Wings of Desire is one of cinema's loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black-and-white and color by the legendary Henri Alékan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (17:09)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "From Her to Eternity"
OUTRO: They Might Be Giants, "Road Movie to Berlin"

]]> 7640@http://daily.greencine.com/ In celebration of Criterion's deluxe double-DVD and Blu-ray treatment of Wings of Desire, my Benten Films partner-in-crime Andrew Grant and I rewatched Wim Wenders' 1987 masterpiece (and pored over the bonus features) to discuss the film's elusive magic and why a work so specific to East-West German tensions has aged so gracefully. Andrew reminisces about spending time in Berlin around the era of the production, with other topics of conversation including They Might Be Giants, Nick Cave's inner thoughts, Peter Falk's unconscious plot hole, a rather unfortunate sequel, and how Wings of Desire almost ended with an pie fight. If you haven't already absorbed its pleasures (or, god forbid, you only know its atrocious H'wood remake, City of Angels), here's the Criterion synopsis:

Wings of Desire is one of cinema's loveliest city symphonies. Bruno Ganz is Damiel, an angel perched atop buildings high over Berlin who can hear the thoughts—fears, hopes, dreams—of all the people living below. But when he falls in love with a beautiful trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), he is willing to give up his immortality and come back to earth to be with her. Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black-and-white and color by the legendary Henri Alékan, is movie poetry. And it forever made the name Wim Wenders synonymous with film art.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (17:09)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, "From Her to Eternity"
OUTRO: They Might Be Giants, "Road Movie to Berlin"

Comments (0)

Comments on this Entry:

Even in this age of Blu-ray and appreciation for all things high-def, many take for granted how complicated but vital a great film restoration can be. Buzzed about at this year's Cannes Film Festival as one of the most miraculous to date is the UCLA Film & Television Archive's restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, starring Moira Shearer as a gifted young ballerina forced to choose between her love for composer Marius Goring and a career as lead dancer and muse to ballet company impresario Anton Walbrook. In association with the BFI, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd., and Janus Films, the restored 35mm print—which Film Foundation founder Martin Scorsese has praised as one of his all-time faves and the most extraordinary use of the three-strip Technicolor process—dazzled a packed house at the DGA Theater last night. (The Red Shoes screens at NYC's Film Forum from November 6 – 19.)

Thelma Schoonmaker—Scorsese's three-time Oscar winning editor, and widow of Michael Powell—introduced the screening with a test sample showing a practical comparison of what had been done to correct for mold damage, shrinkage and surging color. Suffice to say, no superlatives can do justice to what was easily the most impressively eye-popping revitalization these eyes have yet popped for. Following the screening was a swanky afterparty at nearby Nobu 57, where I had a chance to speak briefly with Mr. Scorsese, Ms. Schoonmaker, and filmmaker (and fellow guest) James Toback about the event:

]]> Martin Scorsese:
"I first saw it when I was eight, and it stayed with me over the years. Even when it was shown on television in black-and-white every Christmas, we still had the magic of the film. Over the years, I began to realize it had more to do with wanting to create something artistically, and that drive. That's the thing that really carried me through the years, meaning, that's why I never get tired of the film. Then, of course, you add to that the beautiful way it was made. It's a pleasure to watch."

Thelma Schoonmaker:
"Marty's daughter is going to be 10 [this month] so he had been waiting, waiting, waiting for her to get old enough to show it to her. And you know, Woody Allen brought his daughter, and she's 11."

[On the aesthetic challenges of reaching a relative state of perfection:] "That was very carefully watched. We didn't want it to look like video which sometimes these things do, so we worked very, very carefully. It's about controlling highlights and contrasts and all kinds of things. We just had such a phenomenal team. Everybody who was in it loved it, and was giving much more than they should. The main thing was to make it look like film, and film of the period—not pump it up and do all the things they do with bad transfers these days. I've seen some horrendous transfers that just make me want to kill. [laughs] I saw one of a film David Lean made right after the war, and it looks like some modern movie. They just completely ruined it! We kept watching prints and making sure we didn't make a mistake."

[On the future of film restoration:] One of the problems is that digital is not stable. I hope you've got that point. You would have to take this restoration and migrate it to either another drive or another system that's come along. Who's going to be there to make sure it's done right if I'm dead or Marty's dead? That's the thing that's so frightening. The digital thing is wonderful, but it is not stable."

[On the film's personal value to her within Michael Powell's oeuvre:] "This one is so important because it's about the world I live in, the world of entertainment. It is so honest in showing the jealousies and ego clashes and all the things that go into working in the world of art. It vividly lays it down in such an honest way. It's so wonderful how you're always backstage. You're not seeing things from sitting out front, but you're in it. You understand the incredible love of it, and yet the sacrifices you have to make when you're in it, and we all do. Our personal lives suffer very badly, and this movie just nails it, doesn't it? It's also about being willing to die for our art, which my husband did. With Peeping Tom, his career was ruined. He died for that film. This happens to many, many great artists. It's such a beautiful symbolism of that. It's so real, and ballet dancers to this day still think it's the best portrayal of [that world], even though the dancing has gotten much better."

James Toback:
"I see it every couple of years. It's always emotionally powerful. There are stretches of the movie that kind of flatten out, and then it has that jolt of tragedy at the end that never fails to get to me. It is very beautiful, the restoration. Love and death, music and high style are among my favorite phenomena in life and they're all on display. I think it's clearly the inspiration for Visconti in style—this sort of unembarrassed high emotion and operatic inflation without any self-consciousness. No one would do that today, and yet it works with great power."

[Related podcast: Martin Scorsese and Kent Jones speak to GreenCine Daily from Cannes '09.]

]]> 7638@http://daily.greencine.com/

Even in this age of Blu-ray and appreciation for all things high-def, many take for granted how complicated but vital a great film restoration can be. Buzzed about at this year's Cannes Film Festival as one of the most miraculous to date is the UCLA Film & Television Archive's restoration of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes, starring Moira Shearer as a gifted young ballerina forced to choose between her love for composer Marius Goring and a career as lead dancer and muse to ballet company impresario Anton Walbrook. In association with the BFI, The Film Foundation, ITV Global Entertainment Ltd., and Janus Films, the restored 35mm print—which Film Foundation founder Martin Scorsese has praised as one of his all-time faves and the most extraordinary use of the three-strip Technicolor process—dazzled a packed house at the DGA Theater last night. (The Red Shoes screens at NYC's Film Forum from November 6 – 19.)

Thelma Schoonmaker—Scorsese's three-time Oscar winning editor, and widow of Michael Powell—introduced the screening with a test sample showing a practical comparison of what had been done to correct for mold damage, shrinkage and surging color. Suffice to say, no superlatives can do justice to what was easily the most impressively eye-popping revitalization these eyes have yet popped for. Following the screening was a swanky afterparty at nearby Nobu 57, where I had a chance to speak briefly with Mr. Scorsese, Ms. Schoonmaker, and filmmaker (and fellow guest) James Toback about the event:

Continued reading The Red Shoes: Relaced and Restored...

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Comments on this Entry:

(randi applebaum on Nov 7, 2009 5:37 AM) will the restored Red Shoes eventually be playing at other theaters nationwide? How about DVD???

Sam (Jocelin Donahue) is a pretty college sophomore, so desperate to earn some cash for a deposit on an apartment that she accepts a babysitting job even after she finds out there is no baby. Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (cult actors Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) are the older couple who lure Sam out to their creeky Victorian mansion deep in the woods, just in time for a total lunar eclipse. Megan (Greta Gerwig) is Sam's best friend, who gives her a ride out to the house, and reluctantly leaves her there despite suspecting that something is amiss. Victor (AJ Bowen) at first seems like just a creepy guy lurking around the house, but quickly makes it clear that Sam will end this night in a bloody fight for her life...

Sitting down with Mr. Ulman himself in what sounds halfway through our podcast as if it might actually be Satan's homestead, Noonan and I spoke about his dramatic workshops, being naturally creepy, why he never reads the whole script, and anecdotal remembrances of working with John Cassavetes, Michael Mann, and Michael Cimino—"just a terrible human being."

To listen to the podcast, click here. (18:33)

Podcast Music
INTRO: The Fixx, "One Thing Leads to Another"
OUTRO: The Fugs, "I Command the House of the Devil"

[The House of the Devil is now playing in select theaters and is available on VOD through Magnolia Pictures.]]]> 7634@http://daily.greencine.com/ Among other things, Tom Noonan is a musician, playwright, and writer-director of two acclaimed films (What Happened Was, The Wife), but most will sooner recognize this tall, reserved but eerily intense gentleman as a memorable character actor from films as diverse as Manhunter, Mystery Train, and Synecdoche New York. His latest chance to effortlessly steal scenes arrives in Ti West's wonderfully slow-burning, retro-horror flick, The House of the Devil:

Sam (Jocelin Donahue) is a pretty college sophomore, so desperate to earn some cash for a deposit on an apartment that she accepts a babysitting job even after she finds out there is no baby. Mr. and Mrs. Ulman (cult actors Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) are the older couple who lure Sam out to their creeky Victorian mansion deep in the woods, just in time for a total lunar eclipse. Megan (Greta Gerwig) is Sam's best friend, who gives her a ride out to the house, and reluctantly leaves her there despite suspecting that something is amiss. Victor (AJ Bowen) at first seems like just a creepy guy lurking around the house, but quickly makes it clear that Sam will end this night in a bloody fight for her life...

Sitting down with Mr. Ulman himself in what sounds halfway through our podcast as if it might actually be Satan's homestead, Noonan and I spoke about his dramatic workshops, being naturally creepy, why he never reads the whole script, and anecdotal remembrances of working with John Cassavetes, Michael Mann, and Michael Cimino—"just a terrible human being."

To listen to the podcast, click here. (18:33)

Podcast Music
INTRO: The Fixx, "One Thing Leads to Another"
OUTRO: The Fugs, "I Command the House of the Devil"

[The House of the Devil is now playing in select theaters and is available on VOD through Magnolia Pictures.]

Comments (1)

Comments on this Entry:

(Maian on Nov 4, 2009 11:50 AM) One of my favorite podcasts! You guys have a really natural repoire. His rant on Michael Cimino is hilarious.

High School Record
directed by Ben Wolfinsohn
2005, 75 minutes, USA
Factory 25

Where the Wild Things Are tried to emulate the untamed insecurities of childhood via impressionist sun flares and the pageantry of imagination, but it was a blockbuster rumpus too overearnest and laboriously designed to evoke such emotional authenticity. Far more successful in exposing the raw-nerve anxieties of youth onscreen is an older, rougher, hipper kind of wild thing altogether, Ben Wolfinsohn's High School Record, which could still be about King Max if he grew up to be a confused, complicated teenager who finally discovered garage rock. Neither caricatured like Napoleon Dynamite and its whitewashed imitators with hand-drawn titles, nor played for teens-gone-wild shock value (Afterschool, Kids), Wolfinsohn's naturalistic, semi-improvised series of awkward comic vignettes at a performing arts school absolutely nails the liberating/frightening social moments of post-pubescence in all their riches of embarrassments. Having not seen the inside of a locker since the mid-'90s (which reminds me of some sample dialogue that ages me, between two girls who hooked up with the same dude: "You wanna be his girlfriend now? That's so '90s!"), I still recognized enough of my younger unsure self that I was occasionally and unexpectedly laughing aloud.

]]> Wolfinsohn's follow-up to his shaggily charming 2002 doc Friends Forever (about young rockers who perform and tour, smoke machine and all, out of their van) technically lies in one of the laziest and most overplayed subgenres, the mockumentary, but the writer-director's instincts are pretty sharp. Making a record of their senior year in both senses of the word, cameraman/guitarist Nicholas (Nicholas Gitomer) and boom operator/drummer Susan (Susan Estrada) are the novice documentarians "behind" the camera (Wolfinsohn shot the film), capturing their classmates in vulnerably candid moments while occasionally rocking out in welcome interludes. (The two perform under the name My Little Red Toe, and share the soundtrack with hipster faves like Dan Deacon, Jad Fair, and No Age—more on the latter later.) Their naïve filmmaking decisions play into the atmosphere seamlessly and sparingly, as they deliberate over whether they should film a couple having sex in the science room, or if Susan should run after a student who has been escorted from class by a police officer. Unlike most mock-docs, there thankfully isn't that oppressive detachment when characters self-awarely mug to the camera, the most ghastly mistake made by narratives meant to look like non-fiction. (Seriously, haven't they got enough footage on The Office yet?) And the grainy, lo-fi digital look serves the subject matter both aesthetically (it's meant to be a DIY project) and thematically (how better to express daily humiliation than with a shaky cam?), without that too-polished, fake-amateur shooting that made Cloverfield so phony-looking.

It's also refreshing to see a film about high-school characters that not only aren't stereotypes, but aren't so calculated in their fringe qualities to consciously subvert said stereotypes. Lovably irksome as he tries too hard to fit in, the most uncomfortable player has to be Caleb, played by Dean Allen Spunt—real-life drummer of the noise-rock duo No Age. (Adding street cred à la Rock 'n' Roll High School or Suburbia, many of the actors are musicians from the downtown L.A. scene based around The Smell.) Caleb desperately wants to be edgy-cool, and might've been the class clown if he weren't such a self-serious goon. He misreads a joke and puts epoxy in his hair because he thinks the London kids are doing it, tries to shave a "planetary ring" into his head but gets called a "doughnut-hawk" instead, and looks ill at ease wearing aluminum foil shorts to class. ("Is your dad the Tin Man, or some shit?" mocks a classmate.) Caleb occasionally dates and gets abused by horny swim-team frump Sabrina (Jenna Thornhill, of the catchy post-punk band Mika Miko), who is best friends with impulsive rich chick Erin (Jennifer Clavin, also of Mika Miko), who is seeing swaggering rebel-weirdo Eddie (Bobby Sandoval—yes, another musician). Their sparkly pixie teacher (Becky Stark, frontwoman of wistful indie popsters Lavender Diamond) is obsessed with comedy and good cheer, distressingly so, but when it comes out later that she moonlights as a gifted musician both Eddie and his father respect, she can't just be written off as the hippie-dippie kook.

All but forgotten after Sundance and SXSW 2005, High School Record is decidedly a little movie with minor-key goals, but it's damn funny and has a surprising immediacy, just like every waking moment amongst one's peers at that tender age. Thanks to the good folks at Factory 25, a new music-oriented DVD label that was quasi-born of the ashes from Plexifilm (founder Matt Grady was their director of production, and worked on such films as Helvetica and Style Wars), Wolfinsohn's vivid classroom squiggle—or should I say chalkboard sketch, in reference to the film's best scene—has another chance to be uncovered. Also of note, being released today by Factory 25 are You Weren't There: A History of Chicago Punk 1977-84 and All the Way From Michigan Not Mars, a tone-poetic doc about Rosie Thomas, with Sufjan Stevens and Damien Jurado.

]]> 7627@http://daily.greencine.com/

High School Record
directed by Ben Wolfinsohn
2005, 75 minutes, USA
Factory 25

Where the Wild Things Are tried to emulate the untamed insecurities of childhood via impressionist sun flares and the pageantry of imagination, but it was a blockbuster rumpus too overearnest and laboriously designed to evoke such emotional authenticity. Far more successful in exposing the raw-nerve anxieties of youth onscreen is an older, rougher, hipper kind of wild thing altogether, Ben Wolfinsohn's High School Record, which could still be about King Max if he grew up to be a confused, complicated teenager who finally discovered garage rock. Neither caricatured like Napoleon Dynamite and its whitewashed imitators with hand-drawn titles, nor played for teens-gone-wild shock value (Afterschool, Kids), Wolfinsohn's naturalistic, semi-improvised series of awkward comic vignettes at a performing arts school absolutely nails the liberating/frightening social moments of post-pubescence in all their riches of embarrassments. Having not seen the inside of a locker since the mid-'90s (which reminds me of some sample dialogue that ages me, between two girls who hooked up with the same dude: "You wanna be his girlfriend now? That's so '90s!"), I still recognized enough of my younger unsure self that I was occasionally and unexpectedly laughing aloud.

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: High School Record...

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Chaos... yeah, you know already! I haven't peeked at any reports other than from the IFC Center in NYC, where Thursday's late-night preview of Lars von Trier's Antichrist filled three auditoriums and turned yet more people away. The reviews have been wildly mixed, with the disgusted detractors often just as fiery as the film's champions, but you certainly can't argue that this is a Halloween-appropriate provocation that gets people talking:

A grieving couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreat to "Eden," their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...

To listen to the podcast, click here. (17:19)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Björk and Thom Yorke, "I've Seen It All"
OUTRO: Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar"

[Related: FlavorWire's Review: Mythological Revisionism or Misogynistic Schlock?]

]]> 7624@http://daily.greencine.com/

Chaos... yeah, you know already! I haven't peeked at any reports other than from the IFC Center in NYC, where Thursday's late-night preview of Lars von Trier's Antichrist filled three auditoriums and turned yet more people away. The reviews have been wildly mixed, with the disgusted detractors often just as fiery as the film's champions, but you certainly can't argue that this is a Halloween-appropriate provocation that gets people talking:

A grieving couple (Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) retreat to "Eden," their isolated cabin in the woods, where they hope to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse...

To listen to the podcast, click here. (17:19)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Björk and Thom Yorke, "I've Seen It All"
OUTRO: Marilyn Manson, "Antichrist Superstar"

[Related: FlavorWire's Review: Mythological Revisionism or Misogynistic Schlock?]

Comments (2)

Comments on this Entry:

(Anonymous on Oct 24, 2009 7:20 PM) Ha ha ... I guess I have some strange desire to see Vince Vaughn's nuts get clobbered for making all those lame rom-coms.

(Maian on Nov 4, 2009 11:52 AM) Steve's quote (it's like "Couples Retreat" for art school masochists) made me lol.

Visiting a friend in Omaha this past weekend, I saw The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. at the lovely Film Streams theater. I'd never seen the one-and-only Dr. Seuss-scripted 1953 classic, and the spangly print certainly didn't disappoint. Mostly, though, it got me thinking about everything that's wrong with Where the Wild Things Are. Both are sui generis translations of maverick beloved children's authors to the screen in ways that could be "scary" or "inappropriate" for children. And there the similarities end.

Even among surreal, culty kid's films (Return to Oz is my favorite, but Babe: Pig in the City and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure come to mind as well), The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is singular. A source of dismay for Dr. Seuss (who compared the reviews to an on-set accident where all the children vomited at once) and a financial calamity (losing over $1 million), this weirdest of all children's movies inevitably became a cult hit (yes, a musical version is on the way). Director Roy Rowland was a journeyman who began his career helming Robert Benchley shorts and acting as assistant to W.S. Van Dyke on the Tarzan movies, and ended up directing spaghetti Westerns. Among other things, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a film in which the director is clearly as confused as any of the spectators; watching him trying to figure out the most efficient way to shoot something this unprecedented is one of the film's bracing qualities.

]]> Most of the film takes place in a boy's nightmare, but even the bookending "real world" sequences are radically disorienting. Bart Collins (Tommy Rettig) lives with his mother Heloise Collins (Mary Healy), who forces him to take piano lessons he has no interest in from the downright fascistic Doctor Terwilliger (Hans Conried). Young Bart's only ally is the town's best plumber, August Zabladowski (Peter Lind Hayes). In the super cursory opening, Rowland shoots and cuts like an accidental Kenneth Anger, privileging lurid color, screen-filling close-ups of self-consciously mannered performances and a subtly deranged, artificial narrative flow. This suburbia is Sirk for kids; all is clearly not well. In most of the film, though, Bart is in his nightmare world, processing his fears through a bizarre scenario where Dr. T's simultaneously enslaving little boys to his ultimate practice piano while hypnotizing Heloise into marrying him.

As an expression of childhood fears, Dr. T is simultaneously amazingly direct and utterly bizarre. In Bart's dreamscape, he's got a mother he loves—but who forces him to do things he doesn't like—and two competing father figures; the Oedipal complexes are too obvious to need explication. Here, Bart and Zabladowski bond; in a really unnerving sequence, their replacement-father/son bonding takes the form of an unnerving two-person close-up, each staring at the other dead-on, that makes it look as if it's about to turn into a pornographic NAMBLA ad. This isn't just me being unnecessarily perverse: Dr. T is thrumming with weird, inappropriate sexual energies.

Bart's familial paranoia is hardly the only point of view, however: he disappears for whole reels given over to musical numbers and adult drama. Zabladowski cracks wise about preferring to think of himself as an "independent contractor" and whines about overtime pay; Terwilliger's egomania is clearly based off much more than animosity towards Bart, as opposed to the usual kidpic villains. This is a film in which childhood is as much about scrambled receptions of the adult world as the experience of "childhood." By the time both Joseph McCarthy and the atomic bomb have been invoked, we're in a world that's equal parts Freudian confusion, genuine childhood, and '50s Cold War zeitgeist. By not privileging Bart's viewpoint exclusively, it suggests larger worldviews and fears that can't quite be articulated but are clearly felt; to the extent I remember my childhood at all, that seems about right.

That's way truer to the idea of "childhood" than Where the Wild Things Are. In the world cooked up by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, who we are as children is the same as what we grow up to be: fearful, incapable of processing our inappropriate emotions in any way other than the bluntest and most unsophisticated way. For too long, the argument goes, we've repressed our naïve, truthful reactions and true emotional selves. Talking about needing a "sadness shield" is the new sophistication. I'm not being hyperbolic; this is a movie whose trailer is scored with The Arcade Fire. Simplest thought = truest. And so on and so on. It drives me up the wall.

The first 20 minutes of Where the Wild Things Are have been nearly universally praised, and I can see why: young Max's loneliness, need for attention from his mother and sister, and inexplicable fits of rage cut pretty close to the bone. Jonze's frequent insistence on roughhewn handheld camera has never seemed so right; we're as untethered and volatile as Max is. Yet, the trouble is once you see Maurice Pialat's 1968 L'Enfance Nue, you can't unsee it. That film depicts from outside what it's like to be around a troubled child, and the answer is sheer, unending abrasion: you can feel bad for the kid and still want nothing to do with him. That's because the movie has adults in it who act like adults; in Jonze and Eggers' world, though, childhood is more relatable than any putative form of adulthood.

To be clear: what I'm not asking for is some kind of '50s world where men are buttoned-up and keep their emotions to themselves. Maturity takes many forms, and sometimes it's the healthiest thing to let it all out. The trouble starts when that mode of perception is never challenged or shaken — when tweeness becomes the ultimate wisdom and everything else is cynicism. That's what bugs me about Wild Things: it's not so much about childhood as about perpetual regression, and an endorsement of it no less. Work, relationships outside the family, culture, nuclear fears, everyday snark: everything Dr. T. shoehorns into the story of an equally lost and sad kid has been stripped away. Jonze and Eggers aren't really privileging kids; they're privileging their view of what childhood is, which is preparing for a world of emotional woes whose essence never changes. Making the wild things neurotic adults who grumble about their fears on the same maturity level as Max is a funny joke, but it also isn't a joke: Jonze and Eggers really seem to believe that's true.

Myths about childhood change all the time: the very idea of it as a privileged time that deserves special care is itself pretty recent. One of the new big bugaboos is that parents from the '90s and onward have been too controlling and fearful, trying to shelter their kids from all harm while denying them the opportunity to express themselves. I see that Michael Chabon is the latest to parrot this mantra. "The sandlots and creek beds," he says, "the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations—Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked Staff Only." All of which is kind of true—but it's a manifestation of exactly the same kind of thinking as Eggers'. Childhood should be a rumpus, childhood is special, childhood should be scary because life is, childhood is where the imagination should flourish before adulthood kills it and all that remains is the sadness. It's of a piece with Wild Things' basic parenting philosophy—take your kid to a mosh pit and let them get it all out—and it's just as monolithic and prescriptive a viewpoint as keeping your kids locked up in the house all the time. So: Dr. Seuss vs. Maurice Sendak? Seuss wins. The true wild things are where the adults are.

]]> 7622@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

Visiting a friend in Omaha this past weekend, I saw The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. at the lovely Film Streams theater. I'd never seen the one-and-only Dr. Seuss-scripted 1953 classic, and the spangly print certainly didn't disappoint. Mostly, though, it got me thinking about everything that's wrong with Where the Wild Things Are. Both are sui generis translations of maverick beloved children's authors to the screen in ways that could be "scary" or "inappropriate" for children. And there the similarities end.

Even among surreal, culty kid's films (Return to Oz is my favorite, but Babe: Pig in the City and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure come to mind as well), The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is singular. A source of dismay for Dr. Seuss (who compared the reviews to an on-set accident where all the children vomited at once) and a financial calamity (losing over $1 million), this weirdest of all children's movies inevitably became a cult hit (yes, a musical version is on the way). Director Roy Rowland was a journeyman who began his career helming Robert Benchley shorts and acting as assistant to W.S. Van Dyke on the Tarzan movies, and ended up directing spaghetti Westerns. Among other things, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is a film in which the director is clearly as confused as any of the spectators; watching him trying to figure out the most efficient way to shoot something this unprecedented is one of the film's bracing qualities.

Continued reading Weirder and Wilder Things...

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1996's Bad Moon was the last film helmed by cult genre filmmaker Eric Red (director of Body Parts and Cohen and Tate, screenwriter of Near Dark and The Hitcher) before most had heard about the strange and tragic troubles he encountered earlier this decade. Premiering last year on the SyFy channel, 100 Feet marks Red's return to the screen:

"Her Husband's Dead, and He's Taking the News Badly" reads the irresistible tagline of Eric Red's first film in 12 years, in which abused wife Marnie (Famke Janssen) learns that stabbing her sadistic spouse three times is not enough to keep him away. After serving some time for murder, she's placed under house arrest in her spacious Brooklyn brownstone, fitted with an electronic anklet, and is soon haunted by hubby's vengeful spirit (a creepy Michael Paré, looking more like Michael Myers). Hand-wringingly tense, 100 Feet provides the chills expected from the writer of the wonderfully deranged Near Dark and The Hitcher.

As part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies 3 series (now through October 22), both 100 Feet and The Hitcher will screen on Tuesday, October 20th—the same day that 100 Feet lands on DVD. Ominously calling just before midnight on the 13th of this month, I spoke with Eric Red about both films, the unfortunate remake of The Hitcher, how he feels about a notorious review by Roger Ebert, and what scares him today.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (14:58)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Mark Isham, "Headlights (Main Theme to The Hitcher)"
OUTRO: Mark Isham, "Dust and Gasoline"

]]> 7619@http://daily.greencine.com/

1996's Bad Moon was the last film helmed by cult genre filmmaker Eric Red (director of Body Parts and Cohen and Tate, screenwriter of Near Dark and The Hitcher) before most had heard about the strange and tragic troubles he encountered earlier this decade. Premiering last year on the SyFy channel, 100 Feet marks Red's return to the screen:

"Her Husband's Dead, and He's Taking the News Badly" reads the irresistible tagline of Eric Red's first film in 12 years, in which abused wife Marnie (Famke Janssen) learns that stabbing her sadistic spouse three times is not enough to keep him away. After serving some time for murder, she's placed under house arrest in her spacious Brooklyn brownstone, fitted with an electronic anklet, and is soon haunted by hubby's vengeful spirit (a creepy Michael Paré, looking more like Michael Myers). Hand-wringingly tense, 100 Feet provides the chills expected from the writer of the wonderfully deranged Near Dark and The Hitcher.

As part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies 3 series (now through October 22), both 100 Feet and The Hitcher will screen on Tuesday, October 20th—the same day that 100 Feet lands on DVD. Ominously calling just before midnight on the 13th of this month, I spoke with Eric Red about both films, the unfortunate remake of The Hitcher, how he feels about a notorious review by Roger Ebert, and what scares him today.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (14:58)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Mark Isham, "Headlights (Main Theme to The Hitcher)"
OUTRO: Mark Isham, "Dust and Gasoline"

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Comments on this Entry:

(creejay on Oct 19, 2009 8:28 AM) He didn't really get much of an opportunity to talk about 100 Feet :S

(Wostry Ferenc on Oct 19, 2009 1:05 PM) 100 Feet is pretty good until the overblown finale. I'm always looking forward to Red's new films because he has a great feel for horror.

Like swallows to Capistrano, the zombies return to the Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges every October—at least they have since 1967—and their number keeps growing. The 42nd edition of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic was a breeding pool for all things undead or otherwise beyond mortal kin or consciousness. Yet, Hollywood entertainments like Zombieland or increasingly blah cult auteur franchises, like George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, were merely early Halloween window-dressing for this kaleidoscopic Cannes of cinematic extremism.

The festival, which ran from Oct. 1-12 this year, celebrated the 30th anniversary of Alien and gave a career achievement award to Malcolm McDowell, likewise honoring Walter Hill, Ivan Reitman and the alarmingly vital octogenarian splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis. (These may not always be so coveted. Last year, Abel Ferrara handed his trophy, a scale model of the Time Machine, to a hotel bartender to settle a tab). Everyone from Park Chan-wook to Viggo Mortensen to that spooky little girl from Orphan made appearances. [editor's viewing tip: click for Steve Dollar's reaction to an Orphan mask.] And if you turned around in the theater to see who was kicking the back of your seat, it was that Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, likely getting payback for sneaking ahead of him in line for breakfast buffet French fries.

]]> Duncan Jones's lovely, sad, charming Moon won a bunch of prizes. Too bad its star, Sam Rockwell, was unable to dispatch a clone for the fest's afterhours "karaoke apocalypse." Instead, it was "one of those kids from the new Twilight thing," as New Moon heartthrob Jamie Campbell Bower was generally known to the non-screaming-teen-female crowd of international industry types, bloggers, critics, and juror/troublemakers like Tim League, who apparently teleported directly to Sitges from his own Fantastic Fest.

It's reflective of the festival's range that some of its most startling entries transcended genre slots, even as they jostled familiar concepts into uncanny new forms. Amer, from French-born, Belgium-based filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, grabs you from the dynamic opening credits, set to an intriguing acoustic guitar melody and a menacing gurgle of weird ‘60s electronica that turns out to be from a vintage Bruno Nicolai soundtrack. Soon, we're inside a young girl's head, inside a creaky old house, where eyeballs peep through keyholes and the bodies of dead grandparents lay in state, ready to reanimate in a hallucinatory blink.

Constructed out of more than 900 separate shots, about one every six seconds, the film is nearly as keyed to optical reflex as a 1960s structural experiment. Its three half-hour segments trace the experience of the girl, Ana, from childhood to adolescence and into adulthood, advancing from a magical innocence (ripe with gothic tingles and primal scenery) to budding sensuality to, well... the film is a valentine to the giallo creep-outs of Argento, Bava, and Fulci. So a sexy, gap-toothed Euro Teen sashay for the benefit of a cliffside biker gang gives way to nocturnal stalking, black leather gloves brandishing a straight razor, and a dramatic return to forbidding corridors.

With maybe 15 lines of dialogue, though, Amer is more iconic poetry than explicit narrative, not a giallo but an evocation of its tropes, conjured in a disorienting rush of susurrations and extreme close-ups of bellybuttons and parted lips. "Giallo is the perfect genre in which to talk about desire, about sexuality, about fear and desire," Cattet told me, sharing a post-screening interview with Forzani, who is both her creative partner and boyfriend. It's the first feature for the young couple, who have previously made experimental shorts. "When you are with someone you love, in a couple," Forzani added, "you see them always up close."

Going this engaging pair one or two better as an eye-popping freakout is Enter the Void, the irascible Noé's first film since 2002's Irreversible (fondly remembered by one of this year's jurors as "an unending assault on the audience.") The film's stylistic gambits include, among other things, a protagonist shot exclusively from behind the back of his head, endless overhead "eye of God" tracking shots that swoop low into swirling dissolves, mushroom-trip strobe effects and a sex scene that resolves with an ejaculation shot from inside a vagina. Now that's an extreme close-up.

The effort most likely to be denounced by critics in attendance as "a piece of crap"—besides Paranormal Activity, that is—Void was screened in a 160-minute cut that was even longer than those prints shown at Cannes and Toronto. Those inclined to enjoy the void probably did so because of Noé’s extensive post-production work with a digital effects studio to create a psychedelic meditation on the meaning of life (and afterlife). The film is better appreciated as metaphysics, more akin to Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, as the sudden death of a young American drug dealer in Tokyo cuts his soul free to witness the aftershocks of his killing. The dialogue is largely flat and functional, and the camera's wandering amid the scuzzball depths of Tokyo's sex-and-drug dens offers nothing new for fans of the director's most transgressive impulses (well, okay, actress/model and former Jack Nicholson consort Paz de la Huerta doing naked pole tricks).

"It's supposed to reproduce a DMT trip," Noé said. "When I went to see parts of the movie today, it was weird because by moments the strobing effects, as you try to refocus [your eyes] produces a double image. And I know there's no double image."

Noé expressed his admiration for work by avant-garde filmmakers like Jordan Bellson and Tony Conrad. "I have them all," he said. "People say, 'Oh, you was pretending to do a movie like Kubrick. But at the end, it ended up looking more like a copy of Buñuel or Kenneth Anger.' I say, yeah, when you see Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, it's a lot closer to that than 2001. Another reference for the movie was Tron. I told [the effects supervisor] that I wanted Tokyo to look like Tron."

And as for the, um, climactic money shot near the end of the film? What sort of technology allowed him to frame that? "Very special technology." He laughed. "It was fun to have that cum shot on a big screen in Cannes."

Arriving with no pedigree for outrage, Dogtooth proved to be as seriously disturbing in its way as, say, Eraserhead. Greek director Giorgos Lanthimos's film is, superficially, a domestic comedy about a middle-aged, middle-class couple with three grown kids living at home. Only, their son and two daughters are afflicted with a strange case of arrested development. They've never even left the family compound, where their parents have home-schooled them in détourned vocabulary and treat them like 7-year-olds. Shot in a flat, static manner that allows the weirdness to slowly warp the viewer's mind, the film suggests the inner world of a religious cult where incest is encouraged, role play is used as mind control, and the father is a God improvising an alternative universe. The perils of this hermetic order are evident soon enough, but Lanthimos strikes a nimble balance between the grotesque and the beatific.

Fears that Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans would be a joke were happily unfounded. Werner Herzog's gun-for-hire un-remake of the classic Ferrara title is, indeed, Nicolas Cage's best whacked-out performance in years. Finally, the beast awakes! Post-Katrina New Orleans makes a suitably hellish landscape, feeding Herzog's love of the catastrophic, and Cage's riffing as a drug-addicted renegade cop flares into many a deliriously purple moment. Other than that, I offer only two words: Iguana Cam.

As for the good, old-fashioned horror flicks, Sitges was the land of a thousand jump scares. Sequels like [REC] 2 and The Descent 2 delivered the shocks without the element of dramatic surprise that drove the originals. The British lads-gone-bad comedy Doghouse offered a new twist, though, when a boy's weekend in the country goes terribly wrong: On the outs with their wives and girlfriends, the blokes find themselves in a village where all the women are man-eating zombies. Unlike The Hangover, which happily endorses misogyny and wasn't even funny, Jake West's male-bonding fest actually promotes emotional growth and critical self-examination! This, even as his boisterous crew of punters is gradually picked off and dismembered by a mutant army of female stereotypes.

Equally lethal is Australian actress Robin McLeavy in The Loved Ones. She's the high school good girl in Sean Byrne's mash-up of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Carrie and The Breakfast Club. Or is she? Accompanied by Kasey Chambers's lilting “Am I Not Pretty Enough?,” McLeavy's Lola takes revenge when she gets rejected by pretty-boy Brent (Xavier Samuel) for the prom, aiming to add her crush to a collection of basement-dwelling would-be boyfriends she’s lobotomized. The blend of grindhouse horror, pop spoofery, and sincere teenage drama jells surprisingly well, even mustering a convincing argument for why being a "cutter" (the emotionally rattled Brent likes to slash up his arms) can come in handy when someone's about to drill a hole in your skull.

Such lessons are one of the gifts of Sitges, where the otherworldly really is a walk on the beach.

]]> 7616@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

Like swallows to Capistrano, the zombies return to the Catalonian seaside resort of Sitges every October—at least they have since 1967—and their number keeps growing. The 42nd edition of the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic was a breeding pool for all things undead or otherwise beyond mortal kin or consciousness. Yet, Hollywood entertainments like Zombieland or increasingly blah cult auteur franchises, like George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead, were merely early Halloween window-dressing for this kaleidoscopic Cannes of cinematic extremism.

The festival, which ran from Oct. 1-12 this year, celebrated the 30th anniversary of Alien and gave a career achievement award to Malcolm McDowell, likewise honoring Walter Hill, Ivan Reitman and the alarmingly vital octogenarian splatter king Herschell Gordon Lewis. (These may not always be so coveted. Last year, Abel Ferrara handed his trophy, a scale model of the Time Machine, to a hotel bartender to settle a tab). Everyone from Park Chan-wook to Viggo Mortensen to that spooky little girl from Orphan made appearances. [editor's viewing tip: click for Steve Dollar's reaction to an Orphan mask.] And if you turned around in the theater to see who was kicking the back of your seat, it was that Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, likely getting payback for sneaking ahead of him in line for breakfast buffet French fries.

Continued reading SITGES '09: Film Fest of the Dead...

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Hardware
directed by Richard Stanley
1990, 93 minutes, UK
Severin Films

Falsely but understandably advertised as "The Terminator for the nineties" and loosely based on the 2000 A.D. comics (making it a precursor to Judge Dredd), South African-born auteur Richard Stanley's cult-beloved feature debut had only a fraction of the resources James Cameron did for his Ahnuld-pocalypse. But even in its meager limitations, Hardware is both more cynical and conscious of human indignities as a horrific cyberpunk vision of the future. In this ruddy post-apocalypse, lawlessness pervades the land and Big Brother is always watching via omnipresent closed-circuit cameras, but there's no anti-fascist revolution underway; we compliantly voted the bastards in, just as effortlessly as we decimated the environment so that only the fittest scavengers survive. Technically, the villain of Hardware (and here's where that original comparison gets made) is a murderous combat droid called the M.A.R.K. 13, which is capable of regenerating itself with any old electrical appliances. However, what makes Stanley's nightmare more disturbing in an age of environmental crisis and seemingly endless warring is that mankind is responsible for developing this mecha-monster (it's not a next-gen species like the T-800, but a "population lowering" device), and in this world, we're also responsible for destroying the resources that might allow us to defeat it.

]]> Dylan McDermott headlines as Moses "Hard Mo" Baxter, a former soldier who now scours the scorched-earth area called "The Zone" for post-war debris that he can hock for cash to a shady dwarf. After an extended venture into the field, Mo returns to the post-industrial cityscape (really, everything in this film is "post-"—this is the end, my only friend), and reunites with his fair-weather girlfriend, a reclusive metal sculptress named Jill (Stacey Travis). As a romantic gift that keeps on giving, Mo brings her the skull of a robot carcass that he bought from a radioactively glowing-eyed nomad (Fields of the Nephilim goth-rocker Carl McCoy), a trinket that just so happens to house the brain of the M.A.R.K. 13, uh-oh. As the droid soon switches on, everyone in its path is disposed of via hallucinogenic poison injection, phallic drilling, eye gouging, and other clever gore effects that should be praised for their low-budget ingenuity. This limitation also dictates that most of the survival horror takes place within the confines of Jill's dark, grimy, overly computerized and therefore locked-down apartment, which is being peeped into by an obese pervert (a sickeningly funny William Hootkins), just another debauched consequence of these end times. He'll get his, it's telegraphed, but nobody is innocent enough to be safe, or a hero. (In the original cut of the film, Mo's first scene has him walking by some kids beating up an old man, but then-Miramax honchos the Weinsteins feared it would make him too unsympathetic a character.)

After the shoddy-looking VHS version of the film that had been floating around (which is how I originally saw the film in the early '90s), Severin Films' remastered two-DVD set finally does justice to Stanley's fussy attention to detail and exaggerated stylization—you can tell he began his career as a music video director. The primary-colored gel filters throughout are straight from the Argento and Bava playbooks, and the monochrome blips and blinks of all the analog technology (which doesn't date the film given this is a devolved future) makes for more lucid imagery in widescreen. Hardware isn't a life-changing piece of genre filmmaking or even fresh storytelling, but its psychedelic unease, heavy-metal textures, nihilistic humor, DIY artistry and hold-your-breath-in-the-dark frights are still gloriously entertaining after two decades of special-effects advancements. Oh, and did I mention the special appearances from Iggy Pop as the voice of radio DJ "Angry Bob" and Lemmy from Motörhead as a surly water-taxi driver? Check out the video links below to see why this one's a truly rock n' roll cult classic...

- Iggy Pop on Hardware
- Lemmy on Hardware

]]> 7614@http://daily.greencine.com/

Hardware
directed by Richard Stanley
1990, 93 minutes, UK
Severin Films

Falsely but understandably advertised as "The Terminator for the nineties" and loosely based on the 2000 A.D. comics (making it a precursor to Judge Dredd), South African-born auteur Richard Stanley's cult-beloved feature debut had only a fraction of the resources James Cameron did for his Ahnuld-pocalypse. But even in its meager limitations, Hardware is both more cynical and conscious of human indignities as a horrific cyberpunk vision of the future. In this ruddy post-apocalypse, lawlessness pervades the land and Big Brother is always watching via omnipresent closed-circuit cameras, but there's no anti-fascist revolution underway; we compliantly voted the bastards in, just as effortlessly as we decimated the environment so that only the fittest scavengers survive. Technically, the villain of Hardware (and here's where that original comparison gets made) is a murderous combat droid called the M.A.R.K. 13, which is capable of regenerating itself with any old electrical appliances. However, what makes Stanley's nightmare more disturbing in an age of environmental crisis and seemingly endless warring is that mankind is responsible for developing this mecha-monster (it's not a next-gen species like the T-800, but a "population lowering" device), and in this world, we're also responsible for destroying the resources that might allow us to defeat it.

Continued reading DVD OF THE WEEK: Hardware...

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Todd Solondz starts his latest and finest film to date by introducing us to Joy (Shirley Henderson), whose husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is not quite cured of his peculiar "affliction." Joy's sister Trish (Allison Janney) is hoping to stabilize her family life by marrying the recently divorced Harvey (Michael Lerner), but her soon-to-be bar-mitzvahed son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) isn’t sure he wants another man in the house—especially as it seems his dead father, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), might not be dead after all. His portrait of these and several other major characters—beautifully rendered by Charlotte Rampling, Paul Reubens, Renee Taylor and Ally Sheedy—is tough, tender, at times startling, but never mean or condescending. For Solondz, "wartime" is not a historical period but a permanent condition: not only the constant battle between the sexes, but even more so the endless struggle between personal desires and the society set up to contain them.

In my final podcast from the 2009 New York Film Festival, I chat with Andrew Grant, along with New York Press chief film critic and New York Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White, about Life During Wartime. We discuss the aforementioned misanthropy question, forgiveness, Todd Haynes and Luis Buñuel, but the party officially gets started when NYFF mainstay Sylvia Miles crashes our conversation to talk about the film and her upcoming role reprisal in Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel—which only Armond could link back to the Solondz picture.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (15:27)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime (live)"
OUTRO: Devendra Banhart, "Heard Somebody Say"

]]> 7612@http://daily.greencine.com/ Is Welcome to the Dollhouse auteur Todd Solondz a misanthrope, or a humanist whose characters just happen to engage in ugly, perverse, cruel behavior? For me, the answer has been made clear with Life During Wartime (screening Saturday, Oct. 10 at 9pm), Solondz's quasi-sequel to 1998's Happiness, in which all of the characters are now played by different actors:

Todd Solondz starts his latest and finest film to date by introducing us to Joy (Shirley Henderson), whose husband Allen (Michael Kenneth Williams) is not quite cured of his peculiar "affliction." Joy's sister Trish (Allison Janney) is hoping to stabilize her family life by marrying the recently divorced Harvey (Michael Lerner), but her soon-to-be bar-mitzvahed son Timmy (Dylan Riley Snyder) isn’t sure he wants another man in the house—especially as it seems his dead father, Bill (Ciarán Hinds), might not be dead after all. His portrait of these and several other major characters—beautifully rendered by Charlotte Rampling, Paul Reubens, Renee Taylor and Ally Sheedy—is tough, tender, at times startling, but never mean or condescending. For Solondz, "wartime" is not a historical period but a permanent condition: not only the constant battle between the sexes, but even more so the endless struggle between personal desires and the society set up to contain them.

In my final podcast from the 2009 New York Film Festival, I chat with Andrew Grant, along with New York Press chief film critic and New York Film Critics Circle chairman Armond White, about Life During Wartime. We discuss the aforementioned misanthropy question, forgiveness, Todd Haynes and Luis Buñuel, but the party officially gets started when NYFF mainstay Sylvia Miles crashes our conversation to talk about the film and her upcoming role reprisal in Oliver Stone's Wall Street sequel—which only Armond could link back to the Solondz picture.

To listen to the podcast, click here. (15:27)

Podcast Music
INTRO: Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime (live)"
OUTRO: Devendra Banhart, "Heard Somebody Say"

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(Nick Ramsey on Oct 14, 2009 2:08 PM) Hi Aaron--Wish you could have done more of these podcasts this year as you have during previous NYFFs.

(Aaron Hillis on Oct 15, 2009 2:54 PM) Thanks, Nick. Schedules didn't always align this year, so I missed the opportunities to chat with Jonathan Demme after one of the NYFF screenings, and a work crisis prevented me from talking with A.O. Scott about Police, Adj. But hold tight: one more related podcast will be posted next week (Andrew Grant, Michael Tully, Steve Dollar and myself on ANTICHRIST), tied instead to the theatrical/VOD release. We'll get 'em next year!

The major talking point about the Coen Brothers' new film A Serious Man seems to be that it has "no stars," or is comprised of a cast of mostly unknowns. The leader of this unknown ensemble is Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Larry Gopnik, a tenure-track professor and Jewish father living in 1967 Minnesota. Life doesn't seem too bad for Larry until a nearly unending list of terrible things befalls him, including a pending divorce, a car accident, a gambling brother, ungrateful children, a mysterious letter-writer, a bribery attempt, a lusty neighbor (on one side) and a threatening neighbor (on the other), plus a doctor's appointment and a bar mitzvah under the influence of pot. Larry seeks the help of three rabbis to help sort his life, and finds that their cryptic advice doesn't provide any easy answers. Really, the only thing you can do is laugh. It's up to Stuhlbarg to shoulder all this calamity and turn it into black humor, and he pulls it off.

Before landing this rare leading role, Stuhlbarg appeared in small roles in several films, including A Price Above Rubies (1998), The Grey Zone (2001), Martin Scorsese's short film The Key to Reserva (2007), Afterschool (2008), Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (2008) and Cold Souls (2009). On television, he has appeared on Ugly Betty and Law & Order. But his formative time has been spent on the stage, having earned a Tony nomination for The Pillowman, plus a few Shakespearian turns in Richard II and Hamlet. The very kind and pleasant Mr. Stuhlbarg sat down for a brief talk with me about his new film.

]]> A Serious Man reminded me of Barton Fink, not because of the content, but my reaction—it's one to be pondered. Like that prologue... I kept wondering what that was about.

We all were. When we were making it, we were: "What is this about? Why is this in here?" They just liked the idea, I think, of starting out with this thing, and it having a kind of resonance with the quote at the beginning of the movie. "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you," in terms of a dybbuk coming into your life and trying to accept the craziness of it.

You were being considered for the roles of both Larry and Uncle Arthur. What was that process like?

Originally I came in and auditioned for the part of Velvel, the husband in the Yiddish parable at the beginning of the movie. So I had to learn that whole scene in Yiddish. That was my very first audition. I was going for a very small part. I went to a tutor and learned the whole scene in Yiddish. At that time, they weren't sure whether that part or any of those parts were going to be played by actors who could fake it and speak it phonetically, or people who could speak it fluently. They ended up going with folks who were part of the Yiddish theater in New York, and rightfully so. The movie went away for five or six months. Then I got a call to come in for both Larry and Arthur. I learned three scenes of each, went in and did it, and they laughed a lot. That made me feel really happy. Then I asked periodically as the weeks went on if I was still in the mix. They said, "You're still in the mix." Eventually I got a call: "You're going to get one of these parts. We just don't know which one yet." Maybe six weeks before shooting began, I got a call from Joel: "We'll put you out of your misery. You're playing Larry."

So you were just waiting at home!

Basically. I had to go about my life over the course of about 11 months. But it worked out really well. I did what I could and they didn't want to see me again. They thought it was enough, what I had done. They had a video camera in the room with them. So they had the evidence that they could go back and look at again, which I think they did a lot. I was certainly willing to go back in there, but once they get it in their heads of what they want... Once they hire the actors they let us do what it is that we do. They're pretty hands off.

Their text is pretty polished, and they stick to that?

Absolutely. It was the same text at my audition, and it remained that way through the entire shoot. It was finished from Day One. There were a few things that they cut from that script that they didn't put into the film. But those were few and far between.

I've always been curious about them, but I've at least interviewed cinematographer Roger Deakins. He's a genius.

That's a good word for him. He was so sweet. I didn't want to say or do anything to get in his way. He sets the tone in his weird way. They're sort of all three parts of the same head. It's kind of hard to explain until you see it. They answer each other's thoughts and questions. It's like working with three people who know exactly what they want to do. Roger will stand there for hours with his light meter, just waiting for the light to be perfect. It was a treat to watch them work.

Are they more approachable or distant as collaborators?

Absolutely approachable. They made themselves so available to me after the decision had been made that I was going to do this. I sent them three pages of notes, just questions about the script, and they answered them all. If they didn't answer them, they left it up to me. In terms of asking them questions on the set, they were always open. They love being asked questions. Sometimes they'll come upon things that they hadn't thought of. You can be part of the creative process.

I was reminded of something that was a misread on my part. When Larry approaches Mrs. Samsky's house and knocks on the door, I thought that it said—or maybe it was that I hoped it would say—that he would come to the door and knock, but make up his mind that he wasn't going to do it, and leave. They shot it two different ways, but my way made it in the movie, because I had misread it in the script. Then we changed the text a little to say, "I was gonna knock but I thought you weren't here." It seemed right for him.

This character is kind of passive. Everything happens to him, and mostly bad stuff. How do you approach a role like that?

It's funny because people have brought this up to me, but I had never really thought of him as being that passive. I feel like he's a certain kind of person, and he doesn't necessarily question a lot in his life. But under the circumstances, he does probably what he can to get out of these circumstances—if he has a way out. We're also, as audience members, just privy to parts of the journey. We don't get to see the backstories or the arguments that happened, perhaps, between Larry and Judith in the scene when Sy comes over to house, and it has been established that they're going to get a divorce. We aren't privy to those things. So I had to create them for myself, what I thought might have served the momentum going into the scene.

So you have his whole life fleshed out in your head, and that comes out in the scene.

Yeah. He does what he can. I think he tries to remain civil in an uncivil situation.

Does it offend you when people describe this movie has having "no stars" or "mostly unknowns"?

[laughs.] It's filled with actors! On one level, it allows the audience to really invest in these characters as who they say they are. One of the treats with having stars in films is getting to watch really talented people do different kinds of things. But another side of it is to watch people you don't know, and go, "Wow!" There's a lot of us in this film who have never done this kind of stuff, who have never had the chance. So it's a treat for all of us. And an oddity. And a gift.

This film is very steeped in Jewish culture and identity. It's something you don't see very often. Why is that? Are people afraid to see it?

I doubt it. It should be enlightening and interesting, hopefully, in terms of assimilated Jewry, which we don't get to see discussed a lot. At least submerged in—in 1967—the severity of the Hebrew school and the context of the bar mitzvah and the memorial service. You're thrown into this unique world. It should be enlightening for people who don't know anything about it, but there is a universality to its specificity, I believe. I think that's the most interesting storytelling, submerging people in a culture they're not familiar with, but realizing that we're all human and all going through our own particular troubles that are universal. There might be terms that some people are unfamiliar with, but that wouldn't stop them from enjoying the humor and hopefully the pathos.

There's a term in the movie, "gett," that half the characters don't even understand.

Yeah! I think that's part of the dichotomy. In assimilated Jewry, there are all these laws and traditions and rituals that are part of the tradition. It's why there are so many denominations of Judaism as well as in other religions. Each one chooses to use for themselves what they find to be most useful in terms of living the kind of lives that they want to live. You get some insight in terms of that. It's not The Chosen. It's not A Price Above Rubies. It's assimilated Jewry, and it's how these characters deal with these things.

Probably my favorite part, and perhaps the key to the entire film, is the story about the Goy's Teeth.

Me, too! That's what those stories are meant to be. To give us some insight into what other people struggled with and maybe glean some knowledge to live our lives in a positive way.

As an actor, were you spoiled on this project?

I think so. On Body of Lies, I was in D.C. for a week and I shot two scenes with Mr. [Ridley] Scott. It was thoroughly exciting when I actually got to do the work. A lot of it was sitting around and waiting. But when I got to do it, it was all very... [snaps fingers.] He knew exactly what he wanted, and I did it over and over and over until it took on a sense of meaninglessness, until it had a fluidity to it. One of the scenes was cut and the other was cut in half. A whole subplot, of Leonardo DiCaprio's wife and them getting a divorce while he's going through all the stuff in the Middle East, was cut from the movie. But this was a tremendous first leading role to have.

That's another thing about what I do for a living. With each job you take, with each film or television or theater piece, you have to take each piece as it comes, approach it for what it is, and hope it's not going to be where you just were—the last job you did. You approach each job afresh and use whatever you have to make it come to life for yourself and other people. I'm not going to expect the next gig that I have to be this one. It isn't. I already know that.

I shot a pilot for a new HBO series called Boardwalk Empire. It just got picked up, so I'm going to start shooting that in October. The pilot was directed by Martin Scorsese. It's co-produced by Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson and Tim Van Patten. It's written by Terence Winter, who wrote for The Sopranos, it's his baby, and it stars Steve Buscemi and Kelly Macdonald—both Coen Brothers alumni—and Michael Shannon, Michael Pitt, Dabney Coleman, Stephen Graham and Vincent Piazza. It's a fantastic group of actors. It's based on a book called "Boardwalk Empire," about Atlantic City on the eve of Prohibition. I play Arnold Rothstein, who was allegedly responsible for fixing the 1919 World Series. So it's a whole different kind of genre, and period piece, and it's been really fun so far.

But I guess the point of what I was saying is that it ain't gonna be like what I went through, and it has its own metabolism, joys and hardships. You do your best. Even if it was an off-Broadway play for no money, I would still give my heart to it.

by Jeffrey M. Anderson

The major talking point about the Coen Brothers' new film A Serious Man seems to be that it has "no stars," or is comprised of a cast of mostly unknowns. The leader of this unknown ensemble is Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Larry Gopnik, a tenure-track professor and Jewish father living in 1967 Minnesota. Life doesn't seem too bad for Larry until a nearly unending list of terrible things befalls him, including a pending divorce, a car accident, a gambling brother, ungrateful children, a mysterious letter-writer, a bribery attempt, a lusty neighbor (on one side) and a threatening neighbor (on the other), plus a doctor's appointment and a bar mitzvah under the influence of pot. Larry seeks the help of three rabbis to help sort his life, and finds that their cryptic advice doesn't provide any easy answers. Really, the only thing you can do is laugh. It's up to Stuhlbarg to shoulder all this calamity and turn it into black humor, and he pulls it off.

Before landing this rare leading role, Stuhlbarg appeared in small roles in several films, including A Price Above Rubies (1998), The Grey Zone (2001), Martin Scorsese's short film The Key to Reserva (2007), Afterschool (2008), Ridley Scott's Body of Lies (2008) and Cold Souls (2009). On television, he has appeared on Ugly Betty and Law & Order. But his formative time has been spent on the stage, having earned a Tony nomination for The Pillowman, plus a few Shakespearian turns in Richard II and Hamlet. The very kind and pleasant Mr. Stuhlbarg sat down for a brief talk with me about his new film.

Continued reading INTERVIEW: Michael Stuhlbarg is a (Not Too) Serious Man...

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Most film festivals are just film festivals. Fantastic Fest is a different beast. The premier American outpost on the global "fantastic cinema" circuit of festivals—devoted to all things action, horror, sci-fi and cult—FF spurts forth like a bottomless fountain of arterial spray for a week every autumn. This mutant brainchild of gonzo exhibitor Tim League and Ain't It Cool News geek guru Harry Knowles has evolved over the past five years into a singular cinematic freak magnet.

What other major American film festival gives its prize for "best film" to something called The Human Centipede?

Where else do audience members inquire of a director at the post-screening Q&A (in this case, for Yoshihiro Nishimura’s romantic splatterfest Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl) not details of budget or shooting ratio but: "Is there any body part you have not yet weaponized?" (Answer: "Yes. Nose hairs.")

And what sane festival director promotes as a late-night party attraction a debate between himself and a filmmaker guest (German exploitation iconoclast Uwe Boll) that ends in a boxing match? Can you imagine the New York Film Festival's Richard Peña staring down, say, Steven Soderbergh in the squared circle? I think not (although Clooney might be up for it).

Of course, it helps that the fest's host city is Austin, Texas—a.k.a Slackerwood—where League and his wife Karrie run a sprawling mini-empire of drafthouses (theaters that serve beers and bar food while you watch). A town stuffed with thousands of University of Texas students, homegrown auteurs like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez, and a legacy of pop-culture eccentricism that gave the world the Butthole Surfers, Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson, Austin is the perfect petri dish for Fantastic Fest. To paraphrase League, it’s like a big-ass nacho platter "drizzled in bat-shit crazy syrup."

]]> What does that mean, exactly? Instead of catching a screening at noon on my first day of arrival, I found myself on a gun range in the vast open wilds of Texas hill country, blasting a 12-gauge shotgun, along with about 40 other guests and journalists. Why merely watch the true-to-life New Zealand cannibal prison epic Van Dieman’s Land, when you can join one of the film's stars in the thrill of the kill? I even managed to work through my long-lingering teenage PTSD from Last House on the Left while hanging with its chief rapist David Hess (writer of various Elvis Presley hits, among other things, and now the homicidal helmsman in Smash Cut). Hess drew first blood, nailing a pair of clay pigeons. I, sadly, went 0-for-15.

If Fantastic Fest is where movie geeks man (or woman)-up, an Outward Bound adventure for jaded culture vultures looking to get their groove back, it's wildly successful. And the movies are pretty good, too. The 70 features and 50 shorts unspool, mostly, in the Leagues' cinematheque-of-the-outre, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, a wonderland of model spaceships, microbrews and midnight movie madness anchored in a crummy '70s-era strip mall on Austin's southside. The joint looks like what would happen if a 14-year-old sci-fi fanboy, stoked on Japanese monster flicks and Night of the Living Dead, won the MacArthur Grant and blew it all constructing a Xanadu stocked with his every celluloid obsession.

This year's slate included the now-staple secret screenings (the Coen Brothers, Terry Gilliam) and Hollwood galas, staged downtown at the vintage Paramount (celeb-studded stuff like Zombieland and Jared Hess' amusing-but-labored dorkfest Gentlemen Broncos). Those are great for buzz, but the real fun is in chasing down all the wayward tangents the fest spins together in its vortex of genre ecstasy.

Anyone taken with the New York Asian Film Festival, whose top selections were reprised in Austin, would have reveled in the unofficial world premiere of RoboGeisha. Noboru (Machine Girl) Iguchi's latest opus to female empowerment via mutant transformation playfully (and, um, literally) explodes Japanese cultural and gender-role clichés, opening up the biggest can of she-devil whup-ass since the glory days of Russ Meyer. The film's Verhoeven-on-crack-flavored-Ramen-noodle insanity is best captured by a popular trailer circulating on the Internet. But on the big screen it's more emotionally surprising (believe it or not), as the story chronicles sibling rivals who must become semi-cyborg assassins before ultimately embracing each other to save Japan from a diabolical military-industrial cult.

Colleagues Nishimura and Iguchi, along with League and NYAFF’s Marc Walkow, engaged in a post-screening fundoshi parade—yes, those are ass-baring Japanese sumo diapers—and then submitted to a humiliation ritual at the hands of the movie's formidable Tengu Twins, embodiments of traditional Japanese demons played by samurai sword-brandishing actresses Cay Izumi and Asami (garbed in latex bikinis and red tengu masks with large phallic noses). Later, Izumi showed off her professional pole-dancing skills at The Highball, League's brand new combo bowling alley/karaoke lounge/Mad Men-chic liquor bar, adjacent to the Alamo.

Despite all the crazy juice, some of the fest's best entries weren't so much fantastic as extraordinarily well-crafted. Aleksey Balabanov's Morphia, based on the memoirs of Mikhail Bulgakov, concerns a Russian country doctor's spiral into drug addiction on the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution. It's an immaculate period piece laden with frosty hardship and a dank, sepia-toned palette. Slow-moving and episodic, and given to often visceral realism, it was almost counter-programming amidst the surplus of zombie hayrides.

Likewise, the deadpan Down Terrace offered a detour from the undead, the oversexed, and the extremely graphically violent. This left-field charmer from British writer-director Ben Wheatley and writer-actor-editor Rob Hill took the prizes for best film and best screenplay in the Next Wave category in an underdog triumph. It's a gangster movie with most of the gangster stuff left out. Hill's Karl, a bespectacled 30-something who looks more like a computer programmer than a killer, is sprung from jail back into the tortured bosom of his middle-class Brighton crime family. Everyone turns massively paranoid as the rat is sought out and relationships slowly melt down. It's a bit like Mike Leigh doing The Sopranos— Hill's real-life, non-actor parents play the Mum and Dad with casual incisiveness—sans left-wing politics or Journey hits. Although, Robert Hill's stoner patriarch gets off a spacey improv on the death of the 1960s and plays a lot of sincerely amateur acoustic slide guitar. As events turn more blackly comic, '60s British folk classics brim on the soundtrack, setting a tone of dreamy melancholy that cuts against expectations, creating just the right amount of emotional undertow. Perhaps most surprising is the film’s producer: Mondo Macabro, a UK DVD outfit best-known for its essential Indonesian flying monkey head epics.

Other crowdpleasers were a tad more anticipated: Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson, with Tom Hardy in an Oscar-bait performance as England's most violent prison inmate, was a sure thing, grandly theatrical if too stingily minimalist. Ti West's The House of the Devil gave fans of 1970s and early ‘80s horror a welcome shiver of déjà vu. All slow zooms, freeze frames, cheesy '80s hits and feathered hair, the film's meticulous build-up strands a pretty coed in an old, dark house owned by a creepy couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov, deliciously diabolical) and beset with strange rumblings that may, or may not, imply a looming Satanic sacrifice during a lunar eclipse. All lensed in gloriously grainy 16mm, no less, the film makes an effective reminder of the importance of the lingering take in horror. Sometimes nothing is scarier than anything.

Crazy Racer, from China's mainland, achieves the giddy momentum of Kung Fu Hustle with hardly any of the CGI and very little of the kung-fu. At its delirious best, the film suggests that the only thing wrong with Guy Ritchie's caper movies these days is that they aren't in a Chinese dialect. Hao Ning's jittery exercise in triple-cross gangster lowlife mania follows a champion bicyclist out to avenge his exile from the sport after making an unfortunate arrangement with a sleazy virility drug manufacturer. That's about all I could figure out, but maybe all anyone needs to know, as the director filters a Three Stooges-intense commitment to physical comedy through whiz-bang edits and framing effects.

The film was a lot like Fantastic Fest itself: Way too much going on to keep track of, including a Jess Franco retrospective with the 79-year-old Euro-sploitation director happily holding forth from his wheelchair, and the local premiere of Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, a film that might seem mind-blowingly provocative anywhere else but here. The film prompted an offhand review, in pure King of the Hill cadence, from a late-night karaoke contestant at the Highball: "How ‘bout that Antichrist? Bustin' balls! Yee-haw!"

It also supplied some last minute inspiration for the Alamo's in-house T-shirt vendors, who honored the festival's main meme in a commemorative garment:

Chaos reigns!

[Tim League/Ti West photo courtesy of David Hill, www.davidhillphoto.com]]]> 7604@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Steve Dollar

Most film festivals are just film festivals. Fantastic Fest is a different beast. The premier American outpost on the global "fantastic cinema" circuit of festivals—devoted to all things action, horror, sci-fi and cult—FF spurts forth like a bottomless fountain of arterial spray for a week every autumn. This mutant brainchild of gonzo exhibitor Tim League and Ain't It Cool News geek guru Harry Knowles has evolved over the past five years into a singular cinematic freak magnet.

What other major American film festival gives its prize for "best film" to something called The Human Centipede?

Where else do audience members inquire of a director at the post-screening Q&A (in this case, for Yoshihiro Nishimura’s romantic splatterfest Vampire Girl vs. Frankenstein Girl) not details of budget or shooting ratio but: "Is there any body part you have not yet weaponized?" (Answer: "Yes. Nose hairs.")

And what sane festival director promotes as a late-night party attraction a debate between himself and a filmmaker guest (German exploitation iconoclast Uwe Boll) that ends in a boxing match? Can you imagine the New York Film Festival's Richard Peña staring down, say, Steven Soderbergh in the squared circle? I think not (although Clooney might be up for it).

Of course, it helps that the fest's host city is Austin, Texas—a.k.a Slackerwood—where League and his wife Karrie run a sprawling mini-empire of drafthouses (theaters that serve beers and bar food while you watch). A town stuffed with thousands of University of Texas students, homegrown auteurs like Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez, and a legacy of pop-culture eccentricism that gave the world the Butthole Surfers, Daniel Johnston and Roky Erickson, Austin is the perfect petri dish for Fantastic Fest. To paraphrase League, it’s like a big-ass nacho platter "drizzled in bat-shit crazy syrup."

Continued reading FANTASTIC FEST '09: Bat-Shit Crazy Syrup...

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Since first making his name as the screenwriter of Larry Clark's Kids, Harmony Korine has been slapped with the provocateur label for directing such oddball films as Gummo, julien donkey-boy, and last year's Mister Lonely, all of which are filled with subversive imagery, off-kilter characters, and confrontational moments that are unclear whether they're meant to be laughed with or cringed at. Korine's latest is the as-yet-undistributed curio Trash Humpers, which screens at the 2009 New York Film Festival:

The title is to be taken literally. Harmony Korine revisits the backwater horrors of Gummo, this time with a cruddy, bargain-basement form to match the degraded content. The episodic tale of a band of cretins (among them a masked and wigged Harmony and Rachel Korine) who go around brutalizing dolls, molesting plant life, and—yes—rubbing up against garbage cans, Trash Humpers suggests an exhumed underground movie, or a new form of freak-folk art. Among the parade of abjections: pancakes with dish soap, gay jokes without punchlines, Eng and Chang sock puppets. But then—a sweet lullaby to make it all better. Can something so regressive also mark the maturing of an artist? More than a prank, this is Korine's purest film yet: a work of jolting humor, true ugliness, and unexpected pathos.

Sitting down with Korine today before his final NYFF screening, I asked the Nashville-based filmmaker about his eccentric father, the strangest VHS tape he's ever found, the dream project he'd like to make, and whether he takes pleasure in acting out the nihilistic fantasies of a "garbage fucker."

To listen to the podcast, click here. (18:28)

Podcast Music (per Harmony's request)
INTRO: Al Jolson, "Just One of Those Things"
OUTRO: Al Jolson, "If I Only Had a Match"

]]> 7603@http://daily.greencine.com/

Since first making his name as the screenwriter of Larry Clark's Kids, Harmony Korine has been slapped with the provocateur label for directing such oddball films as Gummo, julien donkey-boy, and last year's Mister Lonely, all of which are filled with subversive imagery, off-kilter characters, and confrontational moments that are unclear whether they're meant to be laughed with or cringed at. Korine's latest is the as-yet-undistributed curio Trash Humpers, which screens at the 2009 New York Film Festival:

The title is to be taken literally. Harmony Korine revisits the backwater horrors of Gummo, this time with a cruddy, bargain-basement form to match the degraded content. The episodic tale of a band of cretins (among them a masked and wigged Harmony and Rachel Korine) who go around brutalizing dolls, molesting plant life, and—yes—rubbing up against garbage cans, Trash Humpers suggests an exhumed underground movie, or a new form of freak-folk art. Among the parade of abjections: pancakes with dish soap, gay jokes without punchlines, Eng and Chang sock puppets. But then—a sweet lullaby to make it all better. Can something so regressive also mark the maturing of an artist? More than a prank, this is Korine's purest film yet: a work of jolting humor, true ugliness, and unexpected pathos.

Sitting down with Korine today before his final NYFF screening, I asked the Nashville-based filmmaker about his eccentric father, the strangest VHS tape he's ever found, the dream project he'd like to make, and whether he takes pleasure in acting out the nihilistic fantasies of a "garbage fucker."

To listen to the podcast, click here. (18:28)

Podcast Music (per Harmony's request)
INTRO: Al Jolson, "Just One of Those Things"
OUTRO: Al Jolson, "If I Only Had a Match"

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With its streets hugging the coastline of two beautiful beaches and a broad river running through it, you don't have to go far for a glimpse of water in San Sebastian and, for the first part of this 57th consecutive edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival, torrential rain ensured the streets were wet, too. The Blade Runner-style weather, however, failed to wash away the enthusiasm of locals, stars, or the large number of press who descended on this picturesque city for some reel entertainment.

At just two years younger than the Berlinale, the fest feels sprightly in middle-age and offers both an opportunity for Spanish cinemagoers to enjoy the presence of Hollywood A-listers (Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, and Sir Ian McKellen were all in town this week), and a chance for Spain and Latin America to show their wares to the rest of the world. The auditoriums include theatres majestically converted for the festival's duration—and the cavernous conference hall, the Kursaal, which has a capacity of more than 1800 seats. The large crowds don't stand on ceremony—and rarely sit through the end credits—but if the assembled throng likes your film, you'll certainly know. At the first screening of Inglourious Basterds, for example, the audience was so keyed up that they even clapped for the Universal logo and TCM introduction, while the Australian film Blessed was greeted with a five-minute standing ovation.

]]> Mother and Child closed the festival seems appropriate, since examples of motherhood are abound in some of the most interesting films here.

François Ozon's Le Refuge is the pick of the bunch and sees him return to a contemplation of motherhood after his last film Ricky—but this time with no recourse to the fantastical. The plot focuses on Mousse (Isabelle Carré), whose drug-addled lifestyle is about to leave her pregnant and alone. Beginning with some shocking and disturbingly beautiful scenes of drug-taking, it morphs into an examination both of pregnancy and the nature of relationships. Those who hate the sight of needles be warned, as at the screening I attended, the film had to be stopped after someone keeled over as one character injected themselves in the neck. Carré was pregnant during the film's shoot, and Ozon makes sure we are given plenty of time to consider the changes this has brought about to her body, while also painting a psychological portrait of a woman whose life is in flux. The French director deftly avoids passing judgment on Mousse, leaving plenty of complexity from which the audience can draw their own opinions.

The conflicts of motherhood are also explored by Ana Kokkinos's Blessed, which makes a virtue of its intricate structure - that sees the action focus on a group of disparate kids in a Melbourne suburb in the first half, before switching to the perspective of their mothers in the second. Adapted from the play Who's Afraid of the Working Class?, the film initially feels as though it may still be trapped within its stage constraints, but once the kids begin their odysseys through the urban jungle, Kokkinos breathes cinematic life into the action, which though difficult and a slow-build results in a surprisingly haunting and touching climax.

If Kokkinos and Ozon don't laud or condemn the moms in their films, The Host director Bong Joon-ho has no time for such niceties. The central protagonist in Mother (Maedo) may initially seem like just another slightly over-protective mom, and with good reason, since her son is at least two sandwiches short of a picnic. But as the film progresses and he is steamrolled into a confession of murder, it seems she is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to prove his innocence. Although it descends a little too far into melodrama in the final reels, Bong's portrait of obsession is nevertheless an entertaining one, thanks largely to Kim Hye-ja—famous in her homeland for portraying mothers of a more caring, sharing nature—whose understated performance takes the edge off some of the more hyperbolic plot twists.

Kim Hye-ja is just one of a platoon of older thespians taking on key roles in films at the festival, as many of the filmmakers here explore and celebrate the process of aging. The best of these considerations—and my personal favorite of the lost—arrives in Juan Jose Campanella's The Secret of Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos). He is a director drawn to the theme of old age, as his Oscar-nominated The Son of the Bride (El Hijo de la Novia)—with its examination of a middle-aged man's mortality and his mother's Alzheimer's—amply demonstrated. When I asked him about it, he said: "I am very obsessed with old age... I was looking for a word, 'intrigued'? No, it's more than that... because I am afraid of it."

Campanella may find the passing of time scary, but when it comes to manipulating it within the body of his film, he proves to have a masterful touch. He seamlessly blends the lightness of a will-they-won't-they romance with the political grit of 1970s Argentina and a dark drama involving a woman's murder, while achieving that rare trick of taking the audience forwards and backwards through a 30-year period—without his plot sinking into the shifting sands of time. Argentine big-hitter Ricardo Darín (probably best known to English-speaking audiences for his role in Nine Queens) plays Benjamín Esposito, a retired court worker who decides to write a book about the case of a woman who was raped and murdered three decades previously, in the mid-1970s.

As he contemplates the case and the political machinations of Argentina in the period, Benjamin also reassesses his relationship with his beautiful, younger boss—a lovely performance by Soledad Villamil—and the romance they always seem to be teetering on the brink of. With its blend of humanity and humor, political comment and tension, this is a smart looking, well-acted crowd-pleaser, and I am not at all surprised to hear that it has just been selected as Argentina's candidate for the Foreign Language Oscar. It will be a strong contender.

Also taking comfort in old age and fine performances is Aaron Schneider's Get Low, which recently sold to Sony Pictures Classics at the Toronto Film Festival. It features Robert Duvall as Felix, a hermit-like "old man of the woods" who has earned himself an almost murderous reputation with the local Tennessee residents. Fearing he may not have long to walk the planet, he decides it is time to reveal the secret behind his seclusion, and sets about organizing his own funeral party, which he plans to attend. Although its denouement is a little predictable, this is a very accomplished debut. Duvall is magnetic as Felix, while Bill Murray turns in a bittersweetly comic turn as the local funeral director, and Sissy Spacek looks as ethereal as ever as Felix's former friend. Schneider has spent almost two decades as a cinematographer, a talent he brings to bear here, to produce a lovely evocative look.

As the festival drew to a close on Saturday, the award winners were announced. That they were spread across several titles is a testimony to the generally strong field of competitors, especially as some of the fests on the circuit this year have had a distinctly lackluster feel. The Chinese film The City of Life and Death—which has been garnering critical buzz all week—won the coveted Golden Shell for best film, and picked up the cinematography award thanks to Cao Yu's black-and-white camerawork. The hard-hitting film concerns itself with the "Rape of Nanjing" as told from the shifting perspectives of the Chinese and Japanese.

Both the Silver Shells for best acting were given to the Spanish film Yo, También (Me, Too)—which examines the difficulties faced by a Down's syndrome man attempting to woo a woman without the disability—while Spaniard Javier Rebollo picked up the Silver Shell for best directing for his contemplative study of a house wife La Mujer Sin Piano.

I was pleased to see Ozon's Le Refuge take home a special jury prize, Blessed pick up the Silver Shell for best screenplay (penned by Andrew Bovell, Melissa Reeves, Patricia Cornelius and Christos Tsiolkas) and Sammen (Together) garner a special mention in the New Directors category. It came as something of a surprise, however, that The Secret of Their Eyes was overlooked—although prizes surely await it elsewhere.

The top gong for the Kutxa-New Director Award went to Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw for The Day God Walked Away (Le Jour Où Dieu Est Parti En Voyage), which recounts the first day of the Rwandan genocide through the eyes of a Tsutsi nanny who finds herself abandoned. Meanwhile, cinemagoers across the world continue to warm to Lee Daniels' Precious—about the tribulations and triumphs of an abused obese girl in Harlem—which notched up another award in the audience vote.

The most touching award moment, however, happened earlier in the week, when veteran British actor Sir Ian McKellen picked up the Donostia gong for a lifetime of achievement that has seen him take on roles as diverse as Gandalf and Richard III. Receiving the award in a Basque beret, he was clearly moved by the overwhelming reception he received.

Smiling broadly, McKellen said: "I don't know about you, but I think actors get far too much attention, they get far too much praise, and they have far too many photographs taken of them—because actors really are just one in the team. That's why I'm not too fond of these prizes for acting. How can you compare one film's performance with another? You can't. We are not in competition with each other.

"But this award is different. It is not just for one performance but for many. It's for 50 years of acting, a whole career—almost a lifetime. Some actors act hoping for success, hoping for fame, hoping for fortune—and that's why there are so many disappointed actors in the world. Many of us, of course, act because we are not fit to do anything else. But I act, simply, to try to get better. If I'm in competition, I'm in competition with myself.

"I'm like a carpenter, always hoping one day to make the perfect chair, and so, taking this home with me back to London, I promise myself one thing—that I will carry on acting. And I promise you one thing, too... I will be back in San Sebastian."

If the film selection is always this varied, the welcome so warm, and the acceptance speech-making so humble, McKellen won't be the only one making a return visit. It's just a shame they can't order in a 3D reel of sunshine for the 2010 edition.

]]> 7601@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Amber Wilkinson

With its streets hugging the coastline of two beautiful beaches and a broad river running through it, you don't have to go far for a glimpse of water in San Sebastian and, for the first part of this 57th consecutive edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival, torrential rain ensured the streets were wet, too. The Blade Runner-style weather, however, failed to wash away the enthusiasm of locals, stars, or the large number of press who descended on this picturesque city for some reel entertainment.

At just two years younger than the Berlinale, the fest feels sprightly in middle-age and offers both an opportunity for Spanish cinemagoers to enjoy the presence of Hollywood A-listers (Quentin Tarantino, Brad Pitt, and Sir Ian McKellen were all in town this week), and a chance for Spain and Latin America to show their wares to the rest of the world. The auditoriums include theatres majestically converted for the festival's duration—and the cavernous conference hall, the Kursaal, which has a capacity of more than 1800 seats. The large crowds don't stand on ceremony—and rarely sit through the end credits—but if the assembled throng likes your film, you'll certainly know. At the first screening of Inglourious Basterds, for example, the audience was so keyed up that they even clapped for the Universal logo and TCM introduction, while the Australian film Blessed was greeted with a five-minute standing ovation.

Continued reading SAN SEBASTIAN '09: The Motherly and Elderly...

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There was much skepticism and whining about this year's New York Film Festival line-up before it started—the usual cries of gratuitous elitism from some quarters, general frustration from others about the sheer obscurity of some of the line-up. Okay, maybe that was just me looking at a line-up initially full of bewildering unknown quantities. But NYFF is almost like two separate fests: the public screenings, sure, but also the press screenings, which start a little over a week before the actual fest and run concurrently. In the week we've been going, I've seen three very strong films—all without distribution, all worthy of your buck—and am now officially on board for the rest. Three capsules to guide you on your way:

Sweetgrass (2009, Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor).

When a movie is described as a documentary about sheep-herding, that gives you a strange amount of confidence; NYFF is, generally speaking, not in the piety sweepstakes of programming worthy but dull docs, so a certain amount of rigor seems guaranteed. Still, it was temping to bolt at the first shot of Sweetgrass, whose awful consumer-grade video took me straight back to the bad old days of 2001 - 03, when documentaries finally made the leap from 16mm to camcorder amateurishness, and pretty much everything was painful to watch. But Barbash and Castaing-Taylor establish pretty quickly that they know exactly what they're doing with their medium. This is ostensibly a straightforward chronicle of the shepherds of Big Timber, Montana and their last ever grazing drive against public lands before the storied tradition ends. The video quality falls into three categories: the neutral and unobjectionable, the savvy and the slightly painful. At night, when the shepherds fire into pitch-black forests, the barely perceptible video crackle is tensely accentuated by white gunshot blasts as potent as anything Michael Mann's cooked up; during the day, when shooting from afar (and some shots are Werner Herzog-majestic in their physical scale), video gives figures against the landscape a sharp edge that's almost outlined. There's a few shots I wish could be cut—since nothing is narratively "essential," anything that doesn't look good really should go, and at some points the video just looks shoddy blown up onto 35mm—but they're minimal detractions.

]]> Gerry: this could read like an activist doc about preserving natural tradition, but there's really nothing within the actual footage to suggest that. It's not that nature's red in tooth and claw; it just doesn't care if you admire it. It's also shockingly unsentimental about sheep: not the fuzzy, adorable baa-lambs of nursery rhymes, but dumb, obstinate creatures who can be a real pain. Part masculine comedy of swearing, part formalist experiment in which not a real word is spoken for the first half-hour, it's anything but cloistered. I was certain I was in good hands during an early sheep-shearing sequence: the camera roams in restless panning arcs—side to side, top to bottom—as sheep are separated from their wool with industrial speed and thoroughness. The noise is metal-factory intense, but slowly I began picking up a backbeat; was it an elegant soundscape, or tinny radio? As the drums became clearer, it became clear: "Highway to Hell" it is, and I was rocking out. The footage veers between the abstractly compelling, the naturally stunning and the occasionally surreal: you may never forget the sight of a hundreds-strong herd marching past the Radio Shack on a small town street. The shepherds are a pragmatic, profane lot: an eloquently despairing, absolutely unquotable stream of invective against recalcitrant sheep in the mountains becomes even more comic as the camera zooms back to dwarf everyone, back to make a wry joke about the gap between the ostensible majesty of nature and the sheer pain of navigating it.

Genre-wise, there's really nothing like it in American film; it is, however, of a piece with the numerous French films on the same subject (Raymond Depardon's Profiles of Farmers series, Will It Snow For Christmas?, Samuel Collerdey's The Apprentice). I've long wondered why America—certainly not short on rural areas and citizens—has constantly failed to document those areas. This is a start, even if Castaing-Taylor is British. Sweetgrass is set to open at the Film Forum on January 13; other distribution prospects, sadly, remain unknown.

Ghost Town (2008, Zhao Daoyang).

Ghost Town begins in approved festival-film fashion: an immaculately framed shot of a city street, majestically distant from everyone, held for eons. "There's nothing worth filming here," someone says; har har. The gauntlet's been thrown down: over the course of three hours, Daoyang proves just how wrong that assessment is. The focus is Zhiziluo, a village in southwest China, and the title has twin meanings. Zhiziluo's a place where nothing happens and economic prospects range from the grim to the non-existent; it's also a place where the local church and pagan traditions co-exist equally and those ghosts can be taken quite literally. I know the difference between a film pleasantly encouraging my attention to wander and when I'm impatiently bored; as with Jeanne Dielman (except, okay, not quite on the same scale), this does the latter. It's hypnotic, but it won't wear you out over its length: you can float in and out. Daoyang's camera is handheld and indifferent to strict composition, instead using distance and duration to construct his film. It's novelistically vast in scope and physically tactile. If it sounds like I'm temporizing, it's just that it's hard to describe the film's main pleasures, which are as much about taking in, in bracing fashion, the environment of Zhiziluo as any of the people we meet.

The first 50 minutes are a prelude of sorts, a portrait of the town's Christian community, culminating in a Christmas day gathering inside the church: Daoyang patiently scans over the packed assemblage, just taking in expressive faces for a good four or five minutes. It's also the oddest of father-son portraits between Pastor John and his father, the terrifying and near-Old Testament John the Elder; the son explains at one point that when it rained through a hole in his roof, the Elder accused his son of climbing on top and pouring water through the hole. It's the first of many tangled relationships Daoyang lays out, all increasingly painful. The footage can seem haphazardly assembled, but give it time: from father and son to son with no parents at all, it's all laid out in a retrospectively eloquent arc.

Reference is made to the government coming in at some point and kicking villagers out of what are officially not "their" houses, and Chairman Mao makes an ominous climactic appearance, but this is really no China that's hit western screens before: neither the world of grinding agricultural poverty nor the fast-paced capitalist boomland, and very far removed indeed from the tragedies of displacement due to the Three Gorges Dam. Zhiziluo is a town that's been left to hang to dry on its own. The texture is of a very impersonal, essence-of-Balzac kind of novel, one where people are sketched relatively quickly but always weaved into an ever-expanding social backdrop. It should go without saying that, like any film made by halfway intelligent people, this is no monolithically doom-and-gloom document: the site of a drunken reprobate being threatened with a good cane-thrashing by an 80-something looking woman is one for the drunken Frederick Exley files. But adequately describing all the sights and events would take more time to read than to watch the film. The real question is: do you implicitly trust on faith that a semi-rigorous 3-hour Chinese small-town documentary sounds like a good idea? If so, you belong here. Ghost Town is hypnotic and far easier to watch than you suspect.

To Die Like a Man (2009, João Pedro Rodrigues).

To Die Like a Man is both aggressively formal and aggressively queer; to a certain extent, it seems to genuinely not care if straight audiences want to be there or not. A drag queen melodrama that turns into a hard-to-define Something Else halfway through, it bifurcates itself like the finest of Apichatpong "Joe" Weerasethakul's films; the diving line is between exquisitely-composed hysteria and the truly mysterious. The first half is just fine, if occasionally dozy-making if you're not on its wavelength: Tonia (Fernando Santos) is a drag queen forever wavering about committing to the final sex change, which pisses off his/her junkie boyfriend Rosário (Alexander David). There are screams, thefts, confrontations, abortive blowjobs, fabulous dance routines, bitchy fights over wigs, the whole deal: not my deal by temperament, I'm afraid, but exquisitely filmed enough to cover up all but the most repetitive dramatic developments. If you know the film's about drag queens, the first shot is truly disorienting: an unblinking close-up of a man having decidedly non-glam make-up applied to him. Drag queen or soldier? The latter, it emerges, but Rodrigues has already eloquently begone laying the visual language for parsing the potential fluidity of gender. He also has the gift for shooting films with the austerity of an art-house master while pacing the drama within the frames faster than Fassbinder; a rare combination indeed.

In the second half, something happens; I don't think I can reveal what it is. Like Joe with more penises, the action retreats to a forest, at which point Tonia and Rosário are decisively yanked out of their spiraling rut by one Maria Bakker (Gonçalo Ferreira De Almeida), an absolutely incredible drag queen who transcends surface affectation and camp devotion to reach a mystical, Oscar Wilde-level of self-assurance and poise. And then... what to say? There are color filters. There are musical numbers. There is, finally [VAGUE SPOILER], a very literal rendering of the title, to a gut-wrenching extent. Rodrigues is prone to the overly literal metaphor, but in ways that are craftier than they seem. Tonia's the one who has her shit together, Rosário the one constantly going through withdrawal and back again; they're mirrored by a pair of dogs, one a domestic house-pet and the other a rough-and-tumble street dog. Clear enough which animal mirrors which person, until it isn't: Rodrigues is at least as ambivalent and fluid about gender (re)construction as Judith Butler, and ultimately he arrives at the intersection point between visceral life-and-death matters and academic contemplations of sexuality. The results are staggering.

]]> 7597@http://daily.greencine.com/ by Vadim Rizov

There was much skepticism and whining about this year's New York Film Festival line-up before it started—the usual cries of gratuitous elitism from some quarters, general frustration from others about the sheer obscurity of some of the line-up. Okay, maybe that was just me looking at a line-up initially full of bewildering unknown quantities. But NYFF is almost like two separate fests: the public screenings, sure, but also the press screenings, which start a little over a week before the actual fest and run concurrently. In the week we've been going, I've seen three very strong films—all without distribution, all worthy of your buck—and am now officially on board for the rest. Three capsules to guide you on your way:

Sweetgrass (2009, Ilisa Barbash, Lucien Castaing-Taylor).

When a movie is described as a documentary about sheep-herding, that gives you a strange amount of confidence; NYFF is, generally speaking, not in the piety sweepstakes of programming worthy but dull docs, so a certain amount of rigor seems guaranteed. Still, it was temping to bolt at the first shot of Sweetgrass, whose awful consumer-grade video took me straight back to the bad old days of 2001 - 03, when documentaries finally made the leap from 16mm to camcorder amateurishness, and pretty much everything was painful to watch. But Barbash and Castaing-Taylor establish pretty quickly that they know exactly what they're doing with their medium. This is ostensibly a straightforward chronicle of the shepherds of Big Timber, Montana and their last ever grazing drive against public lands before the storied tradition ends. The video quality falls into three categories: the neutral and unobjectionable, the savvy and the slightly painful. At night, when the shepherds fire into pitch-black forests, the barely perceptible video crackle is tensely accentuated by white gunshot blasts as potent as anything Michael Mann's cooked up; during the day, when shooting from afar (and some shots are Werner Herzog-majestic in their physical scale), video gives figures against the landscape a sharp edge that's almost outlined. There's a few shots I wish could be cut—since nothing is narratively "essential," anything that doesn't look good really should go, and at some points the video just looks shoddy blown up onto 35mm—but they're minimal detractions.

Continued reading NYFF '09: Sweetgrass, Ghost Town, To Die Like a Man...

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