Fawda (Chaos), "which has elicited a storm of controversy over its ruthless critique of the police establishment in a state where the guardian of the ruling regime is believed to be the iron fist of the security apparatus rather than genuinely politically legitimate. While exploring the most notorious extrajudicial practices of the police, the movie explicitly condemns the regime of President Hosni Mubarak."
"I'm off to hang with American right-wingers obsessed with the threat of Islamic terrorism.... We're here to watch a documentary called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." Steven Wells reports on an odd evening out.
Also in the Philadelphia Weekly, Sean Burns: "This rape-happy Rambo is amazingly disturbing and weirdly hung up on unsettling psychosexual flourishes. In other words, Stallone is a lot like Mel Gibson, only without the talent."
"At once cowboy and Indian, GI and VC, Rambo was arguably the great pop icon of the Vietnam War," writes J Hoberman, looking back. "Or rather, this puppy-eyed, Nautilus-built killing machine was the great pop icon of the decade-after Vietnam War revisionism that characterized the reign of Ronald Reagan. It's as though the ongoing political discourse, with some politicians claiming to be the new Reagan and others denying it, had conjured his reappearance: Rambo redux." Related: A terrific, essay-length comment from Godfrey Cheshire at the House Next Door: "[T]he political mindsets shaped by that era don't fade as quickly as its action icons; they are with us still."
Back in the Voice:

Meet the Spartans has Aaron Hillis contemplating leaving the country. But! Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness is a "beautifully daffy road-movie musical is as inspired, whimsical, and commercially unconcerned as its protagonist."

Julia Wallace on Praying With Lior, "a hardcore tearjerker."

Abigail Deutsch: "If Live and Become strikes you as a vague title, the young protagonist of 's film would despairingly agree."

At the SpoutBlog, Karina Longworth comments on the news that the Detroit Free Press will not be replacing "forcibly retired film critic Terry Lawson, and will fill his coulmn space with wire reviews.... There's no question that smaller films have the potential to be hurt the most by the wildfire-spread of wire reviews, especially when it comes to films of specific regional interest. But in the longterm, the hope is that dedicated moviegoers who are accustomed to a relationship with a no longer practicing local critic will go online, where they can develop new relationships with critics based not just on geography, but maybe more significantly, based on genre concentration and personal taste."
Derek Halm looks back a few years to the point when "Godzilla's allegorical significance needed to be altered for the monster to remain relevant. The last great Godzilla film, Shusuke Kaneko's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001)... recognized this. One self-referential scene has the characters wondering why Godzilla always returns to Japan. Kaneko's answer is embedded in the question: Japan needs to recognize the horrors it has inflicted on others and its own people."
Also at PopMatters, Bill Gibron on evil kids and what needs to be done about them. On screen, anyway.
"No one can take away Juno's $100 million gross or marketing savvy, but its loyalists are now in the position of having to defend a film whose assiduous charm, like Little Miss Sunshine's before it, is suddenly its biggest liability," writes ST VanAirsdale, commenting on the Oscar race for Vanity Fair. "I know it's an honor just to be nominated, Juno, but I really wish you had quit while you were ahead." Not Andrew Sarris, though.
Meantime, Crash is going to be a TV show. Variety's Brian Lowry gets to "thinking about how studios might turn the trick with the current crop of best-picture candidates, including how they'd be sold and which networks would be the most logical fit." Via Joe Leydon.
Christopher Nolan, currently completing post-production on The Dark Knight, remembers Heath Ledger in Newsweek: "I see him every day in my edit suite. I study his face, his voice. And I miss him terribly."
Guardian theater critic Michael Billington has "a sneaking feeling that few new movies bear comparison with the best of the past." Also, news bits: Julie Christie gets married; Mark Romanek walks away from The Wolf Man; and Sean Young checks into rehab after heckling Julian Schnabel. Cut to the video.
Online viewing tip. Arin Crumley: "Social Checks & Balance in the Digital Karma Information Age."

Posted by dwhudson at 11:23 AM | Comments (3)

Fests and events, 1/30.
"Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?, premiering here in Rotterdam, is Barbara Caspar's thoughtful and creative film biography/essay on the late writer, whose formally inventive novels, published from the 70s through the mid-90s, challenged assumptions about gender roles, sexuality, and the literary canon," writes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "Caspar has made a film that captures the essence of both Acker the writer and Acker the person while arguing convincingly for the continuing relevance of her work today."
"[W]hat was particularly noticeable this year was that the feeling of 'place' in each film in Sundance is growing in diversity and richness every year, in parallel with the strength and reputation of its world cinema programming," writes Susan Gerhard at SF360. "To associate Sundance with the cliches of American Indiewood is to miss where the festival is headed: across borders."
"2008 turned out to be the year that Sundance returned to its roots," writes B Ruby Rich in the Guardian. "The best films in the US competitions restored the spirit of the festival's early days: regionally shot films on restricted budgets with new or non-actors, by film-makers more passionate about what they were shooting than where their career was heading."
"Noir City 6, czar of noir Eddie Muller's yearly celebration of not-on-DVD rarities and shadow-dappled classics resurrected from studio vaults, offers plenty of fodder for noir-or-not debate," writes Matt Sussman in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "The programming spans from the critically enshrined (Jules Dassin's 1950 Night and the City) to the relatively unknown (1960's The 3rd Voice) and the not so old (the Coen brothers' 2001 neonoir The Man Who Wasn't There). Perhaps more than past incarnations, Noir City 6 makes a case for film noir as a set of stylistic conventions - or, alternately, for noir as an inspired malaise that permeates a film like stale cigarette smoke - rather than something hard-and-fast that sports a time stamp."
"If the rest of the programming is as good as the first two days then noir lovers are in for a hell of a week," adds Anne M Hockens at the Siffblog.
The latest from the Film Panel Notetaker: Q&A with Cinema 16 vet Jack Goelman following a screening of Paul Cronin's Film As a Subversive Art: Amos Vogel & Cinema 16, part of the ongoing Stranger Than Fiction series at New York's IFC Center.

Posted by dwhudson at 9:30 AM

The Witnesses.
André Téchiné's The Witnesses is excitingly convoluted," writes David Edelstein in New York. "It begins as a romantic quadrangle with unruly emotions and hints of violence to come - think Almodóvar by way of Hitchcock."
"Téchiné is expending the full force of his imagination, in his keenest work since Strayed (2003), and, perhaps, his finest overall since the 1994 coming-of-age classic Wild Reeds, to reach back for a handle on the terrifying moment when the uninhibited world of gay men, and those who loved them, fell into the abyss," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Disclosing its purpose as memorial and testament, The Witnesses forms a magnificent trilogy with Son Frère (2003), Patrice Chéreau's devastating account of fraternal devotion in the face of death, and the amazing, acerbic Before I Forget, a brooding and bitter tale of survival coming soon from Jacques Nolot."
Updated through 2/5.
"Téchiné has tried to capture the uneasy moment when the AIDS virus first hit Paris." David Denby in the New Yorker: "Téchiné is unusually adroit at manipulating a complex set of relations within a very mixed group of people. This movie is easy to take - chatty and sociable, with a brightly lit, even sunshiny gloss and an open sensuality.... The Witnesses is highly intelligent, but, still, one wants more out of this particular subject than lucidity and good sense."
"Téchiné has matched the humanist power of his mid-90s run of My Favorite Season, Wild Reeds and Thieves, bolstering his credentials as perhaps France's leading filmmaker," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "'You can ask anything of your friends,' one of Téchiné's witnesses insists in an early scene, and through the pain of betrayal, accusation, and grief, they do - the price of redemption or forgiveness is high but not unimaginable."
"As with most historical fictions, The Witnesses is unavoidably about something, but Téchiné does not hold this against us," writes Max Goldberg in the San Francisco Bay Guardian. "His film happily eschews the typical 'message movie' ploys of impregnable one-to-one meanings, instead offering a prolonged gaze at temps perdu. Like Christian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, The Witnesses renders the mid-1980s with a subtly graded approach to periodization - that we're in a bygone decade is unmistakable, but it still has the fresh, unresolved scent of living memory."
"Téchiné's mastery has become routine to the point where he's now largely taken for granted, a shame because The Witnesses is still something of a rare bird these days, miraculously blending social commentary, character study and sexual politics with nary a hint of strain or manipulation," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in the L Magazine.
"Instructive without ever falling into cheap bromides, dramatic without ever veering into overzealous melodrama, The Witnesses is a penetrating, even essential narrative," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Téchiné is fascinated by the ways in which lives interact, personalities cross-pollinate, wounds are compounded, exacerbated, or even healed, yet never in that increasingly mundane American style of overlapping stories that prize fate or coincidence; he paints specifically, creating not vague character sketches but full lives, however defined by enigma or contradiction."
Update, 1/31: "In 1995, when André Téchiné's masterpiece Wild Reeds opened, the critical establishment from the Times to the alternative press took sides calling it inferior to Cold Water by Olivier Assayas, a Téchiné acolyte," recalls Armond White in the New York Press. "By extraordinary coincidence, Téchiné's latest film, The Witnesses, opens this week opposite the Anthology Film Archives' Assayas retrospective. There's never been a New York retrospective for Téchiné - the best French director most Americans don't know - but The Witnesses will bring lucky viewers up to date. This new movie, set in 1984, flashes back to a moment in human history that altered the personal-political lives of most people on the planet."
Update, 2/1: "The Witnesses may frustrate those who prefer movies that tell clear-cut stories in which hard lessons are learned," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "But in the director's farsighted vision of life, the ground under our feet is always shifting. As time pulls us forward, the shocks of the past are absorbed and the pain recedes. In its light-handed way, The Witnesses is profound."
Updates, 2/2: "This film need not be approached with dread or trepidation; life, as witnessed by this small group of flawed but always empathetic characters, is a messy, ugly, and unfair business, but sometimes still surprisingly wonderful," writes Marcy Dermansky.
David Wiegand, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, finds it "a kind of film opera without music."
Updates, 2/5: "Téchiné has grown increasingly assured in terms of technique throughout [his] sometimes-labored vehicles, and in his new film, The Witnesses, his mastery of editing and sensitivity to performance has resulted in his second almost-great work, after the deeply felt, flawed beauty of his mid-90s Wild Reeds," writes Dan Callahan at the House Next Door.
"The Witnesses doesn't celebrate the last days before AIDS awareness shook the world so much as it shows keen, insightful appreciation for them, in all their scary/invigorating complexity," writes Steven Boone in the Star-Ledger.

Posted by dwhudson at 12:44 AM

The Silence Before Bach.
"At once cerebral film essay and unsweetened ear candy, Pere Portabella's The Silence Before Bach is nearly as tough to categorize as its maker," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "[I]t's a high-toned experimental feature that eschews narrative and ponders the social history of music, creating a dialectic between sound and image, as well as between a costumed 18th-century and a contemporary post-national Europe."
"Through a series of seemingly disconnected set pieces - some transpiring in present-day Europe, some in the past - Mr Portabella creates a film that doesn't address Bach in the usual biopic terms but instead as a jumping-off point for different visual and aural ideas and associations, including the cross-cultural reality of European identity," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "I didn't find The Silence Before Bach immediately accessible, though this is far from a complaint. The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog's ears, in the curve of a woman's belly, a child's song and an adult's reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world."
Updated through 2/5.
"There are no traditional historians in Portabella's film, no critics, and no commentators explaining to us about the importance of Bach's music," writes Cullen Gallagher at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. Much like in Jem Cohen's documentary on Fugazi, Instrument, Portabella eschews the conventional MTV approach and refuses to tell the audience why the music is important and leaves it up to the performance and the audience to develop a relationship. By having the camera be the only intermediary between them, Portabella nurtures a much more intimate and boundless relationship between the music, the image, and the audience."
"The film's purpose is nothing more than to demonstrate the reach of Bach everyday, everywhere, and for everyone - twaddle pitched somewhere between a music appreciation class and a modernist experiment attesting to art's ability to ennoble the quotidian," objects David Pratt-Robson in Slant. "As if Bach were a new totalitarian, and Pere Portabella his propagandist, The Silence Before Bach doesn't glorify everyday living but substitutes it altogether for a world governed by Bach devotion."
"It's a bit of a mishmash, but even at its weakest moments, the film implies that the true majesty of music is to be found in the melding of perfection and imperfection - the marriage of the flawless composition on the page and the unpredictability of the human performer," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun.
Screening at the Film Forum through February 12 and once more at the International Film Festival Rotterdam on Friday.
Update: "Portabella, a veteran avant-garde director, moves through abstract and literal locations with effortless, arbitrary contentment," writes the Reeler. "Viewed as the sum of its parts, the conceits of The Silence Before Bach are slight, but that doesn't detract from its hypnotic ability to pull viewers into the expressive components of the music."
Update, 2/5: "The Silence Before Bach may never push its meditation on the music to the extremes of Straub/Huillet, but its smoothness and its ease, its eloquence and tangents bespeak an wise, open vision of the world, the way music measures it, and the way we measure it to music," writes Daniel Kasman.

Posted by dwhudson at 12:39 AM

January 29, 2008

Other fests, other events, 1/29.
"The fascinating Harvard Film Archive series Arthur Penn, American Auteur pays tribute to his early days as well as to the decade that followed Bonnie and Clyde (Sunday at 7 pm); it even includes one of his early television dramas, The Tears of My Sister (Friday at 7 pm), from 1953," notes Steve Vineberg.
Also in the Boston Phoenix, Gerald Peary talks with Franco Sacchi, "the Boston-based filmmaker whose documentary This Is Nollywood opens the Museum of Fine Arts' Eighth African Film Festival this Friday, February 1, with an encore screening February 9." Saturday through February 29.
The Grindhouse Film Festival meets a print collector.
In the Voice, Nick Pinkerton sketches the story of Olivier Assayas's career and notes: "The eight-film retro at Anthology Film Archives showcases a virtuosity so unaffected it frequently goes unnoticed, not to say unsung." Saturday through February 10.
"With arms akimbo and legs planted firmly apart, James Ellroy delivered a hardboiled (and hilarious!) introduction to Noir City's doublebill of Gun Crazy (1950) and The Prowler (1951), both written by the infamously blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo." And Michael Guillén's got his remarks.

But there's more: The Grand Inquisitor features "the return to the screen of Marsha Hunt after a nearly 30-year absence. As well as hometown pride in the film's local pedigree: produced by Anita Monga, directed by Eddie Muller, filmed by Jonathan Marlow, and edited by Hannah Eaves. Muller's imaginative spin on San Francisco's notorious Zodiac killings is not only a riveting short story but an effective piece of film as well."
At SF360, Michael Fox talks with Alan K Rode about his book, Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy.
"Now that serial killer musicals are back in fashion, LACMA's screening last Friday of Michael Powell's rarely seen Bluebeard's Castle (1964) - with Powell's widow and longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker in attendance - seems especially appropriate," writes Doug Cummings. "Made for West German TV in the doldrums of Powell's post-Peeping Tom (1960) blacklisting, it's a startlingly expressionist, one-act, one-hour adaptation of Bela Bartok's sole opera (with lyrics by film theorist Bela Balazs)."
"Anthology's series on the short films of [Apichatpong] Weerasethakul offers a great deal of insight into this amazing Thai director," writes Daniel Kasman. More from Vadim Rizov in the Tisch Film Review.

Posted by dwhudson at 4:01 PM

Rotterdam, 1/29.
"In its 37th year, [the International Film Festival Rotterdam] defines itself by its independence — specifically its focus on young filmmakers, many of whom are from developing nation," writes R Emmet Sweeney at IFC News, noting that the Tiger Awards Competition is exclusively for first- or second-time filmmakers. "So far, I've seen five of the Tiger contenders, and the most impressive is Waltz in Starlight, directed by noted Japanese still photographer Shingo Wakagi." Also reviewed are Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Ploy and Matsumoto Hitoshi's "brilliantly eccentric" Dai-Nipponjin.
At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij is reminded of Aki Kaurismäki and Roy Andersson, but Ping-pongkingen - Jonsson's feature debut after a long career in shorts and commercials - lacks an overall cohesiveness that makes the slightly askew worlds of Kaurismäki and Andersson come alive. Nevertheless, Jonsson is clearly a talent to watch, and the chemistry between the actors adds a nice warm glow to the otherwise wintry landscapes." More from Jonathan Romney in Screen Daily.
Ardvark at Twitch on Tomas Alfredsson's vampire movie, Let the Right One In, "It's a genuine surprise just how delightful a genre-mash this movie is. For of all gory movies I've ever seen, this is without a doubt the sweetest. And of all sweet movies I've ever seen this is without a doubt the goriest!" Also, TBS "is a tense, scary and on occasion even funny thriller, no mean feat considering the dreadful subject."
For Reverse Shot, Genevieve Yue offers her takes on Rail Road Crossing and Own Death.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:41 PM

That was Park City, 1/29.
"Someday, statisticians will study the 'Sundance inverse-proportional-law,' which can be applied in two, equally, but converse rules: 1) the greater the magnitude of buzz that a film goes into the festival with, the lesser quality said film will be, and 2) the lesser the magnitude of buzz surrounding a film, the better it will be." Anthony Kaufman at FilmCatcher. Also, at indieWIRE, a second look at the deal-making.
In the Voice, Scott Foundas offers an overview of the highlights - and one lowlight - of his Sundance.
Tim Wu can't find any Sundance 08 films on the major pirate sites. Nor any Sundance 07 films. "The online pirate world and the Sundance world are, as far as I can tell, separate domains." And so: "When it comes to content piracy, obscurity, not security, is the best defense. It also demonstrates that movie pirates are fundamentally parasitic, not predatory."
James Rocchi has a story to tell from a Sundance past.
Online viewing tip. Eugene Hernandez slips and slides out of Park City.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:31 PM

Other DVDs, 1/29.
"With the 1961 roadshow spectacular El Cid, the Weinstein Company has made an appropriate choice to inaugurate its prestige label, the Miriam Collection," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Filmed largely at historical locations in Spain in Super Technirama, a 70-millimeter widescreen process, El Cid remains, even on home video, a feast of visual detail. Under Anthony Mann's direction, the film overflows with deep-focus vistas, towering sets, densely crowded battle sequences and the imposing presence of two remarkable physical specimens, Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren."
More from Glenn Kenny: "The pictorialism, the kineticism, the ferocious visual intelligence displayed by Mann, cinematograhper Robert Krasker, and the rest of the film's production team lift this epic into a realm rarely touched by any of the arts."
"You can argue over what is the greatest historical movie epic, but El Cid is surely the brawniest," writes Sean Axmaker at MSN. "Not in the gladiator sense of muscled bodies and mano-a-mano combat (like Ben-Hur) but in the strength of its storytelling and its visual display of force and pageantry."
"Anybody who values artists over politicians and bureaucrats takes an extra measure of pleasure in the imminent release of a Sergei Paradjanov DVD boxed set," writes Michael Fox at SF360. "Similarly, anyone who cherishes filmmakers above critics and financiers welcomes the arrival of a Jean-Luc Godard box spotlighting his underrated mid-80s work."
Criterion's Lee Kline's been hard at work on The Thief of Bagdad: "We enlisted Oscar-winning editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Michael Powell, to help with this one, since Powell was one of the directors of the film and she has a lot of knowledge about his involvement in Thief and is invested in preserving his archive. Scorsese holds an original 35 mm nitrate print of the film in his vaults, and we set off to try and screen it together. This was no easy task."
Los Muertos is "a trip through the Argentine jungle that measures out to be about 10 percent action, dialogue and motivation, and 90 percent raw vision," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News. "Less is absolutely more - those stingy dollops of context have a seismic punch, and what we don't know makes the ellipses all the more troubling and resonant."
"If someone should feel compelled to make a film about 9/11 - specifically, about the social and psychic toll that the attacks have and haven't taken - a good model would be Akira Kurosawa's I Live in Fear, out on DVD in the Criterion Collection's Eclipse series," suggests Fred Kaplan in Slate.
"Having effectively and lastingly blurred the line between reality and fabrication, it became necessary for [Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi] to completely destroy it. Thus Goodbye Uncle Tom," writes David Carter at Not Coming to a Theater Near You.
"I've recommended a lot of films in the past year, but The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is one you definitely must see," advises Erik Davis at Cinematical.
"I Walked With a Zombie, director Jacques Tourneur's second collaboration with producer Val Lewton after the huge commercial success that is Cat People (1942), is laced with such enigmatic flavor that despite its B-movie roots, it begs to be seen and re-seen, understood and re-understood for beneath the overly simplistic plotting is an indiscriminate mystery, forcing varying reactions and appreciations in every viewing," writes Oggs Cruz.
With Red River, "Hawks Hawks betrays what could have been a powerful film with a lackluster and uneven second act, and a climax that simply doesn't exist," argues Ed Howard.
DVD roundups: DVD Talk; Monika Bartyzel and Peter Martin (Cinematical); Paul Clark (ScreenGrab).

Posted by dwhudson at 1:36 PM

Benten's Quiet City + Dance Party USA.
Andrew Grant and Aaron Hillis, prez and vice-prez, respectively, of Benten Films, are friends. So if I go on and on about the painstaking care they've put into their second release - two films by Aaron Katz, his first and second features, Dance Party USA and Quiet City - that belies an almost fetishistic attention to design (gorgeous) and completeness (director and cast commentaries, extra clips, shorts, a trailer, sharp essays), my words would shrivel in all the salt you'd take with them. So let me turn to James McNally, who writes in Toronto Screen Shots, "Benten are quickly becoming the Criterion of the indie film world." An idea that's occurred to Matt Dentler as well.
Updated through 1/30.
But what about the films themselves? Quiet City "is filthy with intimate images of the kind that epitomize cinema's infectious glow," writes Michael Atkinson at IFC News, while Dance Party USA "makes up for its weightier degree of awkwardness with sharp-edged sexual frisson."
"The other moviemakers in Katz's orbit - Swanberg, Bujalski, and so on—all have talent and ideas," writes Glenn Kenny. "But none of them have Katz's eye, or anything like Katz's sensibility. This is the second release from my friends at Benten and it's one of the most sensitively, beautifully constructed packages I think you'll see this whole year."
"Both films are about a young boy and girl who venture out into urban spaces looking for an authentic experience," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "What sets them apart from traditional coming-of-age stories is, in part, the patience Katz shows in allowing his characters to take the time to settle into a tentative trust together. The films are both languid and totally economical; in terms of action, virtually nothing 'happens,' and yet if there's any fat to cut on either, I can't find it."
"Katz distinguishes himself by embodying their anxieties rather than merely observing them," agrees Sam Adams in the Los Angeles Times. "Shots of traffic lights changing in perfect harmony or an airplane cutting through a burnt orange sky resonate with a depth of feeling the movie's protagonists can only express in the furtive spaces between words."
"This 2-disc release is loaded with quality extras that start with the 10-page accompanying booklet that includes an essay by Chicago film critic Ray Pride on Dance Party, USA, and another on Quiet City by film scholar Ray Carney," writes Chris Neilson at DVD Talk. "In the interests of disclosure, I'll note that I'm a fan of professor Carney's writings on John Cassavetes and independent cinema, and I was impressed to find that this generally, but not wholeheartedly, favorable review of his was included in the booklet."
And you can read that essay in full at Filmmaker.
Online viewing tip. You may remember this one; now, as Bilge Ebiri notes at New York's Vulture, it's an extra in the set: Joe Swanberg's Quiet City, "a six-minute lark, hilariously lo-fi and shot on a dime, and it manages to poke some gentle fun at all the key style points of Generation DIY. As such, it'll probably unite mumblecore lovers and haters alike."
Earlier: Reviews of Quiet City from August and reviews of Dance Party USA from November 06.
Update, 1/30: "[I]f the evidence displayed in Dance Party USA can be trusted, Aaron Katz has already carved a place for himself among the new voices of American independent film," writes Dennis Cozzalio. "I can't wait to see where he takes me on that second disc, and in the many fine films he's likely to make in the future."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:20 PM

Berlinale. Jury, Kamera, buzz.
Some go to the first Berlinale press conference each year simply because that's your first opportunity to get your hands on the schedule. Gives you a week to start sorting out what you'll see when between February 7 and 17. Others go because their papers actually want stories on how many world or international premieres from how which countries can be tallied up for each of the festival's sections. Or to nab sound or video clips for radio or TV. I go because this is the morning the buzz kicks in.
It's not that there isn't any actual news. The lineups may already be out, and you may have already been able to tell on your own that, say, there sure are a lot of films this year that have something or a lot to do with music - starting, of course, with the opener, Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones doc. Among all the other stats, the press booklet helpfully lists 16 more.
What I found particularly interesting to hear about was that, though the Stones are coming - and so are Madonna, Patti Smith, Neil Young, plus dozens and dozens of other Names more commonly associated with film festivals rather than rock concerts - it's the imminent arrival of Shah Rukh Khan to present the Bollywood hit Om Shanti Om that's given organizers the greatest logistical challenge in the How to Handle the Fans Dept. They're coming en masse, evidently, and the Berlinale's been compelled to publish a FAQ devoted to this single event.
But on to other announcements. The International Jury, headed by Costa-Gavras, will be comprised of Danish director Susanne Bier, actress (and director) Sandrine Bonnaire, production designer Uli Hanisch, actress Diane Kruger, the one, the only, the great Walter Murch, producer Alexander Rodniansky and actress Shu Qi.
Berlinale Kameras go to Karlheinz Böhm and Otto Sander.
And the schedule? It's online, too. I can already tell you, though, that Tuesday, February 12, is a big day: Hong Sang-soo for breakfast, Mike Leigh for lunch and Errol Morris for dinner.

Posted by dwhudson at 7:31 AM | Comments (3)

January 28, 2008

Butterknife.
"It's finally here," announces Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. Joe Swanberg's new web series, Butterknife, features Ronald Bronstein (Frownland) "as a private detective whose frustration on the job is counterbalanced by his happy home life with his wife (played by Ronnie's real-life wife, Mary Bronstein)."

Posted by dwhudson at 3:13 PM | Comments (1)

SFBG. Video Mutants.
"Video is exploding, and the mutants have taken over the means of production," writes Johnny Ray Huston, introducing the San Francisco Bay Guardian's video issue. "YouTube ululations, Day-Glo animation, and crazed acts of appropriation are stretching like Shmoo from black boxes to boob tubes to white cubes and from laptop screens to live performances. Each video-active blast favors impulse and expression over obedience to old conventions - and further blurs forms and styles."
He then offers an overview of Douglas Gordon: Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 24, and previews Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait, screening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from February 1 through 7.
Also, "[Kalup] Linzy has stolen the show at a number of New York group exhibitions, and he's represented by a gallery in Manhattan, Taxter and Spengemann. But his work and creative identity extend beyond traditional art spaces via YouTube, an official Web site, and two different MySpace accounts." Samples pepper Johnny's interview with Linzy at Pixel Vision.
Then: "[Stephen] Thrower's [Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents, Fab Press, 528 pages, $79.95] deserves a spot next to Carlos Clarens's An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (Capricorn, 1967), Carol Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws (Princeton University Press, 1992), Michael Weldon's The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (Ballantine, 1983), and Bill and Michelle Landis's Sleazoid Express (Simon and Schuster, 2002) on a healthily horrific bookshelf. Its closest relative in terms of loose format and interview content might be Incredibly Strange Films (RE/Search, 1986), but Thrower casts aside V Vale's coolness for the passion found in Danny Peary's series of Cult Movies books."
Kimberly Chun: "[Mike] Kelley's work can be found in major museum collections around the world, and he's collaborated on video pieces with artists like Paul McCarthy in the past, but Day Is Done, which screens Jan 31 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is his first feature, revamped as a narrative-ish stream from the installation version shown in 2005 at Gagosian Gallery in New York City."
Cheryl Eddy talks with Damon Packard about SpaceDisco One and other works, which you can sample here.
"[A]nyone who's recently hung out with a certain brand of cued-in, mid-20s clubber knows that the neon-splattered, inverted Internet psycho-vids of Ryan Trecartin are the new now," writes Marke B. Plus, an interview. Earlier: Holland Carter in the New York Times.
"It wasn't until I stumbled across an early viral video, This and That by Chris Crocker (of 'Leave Britney alone!' fame), that I seriously considered making one for the Internet," writes Miles Cooper of the Passionistas. "It wasn't necessarily erotic, but there was something completely invading about Crocker's gaze into the webcam - it was as though he activated that little gray box perfectly. He had the excitement of a Pinocchio with his strings recently cut and the entertaining intent of a sociopath like Chucky. I knew this was a car crash waiting to happen, and I immediately became addicted to Crocker's videos."
Johnny Ray Huston wraps the package with a list, "Video Mutants: Eight for 2008," and naturally, a bit of online viewing: Paper Rad's umbrella zombie datamosh mistake.

Posted by dwhudson at 11:45 AM

Shorts, 1/28.
"This film wasn't made for the benefit of those who are unacquainted with Polish history." In the New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum explains why Katyn is "a classic Wajda movie." She tracks reaction to the film inside and outside Poland and comments on Wajda's reasons for making the film in the first place: "Wajda said he wanted to reach 'those moviegoers for whom it matters that we are a society, and not just an accidental crowd.'"
"We have travelled some way from second world war classics The Longest Day, The Great Escape, or The Bridge on the River Kwai," writes David Hearst, who covered the Chechen war for the Guardian. Back then, "the collective cause - the fight against fascism," was "just":

After Vietnam, Apocalypse Now and Platoon, this paradigm has been reversed. The individual can only see clearly by taking leave of his senses, because the collective cause is so wrong. In Iraq there is no collective cause, just individual survival.... The Battle of Haditha consciously eschews judgment, although if it points the finger at anyone it is the marine officers who sanction the shootings as they take place, recommend the staff sergeant for a bravery award, and then hang him out to dry when the truth emerges. The Iraqi insurgents also have their evil alter ego in al-Qaida. It is not history, because both the war in Iraq and the court caseare still going on. It is not fiction, because it actually happened. But it is not documentary, either. It is a blend of all three, for an age that does not pause for judgment."

Also in the Guardian, Maddy Costa meets Donmar Warehouse artistic director Michael Grandage, whose "sparse, heart-wrenching production of Othello" stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor and who's lined up a season featuring "Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and - the big draw for many - Jude Law, playing Hamlet." Grandage "has transformed the Donmar into 'a big house of ideas,' focusing on lesser-known plays and European writers, work that is cerebral and emotionally challenging, with a passion that has proved, for audiences, unexpectedly exciting and enticing."
And Hadley Freeman on Waitress, Knocked Up and Juno: "It is surely no coincidence that these films are emerging from a country that has had eight years of ultra-conservative Republican rule."
"There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score," writes Alex Ross in the New Yorker. "[Jonny] Greenwood's sources of inspiration are easily identified. He has worshipped Olivier Messiaen since his teens, and during his university stint he encountered the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, whose assaultive avant-garde creations of the 1960s - notably the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima - inspired the glissandos of There Will Be Blood."
As for the film itself, Chuck Tryon writes, "I found the film's bleak characterization of the oilman, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), and the religious huckster, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), to be a pretty compelling critique of the seemingly intertwined politics of oil and religion." Spoilers follow.
"Guillermo del Toro is in talks to direct back-to-back installments of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit, which is being co-financed by New Line and MGM." Borys Kit has the story at the Hollywood Reporter.
"Aesthetically, Andrew Bujalski is Maurice Pialat's cousin," suggests Ignatius Vishnevetsky. "He is also Pialat's opposite. We see the same techniques in their films, but used for completely different reasons."
At Alternet, Sue Katz reports on the making of a four-hour celebrity-studded series "based on the words of the original primary sources for Howard Zinn's unique perennial A Peoples History of the United States, now approaching sales of 2 million copies."
"Perhaps the most overtly Bressonian of Pedro Costa's body of work (albeit suffused with the brooding shadows of a Jacques Tourneur film), Costa's first feature, O Sangue, nevertheless bears the characteristic imprint of what would prove to be his familiar preoccupations: absent parents, surrogate families, unreconciled ghosts, the trauma and violence of displacement, the ache (and isolation) of longing," writes acquarello.
"Santouri the Music Man, a harrowing account of a greatly gifted artist's slide into heroin addiction, is another sweeping yet incisive film from Dariush Mehrjui, one of Iran's most accomplished and courageous filmmakers for four decades," writes Kevin Thomas. Also, Undoing is "a sleek neo-noir set in Koreatown's underworld. Around the edges it's arty, murkily plotted and derivative of too many other movies, but at its core it is impassioned and gains power and traction as it goes along."
Also in the Los Angeles Times: "Day," which has just won one of the United Kingdom's most important awards, the Costa prize, concerns itself with Alfred Day, a British airman who, five years after the end of World War II, has returned to Germany where he had been a prisoner of war and participates as an extra in a movie about that experience." Thomas McGonigle reviews the latest AL Kennedy novel. Related online listening tip. Ed Champion talks with Kennedy.
With Jerry Springer: The Opera set for a two-night run at Carnegie Hall (Tuesday and Wednesday), Charles McGrath meets its star, Harvey Keitel: "Seated at a little table, with two volumes on Buddhist meditation in front of him along with a giant green crystal, he touched on all the legendary names of [the Method] acting movement - Stanislavski, Boleslavsky, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg - and threw in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther for good measure. Acting, he kept saying in the course of an hour's conversation, was a 'journey.'"
Also in the New York Times:

Motoko Rich meets Brian Selznick, whose "obsessions with old French movies, automatons, clockworks and the filmmaker Georges Méliès inspired [The Invention of Hugo Cabret], which earlier this month won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children."

"As of Friday, when David Moreau and Xavier Palud's film The Eye creeps into multiplexes around the country, this young movie year will already have seen two English-language remakes of Asian horror pictures," notes Terrence Rafferty; the other one, in case you've already forgotten, was One Missed Call. "Rhythm is often the most significant difference between Asian horror movies and their American versions: the good Far Eastern directors know that the most interesting part of any ghost story is the buildup, the dawning dread that gradually makes the world feel alien, uncanny."

How She Move, a feature by the director Ian Iqbal Rashid (Touch of Pink) about a disaffected young woman competing in dance contests, is the latest incarnation of the up-by-your-bootstraps musical drama," writes Matt Zoller Seitz. "There's nary a twist you don't see coming. But the film's strong acting, spectacular dance routines and culturally specific details turn clichés into catharsis. It's the sort of film that sends you home with a spring in your step." More from David Denby in the New Yorker.

Jeannette Catsoulis takes on Meet the Spartans, a spoof as "redundant and tasteless as Queen Margo's crab-infested chastity belt." More from Joe Leydon.

Also: "Simultaneously delicate and earthy, Alice's House anchors its soap-opera plotlines - adultery, avarice and incipient blindness - in the tired body and vaguely ruined features of its dreamy heroine." More from Martin Tsai (NY Sun).

And: "In the intriguingly layered documentary Orthodox Stance, a determined young boxer strives to prove that the laws of God and the laws of the ring need not be at odds." More from Bruce Bennett (NY Sun) and Lauren Wissot (House Next Door).

"You may view Untraceable, as I do, as a repugnant example of the voyeurism it pretends to condemn," writes Stephen Holden. "Or you may stand back and see it as a cleverly conceived, slickly executed genre movie that ranks somewhere between Seven and the Saw movies in sadistic ingenuity." More from Roger Ebert (Chicago Sun-Times), John Lichman (House Next Door) and Ryan Stewart (Cinematical). And Joe Leydon talks with Diane Lane for the Houston Chronicle.

Samuel G Freedman reports on Ethan Isenberg's efforts to make a documentary about Rabbi Soloveitchik. Who? "Within the Orthodox sector, he had been so revered as a philosopher, Talmud scholar and teacher of young rabbis that he was known, in worshipful tones, as The Rav, The Rabbi, a proper noun implying there were no equal."

Margy Rochlin tells the story behind HBO's In Treatment. More from Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker and John Leonard in New York.

Melena Ryzik reports on what writers have been doing to stave off boredom and frustration during the three months they've been on strike.

"Once a dumping ground for movies considered virtually unwatchable, the direct-to-DVD pipeline is becoming increasingly important to mainstream film franchises," reports Brooks Barnes.

To further catch up with a few more of the movies that opened this past weekend, first, The Air I Breathe:

"The mad dash to summarize the year in film is only now coming to an end, but allow me to rush ahead and prematurely pronounce The Air I Breathe the best bad movie I'll see in '08: So risibly pompous it has the meta-effect of making filmic conventions translucent, it really can't get much better (i.e., worse) than this," writes Kristi Mitsuda in indieWIRE.

"Why do so many 'independent' movies look and sound exactly alike?" asks Matt Singer at IFC News. "Isn't that kind of a contradiction with the whole independent thing?"

"Ah, January, hallowed dustbin for projects half-baked, too-cooked, or both, as in the case of this overstuffed noir actioner from Korean-American newcomer Jieho Lee," sighs Ella Taylor in the Voice.

"The Air I Breathe has a more random arrangement of star power than Southland Tales, and its conceits are a lot harder to figure out," writes Eric Kohn in the New York Press. "Forest Whitaker, Kevin Bacon, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Andy Garcia have never been impeccable performers, but they look like frayed magazine cutouts in this uneven mash-up of jagged conflicts. It's particularly frustrating to watch Whitaker, the strongest thespian of the bunch, desperately mine for gold in a narrative landslide."

"A hard-boiled allegory that consists of four vignettes whose characters bleed from one episode into the next, the film was inspired by a Chinese proverb that divides life into four categories: happiness, sorrow, pleasure and love," explains Stephen Holden in the NYT. "What unfolds is a flashy example of the everything-is-connected mode of filmmaking embodied by movies like Short Cuts, Crash and Babel, but the connections in The Air I Breathe are paradoxical philosophic abstractions lacking geographic and cultural resonance."

Lost in Beijing:

"A nervy love-quadrangle story that contains much less than the sum of its attractive parts, Lost in Beijing is just the kind of lost generation film that a country entering the full throes of a yuppie consumer crisis would be expected to make," writes Chris Barsanti at Filmcritic.com.

"Poised as a gritty study in urban loneliness, Lost in Beijing instead becomes lost in clichés." Fernando F Croce in Slant.

In the Voice, Nick Pinkerton finds but one redeeming asset: "No performance registers quite so much as the capital city itself, a burgeoning-but-sepulchral range of skyscrapers receding into a sheetrock-toned sky."

"There are, at last count, something like 17 million stories in this naked city," writes AO Scott in the New York Times, and Li Yu "relates a tale that is at once representative of the social and economic tensions afflicting 21st-century China and ripely, improbably melodramatic. The director and her cast work in a rough, naturalistic style, but the narrative offers both the pleasures and the limitations of old-fashioned class-conscious pulp. In spite of its raw, explicit moments, the film is at heart a sturdy morality tale about innocence and corruption, wealth and want, sex and power."

The 2008 edition of Rambo:

It has "its own kind of blockheaded poetry," writes AO Scott. "The first installments in the cycle were better films than polite opinion might lead you to believe. At the time their politics made some people nervous, but to dwell on Rambo's ideological significance was (and still is) to miss his kinship with the samurais and gunslingers of older movies. [Sylvester] Stallone is smart enough - or maybe dumb enough, though I tend to think not - to present the mythic dimensions of the character without apology or irony."

But at the House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz, can't get around the politics: "The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be."

More from Bruce Bennett (New York Sun), Kevin Crust (LAT), Alonso Duralde (MSNBC), David Edelstein (New York), Peter Martin (Cinematical), Nathan Rabin (AV Club) and Nick Schager (Slant).

For the Los Angeles Times, Choire Sicha talks with Julie Benz.

Chris Cagle on an "impossible" shot in Zodiac: "[I]t strikes me that [David] Fincher exemplifies two primary uses of CGI in non-spectacle-oriented cinema. First, there's the cost-saving or verisimilitude-creating measure for historical/geographic setting; where a classical film would build backlot sets or use glass painting, the CGI film can "create" objects, buildings, and scenery. Second, there's the stylistic flourish."
Darren Hughes illustrates the ways Abderrahmane Sissako's camera "is obsessed with relationships and with the geography (geometry?) of social interaction."
Girish is "curious to know: what film magazines do you search out, read, and find valuable?"
Two interviews newly "Full-text-ified" at the Believer: Miles Marshall Lewis with August Wilson and Jonathan Lethem with Paul Auster.
"Was five time Oscar nominated (and once winning) actress Susan Hayward a great actress?" asks Raymond de Felitta. "Or was she a basic studio starlet who evolved into a dark and expressive force that came to represent the dark side of the postwar feminine cliché?"
"You know things have gone a bit wonky when the light relief among this year's Oscar nominations comes from a tale in which the CIA covertly arms the mujahideen during the 1980s Russian invasion of Afghanistan," writes Andrew Collins. "This is, without a doubt, the best crop of mainstream American films we've seen for more than 30 years."
Also in the Observer: Elizabeth Day meets Claude Mendibil, who spent two months taking dictation from Jean-Dominique Bauby as he composed what would become The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (excerpt): "In [Julian] Schnabel's film, Mendibil is played by Anne Consigny, who has captured exactly her quiet self-containment and her expressive silences."
And Philip French launches a new series, "Screen legends." First up: Spencer Tracy.
"I've had loyal TFE reader Felippe send me a rundown of what's going on over at Fernando Meirelles's Blindness blog," notes Nathaniel R.
Edward Copeland presents his "film awards for 2007," while Andrew Bemis posts an annotated top ten. Then, another top ten and more from Steve at Film Damaged.
"Every year the glossy magazines pour on the love for Austin's mighty film scene," blogs Chris Garcia. "It's only January, yet already we're blushing and shuffling our feet about the compliments coming in."
The Independent profiles Julie Christie; also, Lesley O'Toole talks with Jennifer Garner.
Happy 10th, Nick's Flick Picks!
Adam Ross's interviewee this week: Paul Clark.
"Christian Brando, the troubled eldest son of the late famed actor Marlon Brando, has died from pneumonia at a Los Angeles hospital, an attorney said Saturday. He was 49." Robert Jablon reports for the AP.
Online cover art. The White Stripes at Sleevage, the Strokes at Golden Fiddle.
Online browsing tip. "More Annie Leibovitz Celebrity Disney Dream Photos" at the Disney Blog, via Monika Bartyzel at Cinematical.
Online listening tip. Steve Erickson talks about his new novel, Zeroville, on the Leonard Lopate Show.
Online viewing tips. Yair Raveh presents a "2008 Oscar Viewing Companion," adding up to a couple of hours.

Posted by dwhudson at 9:24 AM

Fests and events, 1/28.
Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913 - 2008 will be on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London from February 14 through May 26. Rob Sharp in the Independent: "If Hollywood is a dream factory, then this magazine is its ethereal brochure."
Channing Tatum Unwrapped breaks the news that Kimberly Peirce's Stop Loss will be screening at SXSW in March. Karina Longworth comments at the SpoutBlog.
Good Morning, Mr Nam June PAIK, at the Korean Cultural Centre UK, February 1 through March 7.
"Sundance 2008 will go down as one of the worst in recent memory for the quality of its lineup," argues Screen International's Jeremy Kay at the Guardian's blog.
Online browsing and viewing tip. For Make, Michelle Kempner wraps a tour of New Frontier on Main at Sundance with clips, pix and comments. Thanks, Jerry!

Posted by dwhudson at 8:28 AM

Jamie Stuart. Cut Short.
As Jason Guerrasio notes at Filmmaker, the film Jamie Stuart's come back from Sundance with this year features George A Romero, Ellen Kuras and Stacy Peralta.
The ending's a surprise, so I'll cut myself short right here.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:34 AM

Sundance. Be Kind Rewind.
"The big concept behind Michel Gondry's new film Be Kind Rewind is the remaking of classic movies on a shoestring budget," writes Kaleem Aftab in the Independent. "These new 'home-made' films are called 'Sweded' versions, as Jerry [Jack Black] claims that the home-made tapes at the video store are special bootleg versions made in Sweden. Films remade include Robocop, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy and Rush Hour 2.... [E]ver since consumer cameras have been available on the high street, people have needed no encouragement to recreate classic films at home.... And, of course, Be Kind Rewind has itself already been Sweded."
"It's a jaunty, outrageous and visually inventive fantasia that is wondrous, beguiling and dazzlingly executed," writes Patrick Z McGavin in Screen Daily.
Updated through 1/30.
"There's a lot to like," concedes the AV Club's Noel Murray, "But boy howdy is this movie ever a mess, with a plot that takes forever to get going - and to explain, frankly - and with an improvisatory style that thuds as often as it connects."
Variety's Todd McCarthy finds that Gondry's "flights of fancy can't overcome the egregious illogic of the premise.... [I]nspiration is as meager as the antics of Jack Black and Mos Def are lame."
"Not far beneath the slapstick humor and communitarian spirit of Mr Gondry's movie (which had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last week and is set to open Feb 22) lies a strong nostalgia for a technology that revolutionized home viewing but now seems destined for the dustbin of history." In the New York Times, Dennis Lim tells the VHS story, from beginning to end.
"So your world premiere was Sunday - how did it go?" asks the Reeler. "It was intimidating," Gondry replies, "but I think it went well. We got a lot of love and some emotion at the end, I guess. And then afterward Jean-Michel Bernard - the film's composer - Mos Def and I played some songs and opened for Patti Smith. She has a movie here." Yes, she does.
Earlier at the Reeler, Ben Gold reported on a recent Q&A with Gondry in NYC: "[T]he real backbone and emotional core of Rewind lie in the idea of community. After moving from Versailles to Paris he noticed quite a few abandoned movie theaters, which, according to Gondry, was disconcerting but rich with potential." Charlie Olsky has more at indieWIRE.
Rick Giles profiles Gondry for the Telegraph.
Monica Corcoran talks with Gondry for the Los Angeles Times.
Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Gondry for Cinematical.
Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with Gondry and Black.
Update, 1/30: Online viewing tip. Michel Gondry swedes the trailer to his own movie.

Posted by dwhudson at 1:50 AM | Comments (2)

Awards, 1/28.
"[I]n a year when a writers' strike has all but shut down much of Hollywood, the Screen Actors Guild Awards - as anonymous in most years as 'Cop No 3' in a summer blockbuster - took top billing Sunday and drew an inordinate amount of star wattage," writes Edward Wyatt, who runs through the evening, checking off winners' names. If you're in a hurry: Daniel Day-Lewis, Julie Christie, Ruby Dee and Javier Bardem.
Updated through 1/30.
Also in the New York Times. More from Alessandra Stanley, who finds the show "moved fast, looked effortless and fun and turned out to be a worthy substitute for the more glamorous Golden Globes and, should the writers' strike continue, maybe even the Oscars."
Joel and Ethan Coen have won this year's Directors Guild Award for No Country for Old Men.
Meanwhile, more trouble on the Oscar front. Via Movie City News. "'Falling Slowly,' the achingly pretty song from Once written by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, may be ruled ineligible" in the Best Original Song category, reports David Carr. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell notes that, in a comment to the Bagger's entry, "Antonio Jr" points to the trailer for Kráska v nesnázích, a 2006 Czech film, that features the song.
Update, 1/29: "Falling Slowly" is too eligible, argues the Irish Independent. Again, via MCN.
Update, 1/30: David Carr has the latest in the "Falling" saga: the Academy rules it's eligible.

Posted by dwhudson at 12:34 AM

January 27, 2008

Other fests, other events, 1/27.
The 1st Ballardian Festival of Home Movies? Ballardian has details. Via John Coulthart.
"While the Sundance 2008 comes to close and the air clears around the buzz for the big sales out of the premiere and competition sections, the often wrongly overlooked New Frontiers and Midnight programs float to the surface as some of the year's most interesting offerings." Michael Lerman looks back on the highlights for indieWIRE.
"This was the year that independent, personal cinema surpassed celebrity-driven genre films, hands down and no debate about it," writes Tom Hall, just back from Park City.
Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed will be screening a few more times at Seattle's Children's Film Festival, notes David Jeffers at the Siffblog.
It's a good week at the Silent Movie Theatre, notes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat.
"Pre-Code is back," announces Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "For the third time in less than five years, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has come up with a series devoted to this most exciting era of American film, a time when movies were just learning to talk and had the irrational exuberance to prove it." Universal Preservation: Pre-Code Films from the Universal and Paramount Libraries runs through February 27.
Eddie Muller's opened Noir City 6 with a few words and Michael Guillén's taken extensive notes. Plus, chats with writers of noirish tales.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:32 PM

Rotterdam, 1/27.
"Palestinian-Danish actor Omar Shargawi debuts as a writer-director with Ma salama Jamil (Go with Peace Jamil), in all likelihood one of the first Dogme-inspired films mostly spoken in Arabic," writes Boyd van Hoeij at european-films.net. "The film about two small warring factions of Muslims, one Shi'ite, the other Sunni, is set in Denmark but could be set anywhere - even in predominantly Muslim countries, as the film is not interested in culture clashes or adapting to life in a non-Muslim country. Instead, it focuses on the age-old battle to break the cycle of violence that begets violence, and as such, the film is a promising if overlong debut."
"A few years have past since the last Appleseed movie, so with more powerful technology available you'd expect greatly improved visuals" in Appleseed: Ex Machina," writes Ardvark at Twitch. "Both movies have been very ambitious in what they tried to achieve and both have successes and failures." Still, "If you liked the first film I'd be really surprised if you didn't like this one."
Also, Dai-Nipponjin: "While Cloverfield is easily (and often) described as Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project, this film is far more original and therefore harder to describe. With its wit and focus on media-manipulation, Godzilla meets Network comes close though. It's also damn funny."
"For the first time in nearly 20 years, domestic films in Japan have outsold foreign imports at the box office," notes Genevieve Yue at Reverse Shot. "Adding to this the fact that Naomi Kawase's The Mourning Forest, Kobayashi Masahiro's The Rebirth, and Takeshi Kitano's Glory to the Filmmaker! all won major prizes at international film festivals in the past year, and it would seem that Japanese cinema is experiencing its own rebirth of sorts (though significant developments have long been underway). For all the renewed vitality, however, the three films are notably elegiac in tone or subject matter. In each there's a sense of aftermath, but distance doesn't necessarily bring clarity or well-being."

Posted by dwhudson at 2:25 PM

Sundance. Made in America.
"Stacy Peralta's Made in America is an effective and selectively comprehensive, fascinating and frustrating examination of the history of gangs in South Los Angeles," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "For a film that makes a convincing and valuable case that gang warfare is, at its root, an economic problem, it's baffling how little attention is paid to how the rise of the superstar gangster in pop culture has impacted the real people living this life."
"Peralta builds a case that the long-running gang war and all its associated pathologies resulted from a perfect storm of toxic ingredients: restrictive real-estate covenants, the notorious paramilitary racism of the LAPD, the rapid deindustrialization of Los Angeles in the decades after World War II and the implosion of the African-American family," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Some of that may sound like old-school, blame-society white liberalism, but the film is far more complicated than that.... As Peralta told me during a fascinating interview on Tuesday (see the video here), his central intention is to humanize these young men, so often regarded as members of some predatory, not-quite-human species. 'These are American teenagers, and we need to treat them that way,' he said. 'If 28 percent of the white male population were in prison, I kind of think we'd be doing something about it.'"
"The film is incredibly well crafted," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online. "Powerful scenes of heartbroken mothers, desperate children and powerless participants invoke feelings of desperation, strengthening the empathy felt for those living inside the undeniable hopelessness the situation spawns. Mercifully, the concluding portion of the film offers a possible solution, or at least a step in the right direction; a mature choice which adds emotional reprieve and tangible social value to the work."
And he points to Jon Saraceno's piece in USA Today on Golden State Warrior Baron Davis's role as a producer and Eric Lavallee's interview with Peralta for IonCinema.
Chris Lee talks with Peralta for the Los Angeles Times and notes that the film "posits that Los Angeles' gang strife has lasted longer and claimed more lives than the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland and resulted in a higher incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder among the children in South LA than among those in Baghdad."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:03 PM

Envisioning Russia - and Mosfilm.
James Van Maanen previews Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking and talks with the head of Mosfilm, Karen Shakhnazarov. A few notes follow.
Mother Russia has come to Manhattan's Walter Reade Theater, and she'll be staying a while: three weeks to be exact, through February 14. As Richard Peña, program director for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, pointed out (to much laughter) during his introductory remarks at the opening night of Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking, the closing of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the opening of the Walter Reade Theater both took place in the same year: 1991. Russian film, not coincidentally, has long been among the staples of the WRT's programming. The Russian Ministry of Culture has designated 2008 as the centenary of Russian Cinema, so the time seems most appropriate for the FSLC and its partner in this event, Seagull Films, to host a Russian program this all-encompassing.
Updated through 1/30.
Unlike the FSLC's annual French, Italian and Spanish festivals that give cinephiles a look at what's currently happening in those countries, Envisioning Russia is much more concerned with the past than the present. Of the 29 programs/films, only four are from the 21st Century: last year's festival favorite, Aleksandr Sokurov's Alexandra with Galina Vishnevskaya; Aleksei Balabanov's Cargo 200 (given a small rave by David Denby in this past week's New Yorker); Sokurov's Rostropovich/Vishnevskaya documentary Elegy of Life; and the grand prize winner at the most recent Moscow International Film Festival, Vera Storozheva's Traveling with Pets.
Opening night festivities included the thankfully brief and rarely seen 1938 movie by Aleksandr Medvedkin, The New Moscow. This extremely odd combination of comedy, documentary, farce, musical, romance and propaganda has a few very funny moments and some enchantingly fresh-faced actors who spin a story involving city vs country, a "living" model of the future Moscow, a missing pig, polar bear costumes and more. There are a couple of nice songs, some interesting views of the Moscow of the 30s, and lots of love on the loose. At just 80 minutes, the movie does not outstay its welcome, and there is irony aplenty in the smiling, positive attitude of all these youngsters on view, so thrilled to be looking forward to all the upcoming Russian delights - including, of course, Joe Stalin. (The New Moscow will screen again on Thursday, January 31, at 8:15 pm and on Sunday, February 3, at 4 pm.)
The remaining films span the 1920s through the 1990s, with stalwarts such as Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1974) screening along side two New York premieres: a John Ford-inspired 1936 "eastern" by Mikhail Romm entitled The Thirteen and the Russian folktale/American western combo White Sun of the Desert (1969), one of the most popular Russian films ever made. Other record-breakers include the 1980 Oscar-winner for Best Foreign Language film, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears and writer/director Karen Shakhnazarov's Jazzmen (1983) and Courier (1986).
Mr Shakhnazarov is currently the head of Mosfilm Studios, the most famous and long-lasting of any Russian film studio, the output of which is the main focus of Envisioning Russia. You'll undoubtedly recognize the Mosfilm logo - a man and woman holding aloft a symbolic torch - which seemed to precede just about every Russian film I can remember seeing.

I snagged a few minutes of Shakhnazarov's time to learn what is happening these days at Mosfilm, which, since the time of perestroika and glasnost, has undergone some major changes. "Ten to 15 years ago," explains the studio head, "the Soviet film industry was nearly in ruins. The middle of 90s - it was a disaster. But the Russian film industry is these days growing very fast. There is much production now in both films and TV. TV channels, in particular, are growing fast, getting bigger and more numerous - and they are especially now investing money in theatrical films. Mosfilm is involved in more than 100 projects, both theatrical and TV. Sometimes we don't even divide this up: We just call them 'projects.'"
The downside - and of course there is one - notes Shakhnazarov, is that now, "Everything has become, in general, very commercial, which is not so good for creative projects. In this, I can say that Soviet cinema was much more creative before perestroika. This is strange. But the big Soviet filmmakers had more interesting and creative ideas then than we seem to have currently. I suppose today you could say that we have a crisis in terms of creative ideas."
What does Shakhnazarov see ahead for his studio? "My idea was to make Mosfilm a modern powerful factory for making films. And we have very well succeeded in modernizing. Now I would like to see us have more artistic projects, not only commercial. We could have a better balance, I think. This is just my opinion, of course."
Of course. But it sounds like a good one to me. Why would the embrace of capitalism in a country such as Russia not lead to the almost total commercialization of its film industry? Could it be any other way - at least for awhile? Unlikely.
I took a look at the two Shakhnazarov movies included in this festival and found one of them, Jazzmen, surprisingly commercial, given its pre-perestroika time frame. This unusually zestful film, full of energy and sly visual and verbal wit, is an homage to the early days of jazz in Russia. It features wonderful performances from its quartet of jazzmen and a raft of funny scenes, the best of which involves the senior member learning to improvise. At times the movie threatens to become a full-fledged musical but then stops short. And there's plenty of coincidence. Do our boys need to find a fellow who plays brass? You can bet they'll wake up in jail right next to one.
"Jazzmen was a huge hit in Russia," Shakhnazarov explains. "I suppose when it first appeared, jazz was a new theme. Not that Russians didn't know jazz, for it was already in the Soviet Union. But it has always had an up-and-down history, sometime forbidden, sometimes allowed. But to make a film about such things was very new. And to make a musical without political themes was even more new." The writer/director tells me that, at the time of the film's release, a journalist from Hungary told him that the movie was such a big hit because "It was so unexpected in Hungary - 'like a breath of freedom for us!' Jazzmen was filmed just prior to perestroika, and because of censorship, certain things had to be cut out." Even so, 25 years later, the film still seems surprisingly fresh - and very enjoyable. (Jazzmen will screen Sunday, January 27, at 7:15 pm and Wednesday, February 6, at 4 pm.)
Even better is Shakhnazarov's other film in the program, Courier, made in 1986 during the perestroika period. Beginning with a scene in divorce court, it lays out its characters - mother, father, son - with economy and wit. It also offers as good a depiction as I have seen of youth trying to figure out adulthood before it arrives there and fucks it up. The lead actor, a young man named Fyodor Dunayevsky, is priceless: Imagine a combination of Tom Cruise (circa Risky Business) and Michael Cera and you'll have an idea how very unusual is this character, Ivan. Cynical, bright and refusing all offers of peace, he consistently charms his way into something good - and then shoots himself in the foot. Perhaps the most surprising thing about this fine film is how little it has dated. It holds its own against any teen movie, past or present, that I can recall.
"Courier," explains Shakhnazarov, "was adapted from a novel I had written that was published prior to perestroika. It was not possible to make this film before perestroika, and it was among the first films from that period. The hero was very unusual for Soviet cinema at that time, someone who is against everything." As big a hit as was Jazzmen, Courier achieved even more. "It had the biggest success of any of my films in the Soviet Union." When I mention to the director that, even today, his character seems new and timely, Shakhnazarov notes that teenagers are always trying to find themselves. "They try to clear a place for themselves, but it's never easy." When we talk about the ending of the film, the director points out something, time-wise, that I had not realized and that impacts hugely upon its concluding scene: When the film was made, Russia was smack in the midst of losing its war against Afghanistan. (Courier will be shown Sunday, January 27, at 3:15 pm and Thursday, February 7, at 9 pm.)
Before we part, I asked the writer/director if he can suggest any particular must-see film in this festival. "I think that Richard Peña has done a very important job in choosing these movies. The problem is to show the reality of Soviet cinema over a long period. All the films are interesting, but I would suggest you see the film of Marlen Khutsiyev called July Rain. Khutsiyev influenced directors such as Tarkovsky, and I think he influenced very much the whole development of Soviet cinema. I would recommend that film. But, still," he pauses for a moment, "all the other films are interesting too!" (July Rain will be shown Saturday, February 9, at 2 and 6 pm.)
- James Van Maanen

Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun: "This three-week retrospective of classic movies produced under Soviet rule and recent fare created to compete in today's global economic free-for-all is an unusually far-reaching survey of Russian film's unfathomably deep creative well."
Earlier: Aaron Hillis in the Voice; and Lucy Ash in the New Statesman on White Sun of the Desert.
Update, 1/28: Online listening tip. Shakhnazarov is a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.
Updates, 1/30: Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine on The New Moscow: "Alexander Medvedkin’s 1938 comedy... cruises along blithely with a loony charm beyond standard patriotic kitsch, although throwaways about the desire to build and to love never hurt.... Of course, Medvedkin, who died just before the fall of Communism, has already gotten the full historical treatment in Chris Marker's 1993 essay film The Last Bolshevik, devoted to the filmmaker, the 20th century, cinema and the usual sardonically philosophical 'Etc.' But even without harvesting its ideological import, The New Moscow can stand on its own two silly feet."
Current series at the New Museum's Night School: After the Red Square. Post-communist art and film.

Posted by dwhudson at 9:36 AM

Cloverfield revisited.
Most moviegoers hate the Jan/Feb/Mar slump. Not David Borwell: "I have to admit I enjoy checking on those quickie action fests and romantic comedies that float up early in the year. They're today's equivalent of the old studios' program pictures, those routine releases that allowed theatres to change bills often. In their budgets, relative to blockbusters, today's program pix are often the modern equivalent of the studios' B films." And yes, "I enjoyed Cloverfield. It starts with a sharp premise, but as ever, execution is everything. I see it as a nifty digital update of some classic Hollywood conventions."
Updated through 1/28.
"In my heart of hearts," writes Tim Lucas, "I have a creeping suspicion that Cloverfield may be the most important horror movie (or horrifying movie) I've seen in a long time, maybe since The Exorcist or Taxi Driver or Cannibal Holocaust, because it gave me the same apocalyptic feeling those films did when I first saw them - a sense that movies, as I knew them, would never be the same again."
"At a time when remakes and sequels are the norm, and audiences have a library of classic films on DVD at their disposal, a good original horror or science fiction film should be celebrated and Cloverfield is well worth celebrating," writes Kimberly Lindbergs. "Instead of appreciating what the film does get right, many critics seem to enjoy pointing out what they consider to be the films three main flaws, so I thought I'd address them in three easy to follow steps."
"Hollywood uses the stunt to sell movies all right," writes Brooks Barnes in the New York Times. "If Americans go to see the Statue of Liberty's head ripped off, as they have in droves for Cloverfield, all the better. But the fans the studios are really trying to attract with such imagery are in Eastern Europe, South Korea and Latin America."
Updates: "[M]y second viewing of Cloverfield felt less like the apocalyptic arrival I described in my previous column and more like a bracingly tense, disconcerting, out-of-control entertainment - which, of course, is all it really needs to be," amends Tim Lucas.
Benji Wilson has "10 things you need to know about JJ Abrams" in the Observer.
Earlier: the 1/17 entry.
Updates, 1/28: "I hesitate to dismiss Cloverfield as a novelty," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in Stop Smiling. "The seamlessness of its effects and the blatant echoes of its imagery - whether vulgar or not - redefine the parameters of realism in an otherwise by-the-numbers apocalyptic nightmare."
"Cloverfield is a fantasy that wants you to buy into it, and thanks to bravura technical skill it works on its strictly limited terms, but the closer you are to its Ground Zero the more keenly you'll feel its evasions and compromises," writes Robert Cashill.
"The real disappointment, the one that makes the whole thing feel like a complete waste of time, is the monster: never mind where it's from or what it wants, it just has zero personality and visual interest." Phil Nugent.
Matt Reeves directed, but most people think of Cloverfield as a JJ Abrams movie. At the IFC Blog, Stephen Saito lists "10 Directors Overshadowed By Their Collaborators."
Structurally, Miracle Mile "bears a striking resemblance to Cloverfield," argues Phil Nugent at ScreenGrab.

Posted by dwhudson at 7:29 AM | Comments (2)

Sundance. Awards.
The Sundance Film Festival's announced its awards, and I've rounded up the links I could find.
"GCD" denotes an entry here at the Daily; and there'll be more over the next couple of days as the last of the first reviews for these films trickle in. And an index is in the works, too.
Updated.

Grand Jury Prize: Documentary: Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water. GCD.

Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic: Courtney Hunt's Frozen River. GCD.

World Cinema Jury Prize: Documentary: James Marsh's Man on Wire - also the winner of the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary.

World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic: Jens Jonsson's King of Ping Pong - which also won the World Cinema Cinematography Award: Dramatic for Askild Vik Edvardsen.

Audience Award: Documentary: Josh Tickell's Fields of Fuel.

Audience Award: Dramatic: Jonathan Levine's The Wackness. GCD.

World Cinema Audience Award: Dramatic: Amin Matalqa's Captain Abu Raed.

Directing Award: Documentary: Nanette Burstein for American Teen. GCD.

Directing Award: Dramatic: Lance Hammer for Ballast - which also picked up the Excellence in Cinematography Award: Dramatic for Lol Crawley. GCD.

World Cinema Directing Award: Documentary: Nino Kirtadze for Durakovo: Village of Fools.

World Cinema Directing Award: Dramatic: Anna Melikyan for Mermaid.

Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: Alex Rivera and David Riker for Sleep Dealer - which has also won the Alfred P Sloan Prize. GCD.

World Cinema Screenwriting Award: Samuel Benchetrit for I Always Wanted to Be a Gangster.

Documentary Editing Award: Joe Bini for Roman Polanski:Wanted and Desired. GCD.

World Cinema Documentary Editing Award: Irena Dol for The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins. GCD.

Excellence in Cinematography Award: Documentary: Phillip Hunt and Steven Sebring for Patti Smith: Dream of Life. GCD.

World Cinema Cinematography Award: Documentary: Mahmoud al Massad for Recycle.

World Cinema Special Jury Prize: Dramatic: Ernesto Contreras for Blue Eyelids. GCD.

Special Jury Prize: Documentary: Lisa F Jackson for Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo.

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, The Spirit of Independence: Chusy (Anthony Haney-Jardin) for Anywhere, USA.

Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, Work by an Ensemble Cast: Choke. GCD.

2008 Jury Prize in Short Filmmaking: Daniel Robin's My Olympic Summer (go here and click #4) and Andrew Okpeaha MacLean's Sikumi (On the Ice; go here and click #9).

International Jury Prize in International Short Filmmaking: Simon Ellis's Soft.

Honorable Mentions in Short Filmmaking:

Rob Meyer's Aquarium.

Xuan Jiang's August 15th.

Amanda Micheli and Isabel Vega's La Corona (see Brian Darr's take, too).

Ryosuke Ogawa's Oiran Lyric.

Nash Edgerton's Spider (go here and click #10).

Nicolas Provost's Suspension.

The Vikings' W.

And from the press release: "Now in its twelfth year, the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award was created to honor and support emerging filmmakers - one each from the United States, Japan, Europe and Latin America - who possess the originality, talent and vision to be celebrated as we look to the future of international cinema. The winning filmmakers and projects for 2008 are Alejandro Fernandez Almendras from Chile with Huacho; Braden King from the United States with Here; Aiko Nagatsu from Japan with Apoptosis; and Radu Jude from Romania with The Happiest Girl in the World."
Update: Howard Karren has a special awards report at In the Company of Glenn.

Posted by dwhudson at 7:04 AM

January 26, 2008

Park City, 1/26.
"If there can be some crossover between new film and new art that's symbiotic, that's going to be an important part of the future for Sundance - and for film," Robert Redford tells Steven Henry Madoff, who tours the exhibitions for Artforum.
"[I]n a year when the absence of Iraq films has been one of the big stories at Sundance, Russia has emerged as the program's most prominent foreign country. No fewer than four titles this year - tellingly, only one of them actually produced in Russia - approach the country's growing pains from different angles, offering a thorough portrait of a nation in which corruption, violence, cynicism, and despair mingle with a weak twinkle of hope and the shreds of a once-lively folk culture." Darrell Hartman in the New York Sun on Transsiberian, Alone in Four Walls, Durakovo: Village of Fools and Mermaid.
In the Los Angeles Times, David A Keeps profiles "the queen of Sundance," Melonie Diaz, "who this year is actually in four festival entries - American Son, Assassination of a High School President, Be Kind Rewind and Hamlet 2 - is the latest to be handed the crown. She joins such esteemed predecessors as Parker Posey, Lili Taylor, Christina Ricci, Kirsten Dunst, Chloë Sevigny, Catherine Keener and Patricia Clarkson. 'It's an honor,' Diaz says, 'but it's intimidating, and a little embarrassing. In industry terms, I'm still a newbie.'" She's 23.
"This year, it's the ever-proliferating bloggers - Spout, Cinematical, Movie City News and Hollywood Elsewhere - that have become the instant barometers for how a film plays," writes Variety's Michael Jones.
"The upheaval in the music world has tipped the balance of power away from the big corporations and towards the artist: the small-scale is thriving. Will low-budget, DIY production also be the future for movies? It's an exciting, unpredictable time." Tom Horan files a longish report for the Telegraph.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:53 PM

Park City Dispatch. 7.
Brian Darr is "always in the midst of processing [James] Benning's films." Here, he considers Benning's most recent.
Because I'd been so enamored of his recent 13 Lakes and Ten Skies, I was looking forward to James Benning's New Frontier film casting a glance perhaps more eagerly than any other Sundance selection. 13 Lakes set Benning's camera on the edge of a baker's dozen of America's most ecologically fascinating lakes from Okeechobee in Florida to Lake Iliamna in Alaska, to the Great Salt Lake here in Utah, and shot a continuous ten-minute roll of 16mm film capturing each. casting a glance returns to Utah's iconic lake, where Benning perches his camera at various vantage points in view of the Spiral Jetty, a renowned piece of environmental art created by Robert Smithson in 1970. This artwork is, as its name describes, a spiral of carefully arranged stones jutting from the lakeshore into the water. Smithson made a film (which I have not seen) also called Spiral Jetty at the time of its creation.
Instead of using shots of ten minutes in length, as 13 Lakes did, the 80 minutes of casting a glance are broken up into segments of much shorter shot length, perhaps a few minutes each. Both films invite the viewer into a different mode of, borrowing the title of one of the filmmaker's CalArts classes, "looking and listening" to filmed nature. But with less time for us to contemplate how compositions, rhythms and ripples in each shot are functioning, casting a glance becomes more dependent on shot juxtapositions. For example, a particularly stunning pair of shots show chunks of ice being blown over the Jetty and tumbling into the lake, first from a high camera angle and then, in a reverse shot, apparently from atop the artwork itself. The film is organized into sections showcasing the shifting appearance of Smithson's piece at different times of year. Each seasonal variance is preluded by a title card indicating a date sometime in the life of the Spiral Jetty. Seemingly, each title card denotes the day that Benning set up his camera to record, suggesting that this is a project he has been working on for nearly his entire filmmaking career, which began with did you ever hear that cricket sound in 1971.
However, things are not quite as they seem. The program guide states that the footage we see in casting a glance was all captured between mid-2005 and early last year (when Benning had a contribution to another New Frontier film at Sundance, entitled Lunchfilm.) Are Benning's shots of the Spiral Jetty in various seasons and states of submersion over that 18-month period intended to simulate the transformations the artwork has undergone in relationship with its environment over its 37-year life-span? That's what some who have written about the film seem to have concluded from the discrepancy. But the dated title cards are not necessarily inaccurate; they might actually be labeling the soundtrack and not the image, as Benning's soundtracks are not always diegetically matched to the images they accompany. For instance, his One Way Boogie Woogie/27 Years Later retains an older film's soundtrack while showing images of the present. I understand the entire soundtrack to Ten Skies is taken from recordings used in various previous films. One could say Benning is misleading us with these devices, but in doing so he's pointing out the how film watchers can privilege visuals over audio when processing information. I must wonder if some of the soundtrack of casting a glance might have been recorded in locations other than Utah, on the specific dates Benning is using as section markers for his film.

If Benning's images and sounds for casting a glance were not recorded at the same time and place, he was skillful in disguising the evidence from someone like me, who lacks direct experience of what a visit to the Spiral Jetty might sound like. Most of the sounds we hear are of wind blowing, or water lapping against the shore, and fit with what we see on the screen. There is even a shot accompanied by the sound of geese honking. Soon we see a "V" of birds reflected on the lake's surface, and if we look hard enough we can see them in the air above as well. Less congruous sounds that do not appear to emanate from an on-screen source are few and far between: distant gunshots accompany one vantage of the artwork, a few bizarre yelping sounds appear at another, and there is even a group of shots accompanied by a recording of the song "Love Hurts" that sounds as if it could be coming out of an off-screen boombox or car stereo. This last example is noteworthy, however. Since the music plays seamlessly on either side of a cut, it could not have been recorded while multiple images were being filmed, unless Benning was using multiple cameras, which I highly doubt. Once the door to mismatching sound and image has been cracked, it's impossible to know from the material film itself just how how wide Benning has opened it.
This dispatch has been long on speculation and short on conclusions; as you can see, I'm still in the midst of processing casting a glance, as I am always in the midst of processing Benning's films. However, I will draw two concrete conclusions. One, that I love how an apparently minimalistic film like casting a glance can become an instrument for contemplating techniques we take for granted in more "conventional" documentaries. And two, that though the other New Frontier features I watched at this year's Sundance were a mixed bag (Eat, for This Is My Body was tremendous, Half-Life rather weak, and Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, Part 4 somewhere in between, making me wish I'd had the time to fit in the other four parts screened this week), I really appreciate the presence of all these explicitly art-minded films at a festival where the business end of filmmaking can so often dominate the conversation.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:15 PM

Sight & Sound. Feb 08.
"How is Inglorious Bastards going?" Sight & Sound editor Nick James asks Quentin Tarantino before they get into it over Death Proof. But it's a relaxed, meandering conversation, too.
The first part of the BFI Southbank's Burt Lancaster season runs throughout February. Philip Kemp considers the career: "Through all Lancaster's best roles - and through his own personality - there runs this element of ambiguity. Lindsay Anderson spotted it early on, noting "this odd mixture of violence and decency, this goodwill that has not quite found a satisfactory channel of expression.'"
In Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, "Andy and Hank can't help but evoke memories of Biff and Happy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman: they can't accept that they are failures or that they haven't managed to be the sons their father wanted, hence their decision to countenance deeds that risk ruining not only their own lives but those of everyone close to them." Geoffrey Macnab gets a few words with Sidney Lumet.
Reviews:

Roland West's 1929 Alibi "would seem to have everything going for it," writes Tim Lucas. And he lists its assets; they're impressive. But "it fails to conjure a story of sufficient substance or irony to warrant such impressive treatment" as Kino gives it.

Ben Walters and JM Tyree on No Country for Old Men: "Conventional narrative models demand an obstacle between the hero and the object of his desire; in the Coen brothers' films, that obstacle is usually the hero's stupidity."

Kieron Corless on Our Daily Bread: "[Nikolaus] Geyrhalter's film is kin to Workingman's Death, the 2005 film by Michael Glawogger (another of the current crop of dazzling Austrian documentary film-makers unaccountably overlooked by British distributors), in its immersive focus on people at work, its reluctance to editorialise and its often mesmerising rhythms and imagery." Related: Phil Hoad talks with Geyrhalter for the Guardian.

Tony Rayns on Still Life: "Plenty of earlier Chinese movies have looked at the human and social cost of the Three Gorges Dam (from Zhang Ming's Rainclouds over Wushan, 1995, to Yan Yu and Li Yifan's documentary Before the Flood, 2005, the latter also shot in Fengjie), but Jia [Zhangke]'s film is the first to rhyme the loss of a very ancient human settlement with the transience and fragility of human relationships in general."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:09 PM

Slamdance. Awards.
"The 14th annual Slamdance Film Festival has announced 15 film and screenplay prize winners in three categories who will share more than $200,000 in cash and prizes, plus, for one winner, guaranteed production of a feature film."
So here we go, with related linkage:
Updated through 1/30.

Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature: Tom Quinn's The New Year Parade.

Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Feature: Oliver Irving's How to Be.

Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature: Greg Kohs's Song Sung Blue, which has also won the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature. Related: For Filmmaker, Brandon Harris talks with Kohs.

Special Jury Honorable Mention for Documentary Feature: Cynthia Lester's My Mother's Garden. Related: Brandon Harris, Filmmaker, Lester. Update: "While a documentary tends to suffer when the filmmaker becomes a part of the story, the Lesters' ability to cope with the ramifications of hoarding suggests hope for other people afflicted with the disease," writes Eric Kohn at indieWIRE.

Grand Jury Award for Best Animated Short: Andrew McPhillips's Blood Will Tell. Related: An online listening tip. At Twitch, Todd Brown talks with McPhillips.

Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Short: CA Voros's The Ladies.

Grand Jury Award for Best Experimental Short: Michael Langan's Doxology.

Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Short: Daniel Mulloy's Son.

Special Jury Honorable Mention for Narrative Short: Wing-Yee Wu's 4960.

Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature: Ryan Piotrowicz's The Project. Related: Brandon Harris, Filmmaker, Piotrowicz.

Global Audience Award for Best Anarchy Film: Gloria Kim's Rock Garden.

Spirit of Slamdance Award, "Awarded by the 2008 filmmakers, for exhibiting passion and talent as a filmmaker, commitment to the independent community, and enthusiastically embracing all Slamdance has to offer": Jonathan Lisecki's Woman in Burka.

Award for Best Feature Length Screenplay: Anthony Meindl, for The Wonder Girls.

Award for Best Short Screenplay: Will Hartman, for Easy Pickins.

Award for Best Teleplay: Barbara Marshall, for Stage Six Pandemic.

Award for Best Horror Competition Screenplay: Tony Mosher, for The Punished.

Creative Excellence Award for the Horror Screenplay Competition Prize: Damian Lahey and Ian Ogden, for Child in the Dark.

Kodak Vision Award for Best Cinematography: Sascha Drews and Ezra Krybus, for Crooked Lake.

Update, 1/30: Now at the main site: The updated list of past Sundance award-winners.

Posted by dwhudson at 6:55 AM

January 25, 2008

Park City, 1/25.
Manohla Dargis has had an "unexpectedly rewarding week.... [T]his felt like a year of discovery." Specifically, she awards the New York Times seal of approval to Sugar, Ballast and Momma's Man:

One theme of that discussion will be the emergence of a new American realism. Although my favorite fiction films at Sundance were different in theme and tone, they were united by stylistic commonalities, a feel for the still moment - and, importantly, for beauty — a grounded sense of place and some obvious influences, including the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. What was missing from even the most intimate of these works was the solipsism that characterizes one Sundance mainstay, the kind with anguished young men who yearn to break free of their families and towns so they can run away to film school (or a Sundance Institute lab) and turn their suffering into entertainment.

"Most of the so-called major premieres in Park City this year have been widely viewed as disappointments, and beyond the brief and bizarre bidding war that erupted over the high-school musical farce Hamlet 2 (which went to Focus Features for $10 million), there's been far less acquisition activity than expected," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir in his festival wrap-up. "It was business as usual in the gifting villas and corporate-sponsored party spaces here, but the mood at industry events has been muted and muddled, between the still-unresolved writers' strike and the death of Heath Ledger.... But I'm not saying this was a bad Sundance. To my own enormous surprise, in fact, I'm saying the opposite."
AJ Schnack's found more evidence at the festival of "a 'Nonfiction New Wave' that rejects dogmatic strictures of form and that is, ironically, a return to the genre's roots."
"There's nothing all that groundbreaking about the idea that visual artists and filmmakers can share similar practices and tools," writes Glen Helfand at SF360. "A far more interesting dynamic emerged from the edgier portions of Sundance 08, that being a sense that a broad swath of features, docs, installations, and projected art shared similar socio-political concerns, which they grappled with via well-honed aesthetic filters."
"Robert Redford and Geoff Gilmore need to make a course correction at Sundance," argues Anne Thompson in Variety. "[T]his year's Sundance crop seemed to be heavy on Hollywood-indie hybrids that were neither fish nor fowl." Also, a list of faves.
Matt Dentler wraps his stay, too, and posts more pix.
"Blimey, it's all so American." David Bloom blogs for the Guardian.
"This week, I attended the Sundance panel, Alternative Storytelling For New Digital Media Platforms at the New Frontier on Main." And Brian Chirls has a clip at Filmmaker.
Photos: Ray Pride.
Online viewing tips. David Poland lunches his way around Park City.

Posted by dwhudson at 4:10 PM

Sundance. A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy.
"A groundbreaking film, Dennis Dortch's A Good Day To Be Black and Sexy is, despite its provocative title, getting only a smidgen of the notices that Lance Hammer's Ballast is when people begin to talk about so called 'Black' films in Park City," writes Brandon Harris. "The films exist on almost completely opposite ends of the filmmaking spectrum - Black and Sexy is a frank, joyous, aesthetically alive comedy of manners, where Ballast is an oblique, joyless superimposition of the Dardenne Brothers style on the overwrought concerns of tragedy stricken Blacks living in the Mississippi Delta.... Full of jump cuts, naturalistic camera work, and situations never before glimpsed in narrative films before, A Good Day To Be Black and Sexy exorcises the demons of Toms, Coons, Mammies and Bucks that honest black cinematic representation is constantly attempting to dislodge from the American psyche. Never salacious or mean spirited, the vignettes don't shy away from the uncomfortable aspects of modern sexuality and maintains a healthy irreverence in its sexual politics."
Oddly enough, though, just the other day... "One chapter is like something the Dardennes might do if they wanted to make a sex picture (it's a big might, but still)," suggests the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris.
"I had one industry person chuckle as he mumbled, 'So, it's like a Black art film?'" writes Dortch at Filmmaker's blog.
Online listening tip. Kevin Buist at the SpoutBlog: "Stars Mylika Davis and Jerome Anthony Hawkins discuss why they were happy to portray black sexuality in a fresh way."

Posted by dwhudson at 4:05 PM

Sundance. The Wave.
"To call The Wave 'a German Fight Club' would be both accurate and misleading," writes Ryan Stewart at In the Company of Glenn. "The Wave is a somewhat more grounded drama with a more specific focus: to stare deeply into the eyes of today's German youth and find the grandfathers inside.... Many references, such as to anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Scholl, may fly over the heads of American audiences, and The Wave loses steam considerably in its final act, but overall it's one of this year's most compelling Sundance offerings."
"Dennis Gansel turns the true story of a high-school history experiment gone awry into a glossy, pulse-pounding thriller, employing methods almost as fascistic as those of The Wave itself. Intentional irony?" asks Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab.
"The Wave is by no means a bad film; it's just already been done," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "And when it was done before, it was aimed at teens. Grown-ups shouldn't expect to get much out of it."
Justin Chang explains in Variety: "Though it's not mentioned in the writing credits, Morton Rhue's 1988 novel The Wave - a fictional retelling of the 1967 experiment conducted by Palo Alto, Calif, history teacher William Ron Jones (who served as a consultant on the film) - has become a staple of many a high school curriculum. In relocating the story to Germany, Gansel and co-scenarist Peter Thorwarth (drawing from Jones' original account and a 1981 teleplay) pointedly raise the question of whether a Third Reich-style regime could emerge again - and find the answer to be an unambiguous yes."

Posted by dwhudson at 3:59 PM

CulturePulp meets Satrapi.
Mike Russell's got a terrific comic in which his own drawing style meets that of Marjane Satrapi.
Fitting enough, since it depicts a conversation between the two artists about Persepolis - and is based on this lengthy interview right here.
Update, 1/27: Sean Axmaker has a long talk with Satrapi, too.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:16 PM

Jamie Stuart on NPR.
First, an online listening tip. Alison Stewart of NPR's Bryant Park Project interviews Jamie Stuart: "'I'm not a journalist. I'm a filmmaker,' he says. Making films about film festivals, he says, gives him the exposure he needs to get where he wants to be."
The video they talk about at the end there? It's here. And look for Jamie's anxiously awaited Sundance 08 film at Filmmaker on Monday.

Posted by dwhudson at 12:58 PM

Sundance. The Object.
Not a collection of reviews this time, but an online reading and viewing tip. "Partizan director Leslie Ali travelled to the Sundance Film Festival this week, after her darkly humorous short film The Object was selected from thousands of submissions to be entered in the official competition," notes Creative Review in an entry that includes the film. "Ali kept a diary about her experiences in Utah for CR, which included meeting with a talent scout from William Morris, watching The Object shown on the big screen at the Egyptian Theatre, and gossiping with an ex of Jack Black's at a screening of Michel Gondry's latest feature Be Kind Rewind."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:05 PM

Rotterdam, 1/25.
The International Film Festival Rotterdam opened on Wednesday with Lucía Cedrón's first feature, Lamb of God (Cordero de Dios). It's "an assured debut," writes Geoffrey Macnab in Screen Daily, "a skillfully told and affecting tale which straddles the line between political thriller and family melodrama. The elaborate flashback structure – the film is set in Argentina in 1978, when the country was still under the control of the military Junta, and in 2002, during the economic crisis – is initially disconcerting. It takes a moment or two to realise that we are watching the same characters at different points in their lives. In the long run, though, Cedron's subtle and richly layered storytelling style adds an emotional depth that a more conventional narrative would surely have lacked."
One of the highlights of the festival is surely Rediscovering the Fourth Generation, a series curated by Shelly Kraicer, who writes in his introduction to these 12 Chinese films from the late 70s and early 80s: "The Fourth Generation's double misfortune is to have been squeezed out by two phenomena: one political, the other aesthetic.... This led to their relative obscurity in the West, one that is entirely circumstantial, and not commensurate with their artistic achievements."
Filing a first dispatch from the festival for Reverse Shot, Genevieve Yue writes, "Two visions of rural life, Uruphong Raksasad's short film The Rocket (2007) and Sandra Kogut's Mutum (2007) presented distant places as intimate experiences, timeless wonders with sly hints of the present."
For Twitch, Ardvark reviews "Russian director Alexei Balabanov's newest picture, Gruz 200 (Cargo 200), a film which starts as a 'man meets crazy inbred family' thriller but gradually turns into a very cold kidnap drama.... Balabanov meant this film to be the harshest possible condemnation of early 1980s USSR and wants it to give people who longingly talk about the 'good old days of communism' a good kicking. In the teeth. Hard."
Earlier: James Van Maanen on Mutum.

Posted by dwhudson at 8:24 AM

Cesars. Nominations.
"With 11 nominations each, Olivier Dahan's La Vie en Rose and Claude Miller's Un Secret dominate the nominees selected for the 2008 Cesars, to be awarded on February 22," reports Fabien Lemercier, who lists the nominees in the major categories at Cineuropa.
Earlier: Boyd van Hoeij on Un Secret at european-films.net.

Posted by dwhudson at 7:46 AM

Sundance. The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.
"New Zealand director Pietra Brettkelly was in the Darfur region of Sudan working on a documentary when she happened to meet international renowned artist Vanessa Beecroft. Little did she realize that this chance meeting would lead to her next film - The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins." Melissa Silverstein talks with her for Zoom In Online.
Greg Allen is most definitely not a fan of Beecroft, a "vapid, superficial, self-absorbed aesthetic fetishist." He points to Logan Hill's "takedown" for New York's Vulture: "The doc cluster-bombs her faddish fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist. The film is brutally effective because it lets Beecroft hang herself with damaging quotes and appalling behavior." Greg also points to Matthu Placek's interview with Brettkelly for V Magazine.
Updated through 1/26.
"Beecroft discovers a pair of infant twins whose mother died," explains Stephen Farber in the Hollywood Reporter. "She becomes obsessed with the idea of adopting them and bringing them back to New York... But as her husband, Greg Durkin, asks pointedly, is she motivated by humanitarian impulses, or is she mesmerized by the exotic allure of underprivileged orphans? Has she been inspired by celebrities like Angelina Jolie? In short, does her attraction to the twins have the same exploitative element visible in her art?"
The doc "is challenging, fascinating, self-excoriating and often infuriating," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir.
Update, 1/26: This is "a brutally honest, remarkably self-critical reflection on foreign adoption that touches unexpectedly on issues of alienation and loneliness," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

Posted by dwhudson at 7:05 AM

Sundance. Baghead.
"Is it too early for the 'mumblecore' movement to spoof itself?" asks Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Evidently not, and it's a good thing too. A group of underemployed, ultra-indie filmmakers and actors head to the woods to make their own brilliant new film, in the latest work of deadpan comedy from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (The Puffy Chair)."
Updated through 1/30.
"The Duplass Brothers... are growing as filmmakers," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "They're trying new things in Baghead and building upon their strengths as craftsmen of approachable characters, zippy dialogue and warm romance. As a result, Baghead, premiering in the Spectrum program at the Sundance Film Festival, is the Duplass Brothers' best film yet."
Back in November 06, Bryan Poyser filed a set report for the Austin Chronicle.
Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with the brothers for Cinematical.
Online listening tips. Kevin Buist interviews Greta Gerwig for the SpoutBlog; also, Jay Duplass.
Online viewing tip. At the SpoutBlog, Joe Swanberg watches the cast and crew promote Baghead in Park City.
Updates: Brian Brooks reports at indieWIRE that Sony Pictures Classics has picked up Baghead: "The deal, brokered by Submarine, is understood to be a mid to high six-figure pact."
"Brother filmmaking teams abound: the Maysles, Coens, Hugheses, Wachowskis. With the Duplass and Zellner brothers, who specialize in micro-budget indie comedies that mine humor from the banal, dreary and heartbreaking, Austin lays claim to two of the funniest, most frugal and most prolific of these blood-bound couples." And the Austin American-Statesman's Chris Garcia talks with all four of them. Via Matt Dentler.
Updates, 1/26: "Baghead is a complete blast, a meta-exploration of the creative process, genre and relationships that gets just about everything right," writes Tom Hall. "Most excitingly, the film's tonal shifts between comedy, romance, horror and drama all feel completely natural and earned, which is no small feat."
"Reflecting on their first two rousing screenings in Park City, Jay Duplass noted that the film played more distinctly as a comedy during its first showing at the Prospector theater, while two days later at the more intimate Holiday Village theater, some tense aspects of the story came across more distinctly," reports indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez.
Online viewing tip. Matt Dentler points to Andrew Rossi's New York Post video report on the Duplass brothers.
Update, 1/30: "After being suffocated by so many well-made but unoriginal independent films at Sundance, Baghead is like a blast of fresh air," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. "It has warmth and innovation, and the mischievous good sense to subtly make fun of the type of film that it is."

Posted by dwhudson at 6:42 AM

Sundance. Momma's Man.
"Momma's Man pierced me to my core," writes Michael Tully. "It is, without question, the most beautiful expression of a child's love for his parents that I have ever seen, heard, or read."
"A portrait of a young man at very loose ends - Matt Boren as Mikey - the film is at once a valentine to the bohemia of a lost New York and to [director Azazel] Jacobs's parents, the avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs and his wife, Flo, who play Mikey's tenderly loving mother and father," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Shot mostly inside Mr and Mrs Jacobs's actual downtown loft, a wonderland of clutter chockablock with books and all manner of cinematic ephemera, the film beautifully combines the idioms of independent fiction narrative with the personal expressiveness of the avant-garde for a work of surprising emotional and structural complexity. This is independent cinema defined."
Updated through 1/26.
Salon's Andrew O'Hehir awards his own Narrative Grand Prize: "For a film about a man who is arguably sliding into paralyzing depression, Momma's Man is a work of haunting loveliness and Proustian delicacy, shot through with unexpected humor. Jacobs's previous film, The GoodTimes Kid, was an appealing zero-budget indie in a Jim Jarmusch vein, but Momma's Man is a vast leap forward. It's a film of acute perceptions, great sadness and wordless, ecstatic joy, and the one unforgettable narrative film I saw at this year's festival."
"There's a lot of comedy in Momma's Man - Ken Jacobs, so deadpan he's almost sinister, is particularly fun to watch - but as it slinks towards a sweet/sad climax between mother and son, it's devastatingly melancholy," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "Momma's Man is, essentially, a chick flick for cool, bridging-30 boys."
"The strength of this film lies largely in Boren's capturing of Mikey's sense of confusion and helplessness," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "As Mikey's parents, Flo Jacobs and Ken Jacobs hit all the right notes of a mixed concern for their son's well-being and a desire to help him figure out what's going on."
Sara Cardace talks with Jacobs for New York's Vulture.
The Reeler talks with Jacobs, too.
Update: Online listening tip. Kevin Buist talks with Jacobs for the SpoutBlog.
Updates, 1/26: Michael Tully has more to say at Hammer to Nail: "Almost everyone I know who saw Momma's Man considers it to be by far the best film they saw at the festival, but it's interesting to discover that the only other people I know who shed tears over it were males.... I'm such a fan of the charismatic Jacobs that I was disappointed to realize he wasn't acting in the film alongside his parents. But it didn't take me long to understand that he couldn't have played the lead role. That would have been the worst decision of all (something a lesser artist would not have been able to understand). There had to be a level of remove.... To Jacobs, Momma's Man is a home movie he can watch when his parents, and the loft, are gone. To me, it might very well be the finest American independent film of the decade."
At indieWIRE, James Israel quotes Boren: "When we finished shooting the film I would stay up late dreaming about this incredible loft. It was like I always visualized Aza's Dad like a Willy Wonka and I thought if he pulled a book out that the walls were gonna change and I'd fall into something."
"Like Sugar and Ballast, the festival's other great narrative films, Jacobs's low-fi third feature forges unique stylistic territory for the American independent film while specifically recalling such disparate classics as Alexander Sokurov's Mother and Son and Albert Brooks's woefully underrated Mother," writes Rob Nelson at indieWIRE. "Jacobs's work is a rare cinematic expression of heartfelt matriphilia; someone in the industry with love to spare needs to pick up this gifted orphan right away."

Posted by dwhudson at 6:07 AM

Sundance. The Order of Myths.
"Many here were looking forward to Margaret Brown's second feature after her well-regarded music doc Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt, but Brown surpassed expectations with her remarkably assured The Order of Myths," writes AJ Schnack at indieWIRE. "Beautifully shot by Lee Daniel and Michael Simmonds and expertly edited by Brown, Michael Taylor and Geoffrey Richman, the film examines the time-honored tradition of Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama, where celebrations remain segregated between white and black residents."
"Handsomely shot and intelligently edited, with none of the maddening sloppiness that distorts too many nonfiction projects, the film explores the secret societies, the fancy-dress balls and the celebratory parades for a story that is at once very site-specific and seemingly simple and as big and richly complex as the United States itself," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.
It "may find an audience," suggests John Anderson in Variety, "but it will likely be because of the derisive nature of its portraiture rather than the weightier issues of race and class that helmer Margaret Brown attempts to grapple with - when not making some easy targets look ridiculous. Film's concern with entrenched sociopolitical attitudes is commendable, but snideness will more likely be the factor that broadens its appeal."
For Michael Ryan, writing at Hammer to Nail, this doc's far superior to Traces of the Trade.

Posted by dwhudson at 5:19 AM | Comments (2)

Sundance. Sunshine Cleaning.
"Following her beautifully impressionistic debut Rain and the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sylvia, New Zealand director Christine Jeffs lands somewhere in between with Sunshine Cleaning an affecting, well-acted drama that casts an even brighter spotlight on rising starlet Amy Adams," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "What could have been merely an exercise in quirky indie comedy... becomes a more serious dramedy about strained family relationships and overcoming the loss of loved ones."
"People, this sort of Freudian nonsense is killing narrative fiction," argues Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "Characters are far more intriguing and memorable when their behavior can't be reduced to the sum of their childhood traumas."
"It's in the assorted subplots of Megan Holly's script that the project's self-consciously calculated quirkiness rubs the wrong way," argues Variety's Todd McCarthy.
"It seems almost impossible that as people root through Sundance looking for the next Little Miss Sunshine (aka the little indie that was critically acclaimed, award-nominated and a big hit at the box office), the best contender is a film called Sunshine Cleaning and also stars Alan Arkin," writes Sara Vilkomerson in the New York Observer. "This one seems to have it all: fun and quirky plot (two sisters who go into business cleaning up after crime scenes), terrific performances from Emily Blunt and Amy Adams, with an undercurrent of sad family drama that had more than few members of the audience sniffling."
But for Mike Goodridge, writing for Screen Daily, "Sunshine Cleaning has none of that film's dark edges or eagerness to entertain, and is unlikely to follow its path to breakout box-office success."

Posted by dwhudson at 5:11 AM

January 24, 2008

Midnight Eye. Best of 07.
The gentlemen behind Midnight Eye, "the latest and best in Japanese cinema," present their generously annotated lists of the "Best (and Worst) of 2007." Both Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp top their lists with Hitoshi Yazaki's Strawberry Shortcakes. Mes: "Incontestably the best Japanese film of the year. Everything about it seems calculated for the Sex and the City and shojo manga crowds, but the result is closer in spirit, integrity and perceptiveness to Ryuichi Hiroki's Vibrator and It's Only Talk." And it's reviewed in this issue by Paul Spicer.
Nicholas Rucka's list is alphabetical, while Jason Gray comments, "In my Top 10 for this year there seems to be a mini-theme of films that explore little seen sides of Japanese society. This might be the strongest 12 months since I started doing annual lists for Midnight Eye."
And now, it's your turn. The Readers Poll is open for votes.
More reviews:

Paul Jackson places Paprika in the context of Satoshi Kon's career since Perfect Blue.

Johannes Schönherr tells the story behind and of Identity, a "collaboration between porno auteur Matsuo and identity researcher [Tetsuaki] Matsue."

Jasper Sharp on Yasuzo Masumura's A False Student (1960): "[D]espite a few dramatic missteps in the midsection that rob the powerful material of its full potential, it conjures up the same sense of competitiveness and the chaos of modern life as portrayed in his early classic Giants and Toys (1958)." Also, Tai Kato's By a Man's Face Shall You Know Him (1966).

Then Tom Mes recommends the "fully revised and redesigned edition" of Mark Schilling's No Borders, No Limits: Nikkatsu Action Cinema.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:40 PM

Shorts, 1/24.
"The third round of the Book Review's Reading Room series is up and percolating," announces the New York Times' Dwight Garner. "The topic this time: Walker Percy's odd, winsome 1962 novel The Moviegoer."
"I personally would propose these three words, which are certainly at the driving heart of my own practice: richness, intensity and gesture." Adrian Martin in a terrific interview that originally ran in the Slovenian magazine Ekran nearly a year ago and appearing in English now, thanks to the interviewer, interviewee and Girish.
"[I]t is only when the human interest is understood within its wider contexts specifically - not as the dramatic heart of a social message but as micro-developments within a macro-narrative - that I think Still Life emerges as one of the very richest and most important 'festival films' of recent years that I've had the fortune of seeing," writes Zach Campbell.
Reviewing Don't Touch the Axe at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, Ian Johnston stress how much it "is in keeping with Rivette's other films. And I have to say I'm simply left in awe at the formal mastery of this film. Rivette's firm, steady hand guides the film, scene by scene, with a calm precision; there's a finely-calibrated weight and solidity to every level of the film, from individual shot to sequence to the effect of the film as a whole.
Jimmy Carter Man from Plains gets Godfrey Cheshire thinking about the moment "when America's mind turned a fateful corner, the one separating a polity based on observable reality and one heavily infused with solipsistic fantasy." You'll want to read that Independent Weekly piece. Then, at the newly redesigned site for Vue Weekly, Brian Gibson has more on Jonathan Demme's doc.
"Oliver Stone has set his sights on his next directing project, Bush, a film focusing on the life and presidency of George W Bush, and attached Josh Brolin to play the title role." Michael Fleming's piece is more than the usual Variety news item. He gets Stone to tell him quite a lot about what he's got in mind, e.g., "if Nixon was a symphony, this is more like a chamber piece, and not as dark in tone," and to talk about losing Pinkville three weeks before shooting was to start.
Also: Jeffrey Wright and Adrien Brody are lined up for Cadillac Records, playing Muddy Waters and Leonard Chess, respectively, reports Dade Hayes.
Daniel Kasman annotates a list of his "favorite films that were given a theatrical run of at least a week in the United States in 2007."
Nick Davis revs up his countdown.
"Caramel, the directing debut of Lebanese actress/music video director Nadine Labaki, concerns five women who frequent a beauty salon in Beirut, their lives unfolding onscreen in between hair stylings and waxings (the latter accomplished with the sticky, burnt-sugar mixture for which the film is named)," writes Joanne Nucho at Reverse Shot. "[D]espite its ethnographic accuracy and refreshing open-endedness, Caramel is still a traditional movie, and an ultimately pleasing 'chick flick' at that, warm and charming. Though Caramel manages to steer clear of directly addressing the war, its specter haunts the film... At the same time this portrait is a hopeful one, and in some ways it's directed at people outside of Lebanon as well as those within, for whom everyday life goes on despite decades of conflict and turmoil."
"If Marlon Brando remains one of the very greatest of screen actors, perhaps it lies in a paradox: that he was the screen actor who more successfully than anybody else suggested the intimacy of the stage whilst in fact acting in front of a camera." Tony McKibbin in Film International.
A few months ago, Ztohoven, a Czech art collective, hacked the country's early morning weather broadcast with a video depicting a nuclear blast: "Across the Krkonose Mountains, or so it appeared, a white flash was followed by the spectacle of a rising mushroom cloud," writes Michael Kimmelman:

Some Czechs expressed outrage over Ztohoven's action, naturally, but in general it drew a mild, tolerant, even amused public response, in contrast to how terrorism-related pranks, or what might seem like them, have been widely greeted elsewhere. The incident instead has highlighted an old Czech tradition of tomfoolery that is a particular matter of national cultural pride.
Not long ago a film that became a local hit, Czech Dream, documented a boondoggle by two young Czech filmmakers, who enlisted advertisers and publicists to devise a marketing scheme for a nonexistent supermarket. The movie's goal, like Ztohoven's, was to wag the dog: lampoon media manipulation and public gullibility.

"Part social realism in its searing depiction of the plight of the underprivileged against the transforming economy of an increasingly modernized Turkey, and part poetic essentialism in its psychological portrait of a desperate man succumbing to the mania of a delusive, blind faith, Yilmaz Güney and Serif Gören's Umut (Hope) captures the precarious atmosphere of a nation at a political and economic crossroads." Writes acquarello.
Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) and Ross Douthat (Atlantic) both disagree with Manohla Dargis's take on Cloverfield - but for different reasons. More from DK Holm in the Vancouver Voice. Dave Itzkoff looks back on literary monsters. And then, for comic relief, there's John Rogers.
"Sumptuously photographed in glossy digital video by cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr, Youth Without Youth is extremely well crafted, handsomely mounted and almost impossible to sit through," writes Sean Burns in the Philadelphia Weekly.
For IFC News, Aaron Hillis talks with Woody Allen about Cassandra's Dream.
"[F]or Kimya Dawson, the 35-year-old den mother of the tiny anti-folk scene, all the attention for her music in the film Juno is a little troubling." Ben Sisario talks with her for the New York Times.
Laura Barnett talks with Jane Birkin for the Guardian. Also, Mark Brown reports on stage version of Brief Encounter and Eric Shorter remembers Don Fellows, 1922 - 2007.
Novid Parsi interviews Roger Ebert for Time Out Chicago. Via Movie City News.
Teeth: In the Austin Chronicle, Melanie Haupt talks with Mitchell Lichtenstein, while, in the Philadelphia City Paper, Sam Adams interviews Jess Weixler.
Nathan Lee: "Directed by Gregory Hoblit from a screenplay by a trio (a trio!) of whomevers, Untraceable hasn't the brains of a class-act psychothriller like The Silence of the Lambs (though it does reprise that film's titillating homophobia); worse yet, it lacks the balls to juice up the trashy verve of the Saw series. Stuck in the middle, it leaves everyone stranded, actors and audience alike."
Also in the Voice:

Ella Taylor on Orthodox Stance, "Jason Hutt's mildly absorbing vérité trot through the pugilist's quest for a junior title that will put him on the pro-boxing map." More from the Reeler and Bill Weber in Slant.

Julia Wallace on Trailer Park Boys: The Movie: "I'm sure the pot-laced antics of these trashy dudes are, like, totally hilarious on Canadian TV, but they don't translate well to America or the big screen." Also, Alice's House, "an utterly average foreign art-house film, with all the strengths and flaws that label implies."

Jim Ridley on How She Move: "Apart from the exuberant athleticism of the step battles... the movie's chief appeal is a largely unknown cast." More from Armond White in the New York Press.

"Seen 40 years after its initial release, Melvin Van Peebles's [Story of a Three-Day Pass] is a wildly uneven first feature that is often as awkward as the lovers in the film," writes Peter Nellhaus.
Tim Lucas: "The final ballot for the Sixth Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards has been posted, and I'm proud to announce that Video Watchdog and its contributors have received a total of nine (9) nominations this year." Also, a memorial fund for Maila "Vampira" Nurmi.
Offline reading tip. Doug Cummings recommends Beyond.
Online viewing tip #1. Jacques Prévert and Salvador Dalí at the DVblog.
Online viewing tip #2. The trailer for Dead On: The Life and Cinema of George A Romero. Via Coudal Partners.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:58 PM | Comments (2)

DVDs, 1/22.
"Even the best work from [John] Frankenheimer's prolific 60s heyday (he made 11 films that decade) has been unfairly overshadowed by the iconic status of The Manchurian Candidate (1962), one of the four films in [a new] set," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times.
More from Fernando F Croce in Slant: "Had Seven Days in May and Seconds also been included, it would have provided a fuller, scarier view of the paranoid urgency that made Frankenheimer such a wicked director in the 1960s. As it is, however, this DVD set gives a sturdy outline of the paradoxes in his lengthy career: a graduate of live television productions who loved baroquely cinematic setups, an admirer of classic craftsmanship nevertheless plagued with contemporary anxieties, a jittery modernist who ultimately found himself typecast as a terse action filmmaker."
"Venus in Furs remains a brilliant film, whether taken as a microcosmic view into the wild world of director Jess Franco or as a prime example of European Genre Cinema, exploding with creativity and style," writes Mike at Esotika Erotica Psychotica.
"King Kong the success was born in 1933. King Kong the smash happened in 1952." John McElwee tells the story at Greenbriar Picture Shows.
Ardvark at Twitch on Gandahar: "Once again René Laloux provides nearly 80 minutes of excellent eye-candy, and this time it supports an interesting story. While his efforts never seem to be as accomplished as, say, Hayao Miyazaki's, he is more like Mamoru Oshii: preaching to his own choir, concentrating on the things he himself does best."
For IFC News, Michael Atkinson reviews Saved from the Flames, a "cattershot collection of 'orphans' - scatterings of film that, by definition, profit nobody, and so are therefore only salvaged and restored by cinephilic charities and archives." And: "For story, coming at you like a stampede of wildebeest, Lars von Trier's The Kingdom - Series Two (1997) continues his 1994 saga with this nearly five-hour sequel."
In the Austin Chronicle, Rick Klaw reviews two films that "transformed movie storytelling by using revolutionary stop-motion techniques to produce realistic-looking monsters, aliens, and even spaceships": It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth Vs the Flying Saucers.
In Vue Weekly, Brian Gibson recommends No End in Sight and The Devil Came on Horseback.
DVD roundups: Paul Clark (ScreenGrab), Bryant Frazer, Peter Martin (Cinematical) and Gina McIntyre (Los Angeles Times).

Posted by dwhudson at 1:59 PM

Other fests, other events, 1/24.
"Noir City 6 has the usual spread of special guests, rare titles, and newly struck prints across ten nights of double-features," writes Max Goldberg at SF360. "Plenty of notable tidbits for the hardcore, in other words, and for everyone else a chance at the kind of immersion long underlying noir appreciation." Tomorrow through February 3.
Michael Guillén launches his coverage with an interview with Alan K Rode, a frequent contributor to Film Monthly and The Big Chat who can also be heard in more than a few DVD commentaries. Rode's new book is Charles McGraw: Biography of a Film Noir Tough Guy.
Aaron Hillis previews Envisioning Russia: A Century of Filmmaking, running tomorrow through February 14: "Expect film-school staples like The Battleship Potemkin and The Cranes Are Flying, as well as Soviet comedies and musicals, special-effects extravaganzas, Cold War dramas, a perestroika-era gem, contemporary stand-outs (including a special screening of Aleksander Sokurov's wartime allegory and NYFF selection Alexandra) - and, yes, the requisite Andrei Tarkovsky picture."
Also in the Voice: "First, a faith in the possibility of unknown quantities is a necessity when approaching Anthology Film Archives' selection of Polish films in Polish New Wave: A History of the Phenomenon That Never Existed," advises Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "The featured fare here screens with Brigadoon frequency, and is inaccessible even in the videotékas of deepest Greenpoint. I've had only a partial glimpse at the contents of the canisters en route to Anthology from Polska; nothing has been uninteresting." More from Steve Dollar in the New York Sun. Tomorrow through Sunday.
Acquarello has the lineup for this year's Film Comment Selects series, running February 14 through 28.
Mary Harron's coming to Durham "to launch the inaugural Filmmaker Residency Program sponsored by Duke University's Film/Video/Digital Program (FVD)," notes Neil Morris in the Independent Weekly. She arrives Monday; American Psycho screens Tuesday.
In the Austin Chronicle, Josh Rosenblatt previews the Austin Jewish Film Festival. Saturday through February 1.
"They didn't really anticipate going on with the Antoine Doinel character." At the Evening Class, Laura Truffaut, François's daughter, discusses The 400 Blows, its director and star, on the occasion of Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After, at the Pacific Film Archive through February 29.
Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King is on at the American Cinematheque through the end of the month and, in the LA Weekly, David Thomson urges you to "watch everything, not just every film they're showing but every frame of each, because Preminger knew that film was a natural corridor into desire and violence."
Stunt folk will be getting some of the attention they deserve on Tuesday at the Silent Theatre, reports Margaret Wappler in the Los Angeles Times.
The Lumière Reader's Tim Wong previews the tenth World Cinema Showcase, set to tour New Zealand this spring.
For Variety, David Mermelstein previews the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, running today through February 3, and Alissa Simon previews the Gothenburg Film Festival, running tomorrow though February 5.
"Last Friday night, people lined up around the block at the Anthology Film Archives to watch the avant-garde shorts of a Thai filmmaker whose last film made $16,000 in the US. Total," notes Vadim Rizov in the Tisch Film Review. "What was really weird was that, if Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethakul's work already borders the completely inscrutable and non-narrative, his shorts abandon it almost entirely."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:36 PM

Sundance. Pretty Bird.
"Written and directed by the engagingly rumpled young actor Paul Schneider (Lars and the Real Girl, All the Real Girls), this strident comedy about a deluded entrepeneur (Billy Crudup) trying to invent a rocket belt with the help of a paranoid scientist (Paul Giamatti) is notable for having no real people in it whatsoever," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "It's the kind of precious oddball whimsy that Sundance used to take to the bank and that here reaches a thundering dead end."
Updated through 1/26.
"File [Pretty Bird] under Fascinating Failure, and mark Schneider down as a talented eccentric who needs someone a little more grounded, à la David Gordon Green, to prevent him from escaping Earth's atmosphere," writes Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab.
Don't write it off completely, argues Scott Weinberg at Cinematical: "Worth seeing for Crudup, Giamatti and [David] Hornsby alone, the film also does a fine job of deflating a capitalist system that allows any old moron to make a quick buck. Toss in a typically amusing supporting turn from Kristen Wiig, and a few really unexpected plot contortions, and you've got a fine indie flick that's definitely worth a look."
David Carr observes Giamatti coping in Park City.
Update, 1/26: "Smart, sharp and lovely to watch, Pretty Bird... is all one can hope for from an actor making the transition to feature filmmaking," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at 11:44 AM

Sundance. Phoebe in Wonderland.
"First time writer/director Daniel Barnz knocks it out of the park with Phoebe in Wonderland, an imaginative, layered tale about a young girl struggling to fit in and find her place," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "Elle Fanning (younger sister of Dakota Fanning) stars as Phoebe, a nine-year-old girl who finds herself struggling against the conformity and rules around her. Phoebe is an intelligent and creative child with a passion for Alice in Wonderland."
"In a tour-de-force performance by Fanning (do the Fanning siblings do any less?) we see her deteriorate before our eyes but Barnz creates a Heavenly Creatures-like world in which she travels into as Phoebe finds solace in the Alice in Wonderland characters," writes Jason Guerrasio at Filmmaker. "As the film moves on fantasy overtakes reality leaving to a conclusion that many may feel is a little too campy but it's the journey you take to get there that's the thing that kept me into it."
"It's frustrating to see a movie come so close to articulating something specific and important about being the parent of a special needs child - or any child, really - and then retreat into broad strokes, out of fear of losing the audience," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray.
"The main reason to see Phoebe in Wonderland is for yet another astonishing Fanning performance," writes Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "How these little girls are able to summon such powerful reserves of fear and anguish and terror, I have no idea. I'm not really sure I want to know, to be honest."
The Reeler and indieWIRE talk with Barnz.
Online viewing tip. Zoom In Online's "Meet the Artists" video with Barnz.

Posted by dwhudson at 9:28 AM

Sundance. Choke.
"The adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Choke had its world premiere as a part of the the dramatic competition [Monday] evening at the Sundance Film Festival, and a packed audience of 600-plus were treated to a film that mixed Palahniuk's dark and acid conceits with a playfully sardonic tone and some terrific acting and craft," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy.
Updated through 1/30.
"[I]t concerns the misadventures of Victor (Sam Rockwell), sex addict, scam artist, colonial re-enactor, and momma's boy," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "There are as many laughs as gasps of calculated shock in Choke, and everything to do with Victor's job at a historical theme park is blitheringly funny. The film loses focus, though, and eventually it loses its nerve, although always entertainingly."
"Palahniuk's blend of slapstick and social satire can play pretty heavy-handed on the page, but [director Clark] Gregg has transformed Choke into a light-hearted, filthy-minded farce loaded with delightful performances," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Rockwell slithers through the film with the self-mockery and self-loathing of a certified cad and lounge lizard, and Brad William Henke is especially good as his compulsive-masturbator best friend. (Don't miss Joel Grey, in a brief but marvelous cameo as the battered senior member of Rockwell's 12-step group.)"
"Clark Gregg sets himself a formidable task for his first feature effort: Adapting the manic, farcical, disturbing world of lit cult idol Chuck Palahniuk," writes Dennis Harvey in Variety. "Palahniuk's antic absurdism is duly present, but the hurtling pace and barely-underlying nihilism that transferred to screen so vividly in Fight Club aren't much in evidence here.... To be sure, certain narrative ideas and verbal tropes will still tickle tome's fans and may strike the gamely uninitiated as uproarious."
IndieWIRE interviews Gregg.
Online viewing tip. Zoom In Online's "Meet the Artists" video with Gregg.
Updates: "[A]fter a fantastically funny opening at a sex addict support meeting, Choke begins to slide, the gaps between laughs steadily grow and by film's end you're left wondering how something with so much potential could end up so ordinary," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE.
"The performances are solid and kudos are in order to Gregg for directing a varied cast," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online. "Rockwell nails the conflicted, tacitly hostile yet still lovably scruffy demeanor of Victor. Anjelica Huston who plays Ida, Victor's mother, embodies the ubiquitous eccentric aunt archetype perfectly but punches it up to just the right amount of crazy.... When all is said and done, Choke is an enjoyable, albeit twisted, romp birthed from the work of one of America's freshest and uniquely talented novelists. Apparently, Fox Searchlight agrees as they picked the film up for distribution for a cool $5 million."
Update, 1/28: Online viewing tip. David Poland lunches with Rockwell and Huston.
Update, 1/30: For the IFC's Alison Willmore, Choke "demonstrates that without an audacious filmmaker behind them, most of [Palahniuk's] ideas don't seem more remarkable than any in the average Sundance quirk-off. Not that Choke isn't amusing, salacious and halfway touching, but its elements of working in a colonial-themed tourist attraction, pretending to choke in restaurants so that strangers will take an interest in you and picking up women at sex-addition group meetings do blend into the festival's other offerings of abused agoraphobic porn addicts and orphaned professional suicide note writers."

Posted by dwhudson at 9:22 AM | Comments (1)

Sundance. The Merry Gentleman.
"Various critics I respect wandered out into the near-zero cold after the Eccles Center premiere of The Merry Gentleman complaining about [Michael] Keaton's technical limitations as a filmmaker, so I can only presume they exist," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But I felt tremendously grateful for the stillness and quietness of Keaton's picture, its ominous, anonymous American atmospherics and its reticent refusal to open its characters and story to us beyond a certain point, especially considering it's a movie about - wait for it - a suicidal hit man!"
"Latest addition to the resurgent hitman genre sees Keaton, in a very enigmatic role, gentlemanly yielding acting honors and the lion's share of screen time to the ever-impressive Kelly Macdonald," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Macdonald alone provides the film with a raison d'etre, but another one is the way the picture is composed visually. Keaton and cinematographer Chris Seager... worked out a way to shoot the action that can best be described as discreet. Scenes are observed quietly, with thoughtfulness and tact embedded into the luminous, highly textured imagery. The subtly dynamic camera style represents a rarified pleasure, perhaps, but emerges as the film's most distinctive achievement."
At Cinematical, Scott Weinberg finds it "a deliberately paced (some might say 'slow') crime drama that brings a strange sense of warmth, dark humor, and even some odd romance to a potentially dreary tale.... But what a pleasure it is to see Michael Keaton back on the big screen again, and the veteran actor does a fantastic job on both sides of the camera."
In the New York Times, David M Halbfinger talks with Keaton about how, at the last minute, he came to direct "his first feature with one unproven star, a shoestring budget, just five weeks of prep time and a shoot lasting all of 25 days."
Online viewing tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir interviews Keaton.

Posted by dwhudson at 9:12 AM

Sundance. Blind Date.
"If you're a big fan of Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, then I have some potentially good news: the actors' latest film consists of little more than the two of them... sitting in a bar... talking... for about 80 minutes," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "And since these are a pair of exceedingly fine actors, the experience of Blind Date is not what you'd call unpleasant - but it sure isn't all that exciting."
Updated through 1/28.
"This is a claustrophobic, deliberately anti-realistic picture about a middle-aged married couple (Tucci and Patricia Clarkson) who are so seriously estranged in the aftermath of tragedy that they adopt various unconvincing personas and go on dates as if they've just met," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Like Steve Buscemi's Interview, which premiered here last year, Blind Date is an adaptation of a film by the late Dutch director Theo van Gogh (who was infamously murdered by an Islamic extremist, an irrelevant but irresistible fact). Both are exercises in nihilism and/or misanthropy set in an artificial nowhere-space, and much as Tucci and Clarkson pour their estimable talents into Blind Date - it has many moments of delicacy, humor and wrenching, unbearable loss - there's only enough oxygen in the film to support a chilly little flame that flickers a little before going out."
Sara Cardace talks with Tucci for New York's Vulture.
Update, 1/25: Online viewing tip. At Zoom In Online, a "Meet the Artists" interview with Tucci.
Update, 1/28: "Blind Date makes the case that serious melodrama is not Tucci's strong suit as a storyteller," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE.

Posted by dwhudson at 9:02 AM

Sundance. Downloading Nancy.
"Sundance Festival Director Geoff Gilmore introduced Downloading Nancy as 'the most intense film of the festival,'" notes Erik Davis at Cinematical. "Not only is he absolutely right, but it's also powerful, emotional, overwhelming and, most importantly, extremely uncomfortable. God bless whoever takes a chance on this film and attempts to market it, honestly, to a mass audience, because Downloading Nancy is a sick and twisted rollercoaster ride that climbs fast and drops slowly... leaving you plenty of time to absorb its raw insanity along the way."
Updated through 1/30.
"The film was shot by legendary cinematographer Christopher Doyle (Wong Kar-wai's frequent collaborator) in various shades of cadaver-dishwater gray and blue," notes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "[Maria] Bello's skin-peeling, ultra-depresso performance is wrenching and brave, calling for both emotional and physical nakedness. Can a film with those attributes also be insulting garbage? It's a difficult aesthetic-philosophical conundrum, but having sat through this damn thing I now have an answer."
"A forbidding and morbid piece of psycho-sadomasochism, Downloading Nancy is chilly enough to cause global cooling all by itself," writes Variety's Todd McCarthy. "Built around a swimming-in-the-deep-end performance by Maria Bello that is the definition of fearless, this first feature by big-deal Swedish commercials and music vid helmer Johan Renck feels like a walk-on-the-wild-side Euro entry rather than anything that would normally come out of the Amerindie movement. Commercial prospects, at least Stateside, are below zero."
"Downloading Nancy is one of those films that goes beyond in its pretentious efforts to top some of the worst Sundance bad habits," writes David Poland. "At first, I just thought it was going to be the Actress Over The Top Where's My Indie Spirit Award film. But that is actually insulting to those films, which generally fail in their goals, but at least make a game effort."
IndieWIRE interviews Renck.
Updates, 1/26: "This is not only the best film at Sundance this year, it provides insight into where you might be headed if you don't start fighting for yourself," declares Jesse Hawthorne Ficks at Pixel Vision.
"The energy of the film belongs entirely to Bello, who shows dimensions of sadness she's never revealed to audiences until now," writes Ryan Stewart at In the Company of Glenn.
Update, 1/30: "This is a grim film from beginning to end, but it's not without its merits," writes Rob Davis for Paste. "And yet I wish I understood how or why things came to this and knew more about the rope whose end Nancy has reached. I wish I'd been able to slip into the head of one of the characters, past the abraded skin and vibrating skull and into the hurting brain, but the psychobabble offered no entry, nor did the 'Inspired by True Events' title that appeared at the end, thumbing its nose at anyone who'd been thinking, 'Right. Give me a break.'"

Posted by dwhudson at 8:55 AM

Sundance. Sugar.
"No one-hit wonders, Half Nelson writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck have created another stunning, subtle achievement with Sugar, a deeply resonant story about a Dominican baseball talent recruited for America's minor leagues," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "If Half Nelson showed off the duo's skillful attention to character, verite camerawork and progressive politics in their native Brooklyn, Sugar proves they are just as adept working on a wider canvas, away from home."
Updated through 1/30.
"[I]'s a resplendent fuck-you to overwrought sophomore expectations: it has a cast of mostly unknowns, much of it's in Spanish, and it is, unapologetically, a baseball movie, albeit one about the dingier parts of the pro game that don't often make it to screen," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "Not even romance gets romanticized in film as much as baseball, but Sugar is adamantly naturalistic, using its main character's journey to brush on themes of race and globalism with the lightest of touches."
"[Algenis Perez] Soto is an absolute delight as Sugar: handsome, charming and with a killer smile, he's in every scene and carries practically the entire show," writes Kim Voynar at Cinematical. "Despite its backdrop of baseball, Sugar is more a coming-of-age tale than a sports movie, but the baseball scenes are incredibly shot; in fact, the entire film is just gorgeous, like a painting brought to life. Credit cinematographer Andrij Parekh (who also shot Half Nelson) for that. So many indie films lack that true artistry around looking beautiful on the screen. Boden and Fleck know what they're doing, and I'd expect we'll see many more films from this pair in the coming years. They're just warming up."
"Sugar's story takes some unexpected shifts in the last third of the film, but what's wonderful about Boden and Fleck's movie is that it never tries to psychoanalyze its protagonist, never inserts a helpful voice-over or an Anglo girlfriend to explain everything," writes Andrew O'Hehir. "Sugar's journey and destination just make sense, and if the hero of this tender and lovingly constructed film is a dignified young man who holds himself at a distance from us, we'll respect him all the more for it in the morning."
And by the way, Salon should not be all but hiding "Beyond the Multiplex."
Meantime, the Reeler talks with Fleck and Boden.
Online viewing tip. Zoom In Online's "Meet the Artists" video with Boden and Fleck.
Updates, 1/25: "It's one thing to get a great performance out of [Ryan] Gosling; it's something else entirely to guide an unknown like Mr Soto to find the emotional truth of his character, tears and a persuasive knuckleball included," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It's a lovely turn that rides out a tricky drama all the way to a muted, wonderful finish that resists the usual sports-movie clichés."
Sugar is "the most realistic narrative film about baseball that I can ever remember seeing," writes Jason Guerrasio at Filmmaker, "part fish-out-of-water, part rags-to-riches, but always intriguing and at times heart wrenching to watch, whether you're a baseball fan or not."
Updates, 1/26: "Sugar lacks the tough edge of Half Nelson," writes Howard Karren at In the Company of Glenn. "But Boden and Fleck's beautifully polished style of filmmaking, with its low-key dramatics and pitch-perfect performances (often using baseball players and nonprofessionals as actors), more than makes up for it."
"Sugar offers an array of thoughts on the many variations of the American dream, the struggle of immigrants hoping to assimilate into American culture, the pressures facing professional athletes, and the allure of performance enhancing drugs," writes S James Snyder in the New York Sun. "'I certainly hope it's bigger than just baseball,' Mr Fleck said on the night of the Sundance world premiere."
Update, 1/29: "It's a gorgeous film - subtle, observant, full of life - yet the surprise isn't how good it is but rather how true it rings," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice.
Update, 1/30: "Whether the end is a frustrating side-step or a personal triumph depends on whether you've taken the many opportunities for understanding Miguel that Boden and Fleck offer," writes Rob Davis for Paste. "I found it sublime."

Posted by dwhudson at 7:23 AM

Berlinale. Panorama, Forum. (+ Rotterdam.)
Another Berlinale lineup's complete now: "This year's Panorama will present 17 feature films in its main programme, 15 in Panorama Special and 18 in its Panorama Dokumente series. 31 of these films are world premieres and 17 directorial debuts."
"Forum expanded will accompany the Forum with exhibitions, films and video programs, performances, and discussions. More than fifty artists, filmmakers, musicians and performers are represented from over ten countries." And the Forum elaborates on ten "Special Screenings," featuring, among others, Václav Havel and Wolfgang Tillmans.
"Organised by the Berlinale in cooperation with the Frankfurt Book Fair for the third time, the event 'Breakfast & Books' enables representatives from publishing houses, literary agents and producers to meet for a pitching session, followed by breakfast together."
And the Berlinale's devoting a compact series to US films dealing with the Vietnam War, too.
"If it's true that the buzz must begin before a film hits its first big market, then Rotterdam - cleverly positioned from Jan 23 through Feb 3, just before Berlin and therefore the first major Euro fest of the year - holds an ideal spot," writes Jay Weissberg for Variety. "It's the old one-two punch, where pics lauded at Rotterdam drop into Berlin with their reputations already aglow." Via They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?

Posted by dwhudson at 6:52 AM | Comments (3)

Park City Dispatch. 6.
Brian Darr on one of the best films he's caught yet at Sundance.
Making my Sundance home base here in Salt Lake City has given me opportunities to see certain films before they've played 30 miles up the mountain in Park City, where buzz can become deafening. Yesterday evening I saw one such film: Blue Eyelids, which will have at least three Park City screenings over the festival's last few days. I took note of this debut feature from director Ernesto Contreras when it appeared on film scholar Sergio de la Mora's list of last year's best Mexican films, and I'm so glad I made sure to fit it into my schedule here.
Blue Eyelids is a tale, almost fable-like at times, of a loner (Cecilia Suárez) so isolated that when she wins a trip for two to a beach resort she invites along an equally solitary man (Enrique Arreola) who may or may not be a total stranger to her. Before heading on the vacation together, the pair go through the motions of falling in love but struggle to connect. They go on several dates: a picnic in which they each end up lost in their own thoughts, a movie date (the film-within-a-film they watch is also called Blue Eyelids) and a dancing date that turns into a near-disaster.
Each of these sequences blurs the separation between reality and an inner world by drawing our attention to the soundtrack. The recurring use of Dave Berry singing "This Strange Effect" reinforces the achingly melancholy mood Contreras has summoned up for his perhaps fundamentally dissociated characters. I'm not precisely sure what an occasionally reintroduced parallel plot about an elderly woman and her nurse means for the film overall, though I have my theories.
Blue Eyelids brings to mind Eric Rohmer's The Green Ray, if only for its middle class milieu and its use of a summer vacation as a metaphor for a wider condition. It may not be the masterpiece The Green Ray is, but it's among the best films I've seen at this festival so far.
-Brian Darr

Posted by dwhudson at 1:28 AM | Comments (2)

Bookforum. Feb/Mar 08. (+ Atlantic.)
"It's amazing to think that Paranoid Park the film originated as a novel, and it's even more amazing to think that the film is rather faithful to its source," writes Bilge Ebiri. Besides his engaging telling of the story behind the adaptation, there's little else in the new issue of Bookforum that's directly film-related. Even so, this'll probably be the highlight of my reading day; maybe yours, too.
If you begin at the beginning, that'll be James Wolcott's piece on Donald Barthelme, a Glenn Kenny favorite (and some day, I'll have to relate my own brush-with-greatness Barthelme story). How about an appetizer first, though: Barthelme's "The Rise of Capitalism," hand-picked from Jessamyn West's barthelmismo by wood s lot.
And course, there's much more essential reading in this issue; Nathan Heller's piece on Guy Debord's war board game, for example. In keeping with the decision made several issues back, it's all here, online, front to back.
In other welcome news, another magazine has decided that the best plug for the magazine is, in fact, the magazine. The Atlantic's site is freely accessible to all as of today: "Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year the Atlantic was founded."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:00 AM

January 23, 2008

Park City, 1/23.
Peter Knegt relays one great Sundance moment.
"And on the fifth night, the wallets opened," writes David M Halbfinger in the New York Times.
"It happened maybe a day later than last year, but the acquisitions floodgates have opened a bit at the Sundance Film Festival." Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay has news and pointers; indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez has the names and the numbers.
"At the halfway point at this year's Slamdance Film Festival, few films have emerged as consensus favorites among festivalgoers," writes Brandon Harris for Filmmaker. "So far, the documentary competition seems to boast a much stronger roster of titles than the narrative side. Although it hardly qualifies as a market, in this year's of cautious buyers in Park City, no films have picked up significant sales buzz, the way The King of Kong did at last year's festival, where it sold to Picturehouse before it's first screening."
"Sundance ranks among the youngest of major film festivals, both in the average age of its filmmakers and of its attendees, which on the one hand makes it a reliable nexus of new filmmaking voices, and on the other makes it susceptible to more than its share of Salinger-lite exercises in adolescent naval-gazing," writes Scott Foundas in the Voice.
At Cinematical, Kim Voynar reports on the Women in Film panel - and she's got pix.
Stephen Garrett's blogging from Park City for Esquire.
Photos: Shawn Levy (more) and Ray Pride.
Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore assess the fest so far at IFC News.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:55 PM

Sundance. American Son.
"Politics turn very personal in American Son, director Neil Abramson's standout drama about a young Marine (Nick Cannon) on leave before shipping off to Iraq," writes Steve Ramos at indieWIRE. "It's the Iraq War movie audiences have been waiting to see, one that reduces the Iraq debate to the conflicts of one man facing his decision to enlist and coming to terms with all that he may lose back home as a result.... Abramson has made quality films before, dramas Without Air and Defining Maggie, documentaries Bob Smith USA and Soldier Child but American Son... looks to bring him the attention he deserves."
"Really, though, this isn't an Iraq movie," pleads Mike D'Angelo at ScreenGrab. "Think of it more as 25th Hour with combat duty in lieu of prison. Nothing that happens, least of all Mike's 'character arc,' is especially revelatory, but the film boasts an immediacy and specificity that puts most of this year's other American indies to shame. It's a rare film in which you genuinely feel as if you've just been plunked down in the middle of a life in progress; every character, no matter how small or insignificant, seems to have an existence that extends beyond the requirements of that particular scene."
"What a thrill to watch a small story get told with a focused intensity that leaves you breathless and simply in awe of the power of watching actors give honest direct performance," writes Mike Ryan at Hammer to Nail. "Not one second of this film felt off or untrue... Hollywood hasn't done a realistic romance like this one in a very long time, if I were a distributor I would be on this film in a second."
"American Son is blessed with a powerful, honest screenplay by first-timer Eric Schmid, and Cannon - who has always been charismatic, if nothing else - displays a remarkable talent for drama," writes Eric D Snider at Cinematical. Abramson's "eye for real human drama helps make American Son a compelling picture."
"This is conventional dramatic material played with an occasionally heavy hand, but sculpted with care and quiet assurance," writes Justin Chang in Variety.
Online viewing tip. Zoom In Online's "Meet the Artists" video with Abramson.

Posted by dwhudson at 3:53 PM

4 Months..., 1/23.
"Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is as good as you've heard - ravaging, provocative, deeply moving, and expertly crafted -but it may not be what you expect," writes Chris Wisniewski at indieWIRE. It's "a tense, riveting thriller (of a sort) that subtly evokes the experiences of women in a society that fiercely regulates their lives and bodies, often reducing them to commodities to be bought, sold, and bartered, no different at the extreme from the Kent cigarettes and orange Tic Tacs traded on the Bucharest black market."
Updated through 1/30.
"For all its long behavioral takes, 4 Months is remarkably unshowy," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "Where [The Death of Mr Lazarescu] was an exceedingly dark comedy, 4 Months is a shockingly matter-of-fact horror film." Then, there's a second part to this piece in which Hoberman looks back on 2007 as "the year of the abortion - or perhaps we should say the abortion-not":

There can be no female agency in Knocked Up, Waitress and Juno - not because they are comedies, but because, in each scenario, unwanted pregnancy is the joke played (by God?) on the female lead. As the most successful of the preg protags, she who is Knocked Up is necessarily the most smacked down - the glass ceiling turns out to be Alison's own uterus. Jenna and Juno are less formidable, but unexpected fertility mocks their dreams of autonomy. All three are taught their place by their own bodies - and what's more, they learn to like it.
[...]
4 Months is too specific to suggest a tract, let alone an allegory. As I said, it's a thriller. In the most visceral sense, this is a movie about living with terror - political and biological. Like Knocked Up and the others, it's set in a world where unwanted pregnancies occur, and legal abortion is not an option.

"There is plenty here to fuel both sides of the abortion debate," writes Anthony Lane before divulging what some might consider a spoiler in his New Yorker review. "Yet this is not an issue movie. We are not being forced to vote, and the characters are defined less by any stated beliefs than by the moral texture of their actions."
"From Italian neorealism onward, every realistic film has been as much about the present as about the past," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Hence, as I watched Mr Mungiu's work, I had the feeling that, thanks to its palpable location realism, certain aspects of Romanian life have not become idyllic in the two decades since the removal of the Communist overlords."
Earlier: Cannes, Toronto, New York, LA and 1/16.
Updates, 1/24: "It's momentously drab, obvious and guilt-inducing," writes Armond White in the New York Press of this "mystifyingly over-praised entry in what's being sold as the Romanian New Wave."
"4 Months isn't even about abortion; it's about the underground black economies which pop up when the command variety cease to function properly," argues the Reeler, adding that the film should end 20 minutes before it does.
Updates, 1/25: "[T]he camera doesn't follow the action, it expresses consciousness itself," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. 4 Months... is "a pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting and haunted intellectual and aesthetic achievement." It "deserves to be seen by the largest audience possible, partly because it offers a welcome alternative to the coy, trivializing attitude toward abortion now in vogue in American fiction films, but largely because it marks the emergence of an important new talent in the Romanian writer and director Cristian Mungiu."
The House Next Door's going all out on this one with reviews from Keith Uhlich, Lauren Wissot and Steven Boone.
"It is a stroke of subtle inspiration that it is Otilia and not Gabita who is the focus of the story," writes Daniel Kasman. "Mungiu's evocation of the almost ever-present fear and guilt that invades every physical space of the film becomes all the more poignant and heartrending because it comes not from the most obvious sufferer but from one at the immediate periphery."
Mungiu "knows when to cut someone out of a frame and when to include them, and when he does decide to include something, you can't take your eyes from it," writes Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical. "In one scene, Otihttp://www.cinematical.com/2008/01/25/review-4-months-3-weeks-and-2-days-jeffreys-take/lia decides to look through the doctor's bag while he's in the other room, then fumbles to put everything back as he approaches. That's an ancient gambit - almost Hitchcockian - but Mungiu's single-frame, single-take approach adds freshness to it. That's the film's secret. Rather than asking why Gabita needs to go to a back-alley hotel-room doctor for help, it asks, more directly: will Gabita survive?"
"It's a riveting, wrenching, horrifying and beautifully told story," writes Marcy Dermansky.
Online listening tip #1. Mungiu and Anamaria Marinca are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.
Online listening tip #2. David Edelstein on NPR.
Updates, 1/27: "4 Months unfolds like one of those street-level Dardenne brothers movies (Rosetta, L'Enfant), especially once Marinca has to hustle to secure the hotel or satisfy her self-centered boyfriend's request to attend his mother's birthday party," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "But just as often, Mungiu keeps the camera running for much longer than other directors would, usually in tight, constricting spaces where the audience can feel the characters' anxiety deepening."
"[T]his nonstop anxiety-fest could never be mistaken, as Lazarescu frequently was, for black comedy," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve.
Howard Feinstein talks with Mungiu for indieWIRE.
Update, 1/29: Online listening tip. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Mungiu.
Update, 1/30: Jason Shamai in the San Francisco Bay Guardian on the birthday dinner scene: "Stubbornly stationary, this sequence is as impressive as that famous kinetic take in Children of Men. And the subtleties of the conversation, together with a chillingly apropos conversation with her boyfriend shortly after (he's a massive shit, but is she also covering her bases?), prove the party to be less a dramatic contrast with the preceding events across town than a thickening of the septic social context in which those events occur. It is, as much as abortion, what the film is about."

Posted by dwhudson at 3:35 PM

Lawrence Weiner.
Lawrence Weiner: As Far as the Eye Can See, an exhibition on view at the Whitney through February 10, "includes his foundational pseudo-syllogism Declaration of Intent (1969)," notes Ed Halter in the Voice, "which encapsulates his career-long modus operandi: '1. The artist may construct the work. 2. The work may be fabricated. 3. The work may not be built.' But for all his rejection of object-making, Weiner is no slouch behind the camera: During the past four decades, the artist has made over 30 videos and films, ranging from brief animations to feature-length cinematic productions. Presented in a generous Whitney-programmed series at Anthology Film Archives, Weiner's moving-image output continues his interest in forebrain language play, but reveals a more sensual, even unabashedly pervy side not seen elsewhere."
Updated through 1/24.
In the New York Sun, Bruce Bennett focuses on two of the films on offer, Passage to the North (1981) and: "Just as Mr Weiner's early painted propeller studies and 'shaped canvas' experiments were informed and influenced by the work of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella, A First Quarter [1973], which was produced under the auspices of New York's Leo Castelli Gallery, owes a stylistic debt to vanguard French filmmaking of the 60s."
The series opens today and runs through Tuesday.
Earlier this month, Christian Viveros-Fauné reviewed the Whitney exhibition for the Voice: "At the butt end of a decade-long spending spree, folks today are anxiously casting about for models - old and new - of creative austerity. To consider Weiner in this light is to see the work of this 65-year-old artist as what it is not: Hardly an aesthetic countermeasure, his books and sign paintings present instead the artistic equivalent of a hairshirt."
Lawrence Weiner will be "Talking Art" with John Slyce at the Tate Modern on February 2.
Update, 1/24: At the Reeler, Miriam Bale has a few recommendations. "Another selection worth seeing is the feature A Second Quarter (the last in an intended series of four); its gorgeous color cinematography consists of compositions so static that every movement within the frame is emphasized. The movie is the distillation of a feature film - any feature film - to the basics of its own rhythmic progression: a mysterious plot unfolds dramatically but is communicated solely through lists, question/answers and recitations of the alphabet."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:51 PM

On the Foreign Language Oscar nominees.
Besides 4 Months... and Persepolis, were any other worthy contenders for the Foreign Language Oscar overlooked? But of course. Ronald Bergan revisits a wide open field. A few notes follow.
As I was on the Fipresci jury at the Palm Springs International Festival, I must be one of the few people on earth who has seen almost all of the 63 submissions for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. I say this not to boast but to elicit pity. However, it makes me more qualified than most to judge the final round of Oscar nominees.
Because of its proximity to Los Angeles, the self-styled "movie capital of the world," it is a particularity of the Palm Springs Festival, now in its 19th year, to screen as many of the Foreign Language submissions as possible just prior to the announcement of the short list. Our jury of three had the unenviable task, with the help of DVDs sent to us a few weeks before the festival, to find a winner from the 53 submissions from countries ranging from Argentina to Vietnam. Unfortunately, only 10 percent were of a level worth considering.
Most of the films were either too bad or too good to have any chance of winning an Oscar. One wonders what criteria were used by the committees of the countries in choosing their candidates. Some obviously had in mind what they believed to be the kind of film that the Academy goes for. Obviously this was the reasoning behind Indonesia's choice of Denias, Singing on the Cloud, a simplistic propagandist piece for the government, over the extraordinary Opera Jawa. It was sad also to watch the Philippines representative, Donsol, a crudely made film about white whale sharks, when they had an excellent gang film called Tribe at their disposal.
Presumably, Peru could come up with nothing better than Crossing a Shadow, a leaden biopic, with faint echoes of Fitzcarraldo, about a pioneering engineer (played by an actor who would have won a prize for the best moustache). Other disappointments were the submissions from India (a spectacular but conventional Bollywood melodrama entitled Eklavya: The Royal Guard), Norway (the unfunny misogynistic Gone With the Woman), Thailand (a 165-minute gory swordwielding saga, King of Fire - presumably they considered Syndromes and a Century too advanced for the Academy), Switzerland (a feel-good geriatric comedy called Late Bloomers), Iran (M for Mother, a sentimental soap opera lacking anything that one has come to admire in that country's cinema) and Colombia (Satanas, a distasteful episodic drama featuring a serial killer).
The countries which came up with excellent films (maybe not their best) were Denmark (The Art of Crying, about a remorseful abusive father), Japan (I Just Didn't Do It, a gripping "Wrong Man" condemnation of the Japanese legal system and beyond), Bosnia (It's Hard To Be Nice, a delightfully sardonic view of the country, ably illustrating the title) and Turkey (Takva, A Man's Fear of God, a brave exposure of religious - Muslim - corruption). Hats off to Sweden for submitting Roy Andersson's quirky black comedy You, The Living, knowing (or not) that it would be too singular for the conservative Academy.
Although 4 Months, Three Weeks, Two Days (Romania), Persepolis (France), Belle Toujours (Portugal, because of the director, Manoel d'Oliveira) and Secret Sunshine (Korea) were among the cream of the crop in competition (Silent Light was not shown in Palm Springs), we decided that it would be somewhat pointless to add to the myriad plaudits they have received. (However, we presented acting awards to the two fine female leads in 4 Months, and to the hitherto overlooked Song Gang-Ho in Secret Sunshine.) We, therefore, presented the Fipresci prize to Armin, a Croatian movie directed by Ognjen Svilici, "because of its sensitive portrayal of a father and son relationship and the subtle intimations of unseen horrors, brilliantly evoked in a serio-comic manner."
Not surprisingly, the Academy has gone for content over style, the academic (they are the Academy Awards after all) over the innovative, the respectable over the adventurous - obtusely ignoring the far better films mentioned in the previous paragraph - the nominees being The Counterfeiters (Austria), Beaufort (Israel), Mongol (Kazakhstan), Katyn (Poland) and 12 (Russia).
-Ronald Bergan

"Roy Andersson and his tragicomedy about humankind, You, the Living, was the darling of [Monday] night's annual ceremony in Stockholm for the Guldbagge Awards, taking home the most prestigious statuettes for Best Film, Best Director and Best Script," reports Annika Pham for Cineuropa.
Over at the Evening Class, Michael Hawley looks back on the best European films he caught at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
Earlier: James Van Maanen on Armin and his discussion with three of the Croatian directors represented in last fall's series, Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema.

Posted by dwhudson at 12:30 PM | Comments (6)

Jeanne Moreau @ 80.
The German press congratulates Jeanne Moreau on her 80th birthday: Michael Althen (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, lots of pix), Thomas Klein (film-dienst), Claudia Lenssen (die taz), Gerhard Midding (Die Welt) and Christina Tilmann (Die Tagesspiegel).
And in French, Libération.
For something in English, you might turn to Chris Wiegand's profile for the BBC.

Posted by dwhudson at 6:51 AM | Comments (2)

Sundance. Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?
"Perhaps the most anticipated documentary of this year's festival, Morgan Spurlock returns to Sundance with Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden, a follow up his 2004 debut, the piquant Super Size Me," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online. "Thankfully, the film is about much more than a singular manhunt, evolving into a primer on the history of geopolitical affairs in the Middle East, particularly that of applied American foreign policy."
Updated through 1/25.
"Inspired by the impending birth of his first child, Spurlock hits upon one thing he can do to make the world a safer place for his yet-to-be-born offspring; find and capture Osama bin Laden," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "As Spurlock notes in his introduction, 'If I've learned anything from big budget action films, it's that complicated world problems are best solved by one lonely guy....' And while Spurlock may not actually answer the question of where, he actually tackles, with humor, probing wit and a certain grace, the much more important question of why."
In the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Day answers the question posed in the title and adds, "It may seem like I'm spoiling the movie, but I'm really not. Because as Spurlock himself discovers in his odyssey across the Middle East, Bin Laden the man is beside the point now. His ideas and followers have grown much larger than anything a single person could hope to harness and locating him would do nothing to stop the horrific tide of violence in that part of the world."
"We started with the intention of actually finding the man, but at the end of the story, of course it comes out that we didn't find him," Spurlock tells the New York Sun's S James Snyder. "But there are so many other answers here as to what helps create someone like Osama bin Laden, what pushes rational people to come to him with this idea of, 'If I strap myself with explosives, it will solve these problems.'" And Snyder adds: "Mr Spurlock, who uses an array of techniques to make Where in the World seem lighter in tone - from cartoon sequences to a subplot involving the birth of Mr Spurlock's first child to a mock-up of a video game that pits a digitized Mr Spurlock against a digitized Mr bin Laden - said he believes his more humorous approach to the subject matter will have a better chance of connecting with audiences that have thus far ignored a wave of Iraq-based documentaries and dramas."
"[Y]ou'd assume he knew nothing about the War on Terror - which should make pic very appealing for those who know nothing about the War on Terror," writes John Anderson in Variety.
Updates, 1/24: "As Super Size Me proved, Spurlock is no journalist; rather, he is a direct activist with a camera who tries to use his platform to engage audiences in an age where the blizzard of technology and information causes people to lose sight of one basic truth." Jeremy Kay talks with him for the Guardian.
"Comparisons to Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 are well deserved," writes Kevin Buist at the SpoutBlog. "Both rely heavily on darkly comic animated history lessons about the underbelly of American foreign policy. These segments are very entertaining, but also frustratingly simple."
Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Spurlock for Cinematical.
Update, 1/25: "I wearied of the director's 'Global Politics for Dummies' schtick long before he did," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "There are some laughs and a few insights, but mostly I found myself wanting a good policy wonk to put things in perspective."

Posted by dwhudson at 1:13 AM

Doc.
"As exhaustively, rather sycophantically chronicled at the outset of Doc, Harold 'Doc' Humes knew everyone (Baldwin, Duchamp, Dietrich, Ornette Coleman, Timothy Leary) and did everything," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice.
"Lovingly assembled by Mr Humes's daughter Immy Humes and jam-packed with interviews with notable 20th-century cultural figures (including George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, William Styron and Timothy Leary), Doc is one part cultural analysis, three parts home movie," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Times. "Mr Humes, who was born in 1926 and died in 1992, came of age in Paris during the 1950s. He wrote the politically radical novels The Underground City and Men Die; helped create the New American Cinema Group with Jonas Mekas and others; founded the Paris Review with Mr Plimpton and Peter Matthiessen; advocated massage and marijuana; designed a fireproof, waterproof paper house; and gave lectures to anyone, anywhere, at the drop of a hat."
Updated.
"The stylistic success here is so great that it's easy to lose sight of the film's central figure, a brilliant and inventive (and perhaps slightly insane) figure with a mind as divergent and curious as the construction of the film itself," writes Rob Humanick in Slant.
"The renewed attention to Mr Humes is no doubt aided by the growing interest in American writing of the 1940s and 50s, and a better understanding of the mental instabilities that can stall a creative career," writes Celia McGee in the NYT. "But also intriguing to many is the documentary's revelation of a CIA connection to the history of the Paris Review. In the film, Mr Matthiessen, best known as a novelist, environmental activist and advocate of American Indian rights, admits publicly for the first time that he was a young CIA recruit at the time he helped start the magazine, and used it as his cover.... Some critics belonging to a younger generation have discerned in Mr Humes's behavior and beliefs the seeds of the 60s and 70s counterculture. One, Alan Cheuse, also finds in Mr Humes's writing early intimations of what he has called the 'paranoiac fiction' of Thomas Pynchon."
Updates: "While complaining about earnest but hopelessly underwhelming documentaries is as effectual as candlelight vigils for world peace, Immy Humes (Oscar-nominated for a 1991 documentary short) earns a few extra words of condemnation for not even bothering to get a tripod," writes the Reeler. In short, "Doc is a collection of reasonably amusing anecdotes in search of relevance."
"The destructive swath that Doc Humes's insanity and narcissism cut through his family, we learn, was in the end balanced by the piercing intelligence that he freely shared and doggedly worked to awaken in those brave enough to stick with him through the paranoia, chemical misadventures, scarring object lessons, and manipulative freeloading," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "The film's coda discovery about the veracity of Doc's later-life delusions is too deliciously ironic to describe in detail, other than to say that it gives sobering new weight to Woody Allen's old joke that 'paranoia is knowing all the facts.' It ends this fine film on an exuberant, exasperating, and crusading note that perfectly befits its subject."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:55 AM

January 22, 2008

Heath Ledger, 1979 - 2008.

The actor Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in an apartment building at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, according to the New York City police. Mr Ledger was 28....
Mr Ledger, a native of Perth, Australia, won acclaim for his role as a co-star in Brokeback Mountain, a 2005 film.... Reviewing the film in the New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden wrote, "Mr Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."
Mr Ledger met the actress Michelle Williams while filming Brokeback Mountain. The two actors fell into a very public romance. They had a daughter, Matilda Rose, who was born on Oct 28, 2005. They moved to Brooklyn, but then separated last year.

Sewell Chan, New York Times.

Updated through 1/24.
Updates, 1/23: "He was what we call in Australia a bloke, a guy who could rough it and wasn't given much to talking," writes Belinda Luscombe, who interviewed Ledger for Time in 2005. "Ledger was very serious about his work, trying to forge a path like that of Sean Penn or Jack Nicholson, trying to walk the line between what the studios wanted him to be (a romantic hero such as those he played in 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale, his first two big hits) and the more renegade figures he was drawn to (Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain, the iconic Australia outlaw in Ned Kelly or the junkie in Candy)."
For indieWIRE, Peter Knegt reports on how the news hit Park City; and quotes a few statements, including one from Todd Haynes, who directed Ledger in I'm Not There: "This is an unimaginable tragedy. Heath was a true artist, a deeply sensitive man, an explorer, gifted and wise beyond his years. There is no finer person on this earth."
Cinematical contributors offer their thoughts.
"For every one person that ever gave two shits about Ledger as a friend, peer, or admirer of his work on-screen, there's a hundred that just need their tragicomic celebrity scoops, and another thousand that, truth be told, just want the tragedy," writes Ted Z.
"In eight years doing the job, I've never had to write about something as purely and genuinely miserable as this," writes the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. "Without going into Diana-style rhetoric, I can hardly think of a newsflash which would really shock me more. Heath Ledger - the name is short for 'Heathcliff' - is an actor who had grown in stature, in sensitivity, in feeling and in creative intelligence. We had all watched him transform himself from the likeable young dude who played the bad boy teen in 10 Things I Hate About You to the tragic cowboy Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee's magnificent Brokeback Mountain, who movingly discovers that the love of his life is a man. His stunningly persuasive transformation from young hunk to lonely old man in that film really was remarkable. His director, Ang Lee, called him a young Brando."
"He had just begun work on the Terry Gilliam fantasy The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, leaving the state of that project (and its seemingly cursed director) in temporary limbo," notes Bill Gibron at PopMatters. As for The Dark Knight, "Now, its name is nuclear."
"It is hard to know exactly when Mr Ledger discovered his range, and set about trying to explore it, but it is clear that he covered a lot of ground in a very short time," writes AO Scott in the NYT: "He had a taste for portraying troubled, brooding, self-destructive young men, it's true... but the temptation to blend their fates with Mr Ledger's own should be resisted at all costs. Those roles should be seen less as expressions of some imagined inner torment than as evidence of resourcefulness, creative restlessness and wit.... Mr Ledger's work will outlast the frenzy. But there should have been more. Instead of being preserved as a young star eclipsed in his prime, he should have had time to outgrow his early promise and become the strange, surprising, era-defining actor he always had the potential to be."
"Heath Ledger's death is particularly poignant to me because he is, like yours truly, 28 years old," writes Reihan Salam in the American Scene. "My generation will, I suspect, be the last human generation in either a very good way (we will transcend our limitations, we will live incredibly long lives, we will expand our moral imaginations, and in the process we will become something better than human) or in a very bad way (we will all be killed by nanite goo). So I hate the thought of any one of us biting the dust and missing the adventure to come, though of course that is as it must be."
Via Andrew Sullivan, who points to another appreciation by Rex Wockner and adds, "Gay men responded to Ledger and not just because he was surpassingly handsome. He really inhabited a dark place many of us escaped from, and he evoked it with enormous restraint and integrity. The darkness clearly haunted him, but he turned it into a thing of beauty and redemption. For a while."
"Focus Features CEO James Schamus, who worked with Ledger on Brokeback Mountain, today remembered him thusly: 'Heath Ledger was a courageous actor, and a great soul. He gave us the gift of sharing his fearless and beautiful love - of his craft, and of all who worked with him - for which all of us will be eternally grateful.'" FilmInFocus sets up a page where people can post their memories and/or thoughts.
Updates, 1/24: "Ledger's death illustrates the unusually intimate relationship the public has with movie stars," writes Joe Queenan in the Guardian. "This generation-spanning affection for actors can also be explained by the fact that no matter how reclusive and mysterious the star may be, the public feels that it knows him or her."
"It's difficult for me to write anything about Heath Ledger, still, without reflecting on the awfulness of the old-and-new media circus surrounding his death, and I suppose that while spitting out a little bit of my anger could be useful (at least to me and those of similar inclination), harping on it would have me ending up as self-righteous as anybody on the never-heard-of-him/who-cares-about-self-destructive-celebrities side of the fence," writes Glenn Kenny. "And as exercises in futility go, counseling the world that it ought to keep its yap shut until all the facts are in is a noble one, but it's an exercise in futility nonetheless."
"It will be depressing to see the inevitable cult of martyrdom and glam fatalism that's formed around male stars from James Dean to River Phoenix build a fresh shrine around Heath Ledger," writes Dennis Harvey at SF360. "But not half so depressing as the simple fact that we had so much yet to anticipate from him."
Nathaniel R: "It comes to this: I didn't realize that I was as attached to Heath Ledger as I was. But I understood this morning that it all goes back to Brokeback Mountain. Something about that movie settled deep inside me. I feel protective towards all involved. It must be part of the reason that I keep writing about Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal. It's why I feel all warm inside when I see Ang Lee smile. It's why I perked up so much when Michelle Williams wafted into frame in I'm Not There looking and feeling nothing like Alma Del Mar. It's why."

Posted by dwhudson at 2:19 PM | Comments (4)

Sundance. Secrecy.
"This is a strong, probing essay that asks necessary questions," writes the Boston Globe's Wesley Morris, offering a quick take on Secrecy. "Its biggest intellectual shortcoming is that, while the movie has no shortage of proof of how secrecy is corrosive, it provides little positive evidence to support the assertion that more transparency is ultimately better for us. Regardless, it's a movie worth talking about."
Updated through 1/26.
"Directors Peter Galison and Robb Moss don't attempt to hide their belief that the US's government's increasing obsession with classification does more harm than good, and is being used today primarily as a means for the executive branch to avoid accountability," writes Mike D'Angelo for ScreenGrab. "To their credit, however, they also give ample screen time to former CIA and NSA employees, who make a strong case for the opposing viewpoint - so strong, in fact, that I left the movie feeling as if the problem might be inherently insoluble."
"Galison and Moss have found a group of well-spoken people on both sides of the classify/don't classify argument, and listening to them explain themselves is both enlightening and entertaining," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.
Galison and Moss introduce their film to Filmmaker readers.
IndieWIRE interviews Galison.
Update, 1/26: "The film's a balanced polemic (no, that's not a paradox) about our government's rapidly growing fetish for hiding information from its citizens; you can actually feel the movie focusing your understanding of the issues as you watch," rites the Boston Globe's Ty Burr.

Posted by dwhudson at 1:23 PM

Sundance. Patti Smith: Dream of Life.
"Is Patti Smith: Dream of Life, which premiered here last night, actually a documentary?" asks Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "I don't think so, and I don't think the film's director, Steven Sebring, or the film's subject/inspiration/creative collaborator Ms Smith do, either.... Some of it doesn't work but most of it does and as a whole, while it's not likely to win any converts, it's a spellbinder. But it's not a documentary, it's a document."
"The movie suggests a context for Smith's life and work, as she talks about carrying the torch of Walt Whitman and William Burroughs and passing it on to the next generation, and as she sits in cluttered rooms filled with all the accumulated artifacts that continue to define and inspire her," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray, but "the film never penetrates beyond how Smith chooses to define herself. And the paltry amount of live performances in Dream of Life is a crime."
"For me, the authenticity is in the way Sebring has captured (or emulated) the grit and textures of Smith's prose, and the fierce spiritual tension that her band music has always injected in one form or another," writes Jeffrey Wells.
IndieWIRE interviews Sebring.
Update: "Having not seen her for a while, the Bagger had forgetten her gifts as a shaman, the way she used movement - is it OK to say that she is a mighty fine dancer? - to bring a room to heel and then show it love."
Update, 1/23: In the Guardian, Francesca Martin reports on Smith's upcoming show at the Fondation Cartier in Paris: "It will include found objects, such as a stone taken from the river in which Virginia Woolf committed suicide, and Polaroids of cutlery belonging to the writer Arthur Rimbaud, Jimi Hendrix's guitar, and slippers once worn by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Smith's former lover. Also on display will be a total of 250 Polaroids, 25 drawings and film extracts, alongside examples of Smith's collaborative work, including The Coral Sea, a prose elegy Smith wrote in 1996 in memory of Mapplethorpe, set to music with former My Bloody Valentine leader Kevin Shields."
Update, 1/30: "[W]hereas I viewed [Kurt Cobain: About a Son] as both death poem and a film about absence, Dream of Life - a film about continuing in the face of absence - is almost its mirror image," writes AJ Schnack. "While the first hour of the film was a complete success for me, it felt to me as if the film goes off the rails in the third act."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:55 PM

Sundance. Diary of the Dead.
"In a stark departure from the storytelling in his legendary films Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead and the more recent Land of the Dead, [George A] Romero takes a page from Cannibal Holocaust and The Blair Witch Project in that what we see on screen is 'footage' filmed by a character in the film," writes Charlie Prince, reviewing Diary of the Dead for Cinema Strikes Back. "The allegory is most evident in the main character, Jason. Jason begins by insisting on filming his friends throughout their fears and trauma, which of course prompts us in the audience to side with Jason’s friends in thinking 'now is not the time to make a movie.' But Romero quickly makes clear that he is moving beyond the standard use of this as a plot device... and is instead inserting a surreal element to the story to make a point - in fact, the insistence on filming is the point."
Updated.
"In traditional Romero fashion, guts are spilled, necks are bitten, brains are splattered, and a mirror is held up to America," writes Jim Rohner at Zoom In Online. "Before I go on, let me just elaborate on how much it pains me to talk ill of Romero: he is my filmmaking idol, my inspiration, the reason I became interested in cinema. Criticizing his work is like Bogdanovich criticizing Welles, Oasis bringing down the Beatles, Stephen King bad-mouthing Lovecraft. But there comes a point in every director's life where his craft begins to slip, even if it's a craft he practically created."
"The film is filled with some of the most inventive zombie deaths this side of the UK and has a friendly sense of humor to go along with its deeply cynical view," writes Jesse Hawthorne Ficks at Pixel Vision.
Online viewing tip. Joe Swanberg and Ronnie Bronstein meet Romero.
Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.
Update: Online listening tip. Kevin Buist at the SpoutBlog: "In this interview stars Michelle Morgan and Shawn Roberts talk about the mood on set, not knowing if their characters will undergo zombification, and their favorite zombie flicks."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:54 PM

Sundance. The Great Buck Howard.
"One might not expect a sweet, funny and warm-hearted crowd-pleaser from the man who wrote movies like Sexual Roulette, Sonic Impact and Venomous, but I guess filmmaker Sean McGinly has spent the last eleven years churning out schlock flicks just so he could get to something good," writes Scott Weinberg. "And I'm very pleased to report that his newest offering, a smoothly, strongly appealing comedy called The Great Buck Howard, is definitely the 'big break' that McGinly's been working for. Backed by a fantastic performance by John Malkovich - and some really fine work from young actors Colin Hanks and Emily Blunt - The Great Buck Howard might be the most affectionate look back at old-school entertainment since Peter O'Toole boozed his way through My Favorite Year."
Updated through 1/24.
Also at Cinematical, James Rocchi talks with Hanks and Blunt.
"In the last few years, there have been a few movies set within the world of magic and illusion," notes Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "The best of these, like Neil Burger's The Illusionist, makes the craft of the film's magician character integral to the story. The Great Buck Howard deals with magic's sister art of mentalism, which, due to the work of performers like Derren Brown, is experiencing something of a revival these days.... But The Great Buck Howard doesn't have any insights into the art, and, considering that mentalism deals with issues of psychology, personality and influence, the film's inability to use this subject matter to create more dramatic situations for its characters is pretty disappointing."
"A smoothly turned-out entertainment centered around an Amazing Kreskin-style mentalist comes down with an unfortunate case of the warm-and-fuzzies," writes Justin Chang in Variety. "[W]riter-director Sean McGinly's decision to frame the story as a relationship movie, as Buck's impressionable young assistant deals with some very familiar life issues, tilts the comic seesaw toward sentiment over satire."
Update, 1/24: "Despite Malkovich, The Great Buck Howard still manages to deflate itself to mediocre sketch comedy at nearly every turn," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "McGinly's efforts to spoof both trendoid celebrity culture and the bush-league entertainment circuit are broad and obvious, and Buck, by far the most interesting character, is never really the center of the story."

Posted by dwhudson at 8:45 AM

Sundance. Sleep Dealer.
"Synthesizing the concerns of third world with elements of mainstream sci-fi films like Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days and David Cronenberg's Existenz and a touch of William Gibson's futuristic cynicism, Sleep Dealer, Alex Rivera's long awaited directorial debut premiered last night at Sundance to a mostly appreciative audience, although this particular critic was left cold by the film's lack of urgency and it's simplistic take on the challenges of globalization," writes Brandon Harris.
"In some ways an independent, Spanish-language version of The Matrix, Sleep Dealer posits that the technology that helps make the world a global community will also enslave its less fortunate," writes John Horn in the Los Angeles Times. "In Rivera's story, laborers in Mexico are able to connect electronically to work sites in the United States via wires plugged into nodes installed on their bodies. So when a worker moves his arm, for example, a robot arm moves 2,000 miles away. 'Human labor will never disappear,' says Rivera. 'For every technical advance we see, there is someone, somewhere, who is building it - a ghost in the machine.'"
"Sleep Dealer is a film with lofty dramatic aspirations, an ambitious visual palette and a folksy heart," writes Steve Ramos in indieWIRE. "To their credit, Rivera and co-writer David Riker have come up with something unique and yet engaging; the nervy combination of social politics with future shock storytelling. While Sleep Dealer sometimes skips a narrative beat, it's a fantastic journey."
IndieWIRE interviews Rivera.
Update, 1/23: The Reeler interviews Rivera.
Updates, 1/26: IndieWIRE's Peter Knegt reports that Sleep Dealer has won this year's Alfred P Sloan Prize.
"Much of Sleep Dealer resonates with multiple metaphors, both political and aesthetic," writes Howard Karren at In the Company of Glenn. "Rivera, a first-born American of Mexican heritage, rarely sees anything in simple terms." As for the Prize, "The foundation cash heaps on a bit more irony, which is probably apt: Sloan was a GM corporate baron and a union buster."
Update, 1/28: "Rivera and co-screenwriter David Riker have come up with an arresting vision, one that's teeming with cruelty condoned for the sake of capitalism," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "The film's weakness is the story that carries us through it."
Update, 1/30: "It is films like Sleep Dealer that give hope for Sundance's future," writes B Ruby Rich in the Guardian. "Rivera revives the promise of an American independent cinema that can intervene in our world, imagine the worst, hope for the best - and entertain like mad along the way."

Posted by dwhudson at 6:10 AM

Oscars. Nominations.
What a fine day for Cate Blanchett. So the Academy's announced its nominations for this year's round of Oscars. Of course, it's still up in the air as to what sort of show there'll be on February 24.
Meantime, as commentary rolls out, I'll gather pointers here.
Updated through 1/24.
Updates: "Whether the eight nominations for both PT Anderson's There Will Be Blood and the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men lead to Oscar night payoffs is another thing altogether, but for today the two best films of 2007 received their just deserts," writes Ted Z.
A "lot of prognosticators had left Paul Thomas Anderson off the list of director nominees until fairly recently. I can't say enough good things about how well Paramount Vantage and Miramax have handled this release," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. Blood "is as least as difficult a film as Jesse James, but they've truly managed to sell it as must-see for grown-ups."
"The noms yielded a bunch of surprises, some pleasant (Viggo Mortensen for Eastern Promises - awesome; Tamara Jenkins for The Savages in original screenplay, well done) others not so much (Lars and the Real Girl for original screenplay wins, hands down, my 'Are You F**kin' Kidding Me' award, especially given that I was hoping for a Darjeeling Limited nod in screenplay)." And Premiere's Glenn Kenny has a few other angles as well.

Joe Leydon is "especially happy to see Ellen Page among the Best Actress finalists - shameless plug: I have an interview with her in the new issue of MovieMaker - and Tommy Lee Jones getting the attention he deserves for the criminally under-rated In the Valley of Elah."

Vulture explains why Jonny Greenwood's Blood soundtrack was kept out of the running - and notes who else got snubbed. More commentary.

"How did my picks fare?" Gabriel Shanks runs down the list.

Nathaniel R's "Tues Top Ten" this week: "Oscar Nomination Talking Points."

More commentary from Alonso Duralde at MSNBC.

For Jim Emerson, the best nomination's the one for Skip Lievsay, Craig Berkey, Greg Orloff and Peter Kurland - "and un-nominated co-conspirator, Carter Burwell - for sound in No Country for Old Men."

Dennis Cozzalio comments on the list.

Park City Dispatch. 5.

Brian Darr on the highlights of this year's Animation Spotlight at Sundance.

Lapsus Not only has one of the shorts in this Sundance's Animation Spotlight the audacity to channel the spirit of the Chuck Jones masterpiece Duck Amuck, but it actually turns out to be worthy to stand in its self-reflexive shadow. Lapsus, made by Argentine animator Juan Pablo Zaramella, is funny, elegant, and very aware of animation as an arena where an artist can make up laws of nature (or seem to) as he or she goes along. It's a 4-minute monochromatic piece about a nun with an amusing mantra, but revealing much more is liable to spoil the surprises and/or the laughs. What I will say is what Zaramella said about the film's title in the Q&A after the program: that it's Latin for an unconscious error. It would be a Lapsus to let this one slip by you if you've got a chance to see it.

The Animation Spotlight program this year is somewhat stronger, if more consistently macabre, than last year's edition. No one film bowled me over quite as forcefully as last year's Everything Will Be OK, but by the end of the afternoon I was bowled over all the same. Some absolutely terrific titles more technically ambitious than Lapsus include The History of America, Yours Truly and Madame Tutli-Putli. And every selection in the program has something to recommend it. Chonto has a hilarious deadpan voiceover narration. For the Love of God has a singularly depressing worldview. Dog has brevity, The Pearce Sisters has a great sense of atmosphere, and 1977 has me scratching my head to figure out exactly what I was watching. (I think I liked it...)

Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski's Madame Tutli-Putli surely deserves an Oscar nomination in the animated short category, and by the time you read this you'll probably know whether it earned one or not. In addition to a fun, suspenseful story, this Canadian film is a compendium of classic locomotive film references; there's an Arrival of a Train, Strangers on a Train, and a Great Train Robbery, for starters. But it's also a beautifully seamless combination of traditional stop-motion puppet animation with eye-popping computer-aided imagery.

I asked Osbert Parker, director of Yours Truly, if he was familiar with the films of Janie Geiser, and he assured me he wasn't. Nevertheless, Yours Truly shares a similar aesthetic to the likes of Immer Zu and The Fourth Watch, though with a slightly more straightforward narrative approach. Classic film noir cut-out images of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck and Dana Andrews are placed into a dark shadowbox world of nefarious plots, urgent messages, dizzying car chases, and horrifying revelations, to soundtrack excerpts from Max Steiner and Bernard Herrmann. If the noir cycle was the closest Hollywood came to unmasking the smiling sheen of Truman- and Eisenhower-era America, Yours Truly uses animation-only images (like vacuuming up bloodstains) to ask what might have been seen when peeling yet another layer.

And then there's The History of America. There's no way I can do this one justice in a few sentences, but it's amazing, even when it doesn't seem to know when to stop. I'm glad it didn't. Forget Beowulf - this is the season's must-see epic of mayhem and mythology, also a live-action/animation technological mutt. The film chronicles this country's great battle between the forces of the cowboys and the astronauts - it wasn't so long ago, as you probably recall. But I'm sure you've never seen these landmark moments, like the astronauts' raid on the cowboys' fortress of Las Vegas, depicted with such vibrant color, exhilarating camera movements, and completely unrestrained imagination. Even President Elvis Presley himself would enjoy this one, I bet.

Posted by dwhudson at 1:57 AM

Agnès Varda.

"In 1985's Vagabond, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is still probably her masterpiece, [Agnès] Varda's affinity for the conceptual manifests itself both stylistically and thematically," writes Andrew Chan at the House Next Door. "But her career-long suspicion of any conclusive vérité that might be extracted from cinema makes for a film that revolves around ambiguities and questions rather than big statements."

Dennis Lim talks with Varda for the Los Angeles Times: "You're often called the mother of the French New Wave. Do you think that's an accurate label?" Varda: "Or even grandmother sometimes. It's fine with me."

Updated through 1/26.

"It is Ms Varda's eye that gives [La Pointe Courte] unity," writes Dave Kehr in the New York Times. "Each of the carefully massed, densely textured black-and-white images (spectacularly reproduced by the Criterion DVD) seems to constitute an individual moment of grace, like Cartier-Bresson photographs with an added element of artful, dancelike movement. These are not self-effacing visuals designed to be subsumed by a narrative, but rather images meant to stand alone, generating stories of their own. With her enduring passion for puns, Ms Varda described this style as 'cinécriture' - implying a sort of writing with, rather than for, the filmed image. It is a style without parallel among her New Wave 'children' - or, effectively, anywhere else."

"[I]t's thrilling to confirm how many similarities Agnès Varda's celebrated Cléo from 5 to 7 shares with May Spils's overlooked classic Zur Sache, Schätzchen." Jürgen Fauth explains.

Update: "For audiences used to experiencing female martyrdom, either real or imagined, in this era of Lars Von Trier, Cléo from 5 to 7 is almost distractingly refreshing at every turn," writes Eric Henderson in Slant. "Varda's experimental impulse is more assured than Truffaut's, her fractures in time less abrasive than Resnais's. Just as Cléo's apartment is replete with bounding kittens, Varda's film itself is capricious and fully alive. All throughout, Varda deploys hints of artifice - starting with the fact that this supposed bit of real time cinema tells two hours in 90 minutes - that playfully dispel any hint of academicism that colors Godard's work. Varda is the supreme sensualist of the New Wave."

Update, 1/24: More from Andrew Chan at the House Next Door: Cléo from 5 to 7 and La Pointe Courte.

Update, 1/26: Jared Rapfogel on Criterion's set in Stop Smiling: "Even the usual making-of featurettes are of special interest since, thanks to her Godard-like dedication to the concept of film-criticism-through-filmmaking."

Posted by dwhudson at 12:57 AM | Comments (1)

January 21, 2008

Park City, 1/21.

"With Sunday's announcement in Park City, the Cinema Eye Honors, a new award for nonfiction filmmaking that grew out of debate here over the Academy's shortlist in November, stands prepared to exist not as a counter-punch to another organization but as a new tradition within the nonfiction community and an important New York-based annual event for documentary excellence." AJ Schnack's got the list.

"So much for the sellers' market," writes David M Halbfinger in the New York Times. "The Sundance Film Festival's opening weekend, often the setting for rapturous audience reactions and frenzied all-night bidding wars, drew to a close looking more and more like a disappointment, if not an outright dud."

"It's a little early to be calling this year's fest a dud just because Geoff Gilmore programmed a bunch of films that aren't selling the first weekend," counters Variety's Anne Thompson.

"So far nothing has breakout buzz, and the highest-profile titles, that is, the ones with the big name actors, are faring particularly poorly." The Oregonian's Shawn Levy offers his take on the first weekend.

S James Snyder has another overview in the New York Sun.

Ian Olds at FilmInFocus: "Five Things for Short Filmmakers to Know Coming to Sundance."

Photos: Matt Dentler, Chris Garcia (more) and Ray Pride (more).

Posted by dwhudson at 3:50 PM

Sundance. I.O.U.S.A.

Boy, today's the day for this one.

IOUSA "Federal fiscal policy, trade imbalances and politicians mortgaging the lives of future generations may not sound like a Saturday night at the movies with a tub of popcorn, but Wordplay director Patrick Creadon's Sundance documentary competition film I.O.U.S.A. is crucial viewing for anyone who claims to care about America," writes indieWIRE's Brian Brooks. "Presented from a non-partisan viewpoint, the film deftly describes the country's looming fiscal brink. Mounting federal debt, combined with a huge trade imbalance and a decade of cheap credit that gave gluttonous consumers a material high. But, the bill to pay for the party is coming due."

Updated through 1/28.

"A poignant, terrifying and engrossing look at a topic normally relegated to powerpoint presentations by polyester suit clad professors, I.O.U.S.A. is a powerful documentary that makes no qualms about espousing its point of view," writes Mike Raffensperger at Zoom In Online. "Centered around the 'Fiscal Wake Up Tour' of ~~former~~ US Comptroller General David Walker and The Concord Coalition Executive Director Robert Bixby, the film provides historical context for the ever increasing national debt and commentary on its economic, political and social ramifications.... [F]ar and away the best trick Creadon pulls are the montage sequences that express profound or complicated topics in succinct, entertaining ways. Of particular note were the opening montage showcasing decades of presidencies all spitting out identical rhetoric and an early sequence which elegantly sums up 300 years of American economic history."

And Zoom In's got a video interview with Creadon.

Update, 1/28: "IOUSA is most successful when it finds ways to entertainingly and concisely convey decades of economic history through animated charts, archival photos, and, even, a Saturday Night Live skit," writes Scott Macaulay at Filmmaker. But it "punts when it comes to the public policy specifics needed to resolve the problem as the film formulates it."

Posted by dwhudson at 2:40 PM | Comments (4)

Sundance. Trouble the Water.

"A survivor of Hurricane Katrina gets it all on camera in Trouble the Water, a blend of DIY footage and filming by co-directors Tia Lessin and Carl Deal that considers the impact and aftermath of the New Orleans catastrophe from the perspective of a family that stayed at home during the storm," writes Robert Koehler in Variety. "Though tinged with the sheer gumption and personal resolve of amateur vidmaker and would-be rapper Kimberly Roberts, this is ultimately a minor doc contribution to the bulging library of Katrina-related films and TV reports."

For the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan talks with the co-directors and with Roberts, who, 9 months and 2 weeks pregnant, nonetheless arrived in Park City: "Being a witness for the voiceless, impoverished and dispossessed is the role that Kim felt strongly enough about to make the trip to Utah. 'I watched the coverage on TV and I said, "They ain't telling the real stories. What happened to the real citizens of New Orleans?" I wanted to be a voice of the black community. We're speaking for everyone who stayed, everyone who suffered, everyone who died.'"

"As the credits rolled, the audience jumped to its feet, giving the film a rapturous applause, one of the warmest witnessed so far," reported Brian Brooks in indieWIRE yesterday.

Later, that same night: "At 12:47 AM, the film's co-producer T Woody Richman got the call to ferry Roberts and husband Scott down the mountain to a Salt Lake City hospital," reports Variety's Anne Thompson. "Roberts gave birth on Monday, January 21, at 6:14 AM. The parents named their healthy 7 pound 1 ounce baby girl Skyy Kaylen Roberts."

"New snow on the mountain and new life in our midst. It's a lovely day in Park City," adds David Carr.

Updates, 1/24: "No human being I can imagine could watch Trouble the Water and not be overwhelmed by grief and joy, and humbled by one's sudden awareness of one's own prejudices about the lives, passions and dreams of poor people," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Danny Glover, who helped produce the film, spoke eloquently afterwards about New Orleans as a place where 'the global South meets the global North' and where a brief window of opportunity exists to do battle against a redevelopment model that's based on the tourist and service economies - and on a policy of malign neglect toward neighborhoods where people like Scott and Kim Roberts live."

"In the age of reality TV, where no live unscripted footage ever comes across as truly genuine but performed as 'ideas' of reality, Trouble the Water and its brutally intimate journey of two survivors feels rather bracing," writes Nathaniel Rogers at Zoom In Online. "It’s a reminder that camcorders are not just toys. And telling your story to the camera is not just exhibitionism."

Update, 1/25: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir his own Documentary Grand Prize: Trouble the Water is "a transformative story about passion, resilience and heroism among the poorest residents of America's most downtrodden city."

Updates, 1/26: "Since Trouble avails itself so heavily of the amateur video-camera footage of 9th Ward resident Kimberly Rivers, the movie functions as a real-life Cloverfield," notes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr, "a monster-movie where the monster is weather. Which makes George W Bush, FEMA head Mike Brown, and a soulless post-hurricane bureaucracy the equivalent of those arachnoid mini-monsters that jump on people and rip their hearts out."

Variety's Anne Thompson has background on the doc's making.

Update, 1/28: For Cinematical's Kim Voynar, this is the "most powerful documentary I've seen at Sundance."

Updates, 1/30: "[T]he professionally shot material, of Roberts and her husband's struggle to rebuild their lives after the storm, tells as powerful a story about the New Orleans diaspora as I've seen on film, from an angle unfamiliar," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It plays out like a love story, with the Roberts' turning their backs on their city in times of crisis, only to realize that their hearts are there after all."

"Rarely have the personal consequences of government malpractice been so well told," adds B Ruby Rich in the Guardian.

Posted by dwhudson at 2:10 PM

Sundance. What Just Happened?

"One of the most expensive movies ever to come to Sundance played to one of the most distributor-heavy screenings ever to hit the festival on Saturday night," blog the Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik and Gregg Goldstein. "Buyers from pretty much every major company turned out for Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?, the serio-comic study of a studio producer (played by Robert De Niro) plagued by personal and professional issues over the course of one turbulent week. The movie is loosely based on producer Art Linson's memoir."

Updated.

Premiere's Glenn Kenny is "pleasantly surprised... I usually can't stand this kind of inside-baseball moviemaking, wherein showbiz figures prove what good sports they are by essaying appalling versions of themselves... But these guys - not to mention Sean Penn (another self-player [besides Bruce Willis), Catherine Keener (in a very low-key variant of the talent-disembowelling studio exec), John Turturro (as a repellent wreck of an agent) and the too-rarely-seen Michael Wincott (as a dissolute 'visionary' director) made me like it."

"De Niro is very funny as a guy trying to hold onto what little power he has, and Levinson does as good aging directors often do, letting scenes play on until he finds the right level of beautiful chaos," writes the AV Club's Noel Murray. "The biggest problem with What Just Happened is that not much actually does happen... but the movie contains a lot of funny lines, and it captures the business side of show business with an only slightly jaded eye."

Variety's Anne Thompson finds it "a delightfully amusing backstage Hollywood comedy. Think an update of The Player, maybe, or an episode of Entourage (complete with Cannes finale) on steroids."

Back in the Hollywood Reporter, Kirk Honeycutt finds that Levinson and Linson "have too much love and genuine affection for the movies and the way they get made to cut very deep. Everything here is a paper cut."

For Entertainment Weekly, Missy Schwartz talks with De Niro, Levinson, Linson, and then in comes Willis.

Update: "It's meant to be outrageous and unbelievable how art turns into pure commerce, but there have been plenty of Hollywood satires that demolish the 'test screening' mentality, the 'beleaguered producer' conceit, and the oh-so-cynical insinuation that Hollywood has no integrity whatsoever," writes Scott Weinberg at Cinematical. "So while much of the material in What Just Happened? is insightful and accurate... it's just not all that new or shocking anymore."

Posted by dwhudson at 9:46 AM | Comments (2)

Sundance. American Teen.

"Love trauma, bullying, spin the bottle, cat fighting, sexual experimentation, alienation, alcohol use, parental stress, insecurity and the pressure to get into college... These issues and more form the backdrop to Nanette Burstein's spectacularly received American Teen, which had its world premiere Saturday afternoon in the Sundance documentary competition," writes indieWIRE's Brian Brooks. "Over the course of their senior year in a conservative mostly white small town in Indiana, the film intimately captures the lives and tribulations of four different teenagers."

Updated through 1/25.

"It was clear that the film had generated interest by the flashes of blue light in the audience, as acquisition folks frantically texted their business affairs departments to start negotiations," reports Monica Corcoran, who talks with Burstein for the Los Angeles Times. On Sunday morning, she "said that she had been 'in talks' until 4 that morning with potential buyers. 'It's been surreal in a good way,' she said. 'I just want it to find the right home.'"

Writing in Variety, Dennis Harvey finds the film "so packed with high dramatic incidents among classic character types that a skeptical viewer may well wonder just how freely direction and editing sculpted real life into something more like... well, The Real World.... [A]ll the boring and routine parts [are] mysteriously absent from edited-within-an-inch-of-its-life package."

The Reeler talks with Burstein.

Update: "Burstein's trim, fast-moving film utilizes tricks and techniques that would give old-schoolers such as [Frederick] Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers rage attacks," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "The pop soundtrack, the voiceovers, the graphic collages, the ANIMATION SEQUENCES illustrating the dreams and desires of some of its subjects... none of it's a surprise, coming as it does from the co-director of the Bob Evans fantasia The Kid Stays in the Picture, but all of it does raise the question of just how documentary is defining itself these days."

Updates, 1/25: Online listening tip. James Rocchi talks with Burnstein for Cinematical.

"Warsaw Community High School may not be the place to find a perfect statistically average high school that represents America (as if any such school really exists) - it's mostly White, impressively well-appointed, and looks fairly new - but it's where Burstein shot, every day, for 10 months. And you get drawn into these kid's lives - their struggles, their challenges, their triumphs -- so fiercely that you cannot help but be enthralled." Now James Rocchi's got a review, too; at Cinematical, where Eric D Snider declares, "It's absolutely my favorite movie of the festival."

Posted by dwhudson at 7:52 AM

Park City Dispatch. 4. Funny Games.

Brian Darr's now seen both versions of Michael Haneke's Funny Games within a week. He warns that some might consider just a bit of what he's got to say here spoilerish in a very minor way. If you know absolutely nothing about the film(s) and want to keep it that way, skip down to the pointers to other reviews that'll be gathering over the next few days.

After years of hearing recommendations for and warnings against it, I finally mustered up the courage to see Michael Haneke's 1997 Funny Games last week at San Francisco's Berlin & Beyond Film Festival, where it played as part of a posthumous tribute to actor Ulrich Mühe. I watched it knowing I'd soon have a chance to compare the experience against seeing Haneke's new English-language remake here at Sundance.

Funny Games Reports that this version would be essentially identical intrigued me further. I couldn't help but start crafting a review of v.2.0 in my head even while v.1.0 was still running on the Castro Theatre screen in front of me. Something about the way reading subtitles can add an extra level of remove from the experience of watching a film, and how Anglophone viewers will no longer be allowed to read Funny Games as a specific critique of German-speaking society. (If indeed they ever did.)

All that might be true, but upon attending the US premiere of the 2007 Funny Games in Salt Lake City midnight on Saturday, I'm more interested in discussing what occurred to me at that screening than my anticipatory thoughts. I guess a plot summary might be nice too, but I'll be quick about it: a bourgeois family's vacation home is invaded by a pair of calmly homicidal preppies, who physically and psychologically torture them with a series of arbitrary "games" for the audience's "amusement."

First question: how faithful is this remake? The term "shot-for-shot" has been bandied about a lot, and that seems accurate enough. Of course the cast is different, and a few props and locations have changed character accordingly, but the musical selections, the color scheme, the geography of the three rooms in which the majority of action takes place, and even a great many of the camera set-ups, are all identical. The dialogue was tweaked very little in the translation process, other than a few remarks about cellphones and one "joke" missing from the 90-minute mark. Directors from the Lumiere Brothers to Alfred Hitchcock to Trent Harris have remade their own films for various reasons, but this is the closest copy I've seen.

Being so similar, what's it like to watch for someone who's seen the original and knows what's coming? For me, it was just as emotionally wrenching, if not more so. Foreknowledge of plot points made the on- and off-screen violence feel all the more inevitable, and difficult to sit through. Without subtitles, I didn't have to keep my eyes fixed on the bottom of the screen as much, and could pay more attention to the details of performance found in the characters' faces and line readings. That said, I sometimes noticed myself looking looking at a "neutral" corner of the screen space, as relief from the misery on display in another section of the camera image.

Funny Games The casting of Tim Roth in Mühe's role as the emasculated father does diminish some of the innocence found in that character, at least for those of us who've seen Roth play villains and hoodlums. His performance is adequate to the material, as are those of Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the tormentors. But, not to diminish what Susanne Lothar achieved as the mother in the 1997 Funny Games, Naomi Watts in that role changes at least one of the "rules of the games" for the remake. Specifically, her star stature is bound to make the audience feel more complicit in the moment when the physical violence turns into sexual humiliation and threat of rape. This is the scene that provoked the most walk-outs each time.

After sitting through this film essentially twice in little over a week, I can't help but think that the people who walk out in the middle are the sane, well-adjusted ones. That the rest of us are, at worst, just the kinds of casual sadists Haneke seems to be accusing us of being. Or at best, addicted to narrative to the degree that we can't turn away when we sense resolution, any kind of resolution, around the corner. Perhaps it's just the peak-bagger's instinct to check an unpleasant film off of our "life list." Having now climbed Mount Funny Games from two different faces, I'm here to tell you that the view from the top is just about the same. Maybe that'll save you a trip.

- Brian Darr

Reviewing Funny Games US, as it's being referred to now, for Screen Daily, Ed Lawrenson finds it "retains the emotional intensity, visceral impact and gripping hold of the original.... With cinema's shock value arguably greater than 10 years ago - through the emergence of arthouse provocateurs like Miike Takeshi and Gasper Noe and the development of mini-genres like the torture porn of Hostel in mainstream horror - there was a danger that the impact of the new Funny Games would be diminished. In fact, with the exception of a memorable moment of cathartic bloodletting (tellingly a fantasy scene) the violence is all off screen. It is through the emotional consequences of Paul and Peter's actions that the film makes its exacting demands on viewers."

Update, 1/22: Haneke "isn't torturing the family and the audience for the sake of torture, but for the sake of showing us how preposterous it is to assume that such films are accepted under the guise of entertainment, and every single aspect of the film exists to support this commentary," argues Jim Rohner at Zoom In Online. "Many can argue that the Saws and the Hostels carry their own social commentaries, but Haneke has shown how a skilled filmmaker can craft the macabre, how to use the torture for his own devices and has produced a film not to be missed."

Updates, 1/25: "To be honest, I've never felt too sure what to make of Funny Games in the first place, or whether Haneke's comments about it were entirely straightforward," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir:

Add to that the puzzling question of why he chose to remake it in English, 10 years later, and the conclusion I reach after a great deal of high-powered cogitation is this: He's fucking with us.
Because Haneke professes left-wing political views, some critics react to his films as if they all encoded crude Marxist dogma: The creepy videotapes sent to the family household in Caché express the French nation's guilt over colonialism; the sadistic invaders in Funny Games represent the true price of the middle-class family's soulless affluence, etc. Maybe those aren't totally wrongheaded interpretations, but they're no better than partial and reductive ones. Haneke's central concerns, I believe, are more formal and symbolic and ironic than they are narrowly political.

"It's hard to say which Funny Games stirs up more - your guts, or your brain," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "It gives you what you want and asks why you want it in the first place, and it does both those things superbly. It is cruel, cold and darkly thrilling."

Update, 1/26: "At its heart, Funny Games was always an act of intellectual terror, the story of a culture (and a cinema) reaping what it sowed," writes Tom Hall. "But in a post-9/11 world, in a nation whose daily obsession with the sensationalist press constantly keeps the most grotesque and cruel acts front and center in our minds, acts for which we as a nation harbor so much responsibility, well, at this point, Haneke seems to be piling on."

Update, 1/27: Online listening tips. James Rocchi talks with Corbet and Pitt for Cinematical.

Update, 1/31: "Haneke's exercise might seem even more fruitless (and more bananas) than Gus Van Sant's Psycho, but for those who've seen the original, the remake - known for convenience's sake as Funny Games US - is a fascinating endeavor," writes Sam Adams in the Philadelphia City Paper. " Within the otherwise identical frames, the differences pop out like the variables in a scientific experiment."

Posted by dwhudson at 5:46 AM | Comments (7)

Park City Dispatch. 3. Update: David D'Arcy Responds.

David D'Arcy offers his take on one of the most talked about docs to screen at Sundance so far. Related linkage will keep on piling up here.

In this country, Roman Polanski tends to be known for one thing - a sexual adventure with a young girl in 1977, for which he was accused of rape. The film director eventually pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of having sexual intercourse with a minor and, in a special deal with a judge who turned out to be vain and corrupt, he was left with a 90-day "diagnostic" period in a California State prison.

Updated through 1/23.

Never mind that Polanski directed Chinatown, one of the best American films of its time, and classics like Knife in the Water and Repulsion, and the unappreciated gem of black comedy, Bitter Moon. Never mind that he won the best director Oscar for The Pianist, not even one of his best movies. To a lot of Americans, he's first and foremost a sexual predator, a jailbait junkie. To Europeans, he's a great director with a few very forgivable pecadillos - hardly the first person in the arts to have divided opinion along those lines. Think of Fatty Arbuckle, or Charlie Chaplin, or Michael Jackson. Think of Bill Clinton.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, the new documentary by Marina Zenovich about the director which premiered at Sundance on Friday, focuses on the sex case, and presents evidence, most of it readily available, which shows the prosecution to have been be as wild a miscarriage of justice as the trial of OJ Simpson, with a judge, Laurence Rittenband, who makes Lance Ito look like Louis Brandeis.

The documentary is an impressive work of archaeology, which reconstructs the life and career of a man who was smeared by the press and the courts. The truth about Polanski may be lurid, but it's not necessarily the "truth" that we read in media reports about him. Rittenband made a deal with prosecutors and Polanski's lawyers (and with counsel for the victim), all of whom are in the film, which enabled Polanski to resume his work after a diagnostic stay in prison was completed, with a certification from a prison psychiatrist that he was not a psychopath. The judge's pride was hurt when pictures were taken after the director's release from prison, of a free Polanski, in Munich, at the Oktoberfest with beautiful women at his side. When Polanski returned to the US, Rittenband was determined to throw the director in jail for another 48 days. Fearing that, or worse, Polanski left the country (with funds provided by Dino De Laurentis) and he has never come back.

Polanski's biography has always been at least as dramatic as the stories in his films - bear in mind that it was Polanski's childhood wartime exploits in Nazi-occupied Poland that Jerzy Kosinski was said to have presented as his own in the harrowing "novel," The Painted Bird. Once you read that book, nothing that Polanski has imagined in his films, or has been accused of in court, seems so grievous. And let's not forget that his wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson family.

As with all archaeology, the puzzle that is reconstructed is never complete, although Zenovich is exhaustive and entertaining. We never hear from Polanski - no surprise. You can imagine why he would be suspicious of any American reporter. We never hear from the mother of Samantha Geimer, the sexy 14 year old (now a mature mother of her own children), who Polanski says set up his meetings with the girl at Jack Nicholson's house on Mulholland Drive with the intention of blackmailing him. What really did happen? We know that Geimer has publicly "forgiven" Polanski.

We are likely to learn more, since the film will be shown in theaters in the US and Europe, and in the UK on the BBC. International rights are being sold by the Weinstein Company, with the added prospect that Polanski himself may be able to promote the film in France, which may mean at the Cannes Film Festival. Are we looking at If I Did It: Part Deux?

Revenge is rarely so unexpected - or potentially so profitable - since Polanski's discussion of his involvement in the incident in the inevitable interviews to come could well eclipse the information in the film, and become even more newsworthy. Just imagine Polanski and his wife and children walking up those long steps in Cannes with Harvey Weinstein at his side. Polanski can "correct" any assertions made in the film that he doesn't like, and place the documentary showing him to be a victim of California justice in the frame of his choice. For the European market that chews up anti-American stories like raw meat, this is steak tartare. And steak tartare is not cheap.

Update, 1/23: Polanski Revisited: Revulsion

Oh God. What reactions. Not entirely unexpected, but is there anything about Roman Polanski that doesn't inspire controversy and disagreement? I wrote in a short dispatch about Marina Zenovitch's very fine documentary that Polanski was prosecuted for a "sexual adventure." And adventures can come in many forms, not all them pretty or legal.

Initially, Polanski was charged with rape, but then he was prosecuted for a lesser charge of having sexual intercourse with an underage person, which is a far lesser offense in the State of California. Zenovich interviews people involved in the case who say that most defendants charged with such an offense would have gone unpunished. My implied point, which I should have made more explicit, is that the nature of his encounter with young Samantha Geimer is still not clear. Since when do prosecutors allow a defendant to plead down a rape charge, if their own evidence makes it clear that indeed it was rape? The point I was trying to make in urging everyone to see the documentary is that there remains ambiguity in the court record and in the fact that Geimer's mother, who seems to have set up the encounter between Roman Polanski and her daughter, at Jack Nicholson's house on Mulholland Drive (which the mother seemed to know well), is absent from Marina Zenovich's film. If the adventure was rape, the alleged rapist should have been prosecuted for just that. I am hoping that the closer examination of all those events will make clear exactly what Polanski did. Then the word "adventure" might not be necessary. Let's all bear in mind that Geimer has publicly "forgiven" Polanski. What exactly does that mean? Perhaps, with the release of the film and the new attention it brings, we will learn a lot more about what she is forgiving.

The last thing I would do is approve of rape in any form. I was noting that there remains ambiguity here, one of the many factors that motivated Zenovich to make the film. I wasn't condoning anything that Polanski did to this young woman. But the mission Zenovich gave herself in this documentary is to explore what really happened. There are still some gaps.

As to my joking prediction of Polanski walking up the stairs at the Palais in Cannes with Harvey Weinstein this spring, this was a joke and an exaggeration. I'm sorry that my literal-minded friends couldn't see that. Beware of their reviews of comedies. But don't for a moment assume that whoever is distributing the film in France or anywhere else in Europe won't use Polanski's legally free status to promote the movie. When has Weinstein held back? Who's kidding whom here? This means that we'll probably see reporters trying to interview Polanski about the events in question and trying to explore and clarify the very ambiguities at the core of the new documentary. He was there, remember.

Here's how my friend Bingham Ray of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment reflected on the prospect of Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired being released in the spring:

My feeling about Polanski is that this film here in North America, as a marketing and distribution guy, is that this film will do - I would really take my left arm off to have the opportunity to use this film as the engine, as the vehicle, to end all this torment, this 30-year torment for Roman Polanski. I really think it could be the vehicle to do for RP what Thin Blue Line by Errol Morris did for Randall Adams - got him off death row in Texas, and now he's a free man. For me, that's the hook for the film. That could be the driving element.

Thanks to David Hudson for letting the opinions fly. That's what we're here for. As Frank Mankiewicz notes in Alex Gibney's entertaining new doc on the highly opinionated Hunter S Thompson, Gonzo, Thompson's colorful (even psychedelic) coverage of the 1972 US presidential campaign was "the least accurate and most truthful." We could use more of that.

Yet facts, as they say, are stubborn things. The Polanski case is still missing some crucial ones.

-David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at 5:29 AM | Comments (10)

January 20, 2008

Park City, 1/20.

"I ran into producer Mike Ryan, whose Choke is screening here at Sundance, and he told me about a new website he's involved with," blogs Filmmaker's Scott Macaulay. "Hammer to Nail has just launched, with Ryan and, soon, Mike Tully filing film reviews from Sundance - reviews that are intended to be provocative conversation-starters that eschew the niceties that sometimes inhibit writing from not only the MSM but also the blogosphere." Also, the buzz and news of a "Creative Producing Initiative."

Photos: Ray Pride and Jeffrey Wells.

Online listening tip. Filmspotting's ongoing coverage.

Online viewing tip. IFC's ongoing coverage.

Posted by dwhudson at 4:11 PM

Sundance. Frozen River.

"Frozen River is adapted from a short, and you can see the promise in it and its world of rundown desperation," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog. "In its expanded form, though, it's a scattering of unbelievable elements... and a perspective that flirts with condescension."

"The practice of smuggling illegal aliens across the Mohawk Indian Reservation in Upstate New York is real; the characters are not, but could be," writes James Greenberg in the Hollywood Reporter. "Written and directed by Courtney Hunt, this is no-frills filmmaking delivered with earnestness and honesty."

"Hunt builds a lot of tension in the film's final half-hour, and emerges with something tha

January 31, 2008

Slamdance. Paranormal Activity.

Park City Dispatch. 8.

Sundance. Anywhere, USA.

4 Months..., 1/31.

Fests and events, 1/31.

Oscarology, 1/31.

Sundance. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr Hunter S Thompson.

Sundance. Savage Grace.

January 30, 2008

Caramel.

Sundance. Flow: For Love of Water.

Slamdance. Dear Zachary: a letter to a son about his father.

Sundance. Man on Wire.

Sundance. Red.

Sundance. Nerakhoon (The Betrayal).

Sundance. Assassination of a High School President.

Sundance. The Visitor.

Shorts, 1/30.

Fests and events, 1/30.

The Witnesses.

The Silence Before Bach.

January 29, 2008

Other fests, other events, 1/29.

Rotterdam, 1/29.

That was Park City, 1/29.

Other DVDs, 1/29.

Benten's Quiet City + Dance Party USA.

Berlinale. Jury, Kamera, buzz.

January 28, 2008

Butterknife.

SFBG. Video Mutants.

Shorts, 1/28.

Fests and events, 1/28.

Jamie Stuart. Cut Short.

Sundance. Be Kind Rewind.

Awards, 1/28.

January 27, 2008

Other fests, other events, 1/27.

Rotterdam, 1/27.

Sundance. Made in America.

Envisioning Russia - and Mosfilm.

Cloverfield revisited.

Sundance. Awards.

January 26, 2008

Park City, 1/26.

Park City Dispatch. 7.

Sight & Sound. Feb 08.

Slamdance. Awards.

January 25, 2008

Park City, 1/25.

Sundance. A Good Day to Be Black and Sexy.

Sundance. The Wave.

CulturePulp meets Satrapi.

Jamie Stuart on NPR.

Sundance. The Object.

Rotterdam, 1/25.

Cesars. Nominations.

Sundance. The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.

Sundance. Baghead.

Sundance. Momma's Man.

Sundance. The Order of Myths.

Sundance. Sunshine Cleaning.

January 24, 2008

Midnight Eye. Best of 07.

Shorts, 1/24.

DVDs, 1/22.

Other fests, other events, 1/24.

Sundance. Pretty Bird.

Sundance. Phoebe in Wonderland.

Sundance. Choke.

Sundance. The Merry Gentleman.

Sundance. Blind Date.

Sundance. Downloading Nancy.

Sundance. Sugar.

Berlinale. Panorama, Forum. (+ Rotterdam.)

Park City Dispatch. 6.

Bookforum. Feb/Mar 08. (+ Atlantic.)

January 23, 2008

Park City, 1/23.